This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!
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Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
Sleeping Beauties: Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes
She’s a very kinky girl!
The kind you don’t take home to mother!
—Rick James; “Superfreak” from Street Songs (1981)
Picking up from where “Hollow Knight (opening and part one)” left off…
Knowledge is generally something that sleeps in a medieval space waiting to wake back up. Policed into silence until then, such awakenings are seldom perfect. But they are required to reclaim nature (and the monstrous-feminine) from their usual policing through the monomyth as imperfectly camped. For this section, we’ll consider how through development as coming from such imperfections; i.e., the evolution out of Hollow Knight as a Promethean Quest—one whose mysterious-maze housing of the whore-to-rape gradually lead me to articulate worker liberation through a palliative variant. Ultimately this variant become a sex-positive system of thought I called “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” one which workers must revive in light of the Radiance’s seemingly unavoidable doom being one of many that we can learn from and perform ourselves; i.e., witch and witch hunt part of the same police violence we must beautifully survive, rising from the ashes of to challenge profit as a matter of dogma built on raping the whore (controlling sex and force, terror and morphological expression per capital’s trifectas, monopolies, and assorted qualities). However false the king decrees her status as “sun,” the Radiance’s hubris is still speaking to her rape by him as having a power he cannot so easily extinguish. Consider this section—the capstone to my Metroidvania work after my PhD and what I esteem to be my crowning achievement—a royal love letter to such sleeping beauties topping us from below! Hail to the queen!
(source: Materia Collective)
We’ll start with my theories on ludo-Gothic BDSM and how they evolved into themselves through Hollow Knight specifically (and the concepts we already laid out in part one); then, we’ll articulate the camping of rape per the whore as normally policed, the manner in which the Radiance must experience time and time again like Prometheus: the stubborn ghost to hunt down by those taught to do so in monomythic language—get sword, rape whore, which whore must subvert during rape play reversing what is effectively police training in witch hunter language.
To that, capital rapes nature-as-monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of shelter (the home) and the alien (the intruder/foreign plot) by invading female-coded spaces (caves, portals, gateways, caverns “measureless to man,” etc) with male-coded implements of revenge (swords, lances, arrows, etc): reconquering male spaces having been reclaimed by nature as—you guessed it—something to rape all over again (often set to badass music; e.g., Witch Hazel’s 2024 “Ride On” a perpetuation of the same-old monomyth passing the sword down).
Or investigate; e.g., Alien‘s derelict, which we’ll explore in “Giger’s Xenomorph.” Either action is the point because it’s profitable, moving money through nature and conditioning the next generation to keep all of this up, which we fags (all monstrous-feminine, not GNC people alone) must camp to subvert and survive as alien beings routinely harvested by nature: the fall of the male sovereign and its colonial space as gone to pot, which must be reclaimed from nature all over again (and again, and again).
In turn, the cycle is dogmatized under capital per the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection: to invade nature, to bring her back for study—to weaponize, generally against itself, as stolen by a bunch of canonical fakes mobilizing the self-worth of young men (or token workers) stuck in the Man Box’ artificial wilderness: proving their worth by being the hero, thus the rapist, the exterminator and the cop/witch hunter canonizing a forever war between good and evil, civilization and nature ,as essentialized per Cartesian edicts’ moral geographies/manifest destinies.
The fact remains, capital is inherently self-destructive and built on endless conquest/futile revenge against nature. Even if the hero harvested everything from the land once, they must do it again and again because there must always be profit, which means surrendering power to a perceived enemy (re: “Hell coming home”). But even if they did it a hundred times over and poured the whole of the universe into a bottle, it still wouldn’t prevent nature’s return, thus keep the king alive. The revenge is always pointless, then, save to further itself as a seasonal, holiday matter of routine profit, war and rape unto nature as the Great Pumpkin to carve up after she returns again and again. It becomes a perpetual game of one-upmanship, of manly quests for such violence to then show off: “Revenge? I will show you revenge!”
Furthermore, the entire process alienates said king (and king’s men) from nature as something that otherwise would enrich his life, had he not devoted his entire existence to a cycle (or two) of capital. He’s simply a cog in the machine, a replaceable part. All of this becomes a self-report through the castle as a dead ringer/giveaway for past failures, which again are built into the system. Nature can simply turn the procedure back on itself to show the king his doom: that Capitalism isn’t good for the givers of state force because it makes them hopelessly dependent on doing so, which has its limits. Repeat the cycle as many times as you want—criminalize nature to whatever degree you desire—the king will always die, and nature will bounce back in some shape or form. You can’t kill Medusa, but kings (and their cops and castles) are a dime-a-dozen. Their death gives them away.
We’ll get to all that when we look at the Radiance, in just a moment. First, let’s look at the process she uses against the hero as something we can repeat ourselves, and which I was taught by her side of the Promethean Quest subverting the monomyth and its unironic rape spaces chattelizing nature-as-monstrous-feminine: ludo-Gothic BDSM.
Tokenization has pushed down at queerness, forcing me make “monstrous-feminine” a GNC category that older scholars didn’t to nearly the same degree. “Nature-as-female” has a biologically essential sound to it (as does older Gothic scholarship from the 1970s; e.g., “female Gothic” and older works, still: “woman is other”). So as we carry on with Hollow Knight, let’s keep considering it (nature) and its castled spaces as monstrous-feminine, like my PhD did; i.e., upending traditional binaries designed to control nature-as-monstrous-feminine inside a colonial binary in order to harness her power over and life and death for the state (the harvesting of nature-as-alien).
Simply put, the womb of nature has already been raped, making it dark and vengeful, but also something that is forced to conform to a binary prescribed to it by state mandates; further abuse must be stalled within such spaces as therapeutic and under attack by those who, caring not for the “therapy” of the colonizer (rape), camp it as already “mapped out.” Alfred Korzybski writes in Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933):
A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly […] If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must considered only as maps (source).
To look on maps, however unmappable (untraversable) they might seem, or however buried their secrets, we’re effectively looking at a system of rape expressed in royal Gothic language between land and lord—landlord over nature as alien, but also required to have something to lord over and seek revenge against (which conquest and profit require, always moving money through nature and back into capital’s coffers, post-rape; re, videogames as dogmatic tools of conquest through their maps educating these means: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains): telling boys (or token parties) where to go and who to rape with what. Such behavior is not only expected but instructed per the monomyth. Simply put, it is correct.
(source: tuppkam1)
More to the point, this is where queerness as dead-and-buried waits to wake up and dance once more; i.e., in the hallowed halls of our rapists—their chronotopes and maps haunted with the Radcliffean spirit of rape as burned into the maps’ secret chambers, but also on its surfaces.
Our flirting with history as undead is, itself, a revisitation of something I’ve returned to many times already (always for fun); i.e., a process of scholarship that, in the process of tracing old maps (of maps, of maps…), somewhat feels different and familiar with each confounding and delightful passage through itself (very much in the larger exploratory traditional of such spaces). Weird attracts weird multiple times in both directions; i.e., coming back to haunt us and we coming back to haunt it (with queer people drawn to the places where they can be themselves, thus feel most at home as a site of trauma to subvert, thus heal from).
I acknowledge as much in Volume Zero, describing a “life-long process [that] started when I was young and continued into adulthood” through a particular videogame I enjoyed playing at various points in my life as a means of critical thought that can, when harnessed, change the world outside of itself as reflected inside the text (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 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[1] (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 (source).
Such a procedure was a life-long quest grappling with powerful forces, insofar as it concerns the performance of power in ostensibly disempowering stages that, through Gothic theatrics, become a safe place to explore rape trauma by surviving ghosts of itself:
Before the thesis proper, my essay “Notes on Power” discussed the paradox as being the performative nature of power doubled, including monsters but also their decaying lairs as monumental sites of immense, god-like power dressed up through the Gothic language of the imaginary past; the Metroidvania is a Gothic castle full of Gothic monsters, but also Gothic ghosts (echoes) of older and older castles reaching out from novels and cinema into videogames. Regardless of the medium, though, Clint Hockings’ adage, “Seek power and you will progress” (source: “Ludonarrative Dissonance,” 2007) means something altogether different depending how you define power as something to seek, including unequal arrangements thereof. As a child, teenager and woman, I sought it through the palliative Numinous in Gothic castles of the Neo-Gothic tradition carried over into videogames (which I learned about in reverse: videogames, followed by the Numinous/mysterium tremendum as introduced to me by Dr. David Calonne[2]). Of these, I explored their Numinous territories in response to my own lived trauma and subsequent hypersexuality—i.e., as things I both related to the counterfeit with and sought to reclaim the counterfeit from as a tool to understand, thus improve myself and the world by reclaiming the castle as a site of interpretative Gothic play (of kinks, fetishes, and BDSM); i.e., this book that you’re reading right now is a “castle” to wander around inside: a safe space of exquisite “torture” to ask questions about your own latent desires and guilty thoughts regarding the “barbaric” exhibits within as putting the ghosts out from my past on display (the Gothic castle and its intense, “heavy weather” theatrics generally being a medieval metaphor for the mind, body and soul, but also its extreme, buried and/or conflicting emotions and desires: a figurative or sometimes literal plurality depending on the person exploring the castle) [source].
The quest is a meta one, then, its essential idea—of upsetting the monomyth and its harmful illusions using the Promethean Quest—pointedly being to search for the non-male Numinous inside female/feminine-coded spaces; i.e., an exit to Capitalist Realism (and trauma) hidden inside the infernal concentric pattern being reached not by the straight line of empire’s arrows and swords, but the ergodic, non-linear line of the maze among the city of paradoxes (the chronotope yielding fatal portraits echoing dynastic primacy and hereditary rites by personifying them, below).
(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
As stated earlier during “Monsters, Magic and Myth,” Capitalism must be escaped within itself; i.e., through cryptonymy as a circuitous route to healing the structure by changing the system, starting in small. Tracking with this well-trod vein, I’ll furnish you with something of a tangent—a four-page sample from Volume Zero to refresh you on the complexities of the quest—then segue into Aguirre’s geometries per our current discussion of upsetting monomythic power using Gothic space to achieve rape play inside the nucleus:
Processing my troubled academic past, my reflections on Metroidvania as a tomb-like, ludo-Gothic space/torture dungeon have become thoroughly enmeshed in my own sexuality and gender-formation beyond what was heteronormatively assigned to me at birth; i.e., what was naturally assigned and what I had to reclaim through my own work’s seeking and expressing of power as something to find inside particular performative arrangements: the “ludo-Gothic BDSM” of the Gothic castle as a powerful “female-coded” space. Its palliative Numinous expresses C.S. Lewis’ so-called “problem of pain” (1940) through mutual consent; i.e., as a kind of ludic contract that promises paradoxical thrills through the aesthetics of harmful power but also unequal power exchange in the contractual sense as rich food for thought: it changes how we think about the world. As I write in “Revisiting My Masters’ Thesis on Metroidvania—Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space”:
Metroidvania players consent to the game by adopting a submissive position. Most people sexualize BDSM, but power is exchanged in any scenario, sexual or otherwise. This being said, Gothic power exchanges are often sexualized [in appearance]. Samus is vulnerable when denuded, her naked body exposed to the hostile alien menace (re: the end scene from Alien). Metroidvania conjure [up] dominance and submission through a player that winds up “on the hip” (an old expression that means “to be at a disadvantage”). Another way to think of it is, the player is the bottom, and they’re being topped by the game.
[artist: Sarah Kate Forstner’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (2017); source: Michael Uhall’s “A Specter, a Speaker: ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ (1968)”]
With any power exchange there’s always an element of ambiguity and danger (doubly so in Gothic stories). The participants have to trust one another. In this sense, I trust the Metroidvania not to hurt me, but the castle is always somewhat uncanny. I know the gameworld can’t hurt me because it’s a videogame; it can no more kill me than a dream, or C. S. Lewis’ mighty spirit:
suppose that you were told simply “There is a mighty spirit in the room,” and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger [of the tiger]: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking — a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it — an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words “Under it my genius is rebuked” (source).
Nevertheless, the paradox—of near-danger in videogames—mirrors the plight of the Neo-Gothic heroine. 18th century women read these stories to feel danger in a controlled sense, but they still submitted to its Numinous “perils.” By comparison, the Lovecraft junkie submits to cosmic nihilism[3], and the survival horror enthusiast seeks danger of a particular kind. So do Metroidvania players (source).
This power exchange through the palliative Numinous has always appealed to me amid Gothic aesthetics, spaces and cliché, fetishized thrills; i.e., inside castles when I have far less dominant power than one might think, but also more subby power in ways that feel asexually profound but never fully divorced from sexual peril’s aesthetics: the disempowered hero in a very Gothic sense, according to my unequal relationship to/negotiation with a female[4] “rapist” space that feels mightier than I am by virtue of the dungeon (rape) aesthetic, but also our power arrangement being stacked against me:
She’s mighty-mighty, just lettin’ it all hang out
She’s a brick house
That lady’s stacked and that’s a fact
Ain’t holding nothing back (source: The Commodores’ “Brick House,” 1977).
[Our resident lady, Lady Dimitrescu, is both tall as a matter of size difference, but also statuesque; i.e., “of the space-in-question” by virtue of the usual hyphenated interrogations of said space as like a person and vice versa: a bogeywoman to summon and put down, but also to pique particular submissive interests from the hero player—the rape fantasy.]
That’s the whole point. I seemingly “can’t win” because the space’s ergodic potential is fundamentally stronger than I am; but it still sits within that performance of unequal, harmful power as a paradox: the sub’s power through the pairing with a dominant whose power flows through them like heavy metal thunder. In that sense, I actually win and lose at the same time (what ludologists call a positive-sum zero-sum game: a win-win[5])! Replayability and endless backtracking amid dungeon aesthetics are a core part of the Metroidvania appeal: to feel mastered inside the ludic contract despite its inherent flexibility.
Furthermore, as I write in “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” (2021), this doesn’t just stay in the gameworld; for me, it translates to how I live and think about my life relative to my abuse as survived but also played within in Metroidvania safe spaces:
I have male friends, but most of my friends are women or trans people. Most of my partners have been trans or gender-fluid. The same goes for the women in media I relate to or am inspired by. For me, a powerful woman or female space is captivating and educational, especially the “mommy dom” and Metroidvania.
