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.

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The Monomyth, part one: “She Fucks Back”; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics: the Man of Reason and Cartesian Hubris versus the Womb of Nature in Metroidvania

“We are now three months into the year of our Lord, 2023[1]. At this moment in our civilization, we are on the verge of terraforming planets undiscovered just a decade ago. We have identified the genetic chain of events behind 98% of cancers—a chain we have broken, effectively curing them. We can create cybernetic individuals who, in just a few short years, will be completely indistinguishable from us. Which leads to an obvious conclusion: We are the gods now.

“I haven’t been struck down. I take that to mean I’m right. We wield incredible power—the power to transform, to destroy and to create again. The question, of course, before us is, ‘What the hell are we supposed to do with this power?’ Or, more importantly, one should ask, ‘What are we allowed to do with this power?’ The answer to that, my friends, is nothing. Rules, restrictions, laws, ethical guidelines—all but forbidding us from moving forwards. Well, where were the ethics during the Arabian conflicts? Why are rules preventing us from feeding impoverished cultures? How is there a law which states, ‘If we build a man from wires and metal—a man who will never grow old, a man who will never feel the heat of a star or the cold of the moon—how is the creation of such an incredible individual considered unnatural?’

“The answer to all these questions is simple: These rules exist because the people who created them were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t. Well I am not afraid!

“For those of you who know me, you will be aware by now that my ambition is unlimited. You know that I will settle for nothing short of greatness, or I will die trying. For those of you who do not yet know me, allow me to introduce myself: My name is Peter Weyland. And if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to change the world” (source: American Rhetoric, Movie Speeches).

—Peter Weyland, Prometheus (2012)

Picking up from where “‘The Monomyth’ (opening and part zero)” left off…

Now that we’ve looked at the futile nature of undead revenge in Mandy and Lovecraft through the Promethean Quest, let’s consider zombie tyrants and those who fuck back against them! Focusing on Metroidvania, “Monomyth,” part one shall examine the man of reason and why he sucks, aka the spoiled rich-boy charlatan smugly playing God through astronoetic means (from Victor Frankenstein to the Wizard of Oz to Peter Weyland [above] to Elon Musk, crypto bros and weird canonical nerds inside the Man Box). Astronoetics are what Michael Uhall calls a celestial, intelligible presence (“Astronoetic Cinema,” 2019). Reframed by me slightly, it is the colonial gaze of Planet Earth in any imaginary scenario, which the Metroidvania commonly portrays as nature vs civilization. Given the common confusion surround the term, I might as well spare you any extra headaches by supplying its assorted definitions, in whole and advance[2] (from the glossary—originally from my early PhD research, “Mazes and Labyrinths“):

Metroidvania

A type of Gothic videogame, one involving the exploration of castles and other closed spaces in an ergodic framework; i.e., the struggle of investigating past trauma as expressed through the Gothic castle and its monstrous caverns (which is the author poetically hinting at systemic abuses in real life). Scott Sharkey insists he coined the term (source tweet: evilsharkey, 2023)—ostensibly in the early 2000s while working with Jeremy Parish for 1-Ups.com:

However, the term was probably being used before that in the late ’90s to casually describe the 1997 PSOne game, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; records of it being used can be found as early as 2001 (this Circle of the Moon Amazon review is from 2003). By 2006, though, Jeremy Parish had a personalized definition on his own blog, “GameSpite | Compendium of Old and Useless Information” (2012):

“Metroidvania” is a stupid word for a wonderful thing. It’s basically a really terrible neologism that describes a videogame genre which combines 2D side-scrolling action with free-roaming exploration and progressive skill and item collection to enable further, uh, progress. As in Metroid and Koji Igarashi-developed Castlevania games. Thus the name (source).

My own postgrad research (“Mazes and Labyrinths”) has expanded/narrowed the definition quite a bit:

Metroidvania are a location-based videogame genre that combines 2D, 2.5D, or 3D platforming [e.g., Dark Souls, 2009] and ranged/melee combat—usually in the 3rd person—inside a giant, closed space. This space communicates Gothic themes of various kinds; encourages exploration* depending on how non-linear the space is; includes progressive skill and item collection, mandatory boss keys, backtracking and variable gating mechanics (bosses, items, doors); and requires movement powerups in some shape or form, though these can be supplied through RPG elements as an optional alternative.

*Exploration pertains to the deliberate navigation of space beyond that of obvious, linear routes—to search for objects, objectives or secrets off the beaten path (source).

Also from “Mazes and Labyrinths”:

Mazes and Labyrinths: I treat space as essential when defining Metroidvania. Mazes and labyrinths are closed space; their contents exist within a closed structure, either a maze or a labyrinth. A classical labyrinth is a linear system with one set, unicursal path towards an end point; a maze is a non-linear system with multiple paths to an end point [classical texts often treated the words as interchangeable].

Metroidvania, etymology: As its most basic interpretation, Metroidvania is a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania, specifically “Metroid” + “-vania.” However, the term has no singular, universally-agreed-upon definition. Because I focus on space, my definitions—of the individual portmanteau components—are as follows:

“Metroid” =/= the franchise, Metroid; “Metroid” = that franchise’s unique treatment of closed space—the maze.

“-vania” =/= the franchise, Castlevania; “castlevania” equals that franchise’s unique treatment of closed space—the labyrinth.

At the same time, “Metroid,” or “metro” + “-oid” means “android city.” “Castlevania” or “castle” + “-vania” means “other castle,” “demon castle,” or “castle Dracula.” The portmanteau, “Metroidvania” ≈ “android city” + “demon castle” + “maze” + “labyrinth.”

Further Distinctions: There are further ways to identify if a Metroidvania space is a maze or not. As I explain in my 2019 YouTube video, “Metroidvania Series #2: Mazes and Labyrinths“:

What ultimately determines a Metroidvania’s maze-ness are three sequences: the start, the middle, and the end. The start is what I consider to be the collection of essential items—power-ups you’ll need to use for the entire game. Mid-game is the meat of the experience. The end sequence makes the win condition available to the player.

I mention item collection relative to these sequences because they are a core element of Metroidvania play, hence determine what kind of space the player is dealing with. In Metroid, for example, the Morph Ball, Bomb and Missiles are essential, and the player can acquire all of them rather quickly. Apart from those, however, there are few items you actually need to complete the game. One of them is Ice Beam, which is required to kill metroids, thus gain access to Mother Brain (the game’s end condition). Large portions of the game can be played without it, though. Like many Metroid power-ups, it is a mid-game collectible.

Item collection allows the player to leave the start and enter the middle. This section, I argue, determines whether or not a Metroidvania is a maze. If the majority of the game allows for sequence breaks, RBO (reverse boss order) and low-percent, then it is a maze; if not, it is a labyrinth. A Metroidvania can be either (source: the original script on Google Docs).

In terms of appearance, a Metroidvania’s audiovisual presentation can range from retro-future sci-fi to Neo-Gothic fantasy. Nevertheless, their spaces typically function as Gothic castles; replete with hauntological monsters, demons, and ghosts, they guide whatever action the hero must perform when navigating the world and dealing with its threats (ibid.)

In essence, when I mention “the womb of nature” and “astronoetics,” Metroidvania is what I’ll be focusing on for much of the symposium. So keep the above definitions in mind as best you can!

Except, Metroidvania also came into existence fairly late in the game; i.e., a form of neoliberal dogma 1986 onwards, one whose history—of finding lost power in the “ancient alien” ruins (and my scholarship attached to it) as predicting the fall of the West back on Earth—took centuries to formalize. First exemplified by Shelley’s Frankenstein, astronoetics crystalized in the realm of relatively current science fiction starting with Lovecraft’s sole novel, At the Mountains of Madness (1936): cosmic nihilism, or the idea of uncolonized space (nature) as indomitable, thus indifferent to Man as a colonial force per Reason raping Earth, then the stars! Other stories include Forbidden Planet and Alien, but also Hamlet, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Castle of Otranto. We’ll mention them all, here; i.e., while talking about Metroidvania as a critical device conducive towards and corollary to ludo-Gothic BDSM as defined by me, built on the above palimpsests; re (also from the glossary):

Ludo-Gothic BDSM

My combining of an older academic term, [Laurie Taylor’s] “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (theatre and rules). Commonly gleaned through Metroidvania as I envision it, but frankly performed in any kind of Gothic poetics—i.e., to playfully attain what I call “the palliative Numinous,” or the Gothic quest for self-destructive power as something to camp.

The follow-through, here, is that men of reason suck in these stories as a matter of playful critique, one whose hot-potato displacement—of capital passing the buck onto ancient, seemingly alien empires or allegorical, magically reassembled fantasy worlds—dates back to Walpole’s Otranto (for aesthetics, splendid lies, dead giveaways), following Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus, exploring the cynical nature of such tyrants to begin with: those who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing as hidden (along with their deep-seated insecurities) behind a perfidious veneer of reason, of the so-called knowing-better good father looking out for his children and the world by “just asking questions.”

In truth, such men can’t love anything but themselves and their own legacy as a matter of embodying Capitalism, which they do quite gladly. They’re literally the poster children of it, enjoying all of its benefits, including always appearing right, good, and correct, hence being able to arbitrate violence against anything that “isn’t”; i.e., by playing god, punching down against the state’s usual targets: nature, workers and the monstrous-feminine, forcing the latter to fuck back by punching up while receiving state harm as something to subvert during rape play (which ludo-Gothic BDSM boils down to) by using Athena’s Aegis inside Metroidvania.

The fact remains that men like Weyland rape nature all the time, but only double their efforts when they—like the system they personify—reliably starts to die (false power). In turn, the state and its men of reason will do anything to preserve themselves, weaponizing their own bloodline against nature, the latter having evolved to resist dominion (thus rape) through counterterrorism and asymmetrical warfare.

As these men begin to die, everything falls apart in one last-ditch effort to hold onto capitalistic godhood; i.e., choking on the very things they eat to remind them of their cruelty and their hubris (not per Freud’s id, but per Marx’s capital routinely projected into Gothic, Promethean language riffing on parental elements that Freud essentialized as a matter of the crystalized nuclear home): “Where’s the robot to pat you on the back, or the engineer? […] There you see, now, how all your so-called power counts for absolutely nothing? How your entire empire of destruction comes crashing down, all because of one. Little. Cherry!”

To such stupid and embarrassing tyrants, I now want to consider nature (and labor’s) indomitability through the monomyth when camped by the Promethean Quest as personally and spatially monstrous-feminine; i.e., going heroically into and staying inside Hell as researched according to my expertise: videogames as Gothic chronotopes connected to the Promethean Quest, per Metroidvania. Going beyond Shelley or Lovecraft and into Metroidvania, I’ll try to stay focused on their connected, monomythic histories that—while older than Cameron’s 1986 refrain, Aliens (which inspired the shooter genre, but also the Metroidvania)—nevertheless attach to capital presently as we inspect the Metroidvania space itself: as something to reify and move through across the centuries and media types (from novels to cinema to videogames; from outer space to European castles, and in between those things).

We’ll do so through several arguments I want to you to keep in mind. I say that because frankly there’s a lot to discuss, this symposium more an opportunity to raise issues for you to confront and grapple with yourselves; i.e., while showing you the cryptonymic, disguise-like qualities to such subversive query and rebellion when faced with Cartesian copycats looking to pacify our stewardship of nature (indented for emphasis):

Per Hogle, 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.

In short, anytime I say “camouflage” or “disguise,” this is basically what I’m talking about. Furthermore, Promethean space (usually castles) is part of this decay and deception under capital, for workers vs the state (often, as nature vs civilization); it’s something of a “dead giveaway” as person or place—both invented, and restlessly pointing into half-hidden atrocities and subterfuge materializing between opposing forces: on their charged surfaces and inside their dualistic thresholds, asking to be looked into “on the ashes of something not quite fully present.”

That being said, we’ll likewise look at the persons and parental themes involved when capital colonizes said spaces (the womb of nature projected into outer space, or frozen, uninhabitably barren/cold, desert-like territories comparable to outer space), then consider the ways in which all this colonization can be subverted/camped and reversed, power-wise; i.e., with Metroidvania persons and places; re: the dialectic of shelter and the alien enacted canonically through people (men of reason) and places (castles, including Metroidvania) to punch Medusa (indented for emphasis):

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).

Consider the above indented portions something of twin thesis statements for the rest of “The Monomyth,” part one—arguments, mid-symposium, that we’ll touch upon sporadically as we bounce between parent and palace, person and place; i.e., as parts of the same Promethean stories and their liminal expression conveyed through part one’s looser, conversational style: built to move through and intimate different legendary elements of real life, as the chronotope does.

To it, astronoetics are both a settler-colonial narrative voicing the usual things up for grabs (the nuclear family threatened by mad science in a frontier narrative, left), while also remaining a popular cautionary tale about displaced Cartesian overreach; i.e., by sucky men of science embodying Capitalism and its Gothic consequences and divisions (and whose Enlightenment-style enslaving of nature through retro-futurist language pushes nature-as-robata [slave] to fight back, posthuman-style), then carried forward into At the Mountains of Madness, then Forbidden Planet, then Alien, and finally into videogames but especially Metroidvania! The heroes are villains posturing as good, in these stories (often men of means—white-collar criminals [which men of reason essentially are] acting like blue-collar frontiersmen rebelling against capital, but point-in-fact serving it as usual to a mythological degree; i.e., technologically superior space cowboys)!

We’ll consider such a parental abjection of nature (and its reversal by monstrous-feminine agents) in Metroidvania based, more or less, on monomythic stories like Alien and Forbidden Planet as going all the way back to Frankenstein critiquing capital with Walpole’s prurient, medieval, nigh-raunchy-at-times elements (often via royalty and wealthy persons, which men of reason generally are): a vulgar (common) marriage of sex, terror and force, as the Gothic does, through imaginary conquest per Promethean critiques of the monomyth, of capital, of entitled Cartesian dickwads (we go high and low, Michelle Obama)!

There’s certainly an element of rape play to consider through these things. To clarify, though, our focus will be on Metroid-style (non-linear) spaces or offshoots per the man of reason (or token agent; e.g., Samus Aran as cowgirl and white savior/white Indian working for the Man) and Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern, not Castlevania or other videogames that seemingly obey the same basic idea[3] of the Hero’s Journey into and out of Hell; i.e., as a space to explore and conquer per the usual cartographic refrains (stab, punch and shoot the monster inside a given map). Here, we’ll just be focusing on the one that best illustrates spatially and theatrically what inspired my concept, ludo-Gothic BDSM, per “Our Ludic Masters” onwards (for the entire catalog of such spaces, refer to my earlier PhD research, “Mazes and Labyrinths“; also, “War Vaginas” provides some good examples of monstrous-feminine space, weapons and heroes).

(artist: Pepe-Navarro)

For our purposes moving forwards, Metroidvania (and its forebears) are defined by Amazonian movement (and battle) through closed space, often a dungeon or a castle of some kind as occupied by Numinous, Promethean power (the semi-abstract presence of rape and dominion fused into the architecture). In turn, any of them invoke the confrontation of difficult truths, which are the first step towards healing from capital’s abuses: nature as alienated from us by Cartesian elements, including death as uncomfortable to face but also rape and abuse relative to nature as normally dominated by patriarchal exterminators going into Hell (standing in for Earth as otherworldly doubles). Alienize, then rape behind the lies, the camouflage, the debris, the records; it’s well and truly Cartesian thought’s raison d’être!

For example, the metroids, above, are synonymous with the gameworld they inhabit, but also the Galactic Federation’s desire to colonize outer space as an older cycle of conquest bleeding into newer ones that ape the same basic pattern in and out of fiction. As such, Cartesian domination ranges spatio-temporally from the faux-Egyptian Chozo as nodding to Giger’s own dark pyramids, such cryptomimesis reaching all the way back to British Romanticism and Orientalism—by Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” following Napoleon’s raping of Egypt—and all the way forwards to the Federation’s girl boss, Samus, embodying her employer’s frontier vampirism. While all of these things point to real-world abuse committed by Cartesian forces policing nature—essentially conveyed in fictional, romantic language whose people and places mirror non-fictional atrocities—Samus does so through the metroid tied to her as the xenomorph was to Ripley and the Creature to Victor Frankenstein, etc; i.e., as weaponized for Cartesian, thus state hegemony in an astronoetic sense: the tokenization of the monstrous-feminine as increasingly xenomorphic in ways that feel ontologically ambiguous.

(artist: Hybrid Mink)

Per the Promethean Quest (which Metroid most certainly is), nature-as-technology becomes an unnatural predation on itself through the copying of such things via police interference (e.g., “the weapons division,” from Alien, which it looks like we’ll finally see with Alien: Romulus [my thoughts on the final trailer] when a team of robbers break into an overrun science facility run by humans in space, not humanoid space aliens on terra firma). It’s no coincidence, then, that Samus’ suit is generally a stand-in for the monsters she kills but also the state secrets (crimes of genocide) her employers pay her to commit for profit (which the franchise calls “peace in space[4]“); i.e., policing nature while wearing its dead as trophies, Artemis-style; e.g., the Phazon armor from Prime (2002), Dark Samus from Prime 2 (2004), or the SA-X from Fusion (2002), but also the Metroid suit from Dread (above 2021): the white Indian summoned as a neoconservative lullaby cannibalizing the very things that became emblematic of an ongoing war of extermination—one waged by Cartesian men of reason against the womb of nature as something abject to rape (a wild land where the Wild Things Are to make “wild rumpus” in for the state, for men of reason): by our resident TERF furthering abjection, Man-Box-style (the armored maiden punching “nature” as “cosmic rapist”). It’s so fearsome that trying to bond with it is generally seen as a fate worse than death (“Kill me!” from Aliens, being a not-so-subtle reversal of “Help me!” from Vincent Prince’s The Fly, 1958).

In other words, such things are an affront to nature (commonly portrayed as “bestiality”—the part-human, part-animal quality of so many ancient gods) as raped by Cartesian forces playing the tyrant and the white-Indian false-rebel; i.e., disguising the Capitalocene through monomythic likenesses that are passed down, only to be rejected by Promethean stories walking the tightrope. The quiet part is said out loud in Gothic fashion: dancing in the ruins as Promethean, having power hidden inside them, waiting to be found through play with “old” dead things left behind in some shape or form (capital relying on the monomyth’s unironic forms, “Hell” being the past as something to invade in the real world; i.e., the Global North invading the Global South as “past,” where Imperialism, thus genocide and rape, still occur). That’s simply how humans work; no sense in abolishing or poo-pooing such stories (re: Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism and Botting’s “Future Horror“).

(artist: Ayami Kojima)

Except, Promethean stories decay as a matter of function, tokenizing like all things do under capital. As such, it sucks to experience these kinds of abuses in ways that encourage assimilation and reactive violence (starting all the way back with Frankenstein). On the flipside, they become something to grow accustomed towards, thus can be weaponized once more against our abusers as thoroughly unused to seeing such things thrown back at them; i.e., to look on death but especially genocide, and see oneself and one’s belief system, held accountable: as alien, impotent, fallen from grace, the ivory tower and manliness (as they see it). As such, the primary vector for Cartesian downfall via the Promethean Quest is mad science, through which the monstrous-feminine is increasingly non-Vitruvian in its appearance (akin to Milton’s Satan dropping its angelic guise).

For example, while Victor’s Creature was more or less humanoid, Lovecraft’s novelized bogeyman, the amorphous shoggoth, was anything but. Even so, it remained monstrous-feminine in response to a Cartesian effort to conquer the world (abjected onto beings from outer space, of course); i.e., the Archaic Mother (the Medusa) as a fearsome bugbear haunting the inheritors of genocide (the Promethean ruin): the humans who saw it last. They were explorers themselves, feeling their own extinction anxieties peak regarding patriarchal conquest bounced back at them from a dead alien city occupied by rogue technology run amok; i.e., something Lovecraft described as a tunnel, a bottomless well: as fallible thus finite inside a living space built on genocide (re: Le Guinn’s Omelas).

However, instead of Shelley or Lovecraft (the former who we’ll obviously touch on, the latter whose work feels incredibly souless and bare), we’ll introduce all of these devices—the man of reason, the Promethean Quest, bad parentage, people and places, Amazons and Medusa—through cinema (a little bit( and videogames (a lot) as closer to neoliberalism’s remediation of such devices (corporations don’t write novels, at least not to anywhere near the same extent as they produce movies and videogames, because people have to be literate to consume them).

We’ll start with Forbidden Planet, a film that laid the cinematic groundwork, Freudian worship (and wizardly spectacle) for Alien, after which the Metroidvania put the Promethean Quest in the player’s hands (the avatar). From there, we’ll consider how this ludic potential manifests in ludo-Gothic BDSM vis-à-vis castles (and their occupants) in Metroidvania; i.e., a synthesizing of castle-narrative and monstrous-feminine potential to subvert Cartesian hegemony in defense of nature, thus workers and the world at large normally raped by the state and men of reason. In the Gothic, history is a castle whose pieces get up and move around; in short, they interact as the Gothic does, between the space and its legends tied imaginarily to real people and places decaying and regenerating to yield fresh synthesis over space-time. Contradiction is to be expected—is part of the process during the arguments that unfold literally dueling back and forth; i.e., from Otranto to Metroidvania, as the chaff and critique of capital stirring such things up.

For a bit of fun, we’ll actually look at two Metroidvania—indeed, the same two Metroidvania I did for my master’s thesis back in 2018, Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight:

• Part zero, “‘Men of Reason Suck’; or, Ghosts of Freud in Forbidden Planet, and the Gendered Components of Gothic Space (and Its History of Scholarship) as Tied to Capitalism in Disguise” (included in this post): Sets the table. Looks at the history of Gothic expression through people and places, looking at older theatrical works and mythic structures—i.e., about/disguising Capitalism as surviving in more modern examples like Forbidden Planet through which Metroidvania like Metroid operate—then catalogs that history of scholarship (my contributions, some of them) for you to consider and refer back to, when reading parts one and two (the close-reads).
• Part one, “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge“: Considers people first, places (and space) second; i.e., the seemingly Freudian, Amazonomachy-style astronoetics (colonial gaze of planet Earth) and parental themes from Frankenstein and Forbidden Planet, translating nicely into the Metroidvania space, of which we’ll consider through a dialectical-material sense pointed at Thomas Happ’s 2014 one-man-show, Axiom Verge.
• Part two, “‘Look upon my Works, ye Mighty’; or, the Infernal Concentric Pattern and Rape Play in Hollow Knight and Metroidvania at Large“: Considers space[5] first, people second; i.e., explores my grad school and postgrad research into Metroidvania, but especially Bakhtin’s chronotope and Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern in Hollow Knight as informing what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM: a means of rape play (whose performative, revolutionary nuances we’ll also unpack).

The sex-positive idea in doing so is to return not just to people and spaces, but headspaces that, since then, have produced important ideas; i.e., regarding Cartesian thought personified to conquer others behind a veneer of reason and benevolent parentage (re: “thinking beings,” per Cartesian dualism). Metroidvania and other Promethean spaces aren’t just places of exquisite torture (re: Radcliffe) per Bakhtin’s Gothic chronotope—or a Freudian playground that Barbara Creed made a career out of—but something vast and hauntological that yielded new GNC ideas of revolutionary play whose Promethean attack addresses old problems (rape, racism and genocide) stemming from Cartesian thought and its monomythic undead elements under neoliberal Capitalism and Capitalist Realism (re: Mandy and Lovecraft). The idea is to leave the racism of actual men like Lovecraft (and fictional ones like Frankenstein) behind when practicing ludo-Gothic BDSM, but keep the Numinous feelings for palliative reasons that actually predate him.

To that, this section specifically combines my postgrad research after writing my PhD (Volume Zero of Sex Positivity), making “She Fucks Back” a culmination of my life’s work on the subject; it’s my Metroidvania magnum opus and I’m very proud of it! “The Metroidvania castle, as far as I’m concerned, is the perfect dom,” I write in Volume Zero. This, as we shall see, is as much the byproduct of an interaction between myself and all that came before: the Medusa as communed with through space and occupant, past and present, scholar and consumer sitting somewhere in between all of them. No one ever said BDSM wasn’t iconic; lost in the Communist-Numinous potential of such fractals, our freaky big girl both struggles to break free, and is something of a rope bunny who digs the paradoxical bondage (of genuine liberation, to be clear) she ropes others into as well: Cartesian gonads acquired.

(artist: VG Yum)

Metroidvania, part zero: “Men of Reason Suck”; or, Ghosts of Freud in Forbidden Planet, and the Gendered Components of Gothic Space (and Its History of Scholarship) as Tied to Capitalism in Disguise

“Doc, is it a male or a female?” / “For me, sir, the question is totally without meaning!”

—”Cookie” to Doctor Ostro, and Robby the Robot’s reply, Forbidden Planet

The “Metroidvania” symposium is all about parents—good and bad—in monomythic stories, which the Promethean Quest reverses while using the same basic camouflage (Capitalism disguises itself as noble and good, but also doomed in an endless loop—playing the victim as mythologized, which Victor does). To that, the man of reason is an Enlightenment idea, from which settler colonialism (rape and genocide) sprang from Cartesian thought dominating nature for profit[6] (from Columbus’ earliest experiments, to Descartes and Francis Bacon’s revolution, onwards), and survived monomythically per Lovecraft and other space-centric follow-throughs of the 1818 original (Shelley loved her big open spaces, whereas Lovecraft leaned into giant alien ruins surrounded by said spaces—a derelict colony, in other words); i.e., as haunted by ghosts of genocide extending from a desolate planet Earth into outer space, both curiously forbidding and inviting like a Gothic castle: technophobia as corrupting the “natural order” of the nuclear family unit. Communist robots bad!

To it, I want to unpack all of that now, in part zero; i.e, by looking at various “ghosts” that haunt the whole Promethean enterprise: Freud and Forbidden Planet, but also Hamlet and other Shakespearean works (and Gothic scholarship) tied to Metroidvania concerning the same struggles between civilization and nature as gendered (whose trappings we’ll both want to escape, and use to our benefit). That way, you’ll be nice and prepared when we get to the close-readings of Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight, in parts one and two!

As Shelley’s Frankenstein demonstrates, the quest for forbidden knowledge is built on the past development of Capitalism during the Enlightenment; i.e., historically a settler-colonial ordeal that abjures past-and-future attempts at post-scarcity—one whose prophesied chickens in 1818 have been coming home to roost for centuries. For those inside the Imperial Core (thus under the protection of its barriers including Capitalist Realism), these threats of long overdue reprisals classically manifest in and of the mind attached to derelict ruins: what Dr. Ostro in Forbidden Planet calls “Monsters from the Id.” They’re dark, ominous and Freudian—an event horizon per person and place pointing to former crimes they have inherited against nature, then try to rationalize away (such obfuscation, as Radcliffe shows with her castles and protracted suspense, is ultimately a skill one can master for different reasons).

It’s all very theatrical (with Shelley arguably camping the Byronic hero through Victor Frankenstein); to that, if you’re wondering why I didn’t just stick with Lovecraft because he’s the logical palimpsest, I frankly think Walter Pidgeon’s Morbius in Forbidden Planet is far more theatrical (the movie being a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 1611), but still has the suitably Gothic spaces, sexuality[7] and awesome alien presence (of nature seeking revenge) infringing on the nuclear family unit that came to define Metroidvania out of older forms of similar castles: novels and stage plays.

In short, the movie’s man-of-reason monomyth, per the angry space dad punishing his disobedient daughter (similar to Egeus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, invoking the right of Ancient Athens), translates better into what Axiom Verge eventually leaned into—vis-à-vis Shelley’s original novel and ironic themes of bad parentage critiquing capital—than what Lovecraft did to not critique capital (whose story has no children, but also appears to lack the performative irony that Morbius and Trace [the hero of Axiom Verge] try to communicate in protest[8] of settler colonialism through astronoetic language): a psychomachy between two (or more) sides of a divided man of reason/mad scientist, the man-in-question still somewhat humane (thus redeemable) despite his tragic-hero hubris (we’ll get to unlikeable men of reason when we close-read Axiom Verge, trust me). He’s a recluse, not a billionaire, his head stuck in his books while he tries to understand genocide as a symptom of capital pushed to the furthest reaches of outer space (and which Ostro blames on the id, Freud’s “subconscious primitive,” not Captialism; i.e., a Frankensteinian return to tradition and superstition by the man calling himself a “doctor” chastising the movie’s rebel figure).

More to the point, the monomyth is tied to bad parents as a theatrical device; i.e., one of bad instruction, for which Morbius wants to punish his daughter for running away with the soldiers. To this, Morbius’ magnetic rise and fall mirrors the Krell before him: an ancient, “great and noble” alien race that stands in for Lovecraft’s aliens before Planet and the Chozo after it. At the height of their civilization, the Krell are attacked by their own brutal past as brought back to life through technology pulling it, Metis-style, out of the their minds. In Gothic terms, this extends to the space for which all tyrants belong to and inherit as part of a larger structure the Gothic speaks to in monomythic language; re, capital (from Volume Two, part two’s thesis): “Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature.”

From the Krell to the Chozo, the Promethean Quest effectively reverses this predation—and the monomyth’s usual flow of power—by showing the audience what Cartesian men are really like; i.e., by recontextualizing genocide: vampiric sires who have their vampire castles, separating along with them from nature and Earth as something that, littered with the remains of older examples, comes home to roost in person and place. Again, it’s a colony whose fruits of genocide are poisonous.

Except, whether from Dr. Ostro or Barbara Creed, we’re really not keen on Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring dialectical-material scrutiny. But we can regard the problem of Freud’s ghost—specifically the essay, “Medusa’s Head” (1926)—as something that speaks to current historical-material tensions felt in present struggles: Medusa’s killing by brave men of reason scared to death of the things they want to control as archaic, older than them and civilization. All of this ties up in monomythic language, which survives in dialectical-material forms that aren’t incumbent on psychoanalysis at all; they’re stories that communicate themes about competing socio-material forces, using the Promethean Quest as shorthand.

This includes movies like Forbidden Planet, of course, but also the Metroidvania that drew inspiration from them and their palimpsestuous forebears to varying degrees; e.g., Athetos and Trace, but also Mother Brain and Samus (and other character from that franchise who abuse said technology against Samus—like Raven Beak, above), M.U.T.H.U.R. and Ripley, HAL 9000 and Dave, etc, as inspired by Shelley’s original novel (effectively the benchmark for the Promethean Quest as a critical device towards capital in all its forms). We shall now outline and survey these parental Freudian devices, while avoiding Freud’s quack, canonical obsessions essentializing the nuclear family unit.

As such, we’ll continue examining how the man of reason functions per the Promethean myth against nature, albeit continuing briefly with Morbius (exhibit 40b) instead of Victor (who we’re reversing for the Demon Module) before quickly segueing into Metroidvania that feature much less sympathetic characters than him. We’ll start with Axiom Verge (exhibit 6b2), then look into Metroid (exhibit 40d1), whose Amazonian histories we’ll tie into Trace and his own ghostly tyrant, Athetos (not just a mad scientist, but a brain in a jar[9]), during the close-read in part one:

(source: Fandom)

As Morbius shows us (exhibit 40b, next page), the main consequence—of attempting to revive the monstrous-feminine for anything other than pro-state means—is death. Though certainly powerful, reverse abjection also invites state violence against its performers. Historically scapegoated as “mad,” reverse abjection is often framed as a “female” delivery mode that regularly bears fatal consequences against anything monstrous-feminine (not just female): self-destruction, insofar as the self is predominantly male, straight, European. By comparison, abjection—despite being entirely menticidal through state-coerced violence—is not only seen as life-saving and normal in canonical narratives, but rationally as male. Indeed, we can see both sides of the process in Forbidden Planet, when man-of-reason Doctor Morbius warns the military men about looking directly into the planetary reactor on Altair-4: “Remember to gaze only into the reflector, gentlemen; man does not behold the Gorgon and live!” Morbius is effectively playing god, here, warning the soldiers like Lot’s wife.

Yet, as is the plight of power and parentage in science fiction since Frankenstein, the rational man of science also fears mad science; i.e., a Promethean Quest where the hero tries to control its chaotic power for himself only to be punished for it. To that, Morbius keeps the wonders of the Krell tucked away from the soldiers and scientists on Earth, fearing their abuse of weaponized science.

Eventually Morbius is forced to confront the invisible, monstrous side of himself that has been terminally enlarged by the Great Machine (a “brain boost,” which the movie discourages; i.e., wanting people to literally be dumber and not “play god” by investigating genocide outside of canonical, Freudian explanations). Forced to look upon his “Gorgon,” the ghostly (and famously invisible) Monster from the Id, Morbius inexplicably dies (seemingly of shame by threatening his own bloodline—a common fate for many fathers in neo-Gothic novels): he’s the movie’s scapegoat, attacking the soldiers for their active “conquest of space[10]” (again, as something to subjugate, to subdue, to colonize).

(exhibit 40b: The psychomachy of Morbius, meaning “mind battle.” The idea stems from older forms of storytelling including the Elizabethan play. A common rendition of it is the angel and the devil on one’s shoulders; another is the Amazonomachy or “Amazon battle,” frequently depicted in classical Greek art—literally a battle of the sexes, with the Amazons being demonized for challenging the status quo as mythological conquerors that emasculate men. Dressed in black, Morbius realizes he’s the vampire dad feeding on his own daughter [the argument made by the solider, of course]: “My evil self is at that door and I have no power to stop it!” Per the film, he’s the vampire, not the state, and they take his findings on the Krell with them after blowing Morbius’ castle up with the planet [a trope that Alien and Metroid would repeat]. It’s capital punishment, Red-Scare-in-disguise.)

Morbius is a detective puzzling over the ruins of a great, seemingly abandoned civilization he has effectively inherited. Devoid of life, all he can do is use the language and bits of technology left behind, leading to a slow, inexorable confrontation with a dark, primitive and ultimately “female” aspect to what the movie, per Freud, attributes to his psyche; i.e., “unlocked” by the wonderous technology of these truant aliens.

Except, the same basic scapegoating—of nature as monstrous-feminine magically causing the downfall of patriarchal civilization—is present in many Promethean narratives; e.g., At the Mountains of Madness and the nebulous, dark shapelessness of its shoggoth imitators (a weaponized biology build to attack rebelling slaves) living in the ruins of a former civilization returning to nature, but also the female Rusalki from Axiom Verge, the intersex xenomorph from Alien (and the Alien Queen from Aliens), or the queenly Radiance from Hollow Knight, Mother Brain, etc. They aren’t simply female, but monstrous-feminine tied to nature rebelling with technology they turn against the patriarch; i.e., as the technology (the robata, the worker-slave) that refuses to obey the profit motive.

Though founded on military conquests behind Enlightenment obfuscation, it’s important to remember the privileged stupidity of the man of reason; i.e., his incompetence. Good or bad, for capital or against it, we’re not talking about Heinlein’s Competent Man; i.e., exhibiting military optimism (a neoconservative return to force) in order to maintain peace, thus recolonize old territories threatened by collapse. Instead, Victor Frankenstein and Morbius are both know-it-alls and thoroughly incompetent men tied to violent structures (which Morbius, to his credit, abjures), but still have the superiority complex and desire to kill as inherited from the same basic ideological structure they abandon for their own scholarly pursuits (with Victor being a “natural philosopher” and Morbius being a philologist, or expert of ancient written languages). There’s a Promethean element, insofar as power is found, not bargained for—a fatal magic for which Morbius isn’t just the story’s Prospero (the wizard from The Tempest seeking revenge against those who wronged him) but its Prometheus challenging state power in ways that movies’ soldiers (and Victor in Shelley’s book) want to salvage for Capitalism.

To that, Frankenstein—and indeed, the Modern Prometheus in connection to the monomyth critiquing capital—is about resisting bad parents playing god for or against the state; i.e., something we’ll explore now, when the man of reason falls prey to embarrassing hubris while grappling with Medusa using his wits (which often devise weapons of a nigh-wizardly sort); re: Icarus (the person) escaping the labyrinth (the space to explore) to crash into the sea after flying too close to the sun, to the gods and their Promethean fire. Generally without weapons, himself, there is always a military presence tucked away in the wreckage (or seeking it out).

Furthermore, through the Metis-style parentage of the Promethean Quest, Victor and Morbius externalize internalized portions of their own selves informed by their socio-material conditions, which they at first deny, then recognize as “other” and proceed to attack (the recipient of these abuses seeking revenge against the colonizer—a topic for the Demon Module). It’s a psychomachy made-flesh, one fought between the wizard’s swollen ego, and the ghost of the counterfeit piloted by the spirit of the colonized into stories like Frankenstein, Forbidden Planet and Metroidvania: to look on oneself as a dark reflection of empire-as-dead by virtue of nature turning technology against the patriarch that one embodies (the plot to Axiom Verge, in particular)!

(artist: Joaquin Rodriguez)

In propaganda terms, this is called “the useful idiot.” Poor Mobius is sacrificed by the movie and gaslit by the soldiers. Victor, meanwhile, is so dumb, so colossally arrogant, that he thinks he not only invented the problem, but that he’s the one to solve it—in essence, that the universe revolves around him. Morbius is more likeable, and even anti-establishment, but still works within the same narrative devices informed by his material surroundings—in short, the castle he inherits.

To that, dated psychoanalysis pits a self-centered rationalization of the benign male scientist as forced to confront an oft-female but always monstrous-feminine aspect of the psyche—a fearsome, at-times-invisible bugbear doubling as black mirror pushing genocide towards the hero; i.e., someone tied to the rational, good, civilized self. The thought process becomes something to inherit, its evils meant to be overcome or slain through force while classically ignoring the Marxist elements: the material conditions. As Gothic Communists, we’re attaching the process of abjection to socio-material elements; i.e., capitalist dogma; e.g., Cartesian thought and capital, which are exposed in the process (to pay attention to “the man behind the curtain,” as he stands in front of it, deifying himself for all to see). Victor and Morbius’ parents are not shown in their stories. As we’ll see with Trace in Axiom Verge, though, the useful idiot can either be manipulated by patriarchal or matriarchal forces, Athetos or the Rusalki; i.e., seemingly on opposite ends of the Cartesian spectrum, but both decaying inside a forever war’s damned, closed-space territory.

As we shall also see when we look at Frankenstein later in the volume, Promethean narratives like Forbidden Planet often present the hero as flawed, but ultimately noble and representing “progress” as delayed (“Your father’s name will shine again!”). In historical-material terms, however, “progress” (through the state) is inherently genocidal, abjecting the slaughter of anyone like Morbius who stands against the elite, the latter capitalizing on monomythic technology as a poetic means of exchange. Facing that reality is traumatic, but also something of a partial surprise, given these giant ruins seldom spell things out; they have to be sifted through, leading to some nasty surprises hidden inside (the movie is effectively a giant strawman/gaslight, putting the argument for Morbius’ death on his own shoulders; i.e., by virtue of him playing god as forbidden by God and God’s rules throughout the galaxy—the elite: “Don’t do Communism, kids! That includes making ambiguously gay robots [the servant trope] and investigating genocide!”).

If all this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because the cautionary tale of “curiosity kills the cat” was highlighted repeatedly by Mary Shelley’s ur-text, Frankenstein, bleeding into present-day works (from novels, to cinema, to Metroidvania). While scientific curiosity is specifically something Victor Frankenstein warns against after giving birth to his own creation (and which Morbius, shocked to death, advocates by destroying the titular forbidden planet), he ultimately bemoans his own station and rejects the ancient Medusa’s rage; i.e., as a byproduct of concealed, but also embodied genocide attached to Enlightenment thought: the zombie-like children of these men-of-reason as warlike (Morbius’ Robby is patently designed to follow commands and not kill “rational, thinking beings”; i.e., Asimov’s first law of robotics).

As we’ll see, though, the children of a given parent convey different qualities about the creator and their beliefs. Morbius is basically a Communist, so he uses the power of the gods (again, finding it in a faraway magical place) to make a machine—Robby the Robot—that, in turn, can make anything it wants (the Philosopher’s Stone); Victor, by comparison, is a cunt, so he makes something he can dominate and abuse for the state. The violent “offspring” from At the Mountains of Madness likewise serve a shapeshifting military role that is rejected by the hero (who runs away as fast as he can); the Rusalki from Axiom Verge, were made by something faraway and magical, too, survived by the resurrection machines that, once Athetos finds them, he promptly begins to abuse. The Rusalki (and similar Amazons, below) are monstrous-feminized; i.e., in the traditional sense of “repressed” and “chaotic,” reduced to naughty little girls standing in the way of male progress, of daddy playing god (which, per Freud, Morbius’ id serves to enact the same female, irrational side of himself that God—male, all-wise and all-powerful—will always punish for being like a girl: curious and inquisitive as a means of understanding and ultimately befriending nature).

(artist: Devilhs)

The idea is both older and newer than Forbidden Planet, surviving in various stories that came after it. This brings us to Metroidvania, whereupon games like Metroid and Axiom Verge present the Promethean Quest as the fatal discovery that one’s actual or de facto parents suck royal ass, and that one’s home is ultimately doomed because of it (founded on nature as raped by science); i.e., there’s a couple basic ideas about Metroidvania that come from Forbidden Planet, At the Mountains of Madness, and ultimately from Frankenstein (and to a lesser extent, The Tempest):

• a hero is summoned from earthly spaces by the gods to break the stalemate between nature and civilization
• they learn about their infernal, godly parentage (raised by wolves, bird people, or mad scientists, etc); i.e., that they’re Persephone come home; or Alucard, son of Dracula; etc
• the land of the gods is destroyed afterwards; e.g., blowing up a planet, sinking an island, or closing a gate that leads to such places; i.e., destroying evidence and witnesses, but also keeping monomythic mementos (souvenirs) while treating the larger event as dream-like similar to A Midsummer Night’s Dream—something to suggest and dismiss

Science and technology become mythical, even magical, but still comment on our world now in relation to technology and Capitalism “back then” as inherently illusory, manipulative and unstable.

A Promethean story revolves around the child as coming of age while inheriting the past through such discoveries: hell (and the gods, fascism and nature) coming home Their parents are away, asleep or otherwise, and the child (often grown up, like Morbius and Victor, but also Samus, below) must explore the hellish home (the unheimlich) to put the wrong things right. In doing so, the home wakes up, putting the child in danger while teaching them about their doomed past (often through heraldry and statues, below). The past, then, becomes something to inherit and destroy with whatever’s on hand, scuttling the castle, the boat, the giant (or some combination of these things) as having the means to self-destruct built in; e.g., the switch in Morbius’ lab or the Nostromo’s scuttle mechanism, etc.

(artist: MirroredR)

That’s the basic message, mind you. Inside a given Metroidvania, however, the scuttling happens in service to one parent or the other—the father or the mother, which translates to Cartesian powers or powers of nature as monstrous-feminine: Pygmalion vs Galatea, Zeus vs Medusa (or some such Archaic Mother), Victor vs Frankenstein, capital vs nature. To it, we always start and end with the same gladiatorial metaphor for capital canonically recruiting soldiers to its cause; i.e., as something to iconoclastically reverse through its monomythic people and places—its dramas, in other words.

Pertaining to said parentage expressed in monomythic language per the Promethean Quest, I’d like to pause things before we proceed onto Axiom Verge, in part—to unpack some of these concepts in relation to the historical-material struggle between masculine and feminine forces inside Metroidvania; i.e., that my scholarship has struggle to synthesize over time, interweaving during Promethean narratives that feature the zombie tyrant as a man-of-reason, but also the Amazon and Medusa as beings to subjugate and rape, ad infinitum, under his endless lies.