I’ve always felt attracted to female power—be it in teachers, heroines, or videogame characters. But female power is usually androgynous, having pre-conceptions about male power mixed in. I admire Joan of Arc and Elphaba, but also Ellen Ripley and Samus Aran: tomboyish girls, female knights. I especially love the Metroidvania—a chaotic, “female” stronghold to lose myself inside, but also the focus of my PhD work. There, I can explore myself sexually in relation to power and trauma. This is why I submit. When I do submit, I submit to “mommy doms.”
In a BDSM framework, the mommy dom is a powerful female figure, one with the power to punish and nurture inside a consensual framework [of exquisite “torture”]. Just remember that I’m a switch; I’m not submissive all the time. However, when I am, I submit consensually. It’s not for everyone, and it shouldn’t be. That isn’t the argument that sexist men make, though. For them, only women can or should submit. Men who submit are weak, or impossible. Clearly they’re not impossible, but homosexual composer Tchaikovsky’s words on submission (towards a young servant) were nonetheless treated as impossible—his amorous words furiously repressed by the Russian state: “My God, what an angelic creature and how I long to be his slave, his plaything, his property!” (source).
Obviously my connection to the imaginary Dark Mother is tied to my own abuse, and led me down a very dark road: frustrated with academia and dumped by Zeuhl for their decade-long secret flame, I dated online; I encountered Jadis through Gothic roleplay on Fetlife; we hit it off and I quickly moved in; they worked their magic, abusing me emotionally during the pandemic (source).
In Cartesian thought, nature is both wild and a reward to reap. This goes back not only to the genocidal origins of settler colonialism and Divine Right, but the Covenant of the Rainbow and classical Antiquity. Apart from the ability to openly commit lethal force against nature, then be lauded for it, the monomyth usually rewards the hero with getting the girl, afterwards. In short, there’s an exhibitionist, binarized violence to monomyth stories; i.e., presenting two basic forms of monstrous-feminine for the hero to be violent towards or around: the virgin and the whore. Common synonyms are the angel and devil, black and white, leather and lace, good and evil, wife and witch, damsel and demon, etc. Whatever they’re called, the virgin is classically innocent, passive and vulnerable; the whore is guilty, active and dangerous. Both receive punishment in canonical stories because both belong to nature as needing to be dominated and harvested, treated like property in theatrical ways.
Inside this theatre, the virgin sits on a pedestal, being “kept” prisoner (regardless of where she is) while the whore is chased; i.e., hunted down (usually to Hell or hellish areas) and cleansed like a witch is by self-righteous forces ordained by God, the king and the state, more broadly (which translates to capital’s usual operations looping in on themselves): a criminal and a monster. In either case, this synonymizes pleasure and harm in psychosexual forms doubling as capital punishment, mid-harvest; e.g., the succubus is chained and whipped, Medusa is beheaded, etc, while the damsel or the princess is locked up, needing to be rescued again (re: Persephone).
Both types reify the abuses regularly committed against women and nature-as-monstrous-feminine—with violence against the damsel being more of a domestic flavor and violence against the whore lending itself to matters of open war, moral panic and foreign policy (e.g., Red Scare). Both are useful to capital, in that both are invoked to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of shelter and the alien; i.e., nature is a whore; e.g., Beowulf, where Grendel’s mother invades the king’s home (first through her son, then going in herself to punish her son’s killers) to then be hounded to the underwater cave to be killed and presented as dead, allowing the hero to progress and law and order to return.
(artist: Kalinka Fox)
Something to keep in mind when looking at the Radiance, then, is how sex-positive dark mothers/mommy doms are de facto educators for good play using bad aesthetics: the girl to get by raping her for the Man and for capital dressed up in monomythic language. The ruin is a brothel and a warzone. Literally central to Promethean subversion of the monomyth, though, the whore generally waits at the center of the maze in order for the hero looking to progress to the epilogue of promised sex (and the next rape): to teach such children lessons besides the king’s.
Before they even meet, there’s the usual monomythic formula playing out. The hero is called to—generally by a male seer—then given a sword before venturing boldly into the space of doom (the home afflicted with hellish energies). It’s a military mission, a witch hunt that only “ends” when the hero rapes and slays the dragon, witch or Medusa at the end (their functions identical: the fascist/Communist scapegoat, a monstrous-feminine recipient of state force [revenge] by good or bad cops, including token vigilantes). Except there’s always another Medusa waiting for them in another castle, another rape to canonize or camp, another witch hunt to persecute/prosecute (there must, for profit needs to continue for as long as possible). The cats-and-dogs animus lingers, as does the undead matriarch’s hostility haunting the castle walls painted red with invisible blood after the wild goose chase: that of a rape survivor licking her wounds, but also blossoming into the world to stain its much-touted purity with fresh, decentralized uncertainty.
As such, the Medusa becomes something of a door-to-door saleswoman, teaching about rape through characteristic feelings that haunt the venue, post-survival, but also… enriching it? For instance, I didn’t even consider my abuse rape (rape ranking being a common rationalizing method of survivors) until I reflected on it through Gothic fictions like Resident Evil and Hollow Knight. Luckily I did, always comparing myself to the uncertainty I felt in Jadis’ presence; i.e., their toxic love (and furnished home) being like a Gothic castle, and I their Gothic captive.
In short, a dark mother can be played in bad faith, but also good; i.e., the cryptonymic umbra of the cosplayer aping Lady Dimitrescu with her eclipse-sized hat brim (the witch’s black halo, her body’s surface sexually charged with Promethean might, above). In defense of her dark womb as something to protect at all costs—re: freezing the hero as a rape prevention device—Mother Nature must become monstrous-feminine again, thus able to chill in stasis her patriarch-sent, state-ordained male (or token) killers working for the Man as a giant, seemingly inescapable force; i.e., the confronting of rape as popular and unchallenged in mythical, patriarch-centered stories; e.g., Daphne hounded by Zeus, turned into a tree to escape his ordinary rapacious advances. Rooting them in place among “an unweeded garden grown to seed,” a male space is a settler-colonial project on female-coded land reinvaded by a classification that feels female but really is GNC at large. This playing with death and power per ludo-Gothic BDSM has as much an architectural flavor as it does an overtly personified one, which brings us back to Aguirre.
Tying things to Aguirre’s geometries is the final room, or rather a room that conveys finality through the exhaustion of optimism in the face of an endless, yawning dead. As Aguirre writes in “Geometries of Terror”; re:
where the hero crosses a series of doors and spaces until he reaches a central chamber, there to witness the collapse of his hopes; [this infernal concentric pattern has] in Gothic one and the same function: to destabilize assumptions as to the physical, ontological or moral order of the cosmos [… It is like a Mandelbrot set:] finite, and yet from within we cannot reach its end; it is a labyrinth that delves “down” instead of pushing outwards. From the outside it looks simple enough: bounded, finite, closed; from the inside, however, it is inextricable. It is a very precise graphic replica of the Gothic space in The Italian […] Needless to say, the technique whereby physical or figurative space is endlessly fragmented and so seems both to repeat itself and to stall resolution is not restricted to The Italian: almost every major Gothic author (Walpole, Beckford, Lee, Lewis, Godwin, Mary Shelley, Maturin, Hogg) uses it in his or her own way. Nor does it die out with the metamorphosis of historical Gothic into other forms of fiction (source).
While Aguirre hints at videogames a fair bit (the piece is from 2008), I have obviously extended my research considerably to do nothing but explore the videogame’s partitioning of the Gothic’s hellish delights (from 2017 onwards) subverting traditional ideas of strength: confronting the Communist Numinous as haunted by equally enormous oppression (a giant prison for a giant queen).
To that, one does not simply get “raped” once, but over and over again as a matter of exquisite, paradoxically rapturous torture (“rape ironically”)! And if that seems odd, ask us why that might be! Ask the ghost why it was raped—not to get at the truth of what happened back then, but what is going on right now (cataloging history is fairly academic, but reenacting it says much more about current atrocities [with the ghost of the counterfeit] than former ones): marrying the language of sex and war as a matter of camp to bring out of the closet and into the wider world. Such things duel and coalesce in ways a medievalist not only wouldn’t mind, but indeed, would welcome and encourage. The keys to breaking Capitalist Realism lie in medieval theatrics “aping Chaucer, Shakespeare and Walpole,” etc; re: giants, and giant aspects of smaller beings.
(artist: Dream Pipe)
The Gothic has always been campy but invested in secret sins as out in the open (not quite incognito, not quite up front). From “ancient” Romance to ordinary novels, comedy to drama, artist and muse, seafaring adventure and earthbound sexual dungeon, there’s so many ways (and places) to “put it”; e.g., Sabs’ “Captain Turtledove and the Attack of the Terrible Octobussy,” 2024). So explore the taboos and cultural values of the imaginary past as rapacious (appropriative or not); don’t bury them (and their victims) because silence is genocide and genocide always leads to rape, to Rome, to bigger and bigger instances thereof. Ask why the whore is addicted to “rape,” then learn how to “rape” in quotes; listen to Medusa or Hippolyta whispering hungrily into your ear, “rape me!” (or “Take it like a good boy!”). Take the praise and debasement (whatever you both prefer, to whatever degree of aftercare you require); i.e., as a psychosexual, ludo-Gothic means of instruction whose BDSM (often through trial and error) synthesizes good praxis into the future: go big or go home (“rape” so often involves a dominant who looks and feels dominant[6]—the dragon lord or zombie master a fearsome monster-fucker [with a huge dick] that Medusa straight up craves. Mommy has needs).
So while kinky jouissance opens the eyes (so to speak), rape has a practical function: cryptonymy as a means of surviving the state’s usual beheadings (“the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads. Take it in what sense thou wilt[7]“). As a matter of survival and eventual liberation (the state survives by raping workers and nature per the process of abjection; e.g., white middle-class women exploiting cryptonyms to service profit; re: Radcliffe and her echoes), Medusa isn’t the only one who loves being “raped”; Persephone (the deity and me[8]) loves rape as something to camp, thus speak to abusive structures that try to otherwise shock you blind; e.g., the Metroidvania, per the monomythic heroic mechanisms, raping Medusa as a false flag: manifesting the unheimlich as her false castle, invading it and stabbing her in the “eyes” (the white, the pink, the brown—next page).
(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)
A survivor of rape myself, I love writing about rape play both because I’ve gained an appreciation for calculated risk, but also because I have helped others work through such dialogs, too; i.e., manifesting through play and performance as a matter of cryptonymy (showing and hiding trauma) during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a revolutionary device: a pedagogy of the oppressed resisting police violence. While Metroidvania has conveniently allowed me to reenact these in gigantic, dualistic pathways (the castle’s big rape/rapist), any survivor of rape can act out their abuse through the Gothic, during oppositional praxis. Dialectically-materially this theatre invokes mechanisms the state will police through bad actors, players, and instructors: sex and force, but also terror and bodily expression that just as often, actualize/tokenize in highly Pavlovian ways. It’s all the same masks, costumes and mirrors; so remember that flow determines function, as far as the aesthetics of power and death reliably go.
For example, the player’s quest for power in Hollow Knight suitably ends in the darkness of immeasurable death spilling in all directions, trapping the hero in Hell; i.e., the emptying of Hell through a final zombie apocalypse that buries the rapist alive. To this, the heroic quest is Promethean, tied to a space that promises combat; the combat misleads the player by offering power as tinged with a self-imposed decay and malice that ultimately triumphs against the hero upon the story’s conclusion (turning them heel in the process, but to a grand, self-destructive and world-destroying degree; i.e., the fascist notion of the hero’s bondage to the cult of death and rape as venerated by the status quo: an unholy marriage of the hero’s sword to the monstrous-feminine brain. It’s big rape minus any irony at all (“You fight like a young man: eager to begin, quick to finish[9]!”): skull-fucking her Majesty-in-chains on par with Odysseus blinding the cyclops; i.e., she shows herself in all her glory only to be extinguished for it (or so it seems).
Simply put, there’s no way to win, no matter how many treasures acquired or enemies vanquished, because the hero is always a male rapist death fetish (a “killer doll”) working for the state; i.e., a reversal of Axiom Verge. Trace, the useful idiot, kills the king when lied to by the Great Fairy mommy doms (who are good doms despite their strict, imperfect approach); the knight (also an idiot) kills the gay fairy queen haunting the veil. When lied to by the straight king through the ghostly space around him, the hero (thus the player) becomes a bad dom in the process: Radcliffe’s demon lover!
To that, such forces are always in flux behind the scenes and out in the space as interwoven, liminal, anisotropic, concentric, etc; the crypt, as a site of secret sin, oozes said sin (like a ruptured eyeball) all over the status of the self-professed “brave.” It’s censorship with a knife (an oracle speaks with her eyes), profit projecting through rape as a matter thereof; i.e., police violence, repression serving the king as a poetic extension of the nuclear family under capital: protect daddy by raping the madwomen in the attic (classically a woman of color, in Jane Eyre). It’s not exactly subtle, but there remains a cloaked, uncertain element of subversion—some grey area to what might seem like a black-and-white scene.
Indeed, the game is effectively the opposite of Axiom Verge, the white king’s lost boys hulking out/turning black to rape the white queen—a military target—instead of the black queen dismembering the dark father to protect the son from a militarized scientist genociding the land. Furthermore, the extinguishing of the hero’s hopes is literally that of the eyes of the oracle; the eyes of the female Numinous (exhibit 40g) are put out, blinding our poor Cassandra/oracle while turning a blind eye to the darkness that continues in the wake of her execution: the self-destructive rememory—that is, the maddening recollection and attempted reassembly—of an exhaustive tally of imperial destruction, now leaking from the long-dead corpse of empire (which revives to unironically rape Medusa again and again and again). The hole, as usual, is stuffed in ouroborotic fashion by the lance, the sword, as instructed by the game; re: police training through police training grounds, the youthful martyr trading places with the old sentinel to stand watch inside the empty space—blood in, blood out.
Like Moby Dick, the Radiance is canonically the game’s white whale to chase, stab and harvest; i.e., for proponents of Ahab and capital to go overboard and underwater with, putting out their ancient animal enemy’s eyes: “to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!” It’s personal, a framed revenge for Ahab’s leg and his old man’s pride—all to render the whale into blubber and then oil.