A note about ambiguity and dialectical-material scrutiny as we proceed into Metroidvania: The Gothic is generally ambiguous as a point of practice; the Promethean Quest camping the monomyth leads to repeating cycles (and fractal recursion) that—at least from a visual standpoint—become increasingly ambiguous dialogs about who is good and who is not. This extends from Shelley’s originators, Victor and the Creature in singular human form, onto Happ’s Trace as copied from Athetos for him (the father) and his enemies the Rusalki (the mothers) to debate with (thus the player/audience); i.e., about the ethics of Capitalism, of genocide, of progress. Similar to Shelley’s novel (and any Promethean work), there’s a strong mythological and dramatic flavor to Axiom Verge or Metroid, making either a wrestler’s opera whose dialogs about the transfer of power become much easier to parse (concerning class character); i.e., by virtue of dialectical-material scrutiny and of action (re: flow determines function, insofar as flowing power towards workers is ethical, sex-positive, and iconoclastic, whereas flowing power towards the state is not). —Perse

As my expertise, here, comes from studying Metroidvania as Gothic chronotopes that came after Forbidden Planet, we’ll look at different examples from my graduate and postgraduate work concerned with Metroid and Axiom Verge (and their palimpsests); i.e., in the rest of part zero of the symposium, followed by close-reads of Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight, in parts one and two. All parts also include older research of mine about Gothic stories—including sections of writing from my discontinued book, Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes (2021)—and the idea of synthesizing fresh growth and healing amid settler-colonial decay remains a common theme. Here in part zero, we’ve already introduced Forbidden Planet and the core rudiments of the Promethean drama. We’ll want to consider some of their unironic elements in Metroid, followed by Axiom Verge doing its best to satirize to these Promethean theatrics.

All the while, I’ll try my best to synthesize points already made in this volume with that of Volume Zero—namely that all roads lead to Rome as a space of nature colonized by Cartesian forces; i.e., a dark, vengeful womb that, in defense of itself, terrifies its attackers and nurtures its defenders through counterterrorist means: a palliative Numinous that isn’t strictly “female” per Beauvoir’s “woman is other,” but nature as monstrous-feminine food for Cartesian forces preying on it long after Rome “fell” (it merely transformed into kingdoms, then nation-states, then capital and corporations). Simply put, parents lie and often pit their children against each other during the divorce; i.e., in terms of Cartesian agents vs agents of nature as monstrous-feminine; e.g., Athetos and the Rusalki, with Trace stuck in the middle (exhibit 6b2, next page).

More to the point, this can be subverted through such characters compared to older variants (re: Samus and Mother Brain), but doing so takes work, and illustrates complicated labor exchanges that cheerfully encourage the Young-At-Heart; i.e., to play with monsters, dolls, faeries, and rape during ludo-Gothic BDSM. If you’re queer, Metroidvania are the places to find out[11] (from Volume One):

Volume One invites the reader to consider investigating power and trauma through theory and praxis as things to synthesize and express; i.e., through active, informed, collective participation; e.g., through shared exhibits like the one below. Said exhibit was created between Roxie Rusalka and myself, with Roxie being informed of my project ahead of time and agreeing to take part. It was deliberate/planned, and took time, money and work to pull off, but also mutual/informed consent:

(exhibit 6b2: Model and artist: Roxie Rusalka and Persephone van der Waard. Instruction occurs through the interrogation of trauma, wherein power is perceived and performed; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM/general Gothic poetics and simplified theories that incorporate a fair amount of former worker history pushing towards liberation. Said history is typically “lost” under state operations and must be repeatedly reclaimed through a liminal pedagogy—the act of reimagining systemic abuse received by workers from state forces. This reclamation very much includes monsters that are historically regarded as treacherous to status-quo agents, but especially regarding men under the Cartesian model; e.g., the nymph or siren as a regular emasculator of traditional stations of male agency and authority. To that, Roxie’s handle, “Rusalka,” refers to a type of Slavic water siren, which Roxie suggested I use as inspiration for depicting her in my book. Seeing as I already recognized the mythology from Thomas Happ’s 2014 Metroidvania, I drew Roxie as a Rusalki from Axiom Verge to instruct viewers with.

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

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

[artist: Wildragon]

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

The reality between such Promethean stories as half-real (reversing power, thus capital, between fantasy and real life) is that sex workers are lumped in with Medusa as some giant being for men of reason to rape and destroy for profit; i.e., labor-as-abject having to lie to survive against a system that lies to further itself: by insisting that Medusa is the threat (the Promethean Quest is a quest of self-destruction, but also self-deception). Wars are messy to begin with; inherited, their dogmatic confusions only compound—vast and overwhelming (as castles generally are) but also pacifying. Such castled instruction, then, is half-real; i.e., in between the text and the world it illustrates (seemingly ex nihilo, however abstract), hence must occur in a liminal sense, as “caught between” two places. We don’t want our students (other workers, regardless of age) to mark us with their flashlight eyes, then kill us as capital prefers; but we’re forced to speak to them as objects trying to rehumanize ourselves out of Gothic fiction into Gothic non-fiction:

(artist: Deuza-art)

All of this Amazonomachy-style cryptonymy relates to the grim harvests we alluded to at the start of the chapter and which we discussed in Volume One: a peach to carve up, which must become an Aegis to paralyse our conquers with; e.g., Trace hypnotized by the Rusalki’s Numinous “enormity” (their awesome power often coming from their eyes, or their voice as told through their eyes: the Radiance’s flashing gaze, or Mother Brain’s terrific rainbow beam paralyzing Samus the invader to then try to eat[12] her). This cannibalism is what Capitalist Realism ultimately tries to hide in its cycle of monomythic violence, and what we want to face, expose and transform using our own Promethean stories’ dark mommy doms as, to some extent, already dead (above). Ours must reflect genocide, projecting it back onto the colonizers trying to displace their own anxieties and misdeeds onto “elsewhere” (the land of the gods).

Again, we’ll get to that. First, let’s lay out the territories, gendered narrative devices, and Gothic theories pertaining to architecture and space that I have contributed to in the past and continue to do so into the present; re: by revisiting my older work on Metroid and Metroidvania for the rest of part zero, then specifically Axiom Verge in part one and Hollow Knight in part two; i.e., Medusa (and her womb) or Medusa’s enemies (men of reason and the cops who serve them) as commonly portrayed in these stories. From there, we’ll sally forth into other exciting zones (open battle, in part two of “The Monomyth”); as we do, always remember the root function such fictions, as ludo-Gothic BDSM, have: calculated risk.

Per the calculated risk, the paradox of danger inside the Metroidvania equals that of the castle lifted from older fictions (and their castles): danger as a performance of thrilling “peril” that can be survived even when the protagonist “buys the farm” (avatar death). The Gothic castle, as I put in Volume Zero, is still “the perfect dom,” because true rape is more or less impossible inside a consensual theatre of imprisonment where the player cannot die (excluding serious medical conditions the game and its data can somehow affect):

The idea is to liberate ourselves with fairly negotiated, thus cathartic, dungeon fantasies that camp canon through counterterrorist theatre to whatever degree feels correct to us; e.g., me in a haunted castle, wandering through the dark, menacing halls while wearing a sexy dress (and nothing under it, my bare body molested by the breeze and the fabric): a hopelessly vulnerable Gothic heroine feeling pretty and desired, hungrily and desperately interrogating the musical, cobwebbed gloomth^[13] while scarcely having anything between me and certain “doom.” As usual, the Gothic paradox allows for intense, oxymoronic dualities to coexist at the same time in the same space (e.g., “sad cum” or “gloomth” or similar and confused degrees of “verklempt” during the castle’s psychosexual, emotional “storm”). Simply put, I want to feel naked and exposed, thus paradoxically most alive in ways that I have negotiated through the contract between me and the media I’m working with (wherein the Metroidvania castle, as far as I’m concerned, is the perfect dom); i.e., while being “hunted” and covered in rebellious “kick me” symbols and clothing that advertises my true self^[14] as naked, colorful and dark, as if to tease the viewer in the shadows to try something (source).

In my master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis,” I acknowledge this ergodic motion (that is, motion accomplished through non-trivial effort; re: Aarseth) as something of a natural procedure responding to Metroidvania; i.e., as a kind of maze to discover and then navigate, as the legendary land of the gods: “Metroidvania spaces are so conducive to speedrunning as to make avoiding it an arduous task” (source). In doing so, players improve over time because that’s how playing videogames works; i.e., we’re being taught by the game but also pick up the game as something to master in return; e.g., I struggled to beat Mega Man V for the original, brick-sized Gameboy under nine hours, the first time, but afterwards could beat it under two. Mastery goes both ways.

With ludo-Gothic BDSM, the same idea applies to more than just ludology or Gothic architecture, but the complex (and inherited) emotions and BDSM interactions associated with the Neo-Gothic, retro-future hallways and rooms being braved during Cameron’s refrain (the shooter but also the Metroidvania closed space). We can best these in-game trials (and their famous, ubiquitous tortures) in traditionally masculine or feminine ways (the male or female Neo-Gothic hero; e.g., Emily St. Aubert or Ludovico, from The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), but still yield fresh, GNC interpretations that challenge capital, profit, rape, and genocide.

In doing so, however, players must always respect such devices, lest they conceal or further genocide outside of themselves; i.e., as something to perform and “discover” by inadvertently fostering heteronormativity as a Cartesian byproduct well at home in Metroidvania that players carry into their waking moments: the land of the gods coming home during the Imperial Boomerang and its subsequent moral panic and apocalypse!

(exhibit 40c: Artist, far-top-left: Paulo Henrique Marcondes; mid-top-left: concept art for Samus Returns, 2017; right: Caspar David Friedrich; everything else: Wildragon. Unlike Samus, who is a tall, strong girl boss in a suit of space armor, Trace is a callow, physically awkward nerd with a gun [re: a spoof of Cameron’s Amazonian shooter]. Moreover, he is continuously dwarfed by his alien surroundings—much like the British Romantic facing the fog of an increasingly alien world beyond civilization, except it’s a patently human cruelty projected into outer space; re: astronoetics.)

Metroidvania, then, are the multimedia continuation of a larger historical-material cycle—one of dark, imprecise, dialectical-material reflection about Cartesian forces and their monstrous-feminine victims. Home to the Capitalocene, such things are impossibly large in scope and scale, strangely difficult to put one’s finger on and yet seemingly everywhere all at once. They move but stay put.

For instance, I note in “Lost in Necropolis” that terrible abuse struggles to map itself, but survives through the player as the next in line:

Across Gothic media, there remains an excessive quality of time that cannot be mapped, or expressed in clear terms. Instead, it pools inside the space. The returning hero is doomed to face the past again and again, a series of doubles. They can subvert old tyrannies by seizing control, but remain trapped or exiled, themselves. For example, Samus is nomadic, without a home; so is Ellen Ripley from Aliens or Victoria, from Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806). Men experience it is as well, in terms of motion as gendered, but also said motion contested, within a given arc and across all of them. The Knight a wandering warrior, destroyed upon his return; Mather Lewis’ Ambrosio dies an ignominious death. For any hero, it is not simply a call to arms, but a rite of passage wherein the hero constantly infers whatever lies in store for them whilst inside; yet, it is always hidden, revealed too late: they were the destroyer all along. This can be of the space, others, or themselves, and there is no escape from that. One cannot avoid death, or concerns about death relative to growth established through motion; it and Other doubles collect within the space as historical byproducts of motion (source).

In short, the monomythic process is always left behind inside the current castle as echoing older castles (and heroes) tied to Capitalism and its woes across space-time (and its Gothic abstractions).

In turn, this articulation of concealment concerns Enlightenment thought as camouflage, which my PhD and subsequent books would build on (re: “Canonical Essentialism“)—that cartography is a tool of Cartesian domination felt in and across Metroidvania narratives, one operating in service of cataloging conquest in BDSM language; i.e., of the former ruin’s occupation and its past trauma’s reabsorption into empire as a corruption of rewritten memories where power is notably unequal and transferred continually as such (master and slave, dominant and submissive, savior and destroyer).

(source: Hans Staats’ “Mastering Nature: War Gothic and the Monstrous Anthropocene,” 2016)

To it, Gothic castles in Metroidvania are built to be moved through, thus both conceal and catalog Cartesian dogma as a map of itself; i.e., a liminal space, specifically a grave, that was, is, and will be conquered by the mighty ghost of the past again. Classically said ghost is a giant suit of armor that interrupts the husbandry of said dominion; i.e., the giant helmet in Otranto crushing Lord Manfred’s son to death, Looney-Tunes-style, on the very first page:

Shocked with these lamentable sounds, and dreading he knew not what, he advanced hastily—but what a sight for a father’s eyes!—he beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers (source).

Except the ontological uncertainty of the living dead (a zombie), and the suit of armor as animate-inanimate, is a byproduct of a constantly revived medieval working at cross purposes; i.e., one where the organic-inorganic—or bio-mechanical nature of a concentric, mise-en-abyme (the space and occupant as equally castle-like)—yields future liminalities that collectively denote not just the Anthropocene, but the Capitalocene as endlessly swept up in Gothic recursion.

For example, said cryptomimesis conjures up as “castle” that contains, per the Modern Prometheus, the tell-tale xenomorph; i.e., as an abyss-walker ghost haunted by its older counterfeit self (a bit like Hamlet, below) as trapped inside a Gothic castle: a ghost of the counterfeit. Both homely and inhospitable, it remains the usual place to dance and play with such beings during demon BDSM (as the boss music, “Trace Rising,” lovingly shows). Where there’s a castle, there’s a rape, but a ghostly ongoing and vague one linked to Capitalism raping nature under the (dis)guise of divine providence further the process of abjection—one that points to Enlightenment virtues claiming to have moved past such barbarism; i.e., a displaced symbol of current systemic atrocities dressed up as “past” (re: Punter).

For all its “recent” sci-fi trappings, then, Metroidvania are ghost stories much in the same way Shelley’s novel borrowed from Hamlet before it (and Paradise Lost, but I digress); i.e., a hauntological, canceled-future dance party going back to the future of a past moment in imaginary space-time: civilization as conquered by nature as returning from the grave to seek revenge against Cartesian forces several generations removed.

The Gothic castle, then, is the home of fabrication and paradox since Horace Walpole (at least), but one whose place of endless possibilities both resist quantification (colonization) and beg to be played for GNC, postcolonial purposes during Promethean stories (found power and knowledge); i.e., the ghosts of the dead resisting mapping and cataloging only to reappear in the contested burial site, phasing in and out of existence as written regarding great trauma tied to the usual abuses of capital against nature: to terrify people with visions of Hell as attached to the haunted castle grounds! As Hamlet’s father’s ghost puts it:

I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine (source).

As we’ll see when looking at Metroid and Axiom Verge, such dialogs are part-in-parcel with Metroidvania.

For example, just as Hamlet talks with his father’s ghost to uncover and participate in revenge (above)—effectively a mad quest linked to his ancestral home as unjustly occupied by imposturous forces—Axiom Verge takes the same basic idea and marries it to Victor’s Promethean dialogs with the Creature; i.e., Trace talking to Athetos through his creations, who want to kill the son for the father because Trace is being led toward Athetos by the faeries (making him the princess inside the castle attacked by the paranoid old man, below): as a matter of self-destructive power tied to the land of the gods as ancestral/soaked in the blood of mutual revenge (this isn’t a “both sides” issue—Cartesian thought is wrong in this case—but both sides still overlap in terms of their shared actions as disguise-like, but also derelict allegories; e.g., “I’m not a revolutionary! I’m just a gay Gothic scholar telling stories!” We kick up chaff to raise issues, but also cloud ourselves in the inky gloom).

Likewise, Metroid depicts Samus as conversing with ghosts, too; i.e., those of fallen gods (the Chozo) belonging to part of the same kind of abandoned homestead she is destined to inherit, investigate, and like Prince Hamlet, ultimately destroy and pass on! History is a game of inheritance built on individual histories disguising one side or the other using the same aesthetics of power and death.

A castle in a Gothic story, then, is a highly specific (and aesthetic) arrangement of space and time, on whose narratives concerning power and death, nature and civilization, are told through motion responding as a story unto itself (a story in a story responding back and forth). As a fundamental part of the Gothic chronotope, Bakhtin refers to the ongoing relationship—i.e., between the space, its historical past/undead trauma, and the people moving inside of it—as follows; re:

Toward the end of the seventeenth century in England, a new territory for novelistic events is constituted and reinforced in the so-called “Gothic” or “black” novel—the castle (first used in this meaning by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto, and later in Radcliffe, Monk Lewis and others). The castle is saturated through and through with a time that is historical in the narrow sense of the word, that is, the time of the historical past […] the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form as various parts of its architecture […] and in particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights. […] legends and traditions animate every corner of the castle and its environs through their constant reminders of past events. It is this quality that gives rise to the specific kind of narrative inherent in castles and that is then worked out in Gothic novels.

In turn, I would call this “castle-narrative” regarding Metroidvania for my masters’ thesis. More to the point, I would and will continue to argue that the Radcliffean “closed space” is unmappable as a claustrophobic, “event horizon” (re, Hogle: “a vanishing point”)—a liminal space that requires non-trivial effort to explore; i.e., of trauma tied to the human body and mind expressed in monstrous language (re: castle-like bodies and vice versa, per “Castles in the Flesh“) contained within that the player can sense the enormity of (Capitalism and Communism) as visualized to a woefully small degree: a dark forest (the classic precursor to Hell from Dante’s Inferno and its numerous allusions in later canon) can be giant, but one can only see a small portion of it.

(artist: Missuscrim)

Under Capitalism, Medusa is a tyrant as much as Dracula is; i.e., something to reassemble like Osiris out of disembodied pieces, then abject all over again. Whatever the tyrant, and from doll to dollhouse, such Medusas’ revenge constitute a memento mori that speaks when played with—to Capitalism as a hyperobject that has evolved into itself and is experienced, post hoc, through a narrative of itself, ipso facto; i.e., the narrative of the crypt as filled with paradoxical elements, often viewed in small as a matter of abstraction that translates into more accessible-inaccessible language for the middle class to explore, mid-abjection and monomyth-as-Mandelbrot: labyrinths and mazes that, like Radcliffe’s Gothic castles, denote a cryptonymic, dream-like presence of rape, one that a) suitably phases between person and place (the nuclear family house and home, but also homebodies), and b) can be entered and interrogated, power-wise, by exploring itself and its Gothic decay (and regeneration) in suitably nightmarish ways during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

For example, the paradox of darkness is that it is highly visible; re: Milton’s darkness visible playing out through the chronotopes of Walpole and other Gothic auteurs’ shared shadow zone into their present-day simulacra (cryptomimetically echoing past forms). To this, the Gothic castle is equally enormous and “occupied” by a presence tied to the self as material-but-questionable, related to a tyrant in uncertain ways: one’s history in connection to former occupiers of the space brought to the fore, capital or Communist.

Metroidvania and recursive motion going hand-in-hand is not an idea I coined, but I have taken it further than someone like Paul Martin did towards older Metroid and Castlevania games. Indeed, on the cusp of speedrunning and Twitch’s emergence in 2011, Martin dismisses them:

One such typical journey occurs near the beginning of the game. This takes us, due to various locked doors and impassable gaps, from the alchemy laboratory in the lower left quadrant of the castle to the master librarian, seller of keys, in the upper right, and back. We encounter this kind of recursive movement throughout the game and these movements are executed alongside the recursions of the game’s plot. The recursive movement outlined is by no means unique to [Symphony of the Night]. Many games involve this pattern as a core element of their gameplay. Most obviously, this gameplay pattern, in which a character must go back and forth through a maze which opens itself up as the character collects equipment and becomes more powerful, is present in the early Metroid games. However, I am not arguing here that the pattern is anything more than a videogame convention but rather that when this convention is seen in combination with the specific story and characters that we encounter in SotN it takes on an expressive role that the convention does not necessarily have in other games (source: “Ambivalence and Recursion in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night“).

Unlike Martin, I consider the Metroidvania as something beyond “a mere videogame convention.” Instead, its danger-disco tunnels and rooms wind and confuse the protagonist to symbolize the difficulty of recollection when faced with mind-numbing trauma as a Cartesian symptom, but nevertheless remains infused with a nebulous, funerary doom leaping across mediums that challenges the Capitalocene as such; i.e., Hogle’s narrative of the crypt, or “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present.” It would become “castle-narrative” as first recognized in my thesis work (re: “Lost in Necropolis“), which would extend to ludo-Gothic BDSM as evolving into itself (re: “Into the Toy Chest” and “Jadis’ Dollhouse,” etc). Now—given Metroidvania is my bread and butter—I want to stress the kinds of ironies that also phase in and out of existence (like the moon, whose lunacy paraphrases capital’s waxing and waning).

For one, such spaces like Sudra in Axiom Verge and Zebes in Metroid are desolate and oddly alive, a proliferate necrobiome replete with history as a work-in-progress, insofar as empire is trapped in decay but looking to clean house and wipe the slate clean (through Samus, by killing Mother Brain). To that, Gothic castles have—since Walpole, Lewis and Radcliffe—assembled from dreams informed by history as half-real, decaying and regenerating back into itself; i.e., coming up brick-by-brick as both gassy and made up, while somehow wholly solid and confirmed regarding capital: death omens where we—both as host, guest and prisoner—feel most alive, have the most power while appearing powerless, playing amid the hauntological language of war as married to the aesthetic/cryptonymy of power and death under Capitalism. Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, our ludic masters are the castles making us surrender unto them, to beg to our captors, “Take me, I’m yours! But don’t hold back!” It’s ontologically uncertain, thus not set as a space of play that, unlike Zimmerman’s magic circle, isn’t so neatly drawn.

Just as Gothic castles, in any media, are built on the endless potential of theatrical violence, Gothic fantasy is all about fantasizing about death and rape through these castled theatrics; i.e., as things to endorse or subvert in cartoonish, dated language; e.g., the Western’s saloon fight or Gothic heroine’s castle crawl (and other hybrids). Per the calculated risk and palliative Numinous, it’s generally more fun to fantasize through these make-believe arenas according to forbidden desire and earnestly whimsical attempts to heal from abuse than it is to actually subject oneself to dead-serious, unironic torture.

Yes, the camp is entirely brutal, at times, but it’s still camp provided irony and play are present (re: Walpole, Lewis); i.e., as something heroic and monstrous (usually a combination of the two) to conjure up and play with in the usual liminal territories thereof (re: doubles, offering conflict on the surface of themselves and inside thresholds to move through). Hero or heroine, movie or videogame, the protagonist is always between a monstrous state of salvation and damnation linked to abstractions of capital’s horrors come home; they are never strictly free, but encased in a claustrophobic (closed-space) world that paradoxically feels more alive because of it:

(artist: Wildragon)

Similar to novels and cinema, Metroidvania castles are more than their bricks or motion inside of itself. Amid this decayed hyperreality (the map of empire as reassembled, but failing to restore the empire to its former glory), the monomyth hero reanimates to explore the disastrous maze or labyrinth to its logical center tied to extratextual elements. By moving through the old castle to try and remember what happened, they confront its lost histories, but also its total, ergodic histories linked to the external world; i.e., the sum of history the space contains and intimates through effort.

My master’s thesis concluded that this process is fundamentally unmappable, try as speedrunners might when moving endlessly through the Metroidvania in pursuit of their own histories inside the ruin. In continuation, I write in “Mazes and Labyrinths” how there’s simply too many ways to navigate the maze, too many ways to communicate power and its resisting as things to materialize, embody or abjure:

“Mazes and Labyrinths” is corollary to my past research on how FPS empower players; it explores how Metroidvania and survival horror disempower players trapped inside their respective gameworlds. They offset the player’s strength, generally to tell a perilous story. This peril stems from varying lapses of power due to a hero’s position—who they are and where they exist within a space (source).

To that, the endless, concentric wreckage is effectively a reoccurring form of historical-material amnesia and rememory at odds, the unironic hero operating on a path of rememory towards individuation through abjection, thus genocide (the Jungian concept of psychological maturity whereupon a young man slays the mother as a developmental roadblock; i.e., the creation of sexual difference, as predicated on the slaying of the mother, but especially the Dark Mother).

By extension, this haunts capital’s abstractions (Gothic castles); i.e., as a process of generating wealth through play without irony/critical awareness, even with seemingly emergent forms that, in truth, limit their critical potential to have races for their own sake. To that, no matter how fast speedrunners go (e.g., MonStahLer’s “[WR] Hollow Knight Speedrun – 112% APB in 2:59:24,” 2023) the story is more or less told, the protagonist’s lack of memory phenomenologically mirrored by the player relearning the space as part of the next in line—on a routine path of conquest, linked to a Gothic chronotope as the hyperreal site of “civilized” development: inside a giant graveyard that is recorded for the next generation to find, on and on.

As part of this castle-narrative, then, memory is always decaying and must be reestablished by recursive (endless) motion; i.e., through the space, making the one who remembers a more efficient and effective killer picking up arms and knowledge. Irony helps subvert canonical potential along these tracks, but violence is almost always the thing to subvert; i.e., slaying the “monster” in the middle of maze: the dragon master or dark queen.

(artist: Gutter Tongue)

Usually a powerful woman/chaos dragon at first blush—or the ghost of a male tyrant—in truth, the greatest monster is actually the hero looking back at an older version of themselves: the history of the conquered and conqueror sharing the same surface, the same black mirror/reverse abjection (what my friend Ginger lovingly calls “Gothic cringe”).

It’s less about a direct bloodline and more a tenuously feudal, vague connection established in relation to the gameworld intimating capital’s horrors and our relation to said horrors; as something whose repeated conquerings teach the player to be increasingly violent during Capitalism’s whispered decay and rise again. Threatened by it, the player regresses to a feudalistic state; i.e., the black knight, the zombie tyrant, the giant ghost (the Numinous) of Caesar returning from Hell. Their sense of self is thrown into question, all while becoming the ultimate thief and killing machine—a “great destructor” that steals and destroys everything (a bit like a crusader in service of the state colonizing its own territories again). There’s plenty of room for irony but it isn’t automatic among the ceremonies and spaces thereof.

(artist: Adam Hughes)

Furthermore, any revelations about capital through the Promethean Quest are hidden—tucked away behind the pomp and circumstance; i.e., the castle grounds, fractals and artifacts, but also the thrill of the hunt, its unironic victory and the (often) beautiful, body of a humanoid, Amazonian princess. No longer the hidden reward of a hidden system[15] inside a space that cannot communicate its ultimate horrors[16] upon a single completion, she’s out in the open. Like exercise, she takes multiple attempts to progress to the highest point (and the best armor, which is often no armor except her birthday suit). From there, our oft-female Icarus can fall the farthest, often further into delusion; e.g., Samus thinks she’s the hero and that her unironic actions will bring about “true peace in space!” In neoliberal terms, this concept is called false hope; I call it “military optimism”:

Just as Alien evolved into Aliens, the Metroid franchise has become increasingly triumphant over time. Abjuring the Promethean myth, it instead offers military optimism—the idea that seemingly unstoppable enemies can be defeated with patience and, more importantly, military resources; the more victories, the more resources there are to use (even if these are little more than looted plunder in the grand scheme).

Samus repeatedly embarks on the Promethean Quest. Over time, this quest has become less cautionary and more professional. The Promethean past isn’t something to fear or avoid; it’s something to shoot. This attitude removes the quest’s cautionary elements, especially where the military is concerned. This creates a franchise much more fixated on Samus as a neutral figure with military ties. Rather than fight them, she does their bidding and is celebrated for it (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021).

(exhibit 40d1: Artist, top-farthest-left: Rainarc Rhapsody; top-far-left: Gutter Tongue; bottom-left: Pajarona; top-middle: Phobos Romulus; bottom-middle: unknown, source; bottom-right: Azto Dio. Samus is forever between two worlds: nature and civilization, but also the living and the dead. Undead and demonic, she is composed of various pieces stolen from places raided for empire, becoming forever haunted by these crimes as a colonial survivor chasing dragons [while also having “native” blood inside her from older colonizers, the Chozo, as ostensibly closer to nature but in reality were imperial, themselves]. The white Indian pimped out, she personifies the Western fear of feudal inheritance common in Gothic stories, all at once a knight, golem, giant, tyrant, damsel, demon, detective and military pinup girl [all concepts we’ll continue unpacking throughout the book] as part of a larger sequence, structure: Capitalism and Cartesian thought. Originally a comic-book character with zero identity to speak of, Samus has gone through various revisions that try to distinguish her from the legions of cookie-cutter women in sci-fi pastiche, while simultaneously making her nearly indistinguishable from them.

In the queer tradition, an argument could be made that Samus [and by extension, the audience] is looking at older, heteronormative models—less of themselves exclusively and more of their bloodline as inherently violent, but also tied to the historical-material world as a dangerous, instructional memory shaping workers into state-sanctioned killers; i.e., the Gothic castle as a cursed, familial space, but also an undead, monomythic recruiting ground. As a queer person, transition generally involves moving away from the colonial binary and its heteronormative violence according to a cis-het double or bogeyperson; but doing so requires challenging one’s “own” historical portrait through the Promethean space that contains it in various chronotopic markers; i.e., Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination personified, in hero terms: the physically capable body as castle-like and naked.)

(exhibit 40d2: Artist: Teke. The more queer someone is, the more they retreat from cis-het, “heroic” renditions of themselves. Fearful of the violence those variations perform in service to the state, the most fearsome thing for us gays is that we might be cis-het, which Gothic spaces will intimate through their historical-material reminders of the feudalistic bloodline as fundamentally cis-het: kings, queens, princesses, and sanctioned incest/rape; but also zombie scapegoats, be those fallen kings, madwomen in the attic or mad scientists. By wanting to escape from heteronormative, Cartesian models tied to our own childhoods, queer people want to escape the socio-material prescription of canonical monsters that serve as performatively heroic or villainous roles through a false sense of self. The proletarian goal of the black mirror is to reverse abject these and bring our true selves to the fore, altering the socio-material world in the process.)

Confronting the monster inside this final vault, Metroid communicates a common Metroidvania trope: assimilation; i.e., the hero as biomechanically abject, their weapons generally a part of their bodies as extensions begot of the space they’ve inherited/are stealing from in service to empire and the Imperial Boomerang. Triumphant Metroidvania like Super Metroid don’t reflect terribly hard on the hypocritical violence these weapons commit, then, nor the liminality of their dynastic power exchange and hereditary rites; instead, the game routinely grants Samus a mission to complete for Big Brother and she does it as a physically impressive specimen trained in the art of war—a “space knight” who kills dragons, plundering their hoards in the process, before destroying the site of plunder without irony. It becomes a planet-wide cycle of death, one whose succession glorifies genocidal violence in all the Cartesian ways: serve the Man, punch Medusa.

Despite being female, Samus lacks the capacity to safeguard nature; she’s always blowing it up! Canon frames her as the lost daughter returning home to work out her wild energies, reclaiming the bride as someone to disrobe after she’s “played house” as a token cop regressing to the dutiful sex pot. But because she is, herself, part god, she is always out of reach—is always property for the elite to dangle in front of weird canonical nerds lusting after their own avatar as lost to them; i.e., as alien; re: fire of the gods; e.g., “Fire of unknown origin took my baby way” (Blue Öyster Cult’s “Fire of Unknown Origin,” 1981):

Death comes sweeping through the hallway, like a lady’s dress
Death comes driving down the highway, in its Sunday best

A fire of unknown origin took my baby away
A fire of unknown origin took my baby away

Swept to ruin off my wavelength, swallowed her up
[…]

Death comes driving, I can’t do nothing
Death goes
There must be something, there must be something that remains (source: Genius).

It’s the usual quest of revenge/promise of sex per the Prometheus Quest tokenized for capital, profit and rape—of nature as alien, monstrous-feminine.

Under Metroid, we’re left with the usual quest of revenge against nature; i.e., the promise of sex per the Prometheus Quest tokenized for capital, profit and rape—of nature as alien, monstrous-feminine.

(artist: Viktria)

Except, Nintendo’s lack of irony brings us right to Axiom Verge: the fires of capital raped Medusa! It’s a game whose lovely genderqueer (and pro-nature, above) Promethean ironies we’ll unpack, next; i.e., whose close-read occurs contrary to the ghostly (Gothic) histories of capital we’ve unpacked for you here!

Onto  “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge“!

---

Footnotes

[1] The movie was made in 2012, speaking to a time on the verge of reality (as science fiction generally does) whose preface year has already come and gone. This isn’t a far-off place that Scott was speaking to, with Prometheus, but the here-and-now dressed up as “Gothic.” In turn, Weyland isn’t some impossible figure relegated to pure make-believe. He’s a venture capitalist enjoying the luxuries of Cartesian domination, holding the world hostage between his thumb and forefinger.

[2] My master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (2018) was docked quite a few points simply because I didn’t quickly or accurately define Metroidvania to my graduate supervisors (one, Dale Townshend, saying he’d never played “a computer game in [his] life”) or to my guest reader (also from MMU, though I forget his name). The guest reader in particular pointed out feeling confused because I hadn’t explicitly mentioned Metroidvania until about twenty pages in!

[3] To this, the monomyth concept isn’t unique to Metroidvania, and is expressed in other videogames like Zelda (the open-to-closed space), Mega Man or Contra (the run ‘n gun), Resident Evil (the survival horror), System Shock (the action-adventure), Doom (the FPS), and Mario (the platformer). However, none of them are Gothic as a matter of space that illustrates Aguirre’s inversion of the Hero’s Journey through said space, hence don’t automatically apply to ludo-Gothic BDSM as having been founded on maze-like Gothic spaces (and their monstrous-feminine occupants, within, punching up against Cartesian men).

[4] As the opening to Super Metroid explains, “The last metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace.”

[5] Although maps are a huge part of the Metroidvania world as a matter of conquest, this has largely already been covered in Volume Zero, my PhD (re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains). Instead, we’ll be focusing on aesthetics—the motion, appearance and thematic elements that emerge through the exploration of map-like spaces in Metroidvania.

[6] Generation of wealth in or outside of imperial sectors was classically done through conquest, not profit through capital and privatization; i.e., rapine, often through the stealing of gold and other valuable things by force. These things could be mined from the Earth and smelted, but again, this took a labor force (usually serfs or chattel slaves). Trade and things existed but were beholden to the same technological limitations.

Over time, though, capital developed through Capitalism’s ability to increasingly exploit the land through people the state could attack; i.e., not what it could steal from them in a pinch, but occupy and enslave according to the privatization of labor (factories and workers) pitted against an enemy linked to nature as abject: framed as being against civilization because nature was suddenly alien, monstrous-feminine. Doing so combined centuries of dogma, imperial nostalgia (for Rome), and recent scientific advancements granting the state the ability to pit one legitimate population against an illegitimate one with industrialized materiel (moral territories). In short, the state could do Imperialism on repeat, moving money through nature (with advanced weapons technologies) to achieve profit in pursuit of infinite growth per the regular rise and fall of Capitalism’s boom-and-bust mechanism.

Through the monomyth, the canonical Gothic has abjected this procedure to displaced older times, digging said “past” up in ways the state can use as middle-class propaganda; i.e., to remain vigilant lest “our” empire fall, too. The conquest element never really went away, then. It just became privatized, but also industrious/sacred (the Protestant work ethic) and hidden away behind capitalistic illusions that romanticize Cartesian thought as “tragic,” but ultimately something to debate, thus apologize for (and continue to authorize state violence with during Pax Americana under Capitalist Realism). The Promethean Quest challenges all of this by framing the usual benefactors as dickwads, hence the state and its Cartesian dogma.

[7] I.e., fighting over the damsel who, however insignificant she might seem, indicates the larger capitalist enterprise: space as female under frontier Capitalism (the final frontier), but also monstrous-feminine.

So while Zack Welker writes dismissively in “The Lack of Female Importance in Forbidden Planet” (2017)

In Forbidden Planet, one can see that there is only one woman throughout the film. Now, usually one would think since she’s the only female in the film she must have some significance. But that is not the case here. In this film, Altaira (the only female) is treated as an object and a distraction (source).

the fact remains, she is the sole focus, and—more to the point—a heteronormative ritual of pursuit that disguises the ubiquitous Cartesian presence of the soldiers and why Morbius dislikes them so much: the colonization of outer space as seen through their unflattering, predatory behavior towards his young horny daughter.

To it, you could just as easily swap the princess out with the Peking duck from The Pink Panther Strikes Again (“My duck, I must have you!”); the principles of consumption, of propriety and vice (the virgin/whore) vs nature as something to dominate are still going to be at work in such stories (with Gothic canon being obsessed with emulating older morality plays regarding women and the home as beset by wild forces). The movie is Capitalism in small (and the Capitalocene—a dead, mostly lifeless planet; i.e., the absentee Mother), but also Capitalism-in-disguise as borrowed from older Gothic stories under Capitalist Realism: the ending of “other” empires and “their” worlds.

[8] You could argue Lovecraft protests settler colonialism by historicizing its collapse, but he does it self-centeredly and abjectly towards colonized worlds as attacked by barbarians from within (the Caesar conspiracy also abused by Hilter in the 1920s); i.e., as Victor Frankenstein does, so busy “doing science” that he has no time to relate to other people (including his wife, who dies because he’s rearing the fight the monster and forgets about her).

By comparison, Morbius certainly isn’t perfect, but he really doesn’t like soldiers or colonialism. To be sure, he does so to a fault (“the scurry and strife of humankind” sounding somewhat bitter), but the romantic elements have a lot more personality than Lovecraft; i.e., which, in my mind, help make up the usual bleeding heart of the Gothic Romance. Morbius is misunderstood and tragic; Lovecraft is a craven, homophobic bigot with zero pulse. As we’ll see, so is Athetos, sp paranoid of his own son that he tells his “children” (the variations) to kill Trace (the call coming from inside the house, as it were): “DEMON. ATHETOS SAY, KILL.”

[9] A cheeky nod to Tithonus:

Tithonus, in Greek legend, son of Laomedon, king of Troy, and of Strymo, daughter of the river Scamander. Eos (Aurora) fell in love with Tithonus and took him to Ethiopia, where she bore Emathion and Memnon. According to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, when Eos asked Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life, the god consented. But Eos forgot to ask also for eternal youth, so her husband grew old and withered (source: Britannica)

More to the point, men of reason (and the states attached to them) are always trying to cheat death by colonizing nature as monstrous-feminine.

[10] Which the narrator of the film openly describes their mission as, at the start of the movie.

[11] Generally the discovery happens as a matter of empathy towards various characters, onstage, the page or the screen; i.e., who do you side with—the old creepy scientist guy or the big gay faeries trying to survive in between fiction and reality? No one ever said being queer was easy! But it is fun! The key to escape, lovelies, is liberation, and that happens inside the text as half-real, between reality and imagination as negotiating power for workers or the state! Don’t fight the ghost of the counterfeit to further abjection; dance with it, and all your dreams will—if not for you, then your children or your children’s children (the future, in other words)—come true!

[12] The duality of monsters and their theatrics lets Communists occupy Samus; i.e., as a vehicle for proletarian (thus subversive) aims. But it doesn’t change the fact that her intended function is a token cop committing genocide for the state by colonizing the old ruin: a subjugated Amazon abjecting its maternal tyrant as both an infernal perversion of nature through mad science (the brain in a jar/glass womb) and the monstrous-feminine enemy of state forces during monomythic forays in to Hell. Per the cryptonymy process, Mother Brains completes the double operation by pushing visions of state abuse onto Samus, who rejects them by beheading Mother Brain. Their status as enemies is naturalized per Capitalism Realism under neoliberal dogma (videogames).

[13] Gloomth (from my PhD) “being the gloom and warmth attributed to Horace Walpole’s gothic villa, and by extension his novel”:

As Dale Townshend writes in Gothic Antiquity:

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

For Walpole, gloomth was a carefully cultivated hauntological expression—of the civilized and barbaric—into something beautiful and unique. Later, his own villa inspired him to write what is arguably considered to be the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (source).

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

[15] “Beyond communities that reward speed, fast players are rewarded by Metroidvania when using the same items. Samus, in Metroid, will remove her armor at the end, but only if the game is beaten fast enough” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Always More: A History of Gothic Motion from the Metroidvania Speedrunner,” 2019).

[16] “To play the game is to invade it, the hero’s body built to receive items that help them destroy the gameworld, but also themselves. They respond to the castle and its grim historical markers; over time, they are conditioned along a system of movement that can be taught, mastered through motion. By entering the heart of the castle, the hero confronts the past, but also becomes the answer to its riddle: the ultimate monster is merely an older, ‘forgotten’ version of themselves” (ibid.).

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)!

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

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

Bad Dreams, part three: the Monomyth and Cycle of Kings; or, “Perceptive Zombie Eyeballs”: Paralyzing Zombie Tyrants with Reverse Abjection (and Other Gothic Theories)

“And now I, Skeletor, am Master of the Universe!”

—Skeletor, Masters of the Universe (1987)

(exhibit 40a1a1: Frank Langella camps up the skeleton lord with the performance of a lifetime, doing so in a doomed production that barely got finished—and all to make his child [who loved the He-Man toys and cartoons[1]] happy. Similar to Dracula, Skeletor’s top priority is moody Shakespearean theatrics that steal the show from the boring male stoic: a queer death clown hamming it up as best he can. But his appetite knows no bounds, driving the story to repeat itself through a trademark, ghoulish hunger emblematic of the monomyth-as-zombie.)

Picking up from where “Escaping Jadis” left off…

Per the process of abjection, the middle class canonize the raping of nature, treating it as monstrous-feminine through the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., as something to punch, doing so in monomythic language that moves money through nature (repeating the grim harvest). As such, the undead become things to do battle with in some shape or form, as monomythic. Be that doll or dollhouse, castle or tyrant, they reify in magical, poetic forms that never quite existed, but whose rapacious, faux-medieval histories increasingly exist between reality and imagination, onstage and off: childhood as something to revisit in service to profit. The monomyth is the zombie “Bad Dreams,” part three will be looking at.

For all the usual size difference (next page) and Numinous elements, such things are canonically summoned to ultimately conquer by returning things to order—but not before teasing Radcliffe’s naughty-naughty demon lovers unto a ready-and-waiting (classically white female) readership: “rape” as a theatrical, highly creative means of playing with such mechanisms of desire as historical-material byproducts of genuine exploitation. It’s a disco, a monster party that hyphenates castle and occupant as divided into various binaries that must then be rejoined during Gothic Communism; i.e., abjuring rape through bad, Lewis-style echoes of itself, camping the nuclear-family-as-castle (the tyrannical husband as site of rape forecast by his oversized house) normally prone to the concealment of genocide (thus rape). If there’s a castle, there’s cryptonymy as a matter of rape, of genocide, of police abuse, etc.

To reclaim the cryptonymy process, we must camp it. To that, Persephone (the deity or me) likes being “raped”; i.e., as a campy means of Gothic play that challenges state edicts through paradoxical attractions thwarting abjection. “Don’t fear the reaper“; dance in the ruins, because big castle equals big “rape,” pointing ever and always to capital under Pax Americana (the state) as the true and ultimate rapist.

(artist: Sabine Esmeray)

So far, parts one and two of “Bad Dreams” have focused on the apocalypse; i.e., in accordance with the Imperial Boomerang and worker rememory as a forgotten humanizing process: the return of the living dead to devour the present inside itself, regarding the “mingling” of far-off places and interpersonal relationships across space-time. Part three shall now consider the monomyth and its tyrants extending the historical-material framework backwards and forwards.

The usual dualities persist, of course, involving canon as something to parry and iconoclastically subvert inside the usual grandiose stories—of the state-as-undead vs undead workers. One fundamentally searches for “victory” as a matter of total, blind revenge (“an eye for an eye”) against nature and death as a natural event, going the way of Caesar as a ghost thereof. The other offers “blindness” as paradoxically more perceptive; i.e., it becomes a question of zombie eyeballs that, far from being the kinds of “blank parody” that uphold capital (re: Jameson), freeze the cycles of return inside the same theatres, performances, and “rapes.” Placed in quotes, these offer a playful means of yielding more empathetic ways of looking at the world, having already been divided for conquest by capital: as undead, which in turn, freeze the mechanisms of capital—its tyrants forever coming home to roost—in place.

For the next six pages, we’ll go over some basic historical points about camping rape to challenge the monomyth with; then, we’ll provide the subchapter synopsis per section (with links).

To that, there’s far too many devices at play during the monomyth to focus simply on one of them. Instead, I want to combine the previous ideas (and to a lesser extent, ludo-Gothic BDSM[2]) while focusing on the poetic history of reversing abjection (and Athena’s Aegis): as a matter of monomythic theatre that also includes chronotopes (castles), revolutionary cryptonymy and emancipatory hauntologies (spectres of Marx).

Our aim is to catalog different poetic devices (e.g., the chronotope during the liminal hauntology of war as a cryptonymic feature to subvert state revivals with) that have already chilled the process of abjection and its kings, accounting for their ongoing creative histories’ complex (class-to-culture war) matter of interplay touching on the usual ultimatums: of undead heroes constantly coming home to roost under capital; i.e., as a matter of historical materialism being a half-real enterprise, one whose legendary returns—of the old, undead kings or nightly emperors—normally operate as a matter of prophecy integral to the canonical monomyth: “all our yesterdays” making the elite bank, inside the Torment Nexus raping workers and nature till the cows come home.

Such hellish recursions and regression always yield some kind of damned patriarchal wraith inside the Cycle of Kings, all while Cartesian thought preys on nature-as-food and monstrous-feminine[3] through police forces and bread-and-circus-style distractions; i.e., raping nature behind the usual half-veils. The world becomes an oyster to pry apart, a peach to slice. In turn, pro-state workers pacify through menticide, the eyes growing empathetically blind, the brain increasingly dead and the body increasingly numb to state tortures. Following this, state servants (and victims that give or receive state harm) sight the usual portals for destruction as sown into the land, the flesh, the work as things to personify and reap (thus rape) all over again.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Camping said rape is always a juggling act, and arbitration is always, to some degree, a random ordeal. For one, said history and its ritualized “solving” (through monomythic violence) discuss/argue a matter of return in imaginary territories that thrust upon the actual as altered through iconoclastic performance; i.e., a subversion of rape through a pedagogy of the oppressed that lies entirely in how you look at and with it, during liminal expression—zombie eyeballs as blind or perceptive regarding the state’s resurrecting of undead torments set on new territories: inside old, colonized lands, bodies (and parts of bodies) or any other representations of the colonized at large! The normalized outcome, then, is unironic exploitation: the land and its inhabitants becoming the usual peach to harvest (above), raping Medusa (from any angle, the front or the back) by the same old hauntological copies of Caesar/fascism, whose eyes are blind inside neoliberal treatments of those spectres[4]! Camping said rape is a planetary struggle, then, one whose reclamation is performed in small through our bodies and labor during the dialectic of the alien; i.e., as something to see, but also see with between stories: “We have been raped (and lied to) over and over again.”

In doing so onstage, such calculated risks showcase liberation as liminal offstage as well; i.e., something to conceptualize through abstractions of rape that yield sex-positive lessons informed by older histories we’re acting out once more: possible worlds starting as imaginary sites that threaten change as a furious ordeal, a death rattle that refuses to stop, but breathes into dead things fresh, impossible life! “Come and see. Let the scales fall from your eyes.”

(exhibit 40a1a2a: Model and artist, top-middle: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard. Harmony and I camp rape, leaning into the raping of nature as something to subvert through ourselves and our labor. Its materials work towards revolution; i.e., as a matter of rape play the world can learn from for the better! Trauma is acknowledged, but then stalled in future iterations by freezing the usual harvesters of nature by humanizing the victim [the harvest] and expressing the rapist as the monster who cannot stand the exposed reality to their crimes. “Rape” becomes a story to put into quotes, telling per piece what happened, once-upon-a-time, but also how it can change through later retellings of itself that yield new poetic histories build upon older ones [re: Lewis’ bad echoes].

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

For Harmony and myself, medievalism becomes a forward-facing regression, one whose 21st century Neo-Gothic yields cryptonymy as a revolutionary device: showing and hiding to challenge manufactured scarcity as the usual historical-material effect. “Rape,” then, becomes a paradoxical means of retelling our own destruction; i.e., as a taboo voice for psychosexual healing from police violence, developing good praxis through a pedagogy of the oppressed, one whose poetic excursions into a given “castle” synthesize new, oft-substantial forms thereof. All occur if to say to the audience, “Open wide!” with that fat zombie ass: “Rape me. ‘Fuck me in the ass if you love Jesus!'” Such theatrical sodomies unto Medusa is not actually ass rape, but touch on the Numinous terror such threats might normally supply to victims like her by the state; i.e., yet-another-thing to achieve liberation with using ludo-Gothic BDSM, exposing our abuse while playing with bad copies of it on the edge, so to speak, of our seats [to achieve systemic catharsis]: the mystery of a Numinous destroyer ravishing Medusa, the latter pushing the “rape me” button to call upon her strong-thighed lancer.

Any Gothicist should live through their vocations, we doing our gold-star  best to escape the text as a mere instrument of capital, thus Capitalist Realism [e.g., The Modern Martial Artist perpetually trapped inside the boxing ring as a source for profit, not critique[5]]. In doing so, the usual confusion of the senses, selective absorption, and magical assembly give rise to a Song of Infinity whose Aegis becomes something to stare into but also with; i.e., in both directions, reconciling old pains as a matter of fresh history through unspeakable things. These, in turn, become undeniably tangible during the rememory process: Milton’s darkness visible an enormous, thundering and shapely mise-en-abyme that becomes the data to yield, time and time again! Its delicious corruptions sit adjacent to harm, camping our survival while honoring those who didn’t as commodified by the state. When illustrating mutual consent, then, linguo-material elements of ambiguity always endure, and whose skillful, intuitive [second-nature] parsing must be raised across society’s understanding of the imaginary past—its rape a new Wisdom of the Ancients to learn and learn from.

This isn’t always the wail of the banshee in total agony absent of pleasure or brains [the madwoman in the attic], but something of a curious mixture of the two that seeks to challenge profit, thus rape, as historically administered by the state: through half-veiled threats of the tyrant coming back around. Like “Rome,” “Caesar” is the end of history as something to reinvent in so many doubles of the original, so many counterfeits furthering the process of abjection in service to a scared middle class. We find catharsis camping those, Persephone-style, to grow rebellious again; i.e., as princesses who have been raped, thus find our power where it normally resides: within fiction speaking to non-fiction. “We’re living in Gothic times.”

To critique power thus reclaim it, you must go where it is; reclamation is always, to some degree, a matter of rape play through Gothic poetics making arguments for liberation using violent aesthetics; e.g., the castle: a half-real chronotope to walk around inside, and one whose buried, dialectical-material aspects of power [rape under Capitalism rarefied cryptonymically as “castle” or “knight”] become monomythically dream-like. Once dispersed, such particles discharge to float around, bouncing back and forth like Walpole’s animated curios. Inadequacy and disempowerment become, as usual, a means of empowerment during ludo-Gothic BDSM: topping from below, like Milton’s Satan. “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light!” Or maybe the darkness is more fun [such play is often a byproduct of emergent play as intended by the text’s composers, architects to the structure as something to explore in ways they cannot predict, thus police].)

Like any zombie, the problem of state predation is one of canon-induced “bad sight”; i.e., a fundamental question of dream-like resurrection, one where sight becomes faulty by monomythical illusions that encourage police violence as a matter of regulating sex, terror and force, morphological expression, etc. Such monopolies always promise the tyrant’s return to resurrect itself—of seeing the thing upon which to feed and transfer power towards the state as a matter of canon: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” It’s all a lie, tribute boiling down to protection rackets by the imperium preying on the local benefactors (the middle-class nightmare of state collapse): orderly disposal per settler colonialism’s war of extermination turned in on itself.

(source: Bungie)

Luckily for us, such problems concern the reversing of abjection (and other Gothic theories) through zombie eyeballs that—far from divorcing themselves from their blind brethren—must engage with them in order to break the myopia of Capitalist Realism: a blindness the state normally relies on, which for workers constitutes a kind of reawakening through the undead as taking Hell back. Our “rape” onstage becomes something to consume, waking workers up to far-off realities that can be felt easily enough at home, mid-cryptonymy. There is always a castle to interrogate, a tyrant to dethrone, a queen to crown herself through the poetic catharsis of “rape,” of speaking out; the secret lies in what we consume as a matter of playing with rape to transform it: camping canon as a matter of profit, of rape, of the state’s usual flowing of power in the usual directions (always up, with lulls through decay raking profit back into the state’s troves, post-regeneration: a war chest)!

As shall hopefully become obvious, the methods to reversing abjection use Gothic theory as a matter of history-in-the-making party to a forever process: camping the monomyth. Older poetics like Milton or Blake (with Harmony reading Songs of Innocence and Experience, next page) continue to seize upon these thresholds to open the doors of perception; i.e., as a matter of zombie eyeballs, where said doors have become increasingly pacifying as a matter of Capitalist Realism. This means we must camp our own rapes as the old poets did, but under conditions that have developed for the worse in ways they only predicted using the language of their times borrowed from older and older poets.

To that, the Wisdom of the Ancients is a continuation of that thieving poetic trend, one that borrows liberally from the past as yielding different kinds of undead for different purposes; i.e., using the same old histories and historical elements once transformed, including the human body (and its social-sexual labor) as the almighty authors of such things! There’s an element of raw, naked bravery to such rebellion—an assistant to an artist going hand-in-hand towards a better future built on past “rapes” (as much as rapes without the quotes); the courage lies in facing its exposure, clapping back to challenge state tyranny in canonical poetic histories, the latter fatally doubling our Aegises—i.e., in the mirror state as one of endless conflict: between each mask, costume or veil as looking back and forth. It’s how we roll, bitches!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Medusa cannot be killed, any more than the state can—only driven to submission in either direction inside the usual shadow zones (until state shift, that is). The camping (and regained perception) of zombies (and their eyeballs), then, has a long history to it, one we shall now catalog and (to a lesser extent) camp in this subchapter (this emphasis will shift, in Volume Three) regarding monomythic zombies (and because we’re talking about tyrants, castles).

As such, we’re essentially talking about Gothic theatre, including kayfabe, as a matter of performative, imaginary history to look at/with (marrying the language of war and death, rape and love, food and refuse, etc); i.e., reviving fascist leaders that point to older instances of the same monomyth revivals elsewhere before and after the Third Reich; e.g., M. Bison (next page) being yet-another Nazi king zombie merged with Melmoth the Wandering Jew as the very backstabber Germany’s fascists warned against: themselves projected onto their victims, mid-Red-Scare. Per canon, this undead element of capital becomes something to revive, Frankenstein-style; i.e., in service to profit, vis-à-vis pre-fascist, fascist, and post-fascist forms inside neoliberal markets (videogames)!

(source: StreetFighter.com)

In turn, this cannibalism’s cycle of conquest loops in on itself, becoming something ouroborotic to expose like a black mirror. This happens less through overt comedy/camp (or “true camp,” per Jean Claude Van Damme and the truly amazing 1994 movie) and more through serious theatre with the power to camp canon in subtler ways; i.e., whose performances of death and disaster seem cyclically harmful, but actually have the subversive, non-harmful power to paralyze, thus pause and eventually transform, Cartesian dogma (and its tokenized elements): into actual stewards of nature, of workers, of either as monstrous-feminine food that Capitalism, once frozen, can no longer eat.

This being said, horror is a serial affair and introduces or removes irony per entry even without numbers. The zombie genre is certainly known for its comedies and spoofs—every tired genre is, requiring comedy to inject life into dead things; i.e., from Matthew Lewis onwards; e.g., Shaun of the Dead and Dead-Alive[6] (1992). Part zero (included in this post) briefly examines Mandy (2018) as monomythic pastiche par excellence (with elements of camp) married to Lovecraftian homophobia, futile revenge and substance abuse. The remainder of the subchapter examines the function of sight as a Promethean, reverse-abjecting factor in against three zombie monomyth tyrant types in three primary texts over two parts

• Part one covers the Cartesian hero/man-of-reason in Forbidden Planet and its Metroidvania[7] offshoots (all stemming from Frankenstein): the decayed man of reason versus the Archaic Mother during movement through the hauntological castle; i.e., castle-narratives.
• Part two features the crime lord in The Crow (1994) and the Caesar-style warlord/fascist cult of death, in Myth: the Fallen Lords.

(artist: Els)

After those, part three concludes the entire section; i.e., discussing how Capitalism is the great zombie, one that through its endless undead wars and decayed power fantasies haunting Capitalist Realism! Regardless of what form the tyrant takes when we freeze them in place, it’s always an undead extravaganza, a monomyth monster party to make the old mattress squeak as postcolonial (fucking to metal, to disco, to rock ‘n roll, as turbulent, taboo, “rapacious” and fun); i.e., decolonizing the Gothic through seasons in the abyss that challenge profit using our own “beauteous orbs” (next page), but really anything that gives off the Medusa’s trademark “big” vibes: undead and monstrous-feminine in ways that resist censorship, but also transgress[8] it in all the usual places of monomythic rape. As I write in Volume Zero:

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

Per the monomyth, a hero is classically incentivized by rape as the prize—to boldly go into “Hell” as place on Earth, then execute the state’s will; i.e., settler-colonial violence dressed up as “past”; e.g., a carrot-like princess in exchange for killing Medusa (the monstrous-feminine) to, per Cartesian thought, prey on nature-as-food but also themselves. Regardless of the giver or recipient, all present an opportunity to move money through nature.

But even if all capitalists were dead as a matter of proposal, the warzone and its derelict ordinance would still remain: the Gothic castle as an undead mind prison. Stuck cannibalizing itself, we’ll pointedly examine this curiosity with Metroidvania, but also open battlefields when looking at different monomythic undead (the crime lord, and warlords aping Zombie Caesar). Whatever the form, wherever the field (open or closed space), such actions are generally guided by inheritance anxiety feeling the fears of self-made extinction; i.e., insofar as the buffer of settler-colonial walls and projections (of ample “treasure,” below) become false (thus fruitless) harvests that, suitably grim, cannot fully conceal or disguise the state’s usual operations.

In short, Medusa must always “pay rent,” but the “cake” (the waifu, next page, or wheyfu, below[9]) is always a lie: the illusory promise of marital sex. Such dreams are woefully common under Capitalism, insofar as capital foists the conditions necessarily for wanting them (the manufacture trifecta) onto workers; i.e., as a matter of Gothic history in service to the state, scaring you with cataclysm, then offering the cure: a mommy equipped with the god-like goods to even out such nightmares (whatever the audience wants those to be, but generally under a Male, heteronormative/tokenized gaze).

Although reversing abjection is our goal when camping the monomyth, it cannot happen without revolutionary cryptonymy. So let’s unpack that concept a little more (about six pages) before moving onto Mandy and part zero.

(artist, left: Zaloran; right: Romantic Rose)

Canonical rewards promise big things to weird canonical nerds as a matter of cryptonymy (from Dark Soul’s “Amazing Chest Ahead” with Princess Gwynevere, left, to Resident Evil Village‘s Lady Dimitrescu announced by her own fabulous “home,” exhibit 49). The problem is, they—like Gwynevere’s huge, melon-sized knockers (synonymized with crops, but also treasure as a phallic container’s “soccer goal” of sorts: chest, booty or box, etc, as belonging to a chattelized virgin/whore)—are cruel, intentionally misleading illusions that trap the ravenous hero-as-undead[10] inside an infernal concentric pattern (oscillating between the woman as castle, or vice versa); i.e., where they’re always eating dead things (the princess is a sex object of courtly pursuit for the hero’s massive “lance,” a sacrifice but also an illusion, a ghost).

As such, the narrative of the crypt is literally an illusion inside an illusion, per Hogle’s acknowledgment of Radcliffe’s concentric enchantments in Udolpho (re: “The Restless Labyrinth”): “a crypt that is, in fact, only an illusion of a crypt,” one whose “double operation of revealing to conceal” speaks to the heart of classic Gothic stories. There’s always a princess in another castle—a big-ass fake “castle.” The devil is in the details, but also on their surface as frankly discussing things (through medievalized poetics) that capital has alienated us from: sex and rape as tied to and expressed with our labor and our bodies.

More to the point, such fantastic de rigeur is always dualistic, but canonically raised by persons cognitively estranged from reality (accommodated intellectuals) who project/abject their fictions onto real atrocities dressed up; e.g., Radcliffe; i.e., to say the quiet part in a theatrical, dissident, and wackily “medieval” loudness: the ghost of the counterfeit as “thicc,” buxom, zaftig. Doing so was (and is), in the Humanist tradition, speaking truth (or something resembling its opposite that inverts easily enough) through bizarre creative activities: gigantic, corporal-to-architectural abstraction. The map of said pattern is hyperreal but still conducts genocide as part of capital through Pavlovian, thus blind, monomythic eyes—the hero’s and what they’re looking at (from tits to ass, castle to landscape).

State conditioning, then, is very much like a broken bone that has healed wrongly. Insofar as state education amounts to physical, mental and emotional abuse (rape, menticide), monomythic dogma calls fearfully upon state soldiers to defend, thus police, a pearly castle fallen upon hard times (re: ACAB—castles and cops) during capital’s usual cycles of gentrification and decay to serve profit. It’s a vampiric function that feeds on all parties—an Omelas, or city of happiness, that becomes abominable even when the total hapless victim is reduced to a single person; i.e., happiness at the expense of others, which is what settler colonialism ultimately is. To fix the problem, you generally have to break what’s in place on the surface of itself: a dark, operatic reflection that exposes the tyrant in self-destructive ways that, contrary to popular thought (and state monomyths), can then be rewritten. The harvest is humanized through orchards that cut themselves up as adjacent to rape and exploitation—with irony as a cryptonymic matter of camping medieval poetics!

First, we show the tyrant that their destiny is not invincibility through infinite conquest, but the same doom that all men share as one where nature and death overcome them and their fatal bloodline. In turn, the reflection of the hero and castle as fatal is projected ignominiously back onto the audience; i.e., rendering them the dupe, a sacrifice to kill once-feral to apologize for (and hide) the overarching structure: a black knight returning from Hell, a Zombie Caesar’s ghost of “Rome” to try and revive, fail, then behead in an endless series thereof. Per ancient warrior culture, the taking of the head constitutes the taking of one’s adversary by force—oneself; for Medusa, this signifies “castration” as a crude cryptonymic metaphor that places the power of the man at his head, except he has two: the enemy is weak and strong!

(source: Snapchipper’s “Myth II: Soulblighter – Intro (AI Upscaled),” 2020).

Speaking of two, and keeping things in line with the metaphor of sight (and taking a leaf from Sophocles), we have to dig out the eyes of the would-be hero (us) and replace them with undead eyes that can actually see through cryptonymy’s fatal illusion while inside Plato’s cave. Except the surgery isn’t a literal operation on our eyes, but the very thing which causes our eyes, both figurative and literal, to see “badly” in relation to the world around us: the monomyth, and its usual benefactors and agents, as things to freeze, thus liberate ourselves from as conditioning devices; i.e., revolutionary cryptonymy challenging profit to garner post-scarcity as a matter of sentiment, first and foremost: hearts and minds.

This sea change happens by adopting a pre-capitalist frankness using “ancient” medieval language like Athena’s Aegis (the power of the Medusa—her fat ass, but also her cryptonymic cover to operate behind and with). Such cryptonymy challenges Cartesian thought and Capitalist Realism’s usual seeing and hiding of the world; i.e., the hellish place to conquer and rape: a disco-style monster party to escape exploitation through calculated risk subverting genocide. You want it to slap, to fuck, to hurt after it heals as a matter of emulation to our still-aching scars.

Castle or cop, ACAB. Person or place, then, the monomyth is baked into capital’s cycles of crisis and return, one whose inevitable decay brings Imperialism home to empire as something to whisper of, then profit in service to Capitalist Realism; i.e., profit as rape, but specifically undead rape, when castle and conqueror emerge from Hell and go back where it all began (exposing paradise as inverted, its mendacious pastoral a gruesome and fallen cite of rape and abuse, built on genocide from the start).

As we’ll see through the rest of the subchapter, then, there’s an element not just of hubris, but Icarian grandeur to such heroes; i.e., a rise-and-fall cycle of gentrification and decay to giant-like Caesars, but also their fortresses as they fend off imaginary barbarians (and big ladies) to eventually return from Hell as fascist undead conquerors (slaves to death as a hauntological matter of capital that hijacks their corpses); i.e., the Imperial Boomerang during the Cycle of Kings, whose rapists of “Rome” emerge as kayfabe-style heels during the liminal hauntology of war to bring Imperialism (conqueror and castle) home to a weakened empire. In turn, Capitalist Realism abuses the ghost of the counterfeit (the ritual sacrifice of Medusa as matter of the undead patriarch’s petty revenge) to try and maintain the structure, whose sorry game of “follow the leader” must be subsequently camped through Galatean forces; i.e., with perceptive zombie eyeballs employing an aesthetic of power and death—anything tied to or extending from their bodies and labor as exploited by the state’s usual exceptions, abuses, and jurisdictions (re: cops, castles, tokens).

(artist: VG Yum)

There’s great jouissance, not nihilism, in the restless labyrinth. But, as always is the case when reversing abjection, revolutionary cryptonymy’s subversion of the monomyth, martyr and Medusa cannot pass without exposing some inconvenient and uncomfortable truths; i.e., about the home and hero, namely those behind the map of empire as decayed, but also an instrument of our own demise routinely dressed up as heroism-made-gigantic. You have to freeze the process by showing it as it really is through liminal expression, confronting death then cutting off its head; i.e., freezing can cause rape but also prevent it (and other abuses/elements of risk) when applied correctly against the usual villains. Whatever their flavor/outward appearance, a zombie warlord is functionally no different than a mad scientist, god king or slum lord. All operate through revenge as a matter of capital raping Medusa per the dialectic of shelter/the alien. Their unhoused discomfort, then, is our liberation, the clown queen set free to “rape” the world (transing your kids, making the frogs gay and so on) by dismantling its rapacious, stately elements.

Except, that’s only half the battle. The question remains, what is done with the giant’s head afterwards? The classic approach is nothing. In Myth: the Fallen Lords, for example, Balor embodies the Leveler (a symbol of death in medieval thought); once severed, his head is hurled into the Great Devoid, constituting a deliberate and unstable act of forgetting and sacrifice—i.e., a volcano akin to Mount Doom, whose expensive, monomythic band-aid sits on a mortal wound that only leads the Leveler to one day return. We must not only cut the head off, but prevent its inevitable return by breaking the historical-material cycle of growing such heads to begin with; i.e., remaking war-as-undead, the liminal hauntology thereof per the monomyth hero starting off innocent, only to become corrupted inside Hell through a franchise that, itself, sees many rebirths along the same track; e.g., Contra: Operation Galuga[11] (2024).

In terms of sight, this postcolonial reckoning must occur using a powerful-but-Gothic healing process: facing the settler-colonial trauma that these legends’ undead cryptonymies (their castles) orbit around and announce through warlike hunger and hauntological decay run amok. Trapped between the past and present, it becomes as much something to see with as look at, and has many poetic and cryptonymic iterations: blindfolds to see with as a matter of complicated power exchange per the cryptonymy process.

As we proceed, then, remember two things: that healing hurts—is a continuation that we consciously contribute towards—and pain isn’t bad, including the hero’s ignominious death provided it leads to systemic healing. Except the Hero’s Journey classically doesn’t. As such, the Promethean Quest unites with Medusa as thoroughly un-Cartesian by using her Aegis (through the Metroidvania and similar stories) to transform the very illusions at work, breaking Capitalist Realism to bits, thus helping workers imagine a better world inside the ruin (re: the caterpillar and the wasp).

As we shall see, this requires surrendering harmful illusions of power through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a palliative-Numinous affair—a date with a Dark Mother (mommy dom, below) generally invoked in everyday people speaking of such a reunion through their own art’s fruitful angles, ample body parts and dark dimensions: someone to woo and wow us while mastering and molesting us (consensually)—to fuck our brains out and say, “There, there!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

“Death,” then, isn’t something to fear because, when done right, it announces the beginning of a wonderful friendship: a monstress “mommy” as mistress, muse and mentor leading us towards something better than the routine, essentialized, and habitual rape of nature-as-alien; but, as a blindfolded[12] person, speaks to a revelation through cryptonymy as concealed and exposed—i.e., by the mother as one of a monstrous-feminine force, sitting her cushy bum on a dark secret that can set us free beyond the Imperium’s blinding sights: “Mommy’s got a secret, but what?”

Whatever that is, the mother-in-question grapples with rape and death as things to playfully learn from and pass vital information along special conduits; i.e., ostensibly dated and blind, but in truth more perceptive through ludo-Gothic BDSM as “past.”

As a matter of canonical enchantments, it’s a place for the usual monomythic plunderers and white-to-black knights to come back from: Hell, from which to rape empire back at home again, and again, and again. By comparison, Medusa loves to be “raped” in order to make herself (and the paradoxical visions associated with her) more perceptive regarding the returning abusers. As poetic lens and argument, she’s the ultimate whore, packing power of a suitably awesome variety and scale to camp rape, mid-calculated-risk; i.e., as normally a matter of police violence serving capital by raping the whore sans irony! The greatest myth of Prometheus, then, is that the gods are gods at all, and that they have the power to contend with Medusa when she gets mad.

To this, there’s an architectural flavor we’ve discussed already (re: “Castles in the Flesh,” 2024) and will do so more when reexamining Metroidvania, in part two. Per Rudolph Otto, Manuel Aguirre and myself, these travelers frequently yield as a mysterium tremendum that merges resident and residence: a flying castle, vis-à-vis Dracula’s or the Nostromo, sailing oddly through outer space. To it, all the usual principles of cryptonymy (and its application, mid-castle-narrative) apply—to look at Medusa’s severed head—abstract and mixed-metaphor but still undeniably to-the-point—and suddenly “get it”: her vanity one of survival to spite her abusers (normally stabbing and shooting her as a matter of cartographic endeavors in service to profit; re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain).

Except the city of death, when summoned by us, isn’t banished temporarily back to the great void of public memory. When explored and gotten to the bottom of, its monomyth can heal in ways that—while embarrassing and painful (“pride cometh before the fall”)—successfully prevent it and the state’s return, thus their raping of us; i.e., by permanently altering the settler-colonial conditions that bring such reunions about during Capitalist Realism: the return of Caesar and Medusa, the latter exposing the former as rapist and for which she has her revenge.

Doing so effectively ends said Realism by breaking the spell for good, yet the symbols remain, as do their sex-positive function through a learned act of reunion with trauma—again, what Toni Morrison would call “rememory”—that gathers us together to stand, brick-by-brick, against genocidal forces; i.e., by routinely performing ludo-Gothic BDSM as a counterterrorist, educational, iconoclastic means of worker defense against state trifectas, monopolies, canon, what-have-you.

Call the idea Satanic apostacy and the means to advocate for the devil as punished by the state—us. The fact remains, our mission operates at cross purposes with theirs—their mission and objectives of disguise, concealment and lies versus ours; the difference is, they’re shady and mendacious by virtue of what they dishonestly project onto us to better their own image while harming us. Except, just as monsters are anisotropic (flow determines function), cryptonymy is a revelation that conceals, but per Gothic irony allows us to hide within Capitalism’s daily operations while subverting their function with some degree of stealth and underestimation (that of the blind cripple)—a cloaked revolution achieved with Gothic poetics in opposition to the state; i.e., through a splendid mendax, a beautiful liar both a devil and undead, oft-animalized being that challenges the usual pro-state arrangements’ direction of power and force (might makes right).

The state, on the other hand, relies on complicit concealment through these same poetics, using their cryptonymy to blind us to the actual threat, and one which we must generally glean and prevent through a series of concentric illusions while blindfolded. Trussed up, the vision of the Oracle isn’t reliant entirely on organs of pure sight, which are easily deceived, but the power of seeing through harmful illusions with undead empathy (and eyeballs/vision) as cultivated inside medicinal double: a second-nature, collective intuition embodying Gothic Communism through ludo-Gothic BDSM (and various devices: the Black Veil, demon lover and palliative Numinous, etc) to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness, reversing abjection now until the sun burns out.

 

(artist: the Maestro Noob)

Granted, that is our revenge. Capital is a means of profit tied to the monomyth as futile in preventing rape, because it requires it to perpetuate itself through revenge as doomed: raping Medusa until she snaps.

We’ll explore that madness next, with Mandy!

The Monomyth, part zero: Mandy, Homophobia and the Problem of Futile Revenge (feat. H.P. Lovecraft)

“So, what you huntin’?”

“Jesus freaks.”

“…I didn’t know they were in season, man.”

“Yeah, well… […] They lit her on FIRE! They were weirdo, hippie-types, whole bunch of ’em. And then there was some muscle – it didn’t make any sense. There were bikers, and gnarly psychos, and… crazy evil.”

—Caruthers and Red Miller, Mandy

Whereas zombies and the apocalypse have a predominantly dream-like function that struggles to recollect history under a presence of repressed trauma and death, abjection and reverse abjection more broadly are defined by sight; i.e., according to what is being viewed and how the viewer views themselves in relation to what they are looking at and with. In this case, both are affected by the delivery system—a black mirror or Aegis, in Gothic language—as a tool of rape; i.e., one committed by the middle class through their own bad dreams/rape play in service to the state: the monomyth raping Medusa (and the dragon lord, Nazi destroyer) to gatekeep workers inside canceled-future, neoliberal illusions. By extension, capital’s built-in entropy makes these decay—flying into particles that, pre-ejection, still vibrate menacingly (a death rattle). It’s a mood, a tone poem we can hijack.

Abjection, then, is to throw off that which the self is not, maintaining this Cartesian binary by continually rejecting the cast-off elements’ radiation (charged particles); Promethean narratives patently reverse this process (re: Aguirre), dooming the hero by patently revealing their own monstrous nature to them. This happens through a subversion of Campbell’s dubious monomyth; i.e., the infernal concentric pattern and the extinction of the hero’s hopes, dreams, possessions, etc, as bound at the hip to the fantastic spaces that reify them. It’s important, then, to acknowledge ourselves as both undead and spiraling down a path of self-destruction supplied to us by design; i.e., Capitalist Realism as built out of old bricks (or quasi-edible garbage, below). So, too, is our paradoxical liberation, our zombie eyeballs learning to become perceptive once more through less perceptive, unhealthy forms of undeath normally hungering for revenge like a bad drug. Gotta start somewhere. For us, that’s Mandy and H.P. Lovecraft:

Directed by Paul Cosmatos, I’m choosing Mandy because it a) makes fun of the heroic quest as a futile act of undead revenge, while b) crystalizing it inside a timeless nostalgia common to more serious (unironic) iterations; i.e., Lovecraft as a deeply homophobic man. We’ll start with Mandy by outlining its drug-like quest for revenge; i.e., as fueled by the kinds of us-versus-them fears that Lovecraft played with having gone onto inform and characterize Mandy‘s camp (and end with a small postscript/reminder about feeding and holistic expression).

To that, Mandy is campy to an extent, but showcases a bitter heteronormative truth: the hero of the classic monomyth is always a monster on a formulaic quest of revenge, one for which there is no return (and which queerness is dressed up as the psychosexual, monstrous-feminine catalyst). Sold and fed to us like cheap food (e.g., “Cheddar Goblin,” above—the secret star of the show as haunting Capitalism through its usual anti-Semitic conspiracies reduced to cheap, amazingly absurd, Camus-style gags), it’s a sure-fire descent into Hell, catalyzed by the presence of go-to heroes; grandiose, arguably gay villains; and helpless, doomed damsels.

(exhibit 40a1a2a: Artist, bottom-middle: Romantic Rose; bottom-right [source]: Patrick Zircher, Christian Rosado and Al Barrionuevo. In the presence of calamity as felt, we invent heroes to perform, thus achieve, catharsis. All at once completely trashy and deranged extravagance—of the senses, on par with Rimbaud; although we’ve called this device “confusion” instead of “derangement,” the eye-popping idea is identical—Mandy plays with nostalgia to highlight unconformable truths about our world; i.e., as projected onto an outlandish, fantasy one: not the princess being a slut [which the villain simultaneously craves and hates, Jim-Morrison-style], but that she arguably never existed [meaning her husband is trapped in a lie of revenge he cannot escape/drives him to endlessly commit further acts of undead violence towards new enemies]! Except, Mandy’s paradoxical haunting isn’t just a nation-creation myth birthing the wrathful tyrant, her bereaved, insane husband; it speaks to the usual disassociation and derealization of any rape victim, to which their significant others often feel alienated from [re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, with Cuwu and I working through such membranes vis-à-vis Gothic stories to find, however futile it might seem, similarity amid difference]: the family man seeking revenge against a queer, degenerate enemy for the death of his wife.

There’s an eerie-yet-beautiful unreality to the entire production, then, one that feels all in Cage’s head and poured out of said head into the world for us to occupy as well. Here, we see Persephone as the warrior through Cage, her denuded maidenesque precisely the kind of undead covering that Segewick describes in “Imagery of the Surface” [1981] as “the sexual function of veils” [source]. It’s something to look at and reveal/revel in sexual trauma as simultaneously hidden by a nostalgic, cartoon version of itself referred to backwards [with 1981’s Heavy Metal being a clear influence]. Mandy becomes something for Cage to seek but can never have [the only ones actually having sex in the movie are the Barker-style sex demons, Radcliffe’s demon lover with a new coat of paint on top of more coats]: the chaste knight’s great reward.

[artist: Romantic Rose] 

The modesty of the Neo-Gothic’s original, middle-class conservatism always teases the hero as “on the cusp” [the man, ready to penetrate, the woman ready to receive him]. Except, the Gothic communicates power on its surfaces to a mythical, androgynous degree that subverts just as easily. To that, a princess of the nocturnal, Persephone sort [which Mandy very much is] always features whore-like and virgin-esque qualities: something to look at. It’s not a position of weakness.

Rather, the princess’ intense sexual energies are charged, fruit-like, and swollen with a massive, giantess, phallic woman’s power that belies any seemingly delicate or small characteristics [e.g., Rose, above, her face hidden by fleshy softness as something to seek, but also asexually respect as a matter of cryptonymy’s usual barriers: to look and see the beauteous orbs[13] without touching them]. Said power is half-real, consuming the hero, Red, and speaking endlessly to Mandy’s abuse as that of a lived experience common to so many women/monstrous-feminine in and out of fiction.

Something of a Schrödinger’s “cat,” she phases in and out of existence, but feels utterly tangible and close to the hero; i.e., as a matter of flowing power anisotropically towards workers, the duality of the Gothic’s shadow zone using the same wardrobe—the medieval aesthetics, wacky performances, and playing with power [and sex] as a bad, thoroughly ace-level joke on purpose [from Chaucer’s Miller to Kevin Smith’s somewhat more obscure Pillow Pants addressing and manifesting the same basic concerns about sex and religion]: as something to transfer accordingly. It’s “almost holy”—a bad religion haunting the cathedral as remade into a joke of a thing that never quite existed [from Rome to the Goths to the medieval period to Walpole, on and on; re: Baldrick].

 In the Gothic, then, existence itself is always strained/a matter of endless struggle, and struggle is fraught with oscillation in and out of itself—what is, what could be, what has happened threatening the viewer all once through troubling comparison; they’re always on the cusp of something great, yearning to penetrate that greatness, but also daring to embody it: as something to explore and express because it cannot be penetrated. Ostensibly headless like Medusa, Rose’s whorish performance—when contained behind such revolutionary barriers by virtue of context—becomes impenetrable, but simultaneously able to express past harm [and future salvation] as a matter of paradoxical agency protected inside the illusory realm of fatal nostalgia, of calculated risk. So does Mandy.

To it, safety and “danger” [with or without quotes] are all part of the exhibit, the context; i.e., as something to play with on any register and showcase in totality [to illustrate mutual consent]: nothing is stronger than the submissive as having fostered mutual consent as a matter of social-sexual boundaries, of recultivating the Superstructure on all levels, but also reclaiming our bodies and labor for liberation as thoroughly Gothic-Communist. It’s what this book is all about!)

Thoroughly inundated in heady drugs and emphera—from the hag’s infernal, witch’s-brew eye drops and wasp “cherry on top” piercing Mandy’s neck; Cage’s bottomless whiskey and coke; the entire crucifixion scene and its sense of martyred rapture before and after Mandy dies; sodomy, gimp outfits and spiked blood spilled during thrill-kill BDSM; and the Black Skull’s bad LSD stored in mason jars like moonshine (a gift from the Chemist to Sand, who uses the drugs to motivate the Skulls to work for him as “muscle,” and which Cage later takes to become a Skull, in effect replacing them)—torture and illicit drug use permeate the entire film.

Cage, then, is the movie’s mule, failing sobriety mid-gang-war to climb to the top of the heap (said war suggested by the demon bikers, alluding to actual American highway gangs like the Hell’s Angels, routinely exporting hard drugs across state lines to become something of a neoliberal boogeyman when failing state illusions coincided more and more with the collapse that accompanied them). It’s the usual monomyth power fantasy (revenge-killing an evil ruler’s cronies, eventually dethroning the tyrant and replacing him) literally fueled by drugs.

It’s campy to some extent because the quest unravels inside of itself (and the mind of its unstable, vampiric hero); i.e., as a kind of madness integral to its continuation. The more Cage takes, the crazier (and bloodthirstier) he gets, reality flying apart until he becomes yet another tyrant. In the end, the constant torture and drugs bake the hero’s brain, leaving the viewer with the lingering, uneasy feeling that Mandy may have never been real. Instead, Cage basically smiles at the gods (as only Cage can), capitalists having trapped him in a drug-fueled, Sisyphean-style quest for revenge (which the monomyth essentially is: chasing Persephone as the princess in another castle, however virginal or whorish she appears).

Except, for all Mandy‘s posturing about final victory within fatal nostalgia, the monomyth remains as addictively harmful to the world (and workers) as that hellish goblin macaroni—a fact the movie delights in and stresses for its entire run time: heroism is a drug built on revenge to serve profit, a holy grail to chase ever onwards into the oblivion of late-stage Capitalism. Saying nothing of his endless body count, then, Cage is the movie’s central victim—a shell of a man hopelessly trapped inside the movie’s painfully consistent tightrope/recipe of paranoia; i.e., a bad batch on purpose, its product carefully cultivated through perceived loss as a driving force that catalyzes nonstop genocide. Instead of sheer delusion for its own sake, we’re given criminal indulgence inside a Lovecraftian homophobia gelling to the sort of fatal nostalgia Mandy returns to capitalize on; i.e., abjecting queer people as capital’s usual victims under Satanic panic. His drug is literally blood—the spilled blood of the innocent gays dressed up as sexual deviants crushed under Christofascist dogma.

In fact, as I write about Mandy in my 2018 review of the film, its procedure is so widespread, toxic and deadpan that many people replicate and parody the same basic code without seeing the homophobic elements; e.g., me (the review is quite germane to our continued examination of the Cycle of Kings and monomyth as things to critique, so I’d like to include a fair chunk of it to make my point: I didn’t notice the homophobia because I was in the closet when I wrote it):

Mandy is a fantasy tale of revenge that forces Cage into a largely mute role. The actor’s somewhat constrained delivery assists the narrative versus hijacking it; the story is at once a fairy tale and a Western, with horror themes: an old gunslinger working a menial job must return to a life of violence after his wife is killed. To do so, he must also return to drinking and meeting with old, bellicose friends. His bloody quest is two-fold, the villain tucked away in a tower, guarded by parallel agents who swear fealty to no one and delight in mayhem. They cannot be killed; Cage encounters them, first, only to learn what they are, later. These skirmishes feel parallel to the villain, Jeremiah Sand. The bikers push Cage towards Sand, similar to how Eric Draven is led towards Top Dollar by T-Bird and his pals.

The events onscreen are pastiche, understated (much how George Lucas retooled Flash Gordon and Akira Kurosawa for a new generation, with Star Wars). I recognized the nods to Mad Max, except the chase is through a black forest, not a desert, and with a Suburban, not a V8. The weapons are a crossbow with two bolts, and an ax straight out of Star Trek, Conan the Barbarian (1981) or Krull (1983). There’s even a slow, deliberate forging sequence John Milius might have used, in Conan. What’s important is that the story works as a fantasy and a Western and a revenge film, separately and together. Much of this has to do with the visuals, music and dialogue, which exist “as is,” unfolding in ways that allow us to sit back and watch. We remain uncertain as to where exactly it’s going even if the general idea is more or less straightforward. It feels familiar but fresh—a new combination of old parts that succeeds on multiple levels. The dialogue is both lite and abundant. It unfolds like a conversation, not as exposition.

During his quest, Cage goes from person to person, often meeting these individuals once and once only. They feel like part of the world, one that lives and breathes. We need not know who they are; we need only see what wisdom (or arms) they impart. It is what Bakhtin refers to as the Road, wherein the motif of meeting is employed. On it, Cage meets many different people, but in a larger world the movie can only suggest [amounting to a cult of drugs, Cage hijacking its supply from the Chemist to, in short, trip harder than Sand does]. Any sense of rapport or animosity is understated. All that matters is the quest. We’re simply along for the ride. The villain, Sand, monologues much how Little Bill, Top Dollar or Thulsa Doom do; their dialogue is to be heard in the moment, not pieced into a larger puzzle. It is an act of villainy to be viewed, not a mystery to solve. They are hypnotic, not cryptic.

We learn Sand is ruthless, not only a villain, but transparently so [in short, he’s a total dumbass; e.g., “Do you like the Carpenters? (I’m) like them, but better!”]. This same transparency applies to the heroes and side characters. Cage is implacable: his lover was killed; he’ll settle the score any way he can. He largely speaks through action, through facial expression (Cage’s strong suit). More often than not, he’s covered in blood, his nose rimmed with rings of dusty cocaine. He drinks, he cries; there’s little need for him to spell it out. We’ve seen it, firsthand, and he’s often alone. When he’s in the company of others, they know who he is. Bill Duke inquiries, but only just (Cage’s explanation is one of the movie’s funnier moments). Then Cage sets forth, armed to the teeth.

These stories involve terrible loss and resurrection, working in tandem. Cage’s darkest moment is fairly early on. Mandy is killed; Cage is strung up with barbed wire, wearing a halo of “thorns” like Jesus except as a gag. Sand even pierces Cage’s side with a spear. From the brink, Cage comes back to put the wrong things right. If this sounds familiar, it is. In The Crow, Eric Draven is killed before the movie even starts, his death revealed in flashback; when he revives, he is largely unstoppable… until Top Dollar injures Eric’s crow companion (“Lemme give you an impression: ‘Caw! Caw! Bang, fuck, I’m dead!'”). In Conan, the hero’s mother and family are killed; he is made a slave. Failing to kill Thulsa Doom, he is crucified. After being brought back from the dead, Conan must endure the death of his lover at Thulsa Doom’s hand. Continually driven, Conan finally kills his nemesis for good. Bereavement serves to strengthen the hero unto final victory [except there is no victory because his loved one is forever dead; all that remains is revenge, glory and hollow victory].

The point at which the lover is murdered can vary further still. In Unforgiven, William Munny’s wife dies of natural causes, with William standing over her grave during the opening prologue. Recruited for a hit, William is pummeled by Little Bill (not even his target). Later, William returns to kill Bill, but only after the other man kills William’s friend. Another hero—Max, from Mad Max—only kills Toe-Cutter and his minions after they kill his wife and child: there is no moment where Max is beaten, himself. He handily bests the Night-Rider, early on; Toe-Cutter and his men die just as easily. In the “sequel,” Max’s family is already gone. He is fed upon by Lord Humongous, whose army destroys Max’ car. Nursed back to health, he survives and, returned to full strength, deals with his enemies in a final, protracted chase sequence. In Mandy’s case, there is no stopping Cage once Mandy is killed. And that’s the point: he can kill as many of the demon bikers as he wants; they’ll laugh and tell him Mandy is “still burning” in hell [translation: still fucking sex demons instead of her husband]. How can one defeat someone with violence, if violence and dying are what they love? It’s a clever twist. Even if the movie is simply a variation of old parts, it’s done well. [He’s Achilles deprived of Patroclus, killing until everything is dead, including himself as “undead.”]