Our resident Mothra is no different: something to kill to literally keep the lights on, but also restore the king’s good name against nature as daring to refuse the advance of his spearhead, his patriarch harpoon’s madness and obsession; i.e., all roads lead to Rome, to profit, to rape of nature-as-monstrous-feminine—a phallic sea monster in poetic forms, hailing from lands unknown as normally off-limits to man’s domain giving all the usual monomythic rewards as hellish, sumptuous: Neptune’s trove, its plunder dredged up and dragged back to land.
(exhibit 40h3: Artist: Bay. Nature is seen as the place that gives and takes away—a dark mother to fear and go into the territories thereof. In settler-colonial terms, such harvests are hauled monomythically back to the mother country in such stories, but also reduced to corporate fare sold on supermarket shelves. In Bay’s case, they are an Indigenous sex worker against Capitalism and for nature, doing much of their own cooking for their birthday [above]. But they still live in a place that was colonized [originally by the Dutch] and currently overseen by state-corporate influence.)
Whatever the dungeon, then, it’s a place of endless genderqueer potential (with gay themes present all throughout seafaring narratives, not just in outer space; i.e., matelotage; e.g., “Hey, sailor!” and “Any port in a storm!” etc) and value to harvest by enterprising landlubbers (the man of reason generally a seafarer from land who meets his end chasing the fire of the gods “out at sea”): the killing of the space whale. Whether for the bounty of food (which workers who aren’t against nature still must subsist on, above), pure dominion, or some combination under settler-colonial territories, Capitalism is Capitalism; i.e., relying on said animus in astronoetic narratives treating the whole thing as “heroic,” and for whom to the victor goes the spoils. In essence, the sea is badass and plentiful—a challenge to accept and overcome as historically tied to industry preying on nature from the land to the sea. Their deaths coincide, a hate crime against nature and a mind crime against the perpetrators forced to brave the waves for fat cats safe (and dry) on land (e.g., the invisible company executives, in Alien).
(artist: Michel Tole‘s “The Triumph of Venus and Galatea Over Moby Dick,” 2020)
Except, while she is seemingly hunted to extinction during a presumed war of extermination/tokenized exploitation thereof (similar to the sand worms and the power of the land, in Dune), the Radiance eventually returns for her revenge inside the used-up minds of the king’s loyal servants, who, infected with her influence—her testimony—must be isolated* from other knights and then killed to keep the king’s secret; i.e., while they are incarcerated inside the Black Egg. The madwoman lives rent-free in the attic of their traumatized brains: “art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?” they ask. “Can’t kill me, motherfuckers!” she replies.
*A tactic that real-life ants will do, when members of their nest are sick, except they carry the infected away from the nest to die. The Pale King has colonized everything, keeping the secret in-house to avoid it spreading (similar to Rian from The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, when the Skeksis convince other Gelfling that his mind is sick; i.e., so they won’t dream-fast with him and learn the truth).
This is effectively the subversion I’m talking about, here: the rapists’ comeuppance after doing what they were made to do against nature, in effect subverting state-sanctioned rape through the scene itself as something to act out at the center of the maze: by the Radiance having a role in said subversion as playfully veiled by the maze’s walls. The darkness seems to be the king’s will, but it also occupies her revenge afterwards, lending to an awkward and opaque duality. So, there’s a non-verbal element to what unfolds that’s even more subversive, arguably than, Axiom Verge, but also more contested. It is a rape we’re looking at, right? But the Radiance still wins. Can it be more than one thing at once?
Of course, this plays out as an act that is forgotten and concealed within its own artefacts; i.e., something to sing about as a far-off conquest to begin anew by fresh hearts and minds venturing into old dungeons and hunting down dragons like the days of old; e.g., Tolkien’s song of the dwarves, itself a fragment their culture: “and this is like a fragment of their song if it can be like their song without their music” (source) to
Far over misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away ere break of day
To seek the pale enchanted to gold (ibid.)
to “our long-forgotten gold” to “our harps and gold” from unworthy pre-fascist usurpers (dragons) and abject anti-Semitic occupiers (orcs and goblins). The dwarves’ covetous memory becomes one of unbridled revenge, its call to war against nature sharpening to rekindle better times out of myth tied to artefacts that suggest it to start with: “He was witless and wandering, and had forgotten almost everything but the map and the key” (ibid.).
I’m not just someone who plays with rape through ludo-Gothic BDSM. I’m also a Tolkien scholar whose Gothic ludology was inspired by Tolkien’s work (mainly The Hobbit, but I digress). Far from being brainless in the current, neoliberal trend, games and the Gothic are classically a site for clever in-jokes regarding the same old material, in effect playing with it to camp it. As Tolkien speaks to the monomyth and secret things wrought with heroic violence, then, let’s take a few pages to unpack that and apply it to the Radiance’s death as camping such matters, herself (enjoyment is not endorsement); i.e., as something that subverts the usual monomythic abjection and reward (mercenary rape) per the Promethean Quest: raping the whore as the dragon to chase down and steal from (with Tolkien’s Smaug also being queer-coded and animalistic[10]). From there, we’ll wrap things up and proceed onto “The Monomyth,” part two!
To revive the memory of the king, Tolkien’s war-like dwarves (a whole mess of anti-Semitic clichés) embark on a goldrush through the usual business of burgling a stolen home back unto a mythology’s “timeless” ownership (echoes of Zionism): waging war against the monomyth’s usual enemies by unlikely heroes on a Journey thereof (Jewish-coded monsters and a closeted bachelor). In Tolkien’s opinion, only Tookish assholes have adventures, generally as a matter of conducting violence in dark, deep places while wishing for it: “to wear a sword instead of a walking stick” (ibid.). Like all these little quotes, the desire for adventure against the Numinous dragon is littered throughout Tolkien’s world: little things lead to big things, a covert military operation escalating to all-out war on all fronts (making Smaug this story’s Archduke Ferdinand, I suppose).
The home isn’t just guarded by the dragon, but by the dwarves’ secrecy towards the treasure pegging them as vice characters (“the fierce and jealous love of dwarves” amounting to “dragon sickness” later in the book). And in the interim, the map and key go hand-in-hand—as a matter of code that includes the map and its runes, hidden walls, moon letters, riddles, royal flattery and so on—as a business practice among them, an omerta of sorts. The treasure, already stolen through conquest, becomes a mystery unto itself, then; i.e., a trade secret in the usual medieval sort, one unlocked with the key that was, itself, secret: “the quest to the Lonely Mountain depended entirely on a single key and a secret door that the dragon didn’t know about. In fact, without the key, Bilbo wouldn’t have been able to get into the mountain” (source: A Hole in the Ground’s “The Strange History of Thror’s Key,” 2012).
Tolkien’s dwarves are a secretive bunch—homeless criminals with bling (“Thorin stroked the gold chain round his neck,” source) who do dark business in dark places (“Suddenly he found that the music and the singing had stopped, and they were all looking at him with eyes shining in the dark.” / “‘We like the dark,’ said all the dwarves. ‘Dark for dark business! There are many hours before dawn,'” ibid.). In short, they verge on being goblins themselves, operating through violence to take what’s theirs, the dragon a matter of calculus: “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him” (ibid.).
In turn, such careful planning is tied to the monomyth—a matter of returning to tradition—pointedly encouraging violence against Tolkien’s ideological enemies, all of it sold as Goldilocks Imperialism to middle-class children playing war and robbery[11] for fun (as a matter of fact, he wrote the book for his son):
“That would be no good,” said the wizard, “not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary). That is why I settled on burglary—especially when I remembered the existence of a Side-door. And here is our little Bilbo Baggins, the burglar, the chosen and selected burglar (ibid.).
As such, stealing isn’t just cool, but a righteous cycle of revenge ordained by the author playing god; e.g., world-building and dogma; i.e., to restore a fallen people and land to proper working order after a former collapse: the dragon haunting a fallen kingdom—a symbol of sickness not unlike Medusa’s eventual, required return.
In the interim, Smaug is far-off and legendary because of it, becoming something to plan around: a dungeon crawl (whose cartographic refrain arguably inspired every D&D campaign ever run, and every roleplaying videogame you could think of—per the monomyth as something to canonize). Their return is as inevitable as the weather or the night following the day, because Tolkien treats humans (and monstrous stand-ins for humans) as naturally greedy.
To this, The Hobbit is a morality play whose conspicuously medieval language (and stereotypes) rarefy greed as, having inflicted harm against the status quo, become something to meet with harm: the cycle of revenge repaid in kind. In short, Tolkien abstracts nature into a fascist allegory and scapegoat; i.e., a dragon to slay as one might a witch—all done in order to keep money moving through nature in service to profit. As part of the same “rape farm,” the shadow of the dragon is always felt; its giant bones lie at the bottom of the lake; its spirit lies heavy on the hearts of men, dwarves, elves, and goblins all fighting over the dragon’s mountainous pile of gold; its hoard becomes theirs, turning them into dragons.
To it, the final boss of Capitalism isn’t the dragon and its castle-like body as something to invade, mise-en-abyme (the mountain containing the dragon, which houses the return of war outside of dragon and mountain); it’s greed, itself, as a Pavlovian, destabilizing system of exchange and code—also known as capital. Unto it, the recipe is always one of revenge spiraling towards disaster as precisely what the elite want; per the Protestant ethic, war is holy in their eyes, inventing whatever enemies they want/need and essentializing them as “ancient” through a poetry (and cryptomimesis) conducive to war out of good lands into bad, “there and back again”: good races raping bad ones in and out of game-like replicas. It’s Imperialism with more steps, the centrist arbitration of value judgements coinciding with whether you’re on the right side of the fence (the West) or not; i.e., Orientalism’s double standards per moral teams through good-vs-evil, us-versus-them copaganda; e.g., fat bodies celebrated or condemned simply because of which team you’re on as a matter of shame, guilt, revenge, etc. You can see this with Tolkien’s Bombur compared to the Great Goblin of the Misty Mountains—a double standard that also plays out in real life between men like Sammo Hung and Steven Segal (Accented Cinema’s “Let’s Not Fat-shame Steven Seagal,” 2024). It’s vaudeville, which includes the hobbit killing spiders (which extends to their babies, next page, through an extermination war that marks spiders as “pure evil” being killed by tokenized forces).
(artist: the Brothers Hildebrandt)
The point in dredging up Tolkien, here, is the knight in Hollow Knight is really no different: promised by the game some kind of gilded spectacle (rewards are generally promised through tiny markers of themselves, Thror’s key made of silver); i.e., to plunder through rapine (the act of taking by force) from an undeserving party by deserving ones through a casus beli. In this case, the “dragon” is Hallownest’s monstrous-feminine queen, the Radiance, and your reward—as the games little, hobbit-sized hero—is to rape her and take her spectral crown for the former now-dead king. Not so different from a ring around one’s finger, no (either type signifying the transfer and legitimacy of power, which Bilbo is not immune to, below)?
The Radiance’s death—like Smaug’s—is an honor killing met with armed robbery, but also an exorcism of something hidden to the same extent as that pale enchanted gold, Thror’s key or even the dragon: a mountainous glimmer that blinds the hero and fills them with unquenchable bloodlust; i.e., drunk on glory and death, but also their own heroic brand as inherited from the home’s forged, mythological sense of ownership as rooted in secrecy in deception; e.g., Samus and Zebes, but also Bilbo’s hand in a larger race war that cumulates in Thorin’s Viking-style last stand against Erebor’s forces of darkness (arguably the author’s token Jew defending an imperialist stronghold from the “ancient,” essentialized enemies of Britain: “the enemy is weak and strong”): Thorin bashing Bilbo, calling him “descendent of rats” (code for “Jew” but also “thief”), whereupon Bilbo does everything he can to prove he’s of the good’s side (while also, it must be said, trying to prevent all-out war). Antagonize nature and put it to work as cheaply as possible (which is what the Battle of the Fire Armies [a world war predicated on racial conflict] illustrates); assimilate, gentrify and decay.
Except, the context is more different, in Hollow Knight. For one, the Radiance isn’t just a vice character comparable to gold and conquest, but a tragic character whose rape fantasy is one of reversal after you’ve raped her to death more than once; re: “the fourth ending destroys the Absolute Radiance, but turns the knight into an even greater monster that Hornet must fight on her own.” This happens while the sky weeps blood and tentacles[12] (such black shit may as well be blood given the cataclysmic atmosphere). During state shift, then, the female sun goes black, coming home to end the king’s Cartesian madness—his endless line of toy soldiers marching to their doom—by shattering the dollhouse and the heliocentric stance it has; i.e., built around a false, decaying king (the conspiratorial fascist) eaten, in the end, when the raped, hungry womb of nature goes “om nom nom!” It’s simply the planet defending itself.
In turn, the colossal misogyny on display is actually a revelation about instructed rape that, until the grand unveiling thereof, was merely whisper and allegation: the true villain was the hero all along (in other words, the total opposite of stories like The Hobbit)!
(artist: Ashen Hare)
After all’s raped and done, the Radiance remains the most endearing character (“She’s mighty-mighty”) in the game precisely because she’s raped, but is also the wonderous object of pursuit with a secret to tell that lingers in undead fashion, postmortem. She’s the tragically Icarian/Luciferian (and phallic), but also hidden heroine; i.e., Hollow Knight‘s fat lady signing passionately about her rape in Bluebeard’s castle/geometry of terror (the stage being the GNC performer’s classic arena to summon and voice their abuse, their insecurities, their passion—not for the elite, but for themselves as a dark god worthy of tribute).
Emblematic of the unironic monomyth and medieval Romance, the hero is the talent, the Radiance his merchandise to capture and police by a knight errant given license to do so by divine providence: a one-man army campaigning against the barbarians at the gate, nature herself coming home to turn said home into hostile alien territories. Through the usual fetishes and clichés of sports, combat, and theatre, the knight is the Man with No Name (the American Western generally endorsing cowboys and Indians, pushing Indigenous people to the margins and focusing on white pioneer women/saviors); i.e., a killer-doll, blank-state, masking-wearing mercenary/vigilante without a kingdom fighting for a dead patriarch (echoes of Xenophon, whose poetic incursions grandstand against nature, ultimately yielding repeated, cannibalistic excursions [death by exposure] into fatal territories in defense of empire and its doomed, fearful enterprise; i.e., a repeat of the forced march and last stand, a death spiral’s grist-for-the-mill yielding profit for the elite, fear of nature being the motivating drive; e.g., The Terror‘s Sir John: “Show this beast the might of the British empire!”).
His mission? To extinguish Medusa’s grail beacon—her Archaic Mother’s hysteria—as aided by all the king’s men (shades) playing “barber” (the classic function being a bloodletter to cure an imbalance of the humors, generally tied to “wandering womb”): to perform female circumcision (of her “phallic” components) by the heroic barbarian posturing as “of the West,” all while stabbing Medusa’s bloodshot eyes with their heroic knife dick (which includes tokenized forms; e.g., Samus vs Mother Brain; re: “War Vaginas,” 2021). The Call to Adventure is a mating call, then—the sort that knights are feared for doing unto state enemies in state-claimed lands: a room to clear, a plate to finish, moving money through nature through the same-old process of abjection.
Rape is rape, but the game playfully tests your resolve by treating it as your final reward before ignominiously burying you alive, in effect punishing you—the triumphant detective—like Lot’s wife: for looking into things (re: Segewick). Playtime is over, the ending feeling like a game over. And while everyone arguably feels differently about historical events, the events themselves are still historical-material facts that theatrically repeat through such feelings fueling the chronotope; i.e., as dissenting voices coming from the oppressed marrying to the legends, the architecture, the opposing side’s resistance to the buried truth. Silence speaks for itself, as do the things that corrupt the masonry to immeasurable degrees. Something seems wrong and asks you, the hero, to solve it, as monomyth heroes always do: through unironic violence. His nail, her flesh—it’s the same carpentry.
Like all Metroidvania, then (and, by extension, any Gothic castle), Hollow Knight taunts you, first; it dares you to penetrate its domain and hunt down its ancient, monstrous-feminine secrets, a resident Medusa doing its best to isolate you and piss you off (as James Rolfe famously put it, “You’re angry and you want to beat the Nintendo, but the sad fact is, no one cares but you”).
Like Athetos, the Radiance is that thing to get mad at, but also to worship as the dead giveaway with Numinous, castled qualities (“Look upon my wonder!”); i.e., the dynamic is inverted: Athetos is the state gaslighter making the tyrant’s plea as a man of reason having raped Medusa; the Radiance is appearing before the state servant to paralyze her would-be-rapist in awe. Similar to the Alien Queen from Aliens, the Radiance is meant to be held down and raped by the state as Medusa and Communism—but she wins anyways, punishing capital’s libido (the drive towards profit, raping nature) by cursing them posthumously with live burial and state shift; high voltage, she turns it all back on the hero, thus the player, through her zombie eyeballs felt throughout the space, paralyzing zombie tyrants through zombie soldiers (the Alien Queen, meanwhile, sneaks an egg on board Ripley’s ship, avenging her children by killing Newt, the colony brat, and Hicks, the de facto husband—it’s Frankenstein‘s marital destruction visited upon the cop)!
Until things come to light, the Radiance stares at you defiantly through the eyes of the king’s men[13], screaming out of their mouths like a xenoglossic virus (specifically cordyceps): the voice of the dead, the damned, the raped yawping “I am woman, hear me roar!” She’s a fungus, a banshee, Princess Toadstool from Hell chaining Mario up in a very particular way—through lust and shame, but also voyeuristic/exhibitionist violence camping a shared god space and bodies; i.e., literally bloodlust unto the whore as unable to fight back in a moment of extended, legendary vulnerability and betrayal relayed through the monomyth: as a call to violence against the whore—to “breed” her (a euphemism for rape, but also “rape”) through vulgar poetry of courtly love, of Red Scare lusting after the whore to shackle and shame but also sell her red hair and blood!
(artist: Mika Dawn)
To it, the Radiance is a prisoner the hero tracks down and rapes in her jail cell. She’s raped by her “protectors” playing good cop, bad cop (the husk-like knight filled white spirit and black void as something to weaponize against her), but also experiences the pain and death of those she inhabits. In short, she sees the world through the eyes of the other prisoners, feeling their pain as the hero puts them down (often attacking his enemies while they sleep, invading their dreams to duel their corpses—witness tampering, essentially). His perspective is always one of cleansing the land and its memories through these mediums “leaking hysteria” (e.g., the hollow knight’s cracked mask spilling into the Black Egg and out into the kingdom); she, to cry out through the land in tomb-like agony expressing genocide as unable to be contained, thus repressed. There’s a sadistic and masochistic element between the two, the Radiance provoking attacks that always highlight the hero’s vengeful, police-like function; i.e., something to see, then speculate about, in dialectical-material ways concerning what is happening—in short, what we’re looking at as a point of view unto itself, one tied to rape and war of the land by its self-appointed owners: cops.
While reverse abjection yields the usual rape plays that big mommies give to their good little pets (“love taps”), abjection translates to the Radiance being blinded by her captors. Frankly this is rape all by itself—but also the whispers and societal looking away from someone (culture death) whose smiting of the king’s memory is arguably being done to a rapist by its jilted victim operating through the space. It’s “Young Goodman Brown” or The Scarlet Letter (1850) committed without Hawthorne’s critical bite, his irony. But it still gives that away through the raping of the dead whore as a kind of dance partner the game makes the player (and the audience[14]) party to—to show what is normally repressed by acting out cop and victim. As such, the Radiance is both dead and not dead by playing dead through rape play that speaks to monomythic abjection, turning community isolation inside-out; i.e., subverting it as a matter of Gothic paradox through ludo-Gothic BDSM during the Promethean Quest’s geometries of counterterror. She doesn’t escape her prison by leaving it; she escapes by making it a space to communicate buried woes to a wider audience: the fact that she even exists at all.
Us women, you see, historically aren’t “just angry”; we generally have good reason, as do the men who cover it all up breaking our trust (they don’t trust us to keep quiet, afterwards). We don’t tend to rape men for denying us sex (excluding tokenized, Man-Box examples), but we do become detectives speaking to our survival of rape, the latter something that traumatizes us into silence (or, in Tolkien’s case and ours, secretive fictions littered with clues, stitched together across them in ways his “Tookish” side wasn’t exempt from doing when it fancied him). It’s not a trend for its own sake that bored middle-class people buy into (during the process of abjection); it’s a historical-material fact felt in echoes in and out of Gothic media (which Tolkien very much is as much as Hollow Knight is; re: Volume One, but quoted earlier in “Jadis’ Dollhouse“): rape victims are seldom believed, but appear holistically across generations in and out of fiction regarding such abuse—as castle-like people or people-like castles attesting to secret sins and buried guilt. We fags dance in the ruins to camp their mapped-out rapes, their cartography leading to us and our liberation through “rape”: camping the monomyth as monomythic copaganda, instructing nature as something to rape to move money through nature inside the castle space.
As such, rape victims are forced to be their own advocates, appealing to the public by virtue of what the middle class will pay attention to—the victims’ own rape and murder as something to reify and sell, per the ghost of the counterfeit. This can be Pavlovian—electrocuting the bitch to induce a panic response—but the same actions also constitute a theatrical performance that looks the same, and yet differs through context: the irony of acting out one’s death (“O happy dagger!”) through an ambiguous, at-times-unreliable buffer (the plot to Rashomon, in other words): a secret key and plan to a dungeon (re: Thror’s map, key and mountain, but also dragon, inside) that must be explored. It’s that or not saying anything at all, and look what that gets you (unironic rape, genocide).
They say that dead men tell no tales, then, but few things are as loud, brutal and difficult to ignore as rape (especially gang rape or witch hunts that gang up on a rape victim; re: The Scarlet Letter). As we explored with my rape, emotional damage can cut like a knife in ways that are more subtle and diffuse, but also prolonged and, at times, Numinous compared to an over-and-done-with physical incident. A survivor might out-and-out say “I was raped.” I did, but I actually led off with art of the event, first (exhibit 39a1b). There isn’t a superior method because rape victims are always treated like they deserved it or it didn’t happen.
Furthermore, the fact remains that art is a common way to express one’s abuse at the hands of privileged men (e.g., Elisabetta Sirani’s “Timoclea Killing Her Rapist” [exhibit 35b] or “Portia Wounding her Thigh”). Regardless of the method, many people not only won’t believe you, they’ll attack you (even if they’re victims of rape, too). Welcome to being raped! It doesn’t stop with the event itself, but—like Hawthorne’s infamous Scarlet Letter—becomes a brand to stamp survivors with and then police them as whores[15] to serve profit. It’s compelled prostitution, lashing whistleblowers; i.e., marginalized workers seeking equal rights, thus a chance to be heard, by acting out their abuse.
Applying these complexities to Hollow Knight, I can’t prove that the Pale King raped the Radiance “back then”; but I can do the same thing I did with Athetos and ask you to look at the results: everyone who serves under the king is a trained killer working to please daddy to genocidal extremes (e.g., the Soul Master draining the City of Tears of its lifeforce in pursuit of a cure, exhibit 40i). Fucker’s whole court is straight psychopaths; nobody’s that blind, and if he somehow was, he should be removed and the system overhauled. Fuck the king and fuck his reputation. As a matter of capital attached to Cartesian thought, the Shadow of Pygmalion and Cycle of Kings is precisely the problem.
Medusa’s certainly on board with camping capital; she’s a total freak, one whose ghost of the counterfeit (and thunder-clapping pussy fart) all but begs, “What ails you?” Any Gothic creator loves investigating her own death as tied to societal issues, which she plays out through undead fictions tied loosely to taboo truths; i.e., a black rose to pick for Queen Maeb and croon through folklore and urban legend, rock ‘n roll, the chronotope’s restless geometries!
I’m one such detective, but I’m hardly the first or the best. Even so, it all becomes something to remember by passing it along through oral and written forms that speak to lost, incredible things—rape and revenge, reclamation and release—sure enough, having a spatial quality to them:
Tell me the legends of long ago
When the kings and queens would dance
In the realm of the Black Rose
Play me the melodies I want to know
So I can teach my children, oh (Thin Lizzy’s “Black Rose,” 1979).
A kind of murder ballad, then, the Gothic-Romance-as-space like Hallownest is such flower—a whorish “Alraune” that, hardly as censored as O’Keefe, drinks vengefully the blood of slain virgins and the essence of lusty virginial men (remembering both on either side of rape).
(artist: James Fitzpatrick)
As such, the Medusa once again sits between the “ancient” and the ordinary as trapped on and off the canvas, in between the walls, calling from the heart of the castle’s deepest, darkest prison cell. Darkness visible, she’s Jennifer Kent’s Nightingale as singing her suffering sweetly to those who know the signs, the code. Her expression is forbidden and commodified by colonizer forces, but there’s always a wild poetic joy they cannot fully tame or seize for themselves: to see it again (to hear it again in music) makes my skin tingle oh-so-naughtily. Finding it gives me release, but can’t undo what was done.
Liberation is always, to some degree, chained by ghosts of a settler-colonial past whose rememory aches and bristles with scarcely-contained rage: “I’m not English, I’m Ireland! [switching to Gaelic] To the devil’s house with all English people, every mother’s son of them! May the pox disfigure them! May the plague consume them! Long live Ireland!” (source). Something tells me that if we could translate the Radiance’s screams, they’d sound fairly alike. Indeed, the weapon she visits upon the king is a plague. As such, the Gothic—not just Hollow Knight—is a coping mechanism of martyred catharsis; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a faux-medieval, concealed means of raising the dead of empire to let them speak, thus motivate a decaying hegemon to let go and change—to regenerate into something better than it previously was (treating the Radiance like a leper to lock up and abuse, mid-quarantine/segregation).
The larger mode uses stories like Hollow Knight to wrestle with unspeakable trauma in ways we can, to some extent, partially control and capture as psychosexually cathartic; i.e., the palliative Numinous expressed through Her Majesty’s sorry doom in godly (Promethean) forms: the castle, the goddess, the land of the black rose as raped by the king and all the king’s men (“Dayman, fighter of the night [wo]man!”) running a train (of draconian medieval succession, from father to son) on her corpse, censoring the rape for profit’s sake but proliferating it nonetheless through the space’s endless tourneys. Capital is built on rape as a matter of profit told in monomythic language hunting nature down; to show the rape by humanizing the whore (as Hollow Knight does) is to expose itself and give the game way in Promethean terms: the knight is hollow as a matter of power whose puppetry isn’t limited to the king at all, but also the queen.
Furthermore, peace cannot be attained in the interim, because such hidden abuses routinely yield disastrous socio-material effects whose ontological senescence manifests in the world itself as falling apart: state shift, climate change, and class consciousness all going hand in hand after much frustration (e.g., Charlie Day’s glorious refrain, “Why don’t I strap on my job helmet and squeeze down into a job cannon and fire off into Jobland where jobs grow on jobbies!”) to kick the king squarely in the bollocks. BOLLOCKS DESTROYED.
The paradox Hollow Knight exhibits lies in how it depicts rape; i.e., generally one of monstrous-feminine testimony (itself rather ironic, given the etymology[16] of that word): showing the world one’s rape in ways that cannot, like the space itself, be ignored. The Radiance’s pussy isn’t just a Chinese box pattern (aka the Russian doll, or concentric narrative); per Aguirre’s “Geometries,” which combines the Chinese box with the labyrinth and infernal concentric pattern to achieve an anisotropic effect (different effects in different directions), her fatal eye is a finger trap (“lips that grip”) that bites down on the rapist to trap them (a bit like Mars and Venus Aphrodite in Vulcan’s net), trapping the ordeal of rape for all to see: vagina dentata. It’s a trap, one where the ghost of the Radiance—literally an undead Numinous spirit plaguing the land—tops from below. From Hell as a place to inhabit and experience inside the kingdom, she cleverly baits the rapist (the knight) to expose their hidden rapacious side; i.e., one being a byproduct, similar to Lewis’ Matilda exposing Ambrosia for his Catholic passions: raping a corpse.
In the Radiance’s case, her appearance is the hypnotist’s stellar pussy flaring up to paralyze the knight in his tracks, jumping from one shell to another. But even if the current knight wins and she seemed banished for good without bringing forth the apocalypse (the third ending), the Radiance has still acted out her own death—her own swansong hijacking the prison intercom, its guards, to make them her playthings and her mouthpieces.