Cage’s reintegration to violence is gradual. Initially he and Mandy enjoy their pastoral home, announced by sparkling Disney font. Cage is almost gentle. Then, Sand’s toady summons the bikers, parallel to Cage’s own, inner killer. Driven to avenge his wife, his bloodlust mounts through constant battle. The bikers are less defeated so much as escaped from. Cage careens his Suburban off one, kneeling in the middle of the road. They capture him, relish in seeing the old killer (a biker, like them) regress. Covered in blood, he pounds whiskey and blow to see things through. By fighting actual demons, Cage confronts his own. Sand’s cohorts are all but obliterated, bested one by one. Some put up a fight. Some do not. Cage kills them all, insatiable death-dealer that he is.

The variations continue. Sand isn’t as scrappy as Top Dollar. The latter would lay traps and fight as dirty as possible; Sand uses the power of voice and little else. Unforgiven featured no seduction; Little Bill was simply overconfident, backed by a crew that outnumbered William many times over. In Conan, Thulsa Doom’s host fell at the battle of the mounds; all he had left was his voice. Like Doom, Sand’s men are reduced well before. His voice cannot stop Cage from crushing him to ignominious death (wonderful gore effects). Cage leaves, but not before burning the cultist’s temple to the ground, as Conan did with Thulsa Doom’s. There is no princess to rescue, this time around; the villain is dead, as is Cage’s bride. With nothing left to achieve, our hero rides off into the sunset, presumably onto other adventures (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Mandy (2018): Review,” 2019).

This all seems rather formulaic, right? The problem replicating the monomyth to camp it with “Nazi death sex” is that said code has a lot of poorly disguised homophobia to it; i.e., it doesn’t try to distinguish the queer from the Nazi; e.g., Sand as a serial killer whose sexuality is essentialized as queer by virtue of it being a disorder. He’s defined as violent and cruelty—lashing out the moment Mandy rejects his penis by sight. She laughs at him; he burns her alive.

The problem is, all of this is queer-coded in ways that don’t camp the 1980s. For example, when Sand is cornered, he begs Red to spare his life (“I’ll suck your dick, man!”)… only to shift back to the psychosexual tyrant butting heads with the straight man. Sand isn’t just a false preacher but a destroyer of women who uses his disposable flock to get what he wants. Why? Because he’s secretly gay!

At least, that’s how it’s coded, sadly. That’s precisely the sort of cliché, hateful bigotry that informs Mandy‘s camp, depriving the narrative of irony the likes of which Matthew Lewis wouldn’t have sacrificed on the altar. Simply put, commodifying struggle is generally done by straight men or tokenized elements, of which Lewis wasn’t. This makes Mandy’s camp something of a dated, backwards, and ultimately regressive character. As such, it furthers the process of abjection, raping the monstrous-feminine in service to capital, business-as-usual: the straight man’s revenge.

We’ll get to some of the origins of Mandy‘s homophobia when we look at Lovecraft, in just a moment. First, let’s examine the churchly structures the film raises (then razes); i.e., as a matter of scapegoating capital’s assigned victim: the monstrous-feminine (which is what being queer under Capitalism essentially is—anything that a white cis-het Christian person[14] isn’t). Someone decided to do that, but in doing so, like a church, was built on top of older things.

To that, Mandy is a film about the monomyth that disguises Satanic panic (code for “homosexuality” and by extension, queerness at large) as fear of the poor against the Good Husband as bad once-upon-a-time and Mandy alive once-upon-a-time (again, she’s reduced to a casus beli, the hero’s false flag when seeking out new fortunes, Conan-style); deprived and incensed of his good, nuclear home (minus the kids), Red seeks “reasonable vengeance” against an imaginary foe for the greatest taboo: the drug-addled hillbilly’s capture, rape and murder of the helpless damsel, becoming a demonic caricature of the free love movement (with evangelist ties). It’s the monomyth married to Wes Craven’s The Last House of the Left (1972) and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) but with a hauntological stamp neither picture had; i.e., neither here nor there, but in between.

(exhibit 40a2: In the Church of Death, Nic Cage becomes a god through revenge. He beheads Sand’s Medusa-esque witch—like Conan beheading the perfidious snake god, Thulsa Doom—then crushes the head of the final snake [the blind eyes popping ignominiously and rapturously from their sockets—the martyr’s fate]. Very orgasmic in the crushing of the godhead, the joke seems to be, “It’s funny because Sand is gay!” As such, Mandy conflates sex and violence as “interwoven” in the medieval pastiche as homoerotic. In destroying Sand as the “poser” dark religion, though, Cage’s hero also replaces him as the next-in-line: the “true” dark god [through might makes right] whose fiery effigy imitates yet-another-sacrifice consigned to the endless, hungry blaze; i.e., within the text, but also across a series of similar imitations whose grand pattern the director is clearly aware of and challenging full-bore: through rape play with less irony than I would like. Cage becomes fixated with Mandy just like Sand did, becomes yet-another-demon biker strongman sodomizing whomever to stress his own fallen conqueror status: as reprobate. He’s an undead reaver stuck in a dream of futile heroic revenge [against imaginary endless enemies] that never ends. Like the Black Skulls, he only derives pleasure from raping others, revenge being a drug that he needs more and more of. In short, he’s an addict who thinks he’s a god, one tied to a death cult [the monomyth] centered around his dead “wife.” It’s Capitalism in small.)

All the while, Nic Cage is Zombie Jesus demanding his pound of flesh, but also “Hamlet” haunted by his wife’s false “ghost.” A king without a castle, a bride, a home, the crux of the Christ-like drama sits close to Dante’s Inferno as a rapturous cycle of torture; i.e., the futility of revenge trapped amid the Gothic fever dream as a burnt offering. “Blood for blood” is the executioner’s motto of the demon bikers[15] (the “Black Skulls” effectively a sodomic leather daddy cult tied to “bad” LSD [a little nod to Jacob’s Ladder and the CIA’s enforcing of homicidal “bad trips” onto American soldiers]: one to give false explanation to a seemingly supernatural threat that is, in fact, domestic abuse and homophobia when all’s said and done). Except, no blood sacrifice can bring the princess back. The hero’s panoply of great deeds only serve to bury him alive inside the inferno—all while turning him into what he used to be: a slave to his own cocaine-and drink-fueled vices.

Suitably enabled, Red kills Sand, a plural and ridiculous man who bites off more than he can chew by threatening the strong family man. Yet so has Red, descending into the Mandelbrot as Great Destroyer after burying the gay (dressed up as a homicidal Jesus freak, no less). There is no reprieve for being the hero, only madness and death everlasting (which the Black Skulls are drawn towards: “You have a death wish.”). Red becomes trapped in fragments of his own past brought imperfectly back to life, placing himself at the center of a story whose princess is, suitably enough, in another castle; she’s a grail beacon, divorced from Red pursuant to the nuclear family model as forever devastated by sexual deviancy and evil queens, avenging itself through the ritualistic “suicide by cop” of said queens (“failing upwards” while punching down). As such, Red is the black knight—a dragon without a princess, Lord Dracula—but remembers her as that once-upon-a-time that’s notably the title and truant. How Gothic.

(exhibit 40a3a: The story revolves around the ghost of Mandy per the infernal concentric pattern. These men are effectively doomed per their monomythic search for power and revenge, Sand’s being his envy of the straight man’s wife [a similar covetousness seen in David Fincher’s Se7en, exhibit 43b]. The queer elements feel dated in much the same way except they weren’t made in the ’80s; they regressed to them to tell an old, very tired joke: the priest is a rapist because he’s gay [and not because of the system he belongs to; re; Lewis, The Monk]. Under heteronormative thought, to be gay is to be false, to be murderous with bad intent as a matter of straight projection onto capital’s monstrous-feminine scapegoats threatening state-sanctioned brides.)

Mandy is, on one level then, a neo-conservative Viking’s boast about drunk Beowulf slaying demons and degenerates while reveling in the antiquated fetishes and gay-hating clichés, but it still narrowly reverses abjection regarding the heroic quest as reprobate: Mandy the girl is murdered to progress the hero’s story but his story is still eternal damnation once the gay man is six feet under (the Gibson-level Catholic martyrdom is also there, delighting at Cage’s masochistic exploits; but Cage’s irrefutable drive towards complete insanity makes the outcome much more of a mixed bag/acquired taste—I love it, but I’m a weirdo who appreciates queer history as tied up in self-flagellation/torture porn).

In the same vein, the primer has already covered reversing abjection; i.e., by merely proposing the (re)humanization of the zombie (and their assorted parts) inside the nightmare as “awake,” thus perceptive to traumas that are normally repressed by the state. To take this idea further is to actively reverse Cartesian dualism by reflecting on war and rape as a necromantic process similar to Mandy‘s; i.e., trapped in a zombifying death loop according to historical-material effects systemically produced by Capitalism (what Lovecraft, the Cartesian ‘fraidy cat, touched upon with his infamously gibberish, death cultist chant, Cthulhu fhtagn).

Of course, this includes its neoliberal forms; i.e., that prop abjection up as something to scare the public with over time, replicating itself not just through zombies, but many canonical monster types: vampires, ghosts, composites, and demons of various kinds (and combinations). This include the gigantic, xenophobic sort worshipped as dark gods by a curious-if-ignorant middle class; i.e., shamelessly and shamefully enthralled by the ghost of the counterfeit raping Medusa for capital to avenge the American dream (and nuclear family unit) as proper fucked. Capital decays; punch the fag as “Nazi.”

To that, Mandy is basically a mean-spirited Hero’s Journey about rape and revenge, one set to dated, hauntologically vice-like representations of queer sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. It all feels like it’s happened before, too—our heroine causally reading about her own death in a cheap, dime store novel that speaks to the conditions outside of itself that, sure enough, walk up to the counter to size her up. Sand’s sacrifice something of a Catherine Morland, she feels dead, herself, emerging from the waters to approach Cage, who—clearly the story’s unreliable narrator—might be dreaming in the middle of a drug-fueled bender! The story is his attempt to remember after Mandy is dead and gone. Abjection kills Medusa, then teases the audience with her corpse to justify fascist violence (revenge built around a lie with a kernel of truth):

(exhibit 40a3b: “To the last syllable of recorded time” or “Never shake your gory locks at me,” Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” leaps to mind. There’s plenty of Jungian archetypes to observe, Mandy something of a good witch, her face scarred [and rocking something of a David Bowie vibe with her asymmetrical pupils]. This isn’t the stuff of total fiction [any more than those elements/stories are]: “I looked at him and he was dead,” my grandmother recalled, seeing my mom’s golden retriever, Prince, in his doghouse. “He wasn’t dead, but he was. And a day later, he died.” Turns out, he’d been poisoned by a jealous lover, seeking revenge against my then-teenage mother for breaking up with him because his dick didn’t work. Revenge is often petty.)

Moreover, this process of abjection reaches backwards—through fatal, monomythic nostalgia—to highlight sexually conservative authors belonging to a larger canonical (thus homophobic) trend: blame the fag by abjecting them from straight power structures (e.g., the Church) by suggesting that’s “just how we are”: like the evil-rapey hillbillies from Deliverance (1972).

To that, let’s quickly unpack some homophobic elements that Mandy weaves into its camping of the monomyth: its demon church yet another example of religion laid low by degenerate forces that, when irony is absent, becomes another “bury your gays” trope per said monomyth.

Of the aforementioned canonical trend, I could say “Radcliffe,” but we needn’t go that far back. I would rather stick to who was probably on the director’s mind when telling his story. For example, something akin to Stephen King’s literature briefly appears onscreen for a quick second (exhibit 40a3b, above), but I think the ’80s zeitgeist for which King dominated orbits around the pulpy fictions of older bigoted men like Lovecraft having already furthered said process towards King (and Mandy’s director looking back at such slashers with fondness); i.e.,  through the ghost of the counterfeit as something to pulp, then paywall.

Simply put, it’s the Shadow of Pygmalion per the Cycle of Kings upholding capital during middle class Gothic poetics (what I also call “white cis-het guy disease”). It’s hard not to shake the feelings of paranoia, psychosexuality and downright homophobia that permeate Mandy having come from strangely awful authors like Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a man who apparently fucked[16], oddly enough, but whose own steadfast views on love were warped with staunchly homophobic attitudes on par with the Cenobite rip-offs (no shame in it) that Mandy pointedly showcases; e.g., the knife dick scene (next page), whereupon subversion is largely a matter of context (the appreciative irony of Gothic counterculture something we’ll devote much of Volume Three to):

(exhibit 40a3c: The home invasion scene, where the old helpless couple has been sodomized[17] by the demon bikers from Hell. This is both a shameless nod to Satanic panic, and an apt feeling for what it’s like to be queer in the historical period of the 1980s. Mandy’s chronotope jams it all into the same theatrical space, to which a part of me wants to groan and agree with Jameson’s “boring and exhausted paradigm” barb about the Gothic, but also to embrace the psychosexual theatre as a great bit of campy fun. Indeed, the Titus-Andronicus levels of violence marry sex to war as something of a psychomachy that treats the home as a system in which “Red” and his other personalities duke it out. Out comes the knife dick, a rearing fang/greedy mouth struggling to sate itself [through all the usual hyphenations] even after a fresh kill and trying to “mate” with Cage. Both men are addicts, cruising and “forking” like vampires [an old gay metaphor we’ll explore in another chapter].

Rather than hate the fascist elements, though, I want to observe and understand why they exist/continue to revive in ways GNC people can use to our advantage; i.e., as part of an old problem to queer expression through the Gothic mode [and, by extension, real life]: alienation under homonormativity extending to all manner of queer forms. Matthew Lewis touched on this, but it’s something you can see well into the present as stuck grappling with dated conceptualizations of queerness we must reclaim.

This happens per a larger ongoing conversation between generations and personalities over space and time. The below comment, for example

It doesn’t matter to our oppressors that you don’t do drugs or have casual sex. You can have a white picket fence with 2.5 kids and a golden retriever and go to church every Sunday. But don’t forget – we’re still just faggots [source tweet, turnintoabat: June 12th, 2024].

when visually citing [several copy-and-pasted screenshots; reassembled, above] and writing in response to an older Tumblr post

That’s the part you don’t seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn’t even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died. […]

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It’s revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don’t challenge them too much, or it’s conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we’ve got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That’s it. Either it’s all of us or it’s none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don’t agree with it but we’ll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us [source Tumblr post, Vaspider: June 21st, 2022].

Fucking oath, sisters! Exceptions lead to genocide, of which the queer is a regular casualty [and which they internalize bigotry as a matter of dogma-through-osmosis]. Capital is profit is us-versus-them is tokenism the likes of which becomes nostalgic, displaced, holy under stories like Mandy. Never forget, we’re living in Gothic times, cuties. We’re the aliens Red would kill to avenge his dead wife. Expressing the liminal nature of queerness-as-reprobate through criminal hauntology is certainly part of reclaiming our power under state duress [thus police violence]! This all but requires intersectional solidarity.)

As a dubious contributor to a larger queer pathos, Lovecraft only added to the stigmas and violent hero logic that Mandy plays with/adheres to (a scourge for the hero to purge). I think you get the point. He’s something of a spectre haunting such fictions’ revenges against queer aliens, a giant dick still fucking us fags over in the fictions that survived him: inventing worlds that explained his awful, American-Nazi bigotry (colonizing fantasy for those purposes—i.e., nobody is more scared, violent or Quixotic than a Nazi; they make everything up, are essentially weird canonical nerds who use LARPer-style DARVO/obscurantism to invent entire escapist, thoroughly callow worldviews to attack their boogey persons with, then call it “reason” [with a weird bent, in Lovecraft’s case]. It’s criminally insane, but also massively homophobic).

(artist: Matthew Childers)

To that, Mandy’s revenge is as much against stupid cartoons of gay people as it is the religious poors. In keeping with Lovecraft’s codified mythos, though (the Great Old Ones), such enormities like Mandy’s curiously homophobic, psychosexual church of death have since turned into a substantial-if-problematic conveyor of ghastly merchandise; i.e., one that skirts the line between canon and camp per the process of abjection by a closeted-to-homonormative middle class (something Matthew Lewis arguably did, but being far more GNC [out of the closet] and sex-positive in his camp than straight men tend to be):

Lovecraft had many faults, as a person and an author. David Barnett writes, “So why do we continue to fete Lovecraft instead of burying him quietly away?” It’s a perfectly reasonable question; in the world of the university-appointed canonical author and the celebration of the politically-correct and the culturally-diverse, Lovecraft shouldn’t exist. But “‘Tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed” and possessing things “rank and gross in nature,” Lovecraft flourishes. To this, Barnett cites Elizabeth Bear [who] freely admits that Lovecraft’s views are “revolting,” but she writes, “Lovecraft is successful because authors are read, beloved, and remembered, not for what they do wrong, but for what they do right, and what Lovecraft does right is so incredibly effective” (Persephone van der Waard’s “Method in His Madness,” 2017).

In short, “does right” within dialectical materialism is canonical propaganda dressed up as “gay” counterculture, to which Lovecraft offered a special blend of “rock and roll” fear and dogma to manipulate the wider public with: BDSM Nazis (a trend we’ll explore more when we look at the Countess from The Crimson Court [exhibit 41h] in the vampire subchapter).

By extension, Mandy is homophobic because the monomyth (and its futile revenge) are homophobic, making it stuck somewhat in the harmful, regressive past the likes of which an utter ghoul like Lovecraft ruled.

This isn’t too surprising. Profit is founded on division and rape, causing queerness to decay into bad cartoons of itself (of which the monomyth essentially is). Profit is heteronormative, thus homonormative: queerness tokenizing to help capital rape the queer as an extension of nature, thus capital’s assigned prey by design decaying into its expected role, mid-paradigm. The fag becomes the Nazi sans irony.

Furthermore, fascism and Communism as “queer aliens” exist in the same shadow zone, one that Sontag touched with “Fascinating Fascism” back in 1974. Except, it’s much older than that; i.e., has built up through centuries of genuine, heartfelt xenophobia/Cartesian superiority that leads to the Cycle of Kings as waiting to “wake up” not as the tyrant does over and over against the forces of good, but something worse that overshadows both (Cthulhu is both the zombie tyrant and the great Promethean disaster of Capitalism haunting its endless, hauntological hyperrealities) during monomyth pastiche; i.e, the same taboo naughty things Lovecraft played with as a bigot might:

[From] The Eldritch Influence—The Life, Vision, and Phenomenon of H.P. Lovecraft, I’ll paraphrase Neil Gaiman, who being interviewed, essentially says,

Lovecraft is rock and roll. There is nobody else like him, then or now. Looking at H.G. Welles or Jules Verne, they did not give you a worldview. H.G. Welles wrote much scarier horror short stories than Lovecraft, and they are forgotten. Welles is a man, who, in his day experienced much more success—his works were filmed, and so on—but also a man who has nothing near the number of people reading his works on a daily basis, now. On some kind of primal level, Lovecraft has people believing (ibid.).

“Belief” speaks to myth—particular fascist myth—as something to capitalize on, during Pax Americana as conducive to fascism (thus rape) per bourgeois socio-material conditions. Lovecraft isn’t touching to anything “primal” (which would essentialize it), more than he’s hitting a fascist nerve tied to present structures that people are memorializing through his abject stories; it’s hero worship upholding the usual Cartesian nonsense (tut, tut, Gaiman).

Such is basically a long way of saying that queerness gentrifies and decays into heteronormative cartoons of itself, while also camping courtly love by making it gay in easily recognizable forms: a queer iconography that is alien, tentacle, from the stars (what Lovecraft lovingly calls “the unknown.” Bitch, please. Men like you always think you own the universe, always abject [thus fear] women/the monstrous-feminine). To Lovecraft (and so many drafting similar stories), we’re the unspeakable “thing that should not be” as a matter of abject dogma. But it’s patently absurd because anal sex (and other forms of queer love besides sex, such as emotional attraction) aren’t that scary unless you’re a stupid, hateful bigot like Lovecraft who thinks he’s smarter than he is; he’s not, he’s just a massive cunt (a pattern that will continue into other Cartesian men of reason, like Victor Frankenstein).

Such distinctions are seldom neat because exploitation and liberation exist in the same spaces of performance and play. Instead, it’s important to recognize them so we can camp them back with irony. Mandy doesn’t always have that, any more than Tim Curry and Rocky Horror did, fifty years ago (conservative straight people love that movie; i.e., by laughing at the fags’ expense—a clown in the king’s court)! I like both movies, but often prefer something a bit more friendly to queerness-as-alien (e.g., Nimona, exhibit 56d2). But stories like Mandy do speak to a time of transition leaving the closet. To avoid going back into it, we’ll have to ultimately leave that nostalgia behind, but can remember and recall it as a matter of history moving towards universal liberation out of heteronormative bondage.

(artist: Michael Whelan)

The simple fact is, not everyone wants to indulge in the reality that we fags are viewed not just as false, but as abject pieces of shit that practice sodomy as “unnatural” to “proper society.” To them, we’re literally scum, the likes of which Cage kills without a second thought and which Lovecraft relegated to the position of fearsome alien. We are awesomely powerful, but abject is abject and it needs irony to work… which Lovecraft’s stories don’t have.

Subverting canonical simulacra, then, is an act of conscious rebellion and playful interpretation of unironic bigotries; i.e., challenging Lovecraft and his ilk’s heteronormative monopoly on queer sex demons (from Barker to Cosmatos) in monomythic stories—burning their churches down while camping them as a matter of inserting irony where irony is absent. It’s something akin to fighting fire with fire to avoid the kinds of heteronormative undead revenge and blind sight that Mandy to some degree showcases: the martyred, idiotic hero/Roman fool stuck in a dogmatic hell of his own making (and turning Persephone into a ghost, frozen in time). It requires the informed examination of Gothic poetics as something to learn from and teach with inside our own mirror-like creations and what we, as workers, leave behind: “Look on our works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Except our rock and roll is a cycle of counter pulp fiction—of constant, dark reinvention and dreamlike rememory of undead monsters and demons, but also symbols of sex, status and power relative to these things. In short, it needs rockstars (a concept we’ll return to, again and again throughout the book, but cementing the notion as revolutionary praxis in Volume Three, Chapter Five) and vivid implements of power—monarchs and spaces—that don’t uphold the status-quo proliferation of unironic rape as Lovecraft did:

(exhibit 40a4: Artist, bottom-left: Frank Frazetta; bottom-left: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Bonaparte Before the Sphinx”; middle-left and top-right: Blxxd Bunny. Model and artist, middle-right: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard. Sight is something that can go both ways—is anisotropic, but also able to gaze upon persons and places that go hand-in-hand; e.g., zombies in hauntological “graveyards.” This chiasmus also applies to the beholders of strange sights, who not only can see into potential worlds, but reflect those worlds back at canonical proponents in ways that freeze these viewers in their tracks. This needn’t be the classic Archaic Mother’s abject rage, but forms of social-[a]-sexual joy that are just as likely to petrify sex-coercive individuals. These can be from literal mirrors or cameras, or illustrations that “mirror” former artistic reflections on a hauntological past: Bonaparte doing his best to emulate Caesar or Alexander the Great by invading 19th century Egypt and gazing at the same colossal wreck backwards.)

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Instead, gazing upon these awesome beauties is to both look into an imaginary past that never was, currently is, and could be again in the future: a Promethean knowledge that destroys workers and the world so it may transform them (versus the Faustian bargain capitalists rely on, locking things in place). The Broadway ticket lies in facing things that terrify the usual actors of the monomyth: the Cartesian male as a mad scientist and/or warrior-detective conqueror bent on destruction. Their subsequent change-of-heart must happen inside a monstrous-feminine space that “castrates” them; i.e., takes away their sinister, undead desire (thus addiction) to rape the womb of nature for the umpteenth time. Depriving them of the means to prey on the vulnerable in service to profit, we can end Capitalist Realism (thus Capitalism) through a nightmarish ludo-Gothic BDSM fantasy that, when synthesized, informs reality as an ongoing exchange between the two.

Except, the ghost of the counterfeit only disarms the middle class of their bourgeois tendencies when abjection is reversed and all bigotries are actually confronted (through the usual monstrous aesthetics, abstractions, abbreviations) to challenge profit (not just homophobia, because homosexuality decays, too); i.e., regarding a group—the white, middle-class nuclear family and its members (example, above: “You’re scared of this? You kids must be from the suburbs!”)—that is normally threatened by, or at least afraid of, abject forces and normally relies on harmful counterfeit notions of state sovereignty relaid in such fictions (from Walpole onwards): the Promethean Quest inverting the unstoppable, mendacious and vengeful (thus frail, fallible, fearful, false) conqueror’s monomyth as normally extending and defending said group and its token outliers from evil forces (men with claws for hands, velociraptors, killer sharks, etc): “Don’t fuck with the lords of Hell!” “Don’t fuck with the babysitter!” However monstrous either side appears from a poetic standpoint, saber-rattling is saber-rattling.

During the dialectic of shelter and the alien, places and people engage to canonically further the process of abjection, punching the alien, the monstrous-feminine Medusa, per the ghost of the counterfeit (the spectre of genocide, of rebellion). Babysitter or badass, that’s basically what these assorted protectors are—some codified aspect of the nuclear family defending itself as a form of assimilation/replication (e.g., Elizabeth Shue, Sigourney Weaver or Jamie Lee Curtis, as “mother”) or avenging its destruction (e.g., Red, from Mandy, as “father,” etc)—but when tied to capital, they take on a false, predatory and incredibly xenophobic function: the white Indian, the exclusive victim against the wild, non-white world converging menacingly on women and children during societal decay and threatening them as such. Canon-wise, a woman may go wild, but only to protect the nuclear family from such slashers by being “the natural caregiver” (upholding said unit lest she become the irredeemable whore). Babysitting is dangerous!

Mandy is such a Quest, Red’s vampiric, strung-out, crossfading (drunk and high) fall from grace built on homophobic, undead nostalgia like Lovecraft’s after Red’s family is destroyed; i.e., trapping him in the monomyth’s endlessly dependent quest for revenge serving profit while illustrating its most harmful effects. Keeping Lovecraft in mind (though apart from him, the STEM fields are generally patriarchal and homophobic), part one shall examine the Promethean Quest through mad science; i.e., by examining it in Forbidden Planet, followed by the synthesizing of castle-narrative with the Metroidvania quest for the palliative Numinous (Otto’s mysterium tremendum) less as “female” and more as monstrous-feminine more broadly—a Gothic-Communist Numinous scaring evil male nerds acting like scared bullies (similar to sailors fearing mermaids; i.e., girls and gay people have cooties; re: Lovecraft hated the sea as chthonic, monstrous-feminine)!

*The original, unused title for Halloween (1978) was The Babysitter Murders.

Postscript

A small note/postscript before we proceed: this subchapter isn’t, as you’ve probably noticed, strictly about zombies. In fact, there’s really not much difference between the different undead, or even demons and undead (and animals); i.e., poetic exchange being holistic, dualistic, and socio-material, etc. Feeding is a form of exchange, but it isn’t strictly negative on its own (e.g., giving and receiving vitality through sex, vis-à-vis John Donne’s “Flea,” to regain lost knowledge/avoid alienation in modern times); instead, capital’s proponents (re: Lovecraft) make it that way as a matter of historical-material consequence: feeding to serve profit by being unable to stop during abjection—of fearing what you prey on, to ultimately exterminate it.

Red, for example, cannot stop taking power and never gives any back, his revenge built on shaky grounds (re: dead wife = false flag and creation myth) that invite future violence by a thoroughly alienized figure serving state interests. He cannot move on, taking more and more endlessly into the future while becoming frozen in time. An ironic lack of resolution makes him the next-in-line; i.e., to die when he kills someone else and the people who love them start looking for revenge. It’s Capitalism-in-action, expressed in small through blank parody (re: Jameson).

Dramatic theatrics aside, monsters embody poetic expression, which links to material factors and vice versa: the flow of power and knowledge (wealth, labor and anything else), whose function ultimately remains anisotropic; i.e., determined by the direction of that flow towards workers or the state.

Even if this seems theoretically confusing and visually ambiguous, the clue lies in the healthiness of the exchange, the vitality given and received, whatever the form. Capitalists take and never give back, inventing all manner of silly reasons/arguments for doing so; i.e., raping the monstrous-feminine through the process of abjection in monstrous language. We reify the same arguments to prevent harm in the future, reversing abjection and sparing the monstrous-feminine from profit as a matter of rape already survived; re (from “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis,” which sums all of this up, and to which I giving here again as to not have to repeat myself, moving forwards):

“rape” is an acquired taste; victims of rape (whatever the form) experience medieval-coded, regressive fantasies of “rape” they ideally want to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM to avoid actual rape (and overall harm) in the future. In turn, praxial catharsis occurs through iconoclasm while healing from rape in xenophilic ways that involve nature as monstrous-feminine in fetishized, cliché sites of death, damage, decay and rebirth. As such, exploitation and liberation occupy the same shadow zones’ theatrical spaces, the latter weaponized through the same linguo-material devices canonically waged against workers by traitorous forces; said workers reclaim these in public-to-private theatrical “danger disco”/rape-castle operatic spaces (and bodies) mapping trauma out: as something to immersively dance/party with (re: cryptomimesis, or fucking with the dead as a bad, Matthew-Lewis-style echo), adopting sex-positive strategies that resist capital/profit: by misbehaving as a matter of good sex education challenging profit as a matter of fact. […]

monsters aren’t just threats (“Alright you primitive screwheads! Listen up!”); they’re poetic lenses that concern power as something to paradoxically shift away from state forces, mid-struggle. They are, like power more broadly, something to interrogate by going where they are through performance and play. This concerns war and rape, decay and feeding, transformation and fatal knowledge. All exchange per various human tissues as poetic material—from brains, to flesh, to blood, to cum, and others things we won’t touch on as much (e.g., shit).

In turn, all overlap; all are modular and dualistic; all are psychosexually anisotropic insofar as power is concerned, because sex and force are power insofar as they are perceived through monsters as us-versus-them arguments—in short, how we function as monsters, how we feed, decay or transform, etc, mid-exchange. State power aggregates for profit to induce praxial inertia, and by extension a decrease in emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural awareness. We must aggregate against all of these variables, thus the state’s trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital: through ludo-Gothic BDSM as our castle-narrative to weave into the future regarding something we won’t live to see—a kind of “bucket list” to give back to future generations in very sexy-macabre ways; i.e., a “spit roast” that likes the very idea before the pole(s) go in—a piece of meat with agency and rights negotiating its own “rape” in ways that liberate all parties from profit and sexual harm, but play with the poetics, nonetheless; e.g., the captive fantasy with appreciative irony per ludo-Gothic BDSM. As such, the calculated risk should constitute a subversive act of illustrating mutual consent per intersectional solidarity between workers united against the state: to make “rape” impossible by putting it in quotes as a mutually consensual act!

I wouldn’t stress all this monomorphic playfulness, holism, salubrious irony and duality of exchange (all aspects of Gothic Communism that challenge capital’s singular, binarized alienation of things) if it wasn’t important. But it’s literally the thesis argument of this particular volume half. So please bear it in mind as we continue discussing the monomyth (and castles and conquerors); i.e., as poetically modular and intersecting extensions of the same basic principles, of which the undead factor a great deal into ludo-Gothic BDSM/castle-narrative (which will come up, next) but also aren’t separate from demons, nature and monstrous-feminine things at large.

From novels to movies to videogames, then, capital has their fakeries to further abjection by feeding on the monstrous-feminine abusing the ghost of the counterfeit to serve profit with; we reverse all of that using the same tools, to which—visibly undead and/or demonic—all function more or less the same: challenge profit’s recursive predation. From specialist research to casual hobbyist, all are chosen through preference for (and fondness towards) their individual histories, in this respect; i.e., to communicate trauma and contribute knowledge, feeding and transformation unto these histories: a tireless, back-to-the-drawing-board joy experienced through active play to better understand the world, thus pierce any and all bourgeois illusions. Vampire (demon) castle, zombie Caesar giant, mad scientist ghost puppet? Po-tay-to, po-tah-to, it’s all from Idaho!

Onto “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Metroidvania (opening and part zero)“!

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Footnotes

[1] “A lot of people talk to me about Skeletor, which is one of my favorite parts. They always say, ‘Did you feel like you were slumming?’ And I say, absolutely not. My son was four years old. And I wanted him to see his father as Skeletor. And I loved playing it. It’s really one of my favorite parts, still” (source: Jenelle Riley’s “Frank Langella on Trial of the Chicago 7, Being Skeletor and His Legacy,” 2020).

[2] As previously stated, ludo-Gothic BDSM was something I coined after writing the majority of Volume Two, part two. It would be difficult to insert the idea into all of these pages without completely transforming their main purpose (cataloging poetic histories). So the term—a violent souvenir from my time with Jadis—will haunt these pages after the fact (or before the fact, if you consider I was always drawn to weird traumatic things); i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM will come up intermittently from here on out—will be on my mind as I proofread these older portions of the primer again—but won’t be forcefully integrated into these older historical writings beyond the degree I already have in “Bad Dreams,” parts two and part one (and the “Playing with Dead Things” chapter written for Volume Two, part one and its initial release).

Much of the primer from here on out, then, focuses on the history of poetics, not their poetic application (though we will try to include aspects of that as we move through the rest of the modules).

[3] From Volume One:

Cartesian abuses that treat nature not simply as female, but monstrous-feminine food that harms Indigenous peoples, racial minorities and GNC people (so-called “incorrect” or “non-men” of the white, cis-het European sort) to varying degrees of settler-colonial genocide: by cheapening their lives, their bodies, their labor to serve the profit motive (source).

[4] E.g., Tulpa from The Ronin Warriors (exhibit 41a) literally being a ghost of the Shogunate, which the show treats as something to exorcise in defense of capital in neoliberal Japan; i.e., Capitalist Realism.

[5] Which can eventually shift from canon to outright conspiracy as dancing between commodity and camp; i.e., a potential means of grift; e.g., the “birds aren’t real” movement (Vice, 2022), or flat-earth. Dogma, it generally goes, is applied to the masses by those who usually know better.

[6] Aka, Braindead. While certainly a hilarious movie (“Step aside, sonny. I kickass FOR THE LORD!” *organ music plays*), Peter Jackson’s penchant for slapstick black comedy is haunted by the usual ghost of the counterfeit, insofar as he remains unapologetic and afraid of the usual things amid a settler-colonial islander’s fortress mentality.

[7] Metroidvania is a topic from Volume Zero we’ll revisit repeatedly in part two of “Monomyth”: regarding the Numinous as monstrous-feminine, whose ghostly echo on maps-of-conquest involve Metroidvania as a cryptomimetic process (whose ghostly maps we’ll also reconsider in the “Seeing Dead People” subchapter).

[8] This book, for example, is basically impossible to advertise on official platforms; i.e., by virtue of its naked critical nature, but also bared-and-exposed approach to rape play challenging profit as normally raping the monstrous-feminine behind cryptonyms. We take those back and show them what they are.

[9] Medieval language and power fantasies are all fine and well to confront our troubles with, provided they don’t become a means of escape that, all too often, has tokenized potential; e.g., orc-style Amazons having an added racialized element to their traitorous status; re: Jadis and their bad BDSM, Amazon-style raping of me being emblematic of the same dualities we must struggle to reclaim in art. The subjugated Hippolyta sits on a herbo waifu’s tightrope, her greenface a kind of vaudeville when played or produced in bad faith (not that the artist below is, but simply that liberation and exploitation always and forever occupy the same poetic spaces).

(artist: M4rjinn)

[10] The hero in Dark Souls is undead, acknowledged as such by the princess herself: “O chosen Undead. I am Gwynevere. Daughter of Lord Gwyn; and Queen of Sunlight. Since the day Father his form did obscureth, I have await’d thee.” It’s a grail beacon made to force the hero to fight two of the games strongest guardians, only to realize the cake is a lie.

[11] In the neoliberal tradition, fatal nostalgia covers up genocide as a historical-material loop. This includes videogame copaganda like the Contra franchise as made “back in the day” and in the current moment: during problematic revivals banking on nostalgia, mid-genocide, to keep up appearances. This illusory procedure is a creative one, generally assisted by various fans in love with the imaginary colonial past; e.g., RichaadEB, who writes glowingly in his own cover video, “Contra: Operation Galuga – Alien Slayer” (2024):

Yo!! So last year I was approached by WayForward and Konami about the prospect of covering a few classic tunes from Contra for NES – the reason being that they wanted to include them in the REMAKE of Contra that they just released today. You can actually hear this cover in-game, which is extremely cool!! Very honored to contribute in some small way to a notable and beloved franchise like this (source).

It’s fatal nostalgia wedding rock ‘n roll to neoliberal shadow wars and theatre: a canonical battle anthem tied, as usual, to profit per white, cis-het men (and the middle class at large) as the usual benefactors, provided they learn the songs, but also the “prison sex” mentality behind them; re (from “Transforming Our Zombie Selves“): “Whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies, falsehoods, and double standards.” Anything emergent/creative is roped into serving profit.

[12] Blindfolds can appear “blind” (a one-way mirror) but also be blind yet do extraordinary things; e.g., beating Mario 64 by collecting all 120 stars blindfolded (Bubzia’s “BLINDFOLDED 120 Star Speedrun of Super Mario 64 World Record,” 2023). This takes practice, devotion, normalization strategies (to reduce random events to replicable actions). While speedrunners are generally white cis-het men stuck in-text as refusing to apply their invention out-of-text yet gentrifying the profession, there’s potential to reverse this abjection and contribute to the same meta histories through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a holistic polity of expression; e.g., myself and my work solidarized with Harmony as I invigilate them talking about cryptonymy in regards to Dark Souls, but also something we can utilize in our own practices parallel, and often in relation to, all of these other things, but reversing the flow of power, mid-performance, towards workers. If you want to critique power, go where it is. Everything exists in duality—of the seemingly limitless abilities of the human imagination’s invention, memory (testified by the wearing of the blindfold, but also anything done while wearing it) and application—for or against the state to varying degrees, mid-liminal-expression; i.e., under the camera eye as something to fear and embrace to varying degrees of enthusiasm and reticence, voyeurism and exhibitionism.

[13] I want to go on a bit of a tangent, here, but one concerning tokenization vs subversion, which is germane: Just as Mandy camps the monomyth, Lewis camped Immaculate Conception in The Monk, turning the Madonna into a devil-in-disguise that tempts the rapey monk, Ambrosio; i.e., as part of the same oppressive system the devil is exposing in the book, and for which Lewis, a gay man, is using to comment on gay life in then-modern-day England. The difference between him and Cosmatos is irony in service to GNC peoples; i.e., as part of universal liberation through intersectional solidarity illustrating mutual consent (and informed labor exchanges raising class-cultural consciousness and emotional/Gothic intelligence) with iconoclastic art; re: synthesizing praxis, thus catharsis, on an individual-to-systemic level per ludo-Gothic BDSM (reclaim the Base, recultivate the Superstructure).

To that, we fags camp canon for own survival against the state pimping us (re: Broadmoor), not because we’re bored middle-class straight people obsessed with abject things; i.e., you can’t coercively fetishize a particular out-group and all it a day! Furthermore, the same asexual*power of the Gothic that Lewis used in good faith (the ability to speak about sexual things as a matter of violent, pornographic art) lets any whore camp her own abuse; i.e., through Gothic poetics, becoming a form of half-veiled activism passed off as “fake” (revolutionary cryptonymy in practice). It’s quite common for this to happen while working with those who aren’t going to harm you: gay people. We’re not the sex demons Cosmatos puts on a dark pedestal.

*Ace expression isn’t always a byproduct of trauma, but those who are traumatized generally fall into cop/victim and sexual/asexual. We’ll explore the neurodivergent/congenital side of aceness in Volume Three, part one.

Simply put, while reactive abuse does happen, fags more broadly aren’t the universal, alien (us-versus-them) bogeypersons capital depicts us as (we’re sex demons who sometimes self-destruct, but still aren’t the kind who tend to harm women and children; that’s your husbands, boyfriends, community leaders, etc, who actually have the privilege [and power] to abuse people they’ve been given control over). Instead, we’re relatively safe/aren’t going to automatically fly off the handle and berate someone else at the slightest inconvenience (tokenization being an exception of course, below); i.e., as a matter of capital and heteronormative dogma; e.g., during a difficult production, while we wait for things to fall into place. That’s just how working with others goes: setbacks happen, but the planets eventually align. And if they don’t, that’s no reason to attack others provided everyone’s acting in good faith. Things happen; you don’t use that as an excuse to endlessly take from the parties that are historically at a disadvantage!

By comparison, patience generally isn’t a virtue for straight men (or those normalizing to act, thus function* like straight men) because the state: conditions and expects them to abuse and control, thus rape women/anyone else, who isn’t them (the monstrous-feminine), then throw blame onto others to obscure the reality of capital working by design; i.e., moral panic; e.g., Satanic panic, Red Scare, Yellow Menace, etc, as monopolizing sex, force (violence), terror and morphological expression, etc, as a matter of compelled labor and artistic expression (canon). All is done to serve and maintain profit as settler-colonial, heteronormative, Cartesian, hence rapacious. As my PhD argued, Capitalism sexualizes everything around men as pimps and police, who their victims either serve or emulate.

*I.e., as tied to the nuclear family unit/somehow upholding it as status-quo; e.g., homonormativity, like all normativities, emulating heteronormativity from a marginalized position, playing the part of the dutiful servant or fearsome outsider/predator, etc (the subversion of these, onstage, is entirely possible, but that takes irony and awareness, which token agents lack).

To be blunt, all these effects/divisions are historical-material; i.e., a looping matter of social conditions (dogma) predicated on material conditions and vice versa (re: Marx)—of the state treating white cis-het Christian men as it has and always will: as the most privileged group, whose privileges peel off like union layers, but whose basic function is universal. Rape, profit, repeat. All are pimps to police other workers towards this aim, but especially anything monstrous-feminine as things to rape for profit (often in “efficient,” messy forms). In turn, said victims are a spectrum existing on descending rungs of selective punishment, relative privilege and marginalized convenience/entitlement (“Haven’t I suffered enough?”); re, a concept I call “preferential mistreatment” (from Volume One*):

…heteronormativity leads to [double standards]. Female servitude under Capitalism is different to male servitude, the latter of which tends to receive preferential mistreatment as the universal clientele. Both are raped under Capitalism, but differently through Man Box culture. Women (or beings forced to act and appear as women) are raped through figurative and literal labor theft and wage slavery—sold to male clients like useful animals or chattel slaves, but also as highly cultivated products that “beastly” men are likewise conditioned to rape, kill, or otherwise eat like gruel: […] Intersectionality extends this relationship to overlapping axes of oppression within the same basic pedagogy (and its complicated traumas) as perpetually contested under state mechanisms; e.g., people of color or GNC persons as corrupt, monstrous-feminine and correct-incorrect. An oppressed pedagogy will account for these complexities, synthesizing them in practical ways, including parody and irony as an unfolding, ambiguous proposition; a state pedagogy (and its own means of instruction) will not (source).

*See also, the glossary definitions for tokenism and white (cis-het, Christian male) fragility (accessible in my available volumes).

That’s where tokenism and Man Box come in. As Volume Three shall explore (which focuses entirely on tokenism vs good praxis), 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 (often with a Gothic flavor in pop culture; re: weird canonical nerds acting like “minority police/witch cops,” something we’ll unpack in Volume Three). 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.

[14] Originally just men, but extending to women as members of a growing middle class; re: the decay of feminism punching down against queer minorities (as Radcliffe did to Lewis). As we’ll see, this also extends to gay Nazis and punks, etc.