(artist: Heinrich Lossow)
From Chaucer’s Alisoun (“Thus, swyved was this carpenteris wyf”) to Ambrosio, to latter-day cops acting out courtly love as the knight in Hollow Knight does, classic villains not only appear righteous and good; they are outdone by their own lust as informed by carceral material conditions (a wife literally something to fuck under duress, but also take by force); rather than refrain from such theatrics, they become a useful way to express rape as going on right now. Per my PhD, Gothic maturity turns such things—normally a matter of spite—into a vulgar, transformative means of performance and play that interrogates power through trauma; i.e., as allowing one to have fun and expose abuse by acting such things out per calculated risk as built into the space and its motion (which is what ludo-Gothic BDSM aims to do). It denudes the king and his designs, disempowering them to give voice to the victim, empowered through her rape as “castrating” the patriarch and his bloodline; i.e., by matter of viewed scandal, per Black-Veil burlesque inside “the lovely room of death” (re: the center of the Radcliffean space generally being a site of explanation about rape)—a planned witness to a crime that, regardless of the lady’s hand in things, is still a crime committed by the knight as normally receiving state protection[17].
The catharsis to apocalyptic, come-and-see rape play like Hollow Knight roots in general, humorous, medieval-style exhibitionism and voyeurism the likes of Heinrich Lossow (above) or, later, Edward Hooper (whose own works inspired and speak to my consensual voyeurism, exhibit 39a1b). It becomes a codified, routine matter of brothel espionage and prostitute heroism—our resident whore baiting the creep, then outing him for the predator he is in service to the king (“The play’s the thing!”). Like lightning in a bottle, this poetic effect is still one of passion; i.e., what the Irish call a chuisle (“the pulse of my heart”)—something to tease like a clit, growing more sensitive between the world of the living and land of the dead (“undeath” being an orgasmic state of existence, of rapture) not exploiting rape but healing from it as a ghost of itself we summon to “ravish” us among the hallowed halls. The feelings intensify towards the vaginal center before the thrust, which mounts and explodes then like the castle itself, the hero and the whore dispersing and disappearing like a (wet) dream.
(source Tumblr post, Samurai Trooper fanzine: February 26th, 2021)
To it, playing with rape isn’t rape, but speaks to unironic forms that, unto themselves, have cathartic potential we can dance with to outperform in subversive, asexual ways; i.e., that can be harnessed to take power back from bourgeois elements pimping Medusa tied to a cultural fascination with the imaginary past (castle or occupant, including warriors and princesses, but also Amazonian hybrids of these, above). Again, they only have as much power as we give them, and through rape play can take it back as a matter of flowing such things back towards workers using Gothic space during ludo-Gothic BDSM. It’s a dangerous game regardless, so we might as well use what we got to take something of ours back from these pigs: “Come feel my hammer, little man!” As Mavis taught me (and for whom this section is dedicated), she absorbs power from those who generally don’t know the difference (men), waking up to describe what happened to Medusa classically in her sleep; i.e., when she was powerless and raped by the hero; e.g., like Theseus and the Minotaur (the former a cop to invade the home of the latter). Perseus hunted down the Medusa to “behead her”—to take her “maidenhead” and synonymize sex and force, but also replace consent with genuine harm. When camping these behaviors, there is always a vampiric exchange, which the space exemplifies in terrifying-yet-rapturous ways.
Except, in cases of genuine harm, it serves the whore to able to top from below to avoid or discourage harm and still take power back from one’s would-be abusers and their monomythic weapons. “Disempowerment” through the vice character is the classic means of subverting police violence by GNC folk—through theatre as a shared space, one that speaks to real-life examples. Actual predators project their own behaviors onto their victims, who they use DARVO to turn other members of the same marginalized community against the predator’s prey as a “threat” in order to prey on them; i.e., camouflage through aesthetics and argument, defined through dialectical-material engagement as a matter of canon vs camp, vice and virtue, behavior and cosmetics (through gender performance) going hand-and-hand with their biology, orientation, and politics, etc.
The Radiance’s bristles with phallic implements—her crown, legs and spiky projections to stab the hero to death with. Except. greatest power is her banshee-like voice, but also her scent as a kind of fairy glamor/magical perfume—one that turns her captors into her willing slaves, reversing the flow of power inside the prison while still visually playing the quest out. In turn, her announcement of rape is a subversive act, one never entirely divorced from genuine abuse by virtue of the player returning the system to working order by seeming laying her low—an act he does by clapping her in chains at the center of the maze: the scapegoat for the king’s crimes/madness already his prisoner.
(artist: Willow Wormwood)
Power and resistance occupy the same space, one whose dominant and submissive roles tend to either outright reverse, or maintain their appear while topping or bottoming changing as a matter of subtext that plays out through the same performance and aesthetics (re: bottoming from the top or vice versa). Keeping with the usual ambiguities—whose speculative qualities of play work off said ambiguities to speak to real life as not being cut and dry—such playtime speaks to the fact that we, in fact, aren’t knights and kings and queens and more than the Radiance is from planet Earth. And yet, we see her eagerly waiting at the door to greet her latest gentleman caller, not unlike a bored housewife playing the Duke of Burgundy (2014) out in real time—that naughty and eager desire to escape the prison-like qualities of middle-class existence, but also genuine abuse tied to the seemingly perfect existence of white American women in suburbia. The Radiance is something of a bored aging housewife, then, eagerly awaiting her next chance to give it to the knight, but also have her castle-space essayed into and ravished by him (the demon lover’s jizz running down her leg a lovely memory as fate comes knocking once more). She’s a freak because she likes to play to recover from trauma that sadly is all too common to women/monstrous-feminine at large; i.e., making such escapes something of a liminal, prison-like opera where liberation is—sadly and joyously—something to play at in order to reify (the story of our gay lives).
(artist: Shane Ballard)
Moreover, such calculated risk’s historical cruising can reduce to safer thrill-seeking that, all the same tends to get the old blood (and other fluids) pumping—in part, because you’re not always sure what’s going to happen or what someone is saying (e.g., body language, gags, and being restricted [for the sake of argument] to only making cute animal sounds), but all the same have a pretty good idea when working with someone you trust; i.e., who isn’t bad-faith, hence can actually follow commands (won’t bully/rape you and then stupidly fail up) and play the part of the dom or the sub regardless of aesthetic; e.g., the dragon master of the dark mommy dom using you the way that you want to be used, “raped,” what-have-you. That’s what makes it silly and fun, but also cathartic regarding actual abuse per the pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., speaking theatrically to repressed actions routinely committed against the usual criminalized parties (the monstrous-feminine as sex demons, foreigners, sodomites [vampires] and other such “degenerates”) during state crisis advertising rape epidemics against marginalized peoples inside domestic war zones, aka prisons (cops and victims, witch hunts scapegoating nature for capital’s regulation predation, but also its boom-and-bust design)!
The fact that it’s a videogame aside, there’s always a BDSM element of play to stories like Hollow Knight. Except terror is always part of the historical equation, the disguise-like context of said play—the psychosexual excitement of release and incarceration—offset by acquiring new playmates to bask in the dom’s Numinous glow. She’s definitely a strict dom, playing it straight and only surrendering in the game’s final moments.
But in “dying” for all to see, the Radiance has her revenge/generally gains the upper hand over servants like the knight (similar to Portia’s ring game); i.e., those who themselves have been historically conditioned by the prison to prey on her to begin with. As a matter of exchange, they become her playthings, hypnotized in ways police agents often are, albeit in ways the Radiance uses to reverse the usual flow of violence and give Her Majesty a modicum of control: setting herself free inside the oubliette (a kind of prison that means “to forget”) as infernal schoolhouse to unruly children. The signature of choice begins to suggest mutual consent in ways that, on their face, seem wholly nonconsensual. Indeed, rape is as much the emotional abuse of isolation waiting to be fucked as it is the penetration, itself. The Radiance is paradoxically free, then, while still in chains (at least for now)—liberated from the embarrassment of total silence and bondage abuse, learning to enjoy its subversive power as a profound means of de facto education/reclamation: topping her captors, dominatrix-style, or at least making them work for their reward, then turning the sweet taste of victory to ashes in their mouths. She’s teaching them a lesson, one rooted in the humiliation of play where resolution is always found amid theatrical, but also dialectical-material tension.
As Jadis taught me, power becomes a vital means of play and performance while being imprisoned in some shape or form. Such hypnosis, then, has a canonical, settler-colonial function to it—a “prison sex” mentality the Radiance breaks by turning imprisonment back, boomerang-style, on her abusers, forcing them to remember the person they’re guarding as having value. She does so by using the dogmatic, vampiric nature of the prison against its employees; i.e., using her terrifying voice to infectiously travel through the guards and architecture, draining them of their essence and short-circuiting their brains. It’s a queer, iconoclastic metaphor of disease not unlike Foucault’s panopticon, one she—a skilled and unscrupulous survivor locked in her cell—uses to her advantage to speak to past wrongs against nature (and herself as “of nature”) through ludo-Gothic BDSM: a “rape” epidemic. Like any good example of the exercise, it’s even set to music—a song and dance to play out for the umpteenth time (with Radcliffe’s vaguely cursed spaces of terror often having hauntingly enchanting and spooky “mood music,” setting the signature gloomy tone by playing atmospheric from undiscovered locations; i.e., that, like the Pied Piper or sirens, lead you to your indeterminate but certain rape/doom; e.g., Azathoth’s flutes from “Dreams in the Witch House” or the spooky guitar music from 1996’s Diablo 1 “Tristram theme,” etc):
(source: Materia Collective)
In other words, such abuse is generally tokenized, the queen stuck in her closeted, isolating position because she was ostensibly betrayed; i.e., forgotten by her clan (the seer in the Burial Grounds, above) and left to rot inside the mind of the people abusing her for the king: sending the hero to rape and destroy their matriarch as a matter of pro-state penance, unburdening themselves but also unable to live the guilt and fading to dust. Such preferential mistreatment translates to real life and the ways a witch hunt normally play out: turning society against those who aren’t normally believed by other members of the prison population.
For example, JDPlaysMoth accused me of abuse based on my testimony of older transmisogyny committed against me (source tweet, vanderWaardart: July 19th 2024), doing so after refusing to transvestigate my own partner because I didn’t take Jade at their word that Crow was a Nazi “fake trans” preying on “real trans people”:
Crow is racist, lied about being trans to me and you, is abusive, steals money, intentionally asks trans people they’re acquainted with if they can write fiction of them detransitioned, and lies about being single and friendless to get new partners. They also aren’t trans. They lie about being trans because they have a fetish for trans women. They also are a chronic narcissist who uses abuse to try and control people who want to help them (source).
and then adding, “If you want to know more, that’s fine, but I’m out of the situation, and this is just information” before running a smear campaign on me because they were “just trying to help” and I refused to listen. They then deadnamed/misgendered Crow, saying that they didn’t “want to transition, doesn’t want surgery, and as another partner of hers has confirmed, she only does it because she thinks it’ll make trans women like her more” (ibid.). Jade’s actions—cloak-like though they are—still speak for themselves.
Furthermore, all of this is done by Jade while swanning and showing off their outward appearance to their fans (source tweet: June 26th, 2024)—in short, while kissing up and punching down as a byproduct of their own lived abuse. Acknowledging that abuse is valid, but more important is understanding that Jade is presently an abuser weaponizing their own lived experiences against others. They’re the impostor in love with themselves, a mirror that reflects their false nature onto their victims in order to makes others feel threatened; doing so is meant to alienate Jade’s victims, presenting them as false, illegitimate outsiders Jade’s flash mob can string up in association with their usual inequity under police rule: the scapegoat, witch whore inside more earthly and less fantastical prisons. Fantastical or not, there’s always some orc to lynch, some whole to fill through revenge; re: the givers and receivers of state violence inside the state of exception, moving money through nature.
Free from scrutiny and indeed, venerated for having exposed a perceived menace through the usual bigotries leveled at the marginalized struggling for in-group status, Jade is the fascist ringleader free to feed on her victims with impunity! She’s a witch hunter played by the witch—a feeding frenzy conducted by those commonly dehumanized by systemic abuse seeking empowerment through said system; i.e., the policing of others through a matter of dogma, fear and revenge, abjecting members of the same community by triangulating against them for the state: robots policing robots, slaves policing slaves, those of nature policing those of nature as monstrous-feminine with monstrous-feminine. Orcs police orcs, rats police rats (or rodents in general, but I digress) as givers and receivers of state abuse (often fetishized, knife-dick-style, through badass-looking weapons, below—less Excalibur and more an evil, “Soulreaver[18]” version of the same device), dividing and conquering territorially (the essence of settler-colonialism) when capital dies and regenerates through said witch hunts as hazing rituals:
(source)
This includes fiction speaking to non-fiction as married to each other. As Silvia Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch, Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004):
Witch-hunting did not disappear from the repertoire of the bourgeoisie with the abolition of slavery. On the contrary, the global expansion of capitalism through colonization and Christianization ensured that this persecution would be planted in the body of colonized societies, and, in time, would be carried out by the subjugated communities in their own name and against their own members (source).
only to add elsewhere (cited in “Hot Allostatic Load”):
One lesson we can draw from the return of witch-hunting is that this form of persecution is no longer bound to a specific historic time. It has taken a life of its own, so that the same mechanisms can be applied to different societies whenever there are people in them that have to be ostracized and dehumanized. Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity (source).
In response, the author of “Allostatic” responds
The term witch hunt is thrown around a lot, but let’s look at what it really means. Witch hunts, as discussed by Silvia Federici, were responses to shifts in capital accumulation, as is slavery. To jury-rig the perpetually self-destructing machine of capitalism, huge amounts of violence are required to obtain captive labor (fem and non-white). The effect is to devalue our labor as much as possible, and to destroy the bonds between marginalized people (ibid.).
to argue for a cheapening of nature (re: Moore and Patel) through labor associated with it as recognized inside different marginalized populations conditioned to self-police, thus witch hunt in and out of fiction.
In response to both authors, I would include that capital tokenizes all labor (not just female and non-white) as sexualized, fetish, alien; i.e., something to gentrify and decay inside of itself, moving money through nature to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine (thus having masculine elements; e.g., phallic women). Feminism decays for these purposes, as do genderqueer movements, sex work, and Gothic poetics. Cops are also assassins, including vigilante ones recruited from the prison population expressed using such theatrics to embody by Man Box agents as “witch cops”; i.e., “prison sex” mentality selecting the whore and the cop to rape said whore who, regardless of sex or gender, is acting like the colonizer as something they have internalized and dressed up as. This includes whores acting as cops, “undercover” insofar as their tokenized police function is concealed by their marginalized origins worn on the outside in visibly fantastical forms: a robata romance, reduced to the nuts and bolts of class and culture betrayal. Rape is rape, betrayal is betrayal regardless of why you do it (e.g., “I was tired,” or “I was raped”)!
(artist: Monori Rogue)
All of this is Jade talking about themselves as projected onto their victims; people like Jade use DARVO, community isolation/obscurantism and police-grade hard-lining to bully their prey. In dialectical-material terms, it’s still Red Scare—pinkwashed by a predatory trans woman against another trans women (and trans man), pitting other GNC people (who often do sex work to survive) against Jade’s targets. Jade’s ugliness isn’t their outward appearance, but the predatory context of their actions. “Genuine transness,” then, becomes a matter of class action through culture as something to uphold, not betray through police violence (which is inherently fake). Such “boundaries for me, not for thee” predation is quite common in marginalized communities, essentially amounting to gang wars and tokenized policing instead of intersectional solidarity against all manners thereof.
Per the cryptonymy process, all of this self-reports and self-deceives, the complicit villain reduced to the useful idiot[18a] that gives themselves away by acting against their own kind inside the police state. Because they cannot monopolize the mirror as a cryptonymic device, we can use it to out and expose them through their own behaviors speaking for themselves: such traitors are cheap, worthless vampires that drain others for the state. Their value comes entirely from raping others, making them unironic leeches—parasitic hollow knights seeking their sorry prey like Slave Knight Gael blindly chasing the Blood of the Dark Soul until the end of time, or the king’s men walking into the Radiance’s willing clutches (a pathetic, pernicious, predatory quality we’ll explore even more in “The World is a Vampire” subchapter). This is a school for ants!
Ants are not known for their intelligence. Rather, such behaviors are taught through canon’s normal coded instructions denoting value by going to the center of the maze (the nucleus, which isn’t always the middle) to rape the witch, the dragon, the Medusa “just one more” time. Even if you make it to the Radiance’s cell—her home, as she preys on the hunters normally trying to house and harm her for the king—she is simply waiting for the killer with a variety of extensive and fatal weapons.
The Radiance own clever defiance is informed by police action as something to twist, making the experience more agonizing (and fun) for all parties involved. By camping the hero, she shows that to survive rape, we must camp its execution as endemic to capital, liberation being the continuous and mounting result of that on a cultural level that reclaims the Base and recultivates the Superstructure: through data that—like the Radiance’s cordyceps analog—freezes our abusers usefully in place. “Stay! Good boy!” Or, “Rape me! Good boy!” It denotes an inability for a superior side to exist, the state and workers locked in perpetual dispute. We want to expand our advantage to shrink the state (and its agents) to irrelevancy. This happens through the paradox of “disempowerment” to speak powerfully to our imprisonment under capital.
Furthermore, these disparities and harm play out between fiction and non-fiction, satire and canon, speaking to the same things being colonized and liberated to a holistic, half-real degree. This pedagogy of the oppressed is as much our bodies and their labor power as it is the Aegis a theatrical trampoline/mirror saying like an all-projecting panopticon, “Look, don’t touch!”
Either way, Medusa’s restless corpse and labyrinthine frontier fucks back through the space—using tricks that short circuit the usual heroic bullshit (“And your tricks won’t work at all!” as Lady Kayura [above] puts it) by reversing the usual flow of power that occurs in all caps: “FINISH HER!” Kiss, bite or slap, though, her vampire booty (and castle) is a vitalistic fetish whose charged surfaces and thresholds take power from the usual abusers in the usual genderqueer ways: rolling with the punches of courtly love as something to camp and subvert (the player telling the Radiance’s story by reaching and raping her per the game’s ludic contract: play Metroidvania, rape Medusa—again, it’s par for the course)!
(artist: TMFD)
Furthermore, sexual feelings don’t always go away after rape, but they do often get swept up in rape fantasies whose paradoxical fun remains tied to real-life abuse and power structures (so many divorced dads to out as creeps); that’s what Gothic fiction is!
Keeping with that, the player and the game’s ludic contract/geometries of rape play in Hollow Knight are ones where the game fucks the player after a perceived momentum shift from the assigned dominant (the knight) by the Medusa; i.e., topping from below, out of Hell, to haunt the player after the fact: exposing themselves as a witch hunter by completing a long series of “hits,” of which the Radiance is queen (a “power target”).
Such reversals of mastery are hardly a secret contained inside the gameworld; castles like Metroidvania advertise their raping of the player as a matter of power exchange similar to Radcliffe’s or Lewis’ readers; re (from “Our Ludic Masters”):
A person motivated by sex is hardly in control. Not to mention, the sex historically offered by Metroid is fraught with peril. The entire drive is illustrated by gameplay [space] conducive to speedrunning [rape] at a basic level. The same strategies employed by the best runners are executed by regular players. You play the game and begin to play it faster. In some sense, this “maze mastery” is involuntary. The player cannot help but play the game faster as they begin to re-remember the maze. The game exploits this, repeatedly leading the player towards self-destruction and domination.
These feelings are orgasmic, but differently than the Doom Slayer’s own attempts at conquest. They’re a Gothic orgasm, a kind of exquisite torture. I say “exquisite” because they occur within the realm of play. For Metroidvania, this jouissance is ludic (source).
But these, per the process of abjection, classically serve the state through the middle class doing the rape-in-question. There is always a psychosexual threat that motivates the player to be unironically violent with their avatar towards the monstrous-feminine (this includes Dracula in Castlevania, but more on that in the “Feeding” chapter); i.e., before the game eventually tops them (the warrior submitting to the game after a hard day’s work): rape Medusa, get pegged (the paradox to ludo-Gothic BDSM again being that no one is actually being harmed, onscreen).
All of this is standard-issue Amazonomachia. Per the Gothic Romance, though, the house is the monstrous-feminine, and it always wins by reminding players that the king—and by extension the man of reason—is dead, built on stolen land. But they think they’re not; they’re undead in service to the state as always hungry for more rape. It’s precisely this mechanism the Radiance uses to made herself and her abuse heard. She is the Numinous—something to acknowledge rape with (carceral violence through solidarity confinement, in her case) and play games that help us process our own abuses, in real life.
To it, the same invulnerable quality to BDSM, the inability to get raped, applies in either direction. The Radiance can’t be killed any more than Medusa can, and in being raped she always takes the hero’s power as a matter of performance (to have him, and him her, back and forth, per the usual Beowulf-style kayfabe and momentum changes and stances: cops and victims): his sword is useless to him no matter where he plunges it (the brain, belly or box), because he will always corrupt, the kingly godhead and colony will always die, and the Medusa—well and truly broken in (and not under the spell of their rapists’ penises, like the owners of these penises are)—will always return, playfully reminding people camping her rape that she was actually raped by king and countrymen alike. That is her revenge!
“Some power!” Dr. Christine Neufeld once scoffed at the topos of the power of women. Except, all power is performative, Dr. Neufeld. Furthermore, history is canonically predicated on men raping women, workers and nature, the latter of which are monstrous-feminine by virtue of their expected role: taking it inside the prison. Indeed, the Radiance’s pussy—her stolen land—is raw and inflamed with irritation, decay and fungus, the febrile yeast infection entering her insectoid rapists’ ant brains. Hysteria becomes something of a defense mechanism; i.e., akin to the xenomorph’s acid for blood, but an STD to discourage the warrior’s invading her realm. It’s not unnatural, but nature defending itself from manmade incursions essentializing themselves as “natural” (re: Divine Right and Manifest Destiny), only to fall into disarray as their usual Cartesian progress is denuded and reversed to develop a Communist opposite invading the space (the fungus grows over time): “Let nature be your teacher!” as Wordsworth puts it[19]—your dominatrix discouraging canonical violence through bad (campy) echoes of itself!
The monomyth delivers rape disguised as “heroism,” showing the player how to act (rape the whore); the Promethean, iconoclastic gag—its bread and butter—is subverting this exchange, taking the rapists power to unmask and dethrone the sovereign through the player aping them, and that’s exactly what the Radiance and castle do. Having hijacked the prison, she lures the player to his doom at the middle of it, showing him the truth of the Pale King despite said king having given him, the knight, amnesia. Working through the gameworld, its unmappable qualities to trauma can never be fully explored, thus raped enough; something of the Radiance always stays out of reach, the Pale King always exposed as futile, impotent, and wretched. He has no clothes and thought he could conquer death, his primrose path the road to Hell paved with bad intent doing him in!
Instead, death becomes him as something to look on in horror (and perceptive zombie eyeballs), the Radiance jeering liminally behind her sanctuary’s Aegis, her dominatrix’ panopticon fucking back against weird canonical nerds. A fatal parting gift that comes back round and round, she rises from the grave—its ashes, dung and corpses—to become reborn in the death and decay as paradoxically what returns her to life; i.e., that she may haunt her abusers’ value (the swordsmen’s “swords”) tied completely to raping her for the Man. You can’t kill or fully imprison Medusa, and the state will die trying (unable to regenerate in the face of something more flexible and prone to adapt—the king’s a lightweight, in other words)!
(photographer: Dennis Lowe)
To it, Medusa can take all comers, fucking back hard against any who take a swing but especially Cartesian men of reason (and their theatrical disguises)! Such bullies are weak cowards, accustomed to state protection, whereas Medusa has built herself up through adversity. She is strong and her bullies are not, which means they will only fear her more when her reunion with them—rising up from the depths like a ghost ship, or a hellish castle descending astronoetically from the stars—suddenly threatens to expose their shameful and pathetic actions during the usual heroic tests, the bloodsport of a given witch hunt suddenly achieving proletarian results; re: like Macbeth—slave to the same Cycle of Kings—seeing the murdered Banquo while awake, to Ashley Williams’ being exposed as a stupid, egotistical, and enabled charlatan (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Valorizing the Idiot Hero,” 2020), to Castle Otranto’s mighty helmet crushing Manfred’s son to expose the entire Capitalocene. Such things are generally fabricated (above) to counteract state versions. Dragon or witch, fascist or Communist—all paradoxically occupy the same messy venue, the same shadow zone to sing our little hearts out. Power is always a performance.
Similar to Peter Weyland or Athetos, everything about the Pale King’s performance is deceitful and penetrative; e.g., the chair and crown of swords (next page), the lord’s many needles stabbing the world around it for a cure to death as simply being the cold hard truth: “A king has his reign and then he dies” (death being the Leveler of so-called great men of history—a theme we’ll look at next with Myth: the Fallen Lords).
Like all men of reason tied to cartesian thought, he becomes the ghost of rape seeking its revenge against nature having humbled him and his phallic, monumental posturing; and as we’ve hopefully established by now, revenge during the monomyth is always futile: Medusa’s power (sunshine or darkness, sword or spike) is bigger than any king’s, haunting the bad timeline to threaten new resurrection and growth towards Gothic Communism—all while our man of reason dies alone in his tomb-like throne room, his prison cell. This happens inside capital, regardless; the difference is dialectical-material context.
Sound familiar? The Radiance and Rusalki have that in common, too! They’re king-slayers, the thorny cunt that—once thrust into by the king’s lance—takes the lord’s power and kills his men like sacrifices that she exposes; i.e., not as philanthropists at all, but Charlie Day’s “full-on rapists.” Hoisted up on his own petard, the king is the sacrifice, capital reporting on itself as aided by the Radiance being raped as loudly as possible; i.e., our girl to get “gets got,” and she just won’t stop cumming (a true exhibitionist, walking the game’s tightrope just as the player does)! Regardless of exact intent, her rape exposes her rapist through emergent, psychosexual forms of play between hero and whore, hunter and witch; i.e., involving canonical rape (the monomyth) as something to camp, mid-torture: exquisite, half-veiled threats of calculated risk striking the king stone dead (the bully afraid of his own shadow, dying of fright). Instead of celebrating the whore as victim and nothing else, then, the Radiance beats him at his own game: “The king is dead; long live the king!” (or as David the android would say in Prometheus, “Mortal after all!”). Speaking the king’s language for workers, she invites the player to celebrate his demise, taking the whore’s side to spurn the tyrant’s shriveled corpse. Get that ass beat, old man!
This matters insofar as Capitalist Realism will incur the end of the world (the wrath of the gods) rather than imagine anything beyond Capitalism; re: the myopic, entitled delusion of a Quixotic idiot trapped in his dead dream of greatness. In turn, the banality of such evil’s looping threnodies is that those who know and have only care about one thing: holding onto power for as long as possible. Preventing state shift (cataclysm) was entirely possible in the king’s world, or Sudra, if only they would let go and spread power more evenly around. But they—like their earthly counterparts—would rather gas entire nations and send the ants marching off to their deaths if it meant they could only enjoy their usual glass of blood one more time. They’re not just complete and utter ghouls, but deeply cynical tyrants in suits who cannot make or enjoy anything except rape. They are the enemy of all things, both workers and nature; there’s not enough time in the world to express just how much they (and the state) suck (and how much fucking time they cry about it to the world, as Victor once did; i.e., DARVO and self-centeredness; e.g., Elon Musk insisting he is the victim, losing an heir instead of gaining a daughter[20]).
However imaginary such monsters and castles are, then, the DARVO-grade, victim-blaming language used to describe them (and the rape it causes) is very real. As a matter of returning to these embarrassing defeats, the hero travels deep inside worlds like Hallownest, confronting uncomfortable truths about the Cartesian rulers they serve; i.e., per monomythic exchanges baked into or otherwise tied to capital as having been displaced to make-belief spheres: there are no kings left, only bones that hunger for revenge, for closure, for awakening. The man of reason is a zombie, as is his good little soldier raping Medusa for him (the routine sacrifice made to keep Medusa in check, which doesn’t work). To bad he didn’t know she’s a necromancer camping the castle to lure the hero: “Come to mommy!”