[15] I.e., Faust, but gayer (the love that dare not speak its name). The pleasure and pain of Mandy‘s monsters exist in the same place as a trademark of ’70s BDSM, wherein trauma and catharsis but also resistance and power occupy the same territory using the same language. The liminality sits between realism and folklore; violence, hard kinks, drugs and heavy metal (as a bizarre “don’t do drugs, kids!” narrative that still celebrates the whole practice); the Numinous and the ordinary as a site of abject exploitation/forbidden fruit tied to fatal penance, flagellation and circuitous trials by fire. Reverence and dark worship, then, laud the ghost of the counterfeit as penned in, but also a liminal space to move around inside; i.e., the blurring of the line between pulp fiction and daily life as trapped in how Steve Huey describes Megadeth’s Peace Sells: “The lines between hell and earth are blurred throughout…” (source, Allmusic). It’s The Cell or Jacob’s Ladder as darkly indulgent, a kind of aberrant, haunted-house escape into total oblivion—the guilty pleasure of the privileged going to the dark gods.

[16] I love that Lovecraft.com is like, “But wait, he fucked women!”

The facts that Lovecraft had little success with women and had many male friends have led people to believe that he was a homosexual. However, it must be remembered that he was married (briefly) and his wife described him as an “adequately excellent lover” (Sonia H. Davis, “Memories of Lovecraft: I,” The Arkham Collector, No. 4, Winter 1969) [source].

God help me, the stupid shit people choose to remember in order to memorialize assholes! So, gay people can’t fuck, apparently? Annoyed inferences aside, it’s also rather telling of homophobia on the writers of this myth bust. Beards are a thing. Moreover, it’s just as common to call someone “asexual” to avoid calling them homosexual:

[…] But, this is not to say that his heterosexual inclinations were especially strong, either. Lovecraft, like many intellectuals, focused his attentions and efforts on mental, rather than physical, pursuits, and simply didn’t have very strong sexual interests at all [ibid.].

This “they’re not gay, they’re…” trend has haunted the Gothic since its inception and before; i.e., extending from Shakespeare (who was married with kids, but still probably gay anyways) to Walpole (not married, no kids, also probably gay by modern standards); re:

Was Walpole gay? Is Strawberry Hill the manifestation of a gay aesthetic? The questions linger, even though searching for something akin to a modern homosexual identity is fruitless. Homosexual acts were criminal— sodomy was a capital offense—but virile men were known to take lovers of both sexes, while effeminate manners were seen as a Frenchified heterosexual weakness. Walpole’s biographers have often considered him effeminate and asexual, or at most passively homosexual (source: Amanda Vickery’s “Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill,” 2010).

[17] A nod to the Nightstalker killer, Richard Ramirez, who would home invade the elderly middle class, then rape and murder them. He leaned into abject “Satanic” theatrics, and killers like him were generally framed as “gay” similar to Ed Gein, but also fictional counterparts like Hannibal Lecter, Count Dracula, Mr. Hyde, and countless others. It’s the process of abjection scapegoating queer people [which historically would have been homosexual men recognized as citizens in England and elsewhere*] while apologizing for capital’s raping workers and nature at home and abroad.

*More on this when we look at vampires and Foucault’s A History of Sexuality.

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)!

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

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

The Rememory of Personal Trauma, part two: Escaping Jadis; or, Running up that Hill (feat. Stranger Things, Majora’s Mask, and Wuthering Heights)

“You’re not really here!”

“Oh, but I am, Max! I am!”

—Max and Vecna, Stranger Things (2022)

Picking up from where “Meeting Jadis, part two” left off…

Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. In this sense, we are indebted from the lessons of former abusers, insofar as we can learn from the harm they caused: how to survive and be better than them. This means liberating ourselves and others by subverting the abuse we survived; it means camping our own rape as something to play with and out in dollish, theatrical ways. Part one explored my attraction to Jadis through our mutual weirdness and trauma as doll-like. Living through their abuse eventually led to my forming of new scholarship; i.e., my coining of the academic term, “ludo-Gothic BDSM.” But to reremember Jadis, first I would have to survive them, and that was easier said than done. As Robert Burns once described, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” It was in his poem, “To a Mouse” (1785). In similar fashion, Burns’ lines were on my mind as I prepared my escape from Jadis: I was the mouse under their power and couldn’t simply disassociate to get through it[1]. Escape would not be easy, but an uphill climb made by a doll with her strings cut.

We’ve already talked about uphill battles, of course, and poor Sisyphus endlessly pushing the rock uphill. The rememory of personal trauma, we’ll see, is more akin to a Christly passion. Part of the difficulty wasn’t because I was under Jadis’ control so much as I felt like it; i.e., their doll to do with as they saw fit. To that, no one is immune from conditioning. Even when it starts to break, you can still feel its effects on you. Once my escape was materially and mentally prepared, though—and once I reclaimed my devices from Jadis to the extent that I could, back then—I confronted them.

To be clear, this wasn’t done without some trepidation; i.e., abuse tends to intensify drastically when the victim tries to escape (re: extinction bursts), insofar as their presence normally reinforces an abuser’s addictive possessiveness. I didn’t attack Jadis, though; I gradually hinted at their abuse, partly because I was scared out of my mind, dreading what would inevitably transpire once the cat was out of the bag. My fears were not unfounded; once I said the words, “I think your behavior is abusive,” Jadis threw me out on the spot. I had my friends on call when it happened, so Jadis could defend themselves from my “aspersions.” I told Jadis so; they literally hid in the shadows and whispered accusations at me—that I had “weaponized” my friends against them (the DARVO tactic: Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim, Offender).

To Jadis’ “credit,” they released me from bondage and didn’t physically harm me. But they also never spoke to me again. After a seventeen-hour car ride to Cuwu’s (we rode in relative silence despite me trying to break the ice), Jadis accused me of burning the bridge (“nuking it from orbit” were their exact words) before driving away. I haven’t heard from them since.

Note: I originally wrote this section over a year ago, and am revisiting it now as I prepare to finalize its release. Primarily I’m including notes about ludo-Gothic BDSM as it evolved on these earlier reflections to what ultimately amounted to my scholarship’s formative years. —Perse 6/25/2024

This might seem open and shut, except then I had to deal with Jadis’ ghost haunting me. “Leaving Jadis” is my attempt not to deny and bury that ghost, but turn it into something different; i.e., that takes their lingering hold on me and turns it into an object lesson: something to help me and the world heal from the forces that turned Jadis into yet-another-tool for the state.

As such, this book was originally written to commemorate my escape from Florida and eventual healing from what Jadis did to me—a kind of monstrous rebuttal where I humanize monsters (and monstrous toys) through my own work; re: my formulation of what eventually would become ludo-Gothic BDSM. And yet, this rebellious healing is a slow, time-consuming process—not just this book and figuring out my past through it, draft-after-draft, but building up to its inception before I’d written a single page or drawn a single image (not including older works that I’ve since renovated for the book).

(exhibit 39a1a: Models, top: Mom and Persephone van der Waard; bottom-left: Uncle Dave. Artist, top and bottom-left: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right: Cuwu.)

To this, my usual creative outlets evolved into a deep healing process—to deal with what had happened in Florida, but also to cope with several other developments afterwards: Directly after Florida, I rebounded with Cuwu, which promptly fell apart after six months. During that time, Uncle Dave suddenly died, killed by a heart attack (re: Volume One). Dealing with both events, everything was constantly interacting back and forth inside of and around me, so I decided to double these traumas with my own sex-positive creations; I drew Dave’s portrait and another picture for my mother (a hauntological, liminal space, inspired by Edward Hooper’s “Night Hawks,” 1942) who had already lost her fiancé to Covid six months prior (I came out, two days later[2]). Built up inside of me after Florida, the inspiration was less like a spark bursting out of thin air and more like a dam breaking under pressure.

Said deluge happened after watching season four, episode four of Stranger Things. I related to Max’ own predicament (exhibit 39a1b) under the knife-fingered spell of the villain; my empathy during their moment on the cross touched me through a shared connection with trauma and due to my own psychosexual urges tied to said trauma—i.e., seeking the palliative Numinous by envisioning myself in Max’ Christ-like shoes.

After watching her barely escape, I positively bawled. Doing so gave me the desire to live; moreover, I felt inspired to “release” my own trauma by giving voice to a larger historical-material struggle: liberation. Expressed through Gothic poetics as a matter of oppositional praxis, I drafted an egregore; i.e., whose dialectical-material presence denotes a recursive, dualistic sense of old traumas tied to present, centuries-old structures: capital as made for profit, thus the raping of nature as monstrous-feminine on all registers. I envisioned the subverting of capital as universal to all workers affected by it, hence for the young and old of any sex, gender, religion or inclination to return to and play with—to confront rape itself, but also to consciously make that informed choice (thus consent) when dragged down by such forces themselves.

The moment the episode ended, I went downstairs and instantly drew a picture of Jadis and myself: a great black shape lording over a princess in a white dress (exhibit 39a1b, next page). This creation had spawned from an attachment to past abuses from my own family circle, but also my own life as filled with markers of parallel trauma: the echoes of Cambodia, Nanking or Nazi-occupied Holland, intimated by videogame “zombie” violence marking the state of exception. It all felt connected because I—more than usual—felt connected to the world around me, for better or for ill. That’s how radical empathy works! Except, now I realize that I had—like said world—been raped as well.

For the rest of this section, I shall exhibit Jadis’ abuse of me in ways I hopefully can convey to you a) through other stories, and b) through exhibits of Jadis that partially censor identifying factors; i.e., with their face scratched out of the photo to keep them—along with their codename—as anonymous as I can do at a glance. Originally, I wrote of them behind their codename while conveying them as a simple black shape (next page), but have since decided I wanted to convey them a little more corporally (exhibit 39a2b) than a fatal portrait or Nick Castle homage.

To be absolutely clear, records of Jadis can still be found in my broader material histories. I will not take the time needed to entirely expunge them, partly because Jadis isn’t worth effort, but also because I want proof of their abuses and their actual existence—including the love they coerced from me—to remain after I am gone, without provoking them overtly while I am still alive. That’s their immortality as far as I’m concerned. As such, this book would not exist without their abuse of me, nor ludo-Gothic BDSM as a scholarly idea; i.e., that became entirely devoted towards avoiding similar abuses in the future! —Perse

(exhibit 39a1b: Fatal portrait, top-left: Jadis, whose “beautiful” memory I will replace with the truth of what they were—an abused person who went on to abuse others; artist, top-right: Persephone van der Waard, who came out a month after illustrating her abuser’s true form and her own: “Somebody new, I’m not that chained-up little person still in love with you” [Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” 1978].)

A common Gothic trope, then, is the restoration of sentiment through the material world: the collapse of the Gothic castle like a nightmare, the transgenerational curse of its perceived, mighty undeath swept away like a bad dream and repealed with a benign counterpart (which Hogle would posit is, itself, a mere counterfeit that serves the material interests of the elite; i.e., the Cycle of Kings [more on this idea in the “Monomyth” subchapter] exemplified through the whitewashing of the regal home—the castle itself and its surroundings haunted by what is normally abjected). However, these stories more broadly denote a continuous healing process—of oneself and the sick home (or land around it) as part of the socio-material world that occurs through the pain of existence unnaturally affecting a natural process: the fusion of memories, artistic ideas and trauma together in nightmarishly beautiful ways. As such, I had intimately studied them already in my own graduate work, writing about Hollow Knight‘s poisoned land, but also poisoned memories per the rememory process; in turn, my postgraduate work involved my surviving of rape as something to study and camp more than once.

Pregnant with these sensations under Jadis’ “care,” I dutifully wrote the story down after they threw me out (Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022”). I did so at the time in order to get it straight in my own head, but also communicate my exodus in language I thought others would understand (rape is alien to many people, but Gothic stories less so); then, after Florida, I drew Jadis despite knowing the image would chill my blood at every viewing.

I had put off doing so for months, afraid of the agonizing “birthing” process but also of its dreadful completion. Eventually I could no longer keep them inside me and released their abuse onto the canvas (and later these book volumes). My aim was not to vent or self-torture, but bravely educate and inform future would-be-victims in language that speaks to them and their own assorted traumas and socio-material experiences. This book and its artwork are a logical continuation of that vital trend, as is ludo-Gothic BDSM a rememory-style means of revisiting such events; i.e., to recreate them in a variety of increasingly playful forms.

To that, these rather sober historical exhibits form the starting point for the subversion of martyrdom, which ludo-Gothic BDSM speaks to: as practitioner of it who became more and more playful, regarding the overall process.

What comes next is a passion of mine, in the religious, Numinous sense of that word; i.e., the “rough stuff” we alluded to in “Monsters, Magic and Myth” (2024), from Volume Two, part one. Tread lightly but also know that this book, for all its heavy weather, is still a safe space.

That being said, writing about these experiences and illustrating them, then editing and proofreading them again and again, I’ve had to go back repeatedly to a very dark place and dig up these bones; and it’s weird, because a part of me loves it—i.e., the thrill, the profound sense of annihilation and live burial, post-disinterment; it’s a madness that touches you and never lets go, haunts you for the rest of your life.

But I lived to educate you as matter of pride in my work. So if I ever feel small and weak, if I ever break down and cry because of it, I can remind myself that I survived; I didn’t break, I didn’t give in; I fought back and I lived. Whatever sickness drove Jadis to hurt me, I didn’t let it get me, too. And whatever money their father left behind for them, and all the material things that come and go for them as a result, I will rest easy knowing none of it can possibly fill the void in their heart, the sheer inability for them to relate healthily to others. Destroying things is easy and over in a heartbeat. Healing from trauma takes constant work; it takes courage the likes of which a villain like Jadis could never hope to match. —Perse

(exhibit 39a2a: For all its self-indulgent and fatal, carceral nostalgia, Max’s thrilling liberation from Vecna is Stranger Things‘ crowning achievement. Yes, it occurs from a Red-Scare, cis perspective that, as always, gives BDSM a bad name; the analog for trauma and abuse is both profound and applicable to any situation thereof. Ignoring but re-remembering the xenophobic nature of Vecna as the cartoon killer of white, cis-het, American children, the reality is that Max is an imperfect stand-in for any victim under capital: the plight of the heroine needn’t be gendered at all, but merely the portrayal of someone without power being gaslit by an invisible killer from the shadows. While Vecna is male—coded similarly to Malcolm MacDowell’s Alex from A Clockwork Orange [1971] just “Singing in the Rain” as he goes about his gruesome work—the reality is “killers” needn’t be so overtly rapacious in a physical or male sense.

The truth is, abuse but especially rape takes many forms and can use the same psychosexual language of unstable/unequal power as a dialogue between them; i.e., the victim and the audience relating back and forth, but also the predator and prey or multiples of each: the mark of trauma that communicates nonverbally[3] but also is told through widespread forms of psychosexuality tied up in demonic, Christian-torturous imagery popularized by Dante and revived in other mediums [e.g., Jacob’s Ladder or Tool music videos, exhibit 43a]. It becomes a paradoxical chase of the nurturing force as powerful and god-like, but also the aesthetic darkness as speaking to you in potentially harmful ways. When touched by a massive trauma that scars you, then, catharsis is paradoxically swept up in bad copies of the original abuse. You’re drawn to its dark intensity and gravity to face your fears, but also transform them and your trauma as something to hopefully camp and transform.

Simply put, it’s a prey mechanism and at times an intensely maladaptive one that brings new targets to an abuser hunting its prey [we’re taught not to self-conceptualize as animals; except we are animals, and few things are as intensely animal or ancient as fight, flight, fawn or freeze]. Prey fear predation but also seek protection through likenesses thereof that won’t harm them; i.e., less checking under the bed for monsters and instead inviting one inside to keep a former victim safe. The paradox of psychosexuality is the victim’s erotic desires often become pluralized, a strong urge from emotional scarring potentially leading them to conflate sex and harm through these maladaptive behaviors.
For example, my mommy kink is the seeking of a protector other than men [who have abused me all my life]: “Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children.” Indeed, my supposed rescuer was Jadis, who having conversations with me that my family could not see [thought I told them plenty] spirited me away to Florida. There, they worked their magic, doing their best to awe me with a shared psychosexual connection; i.e., drawn to my trauma and my seeking of the palliative Numinous as useful to their abusive machinations.

At the time, I thought Jadis a victim like me who was abused in ways that would bring us together to each other’s benefit. But as a harmful demonic persona, they were victim who had been operating as an abuser for years, one who forsook me in my time of need and pushed me to madness and suicide ideation:

Father, into your hands
Why have you forsaken me?
In your eyes forsaken me
In your thoughts forsaken me
In your heart forsaken me [System of a Down’s “Chop Suey,” 2001].

Like God unto Jesus, Jadis became my destroyer [their mother acting like a man, in that respect, hence them playing the TERF whose tokenism would go on to inform Sex Positivity‘s entire critical voice[4]]. They tried to sever all bonds of friendship and family I had, so there would be only them. They would fret and strut about the house in fetish gear and knife heels, hypnotizing me as their prey. And my friends and family either did not know, felt unable to reach me/powerless to intervene, or some combination of these inadequacies [and in Cuwu’s case, they rescued me only to prey on me, themselves].

Likewise, Max’s friends paw desperately at her body as her eyes roll into her skull and she falls upward; i.e., less like a balloon sailing away from them and more like Christ on the cross severed from gravity itself. The killer had targeted her for her trauma and worked from the shadows, hunting her without her knowledge until finally making himself known.

[artist: Theremin Trees; source: “‘Unconsciously’ Seeking Abusers? | bogus therapy,” 2022]

While the show treats Vecna’s reveal as strictly torturous[5], the truth is, killers aren’t just two-faced, but many-faced. First, they generally approach you with two basic masks: a dark side and a light side, and doubly imposturous, they oscillate between them to confuse you while also often having several on at once [concentric veneers] and borrowing from a vast store of expressions [above]. They tell you lies to keep you close, intimating cheap rewards and brutal punishment as if to say, “Stay here with me; it’s the only choice you have.”

To that, Vecna doubles Max, offering her a Faustian choice, a psychosexual martyrdom similar to Owen from The Night House. Like Beth from that film, Max is jostled by her friends to reject this fantasy at the critical moment. As such, she recovers and runs away from the killer whose spells are, themselves, mere illusions; i.e., unable to harm her to the degree that he’s suggesting: that he somehow has total power over her. The socio-material truth is more complex; i.e, those with power over you always have the capacity to commit real violence and harm, but the method to evoke this as a means of rooting you in place until they can have their way is fallible. In short, they cannot monopolize you anymore than capital can at large.

To this, Netflix’ overall metaphor for Numinous destruction is apt, the psychomachy suitably operatic as Kate Bush’s infamously spectral voice swoons and sighs some forty years after its debut. Max frees herself, suddenly able to move, and she desperately makes her escape. Running through the dark forest of her mind, the thunder of the music drives her onward while the dark wizard’s spell swirls chaos all around. But her prey-like desire to be free drives her on, until finally the spell breaks and she falls back to Earth, reunited with her friends and leaving the thin-skinned, fragile and lonely predator isolated and alone. “I’m still here,” she says, having chosen to live instead of give into Vecna’s devilish offer [a Faustian bargain that conflates genuine love with non-consensual, harmful pain; re: false power as self-destructive].

For all Stranger Things‘ Gothic panache, the concept is hardly unique to strictly Gothic language. For example, when regarding my own childhood trauma as exacted my father and step father, a particular film speaks to that abuse; i.e., to a similar degree to Stranger Things‘ own psychosexual narrative—with similarly abusive, thus unequal power exchange and subsequent outlets of escape, without the overtly monstrous visuals: one of my mother’s favorite films that we used to rent on VHS, Immortal Beloved [1994]:

In the film, Beethoven stands on the stage, old and deaf thus unable to hear his own music; he hears it in his mind, the Ninth [1824] supplied to us as he might have heard it. He remembers every single note while likewise envisioning his drunken father coming home at night; unable to comfort himself with drink or non-consenting women, he mounts the stairs like a shadow, pursing his own son with phallic intent [the father’s club extending seemingly out from his crotch, suggesting a psychosexual nature to this abuse: raping his son to control and dominate him, no doubt in response to criminogenic abuses capital visited on the father and father’s father, etc].

As I have bourne witness to, there is no difference between a man climbing such steps and a demon in the eyes of a child; Beethoven expects the fiend, waiting almost patiently while gazing out the window at the stars, longing to be free under them instead of imprisoned within his father’s fallen home.

Seemingly at random, Beethoven takes a chance: He climbs out the window and hides in the shadow of the roof while his father screams his name. Then, he climbs down the storm drain and runs for it. He runs like his life depends on it, sprinting through the forest, between the trees, with the twinkling stars looking down from on high. And reaching a secluded lake, he disrobes and climbs inside the paternal waters, floating in the womb-like darkness of a Maternal Sublime[6]. Revived in 1994, Beethoven’s Ninth, in 1824, echoes Coleridge’s sentient from 1818; re: “…the Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I am filled with devotion and with awe; I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible impression left, is, ‘that I am nothing!'” [source].

Like Max, Beethoven was freed from his father’s abuse, but is forever haunted by him, the power of music as a cathartic, creative force keeping the devils seemingly outside the cathedral at bay [in truth, they are everywhere, and not all of them mean workers harm (re: Spectres of Marx), but I digress]. The same concept applies to my art [and ludo-Gothic BDSM] as a poetic, scholarly extension of myself, but also the abuse and friendships I’ve had throughout the years; the latter saved me from former.)

Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, praxial synthesis and catharsis are a matter of calculated risk while returning theatrically to old traumas during the rememory process. Except, returns to childhood-as-harmful are always traumatic. For the abuser, they become manna from Heaven: a tool to leverage against their unhappy victims the way they, too, once experienced; i.e., the mask of the destroyer and savior something to swap in and out, and which to survive Jadis I had to learn to do the same in opposition (which led to my developing of cryptonymy as a revolutionary countermeasure).

To be thorough, here are some more examples of Jadis’ abuse I’ve decided to document and include. —Perse, 6/23/2023

(exhibit 39a2b: Models: Jadis, all, and Tim, top-right; photographer: Persephone van der Waard. Jadis liked to control their prey through treats. In short, if I was good, I got fed. Or, as I write in “Setting the Record Straight Again; Accounting My Ex’s Abuse of Me to Another Victim, August 30th, 2022” [2024]:

Jadis always had all of the material power. They signed off on everything. And eventually it became toxic to me. I stopped wanting to have sex with them, but also to have breakfast with them. And they, in turn, stopped offering me any semblance of agency. I couldn’t decide where we ate or where to buy groceries. Hell, they almost didn’t buy me those books when the three of us went to that giant used bookstore. But they were perfectly happy spending hundreds of dollars on cute sexy clothes for me to wear because they liked me in them (but also didn’t want me wearing them all the time, and kept all of these articles when I moved out). In short, they not only treated me like a pet, but a doll they could objectify in ways they found sexy by dressing me up in expensive clothes they paid for, but also owned. Nothing was a true gift with Jadis (except for my phone, which they let me keep, and a couple of old Metallica t-shirts) [source].

The books-in-question, but also photos of a trip of ours to the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. The treats, then, extended car rides; i.e., to where they wanted to go [the museum was pretty awesome, to be fair]:

 

[artists: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard]

Clothes Jadis bought for me [and took back after I stood up to them, including the pink kitty collar]:

[artist: Persephone van der Waard] 

Everything Jadis did had a purpose, specifically to threaten and control; i.e., as something they could give and take away if I was bad. Jadis took after their mother, in that respect, but also the music they listened to under their mother’s abusive roof; re: Tool’s “Stinkfist“:

Show me that you love me and that we belong together
Relax, turn around and take my hand

I can help you change
Tired moments into pleasure
Say the word and we’ll be
Well upon our way [source: Genius]. 

This became something I noticed over time, but especially at the end. I was always bad and Jadis, like a goodly parent, was always correct; or, as I write in “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022” [where I refer to them under a different alias, “Jack”]:

I spent our entire relationship trying to make things work, doing my best to communicate and prevent toxicity. I stayed by Jack’s side during their rocky grad school tenure, but also their father’s illness and eventual death. I cooked, cleaned, and made love to them. I made art for them. I did everything I could to make things work, including talking to my friends about what I could do to become a better partner for Jack. I worried until my heart was sick.

In the end, I was Jack’s live-in cock, a conjugal cook and maid. I did everything to please them; they “rewarded” me with constant emotional abuse and neglect. This torment worked at a glacial pace. Jack love-bombed me early on, then slowly turned off the tap. I rationalized this any way that I could: When their [masters’] research dried up, I blamed their fruitless workload, not them; when their ex refused to talk to them, I blamed their lack of closure, not them; when their father died before they could have the fabled heart-to-heart, I blamed their arrested development, not them.

Jack had derided me on various past occasions. In particular, they criticized my academic expertise and research on neoliberalism and the Gothic, but refused to read my work. I was simply “wrong” in their eyes. No matter how hard I tried, they refused to talk with me at all. While I eventually gave up, I always felt like Jack despised me for my political beliefs from there on out. The walls went up and stayed up, isolating me from them [source].

Isolation and DARVO were two of Jadis’ favorite weapons, using them to triangulate me against Tim and, I presume, the other way around:

When Jack and I first met, they were going through a divorce. Their ex—I’ll call them Tim—was someone Jack constantly complained about, calling Tim an irresponsible man-baby. They said I was so much better than Tim, so much more helpful and fun to be around. But Jack was also estranged from Tim and wanted my help in patching things up. They wanted closure.

This seemed simple enough to me. So I decided to help. If Tim was really so bad to Jack (when all Jack had done was try to care and provide for them—again, according to Jack), I figured a simple apology from Tim was in order. Eventually Tim apologized to Jack and things began to improve between them. They talked more often and even signed the marriage dissolution papers. Hell, we even had a threesome [to mark the occasion]. I wanted to help make things between all three of us [better]. I wanted a polycule.

Time passed. Jack and I were preparing to move. Being of a poly mind, I suggested that Tim move in with us. He seemed fun, a totally new person. I asked Jack and they agreed. So I made plans to facilitate Tim’s insertion into our new living arrangement. The polycule was becoming a reality.

This entire time, though, it never occurred to me that Jack had been lying about Tim. So later, when Jack started accusing me of being irresponsible and “a bad person, unlike Tim,” I asked Tim for his side of the story. Tim called Jack an abuser. But here we were, all under the same roof. It felt strange because Jack had no excuse to be playing these kinds of games. But here they were, playing them anyway.

Now that I am away from them, I sincerely believe Jack wanted me gone, thus allowing them to abuse Tim—a person they’d abused in the past (for nearly a decade)—with impunity. Recently divorced from Tim, Jack needn’t worry about any legal repercussions; their name was on the lease, they had their father’s inheritance, and they could leverage the fact that Tim needed their help against them in any dispute. All they had to do was wear me down [ibid.].

[artist: Tim]

In the end, Tim was a victim, too [Jadis making you think the only way you could have anything in life—including self-expression—was under their control, their domination]. Sometime after I left, Tim and I spoke about all of this, but eventually the talks stopped. I don’t know what ultimately happened to them, but I hope they’re safe).

Please note, I really haven’t touched this subchapter too much, in order to preserve its accuracy and immediacy at the time of writing it, but will simply say that returning to it is like going back into Hell; i.e., feeling the dark seduction of Jadis as a master manipulator working me over with their masks, their weight, their power as seemingly greater than mine.

As always, I think of Jadis like a black shape, haunting me. I know it’s just a corpse from my past, but that it (and its trauma) will never truly die. All I can do is face it vocally as a sex-positive lesson for others to learn from, dissecting my past as much a corpse of myself and my trauma living ever on: something to return to, while reifying ludo-Gothic BDSM as something that ultimately came afterwards—is always coming after a return to the past as something to reassemble and convey in serious-to-silly forms: things to play with and relate to as people do.

Even now, though, the venue remains haunted; i.e., I feel beckoned as much by likenesses of Jadis, but also myself as confused by virtue of the kinds of attacks they levied at me with their Aegis, their masks. “I’m not a bad person,” Jadis told me, underestimating their own cruelty while insisting all the while that I was the one victimizing them. It’s hard, then, not to look at the dark shape and see myself on it: owned by someone who took me for all I was worth and never let me go. It hurts, but the wound has healed; these paradoxical feelings remain, as if to spite my progress. Jadis was my Weathertop, stabbing me with a Morgul blade (wrought in the city of their past abuse, which they turned against me: as yet another threat for them to police).

(artist: Keith Macmillan; source: Kory Grow’s “‘That Evil Kind of Feeling’: The Inside Story of Black Sabbath’s Iconic Cover Art,” 2020)

In short, Jadis’ spell worked as a false promise of protection, the usual Man Box nonsense relayed in a TERF form. Through Jadis, this has become something for me to reify and revisit as a theatrical, doll-like device; i.e., to reclaim through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a perpetual work-in-progress: the black knight—the lurking threat of parental, spousal, and/or community abuse—attached to police violence defending profit through weird nerds failing up. All become something to recognize in small; e.g., the trembling and vulnerable side of myself, playing with dolls I pulled out from within: to place in front of me, thus better control and camp Jadis’ raping of me.

I’m not plural—I don’t front as such when triggered—but I can still recognize the scholarly and practical value in such protectors, and in conjuring out dark abusers in theatrical forms; e.g., John Kimble vs the abusive mother and father, Sarah Conor vs the abusive cop, and so on; i.e., someone to see me freeze, look at the dark abuser (who often looks perfectly normal, on the outside), then take me aside and say, “It’s ok, I got this” before confronting the destroyer in suitably theatrical fashion (through Cameron’s mirror test, below, was used to capitalize on audience fears of police brutality at the time):

In the absence of actual protectors, we create our own, psychosexually recontextualizing trauma (often through an asexual, dollish interrogation of rape) as something that generally lives inside and around us. It’s simply how humans operate. In revisiting this section to polish it, then, ludo-Gothic BDSM has become the theory for such operations put to practice long before I knew concretely how to express it. Although again, it already had started to with my postgrad Metroidvania work[7] as built on older fabrications reversing abjection; i.e., on older instances of survived abuse as something to camp as a matter of capital looping in on itself. Time is a circle, of which our abusers come back around in ways we can control: by making them into dolls (and dollhouses) that are very much haunted by the echoes of trauma. With Jadis, I’ve made them into something to play with—unable to rape me ever again but teasing me with the pain of such passions threatened by such destroyers-in-small.

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

They weren’t always small, and generally had a variety of tools to leverage against me (e.g., sex, left). For example, my exit letter was written at the height of Jadis’ abuse—where I had become a frightened, pretty bauble on par with Haggard’s unicorns (when we watched The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, one of Jadis’ favorite lines came from the Hunter: “You have heart; I’ll take that, too!”). Inside the letter, I likened my home life through the toy-like language of children—as what I had to work with, but also because it made sense. In short, speaking through toys and games was comforting because I could play with them to solve the puzzle of Jadis raping me; i.e., to Majora’s Mask (1998) because it felt like being threatened with the moon night after night. Eventually the only way to escape was to summon the moon and expose the monster, breaking the spell they had over me:

I liken [Jadis’ abuse] to Majora’s Mask. In that game, the villain, Majora, curses the moon to fly into a [double of Hyrule called Termina]. While the player can return the moon to its original position using a magic song, the residents of Hyrule are still trapped inside a cruel time loop. Faced with their impending doom, they stew in their own fear. The world around them slowly falls apart—not just once, but over and over and over again. It degrades their sense of reality until nothing but madness remains. Majora uses this madness to control the [doubled] Hyrulians through fear, distorting their very perception of reality. This mind-prison is what Link ultimately escapes. The paradox, here, is the method: He doesn’t escape by playing the song and stopping the moon. He escapes by exposing the tyrant controlling the “moon” to begin with.

Like Link, I could not escape by playing the song. Every time [Jadis] threatened me with anger or Instant Breakup, they were abstracting the consequences of my actions so much that I felt like the floor was eggshells: Any wrong step might send me hurling into the void. I felt the shadow of the falling moon in their words. A glance, a heavy sigh, a tapping of the foot, a laborious roll of the eyes. They had mastered me. I thought love through win out, that [Jadis] would change if only I played the song enough. But as our living conditions improved, my happiness worsened. They began to reject me, doting on [their ex], instead. I felt trapped. If I confronted them, they would throw the moon at me. If the moon came, I would play the song to save myself. And the whole cycle would repeat. So now I hid from the falling moon and became what they wanted me to be: their little artist boy. I did not please them, but they seemed oddly content with this arrangement. I knew it wouldn’t last, but I couldn’t say for sure when it would end. Terror was everywhere and madness reigned within me (re: “My Ex’s Abuse of Me“).

As said letter proves, but also the artwork and writing that came later, putting myself in my own shoes from an outsider’s perspective and reimagining my own trauma (as a Gothic heroine, exhibit 39a1b) was central to me understanding what had already happened and what was going to happen. At the time, I really wasn’t sure how it was all going to play out. Nevertheless, the more I creatively processed my trauma, the more that imaginary hindsight slowly became Gothic insight and emotional intelligence, but also undead-demonic release through the wearing of my own mask and acting things out.

Unbeknownst to me, this had also conveyed the mask-like “brave faces” that I wore for Jadis, secretly (or perhaps not so secretly) frightened of them; and they for me, in treachery and bad faith. Indeed, masks are vital to survival, but also swept up in cathartic and harmful Gothic dramas concerned with parasitic imposters (Jadis, in full control, pulling me around on the dance floor): the Amazon as a protector of children that, like our childhood bugbears, also follows us forward as something to summon up again—to be our Medusa when we feel small and scared in the face of things that remind us of (and indeed act out) our past abusers.

While we’ll explore the concept of performative (and cryptonymic) masks more, in Volume Three (especially concentric veneers as something to destroy our enemies’ through our own survival maneuvers), here is a quick example below of me reifying my survival as dollish:

(exhibit 39a3: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. Revana is my alter ego, a “mask/costume” warrior mommy the likes of which I always wanted to keep me safe [my mother, through no fault of her own, could not]. I drew this the same day I drew Jadis as my Great Destroyer [exhibit 39a1b]. The idea was to show the plurality of trauma as divided by my feminine side having different qualities to it; i.e., that I could embody as separate from myself—both desiring to be strong yet still wanting to be a trans-woman princess. That is what Revana means to me: a warrior and protector Amazon who can step up and throw down when someone sees my soft, feminine side and wants to take advantage as I regress; i.e., the female/trans femme hero out of popular stories I grew up with and dined on after I was fully grown; e.g., Eowyn from LotR or Sarah Connor from T2, but also Mercedes from Pan’s Labyrinth [2006] saying to Vidal: “Don’t touch the girl, motherfucker! You won’t be the first pig I’ve gutted!”)

The cathartic effect of such rememory was almost orgasmic, feeling strangely good through my tremendous tears laid on the canvas, the page—not because I was a glutton for punishment, but because I reveled in my own profound survival. I had wanted to escape punishment by facing whatever Jadis had in store, but also was trying to understand it while steadily moving forward onto better things. Also, I learned ways to recognize abusers attracted to, and feeding off, my trauma, which would come in handy with future partners; e.g., Cuwu’s draconian shenanigans, but also having the arsenal for bullshit after that, like bigoted female sex workers trying to bully/pimp me (re: “Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023”), which we’ll discuss in Volume Three.

Contrary to canonical exhibitions thereof, subversive Amazons like Revana denote something we can use to feel capable, without turning into Charlotte Dacre’s Victoria from Zofloya or Ellen Ripley killing Communists for the state (re: James Cameron’s white-savior billionaire Marxism). Even so, they are undead, and constitute a painful revisiting of one’s personal trauma in order to face and reform it into a better lesson: that I had some hand in my own abuse. Here at the end of things—as I turn Jadis into a doll (to make them easier to handle) that I and others can play with to camp our own survival of rape—I shall be honest and confess my hand in my own rape.

Before I start, a couple things to bear in mind: One, per the zombie and its apocalypse as a kind of demon lover come home to, this is ultimately what ludo-Gothic BDSM and good rape play were founded on: the survival of rape as something to keep playing with, raising healthier Gothic castles built on former tyrants who, as they cannot be escaped (silence regarding them leads to rape returning home), become part of the castle-narrative; i.e., the thing we can play with inside to avoid rape in the future whenever, wherever and however it occurs.

To that, Jadis has become—as I alluded to, a moment ago—my haunted house; i.e., a dark place of play whose spirit of playing with the half-real past means facing said past (and my hand in it) as always coming back around: to scoop us into the halls of older histories the future learns from (until it also becomes past); re, “Baby, You’re a Haunted House“:

And your heart will stay forever
When your last remains are few
In the dark, we dance together
And I’d like to be waiting with you (source: Genius).

It would be a lie to say that I didn’t and don’t love part of Jadis still: the likeness of them that I can fashion, then play with to heal from the original’s dreadful abusing of me (which was also doll, in bad faith). Except, it’s less about who they were and more who they could have been, if things were different. I was raped, and not just by Jadis; but Jadis was the one who did it despite everything I did to make them happy. A part of me knew that, and it took time for me to escape the trap I had knowingly, on some level, entered of my own accord.

The best revenge for me, then, wasn’t letting them know that they could have had all the sex they wanted, or good food, or whatever else I could have given, because the only thing they enjoyed was preying on me exactly the way they did. Instead, my success—my escape, if you want to call it that—is having survived them to turn them into a sex-positive lesson that will make such police-like antics of theirs a thing of the barbaric past. The survival of police violence is generally “cops or victims” as a matter of survivors becoming either moving forward. If we build a place where people can play with rape as an educational device geared towards rememory as a healing process, confrontations with the past become honestly cathartic; i.e., by changing the state through society as veering away from its usual dogmas and hand in things.

And that is ultimately what I’ve done with Jadis: turning them not just into a playground, but a harmless likeness of what they were that spells out their raping of me and my hand in that; i.e., while seeing them as someone human that, for all the harm they exacted upon me, I will always love that gentler side of them—the side that, as much as it pains me to tell you all, died/retreated deep inside them the moment their father left his parting gift: the widower’s gold. In that moment, Jadis made the choice (as much as anyone can make choices with the past forever weighing on them): to become the destroyer sans irony once and for all.

To find some semblance of victory over their humiliating raping of me and throwing me aside, I have taken us both in totality to leave you, dear readers, with something to learn from as a matter of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as hammered into me by Jadis, belonging to part of a larger cycle of abuse—one tied to the land and its memories projected onto any kind of media you could dream of. I don’t wish to romance abuse, here—not to celebrate toxic love, but learn from the harm Jadis caused me, that befell me as something I have since returned to and acknowledged in dollish form; i.e., preserving its dark memory to behold for all time: an alien that I loved, but one who never really bonded with me through the experience; i.e., as one that always held me at arm’s length—never to let me heal each of us from the trauma that touched us both: “He shall never know how I love him […] because he is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” (source: Wuthering Heights, 1847).

(artist: unknown)

Weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma. I don’t wish to hide the fact that I loved and made allowances for my abuser because I most certainly did (and still am always reminded of that, through these rememories of them). Nor do I wish to change them, after the fact. That only happens when they decide to (and until then, they simply take and take, having no reason to change). To my most antagonistic abuser (the most Hurtful Abuser Award actually goes to Zeuhl, oddly enough), I merely wish to leave some parting words as we begin our segue into the sorts of monomythical forms you were doubtless inspired by when brutalizing me:

Jadis,

I don’t know where you are now, and I suspect Fate has given you no reason to change (capital not only creates people like yourself—victims who go onto gatekeep others—it incentivizes you to keep at it and perpetuate the cycle in service to profit). But if there is any good left in you at all, know that I saw that and did my best to capture it; i.e., as hopelessly fused with your dark side as the side that sadly won. But in winning as it seemingly did, you sent me away to learn from your lessons. Even if you never meant them to teach me anything, the crux of understanding lies on the student being able to learn anyways; i.e., as a matter of emergent play relative to the devices at hand. You couldn’t, but I could and did. Thank you for that.

I loved you as much as I could, my orc queen. Yes, I feared you and still very much do. Yet all the same, I adored the idea of what I saw in you: as something that could be better with only the right touch. Since I was mistaken about you, as a person, in that respect, I’ve since erected its Heathcliffean likeness here for others to learn from, including my own folly standing before. The paradox is that in escaping your person, I’ve found that you’ll always, to some extent, be with me. So I’ve made that part of you into something toy-like for which ludo-Gothic BDSM is possible.

You’re the doll to play with, my love—the dollhouse stripped of its harmful capacity but not its ghastly echo. You vibe to the ghosts of older tyrants you clearly seek to emulate; I, to the spectres of a Marx I’ve made—like you—quite a bit gayer than their historical figures could ever really be. However futile it might be, then, I would only ask that you do better towards others in the future, to try and match the spirit of play my little idea encompasses: as having a little bit of you inside it.

Farewell, my bug-loving black knight; you were a cunt, but I loved you enough to try and change you. Failing that, you have become my darkest object lesson, my Heathcliff on the moor that, whenever I look upon you, never fails to chill my blood and send me falling upwards, sailing far and wide on my own Numinous adventures. When I question the wisdom of reifying you as a matter of instruction, I sometimes pause regarding that quest, thinking of Charlotte Brontë’s wayward sister, Emily, making her own monument to such a being:

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master […] The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur — power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot [source: Nava Atlas’ “Charlotte Brontë is Preface to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,” 2014].

“No coward soul is mine,” said the girl, herself. And I was never one to shy away from nightmares. Had that been true, I would have never met you, my destroyer. The rest, as they say, is history—the kind of curiously pretty flowers with dark stems, which I’ve laid on your grave to remember what was best of you married to the worst of it, too (forgiveness comes at recognizing both, and my own hand in things). I’d say I’m laying you to rest, but the dead never stay dead, do they?

Himmelhoch jauchzend, zu(m) Tode betrübt[8],

—Persephone van der Waard

With that out of the way, lovelies, I wish to conclude this subchapter with some closing points (about ten pages, seven of which are exhibits). These won’t be terribly organized—will merely be arranged as I originally compiled them: as a manner of afterthoughts. Keep these in mind as we go from the rememory of my personal life’s traumas into the sorta of monomythical forms Jadis was emulating: camping rape as something to revisit a “childhood” that never quite happened, but sits between imagination and history as half-real and chronotopic, but also fun (re: Walpole); i.e., a dollhouse to go and camp rape as a matter of rememory concerning personal trauma as undead. To that, Jadis is my favorite toy to illustrate rape, but also one I don’t like to use often. In fact, I may never use them again. All the same, this is my home—has become my life as a matter of healing a broken place into a matter of balance with those things lying in the graveyard of my soul—but I shall, a sad and wiser woman, move onto greener pastures held inside the same castle grounds: “Never did I wanna be here again / And I don’t remember why I came” (Godsmack’s “Voodoo,” 1998). —Perse

Despite being my attempt to make these understandings public, sharing my childhood and post-childhood mistreatment with the world through Sex Positivity wasn’t always the obvious route precisely because it happened over time and in ways that horribly confused me. This remains true when summoning the ghost of the thing that harmed me, doing so to comment on the harm it caused being tied up in another earnest truth: that such things can be incredibly exciting and cathartic when harm is removed from them, but also per a means of catharsis that confronts the mind of a hostage; i.e., someone living in fear of the thing exciting all manner of emotions/psychosexual predicaments.

Anyone who says that such monsters aren’t, to some degree, exciting has never been through it. I’m not invoking that here to stress the escapist qualities of a hostage stuck in the hauntological past of their own rape; I’m doing to it emphasize that escaping the prison is a vital means of transforming it through likenesses of the very bait that led us into our captors’ hands. This involves a great deal of confusion, insofar as trauma warps our approach towards, and perception of, what excitement even is.

For example, one of the worst[9] effects Jadis had on me was being made to hate sex, specifically feeling ashamed of needing to cope with my own trauma: having sex with them. I didn’t think such a thing could be possible, so I blamed myself instead. Sex can certainly be good under the right conditions—and much of the sex with Jadis was amazing. It was like fucking a demon. Not only were they physically strong and built like a tank—able to take whatever I dished out while asking for more—but they demanded everything from me, their eyes turning black as they ordered me to go deeper and harder to fill them up.

Being into BDSM, Jadis also had the equipment; e.g., a throat collar that hooked to ankle shackles, rendering Jadis completely helpless (a human pretzel for me to fuck). They also had the body for it. Despite being a big girl (their weight tended to range from 240-270 pounds), they had unusually flexible hips and could put their legs behind their head without stretching. Once the shackles were in place, their legs pulled back and exposed their pussy to me, which they expected me to raw-dog like a good little girl. In that sense, they were like a vampire: able to command me with their eyes while being physically “helpless” (in truth, they had all the financial control, which undoubtedly gave their gaze and actions further weight against a woman who physically had no material agency and had been abused in the past).

(exhibit 39b: Source (AI “art”), top right: Xenodochium; artist, top-middle and -right: Isutoshi; bottom-middle and -right: Low-Polydragon. For an idea of what Jadis was like, the top-left image was their body-type; the bottom-left/top-middle and -right image were their initial effects on me, comedy[10] included; and the bottom-middle and -right images were a close approximation of the phenomenological experience of their increasingly baleful, demonic gaze.)

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t relish these rituals (and serving their chonky overseer) at first; Jadis tried harder in the beginning to impress me by actually being good in bed. I also think they were seeking a feeling of power in relation to their own abuse suffered at the hands of their narcissistic mother (again, swapping out a variety of masks to confuse me with; e.g., like Shang Tsung wearing the masks of his victims to act the hero with: “All these souls and you still don’t have one of your own!”). However, the context between us was reactively abusive and became more exploitative over time. Not only I am hypersexual and gravitate towards sex when stressed or scared; I’m also eager to please, meaning I would have sex with Jadis just to calm them down (they were constantly hyperviligent and said as much); i.e., to stop them from glowering at me with their pitch-black eyes. Simply put, I wanted to be a good girl that Jadis regarded with love, not hate—especially during sex!

Jadis’ arc was complex, as was mine and my scholarship in relationship to them. Long before I penned ludo-Gothic BDSM in a crystalized, doll-like form, they love-bombed me, pulling me close to them as quickly as they could; I participated, wanting to go to Florida (the reasons why having already been stated, here and during the manifesto). As time went on, Jadis not only abused me; they slowly pulled away and raped me from afar. Their estranged father had died roughly a month after Jadis turned 35, leaving them with a considerable amount of “fuck you” money and capital (dividends).

It was not a clean process. His ruined trailer had to be gutted, sorting the decades’ worth of old, dusty records hoarded inside. Much of that “homecoming” was left to me, as Jadis piled everything inside our duplex before hiding themselves away (retreating from their childhood instead of facing it). As my book has expanded, I have given voice to this oddity and others besides; re: about Jadis’ ex, Tim, who we were living with towards the end. Like sex, though, the build-up takes preparation, time and repeated execution to yield the best results (and is generally better with music, costumes and other “spices” that evoke feelings, memories and various other “spell-like,” hard-to-explain-but-easy-to-feel phenomena).

Since July 22nd, 2022, the feverish pitch of writing this book—night after night, assembling the dreamlike “bricks” of paragraphs and images frantically plucked from the void—has become an ongoing attempt to heal and educate, breaking the cycle of systemic exploitation for all workers under Capitalism. As I hope the primer has illustrated up to this point, proletarian praxis starts with excavating the past as already created; i.e., from our zombie-like dreams of war and violence about older material variants, which gradually yield a more guided analysis of posterior reassemblies. Begot from older traumatic memories—e.g., Jadis in Florida, grad school, my remaining uncle, my stepfather, my father, the stories of the past I have consumed at each of these points from different literary traditions with the same goal—all were Marx’ nightmare (of the dead generations) made material in and from my flesh.

As trauma lives inside me and around me, I have become like the zombie: a being that houses and expresses systemic trauma from childhood onwards (emulating Jonathan Harker’s journal that I, as child, used to read with voyeuristic delight; i.e., seeing my trauma and struggles in others, but also monster sex as something that I discovered was desirable to me from an early age). Accepting this role has opened my eyes; the point of this book, then, is to open your eyes, too. By yielding sex-positive expressions of trauma in the material world, you can expose the wider public to a Gothic imagination that liberates all workers from the state-corporate spell of neoliberal, hauntological brain death: Gothic-fueled class-to-cultural consciousness.

Of course, you might not live to see it, and it might show you how the world and those you care about aren’t so rosy as you’ve been led to believe (re: Jadis); but it can be part of something better that materially survives and aids your future family and friends after you die—but also while you live to smaller, incremental degrees through your own creative successes and social-sexual habits: “To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition” (source: Emerson’s “What Is Success?” 1908). Sometimes, that means digging up a zombie or two, laying a flower or two on the cold graves kept warm by the buzzing bumble bee butts, getting at the blossoms laid there:

(source, Facebook post, Gardening Soul: August 21st, 2021)

Convicting Capitalism is redemptive in this respect. Like Jadis’ awesome power over me, it wasn’t infinite but seemed that way. If it was, then surely any case for fighting back would be pointless. Such as it happened, I did fight back; I escaped Jadis and made my way back home, the bad dream less ending in totally and more me finding agency among the trauma in and around me by creating ludo-Gothic BDSM after surviving Jadis; i.e., as a means of understanding the world in ways that could shape and change it through future friends I would make as a result; e.g., Bay and Harmony as drawn to my work for these reasons: having something in common as sluts and weird nerds touched by death, but still alive and able to talk constructively and creatively about it—to toy with it in a productive manner conducive to developing Gothic Communism. Ours is an outpouring of raped zombies, vampires and ghosts coming forward to testify against capital!

We have now concluded the meat of the original zombie apocalypse section and its discussions about humanizing zombies and sex toys; i.e., reversing abjection through the rememory of personal trauma (childhood abuse) by returning to Gothic spaces (the zombie house, returning without moving) and playing with them: to interrogate power in order to challenge profit and Capitalism Realism (versus the usual fatal nostalgia in neoliberal refrains; e.g., Metroidvania).

(artist: William Blake)

Before we move onto ghosts and other forms of undead, though, I want to bridge the gap between dreams and sight (something of a poetic goal of the original manuscript I want to preserve here, in finalizing it). I want to include a part three to “Bad Dreams” concerning people similar to Jadis, but on a different poetic scale. To that, we’ll be examining the larger-than-life as a legendary sort; i.e., the undead tyrant as something to see in dream-like spaces that take our criticisms of capital to a common place of remediation—the monomyth, and the various, ghostly echoes of Caesar as someone who douchebags nowadays are still trying to revive, millennia after his infamous demise[11]. Such overlords are commonly shown as ghosts (e.g., Hamlet’s father’s), but we’ll be sticking to more corporal forms: Zombie Caesars (next page): “With Caesar dead, Rome had moved from one crisis to the next,” writes hoakley in “A History of Rome in Paintings” (2020). This includes Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire” alluding to that tradition all dead generations weighing on our brains; i.e., that cyclical, historical-material matter of tragedy and farce we must rescue from itself: through ludo-Gothic BDSM as camping such spectres and supplanting them with far gayer forms than the usual heteronormative, Cartesian idiots bother to try (always scapegoating Medusa instead of Caesar)!

Keeping with the original poetic flavor of the Humanities primer and its assorted key phrases I only partially stuck to while editing and expanding on things, we’ll explore “sight” as a critical poetic trope in the “Seeing Dead People” subchapter (when we examine the undead’s universal feeding mechanism beyond just zombies), and the notion of reviving the zombie future more fully at the end of the primer (and volume).

Here, though, I want to introduce both ideas—to flirt with them a little through another concept we’ll explore constantly throughout the rest of the book: reverse abjection as a process vital to Gothic Communism. Its subversion of zombie enterprises remains important, but especially the chronotope of undead war and its “fallen lords,” whose tyrannical, dynastic power exchange spawns endless zombie tyrants—e.g., generals, skeleton kings, masters of the universe, and ghostly “fathers,” etc—that help spread a blinding “false” vision of imaginary history.

To subvert Capitalist Realism, this history (and its fearful inheritance/failed memory of the decaying nation-state) must be challenged; those who cannot face, thus play and learn from history (and its Wisdom of the Ancients) are doomed to repeat it—i.e., as a matter of hauntology per the shadow of “Rome,” of “Caesar,” of “Pygmalion,” etc (from Volume One):

Canonical Rome absolutely sucks ass/is not to be trusted. For one, Rome is, by modern standards, hauntologized (utterly fake; re: the ghost of the counterfeit). The original lasted for centuries in various forms, but was effectively a city-state; nation-states, by comparison, emerged during the Renaissance formation of national identities, followed by the Enlightenment’s settler colonialism appealing to the pre-fascist (Neo-Gothic) hauntology of “Rome” as unified post-fascism—one nation, one army under “God,” or some other vertical bourgeois authority (secular or religious) that endures after the “defeat of the Nazi” (the details of their death have been greatly exaggerated; Nazis were copying American fascism, which is alive and well). Nation-states normalize Imperialism, thus genocide, rape, war and worker exploitation through canonical Gothic praxis. They compel sexual reproduction through heteronormative, amatonormative, Afronormative, and queernormative lenses, etc—are built on a settler-colonial binary that yields an imperial, dimorphic flavor in everyday language: good vs evil, black vs white, us vs them, “the creation of sexual difference” by Luce Irigaray and so on.

For our purposes, this binary is remediated within the Gothic mode to communicate Western glory as something to synthesize through pro-state propaganda as coercion personified: the fetishization of war, deception, rape and death linked to the hauntology of the state apparatus as a lionized conveyor of traditional Western virtues (source).

As we shall see with the monomyth, these virtues manifest in the zombie tyrant; i.e., as a likeness of Caesar being largely one of mythology that, while largely invented, still dovetails unto fascist goals in service to capital (and tokenism) nonetheless: through neoliberal media, but especially movies and videogames, as having exploded in that era. They become undead as a matter of history in the Gothic sense of the world—in ways that further the process of abjection to maintain Capitalist Realism through castles and tyrants (castle-narrative, vis-à-vis Bakhtin’s chronotope: dynastic primacy and hereditary rites) as monstrous, poetic, useful to the state as preserving itself through them and giving the game away as a matter of cryptonymy (the scapegoat and the symptom to a larger problem): Caesar’s ghost haunts capital as decaying towards a former time of invented greatest.

As we shall see, Capitalism is a Big Zombie that foists its own charge of cannibalism onto its victims, which it then polices through tokenization as a matter of criminogenic conditions: divide and conquer amongst empire eating itself, when the chickens come home to roost!

Concerning “ludo-Gothic BDSM”/medieval poetics after this point: Ludo-Gothic BDSM as I coined it remains utterly central to my work; i.e., having traced its evolution to where it presently exists, I’ve since tried very hard to mention different instructional points for you to consider moving forwards; e.g., dolls and rape play in the “Bad Dreams” chapter, so far, as well as the “Another Castle, Another Princess”/”Playing with Dead Things” chapter before that (in Volume Two, part one). Per the cryptonymy and hauntology processes—i.e., informing abjection as something to forward or reverse inside various spaces, including chronotopes like the Metroidvania—ludo-Gothic BDSM takes on many different shapes and sizes. Keeping all of this in mind, ludo-Gothic BDSM will still come up quite a bit; i.e., throughout the rest of the Undead Module and the entirety of the Demons Module.

(artist: Lil Wolfy 69)

As for the five medieval poetic terms from Volume Two, part one (selective absorption, magical assembly, Gothic maturity, confusion of the senses, and the Song of Infinity), they won’t come up very often. Simply put, you won’t need to know them to learn the rest of the primer’s historical elements, but you can take and use them yourselves when engaging with the history inside; i.e., by applying my more recent poetically instructional arguments to older monstrous histories, said arguments being founded on the principles of sex positivity and Gothic Communism that I’ve championed since the start of this project, nearly two years ago (and based on older research feeding into the present): the liberation of sex workers through iconoclastic art. However you want to synthesize that outcome, you’ll have plenty of toys with play with!

Last but not least, here are several additional exhibits to give you a taste of what we’ll explore in “Bad Dreams,” part three. —Perse

(exhibit 39c1: Top-left: Balor, the central villain from Bungie’s Myth: the Fallen Lords, 1997; bottom-left: Anubis, from The Ronin Warriors; top-right, artist: Michael Broussard, of the villainous Engineers from Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, 2012.

Neoliberalism crams fascism, Communism and queerness into the same poetic space. This being said, a common thread for all these canonical examples is decayed hauntology tied to the zombie tyrant, often a giant wearing armor and a helmet [e.g., Hamlet’s father’s beavered, medieval helm]. Balor is a kind of fascist, “Zombie Caesar” [zombie Nazis being a whole zombie sub-genre] that rises from the grave to destroy the degenerate West as its former “greatest champion.” He’s an action figure.

Removing his helmet, the greatest horror is that Balor is not rotted at all. Instead, his outward appearance is entirely human and he follows his own maxims to their logical conclusion: slay the enemy as a matter of coming home to empire. The same goes for Scott’s Engineers, their nightmarish armor concealing a worryingly human appearance. Not only were Scott’s story and monsters partially modeled after Lovecraft’s take on the Promethean quest, At the Mountains of Madness; both stories borrowed liberally from Shelley’s 1818 palimpsest, Frankenstein. Yet, Scott inverts the scheme somewhat, having the marbled, statuesque appearance of the classical-looking Engineers become gradually warped by a mad science buried deep in the cold reaches of outer space [versus Antarctica in Lovecraft or Shelley’s books]. Slowly the Promethean knowledge turns these false gods “mad,” technophobically represented by their bodies as darkly cybernetic—almost stitched together like Victor’s manmade Creature.

Apart from their bodies, both Balor and the Engineers have canonical zombie eyes, utterly blinded by an endless pursuit of “progress” that brings the Imperial Boomerang back home out of an uncertain past stitched crudely together [the more undead something is, the more “stuck” it is in a traumatized, corpse-like body; the more demonic, the more something can change its shape]. Anubis, meanwhile, serves an undead emperor out of an equally nebulous former time, bringing the warring states period into a Westernized, 1980s Japan: the return of the Shogunate again. Yet, the shock at realizing Anubis is human offers the protagonist fighting him hope: “You’re a man, a human being like us!”

For Anubis, though, the revelation is painful, his helmet being cut from around his head, revealing a surprisingly pretty face and girlish, red, long-flowing hair. The process of reverse abjection opens his eyes, turning him away from war and his undead master and placing him on a path of peace. Unfortunately he dies, as does Balor and the Engineers; regardless of their stations on the battlefield, the state reduces all of them to undead fodder.)

(exhibit 39c2: Dragon Ball has an absurd premise that is easily camped [dbzking541’s “The Funniest DBZ Dub I Have Ever Seen,” 2016]. Its canon still rolls The Modern Prometheus into The Iliad, presenting the zombie tyrant king as trapped between father-and-son according to man-made, unnatural husbandries: the Divine Right of Kings and the imperial relationship of master and slave, but also the cruelty of a bully patriarch-god towards his bizarre, man-made children: the archaic male baby as a killer child for state forces stemming from Beowulf into the present through hauntological regeneration; i.e., as undead/composite but also able to change its shape like Cú Chulainn’s ríastrad, aka “warp spasm”; or Milton’s Lucifer gradually shedding his angelic form to turn into a variety of animals—a demon, in other words.
The result, in this case, is canonical [unlike Milton]: a father-mother with delusions of grandeur, but also his child as an infantile slave with daddy issues rising to become a great warrior renowned for his inherited, informed cruelty [which would play out in real life with Reinhard Heydrich being known as “the young, evil god of death”; source: Behind the Bastards, 2023]. Just as the Nazi, the Communist and the queer are crammed together in the same shadow zone of centrist monomyths, the likes of Cell and Broly [above] are unthinking, childlike slaves taught to seek revenge by an absentee father figure: the scientist and the rival warlord seeking revenge. There is no mother in their lives and they are immediately and incredibly fragile creations desperately seeking fulfillment through patricidal revenge, but also combat against a cycle of warriors who are equally flawed.

In other words, the show’s much ado about nothing is built within and around a shonen-level crisis of masculinity for said crisis: to show and prove their strength for their fathers [“Look what I can do!”]. Even if they kill or otherwise hate their fathers, these lost boys are useless without them and driven by the taught seeking of bloodshed to appease their inherited idea of vampiric superhumanity. Deprived of the parent, “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct” becomes, “If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends” [source]. Except the negotiation is made to a captive audience under duress, themselves trained to kill and fight as “less” genocidal variants of the Great Destroyer’s cataclysmic, hellish tantrums: Broly either killing his father in a self-destructive fit of rage or misled by Freiza to rise up out of Hell’s green fire like a loving and dutiful demonic son.

I originally decided when I wrote, “Dragon Ball Super: Broly – Is it Gothic?” that the film wasn’t Gothic, but I feel like I was overlooking the liminality of its situation:

Broly is a highly-weaponized survivor, not unlike older, murderous, Gothic villains. However, the similarities mostly stop there. He is not a slasher like Victor Frankenstein’s Creature was, or his various counterparts. While the Creature was physically hideous, Broly is, for all intents and purposes, handsome (a throwback to the likes of ‎Robert E. Howard’s titular Conan the Barbarian). The Creature was brilliant; while not an idiot, Broly isn’t a rocket scientist, either. There is parental strife, though. Remnants of the father are passed down the same bloodline, signified by the collar around Broly’s neck. Broly isn’t allowed to be himself, any more than Vegeta was under the yolk of Freiza. Is this like Frankenstein’s monster, or the xenomorph? Not quite. Unlike them, Broly isn’t simply made; he’s raised by his father to be violent. Except Paragus’ quest largely fails: Broly isn’t violent; his monstrous side is. And therein lies a clear divide. Broly is only a monster when driven to grief, when his father is killed. Furthermore, his own drama stems not from the bad parentage read about in Frankenstein (1818). Unlike the Creature, Broly is not begot from Promethean science, nor is he driven by petty revenge. He’s naturally strong, loves his father no matter what, and remains totally innocent post-abuse (thanks to amnesia)—effectively the opposite of the Creature [source].

I don’t think it’s a question of opposites altogether, though—with the Creature being similarly trapped by bad parentage to be violent according to his father as both his worst enemy and the one person he believed who could bring him salvation [even if it meant destroying him, a mistake that proved fatal for all those involved]. There are differences, but these variants aren’t mutually exclusive; they are agglutinative. Whether Broly kills Paragus outright or avenges him, Paragus was still a terrible father who—like Cus D’Amato with Mike Tyson—trained his son to do one thing: to fight for a perfidious, Faustian father figure’s benefit [or like Peter Weyland or Victor Frankenstein, created a robotic/cyborg slave entity to do his bidding]. This is bad parentage any way you slice it; i.e., “I’m your father, boy, and you’ll do as you’re told!”

 

[Artist, far-mid-left: Imbisibol; bottom-mid-left: Tonami Kanji]

The ghost of the tyrannical father is trapped somewhere in time, threatening like Skynet’s Herculean T-800/T-1000 to rip into the present out of another destroyed past-future: one possible future as a hauntological death omen. Amid this Gothic pastiche, the dead future is full of the imprecise echoes of the Modern Prometheus: test-tube babies, brains in jars, cyborgs, genetically engineered Supermen, children weaponized accidently or deliberately for or against their fathers by said fathers, and “retroactive abortions” of the animate-inanimate golem; i.e., the killing of the child by the father, Abraham-style, before he can grow old enough to seek revenge when coming home.

The idea of the archaic baby is quite popular in Toriyama’s work, but also seen in the work of similar Japanese artists riffing within the same East-meets-West mythic structure; i.e., Shigesato Itoi’s Giygas [exhibit 60e2], but also Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune’s Dr. Light/Wily as a conflation of the evil/grey-area/good German scientist [Operation Paperclips’ Wernher von Braun, Oppenheimer and Alfred Einstein, etc] as a pre-fascist/Catholicized scapegoat and anti-Semitic trope [note the purple and red, above, but also the cartoon skull codpiece] whose monstrous-feminine super soldier is both the vengeful ghost of the fascist child and that of Jewish revenge [re: “If you prick us do we not bleed? … And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?”] smashed together during the crossing space-time fabrics of half-real geopolitics: Protoman and Zero both being children of Cain as much as Sigma, our Zombie Caesar/Dracula [with his own flowing red cape] is; and Cell being an uncanny cross between the human and the insect, but also the goblin and the vampire as—like the xenomorph before him—a time-traveling, shape-shifting, undead menace composed of many different stigmas and biases, but also worship of non-Western/non-heteronormative power and resistance.

Just as with the Creature and Victor, the haunting by Marx is incessant; i.e., of Broly by Paragus or Cell by Dr. Gero’s “obey me!” mentality and Red Ribbon stigma [Toriyama’s neoliberal framing of anything “Red” as villainous to Japan’s post-Occupation emulation, above]. By extension, Red Scare is incessant, the son a pile of offal turned into Achilles [with a similar emotional temperament] or even Alucard by Lord Dracula in Netflix’ 2017 Castlevania. In turn, the father is symbolized through a gender-swap for a popular image of undeath normally reserved for Medusa, but also the dragon lord when slain: the disembodied head that can still talk into the “son’s” ear [placed in quotes due to the unnatural, unreliable relationship between the two; i.e., “I am your father!” as the tyrant’s plea made famous in the 20th century by Luke from Vader. It’s the Shadow of Pygmalion lurking within the shonen variant of the Cycle of Kings].

[artist, left and right: Bernie Wrightson]

In Frankenstein, the story is a murder-suicide, enacted by the zombie son shambling towards the father-mother in an act of childhood revenge the double-parent first dreams about before sculpting his child [re: Zeus pulling Metis from his forehead]. Alucard, by comparison, does not want to kill his father, Dracula, who had sex with Alucard’s mom to have a, by and large, natural birth tainted by blood libel and pre-fascist coding. But the reckoning felt during the fatal return to his childhood home [something he does repeatedly throughout the franchise] is always traumatic to Alucard. It’s also [as we shall see next and in the Demon Module] dangerous: sometimes the house wins.)

Onto “‘The Monomyth’ (opening and part zero)“!

---

Footnotes

[1] Mavis explained it frankly and well (from Volume One):

Mavis is someone I haven’t mentioned until now, but will mention more throughout this book. They have had countless experiences with rape (dissociation makes you forget or “block out” the trauma, which makes it hard to remember). According to Mavis, rape is awful, but it’s also over quick and you can dissociate (something that plurality allows for); also, according to Mavis, they’d rather experience rape than prolonged mental abuse, the latter which can go on for years like a war of menticidal attrition—including threats of rape amid diminishing returns of genuine care after the initial “love-bombing” phase (say nothing of the historical-material variants if you’re living in someone’s family estate, or equally bad, being shamed, neglected or ignored by what Melissa McEwan calls “rape apologia” or “rape ranking” amid rape culture, 2013).

Speaking from my own experiences, it’s the kind of thing you can’t block out. Over time, this abuse can be “buried alive”—hidden in plain sight all around a “cursed” location littered with markers of power, but also illusions-of-illusions (crypt narrative) of normality that broadcast imprecise ambivalence. It’s precisely these iffy phenomenological disturbances and partial disconnections/connections that one relates to in continuum; i.e., being a part of the space-in-question, the broken home that is nevertheless one’s poisoned wellspring and haunted library of nostalgic storybooks. Trauma lives in the body but also the chronotope as something the body absorbs things from—the haunted house as returned to, feeling uncannily familiar and alien, but also already-occupied by something close-at hand during uncertain, liminal, feudalized ownership […]: the fear of inheritance; i.e., Walpole’s idea of a “secret sin; [an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse” from The Mysterious Mother (1768). Except incest isn’t a “pure myth” relegated to Gothic fiction, but precisely the kind of thing experienced by Mavis, Cuwu and people like them (who extrafamilial predators will mark as having survived, and try to exploit them in the future; i.e., trauma lives inside you, but also follows you like a curse) [source].

As such, I couldn’t disassociate from Jadis’ emotional abuse because it, unlike physical and sexual abuse, is interactive by design (to such a degree as Jadis could torture me without being inside the room); i.e., emotional requires a victim to respond to something from the abuser as supplied to them linguo-materially. But as we’ll, I was able to rely on the stories of the past (Gothic novels and my education about them) to navigate my own abuse in much the same way.

[2] Persephone van der Waard’s “Coming out as Trans”: August 7th, 2022.

[3] Re: Trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird. Jadis saw in me what I didn’t see in myself: a dupe who they—someone I loved—would unironically prey upon using my vices to hypocritically enslave me while saying they weren’t about that. It was disastrously potent and effective, just the right mix of pleasure and pain, isolation and abused trust.

[4] The first chapters (what became Volume Three) concerned TERF-style abuses that expanded to other forms of tokenism and Man Box thinking under Capitalism; re: “prison sex” mentalities.

[5] His mutilated, black-and-red body and fetish outfit evokes H.R. Giger’s xenomorph; his torture chamber evokes Stan Winston’s atmospheric processor from Alien—i.e., in a psychosexual, domestically xenophobic manner akin to Satanic panic from the 1980s and Catholic-to-anti-Catholic dogma across the centuries.

[6] We don’t have to ascribe gender towards a desire for protection, but in Beethoven’s case, the film’s director is patently noting the absentee mother in relation to Beethoven’s broken home and domineering father. In my case, my father was never around and I turned to my mother for succor in the darkness of the night; likewise, I found the night to be immensely comforting as a small child, teenager and adult, going for nightly strolls surrounded by the whispering trees, moon and stars. In the words of Blue Öyster Cult, “I love the night”; i.e., a little trans vampire who felt safer in the shadows of the forest where I could hide, not indoors where my father could claim me.

[7] Re: “Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space.” More on this when we talk about Metroidvania per the monomyth; i.e., as a matter of scholarly history I have since contributed to many times since.

[8] From Goethe’s Egmont (1788), translating to “Rejoicing to heaven, grieving to death” or “heavenly joy, deadly sorrow” (source). It’s a mood.

[9] Another abuse I really hated was being told not to quote things or make connections to different, seemingly unrelated things. Jadis hated that and constantly chided and scolded me for wanting to share my Humanities education with them, quotes included. I can hear them now, whining, “What does that have to do with anything!” I have since covered this entire book in quotes as a big “fuck you” to them. “Suck it, Trebek!”

[10] Slut Girl is a surprisingly funny-yet-biting satire of ’90s Japanese office culture. In the 2003 book, Manga: The Complete Guide, Derek Guder writes, “The storylines are played up for comedic payoff, and you can’t help but laugh [as] the characters’ facial expressions liven up otherwise boring sex scenes.” Other critics like Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog praise the expressive translation of the English edition, and describe Sayoko in “Eroticism for the Masses” [2002] as a “tsuya/yoen” woman, a complex figure with “voluptuous charm” and “bewitching beauty” who deals with sexual assault by weaponizing her slutty charms against her historical attackers. Perper and Cornog describe Slut Girl as being a satire on modern life, especially the role of women in the workplace, and a “long-enduring glass ceiling.”

[11] The Romans loved their numerals, but these extended into a numbered ordering of the universe under the cartographic language of conquest, per Cartesian thought; i.e., a returning to the stillness of “antiquity” as something the Enlightenment couldn’t account for in its brutalizing of the world. We’re left, then, with numerical extensions of the prime mover as the patriarch, the skeleton king in the same Cycle thereof: the ghost of “Rome,” the Shadow of Pygmalion. Per the narrative of the crypt and its infernal concentric pattern (more on this when we look at Metroidvania), it’s history stuck on loop; i.e., in material pursuit of glory as undead, eating itself. Except, time is a circle; when it comes back around, its might ghosts will there, waiting for us. We’ll examine those next, in part three!

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)!

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

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

The Rememory of Personal Trauma, part one: Meeting Jadis; or, Playing with Dolls

“You really do have a beautiful body…”

—Jadis, complimenting me on Fetlife (2019)

Picking up from where “Bad Dreams, part two: Transforming Our Zombie Selves (opening and part zero)” left off…

Whereas part zero of “Personal Trauma” considered ludo-Gothic BDSM’s base mechanics—what it is, the process of exchange it achieves using Gothic poetics, and finally its dialectical-material qualities bucking the “pure psychoanalytic” side of Gothic scholarship (sorry, Barbara Creed, but Freud sucks)—part one shall now consider my meeting Jadis, but also how they liked to play with dolls as much as I did; i.e., as something to inspect and continue learning from, after the fact. I’ve had to divide it in two again because of its size, but will give the entire list, here, before we start.

Keeping with the sorts of devices this chapter has introduced so far into itself—zombies, apocalypses, trauma and rememory—we’ll explore various things about dolls and how to play with them.

Part one of “Meeting Jadis” (included in this post) will explore how dolls

• are often infused with trauma as taken and assembled from different players but also points in time
• poetically engaged with through modular elements ranging not just from undead, but demonic, animalistic and beyond(!)

Part two will consider

• the Gothic (monstrous) relationship between dolls, space-time and foreign-to-familiar evocations of either regarding undead sentiment as a coercive or liberatory device (feat. Alien and The Night House)
• the balancing of a paradox of cuteness that can be used to help or hinder workers depending on who’s using them and how
• the means to subvert a canonical absence of irony, mid-play (taking the opportunity to look at various cartoons with doll-like themes in them; e.g., Steven Universe, 2013 and Scott Pilgrim, 2010)

From stories like Hellraiser to The Night House, dolls classically evoke an out-of-the-closet sense of manipulation and control (Clive Barker being a gay man writing in the ’80s) tied to state abuse as undead; e.g., the lament configuration, above; i.e., enacted at an individual level between players of a given contract. The potential to camp is there, but it always sits next to genocide as a Faustian/Promethean matter of profit. That is, capital predicates on rape as a means of profit to deceive and destroy workers, generally through themselves. To that, doll-like disempowerment is a historically common sensation among women, or things otherwise treated as monstrous-feminine, thus harvested by capital in-between history as real and fabricated; i.e., like the heroine in The Night House, or really any Gothic story. The problem lies in those who, once abused, often go on to abuse others while acting abused themselves long after abuse unto them has become a thing of the past.

Furthermore, as we’ve already explored, you can’t really camp a holocaust as a matter of fact; it happened and it’s no laughing matter. All the same, holocausts are a matter of the past coming back around, which in a hauntological sense we are never fully beholden to or free of. As such, we camp our own survival (thus rape) within these structures and their historical-material loop, which is where dolls, rape play (and yes, Jadis) ultimately come in: as a matter of playing with and performing trauma as something to reify and interrogate on all the usual operatic stages coming out of the Gothic past; re: from Shakespeare to Lewis to us and our own idiosyncratic approaches!

So while we’re talking about rape, here, we’re doing so as much to camp how such things are normally handled. Things will get serious, to be sure, but all the same dolls are fun to play with—silly at times, but also an effective demonstration of what it takes, labor-wise, to exercise rememory through them:

(exhibit 37e1: Model: Harmony Corrupted; artists: Lydia, Persephone van der Waard and Jim32. Rebellion is quite literally a craft, one that involves dolls—or likenesses of people, which dolls essentially are—in some shape or form; e.g., action figures/athletes, but also sex dolls [or things akin to either expressed through sex work]. Whatever the exact type, dolls are homunculi; i.e., generally a smaller instance of a larger reference. More to the point, they take work to realize: planning and drafts, a model, and one or more artists working together to accomplish a shared vision’s theatrical production. The main idea is mine, in this case, but it’s still accomplished through teamwork that contributes to the primary demonstration of said idea and goal; i.e., universal worker liberation through iconoclastic art using Gothic media; re: illustrating mutual consent through informed labor exchanges that challenge Capitalist Realism.

To that, Revana is very much my character by design [as is Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, whose symbol I designed, next page]. She’s someone I can have stand in for myself, given that I cannot afford gender-affirming surgeries. Even so, she has been drawn by many different artists over the years. In this case, my usual paper doll approach became something to instruct others with; e.g., my friend, Lydia, illustrating a Drow character I later completed on my own and borrowed its wardrobe to dress Revana, Macbeth-style, in borrowed robes [above]. This isn’t someone forced to wear clothes made to objectify her against her will [re: “Borrowed Robes“]; she’s an extension of me, and Lydia helped with that. So did Jim32 and Harmony. All the world’s a stage and we, upon it, had and continue to have a part to play [from Volume Two, part one]:

I’ve often been accused by trans misogynists of devising this book as a wicked scheme: to “just” get laid. First off, while I love getting laid, surely there are far easier ways to have sex than writing a four-volume book series based on ten-plus years of research! Such persons seriously miss the point, then; i.e., my revisiting of old strategies of reflection to bond with new cuties I can teach important lessons (and they me) while we relate back and forth (which making art and having sex both consist of and combine).

The point in doing so is to build on something that liberates all parties, targeting the Superstructure with Gothic poetics mastered by a community of awakened workers building in perpetuity (always out of breath with more to say). This requires trust in good faith, not deception (which my critics seemed to have projected onto me regarding their own humanistic shortcomings): the valuing of that which Capitalism normally cheapens in pursuit of profit.

To this, a director is precisely fuck-all without a muse to blow up, and a model often needs a platform to work their magic. As such, Sex Positivity was and always will be a group effort, its total collective statement on/with artwork and sex work entirely impossible if not for all my muses, models, partners (currently friendly or antagonistic) and friends (sexual or platonic) working in concert. Nor is ours the first. Like the patchwork group of (mostly cis-het male) art nerds who made Alien, celebrating the monstrous-feminine in Gothic panache, my cuties and I don’t own each other while raising temples to our own dark gods. Instead, we’ve worked together to contribute to a diverse, inclusive labor of love that we can all feel proud of; i.e., a dark progeny begot from enthusiastic, heartfelt teamwork [source]. 

As we shall see, rebellions are fought by whores in the streets—the misfits of society that society normally exploits, in hauntological forms; re, Marx’ “Eighteenth Brumaire”: “And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language” [source]. Revana, then, was very much founded on older historical events and people—specifically the French Revolution and Joan of Arc—to weaponize these ghosts’ cryptomimesis in service to a possible world galvanized by their imperfect resurrections; i.e., unto labor and nature as normally enslaved by capital and Capitalist Realism canonizing these bugbears [so fearsome, rawr]:

[model and artist: Romantic Rose and Persephone van der Waard] 

Any information commonly spreads through the vector of sex; i.e., as something captivating to perform, hence occur at least partially through asexual, Gothic treatments of sexuality [force]: as a means of play but also code. A given cryptonymy shows and hides, but can be counted on as reliably magnetic to most audiences [even ace people]. To that, the elite are ok with rebellion as long as it stays in the past as something they can control; i.e., as dead, dogmatic, inert. But we, through our own games and BDSM-style performances, can smuggle the revolutionary past back into the present for workers; i.e., as doll-like undead; e.g., Harmony and I fomenting rebellion inside her pussy as a stand-in for the Romanovs’ doomed palace during a consent-non-consent ritual harboring a general attitude about figures like the Romanovs.

Even so, there remains a child-like element of fun and games to our wild playtime, saying “Off with their heads!” as I creampie Harmony to consummate an imaginary execution; or as Harmony puts it, “Humor makes for the best sex!” The trick, I think, is combining humor with genuine rebellious sentiment as a matter of grim historical violence; re: Matthew Lewis’ camping of canon in The Monk. As such, Gothic-Communist liberation is always made by camping old dead things/symbols that continue to live on trapped between the past and the present; e.g., mascots and political cartoons; i.e., so-called “graffiti-style” activism using the human body as a literal billboard. For workers—who are sexualized to varying degrees under capital, not just prostitutes—the camping process requires rememory to work; i.e., by including things normally left out that have to be tracked down and included after their initial omission.

More to the point, such voices come in handy when dealing with living abusers posing as friends; e.g., Jadis. As such, these abusers also have an accidental role in capital’s transformation away from itself; i.e., when their victims escape to camp whatever needs camping to help develop Gothic Communism. Indeed, Jadis’ abuse of me was instrumental in demonstrating what not to do when performing BDSM in good faith.)

To that, trauma is like a doll and its clothes: something to reassemble per rememory out of smaller zombie fragments to a larger undead whole that, often enough, operate modularly (on their own) as a matter of varying amounts of intersection. Dolls store trauma and pain, but also express it in a variety of ways that, as I shall demonstrate, articulate BDSM’s usual power exchanges through handy abstractions.

More on that, in a moment. For now, the reassembly is often as toys, but also toy collectors. My own preference—of exploring Gothicized trauma within my artistic output and daily life—both led Jadis to me, then helped me escape them through such means. In short, just as their room in Florida was full of colorful and alien sex toys (next page), I was to be the finest addition to their collection. Jadis was a proud neoliberal—the token witch over the rainbow seeing profit as holy and, by extension, rape and various endorsements of it through Gothic media inside the neoliberal period; e.g., Tool as rather rapey and yet, all the same, a starting point to my journey I can revisit to understand what I survived, postmortem: “This may hurt a little, but it’s something you’ll get used to.”

(artist: Adam Jones)

“Stinkfist” might sound esoteric and disturbing (and that’s the point). Then again, paradoxes allow for two (or more) things to be true at once, and frankly Tool wrote a baller song about something bad that I can enjoy and critique (re: “Facing Death” from Volume Two, part one, 2024). Furthermore, you gotta start somewhere, and Jadis gave out plenty of object lessons to weave into better things; i.e., by me, using my Aegis to subvert their poisonous worldview, hopefully inspiring other victims of rape to come forward regarding Capitalism’s usual monopolies, trifectas and ever-present Realism.

That being said, my rememory and subversion of Jadis initially required escaping their doll-like hold on me to begin with, which we shall now articulate as a historical matter—one of deep personal trauma enmeshed with my scholarship built on said trauma: the starting point of ludo-Gothic BDSM as eventually growing into itself. Turns out, escaping Jadis (and their raping of me) also means escaping the ghost of them as worryingly haunting me, afterwards; i.e.,  making me feel like a zombie, doll, what-have-you as still under their power long after I returned home—both as a larger house but also the smaller dollhouse whose earlier approach I calibrated from older pioneered forms and their speculative richness (re: Metroidvania, Gothic novels, the Labyrinth of Crete, etc).

We’ll discuss my escape from Jadis in part two of this subchapter. “Meeting Jadis” will predominantly talk about how I met them while going over some different qualities to dolls; i.e., how the two of us, as BDSM practitioners, used such devices to relate to each other during rape play as a complicated means of psychosexual healing.

However bad this play ultimately was (Jadis monopolized it to sate themselves by abusing me, removing the healing element in favor of mere predation), it would—like Cuwu after Jadis—still help to form the basis for what ludo-Gothic BDSM eventually turned into: dos and don’ts. Jadis and their toys predominantly consisted of the latter type, but they still weren’t completely stupid insofar as pleasure went:

I can help you change
Tired moments into pleasure
Say the word and we’ll be
Well upon our way (source: Genius).

There was something alien and powerful about them—a genuine terror they couldn’t fake by virtue of what they had survived. It colored the sex, intimating something awful that threatened to break loose at all times. True enough, it reflected in their masochistic, visually-intimidating sex toys:

(artist: Jadis)

“Meeting Jadis,” part one: Some General Points about Dolls and Playing with Them

[Cuwu] liked to be fucked in their sleep, a rather common form of consent-non-consent that is regularly discussed between even your more vanilla sex partners; i.e., “Sure you can fuck me before work. Just no anal and don’t cum in my hair!” The idea, as usual, is a test of trust and established boundaries where one proves one’s loyalty and trustworthiness by obeying the sub when no commands can actively be given. It’s worth noting that such behaviors are often popularized in vampire narratives, but also sex dolls and other motionless, “as dead” doll entities fetishized as naked and helpless, usually female sacrifices—during sex-positive scenarios, of course, but also in unironic demon sex scenarios enacted by fearful-fascinated white people enthralled during the ghost of the counterfeit […] In sex-positive cases, the reclamation of control during calculated-risk experiments is generally conducted by lying still and inviting someone to inflict pleasurable pain, tickling and/or erogenous sensations on you while in a traditional feminine, passive/theatrical compromising position (source).

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

There are many parts to dolls insofar as they represent us and how to play with ourselves and our trauma as undead—so many I’ve had to divide “Meeting Jadis” in two. To reiterate, part one of “Meeting Jadis” will explore how dolls

• are often infused with trauma as taken and assembled from different players but also points in time
• poetically engaged with through modular elements ranging not just from undead, but demonic, animalistic and beyond(!)

Dolls generally invoke a sense of nudity and paralysis; i.e., Gothic stories and live burial as a metaphor for psychosexual abuse but also liberation through the same devices. Prior to actually meeting Jadis and being teleported to their lair for later use (a seventeen-hour car ride, more like), I had been roleplaying Gothic scenarios on Fetlife to cope with Zeuhl leaving me (after using me for money and sex). Having already gone through numerous stints online, I felt thrilled but wanted more. I stayed “on the market,” happy to share myself with the world. “Put yourself out there,” my sister-in-law said. So I did, advertising Gothic roleplays on Fetlife, Kik and Reddit (taking Zeuhl’s advice, for better or worse).

Through sheer chance, Jadis found my advertisement on Fetlife in April 2019; they liked what they saw—savoring my roleplays but my naked body more. We were both weird, too, drawn by each other’s trauma in ways that manifested in the media we played with—in short, our pedagogy of the oppressed as toy-like, taboo, and nocturnal: “The sun can be fun, but I live to see those rays slip away!” This mutual attraction quickly led to Jadis confessing to me about how they saw me: “This guy’s weird as hell—I like it!” (to be honest, they were, too—eventually saying they wanted to give me their skeleton after they died, so I could put the bones into a sex doll and fuck it).

I was flattered, honestly. We were both trying something new, seeking a fresh start (and in the middle of Covid, no less). Right from said start, they wanted my sweet femboy ass (I was in the closet, at the time); I wanted their delicious orc cunt. So perhaps it wasn’t the newest approach, but it certainly clicked fast enough!

“Orc,” in this case, wasn’t even so much a figure of speech as it was a theatrical preference we both already had. The word, as popularized by Tolkien’s stories, originates from Beowulf, but also from the Old English word for demon: orc. Since Lord of the Rings, the orc has become synonymous with a kind of physically powerful, dark-skinned aggressor (a merger between the anti-Semitic goblin of medieval Europe and the racist flavor of the American zombie) to scare children (and adults) with. Jadis liked to present themselves as monstrous in this sense, but sexed up in ways that orcs (especially female orcs) often are in American kayfabe/monomythical stories under neoliberalism—videogames, but also tabletop games at large (which Tolkien helped inspire per his cartographic refrains; re: Volume Zero):

(exhibit 37e2: Artist: Bayard Wu. Wu’s art showcases the kinds of tough, savagely capable orc women that Jadis preferred. A maxim of theirs was that “heroic” women weren’t allowed to be ugly, so Jadis especially enjoyed seeing female characters that were either too tall, wide and/or brutish to meet conventional beauty standards; i.e., women of color outside of the West, closer to nature, the jungle, rape and death [the “voodoo” of the pre-colonial “zombie”]. “Strength,” for Jadis, was meted out through appropriative perceptions of tomboy force delivered by capable-looking female bodies of given races [an idea we’ll return to later in the book, when we talk about TERFs and popular media, in Volume Three]: monster girls who spat, farted, fucked and took spoils of war as sexual prizes [re: Jadis used to fart when they came during sex, which is cuter than it sounds]. In terms of our bedroom games, the consent-non-consent that Jadis and I engaged in frequently had me playing the femboy “war bride,” taken prisoner by the strong and capable war chief through captive/captor-style rape fantasies. “I’m keepin’ this one!” Jadis would playfully grunt while I topped them.

And honestly? We had a blast in that department; the abuse occurred when the captive fantasy became reality and I lost the ability to consent to it inside or outside the bedroom. Both of us became undead, in my eyes, albeit with them as the abuser and me as their disempowered, doll-like victim: the master and the slave.)

Jadis loved such things, extending the aesthetic to themselves; they frequently enhanced their wide, sturdy frame with tight black corsets and topped their crown with plastic demon horns. They also had jutting front teeth that looked somewhat tusk-like (their “orc teeth,” they called them). I loved this about them, which undoubtedly influenced my ability to give them the benefit of the doubt early on. It’d be incredibly easy to blame the disaster that followed on lust—”love is blind” and all that—but I certainly didn’t think so at the time. I felt prepared, ready to enjoy a non-abusive relationship for once. In truth, it’d be more accurate to say I was half-prepared—eyes open and educated, but still prone to manipulation by a skilled abuser who had their own baggage from childhood weighing on them.