This rebellious potential of the infernal concentric pattern is one that that we, as Gothic Communists, should welcome and capitalize on; i.e., when developing Capitalism away from patrilineal descent towards Communism as a monstrous-feminine dark womb, but it starts in the self-dug pit of kings and their used-up defenders: the mind space of the dead monarch (Zeus as braindead, creating things that rape nature’s “womb” as part of the world he tries and gloriously fails to dominate). The usual displaced intimations of capitalist instability (the process of abjection) becoming a death omen fir Gothic Communists to prevent, not bury and escape whenever capital rears its ugly head! They try to invoke Cartesian dualism; we drop a piano on their heads.
In short, all’s fair in love and class war. During it, we have to befriend the ghost of the counterfeit, talk to it and wake up (class and culture consciousness, emotional/Gothic intelligence), which means facing rape as a matter of profit recycling blinding apocalypses/rapes. If the legions of unburied death inside that wormy pit are any indication, we cannot afford to be blind:
(exhibit 40i: Intimations of genocide are commonplace before the final tragedy—e.g., the Soul Master’s charnel house, a secret resting place of his ghoulish experiments. To this the Abyss is a literal level in-game, commenting on mise-en-abyme as literal within ludo-Gothic, ergodic spaces: a “desert of the real,” abyss-like maze whose chronotope is chock-full of cryptonymic wreckage. Desiring to separate the spirit from the body as a weapon against hysteria, the Soul Master exemplifies Cartesian folly in the face of mature challenging male imperiums. More broadly the closed space is generally a site of trauma for the heroine looking at something nigh inexpressible: less a thing fully uncovered and more the protagonist being sent to a buried location where the unspeakable trauma can be found as too much to process [the protagonist being a genderless, monstrous-feminine variant of the Gothic hero/heroine in one uncanny ghost].
Unlike the rooms and tunnels, the presence of living death within them cannot be recorded on the knight’s trusty map; in other words, it cannot be openly acknowledged, let alone quantified by the cartographer as a cop, but is felt everywhere as something the dead walk you through in a liminal, architectural sense—both in the City of Tears, but also the entirety of Hallownest and in the parallel, concentric spaces of the ghosts and their sleeping minds [re: Aguirre’s “Geometries of Terror”]. Dreaming of trauma, these restless spirits are tied to the savaged land, both invaded by an ultimate killer [the player] who “avenges” them after absorbing their power in duels from beyond the grave. Taking their power for itself, the Pale King’s weapon uses them to root the Gorgon out, pinning all of the Kingdom’s federalist desolation [from the Soul Master and others] onto the Radiance as an ancient, monstrous-feminine scapegoat: Original Sin.)
Despite being presented as “female,” this irrational fear of looking at repressed trauma—and the coercive, duplicitous methods of engaging with it, in the blood-soaked, circular ruins—is actually heteronormative and patriarchal. Empire is inherently Cartesian, thus genocidal; forever haunted by the rapacious ghosts of kings and ancient Gorgons, but also their affiliate zombie hordes, its legions of dark, voiceless undead marking the general location, if not the exact manner in which these bodies were exploited by empire in the name of “progress” (following the leader). Rediscovery leads to further stabs at repression, but also redistribution through the paradox of terror, violence and anything else to serve workers thwarting state monopolies: the Aegis goes both ways, and fucks back through all the usual devices’ anisotropic (reversible) dualities, hyphenations, paradoxes, et al.
Let’s wrap everything up (four pages) before exiting the symposium and moving onto “Monomyth,” part two.
In The Hobbit, Bilbo is repeatedly concerned with the quest as a kind of suicide mission: will he make it back alive? The same applies to rape survivors, who generally aren’t the same when they “come back” from rape encounters; i.e., a part of them simply doesn’t, dying back at the crime scheme. But something new emerges, regardless, something strong in spite of that; e.g., the Radiance’s phallic elements thrusting and stabbing at the hero.
Liberation and exploitation, then, share the same spaces, the same terrifying bodies as castle-like and vice versa; re (from “the Origins of Ludo-Gothic BDSM as a Matter of Rememory”):
big power and trauma often lurk on the surface of gentler-looking (and smaller) bodies, their double operations showing and revealing different things useful to state or proletarian agency through Gothic reenactments of paradise lost; i.e., of shattered innocence, of childhood devastation confusing pleasure and harm through conflations of psychosexual pleasure-and-pain responses inviting the audience to consider an uneven pedagogy of the oppressed: look on those of us affected by rape and see how we cope with the trauma it forces us to live with (source).
Such rape-play, laugh-at-the-gods showmanship doesn’t just include the Radiance contained inside the hollow knight inside the castle grounds, as we have shown, but any monstrous-feminine, be they big and small, tall and short-stacked, young and old, kawaii and kowai, goblin and witch alike (or combinations; i.e., kids playing with dolls to achieve deeds worthy of remembrance; e.g., Hayao rocking Hugo at Evo 2024). All are criminals seeking liberation through what normally is policed: forbidden fruit to reclaim and deny our rapists using ludo-Gothic BDSM inside the state of exception and its persecution mania’s places and people, maps and monsters, etc.
We’re vampires, too, but we move power towards ourselves using what we got (re: Matteson): reversing abjection through our darkness visible; i.e., our Satanic camping not just of paradise (the castle or castle grounds), but its prophesied restoration through heroic violence cleverly upended during Promethean counterterrorist schemes topping from below.
Adversity isn’t just baked into capital, but class and culture war’s revenge against bourgeois forces’ notion of destiny through moral actions (witch hunts) and territories (maps, mazes). For the elite, then, the end of the world is when workers refuse to police themselves, but rather humanize each other using the same monstrous language’s stigmatic elements to organize labor action; e.g., orcs and goblins (medieval anti-Semitic symbols of greed similar to dwarves, but also eating children and raping women), dragons (medieval symbols of cruelty and power), witches (medieval symbols of children eaters), and other oppressed things clapping back, guerrilla-style, against state forces and their codified bigotries; i.e., with the very things the state cannot control, repress and ultimately abject: some combination of their monstrous-feminine bodies, their labor and genders, their sexualities’ sultry and inventive Gothic poetics, body language, and colorful swearwords, etc.
In rebel hands, these articles of desire, vice, struggle and sin collectively and joyously voice rebellion as a stubborn, intoxicatingly transgressive means of rocking out against false protectors: underdog agents of fortune—like immovable objects meeting an unstoppable force—reconciling fate by refusing to be dutiful pets while simultaneously rubbing their assigned owners’ noses in it. “Hell’s bells, Satan’s callin’ for you!”
(artist: Bottled Line Art)
So while it’s true that (re: our volume thesis)
Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; [and that] profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on [nature, the fact remains that trauma] cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it (and its trifectas, monopolies, etc) using the same threatening aesthetics of power and death, decay and rape (source).
we must remember that (re: our Metroidvania symposium theses)
the Gothic is predicated on fakery through the process of abjection attacking nature vis-à-vis the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., nature as alien/monstrous-feminine, colonized by the sovereign West through Cartesian thought. Historical materialism proliferates decay and deception through open secrets (casualties of empire, but also empire in decay expressed in medieval language; e.g., castles) that no one side can monopolize, but for which terror and obfuscation allow either side to partially conceal themselves with, using the cryptonymy process to operate in capital’s wake: to either defend the status quo while wearing its victims and symbols of oppression, or to undermine it through the same basic means (source).
and that’s
what the Promethean Quest effectively encapsulates and discourages, Medusa fucking back to reverse the flow of power and information the monomyth normally supplies in outright parental language, but also monomythic media exposed to middle-class children at a young age; i.e., standing in for absentee parents (videogames, for our purposes): the givers of Cartesian dogma, but also rebellious sentiment through Promethean allegory (the appearance of the black castle/fallen manmade paradise to begin with) [ibid.].
There is no monopoly on any of this, no set future relayed in the imaginary language of the past where Hell comes home. Capital rapes us, but we can always fuck back to reverse abjection; i.e., to take anything they have back from them through the same poetic allegories, illusory dialogs and medieval, at-times-crude (and fun) puns: where power is, and where trauma is interrogated through said power as exquisite “torture.”
As the Radiance shows, this happens through performance and play occurring for one side or the other in perpetual conflict—our existence, happiness and survival is a life-after-death threat display they will always fear/try to control through futile revenge and empty promises of power (the myth of the middle class, avenging their losses for the state by policing us, only to have their home collapse).
For us, then, “sleeping beauties” are when the witch wakes up to collectively fight class war through culture and race united with it; i.e., to raise a cumulative emotional/Gothic intelligence and awareness for all of these things during intersectional solidarity liberating sex workers through iconoclastic art—our castles in the flesh, but also our praxial necklaces and oppositional synthesis made by connecting the dots differently per outing (as this symposium has done, referencing my older works in ways that you can try yourselves). Sex Positivity is holistic, in that respect, summoning sluts to scare our foes; the enemy to Gothic Communism, workers and nature is the state and its police agents (token or otherwise) bastardizing our stolen power to police us with, keeping us oppressed and downtrodden, their pet-like sluts to shame and chattelize, raped without irony.
Ending on a curtain call to the symposium, let me conclude with an appropriate visual: the curtain, itself, as black. As such, either direction of power and knowledge as outlined above ties to the cryptonymy process (revolutionary or complicit) through a classic Gothic device: Radcliffe’s Black Veil, whose pulling back showcases the Medusa torturing herself (as the Radiance does, calling the hero to her) to achieve rapture of a palliative, generative sort. Such a charm school of Gothic hard knocks has elements of formal and informal training. Returning to Forbidden Planet from the start of the symposium, that film showcased a curious desire to look at the awesome mystery that was teased throughout the film, hidden behind a Black Veil that all but begs to be pulled aside: Medusa’s panties hiding her fearsome death cunt, her peach of torment hungering for fresh delicious peril.
For the Radiance, her lesson seems to say to us, “While I love you, [we] can never be free.” But there’s no place like home when restored to appreciate her survival and love for healthy psychosexual power exchange outing the original space and population as punitive, hypocritical, and undeserving (the vampire body and castle as having a shared vitalistic function). You don’t kill capital with it; you transform your enemy/cage into something that can’t rape you anymore—that won’t rape you no matter how compromising your position: mutual consent (established at a second-nature, societal level) makes that all but impossible! All that remains is the fantasy of “torture,” the ghost of agony (and nature) set free upon/with the thrusting Aegis! The moon is full, the prisoners breaking out to have their sweet revenge by teaching other workers, mid-exchange and mid-exhibitionism (of power and knowledge) to obey the hellish, queenly dominatrix topping from below. “Stare and tremble!” at all that speculative richness living deliciously!
(artist: Sephy Pink)
Tying that to Metroidvania and similar monstrous-feminine rape spaces, if Gothic canon monopolizes the Veil as an unironic threat (“Look and die!”) within formerly glorious spaces, then Gothic Communism‘s success lies is making Capitalism—literally the stuff of Gothic villains and their castles—inexorably fail to everyone’s benefit; i.e., to ironically subvert its canonical tools, thereby transforming the state (and the middle class) into something that doesn’t exploit workers, but still improves their material conditions through the Superstructure as modified: a world of infinite possibility except for the usual deceptions meant to conceal genocide behind monomythic tomb raiding—loot ‘n shoot, run ‘n gun, etc.
All heroes are monsters. Rather than flee/get away from such monsters per escapist, heteronormative fantasies that expose the cannibalistic nature of Capitalism (and its assorted cartographic refrains [either Tolkien or Cameron’s] populated with imaginary bugbears, below), we must play with power-as-marketed to subvert its settler-colonial (thus exploitative) character in Gothic ways; i.e., to humanize the ghost of the counterfeit by navigating the space of terror anisotropically—saying to our actual rapists (not the imaginary non-white ones, above), “We wouldn’t fuck you with a ten-foot pole!” (“once you go black…”):
(artist: Devilhs)
A large part in doing so is challenging the canonical, heteronormative past as something to dogmatically fall in love with (re: Dimitrescu, but really any Medusa as walking the tight rope; e.g., Lara Croft as yet-another-Amazon “white Indian” with a classist character we can camp and have fun with[21]); i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit as a kind of false, fatal memory that survives in the material world under Capitalist Realism (whose solution is always rape, because it can’t imagine anything better). This can merely be the echoes of a being or person that someone else has created years later—a narrative of a narrative of a narrative.
It’s certainly true that sex-positive art can remove the villain entirely in order to focus on sexual agency as something to appreciate during hauntological reinvention (as I have done with Ozymandias, exhibit 40a). However, the trope of the ignominious death under Numinous power remains a common teaching device inside the Gothic bag of tricks—not just the man-of-reason or “noble” king as we have just explored, but also the crime lord driven mad by their own abuse of systemic power until they go insane: to awaken from a sleep of death, returning home to destroy empire over and over again. We spit on their grave, basking in the sub drop of the palliative Numinous’ dream mushrooms, her pussy sunbeams.
Decay, of course, becomes something to leave behind and study. Better worlds are built on worse ones, deconstructing the former’s illusions anchoring us in place. Like Sudra or Hallownest, then, our funerary consignment is always part of a larger kingly crime site we can reclaim, camp and send back out against capital, leaving such tyrannies behind while decolonizing their homes. That’s what this subchapter is: my life’s work squeezed into a little over a hundred pages (technically 146, but who’s counting). It’s been real, but “so long, gay Bowser!”
There’s always a bourgeois double to the kinds of titanic rape iconoclasts revel in, when recording their own doom; i.e., actual rape always lies adjacent to psychosexual healing that, in the wrong hands, can lead to genuine exploitation. As curiously gigantic and rotting beings (re: Frankenstein), such tyrants revive in future stories begot from older castle commenting on a larger historical-material loop: intimating the Great Destroyer during the Imperial Boomerang’s homeward voyage (who always comes home, no matter how often you pass the buck). There’s a demonic, composite quality to tyrants we’ll return to in the Demon Module, when we look at Shelley’s novel; in part two of “The Monomyth,” though, we’ll specifically examine these revivals out-of-doors (versus closed space) through crime lords and Zombie Caesar!
Onto the opening and part one to “The Monomyth, part two: Criminals and Conquerors” (feat. The Crow and Steam Powered Giraffe)!