First, I trusted Jadis not to actively deceive me, the two of us negotiating a BDSM agreement in advance: they would work and take care of me; I would cook, clean and fuck their brains out. We were very clear about that. Granted, it wasn’t foolproof, but no plan is. Furthermore, while there’s risk to any relationship, I certainly never consented to being abused (the two activities are mutually exclusive; i.e., you can’t consent to rape unless you camp it)!

Regardless, their breaking of our agreement didn’t make sense to me, as it would require me falling in love with someone who meant me harm. I admit, a part of me turned a blind eye when Jadis showed early warning signs; they talked the talk, but occasionally got a little too angry about small disagreements (reminding me of their abusive mother[1], insofar as their own survival mechanisms had become not just maladaptive, but predatory). These foreshadowed bigger fights in the days ahead—and the raping of me that would accompany these—but I wanted it to work so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I did so assuming that Jadis would meet my conviction with equal effort: as a team. And why not? We had an agreement and that, at least to me, was sacred.

(artist: Ezokz)

Second, I felt like someone who had learned from my own abusive past. I was already a veteran of traumatic events when Jadis and I met. Not only had I studied romanticized variants of trauma for my master’s degree (re: Metroidvania and the Gothic castle as calculated risk); I created them as an aspiring artist using erotic visual elements inspired from the kinds of artists and media I enjoyed (e.g., Mass Effect, above): pieces that help us, like dolls, reconnect to lost, forbidden things—often erotic pleasure, but also pain as indistinguishable from pleasure that verges on the harmful[2] in BDSM scenarios. Jadis liked this about me; i.e., that I was an erotic artist but also open-minded. It felt especially flattering because, apart from Zeuhl, I wasn’t used to compliments about myself and my curiosity towards taboo subjects like fetishes/sex dolls and torture. This was especially true regarding my artwork, which I always struggled with. The ego boost—especially from someone so powerful-looking and BDSM-inclined (the black knight)—well-and-truly hypnotized me.

All the same, this particular coping mechanism stemmed from an abusive past before Jadis entered the picture. I had survived a great number of difficult experiences besides my stepfather (who admittedly was the worst of the bunch): the abuses of a second uncle (more on him in a moment), grad school, Zeuhl leaving me for their future husband, and my brothers (who once duct-taped me to a flagpole during a thunderstorm, stuffed a sock in my mouth, and left me there for my mother to come and rescue). I was also bullied by other children, primarily neighborhood boys who quickly recognized my being different from them: femme, highly imaginative, prone to writing and keen to avoid violence if I could help it (though I did get into fights in the seventh grade; i.e., acting out while my stepfather was abusing me).

Regardless, Gothic stories—and their ambiguous, liminal ways of presenting traumatic experiences in highly sexual ways—have always resonated quite strongly with my own complex abuse. Art, for me, was the best way of expressing that abuse—something the following pages will try to illustrate in relation to Jadis and myself through dolls; i.e., they and their trauma as kept-in-check through BDSM, which lulled me into a false sense of security. I thought they used their artwork, toys and rape play as a means of recovery from past harm—quite the opposite; they used it to prey on me, but all the same, my escape from them required the same devices reclaimed by me (an ongoing process)!

Again, we’ll get to that, in part two. Following the forecast of escape, though, let’s articulate my own artwork and survived abuse as a) intertwined in ways that I would eventually rely upon to liberate myself; i.e., not a foreclosure, but a release from torment while still, even now, happening inside the dollhouse as a matter of acclimating to trauma: as something we can never fully escape from. This methodology and its acceptance took time to evolve, and as always, tends to point back to childhood; i.e., as something to return to and understand by reifying healthier forms.

In other words, dolls—similar to heroes—don’t just store cultural values or taboos (re: Volume Two, part one); they store trauma as something to interrogate, mid-play. We’ve set the table to unpack the idea; let’s do so now, then consider some modular qualities to dolls that often come into play when investigating trauma during calculated risk.

Although I was a sexually precocious child, my art hasn’t always been sexual or monstrous. Rather, it was a place for me to go when things got bad, but even this was inconsistent. Despite being abusive, for example, Dad was never really around when I was small; it was his family who abused me the most. Not only did they gaslight me and neglect my version of things; they blamed my mother for seeking divorce, calling her a “homewrecker” despite her refusal to cheat on a notoriously unfaithful husband (who slept with just about wife in town). Equally traumatic, the judge of the custody battle had mandated supervised visitations with my father that I thoroughly detested. They only made me a captive audience to my father’s side, who tried incessantly to convince me that Dad “was still my father” despite omitting his abuse of me during these talks.

To cope with my father and the subsequent divorce, I drew comics inspired by Bill Waterson and Jim Davis. These strips weren’t monstrous, nor did they accurately reflect my lived experiences; their style was basic and childlike. By the time my stepfather appeared, however, my creations had become far more detailed, erotic and subversive. I loved witches and Amazons and started making powerful, sexy characters like Glenn, Ileana or Revana (exhibit 37g1, below).

Originally inspired by Tolkien, Robert Howard and Lovecraft, but far more genderqueer than any of those men, these trans expressions of my trauma have only expanded over time—within my own work and when collaborating with other artists. Moreover, they were a monstrous-feminine, Amazonian extension of myself as having survived trauma that was also Amazonian; i.e., becoming transformed by the ordeal as zombie-like, but acquiring agency while acknowledging my trauma in doll-like ways. The more I reflected on Jadis and my other abusers, the more I changed through my artwork’s future dolls concerned with healing from past events:

(exhibit 37f: Artist, left: Sensaux; right: Persephone van der Waard. Virago the cyborg. Gothic stories—and their ambiguous, liminal ways of presenting experience—resonated quite strongly with my own complex abuse, but also my manner of processing said abuse through Gothic poetics; i.e., dolls.. I’ve always loved cyberpunk and its left-leaning queer elements for these purposes, effectively a retro-future stage filled with all manner of posthuman monsters and decaying things; i.e., in relation to the material world as controlled by the undefeatable powerful, but also the xenophilic ability to rebel against these powers by harnessing that creative potential for ourselves. That’s what Virago, for me, is all about. She’s someone I’d happily play as or with! Also, unlike Samus, she always saves the animals!)

(exhibit 37g1: Artist, top-left, bottom-left and bottom-middle: drawings of Revana, by Persephone van der Waard; top-middle: a collab of Revana, lines and base colors by Dcoda and background/final render by Persephone van der Waard; top-left: a collab of Revana, lines and colors by Adagadegelo and background/final render by Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right: Persephone van der Waard. All of these revisited drawings feature older characters from my teenage years, made visibly more colorful, queer and iconoclastic than they already were. Revana is my avatar [essentially a kind of doll, especially in videogames], specifically an expression of the person I’ve always to be: French, red-haired and shapely. The identity and its expression have evolved over time, of course, but this evolution has moved increasingly in a trans/gender-non-conforming [thus xenophilic] direction since my coming out of the closet. It’s what feels correct to me now and in hindsight, because it helps me process my own “undead” trauma. She’s literally a sex doll to embody all of that, but also play with it.)

My art was one of the first things Jadis noticed about me, their enjoyment of my portrayal of strong women making me a target to their sexual advances and later their abusing of me as their unwilling sex doll. Yet, these same, toy-like qualities had inadvertently “inoculated” me from Jadis. I did not know it, but I had slowly acquired the uncanny ability to understand Gothic media through my own life, whose stories and complicated, monstrous symbols I not only felt attracted to, but would be facing again, in future Gothic forms.

So when Jadis set their sights upon me, I wasn’t completely powerless, but I did (and do) handle trauma and abuse a particular way that makes me something of “an open book.” Simply put, I fawned, a people pleaser who—faced with unaddressed trauma in someone else—defaulted to appeasing my latest in a series of idols: through sex as a means of relating to such things as never truly closed-off.

For example, just as I admired and sided with Ripley hiding from the monster in Alien, a part of me loved the monster and found it strangely beautiful. Loaded with a holistic appreciation for two kinds of victims, I always thought of the company as the true villain: the one exploiting Ripley and the monster at the same time. This being said, it took me a very long time to articulate the dialectical-material framework regarding the corporate exploitation of workers, and even then was only able to by first identifying with the monster in a liminal, humanizing manner (which we will explore deeper in the primer when we look at demons).

This underlying desire speaks to Gothic Communism’s larger goal as I have increasingly envisioned it: wanting workers to reclaim our power by a) mastering our emotions through Gothic poetics, and b) surviving Capitalism in ways that can teach the world to escape and survive through the same outlets; i.e., our trauma as something to historically-materially examine, but also recreate in highly subversive ways that reduce alienation and exploitation through campy doubles thereof: dolls, which reclaim trauma by camping it (often rape) as a matter of ludo-Gothic BDSM.

As such, any desire I felt to reshape the material world—while living with Jadis during Covid—was already shaped by past abuse I had suffered at the hands of family members living in the same world. In fact, much of the abuse wasn’t even rooted in my father’s side; it actually came from my mother’s.

We’ve discussed some of this in Volume One, but there’s an element I have yet to mention. Mom was the eldest of three siblings, Dave being the youngest and the middle child—Mom’s other brother (who I’ll call Iago)—being the source of a great deal of trauma after I was an adult. In the 2010s, Iago bankrupted the family business and blamed it entirely on all of us. I didn’t know it at the time, but Iago’s abuse had slowly turned me Communist (a process that materialized through my second bid at university and my graduate/postgraduate work). Though I am always painfully honest with new partners, I didn’t mention Iago’s abuse to Jadis when we met. Partly I was still figuring it out; frankly I also thought worker rights were a universal concern and Jadis would simply “get it,” should the conversation ever come up. Alas, they did not share my sympathies (though the extent to which they and I disagreed only became clear after I was living in Florida for many months).

(exhibit 37g2a: Artists: Leo and Diane Dillion. Queen Jadis is C.S. Lewis’ strict mommy dom from The Magician’s Nephew [1955]. She’s, in her own sense, like a killer doll [and cautionary pre-fascist tale against matriarchal authority by Lewis]. Relegated to the desolate city of Charn after the Deplorable Word is spoken, our giantess queen is frozen in her seat. Completely by accident, the children heroes of the story bring her back to life, where—once again animate and mobile—Jadis immediately begins to move around and make trouble. Fun fact: Jadis is the name I gave both to my ex in Florida, but also the golden orbweaver spider living outside our home [to which I realize that I have compared my ex, Jadis, to a spider more than once].)

Truth be told, Jadis was a self-confessed neoliberal who actually worshipped the likes of J. K. Rowling or Bill Gates; i.e., to such a point that critiquing either person led to Jadis resenting me more and more (with them liking to pull rank, reminding me that they knew more about such things than I did—not because they studied them more, but because they had money and wanted me to automatically agree with them “or else”).

Granted, this didn’t seem to matter as much at first or even announce itself. Indeed, when Jadis and I crossed paths, they had access to all of me, thus all of my trauma and all of my interests (doll-like or not). We didn’t talk about politics; we talked about sex, often through toys. Jadis knew I was an erotic artist and patroned me for my work; I was intrigued by their BDSM know-how and extensive sex toy collection, which seemed so monstrous yet so colorful. Most important to me was how Jadis seemed to appreciate that I was into them and they very much wanted to fuck, but I wasn’t careful enough before agreeing to their insidious offers of “protection.” Simply put, I rebounded, to such a perilous degree that I ignored several red flags while being their slutty girlfriend:

(exhibit 37g2b:artist: EXGA. Our roles of power exchange included Jadis topping me from the bottom and me bottoming them from the top. They prized me for my big soft princess butt, and I prized them for their big soft orc body. There was a shared sense of whose turn it was to be the object of pursuit, the dominator and the “victim.” And by God, it was fun!)

It’s not so mysterious; I was poor and Jadis had means, but I had a big booty they liked in ways that let me gender conform less. Anyone acting like these aren’t potent (and common) means of negotiation is alienated from such means, methods and opportunities: “rape” and monstrous, doll-like sex (above) as a profound, monstrous-feminine dialog to work things out using what we got, and Jadis and I had plenty that fit together well/temporarily held our undivided attention: the orc chiefess and her (at the time) twink war bride.

At first, it melted into a sweet puddle, then an illusion that kept me trapped, but the feelings of genuine harmful imprisonment (and complaints) came later. Not only did I desperately want adventure by going to Florida as my mother once did; my grandparents gave me away to Jadis trusting Jadis to care for their grandchild as one would a bride. I had gotten my wish and was off see to a new world! Alas, once I was living under Jadis’ roof, things quickly changed. My imaginative responses—so useful to interpreting my own trauma—only blushed at Jadis’ numerous threats, making me an easy target for lengthier unironic tortures.

All the same, these tortures occurred through toy-like aspects of zombies that we shall now reclaim in hindsight, per ludo-Gothic BDSM. That is, the presence of cathartic play and ironic “tortures” can yield a variety of sex-positive rememories. These include the dildo, but also the doll of two basic kinds: the doll-like immobile persona (the Kafka-esque “Odradek”) and the golem-esque mobile variant (the performer of/with the animated-inanimate); as well as the undead/demonic flavor of such a being—e.g., Victor’s Creature from Frankenstein. Such examples are often tied to hypercanonical fiction like the Wizard of Oz under Pax Americana, so I’ve provided an example of each for your consideration: the monster cock/doll piece, the undead/demonic doll as a performance, and the blank object as sex-doll fetish being something to take apart as a victim might their own troubled condition; i.e., doing so to find release through disassembly and annihilation as not always having irony but certainly allowing for it.

We’ll explore these now, then move onto the anisotropic qualities, cuteness and ludic complexity of such devices, in part two. However, before these exhibits even unfold, please bear in mind several things:

First, that the doll evokes the language of “death’s counterfeit,” such as a drugged or magical sleep but also sleep sex (exhibit 11b2) as something to ply with using mixed metaphors that have a vampiric vibe if not outright coding: the feeding on the “victim’s” essence—including their sexual energies but also their sanity and health—by “traumatizing” them as they literally sleep (or pretend to; i.e., to avoid getting harmed or—in ironic cases—to play along during “somno”; re: Cuwu). Rape play is complicated, and generally concerns catharsis and trauma occupying the same spaces of play as a rememory-style means of return in order to heal versus escaping through predation dressed up as “healing.”

Second, as Jadis was doll-like and loved toys—especially toys of an undead/monstrous variety like we previously alluded to—they were largely what caught my interest and they mine, thus are things we must reclaim from their abuse of me in hindsight; i.e., in future doll-like, undead houses and excursions that piqued their interest (and taste buds) to begin with:

(exhibit 38a: Artist, top-left: SXXY; top-right: unknown, source; bottom-left: Real Sex Love Doll; bottom-right: unknown. First, the dildo/monster cock as undead/demonic but also fabricated like a doll’s would be. Xenophilic cocks take many different forms, generally as anthropomorphic cocks that humanize the owner but also present them as sexual potent to unequal degrees; i.e., stronger than the person they’re topping and fearsome in their appearance. It’s rape play, which can play out in sex-coercive or sex-positive forms [we’ll unpack these even more in Volume Three, when we discuss subverting Demon BDSM and bad play in countercultural Gothic performance art].)

(exhibit 38b1: Model and artist: Venusinaries and Persephone van der Waard. Second, the immobile/mobile effigy wherein the performer acts as an undead doll; i.e., that which was alive, then dead, then alive again [or somewhere in between].

Rape is like a bad dream imparting awful instruction and exchange. Whereas canonical zombies personify the state of exception, mid-harvest, as decayed by still abusing the monstrous-feminine inside contested territories thereof, iconoclastic iterations can humanize the zombie; i.e., as doll-like to varying sex-positive degrees: a feeling of rotten flesh/trauma-in-flesh whose “necrophilic/necrophagic” roleplay works as giver or receiver [the zombie, vampire, and/or ghost as Destroyer or “victim” to varying degrees of cannibalistic topping and catching that can subvert traditional delivery routes and destinations of power]! It has a tremendously popular [and populous] theatrical history to it; i.e., camping the Nazi; e.g., Kain’s barb from Blood Omen: “But I am dead!” which he gives out before beheading his enemy and declaring him dead [source: Game Cinematics’ “Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen – Story (All Cutscenes),” 2017; timestamp: 16:10]. Checkmate, as they say.

[source, right: ibid.; left, bottom: Capsule Computers]

More to the point, such rapacious, psychosexual theatre exposes privileged workers with their own expendability during state crisis; i.e., in ways that, just as often, yield funny internalized debates; e.g., Team Four Stars’ Piccolo deciding whether he should block Nappa’s attack or pick Gohan up and throw him out of the way or not, until our resident green alien pays the price for his silly hesitation [“Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Episode 9,” 2009; timestamp: 3:59]. Conversely there are benefits to not dodging should one choose and provided the context is right for it; i.e., someone feeling undead in ways that seek out a healthy form of ludo-Gothic BDSM/psychosexual kayfabe: when someone “throws it” at you.

In short and in truth, death and rape are extremely funny if you camp them through rememory as something you’ve actually survived [and death, rape and monsters go together with theatre like pussies and cocks, swords and sheaths, etc]! Furthermore, “rape” can be healing as well—can paradoxically feel good with the right demon lover taking you to that extra special edge, mid-calculated risk. To that, though, beware anyone monopolizing it for the state! Whatever the arrangement of the undead dynamic of giving/receiving pain and eating essence, they help us confront our own mortality as something to fearfully embrace the human side of trauma; i.e., that workers are made out of flesh and blood, organs that can be harvested and weaponized, mid-apocalypse.

Cops and victims. As I demonstrate following my own rape, rebellious zombies start to seek out rape with varying degrees of irony as something to camp canon with, versus Man Box agents classically doing it to rape women sans irony and calling it “art”:

The “sweet spot,” I think, is to maintain a steady resistance towards the state’s coercions without defanging the critical power of the zombie, itself [or any doll, for that matter]. However, liminalities can intersect, swinging the performance away from straight-up exploitation and more towards a kind of playful “slut reclamation,” carefully projected onto the zombie persona as a mutually consensual “necrophilia”; i.e., with bodies that aren’t dead, but perceived as dead to express their present struggles under the status quo; e.g., Rosemary’s Baby [above]. There’s a presence of rape that speaks to the usual abusers against the usual victims having appetites that, in times of heightened control, become confused but also monstrous as a matter of duality-in-action.

As such, iconoclastic “necrophilia” [sex with “dolls”] pointedly reverses the process of abjection in defense of workers reclaiming their ability to express mutual consent through Gothic language: surviving rape; i.e., the inanimate as reanimated to convey the performer’s pedagogy of the oppressed through undead, made-up markers of trauma [or class envy/revenge from the bigoted, conservative mindset] staining the surface of their doll-like persona green [or some-such color]. Dolls, like actors, can be painted, to which “greenface” sits adjacent to blackface as a racial symbol [vaudeville] but one allows for different forms of “black” [as in, “non-white” vis-à-vis the colony binary] during apocalyptic discourse. Although race is generally involved under settler-colonialism, these go beyond race alone; i.e., stigma, bias, envy and so on; e.g., non-English, low-class, foreign, unmarried, homosexual, and stigma animal [the Drow, exhibit 41b]. Painted and clothed, dolls store trauma as a means of expressing its usual giving and receiving during state crisis, decay and moral panic: a witch hunt, which is basically what The Wizard of Oz is, below.)

(exhibit 38b2: Artist, bottom-left: Cherry-Gig; right: J. Scott Campbell. Third, the immobile/mobile effigy whereupon the performer is a demonic doll; i.e., one whose existence is thrown into question by virtue of having never been alive on the earthly plane [Kafka’s “Odradek” from “The Cares of a Family Man,” 1914, being a famous/generative example] but instead animated or summoned by magic, or made by mad science.

However, there is crossover with certain kinds of undead; i.e., the ghost in its most viral, inhuman forms and the composite as a kind of reanimated golem made from inanimate things, including human tissue, animal parts, and various inorganic or at least non-animal things [straw, above]. Unlike dolls in general, sex dolls play with notions of dehumanization and control in sexualized spheres: the thing you can dress, manipulate, destroy or fuck.

For example, Ti West’s 2022 Pearl portrays a phallic woman at least partially conditioned to seek coercive control with an immobile partner—i.e., as an Elektra-esque virago railing against her patriarchal mother [a matriarch acting like a man in the absence of the heroine’s paralyzed father]. Conditioned thus, Pearl rapes a double of her own comatose father in a cornfield [evocations of the strawman effigy of the Pagan harvest]. Yet, the sex doll in ritualistic terms represents a submitting of one’s agency within a negotiated inequality between one human by themselves, or two in cahoots; i.e., the sub was never alive, thus cannot be harmed, or is alive but trusts the other party to not harm them while both are seeking catharsis through the fetishized embodiment, or wearing of, various shells. These can be the virgin/whore or damsel/demon as things to wear, thus interrogate the feeling of ontological “claustrophobia” while being trapped inside and forced to act a particular way for one’s ritualized captor. The critique becomes a meta commentary performed in real-time, between the fiction and the rules of a theatrical magic circle: where the “rape” game takes place.

[artist: Blxxd Bunny]

Keeping this flexible theatricality in mind, Bunny’s “scarecrow” sex doll is aesthetically and performatively similar to Pearl’s dance partner as never-having-been-alive, minus the abject harm and xenophobia Pearl the puppeteer intimates [evoking the miracle of Christ’s resurrection and Milton’s narcissistic Eve kissing her own reflection]. The general process, then—while potentially connected to real-life trauma [rape while the victim is asleep, a common historical occurrence for women]—isn’t an automatic extension of it as a premeditation towards harming others in the future; for Bunny it’s a healing ritual, in which they can explore the mechanisms of control within a single-person, consent-non-consent ritual: the sleeping “boyfriend” being toyed with by a curious “doll,” both of them “Barbie-like” in different ways.

In other words, the immobile doll was never alive like a corpse was or a taxidermized animal, thus has not been reduced to a permanent lobotomized state by the dominant; it’s no different than a dildo in that respect. Bunny’s particular theatre of nudism invokes such a persona within a stuffed “scarecrow” for them—a doll-like cutie, themselves [their body sculpted and lovely like a doll’s]—to play within, applying voyeuristic peril and giddy exhibitionism as floating around inside the general meta of the screen: the nerdy debutante converging with the whore/demon archetype as “letting her hair down” for the viewer of the exchange to look upon with curiosity and delight.

Simply put, it’s a peep show but it needn’t be divorced from actual jouissance for the performer! Bunny is ace, but absolutely loves their work [and plays with more than just literal dolls].)

(exhibit 38b3: Fourth, the actual sex doll object, divorced from undeath/demonic magic but used to convey the aesthetics of either type. Whether immobile or mobile, the theatrical exhibition of doll theatre takes physical work, but also “lights, camera, action!” It’s hard work to direct a body physically and without harm, but also to manipulate a literal, never-alive doll physically [or to act like one under the hot camera lights; e.g., the Technicolor stage lights for The Wizard of Oz or Peeping Tom, etc]. Personally I always liked the idea of exhibiting these things in a similar sense to those movies, but also my friend Bunny’s adventures. Although my expertise lies more in directing a model long-distance, the vampire cloak draped over my sex doll [Jessamine, above] has been worn by real people that I’ve fucked and filmed: Cuwu and Jadis, in particular.

For me, control as a “service top” is the optimal approach; i.e., to subvert the idea of the dominator as forceful, proving myself as thoroughly unlike my abusive father or exes while still enjoying the volunteer “sacrifice” offering all of themselves to me—for a moment, not forever!

Unlike the cliché sacrifice, then, no harm is taking place. This can apply to literal sex dolls designed for sex [with stuffed pillows or replicas meant for companionship] but also sexual partners whose surface image is sexualized to serve a doll-like function inside an ironic BDSM scheme; i.e., meant to heal one-or-both parties through a complicated, informed “dance.” Within this dance as ludo-Gothic BDSM, the image of the Pagan/witch priestess [and other aspects of prestige, power and vulnerability, etc] can be worn upon the body of the doll or the naked, exposed, dollish likeness of a person: the magical “scarecrow” coming alive and dancing with the girl in the cornfield [again, evoking the Pagan harvest and older magics as not intrinsically harmful, but certainly coded as “evil” under state influence].)

At first, Jadis and I vibed through dolls, and all seemed fine; I accepted them for their toys and they accepted me for mine (eagerly asking me to fuck my own sex doll as they used their own toys on themselves). However, the longer I lived with Jadis, the more unironically monstrous (and doll-like)we both felt in my esteem—they the master and I their pathetic slave. Jadis’ torturous abuses not only became harder to ignore; they occurred inside a liminal position wrought with fetishized violence—i.e., they were my first experience with emotional violence of a sexualized flavor in my own life: rape. It felt weirdly uncanny—familiar but alien in ways I easily recognized from second-hand accounts or popular stories, but also second-guessed at every turn: “Am I being raped?”

Faced with that abominable question, I started to feel undead in relation to what I conceived the undead to be, albeit in confused ways: dissected and studied, fascinating odd sensations of division and confrontation expressed in some of my favorite childhood stories. It was the only thing I had to compare my abuse to.

This stresses another key aspect to dolls: feeling undead as a nostalgic means of playing with personal trauma through the rememory process; i.e., in ways that abusers manipulate, but which we can reclaim through our own arguments, using ludo-Gothic BDSM (egregores, simulacra, homunculi, etc, of course being poetic lenses, but play constituting its own argumentation for or against workers facing trauma: as something to play with). I’d like to unpack these undead feelings and practices, next, then proceed through the rest of our list about dolls and their undead ludic qualities; re: playing with dolls something I employed to eventually escape Jadis’ physical clutches.

Onto “‘Meeting Jadis,’ part two: One Foot out the Door; or, Playing with Dolls to Express One’s Feeling Undead (feat. Alien, The Night House, Steven Universe and more)“!

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Footnotes

[1] To deflect my observations, Jadis would always cry if I mentioned their mother but especially if I compared Jadis to their mother. Their tears always had the desired effect, too: back off, change the subject. They would cry and I would lose heart.

[2] Under such conditions, “power” can very quickly find itself in quotes; i.e., false power as either a matter of predation on obedience by a predatory actor (with BDSM classically inverted to send power away from workers, which ludo-Gothic BDSM aims to reverse through the same elements of play and poetic devices being anisotropically played with; re: reversing abjection).

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)!

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

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

Bad Dreams, part two: Transforming Our Zombie Selves (and Our War-like, Rapacious Toys) by Reflecting on the Wider World through the Rememory of Personal Trauma (feat. Jadis)

My room is full of toys and things
But filled with nothing new
Just me and Clare alone in this
Enchanted, placid room

—Coburn Pharr; “Never, Never Land,” on Annihilator’s Never, Never Land (1990)

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Picking up from where “‘The Roots of Trauma, part two: Healing through ‘Rape’” left off…

As we concluded at the end of part one, the zombie isn’t merely a braindead, rotting corpse or literal infection; it’s an undead presence that rises from the grave to traumatically feed inside an expanded state of exception within the home (the Imperial Core): during rape play as something to camp profit with (catharsis always being a matter of return to painful things). While this process is anisotropic, it canonically denotes continuous state violence (often sanctioned theft, rape and murder but also division; e.g., the Middle-Passage diaspora and Jim Crow segregation) towards or from particular groups over time: animals, people of color, and Pagans, versus qualities of these groups fed into fearful colonizer attitudes that are guilty of, or feeling guilty about, former colonial acts, but also current xenophobic abuse happening regularly under the same-old system—what LukHash might call, in the spirit of “Ozymandias,” a “Museum of Failed Efforts” (2019); i.e., a dollhouse to play around inside. As we shall see with Jadis (who this subchapter is entirely dedicated to), such places are made from old abusive symbols; i.e., of personal trauma, which ludo-Gothic BDSM camps through rememory in order to subvert their historical freight as normally being dogmatic, thus menticidal.

From Volume Two, part one, I write, “Capital relies on dogma as something to internalize and serve profit on all registers—on and offstage, at home and abroad, by white male predators” (source). This extends to token agents (women acting like men, fags acting like straight people, etc), which is precisely what Jadis is and how they acted towards me. Moreover, harmful mentalities like theirs are informed by popular media such as videogames, which victims escape into only to be bombarded with the very ideas that drive their abusers at home and abroad. The effect is often one of recruitment (cops or victims). I continue,

Regarding videogames as a neoliberal form of dogma, from the early ’80s to the end of the Cold War and beyond, you went from public entertainment devices (arcades) that had a bunch of mostly young male clients cycling through them like a pimped-out sex worker… to the 1983 Atari Crash and subsequent 1985 smash-hit success of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. encouraging the widespread sale of videogames in the Gothic’s usual haunt: among the middle class. Except this time, the elite wanted in through ways that didn’t exist during the Neo-Gothic revival: televisions as personal property that could funnel in their burgeoning ideology through the disguise of (expensive and highly recursive) games.

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

In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual (ibid.).

Whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies, falsehoods, and double standards; e.g., speedrunning as white, male and cis-het extending to streaming platform Kick’s Nazi pedophile problem, but also streamers like Dr. Disrespect[1] protected by the system like black penitents in an Ann Radcliffe novel (more on streamers when we look at weird canonical nerds like Caleb Hart, Ian Kochinski and Man Box culture, in Volume Three). Due to the euthanasia effect, token agents enjoy similar-if-temporary protections for as long as capital holds up to the degree that they will be permitted; e.g., J.K. Rowling or Hilary Clinton; i.e., two TERF Jadis respected for being powerful women in a man’s world, yet utterly refused to criticize them for their transphobic beliefs and hawkish attitudes (all tokens are closeted to some degree). In doing so, Jadis became the first TERF (and SWERF) I experienced, first-hand.

When you’re playing with rape, then (as we shall be doing with Jadis, post hoc), you must remember you’re playing with power as something to revisit and alter for workers’ benefits, aggregating on their behalf while facing the system aggregating self-righteously against you; i.e., the state employing DARVO and obfuscation in defense of profit, but also literally killing the whistleblower (e.g., Boeing; Second Thought’s “We All Know It’s Happening,” 2024) while saying “thinking of the women and children.” Token enforcers like Jadis will literally do such things in small; re: on people like me, who they segregation and brutalize through bad BDSM.

Simply put, profit defends itself, thus rape, through violence and lies, but also masks, costumes, performative roles, etc; i.e., per my PhD’s thesis statement, Capitalism sexualizes everything—doing so by tokenizing outwards through a rightwards radicalization that polices and harvests labor through nature-as-monstrous-feminine. In turn, those touched by trauma tend to advertise it (that “goth” look) as something to play with. This includes playing with our abusers through our own cryptonymy—our masks and costumes, boundaries and barriers, our ludo-Gothic BDSM!

Volume Three shall discuss the praxis of this—of the appreciative irony of Gothic counterculture during demon BDSM (which, in hindsight, is more-or-less synonymous with ludo-Gothic forms). Part two of “Bad Dreams” will now consider returning nakedly to such sites of exchange relative to childhood abuse chasing us into the future; i.e., to achieve a paradoxical state of undead healing and rememory through ourselves as toy-like, and our toys as like us: oscillating between alive and unalive in ways that only humans and ludo-Gothic BDSM can. Eventually we can reach a post-scarcity world, but in the interim, trauma will remain; keeping with paradoxes, we must evoke the threat during liminal expression, or the healing process generally won’t work (what Gothic poetics like to refer to as “facing one’s past”). For me, that means evoking Jadis as someone who genuinely excited me:

(artist: Jadis)

Note: This section will be rather intense, insofar as it explores some of the most painful moments of my adult life. But such honesty is important; it’s just not easy to recollect without echoes of pain, of trauma—a frisson, if you will. It also, in this case, involves someone very real and with means (daddy’s “fuck you” money).

To that, I’m choosing to out my abuser to the degree that I’m currently comfortable. I don’t want to show their face any more than I have (re: their portrait, painted by me). The above photo merely demonstrates their being a real person; i.e., someone who raped me in the past per my generalized, expanded definition of the word (re: someone who disempowered me with the specific intent to cause extensive and prolonged emotional, psychosexual harm). I would ask my readers to leave Jadis alone—not for their sake, but mine; litigation is the luxury of those with money, which I do not have, and while what I saw is true, much of it would be difficult-if-not-impossible to prove in a court of law (as rape generally is). Instead, I will let this book speak for me, chronicling what I survived as the Gothic does: as a castle-narrative to explore as composed of space and time (re: the chronotope). —Perse

(exhibit 37c1a: Source; a Fetlife conversation between Jadis and I, when we first met. It merely establishes our similar taste in media—that we met shortly after I put up a forum post looking for Gothic roleplayers on the site. It was during the middle of the Pandemic, and they were going through a divorce [which they only finalized after we were living together—more on that in a bit]. Intrigued by my advertisement, they responded. We didn’t end up roleplaying much. Instead, we sexted for five weeks straight, after which I moved in with them. Shortly after that, they started abusing me for sex, but also cooking, cleaning and general housework; i.e., women’s work as a means of all of the above.)

The opening to this subchapter—part zero, “Jadis’ Dollhouse” (included in this post)—covers some basic points about personal trauma and rememory as a liminal, radicalizing process. After that, we two further subdivisions concern myself as the test subject for what ultimately crystalized into ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., my further radicalization while surviving Jadis (who, traumatized themselves, certainly advertised their penchant for doll-like fictions, above):

• Part one, “Meeting Jadis“: Explores how Jadis and I met—indeed, were attracted by our mutual weirdness and trauma—and related to each other through toys that were equally sexy and weird. Divides in two halves, which explore further ludo-Gothic qualities to dolls useful during BDSM, which I had to reclaim from Jadis to eventually escape them and write this book with/about.
• Part two, “Escaping Jadis“: Articulates my escape from my abuser, detailing the tremendous feelings I felt at the time (and which shaped my scholarly and artistic work afterwards, including ludo-Gothic BDSM).

In short, ludo-Gothic BDSM happened through painful reflection regarding my childhood, but also its consequences relaid in Gothic language, theory and experience; i.e., writing these portions about Jadis and I, thinking about them, then writing the three books that came after but which I published before the Jadis elements, which I’m returning to now (as a Gothic heroine would: starting with letters that lead me back to a site of decayed abuse inside my mind, my dreams, my work as haunted by Jadis).

All this being said, I couldn’t have formulated my arguments without trying to find love, getting hurt, and struggling to heal afterwards by assembling and weighing everything as a profound and complicated object lesson. Things come home to roost as ghosts of themselves, and generally overlap with redoublings thereof; i.e., Harmony’s “castle” vs Jadis’ as facing off when I go back to a shared chronotope: writing the Jadis pages before meeting Harmony to then mutually act out these scenes again to regain power for us both. As such, these specific passages (and much of the rest of the Monster Modules) will seem somewhat dated compared to the opening chapter and everything we’ve previously examined having come afterwards.

Except, that’s precisely the point: a revival, for which I return to older passages to better understand how I conceived ideas I might otherwise take for granted. We’re literally conducting rememory by looking at my recollections of/reflections on the past as aged, undead; i.e., of a previous zombie moment in time to dig up and play with again through holistic expression: as a matter of recursive revisitation and regeneration, always falling apart and out-of-point but coming together by virtue of transformation into something better. Said moments aren’t something I want to change, here, but stick to; i.e., as things to play out by letting you (as much as me) play with it yourselves, relatively unaltered: the ghost of my past abuse, whispering of Jadis’ abuse of me, post-seduction (with songs like Emily Portman’s 2010 “Two Sisters,” below):

And yonder sits my sister the queen
Oleander yolling
She drownèd me in the cold, cold stream
Down in the waters rolling (source: Genius).

Changing them too much, and in effect their tune, kind of defeats the point, I would think. There will be revisions and at times playful, even cheeky editions to make things more bearable than they might be completely unfiltered, just not substantial ones that transform/camp anything to an unrecognizable degree. This is my rape we’re talking about and I don’t want to disguise that. Instead, I’ll let the things that befell me haunt you amid my usual academic architecture and earthly variables reenacting older dooms than mine tied to the same system. That smaller princess Jadis tortured under the guise of martyred virtue? Like all the dead, she’s still there in the dark, waiting for you…

Before we get to Jadis and my ghost inside the dollhouse, though, let’s go over some of these broad-but-important ideas I mentioned that make up said house (and its dolls)…

The Rememory of Personal Trauma, part zero: Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse, the Birthplace of Ludo-Gothic BDSM; Some Points about Dolls

“Welcome home, Michael!”

—Laurie Strode, to Michael Myers, Halloween (2018)

I met Jadis in April 2019, several years into my postgraduate work. While their abuse certainly catalyzed my creating of ludo-Gothic BDSM, the process was admittedly already underway by the time we crossed paths. Yes, the word first appeared after our separation—in Volume Zero, October 8th, 2023—but I had already been flirting with the idea for nearly several years[2] before meeting Jadis (my grad work started in 2017 and I published my master’s thesis, December 2018); not to mention, I had conceptualized the giving of rings and collars as a kind of fantastical BDSM in my own fiction writing as early as high school, which was influenced by Tolkien (from Volume One):

• Madoff concludes, “The idea of gothic ancestry endured because it was useful,” and I’m inclined to agree. Except I would extend this utility to Gothic Communism as something to fashion through the same myths of ancestry found in the usual haunts; i.e., mirroring the unspoken but still advertised material conditions of Pax Americana that Tolkien’s “empire where the sun never sets” was suspiciously covered in shadows and bathed in blood. To touch on those, you often have to go somewhere else when formulating your own critiques (the monsters, psychosexual predicaments, and lairs of various kinds). This can seem purely ahistorical, but generally the goals of any historical play (re: Shakespeare) or historical Gothic novel (re: Bakhtin’s chronotope) utilizes some degree of invention and informative chaos (re: Aguirre’s geometries of terror) amid the displacement and disassociation: crafting your own histories and bloodlines that reverse the process of abjection in a very Gothic way—through the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the fake blood of Gothic horror for sex-positive reasons made in the spirit of fun, but also interrogating trauma by camping it. / This doesn’t take an Oxford scholar. For example, my older brother once invented his own Eastern European leader for a third-grade assignment and called him “Mr. Kazakhstan” while using a picture of Stalin; despite how this would have been right around the fall of the Soviet Union, my brother’s teacher didn’t recognize the photo and gave him an A+ (angering my mother to no end). Keeping in line with the same family tradition, and informed by my mother’s bringing of Russian and Eastern European history home to us kids, I wrote my own fantasy story in the early 2000s where an incestuous tyrant called Bane (the name comes from Weaponlord, 1995, not Batman) forces his half-sister, Sigourney, and half-brothers to wear magic rings that keep them bound to the family castle. When Sigourney cuts off her finger and tries to run, her half-brother forces her to wear a collar instead [below]. Over time, she gives birth to Bane’s rape child: an incredibly intelligent/latently powerful witch named Alyona. Alyona is kind and book-smart— with her non-rapey uncles and her pet ravens there for her as friends (and also Ileana, who trains Alyona to harness her dormant powers to escape Bane’s clutches). Eventually Alyona goes on to defeat her own father-uncle and save her family from certain destruction (with their help, as she cannot defeat him alone) [source, pg. 273-274].

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

• In my case, my poetic division, displacement and disassociation amounted to Alyona as something I materially created in a barbaric, pointedly antiquated offshoot of my family home informed by Tolkien’s imaginary one: a castle filled with psychosexual counterfeits talking about my abuse as arranged chronotopically around me; i.e., Bakhtin’s dynastic primacy and hereditary rites speaking in the usual fatal portraits, suits of armor and coats of arms, but animated by the endless legends occupying the same space through its past-and-present inhabitants [ibid., pg. 276].
• Yes, Tolkien was a philologist (an expert in ancient written languages) and Beowulf aficionado—basically an old, dusty scholar who was well-versed in the Scandinavian legends of dragons, war and plunder. As such, he undoubtedly appeared as totally lacking in the language of women, ethnic minorities (the East is a dark place for him) and gay people. And yet similar to Milton, he had his devilish moments, and similar to my crafting of Alyona, there existed a tremendously secret, divided self waiting inside Tolkien’s own psychomachic dialogs about his own dissenting opinions; i.e., the shadowy spaces of a deeply troubled man who, as we’ve already established, was at least publicly allergic both to the Gothic and allegory as a theatrical device […] as classical symbols of status and power exchange. Rings are given and worn; the Ringwraiths (and their rings) are smaller abstractions of the Faustian bargain manifest through the wearing of Sauron’s rings as harmful symbols of power but also power exchange as having a torturous effect on one’s ability to relate to others; e.g., of Frodo to Sam. The magic becomes a metaphor, a kind of BDSM shorthand—re: not just our hobbits, but also similar acts of gift-giving that famously involve the ring as a kind of contract that is worn, generally in a variety of roleplays (which, for Tolkien, were primarily chaste in their execution—excluding the raw, lethal force of dead orcs, of course) [ibid., pg. 279].
• If I made Alyona and my own gay-penned torture castle to interrogate a Gothic living situation through BDSM theatrics (and in response to Tolkien as someone to camp), then I don’t think it’s really much of a stretch to see Tolkien doing the same to canonize the Gothic; i.e., his borrowed bestiary gnawing at the back of his own mind about the imperfections of the heteronormative West and its own imperfect bloodline. Except for him, the abstraction of the Ring was something to offer up during a ritualized sacrifice that, once invoked (using a volcano, no less), defeats fascism once and for all, letting things “return to normal” after the glory of Gondor’s white castle is restored through the same-old monomyth purifying the blood through a trial by fire into Hell (versus already functioning normally through the endless cycle of war and false hope under Tolkien’s brand of Capitalist Realism apologizing for nation-states) [ibid., pg.282].

Given their proficiency in BDSM, though, I doubt the idea would have come to fruition as it did without Jadis’ “help.”

Given that time is a circle and not a straight line, though, I want to add that isolating any first-mover is kind of arbitrary. Beyond my childhood/formative years, Zeuhl put me on a collision course with Jadis, and Jadis sent me towards Cuwu, Bay and Harmony (among others), bringing us to this exact moment in time. Instead of pinning it all on Jadis, then, the entire subchapter seeks to considers Jadis’ site of abuse as something to raise and rebuild in small; i.e., during the rememory process concerned my personal abuse as something to resurrect and play with by returning home to face the music again: as a matter of playtime.

To that, part zero of “Personal Trauma” outlines Jadis as someone to summon during liminal expression, specifically ludo-Gothic BDSM as coming home to its own origins. To that, the ensuing dollhouse has been made to safely invigilate my unironic Great Destroyer and learn from what they did to me; i.e., their harm as emblematic of capital’s business-as-usual, its seasonal rapes of nature through past victims commercialized in various ways (re: Pagans and Halloween). All become a kind of cultural zombie to transform away from systemic harm by reflecting on my personal trauma. As something to join with a broader pedagogy of the oppressed, doing so challenges rape as a matter of profit under capital. Rape equals profit through Capitalism, and Jadis raped me to profit in all the usual ways that capital does—playing with my emotions like a doll they could slowly break.

(source: Ray Morse’s “Blumhouse Surprises CinemaCon with Terrifying Halloween Trailer, 2018)

Whatever the register and scale, the trick to subverting rape and its trauma during ludo-Gothic BDSM is, of course, irony. We summon the destroyer less as Michael Myers (and his killer’s doll-like mask) and any legitimate capacity to inflict harm, but instead as something that could never actually destroy us. In doing so, the summoning speaks to the Imperial Boomerang’s proverbial “chickens” coming home to roost; i.e., the grim harvest reifying through a toothless destroyer persona felt during calculated risk, a death ritual. Imagine, for fun, a Mr. Stay Puft, that unlike Ghostbusters, actually speaks to the sorts of abuses Michael’s fatal nostalgia intimates—a remake, to use the industry term, of a reckoning tied to the monstrous-feminine coming to collect.