Footnotes
[1] As I write in “Mazes and Labyrinths“: “[Unlike survival horror,] ‘Metroidvania’ was effectively the combination of two IPs owned by different Japanese companies. So the term was never printed in any official capacity. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that ‘Metroidvania’ saw wider use in the indie market”: PC Gamer (“The Best Metroidvania on PC,” 2022), Engadget (“‘Metroidvania’ should actually be ‘Zeldavania,'” 2016), GamaSutra (“The undying allure of the Metroidvania,” 2015) Giant Bomb (“Metroidvania,” 2023), and Wired (“An Anime-Inspired Platformer That’s as Beautiful as It Is Mind-Bending,” 2015). Simply put, the genre exploded in popularity in the mid-2010s, becoming a smash indie success on Steam and continuing to be wildly popular to this day.
[2] Under whose independent tutelage (LING 499) at EMU, I wrote the paper, “Method in His Madness: Lovecraft, the Rock-and-Roll Iconoclast and Buoyant Lead Balloon” (2017), which inspired me to pursue the Numinous (as a subject of study) to the faraway, magical city Manchester, England.
[3] This idea was coined by a supremely bigoted white man—one whose tottering regressions towards fascism forever hang over the science-y heroes he constantly tortures in his stories; i.e., threatening them with insignificance in the face of mightier things:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little [speak for yourself, whitey]; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age (source: “The Call of Cthulhu,” 1928).
“Oh, no! I’m not the center of the universe?” I think old Lovecraft could have seriously done with some “flexibility training” insofar as acclimating himself to chaos, meaning there’s more to life than the myth of male power deflated. His empty outlook, in my opinion, is very much him projecting his own privileged shortcomings into the power vacuum of an impenetrable void (that isn’t, you should know by now, outer space). He’s basically Peter Weyland gazing solemnly into the abyss and seeing nothing because, for him, there is nothing worthwhile to acquire. It’s the trembling that he enjoys. He’s very much like a child afraid of the dark, whose prescribed unapproachability is a kind of “backtalking from the sub”: “You’re hideous, Cthulhu; now step on me.”
[4] The gendering of spaces is not usual; sailors would do it with ships, gendering them female as they cut through the equally female sea. A giant, hostile castle isn’t so odd, then—with Scott’s “space castle” (and its Gothic matelotage) sailing through the murky darkness like a ghost ship haunted by an older copy of itself.
[5] Versus a negative-sum game: a lose-lose; e.g., Capitalism (because the elite will lose in the end due to climate change).
[6] There’s plenty of exceptions to this; i.e., a whole can of worms (so to speak); e.g., femboys, whose curiously large dicks and slender bods (androdiversity) we have already examined in this series; e.g., exhibit 34a1b1b1 from Volume Two, part one:
The monstrous-feminine is very broad and dualistic. It would be impossible to cover all aspects of it here, because there are an infinite number between overlapping/intersecting gradients. In gender-studies fashion, I’ve isolated three gradients for your consideration: biology/sexuality, gender performance, and performance-as-identity. Though I could devote a book [or series of books] to each, I will merely supply one exhibit per gradient for you to keep in mind as we progress. As we do, remember that canon both divides and essentializes nature as discrete and fused; e.g., biology is essential under capital, and sex and gender are both discrete in terms of critical analysis and dogmatically fused insofar as canon treats them like one-in-the-same and chained to human biology serving the state [the challenging of which Judith Butler calls “gender trouble”] (source).
(artist, top-and-bottom- left/mid-right: My Emetophobia; top-right: Pancake Pornography; bottom right: Paladin Pleasure Sculptors)
The primer can only scratch the surface of such things; we will examine andro and gynodiversity even more in Volume Three (a sample):
(exhibit 91b2: Femboys demonstrate androdiversity with tremendous irony. For example, although undoubtedly there are plenty of femboys with smaller schlongs, plenty on the market advertise the slenderest of elfin bodies and the girthiest of members [contrary to heteronormative belief, big bodies—especially ones on inordinate amounts of synthetic testosterone—have shrinking genitals]; e.g., vacillating throbbers of cuties like Catboi Aoi, Rayray Sugarbutt, Olivia the Robin, Zay Zay, illiteracy4me, Hanyuu, Jaybaesun, etc.)
Simply put, Medusa isn’t strictly female (fuck off, TERFs); femboys and catboys (regardless of biological sex or gender in relation to that) are monstrous-feminine, too, thus fall into the same sodomy-style states of exception/critiques of capital. Secretly raped as open pornographic secrets, they become the secret weapons of rebellion through much the same cryptonymy reversing the flow of power—towards workers versus the state. So often porn chattelizes non-normative bodies (or honestly anything that isn’t a white, cis-het, Christian man); liberation is about reclaiming such things to serve our needs.
[7] From Romeo and Juliet, act one, scene one.
[8] I’d rather be raped and free, then still under my rapist’s “protection.”
[9] A throwaway line/role in an otherwise awful movie, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) at least gets the Nazi-Russian she-wolf right.
[10] For more examples of Tolkien’s animalistic language in relation to capital and greed, consider my essay on Tolkien’s Hobbit vis-à-vis Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: “‘Dragon Sickness’: The Problem of Greed” (2014).
[11] And, point in fact, dressing the heroes up as robbers, as rebels, where they’re policing the Good Lands of those pesky inhuman, blood-drinking and baby-eating goblins. Adventures like Tolkien’s conceal their bigotry through shadowy monsters that, often enough, are killed in plain sight; though tokenized (re: Jewish stereotypes and one gay wizard and hobbit), it’s still cops-and-robbers terrorism serving the state.
[12] Allusions not just to Lovecraft, but tentacle rape in reverse. Kinky!
[13] Normally the panopticon is a view piece for the king of his subjects through his subjects; i.e., a tower from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, specially a prison meant to house and monitor lepers (showing Foucault’s love for medieval comparisons). In short, workers in both texts are kept under lock and key per a constant state of surveillance—one they embody and report to the top on themselves (tattletales), even when said top ceases to exist. In the Radiance’s case, though, she has hijacked the hive, effectively seeing backwards through a collective disease that monitors and attacks the hero as the last knight/prison guard alive.
[14] I.e., through bread-and-circus kayfabe spectating rape.
[15] The policing is generally done through the state’s own victims triangulating against themselves through the mechanisms and language of domination under capital; i.e., of workers at large, but especially marginalized workers closer to the in-group than not. First and foremost, per Gothic canon, this is white middle-class straight women, who—while they are sex workers whether they like to admit it or not (the myth of the liberated second wave feminist, trading overt sex work for the role of the pimp)—will attack other marginalized groups doing sex work of a more openly extramarital sort: the virgin vs the whore. Often this has a racialized character to it, but also a transphobic one, too.
For example, as Porpentine writes in “Hot Allostatic Load” (2015):
I saw a queer black woman, struggling to survive by her art, falsely accused of rape by a white queer. The call-out post was extremely vague and loaded with strong words designed to elicit vigilante justice. Immediately, hundreds of other white queers jumped on the bandwagon. Many of them likely didn’t know either of the people involved.
Accusations of sexual menace are a key weapon used against marginalized people in feminist spaces, because it arouses people’s disgust like no other act—the threat of black skin on innocent white, of trans bone structures on ethereal cis skeletons. It’s as common for many of us as cat-calling or any other form of ubiquitous harassment that cis feminists talk about, except no one wants to talk about it. It’s a way for the dominant people in the group to take us aside and say, you are not welcome here, or do this thing you don’t want to do or I’ll ruin your life. But frequently it happens without any particular thesis, just as a general tool to keep us destabilized and vulnerable. Don’t forget who you really are in the unspoken hierarchy.
Mobbing uses these rumors to trade a vague suspicion for the actual reality of violence. It’s like turning the corner and watching someone on the street having their teeth kicked in by a mob who assures you that just before you appeared, this person had committed some mysterious act which justifies limitless brutality (source).
From my own experiences, some of my worst memories of abuse weren’t from cis-het white men, but other sex workers—especially white women pimping the venue as the exclusive sex workers, victims, cops (re: “Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023“); i.e., third and forth wave feminism in decay, working the lynch mob setting the example. This isn’t truth, but punishment enforcing a hierarchy built on lies to haze those who challenge the established order. That’s what cops do, including vigilante sex workers throwing stones in glass houses.
The sad fact is, rape victims go on to either keep being victimized, or become functional cops who rape others for the state in prison-like environments; i.e., an act they dress up as self-defense through DARVO behaviors (re: from earlier in this volume):
Rape, then, is historically a power fantasy to enact upon others against their will […] Except no power fantasy should ever come at other people’s expense. When it does, it leads to a routine failing of memory and willpower in the face of trauma, but also to the classic dice roll: cop or victim, during service towards profit through the usual monomythic, hero-grade rape fantasies/demon BDSM operating like demon lovers historically do; i.e., as controlled opposition policing the usual victims by their assigned masters
Like with Jadis and myself, it’s always a dice roll.
Of course, there are double standards that play out through intersecting axes of oppression; e.g., racism and transphobia in Alien being abjected onto an intersex rape demon by the white woman seeing genocide and chattel slavery through an “ancient alien” fetish (more on this when we look at such tokenization in “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph“). Whatever the form, just remember our footnote from earlier about “preferential mistreatment”
capital extends the abuser’s privileges (the coercion trifecta: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss) to women and other marginalized groups provided they tokenize, hence betray their class, culture, and race interests in service to the elite; i.e., become cops […]. Like anything, the monstrous-feminine is susceptible to betrayal and decay; i.e., whose tokenized “onion” historically-materially fosters marginalized in-fighting as a matter of “prison sex” and fortress mentality: tokenized groups from increasing privilege (but less than those above them) kissing up and punching down towards groups more marginalized then they are. The global consequence is assimilation—of women, people of color or queer persons, Indigenous peoples, etc, acting like white, cis-het men as a matter of tokenized representation.
which is a concept we’ll unpack in Volume Three extensively when we look at current tokenization through TERFs and feminism-in-decay.
[16] Testimony something medieval men would given while using their testicles as collateral, but dates back further to Rome and beyond; i.e., to what Dr. Dario Maestripieri calls a “testicle ritual”:
In ancient Rome, two men taking an oath of allegiance held each other’s testicles, and men held their own testicles as a sign of truthfulness while bearing witness in a public forum. The Romans found a word to describe this practice but didn’t invent the practice itself. Other primates had already been doing this for millions of years. Two male baboons who cooperate with each other by forming aggressive alliances against other baboons frequently fondle each other’s genitalia. This behavior has nothing to do with sex but it’s a social ritual that primatologists call a “greeting.”
The behavior of ancient Romans and male baboons can be explained by the Handicap Principle, an evolutionary theory according to which the most effective way to obtain reliable information about a partner’s commitment in a relationship — whether a political alliance, a romantic relationship, or a business partnership — is to impose a cost on the partner and assess the partner’s willingness to pay it (source: “‘Testify’ Comes From the Latin Word for Testicle,” 2011).
Maestripieri further adds, “it’s important to remember that cooperative relationships between unrelated individuals are intrinsically unstable: One business partner may cooperate one moment and cheat in another, and one romantic partner may promise eternal commitment one day and end the relationship the next. Economists call this ‘the commitment problem'” (ibid.). Such instability is owed to Capitalism, whose murderous ups and downs portray quite vividly in operatic language like Hollow Knight‘s Gothic courtship rituals a circular raping of the queen (whose proposed vanity is just another form of Original Sin: “She asked for it, the siren!”).
[17] The state historically decides what is legal or not, the powers that be making rebellion illegal as a matter of preserving the status quo; i.e., we will always be criminal to them, any act of resistance or exposure (muckraking and whistleblowing) seen as violence against the state, which the state will always meet with automatic police force and illusions, under Capitalist Realism. In short, genocide is legal as a matter of enforcement, rebellion is illegal no matter what. But the ability to create stories that speak to these things in ways the state can’t—and furthermore, won’t if they think it serves them—police through brute force, is where Gothic poetics truly shines. Skilled theatrics and architecture can speak to state abuse, displaced and disguised through cryptonymy to serve rebellion, thus reverse abjection and liberate anything criminal. Liberation, my book series argues, begins with iconoclastic art, recultivating the Superstructure and Reclaiming the Base through proletarian praxis’ synthesis (thus catharsis).
[18] Silicon Knight’s 1996 allusion to Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (1871):
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back (source).
The hero is always a cop, the monster always its victim in service to profit. Sometimes, the state relies on victims to victimize themselves.
[18a] Bear in mind, such idiotic utility also applies to Leftists ceding ground to fascists; i.e., problems of representation versus activism; e.g., Jessie Gender—a white, middle-class content creator concerned more with success and respecting everyone’s viewpoints—actively defending the IDF from postcolonial critics of Zionism in the middle of a genocide (Bad Empanada Live’s “Jessie Gender Should Delete Her Zionist Propaganda Video Immediately,” 2024; timestamp: 9:09). Calling for nuance is one thing. Calling for nuance against a position that is actually simple in terms of who has power and who doesn’t (thus, who is the abuser in that situation) is intensely problematic—especially when the person doing it falls into the tokenized category of white moderate incentivized by profit. Betrayal is betrayal, Jessie, even if you’re polite about it (or funny and tokenized; re: Jordan Peele). Hope, even radical hope, becomes another neoliberal weapon the elite use to have polite rationalizers like yourself tone-police activists challenging genocide in ways you won’t.
[19] From “The Tables Turned” (1798).
[20] The Humanist Report’s “Elon Musk Tells Jordan Peterson His Transgender Daughter is ‘Dead’ to Him” (2024).
[21] Though problematic, heroes like Lara Croft or Samus Aran are useful vehicles when interrogating power and rape as things to play with; i.e., they store value and trauma as a matter of Amazon-style bread-and-circus (the state raping workers and nature through its own tokenized labor force—TERFs), but also social-sexual elements of human beauty and attractiveness that butt up against rape tied to profit: as something to investigate and explore through an avatar in neoliberal forms (videogames). Per Sarkeesian, we can walk in the shoes of such a raider trapped inside such mazes and labyrinths of abject circumstance without endorsing her settler-colonial character (the white woman fending off domestic rape of an abjected sort)! Videogames make for an excellent form of ludo-Gothic BDSM, insofar as you can’t get raped during them; re: the castle is the perfect dom, but also the perfect cryptonym that we can reclaim from the state and its usual profiteers (from Radcliffe onwards).