Amongst all of that complicated forgery are two basic things: the ghost of the counterfeit as something to either abject/alienate or dance with, thus humanize and understand, but also the awesome means to break Capitalist Realism; i.e., Hamlet’s play to “catch the conscience of the king!”

Child or not, ask someone to remember past abuse, and they will invariably create a home with a monster inside; i.e., something unheimlich (alien) that, despite its foreign element, actually belongs there: as a matter of unaddressed abuse on a systemic level bleeding into the rememory of daily life under said system relaid through personal experience. While this includes the miniature, Volume Zero already examined the kind of anti-Semitic counterfeits on display in stories like Hereditary as aping older and older ones in defense, to some extent, of capital (re: Rosemary’s Baby but also much further back, to Hammer of Witches).

Per our castle-narrative’s usual mise-en-abyme, then, we’re left with the dollhouse as a particular kind of Gothic poiesis I want to utilize and stress when bringing Jadis back to life: a location, but specifically a recursive, anisotropic, concentric ordeal tied to a likeness of the home as cryptomimetically invaded by its own history that can, per the Gothic, get up and move around, but also be reinvented, mid-loop. It’s zombie-like, to be sure, but also ghostly and vampiric as well; i.e., an undead recreation of Capitalism-in-small as hopelessly imbricated with us and our own fragmented, painful memories: embroiled in the chronotope’s messy assemblage bouncing back and forth on the same hellish mirror’s black glass. Simply put, rememory’s a bitch, but it and its doll-like devices aren’t monopolized by anyone.

As previously stated, part zero of this subchapter covers some basic points about personal trauma and rememory as a radicalizing process using dolls; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as my attempts to not only heal myself-as-undead from Jadis’ abuse, but heal, thus transform the world from those like Jadis and the criminogenic factors that give rise to such tragedies past, present and future; i.e., normally dressed up as “play” in bad faith. To kill Jadis’ power and by extension capital’s, though, we’ll have to summon them home to such places, using dolls and BDSM: to kill their potential to rise inside/outside ourselves and bring rise to abuse that oscillates, in a half-real sense, between the imaginary and the real, the person and the place.

Sp why dolls and BDSM? In terms of a thesis argument, dolls are central to the rememory process as undead, which involves feeding and BDSM. And as we’ve established (from my modular thesis):

Poetically there’s not much difference functionally-speaking between feeding and transformation. As a kind of power/knowledge exchange, each has a rich, unique history woven into itself; i.e., as someone’s or some society’s older preference serving as monstrous code to proudly shape into cryptonymic cultural forms with their own double operations: showing and concealing or vice versa regarding the Gothic’s usual erotic medieval paradoxes.

In turn, rememory uses Gothic poetics that, when played with in irony forms, summon up old memories tried to games of power and exchange  that we can use after the fact; i.e., to reclaim our power as taken from us through state-sanctioned forms and byproducts (which domestic abuse fundamentally is: the policing of property through copaganda [and other criminogenic conditions/dogma] to maintain the nuclear family as part of a settler colony project).

For example, when Jadis and I first roleplayed online, we played over text to see if we were even sexually compatible before doing roleplays. The scenario was a simple hook up, me coming to them. I knocked and they answered; they asked what I’d like to drink. Playing along, I replied, “A root beer!” After they “got” me one from the imaginary fridge, we made small talk and then had sex (sexting and exchanging photos). Turns out, we were very compatible (we sexted for five weeks straight, after which they came to collect me). However, as a token of their appreciation of the original opening scene, Jadis also brought an actual bottle of root beer with them to Michigan when they came to take me to Florida.

To be honest, it’s frankly a cute memory and one I had forgotten until tonight when taking notes for these revisions. Unfortunately Jadis tacitly rescinded the agreements they had with me, but only after I was in Florida (all of my immediate family live in Michigan); i.e., abusing the doll-like mechanics of Gothic poetics and BDSM by treating me like a doll they could abuse by virtue of the unequal side of our relationship: the material factors. But those sorry details don’t make the root beer memory any less touching to me; it was before the rapes took place, and frankly provides a cute, bittersweet reminder of what lowered my defenses to start with. Surviving all of the above (with anecdotes to spare), I’ll be recollecting such events for the rest of the subchapter, but want to comment on various oddities for those who survive as I did.

To that, sex workers post-survival are generally left feeling alienated by their labor as something they want to repurpose to their advantage; i.e., wanting to get down to business (a special set of skills) but not get jerked around by future partners, FWBs, fuck buddies, what-have-you: to be good at handling “joysticks” but using them to steer the owner (and us holding them) towards something we both want. In terms of that, sex workers generally have to be our own pimps, requiring some inventiveness to achieve liberation while working out in the world, trying to survive; i.e., making up the rules of what is exchanged for what, tit for proverbial tat; e.g., cheeseburgers for sex, or cuddles for slow walks on the beach. It really doesn’t matter what, provided the rules are clearly expressed and help deviate the proceedings away from the usual historical outcomes the state is built to achieve: rape.

Or so it would seem. As we’ll see with Jadis, rapists come to you with smiles, but often betray themselves by always feeling a bit off (red flags): punishers presenting as benevolent, but in masks/costumes that quickly slip to show their true colors.

To that, another player can still harm you despite seeming to be compatible and down to fuck, but also after establishing a social-(a)sexual agreement that isn’t a marriage contract: “I work, you fuck me.” That’s basically what Jadis and I agreed to, which seemed fair on its face (we’ll get to the particulars between Jadis and I, in part one of the subchapter). Indeed, a sex worker relies on such agreements because those, combined with their trade (of sex exchanged for different things), are a common skill we rely on as sacred; i.e., tantamount to our survival as sex workers.

The whole thing sounds simple enough in theory—to fuck someone every day provided the person plays by the rules we both establish and doesn’t harm us in the bargain—but we’re also doing it knowing such contracts are built on trust in the face of regular historical abuses; i.e., performed by bad actors doing what capital always does: profit as a matter of rape per settler-colonial (Cartesian, heteronormative) models of power exchange. The two go hand-in-hand under capital, Capitalism being the dominant socio-economic force on planet Earth. As we go back into the world with the post-abuse skills we’ve gained to forge new destinies, post-abuse, it can feel a bit like Sarah Connor’s “dark highway at night; to be in uncharted territory making up history as we go along.” We want to liberate ourselves using what we got, but as the old saying goes, “Once bitten, twice shy!” It becomes a prison, a holding cell, one shared with ghosts of old lovers, dead and gone:

The name of the game, then, is determining compatibility alongside intent while establishing the rules between individual players seeking to encourage the valuing of nature and basic human rights across all aspects of society (until they become second-nature, recultivating the Superstructure). This ultimately takes someone (or multiple people[2a]) for us to work with; i.e., as a matter of playing house/with dolls through BDSM, but also experimentation and ultimately rememory through them for the interrogation and negotiation of power and trauma as undead. Arbitrating a product (sex and other labor types) that has infinite value, we play to remember the fun bits (re: Jadis’ root beer) and the painful ones (re: Jadis being happier raping me than respecting our agreements). These, in turn, occur within calculated risk as a safe space/dialog on things that are funny and fucked up, yielding Austenian ironies (“a truth universally acknowledged”); i.e., we’re told how things should be, then learn that they actually can be whatever we want them to be, mid-play.

For example, my friend Mavis discovered this, one night, when dealing with an obscene phone caller named Marty back in the day. One night in the ’80s, the landline ringing woke Mavis up (there was no Internet or cell phones back then, except car phones for rich people). They got up and answered it. “What are you wearing?” the voice on the other end asked. “Oh, I’m naked!” Mavis replied. The caller paused, clearly surprised. “Really?” they asked, to which Mavis replied, “Yup!” It was a completely random event, but one that Mavis—a sex worker earlier in their life but now involved with an unfaithful, abusive man—was able to regain some feeling of agency doing (and combating boredom): acting like a “doll”; i.e., a hot piece of ass someone couldn’t control unless Mavis wanted them to. The telephone call was something of a buffer, in that respect (similar to “flashing” on the Internet, per revolutionary cryptonymy’s acts of showing and hiding things to assist in worker liberation).

(source: Wikimedia)

Before we proceed onto my personal trauma with Jadis as something I reclaimed through dolls as an undead rememory device, I want to give a broad, generalized note about dolls as a matter of practice (ourselves as doll-like); i.e., one that that applies to the rest of the subchapter and its place in the Undead Module (indented for emphasis):

The interrogation of trauma is often regressive, especially with hindsight and know-how to better highlight that fact. For example, the transformation of my undead self through the rememory of personal trauma with Jadis concerns dolls; i.e., how they factored into ludo-Gothic BDSM as evolving into itself. Except, there’s a catch: dolls aren’t explicitly undead. In fact, they aren’t explicitly anything. A doll is a “blank monster,” insofar as it can be, undead, demonic, and/or animalistic/anthropomorphic.

Furthermore, while our focus here will be interrogating and negotiating trauma, this occurs through BDSM, which is primarily a demonic characteristic; likewise, my relationship to Jadis was one of dolls that were often undead, demonic and nature-themed to varying degrees. Simply put, they had trauma, liked BDSM, and were an entomologist who worked in pest control. So I was exposed to all of the things that went into what eventually became Gothic Communism, its modules and, by extension, ludo-Gothic BDSM!

Even so, the emphasis of this subchapter is still the rememory of personal trauma (an undead characteristic) through BDSM, which the undead can still do, albeit by feeding in a vitalistic sense; i.e., passing knowledge and/or power through the metaphorical exchange of various kinds of essence. In other words, they tend to exchange knowledge and/or power through feeding and instinctual behaviors that tie/contribute to trauma versus bartering in any kind of way that seems outwardly intelligent or divorced from unthinking appetites.

Of course, there is the nature of the Faustian bargain, which generally has a predatory component to it that could be considered feeding with a bit of poetic leeway (to feast on one’s soul, versus owning it). But these kinds of poetic distinctions won’t really matter in the following subchapter—save to clarify that I’m mostly talking about dolls, which again can be assigned any monstrous quality you want. I merely want to mention some of these exceptions now to account for the incongruous elements this subchapter will invariably yield when parsed; i.e., regarding the holistic nature of its examination into my history with Jadis and our combined monstrous poetics informing liberation as a poetic ordeal, thus coming equipped with poetic exceptions; e.g., The Night House being concerned with trauma and ghosts, only to gradually shift focus away from the undead towards a sex demon[2b] obsessed with psychosexual domination.

Despite these incongruities, I will try to emphasize all of my examples in this subchapter through an undead lens; i.e., even when they are predominantly demonic according to my definitions. This can go either way with dolls (and especially with BDSM through dolls). Keeping with the Undead Module, though, we’ll still be considering their undead potential, first and foremost. There will doubtless also be lingering issues and questions we won’t be able to answer here about demons, and this subchapter is holistic and idiosyncratic enough (re: proto-ludo-Gothic BDSM and dolls) that it probably deserves its own module (or a spot somewhere in the Poetry Module). Except, I’ve since organized it as a deliberate segue between “The Imperial Boomerang” and “The Monomyth” subchapters; it’s not going anywhere.

Given the subchapter’s taking down roots, then, I’ll be focusing on formative trauma while keeping the doll subchapter in the Undead Module. Rest assured, demons will get their time in the sun, later in the volume!

Another way to look at dolls is they’re fun. Simply put, I like them; fetishes are generally doll-like, reducing things to an abstract means of play that nonetheless concerns the ritualistic summoning of trauma, like a voodoo doll, into something ultimately unable to cause harm: “Show us on the doll, where they touched you.” Simply put, dolls are useful when telling things that might otherwise be too difficult (or dangerous) to say or act out.

More to the point, dolls are fun play with—to dress up and fuck/otherwise engage with less by literal means, alone, and more in relation to other people as a kind of theatre that invokes objectification as an ontological statement one occupies and moves through. In doing so, these various Russian dolls speak to the human condition as alienized under capital as a settler-colonial structure over space-time; re: Harmony and I engaging among such spirits like a kind of interactive data bouncing between us and our various devices, mid-castle-narrative; i.e., me fucking of my doll as we do consent-non-consent, but also while thinking about stories that would seem to theatrically point to hidden realities for us to wonder and laugh about versus feeling fearful towards:

Let’s proceed. Before we get to Jadis in parts one and two, I want to go over ludo-Gothic BDSM—what it is, followed by its process of exchange using Gothic poetics, and finally its dialectical-material qualities bucking the Gothic’s psychoanalytic side of things.

First, a reiteration of the concept at large, based on what we’ve covered so far and will continue to explore (indented for emphasis):

Capital is as old as zombies, and zombies, acting, shelter and prostitution (“dolls”) are far older still. But under capital and its powerful illusions, they allow us to regress and play with power to release anxiety and dispel abjection; i.e., through castled clichés during calculated risk; e.g., fucking the queen, the mistress, the sire’s daughter and, in effect, “doing one’s duty” as a matter of Gothic innuendo/euphemism (which generally combine food, death, war and rape into mixed metaphors; e.g., “to cook one’s goose” or “butter one’s biscuit”) and cutesy anachronisms regarding the hushed medieval reality of incestuous procreation.

This “ludo-Gothic BDSM” plays with rape by encapsulating its lived realities in general; e.g., with a wife who can’t consent, the servant put to heel, the vengeful or covetous man, etc, as a historical-material means of living in the castle/storming it as a theatrical, fourth-dimensional, half-real matter of apocalypse. However in-between, though, such liminalities are always informed by earlier forms of rape and warfare evoked during fascism in the present space and time; i.e., to a hauntological time period I’ve called “pre-fascism,” or essentially the medieval period as a matter of discourse that loops in on itself, mise-en-abyme, as “ancient.” Despite the quotes, though, this discourse is as old as our aforementioned zombies, rape, acting and prostitution, including a Quixotic effect Plato would describe as being “in the cave.”

That’s essentially what abjection is, you see, what zombies are as a matter thereof—only incomprehensible horrors by virtue of emotional/Gothic unintelligence, immaturity and deflated class/cultural awareness (which include racial factors) becoming a mind prison, a menticide that serves profit through unironic violence. When the voices of the dead return, said prison leads those trammeled by state illusions (canonical Gothic Romances) to cut off Medusa’s head: to silence her and nature as monstrous-feminine, then keep harvesting them. Sex—though specifically sex with monsters through general kink activities that practice boundary-forming and consent as an asexual exchange—is the best place to start as far as reversing abjection goes (along with the other main Gothic theories per our iconoclastic doubles, synthetic oppositional groupings and creative successes achieving the basics: anger/gossip, monsters and camp); it’s what ludo-Gothic BDSM is all about!

Per the Wisdom of the Ancients, or cultural understanding of the imaginary past, we summon said “past” as counterfeit (apocalypse) to better understand it, but also transform it to suit our needs; i.e., playing with it to dispel its canonical power in favor worker power that humanizes the zombie as person, house, toy and childhood, but also rape and war as “dead,” in quotes!

In exploring ludo-Gothic BDSM through Jadis, we’ll be starting with my zombie-like childhood, toys and relationships as doll-like. As this subchapter segues into the next, though, we’ll be moving onto older forms of undead that, like history itself, are constantly being played with through the monomyth, hence dragged forward out from a hauntological shadow zone felt during these kinds of performative games: the Cycle of Kings per various tyrants and imposing old guys; i.e., great men of history expressed as spectres of “Caesar” (or Marx) to attain a Numinous effect.

More on that after we’ve dealt with Jadis. After all, they taught me how to abuse BDSM, which I have since tried very hard to subvert. But I must abstract their return to do so; i.e., as a demonic, doll-like place to acquire forbidden knowledge, but also an undead place to feed and recover from trauma as forever a part of me: to go to and die inside, but also bring back the dead as fascist or anti-fascist to varying degrees. Something is always given and received. In turn, this might raise some purely philosophical questions, such as, “Can a doll be dead if it was never truly alive?”

While admittedly fun to think about, I want to encourage you to play with these things as a matter of theatrical application; i.e., that make you more emotionally and Gothically intelligent, thus sex positive, mid-synthesis. As you apply yourselves to play through ludo-Gothic BDSM, it should become second-nature; i.e., a if-not-simple-then-at-least-practical means of cultivating good social-sexual habits that contribute to daily activism: as a lingual, societal and material means of engagement between workers and the world, including its half-real past.

To that, while part two of “Personal Trauma” specifically investigates the reclaiming of dolls and doll-like zombie pieces (exhibit 38a-38b4), a dollhouse is really no different in practice than a Gothic castle (or some such place; re: the danger disco). Such revivals are ultimately necessary if we are to learn from the past, thus escape its routine, historical-material abuse under state myopias. This rememory happens in more ways than one—to literally be buried inside, but also to confront wild, reclaimed-by-nature, overcome-with-decay aspects about it that are less rosy than we care to admit upon reinspection as adults.

Bear in mind, doing so isn’t meant to trap us in stasis, but to invoke live burial, hence undeath, as a feeling that puts us in touch with the world around us supplying the clues; i.e., as between a living and dead position that best reflects our lived trauma as something a) we survived, and b) that survives the dead. Live burial, then, is a kind of forward-facing regression, one whose death therapy grants an apocalypse unto itself. As such, Jadis’ dollhouse is an undead structure I made of their likeness; i.e., as a kind of rape play to yield better future outcomes according to a cannibalistic[3] legacy that yields routine Gothic confusions and demises, but also rebirths, resurrections, returns.

Inside the following pages, these effects play out in deliciously recursive, painfully erotic forms: entombed through hubris as something to theatrically deal “death” unto ourselves and those who would harm us. Once inside the dollhouse (or Metroidvania, below), schadenfreude (and other complex sensations linked to generational trauma) reliably emerge to—given the right amount of attention and care—become suitably palliative during rape play as cathartic; i.e., a safe space to avoid actual harm inside as having happened during past attempts having already gone back to a given childhood home haunted by past invasions coming back, back, back; e.g., the Terminator to 1984, Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Aulin into different fatal portraits (specially from Portrait of Ruin, left), and the heroine from Smile (2022). Each time, it’s the corpse of empire displaced into a legendary ruin populated with imaginary monsters, imposters, damsels, knights, etc, as collectively speaking to real atrocities; i.e., that secret spell we’ve been chasing.

(source Tumblr post, Castlevania Gallery: May 22nd, 2016)

Per the process of abjection, the canonical goal is always to kill the past as undead, hence save the future for different in-groups afraid of zombies. But they can’t monopolize the procedure (or its violence) inside the state of exception. Whether for witches, witch hunters, or one disguised as the other (undercover cops/rebels), it’s like a washing machine stuck on spin cycle; i.e., always spinning with us inside it, trying to get clean in the same soapy water as haunted by various inescapable ghosts (of the counterfeit, of Caesar or Marx). Well past a healthy saturation point, there’s simply no avoiding the ambiguity that comes from prolonged contact with such things as alien, and censorship is pointless/conducive to genocide; we can only play with such things transparently to try and achieve a better outcome: by going in circles to achieve transformation.

These are clearly complicated feelings with complicated histories of play occurring over time using Gothic poetics. So it’s important to release them into society as a matter of de facto education, not profit for the sake of making the middle class horny and anxious without concern for the consequences (the white director/vice character problem). Whatever you create or grapple with yourselves, do so responsibly and in ways that invigilate your id-like extensions to an informed, prepared audience.

To that, I’ll just give just our earlier rule of thumb: residence or resident, “whatever a monster’s shape (size difference) or modular class (undead, demonic, animalistic), if it challenges the profit motive, it’s probably sex-positive; i.e., doesn’t instruct through unironic sexual coercion and rape” when evoking the master/slave (the heel and babyface, in kayfabe[4] circles), destroyer/sacrifice or abusive parent/child (the narcissistic mother or rapacious father): the dos and don’ts of toxic love, essentially! It can be a real treat to do “one’s duty” not as a dreaded task, at all, but an act of mutually consensual fun; i.e., one had between, for all intents and purposes, equals by matter of exchange during ludo-Gothic BDSM: between two consent parties playing the zombie and the summoner (to varying degrees, double standards, fetishes and clichés, etc)!

(artist: Evul)

Now that we’ve outlined ludo-Gothic BDSM as a historical-material process, let’s unpack its ability to exchange; i.e., as part of the ludo-Gothic process, whose toys and play are a BDSM means of exchange concerning trauma (and power) as something to confront during calculated risk.

There’s sex-positive and sex-coercive instances of this, hence good and bad play/acting/education during BDSM. For sex-coercive forms, the vector needn’t be strictly “rotten” in its appearance, though—just repressed through transgenerational violence that makes one feel undead, thus raped; i.e., belonging to the abused group and its devastated history directly or sitting adjacent to them from a fearful vantage point, a point of entry into the vector of exchange as traumatic; e.g., white women made to fear non-white men (especially African American men) as universal rapists “eating” them, but really any type of destroyer that can be fetishized to worship the dragon as something adopted to favor white men as the preferred dominator (e.g., serial killers and feudal lords, but also dragon masters, below). Through ludo-Gothic BDSM as an ironic process, then, “rape” becomes something to play with in ways that don’t assist/defend the nuclear family model; i.e., despite classically being used as guilty pleasure by conservative agents capitalizing on the ghost of the counterfeit.

In this respect, randomly threatening Princess Peach with Bowser’s monster cock (exhibit 37c1b, below) can easily make our point, provided its apocalyptic revelation comments on state trauma as repressed in zombie-like fashion; i.e., lobotomized, but also enforced during nightmarish, hauntological conditions of us-versus-them peril. Faced with the king’s “scepter,” a recoiling Peach can feel the creeping return of a barbaric, tyrannical past that never really left; i.e., the constant rape of white, Western women by their husbands as repressed, but also evoked per rememory by observing and performing xenophiles alike through a particularly nostalgic performance of unequal power exchange set to traditional markers thereof: the medieval despot as a kind of undead daddy dom, a reaper that doesn’t take the harvest for all its worth.

Except, this only becomes ludo-Gothic BDSM, thus cathartic, through revolutionary cryptonymy as visually fearsome, but coded paradoxically and ironically for maximum safety by players: to generate nerves that calm us, in spaces that actually allow for it. “Yeah, baby! Butter my biscuit! And I ain’t talkin’ ’bout love! Mommy wants to fuck and she got it bad!”

(exhibit 37c1b: Artist, left: Toxxy Kiss; right: unknown. The devil is in the details; the dragon as a kind of demon lover is, from a classical standpoint, a medieval, masculine rarefaction of greed, cruelty and evil: the fierce dominant, death-dealing performer famously associated with feudal tyrants of an especially legendary cruelty—i.e., the now-vampiric personas associated with the order of the dragon, namely Dracula, the Impaler [and older “draconian” leaders not explicitly tied to the dragon symbol; e.g., Genghis Khan] but also the Nazi as something to camp in oft-ambiguous ways: pointing hauntologically to such grim histories.

To that, the phrase “monster cock” promises several things all at once: a dick of unusual size, used by its fearsome, “undead” owner to commit performative acts of psychosexual violence [the bloodthirsty invader] associated with a barbaric past revived in the present. All become repressed under Capitalism, demanding reunion through various sex-positive BDSM rituals whose rememory struggles to forget and remember what has become lost; e.g., Peach—despite being small, dainty and fair—discovering that she enjoys the ritualized “peril” of the Koopa King’s “arsenal,” his huge zombie-king cock spreading her open; i.e., his Numinous boner running a train on her temple. Beyond the ghost of the counterfeit trapping the damsel between abject terror and rapt fascination, her sticky reunion with Bowser as a perceived “master” should strive to push beyond mere teasing and use good-faith xenophilia to transmute the heteronormative order [the spiked cock ring subverting the master’s collar as a servile hound’s anti-predation variant].

After all, the zombie, for persons of privilege, is a ravenous symbol of guilt that climbs out of a buried past—either a tyrant of the status quo or victims of said tyrant’s genocide. To proceed onto better times, the privileged must use ludo-Gothic BDSM to face the half-hidden violence that continues against oppressed groups; i.e., by subverting the repressed horrors of Capitalism once uncovered in sex-positive-albeit-transgressive subversions; e.g., Peach’s “rape.”)

While time is always moving forwards, its historical-material elements come back around again. Memory is finite under the best of circumstances, then (with current beneficiaries under Capitalism unable to remember the abuses of their forefathers); the closer to death and trauma one is (which one always is under capital’s socio-material conditions), the less reliable memory is (e.g., the failing memory of slaves, but also that of tyrants and Western histories under fascism, which we’ll explore in “Bad Dreams,” part three). Under repressed, invented conditions like these, the state’s constant bloodletting occurs through a plethora of playful devices that imperil memory with undead intimations of trauma, most notably weapons as both historical commentaries and eye-catching onstage since ancient times (sword are shiny and reflect light, but they’re also sharp and promote danger and excitement in traditionally “phallic” ways).

Per the dialectic of the alien (and the harvest, for that matter), guns and knives (and other devices to police sex and force with) abstract and dislocate state violence as fetishized, applying it directly to zombie targets by zombie attackers of various kinds; i.e., people as the crop, pareidolically rendering themselves unto profit as something felt across different aspects of itself, mid-reaping:

Sex toys, on the other hand, can fetishize the targets themselves, primarily their genitals as xenophilic instruments of performative “violence” that resemble such abuse (often as sports-like; i.e., what queer parlance refers to as “pitchers” and “catchers”). Attributed to fearsome bodies, the zombie dildo or sleeve can present as traditionally masculine and feminine, but also dark, savage and animalistic. Often an indication of gross, indecent, even vengeful appetite from beyond the grave, it can just as easily be a living likeness of things that are so commonly farmed under capital for their labor value; i.e., as something to exploit in ways that cheapen whatever’s “on tap”—flesh, but also symbolic, theatrical elements that express such things in animalistic forms: a monopoly on monsters milked, thus drained of their worth for the elite, and which we must reclaim together using what we got!

Regardless of the exact form taken, xenophilic examples subvert canonical doubles and their monopolies, which pointedly demonize the exchange as xenophobic; i.e., by inviting fascist reprisals that dehumanize the so-called “walking dead” through provocations of unironic, fear-inducing violence: “the enemy is both weak and strong” according to whatever fetishized harm they inflict or endure. The point of xenophobic necrophilia isn’t to heal, but harm in highly rapacious ways (e.g., the myth of the black male rapist, exhibit 52e). Subverting that requires either humanizing the thing being exploited, or otherwise featuring it as something to treat humanely!

For example, Bovine Harlot (next page) exemplifies humanizing the harvest through a common device: anthropomorphism (something the “Call of the Wild” chapter will explore at length, during the Demon Module). As a theatrical matter of the human and the cow anthropomorphically intertwined, these are “ancient” myths insofar as their original historical function (from a Western standpoint) is effectively being camped through a modern identity (of the minotaur) through sex-and-gender conversing on such things; i.e., during the playful, theatrical struggle for liberation from heteronormativity under state paradigms (e.g., the nuclear family unit). Liberators like Bovine pointedly employ these hybrids for the benefit of workers and nature: as normally preyed upon by the elite (who put meat on the table to feed their enforcers and slaves with, thus continue the process as a matter of dogma)!

(exhibit 37c2: Model and artist: Bovine Harlot and Persephone van der Waard. Beasts of burden are commodified as chattel animals whose bodies are eugenically controlled and offered up to rape in order to serve profit; e.g., steers are injected with steroids to increase their body mass, thus meat production, while dairy cows are accommodated within an industry built around farming them for their milk. Sex workers are no different, insofar as the industries around them seek to control their bodies as things to exploit and fetishize per all the usual methods. Poetry is a part of that, but especially Gothic forms that merge the human and the animal to express genocide as a cross-species ordeal, but also a morphologically dogmatic one; i.e., per the settler-colonial treatment of anything deemed “too big” to be white within the binary.

Simply put, fat bodies—especially female bodies [the BBW]—are both shamed and chased for their value as descriptively deviating away from traditional, European beauty standards. This regular exploitation of corporal variation reflects in parallel media, becoming something to abject and pimp, but also half-jokingly hunt down, mid-rebellion, for those very reasons; e.g., Diablo 2‘s secret cow level, Earth Worm Jim‘s own parody of the animal, and Monthy Python’s cow catapult method [the last example echoing historical approaches to castle defense; i.e., by using your dead livestock as a desperate means of anti-predation]: when the cows come home [a natural-paganized reckoning on par with Michael Myers and the holiday for which he belongs, but also the Blob or Godzilla]!

Like any monster under capital, reclamation of the cow occurs through owning such things ourselves; i.e., as a GNC act that challenges profit to liberate fat bodies [female or otherwise] through monstrous-feminine acts of self-expression that humanize the harvest; e.g., as Bovine Harlot and I do, operating in conjunction towards universal liberation as a common goal with a common foe, the latter of which monopolizes each of us differently.

As things to challenge, such monopolies extend to the mythological side of things, or has a mythological, essentializing function, insofar as the entire process becomes essentialized once installed; i.e., something to worship according to how it is ordered to serve profit through a particular Cartesian arrangement of man and animal that has evolved into a neoliberal form—the monomyth—and which reflects the usual harvesting of nature as monstrous-feminine dating back to Antiquity into the present; e.g., King Minos’ and his labyrinth occupied by the Minotaur as a reflection of people treated like animals, but also animalistic beings [human or not] being treated inhumanely by patriarchal forces having evolved to serve capital. Within capital, they become our Aegis to reclaim and do with as we wish! To take back our milk and jokingly but lovingly share it among all [“Aw, yeah! Gimme that thick, creamy ‘milk!’]: to save ourselves not for marriage, but our friends extramaritally to challenge the nuclear family unit [and all that entails].

In short, wherever and whenever a cow is present, we can take and weaponize it against profit during rape play/ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as a direct challenge to all the things that normally result when profit goes unchallenged [so-called “peace,” generally conveyed as “law and order” by executed by cops and vigilantes defending state property as a structure]. The challenge lies in reclaiming the cow’s symbolic power and labor value through the media we encounter and consume. In doing so, we [and the cow] can serve an iconoclastic purpose; i.e., illustrating mutual consent during ludo-Gothic BDSM, which occurs through an informed, negotiated labor exchange: one that works within the very things the elite, as unironic butchers, cannot exclusively control and weaponize against us; e.g., the leather shield and shield rod from Symphony of the Night buffering Alucard to help him through the castle under the protection of the humble cow.

Except, the same half-real idea also applies to us synthesizing praxis through things akin to the Metroidvania—its mazes and labyrinths, but also its monsters and randy in-jokes, which cows, for whatever reason, often are; i.e., so-called “barnyard humor” echoing Chaucer’s randy and down-to-earth Miller from his infamously crass story of the same name, “The Miller’s Tale” [c. 1386]:

[artist: Jodie Troutman]

Troutman writes,

Absalom, Alison’s stalker, shows up in the dead of night while she and Nick are making whoopee. It’s so dark outside that Absalom can’t see a thing, which makes you wonder how he made it to their house in the first place. Anyway, he rolls up to Alison’s window and proclaims that he’s there on a mission of love.

Naturally, Alison tells him to stick it. More specifically, she tells him to run like hell, ’cause if he hangs around much longer, she’s gonna stone him. One imagines that in the days before restraining orders, women just kept buckets of rocks next to their window in case of emergencies like this. Absalom says that he’s not going anywhere until he gets a goodbye kiss, so Alison decides to play a bit of a joke on her would-be suitor.

While the poor sap puckers up in the darkness, Alison sticks her naked ass out the window instead of her lips. More specifically, Chaucer notes that “at the wyndow out she putte hir hole,” which is funnier than anything I could ever write myself. One thing leads to another and Absalom smooches her arse – and not just one of the bare cheeks, mind you. Chaucer notes that Absalom knew something was amiss, “for wel he wiste a womman hath no berd. He felte a thyng al rough and long yherd.” Loosely translated, when Absalom when in for the kiss, he felt quite a lot of hair. Yeee-ep.

And while you might think that making out with a woman’s ass crack is about as far as this story is willing to go, you’re sadly mistaken – things only get stranger from here [source].

[artist: Jodie Troutman] 

I’ll admit, this hasn’t been the classiest week in Lit Brick history. But you know what? It’s not my fault. It’s Chaucer’s fault. If someone published something like “The Miller’s Tale” today, even in context with the rest of The Canterbury Tales, it’d be dismissed as garbage. It’s ridiculously filthy and makes almost no sense. That said, I adore it for those very reasons. Seriously, this story is filled with words you still can’t say on network television, yet it was published over six hundred years ago. Ah, the things our society chooses to care about.

Anyway, the rest of the story: after kissing Alison’s ass, Absalom is out for revenge, so he visits a smithy and borrows a hot iron. He promptly returns to the house, where Nick is taking a leak. Deciding that it’d be even more hilarious if he could get Absalom to kiss his ass, Nick spreads ’em out the window. Sadly, instead of a kiss, he gets a hot iron in the butt. This shock apparently triggers a fart so mighty that it sounds like thunder. Talk about your killer gas. The foul stench knocks Absalom out, and all this ruckus finally wakes up the Carpenter, still hiding in the trees.

The Carpenter, assuming that the thunder-clap of Nick’s ass was the sound of the Almighty raining down doom, cuts his tub free from the tree… and promptly plunges several feet to the ground, knocking his lights out. Shortly thereafter, the townsfolk show up and decide that the Carpenter is clearly mad (and honestly, that might be the first sane decision anyone has made this entire story). Thus, with her husband committed, her stalker poisoned, and her lover screaming bloody murder about his burning bum, Alison is – to translate Chaucer into Modern English – f**ked.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the most revered works of literature in the English language. There are some days I love humanity [source].

[source, Facebook post, Heavy Metal Magazine: September 12th, 2020]

Indeed, it’s almost like people with Humanities educations either inside or at least closer to the medieval world [or of the same mentality nowadays, left] inherited its crude, honest attitudes about nature, sex, death, and bodily functions! Whatever the exact venue, then, ludo-Gothic BDSM isn’t just about literal cows, but places where cows [or beings treated like cows—AFAB people] both actual and magical can be found; i.e., at a castle with equally legendary and earthly components; re: something akin to Geoffery’s Chaucer’s infamously wacky story as carried forwards into the equally wacky Neo-Gothic several centuries down the road; e.g., Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver putting out the Lilliputian fire by peeing on it, or Walpole’s Lord Manfred seeing his son get crushed by a giant falling helmet only to try and marry the bride at the altar! Medievalists tend to be pornographic, hence are not really known for their tact.)

Through dogma’s habitual predation, collective repression is illustrated by the devastation of a given calamity present within the physical world; e.g., the cow as a victim of capital; i.e., cryptonymy and the narrative of the crypt denoting trauma attached to such seemingly innocent symbols. While societal memory is a regular casualty to the powers that be, surviving markers of trauma assist in the clawing of a collective, intersectional suffering back towards the surface.

Despite being white, pure and obedient, for example, Peach from earlier (or any Gothic heroine, really) is on the receiving end of a very monstrous-looking cock; the commonplace nature of this kind of domination fantasy denotes a larger relationship at work, but also a specific imbalance of power exchange disseminated throughout the material world. Thanks to globalization and U.S. hegemony across the globe, the repressed abuses such predicaments intimate occur behind the closed doors of powerful men who own the means of production; sometimes, all you can do is tell your story in between the lines of a financially incentivized performance, subverting the established aims through covert, imaginary means (revolutionary cryptonymy being a tactic we’ll explore throughout the remainder of the book).

Before we continue onto my traumas with Jadis, though, I want to quickly (re)stress Gothic Communism’s dialectical-material aspects through ludo-Gothic BDSM as bucking pure psychoanalysis. Our approach relies far less on psychological models that claim to reliably measure and predict abuse in the socio-material world (which they really don’t) and more how memories of trauma are stored in linguo-material things that people respond to socially in predictably fearful ways; i.e., not according to some vague collective unconscious, but collective biases, fight-or-flight mechanisms, and the subversion of (or submission to) canonical norms that exist as part of the socio-material world (the Base and Superstructure).

To change its material conditions, though, you first must change how zombies are perceived (which includes who’s actually[5] doing the eating and who’s being eaten, above) through your own experiences: social conditions that shape and maintain material ones (re: Marx) and vice versa as things to camp (re: me). Coded as sites of trauma through linguo-material instruction, this includes a zombie’s genitals, as well as any intersecting memories of personal and collective traumas expressed in various BDSM rituals we can reclaim to transform the zombie piecemeal.

Furthermore, completed with erotic or at least fetishized zombie components, black and white bodies are hybridized (often with non-human colors, such as green) to express colonial fears in Cartesian language, but also decay resulting from its enactment over space and time. Cartesian dualism, then, not only treats nature as alien; it erases the collective memories of the exploited by fabricating its own undead enforcers to assail state victims with. Under these lived conditions, safety amid perceived danger becomes the audience’s number-one concern (exhibit 37d, next page).

In Gothic stories, a desire to explore childhood trauma through conspicuously adult sex and graveyards is annoyingly linked to psychoanalytical models (which tend to be outdated in sexually dimorphic ways); re, our companion glossary definition for Eve Segewick’s notion of live burial:

The Gothic master-trope, live burial—as marked by Eve Segewick in her introduction to The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986)—is expressed in the language of live burial as an endless metaphor for the buried libido within concentric structures as something to punish “digging into” (which includes investigating the false family’s incestuous/abjectly monstrous bloodline; source). To move beyond psychoanalytic models and into dialectical-material territories, I would describe live burial as incentivized by power structures in ways that threaten abuse (often death, incarceration or rape) to those who go looking into hereditary and dynastic power structures, especially their psychosexual abuse and worker exploitation: the fate of the horny detective, but also the whistleblower.

Yet, divorcing a BDSM ritual from academic psychoanalysis doesn’t change the fact that many people experience sexual trauma as something that survives the initial event. Enduring through displaced material reminders, individual trauma as Gothicized can damage memory but also repair it.

The same is true of collective trauma. When trauma is collectively repressed on a societal level, the systemic eradication of slave/worker histories are survived by different cryptonyms—corpses but also their fragments as a kind of code tied to repressed trauma. Just as the zombie is an erased history that fails to disappear entirely because the bodies always remain, the struggle is two-fold: remembering those who were destroyed and what made them become forgotten afterward, while also healing from trauma through ludo-Gothic BDSM by subverting the canonical zombie as a call to violence against the oppressed during a given apocalypse and its painful revelation.

(exhibit 37d: Model and artist: Persephone van der Waard [the model abused me during this transmisogyny incident[6], so won’t be credited, here]. When the dead already walk the earth, you can supply the graveyard ritual with whatever forms best communicate the state’s necro-erotic abuses as a lived experience. Not only can this vary per individual; a common concern for all workers is proximity to, and protection from, harm. In the absence of reliable, stable histories, safety amid danger becomes paramount; i.e., to relax the worried viewer but also to highlight any potential threats when seeking out comfort as a form of rememory that confronts the zombie-like horrors of the ongoing past always returning in Gothicized narratives: ludo-Gothic BDSM as, like Chaucer centuries, of an often-animalized, transformative variety.)

When humanized, the zombie’s rememory becomes one to consider favorably in the absence of canonical bias. That is, it becomes a dogged survivor whose rebellion—of open communication about trauma—helps them reassemble state abuses that seek to erase memory as a collective history before Capitalism came into existence. By openly embodying these abuses, the zombie organizes a transformation through pieces of itself; i.e., xenophilic action organized against the state. As such, the rememory of total trauma becomes eclectic, undead and incongruous, populating the graveyard with whatever “zombies” (dolls) are needed to make their point and achieve catharsis through transformation.

By returning to a replicate site of trauma, then, a dollmaker is also an architecture—one who can playfully assemble and conduct a cathartic BDSM ritual that playfully addresses trauma where it lives: within the body as effected by trigger mechanisms supplied by a dialectical-material struggle the world over. Executed under more favorable, ethical conditions, these xenophilic rituals can supply the recipient of pain with the ability to consent, gaining agency under gestures of theatrical peril (“rape”) with allies and assistants that help them process trauma in past, present and future forms.

Despite Gothic Communism’s playful, xenophilic nature, confronting the zombie is always traumatic to some extent. Not only can the triggering nature of rememory not be avoided; the social-sexual interactions that occur before, during and after these rituals aren’t completely risk-free (the idea being risk reduction under capital’s risk-adverse conditions).

For one, blind spots can make the consumer biased, but also primed for further abuse. Consider the cliché of the well-read horror fan—the suburban teenager who studiously reads about monsters all their life, only to be fooled by a “real” example. The deception occurs not from an inability to recognize the symbols, but from a social component delivered by an active deceiver presenting them in bad faith. The idea, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, is to have them appear within boundaries of play that help survivors process their trauma while restoring a sense of agency under negotiated peril. This isn’t “looking for trouble,” but it does call for a dance partner that fits the bill.

As we’ll see with Jadis and myself (which the above paragraph was essentially talking about), auditions are an imperfect process, opening the door for further abuse if one is careless, unlucky or both (e.g., like the Takashi Miike movie, its spider-like avenger[7] catching an unhappy abuser in her web). Yet, just as trauma and its symbols can “brand” a former victim to become habitually preyed upon in spider-like fashion, the same psychosexual language and rituals can mercifully be inverted, helping survivors escape future abusers by reflecting on past trauma in present forms; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as a means of transforming the zombie. Again, I want to explore said practice as I coined it—through lived trauma as something to reflect on, reassemble and play with, after the fact, inside Jadis’ dollhouse.

Speaking of which, now that we’ve gone over ludo-Gothic BDSM—it’s base mechanics of exchange, but also its historical-material and dialectical-material elements—a I think we can finally enter the house-in-question. We’ll do so in two further subdivisions that will—like Stoker’s famous novel—feel more epistolary than some parts of my book do: journal entries chronicling my meeting and escaping of Jadis. They were someone who fed and clothed me, but also who held me prisoner and tortured me every day for nearly two years: “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,’ generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit.” In short, they raped me—something I have hesitated to say for the effect that it has on me, when leaving my lips:

(artists: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard)

In facing this sad truth, Jadis’ abuse becomes like the doll: something to play with in order to regain control over a historically disempowering force, but also a BDSM device that speaks through said play as harder to deny than through mere words alone (written or otherwise). Jadis abused me emotionally in ways I’ve struggled to express since escaping them—in part because when I am stressed, I can still hear their creepy doll-like voice whispering to me from the safety of the shadows: “You’re a bad person. You’re so wrong! It’s all your fault!” I loved Jadis for their pain, for I had pain, too; but much to my chagrin, they used it to trap me and, like a fat patient spider, calmly and coldly prey on my frozen body.

To heal from Jadis, I shall now make them into something that I can control—not to bend the truth, but to tell my side of things as completely as I can, and per the medieval-adjacent ideas like ludo-Gothic BDSM that I’ve developed in light of what my abuser did to me. They raped me and let me go, insisting they were good and I was not. Abusers either kill their victims (usually the male approach), or use literal or figurative poison to kill any part of them that might speak out (the proverbial “woman’s weapon”). I think Jadis was counting on the latter to silence me, so it’s only fitting if my testimony makes them anxious once it comes out! While something of an attempt to forgive them (though more of an attempt to take their power over me and weaponize it against the state by transforming my zombie state into something instruction for others to learn from), I won’t lose sleep if my ghastly accounts haunt them; a rapist, but especially an impenitent one (remorse was never your strong suit. Jadis), should never know peace. So reap the whirlwind, honey!

(artist: Carlos Agraz)

Note: The paradox of pain is it makes us feel alive; i.e., per the ancient graveyard function of women and monstrous-feminine entities (e.g., oracles, witchdoctors, priestesses, etc) taking the dead into themselves to pass along. For that reason, I have dreaded returning to these sections, which are meant to be painful to capture the truth of what I experienced, but also per my arguments feel Numinous to me; i.e., sitting with the saint, as I generally do during the grieving process—in this case, myself. It becomes pushed-and-pulled between the desire to know and forget, to hurt and heal, as confused between pleasure and pain, safety and harm, per survival mechanisms, but also responses that are profoundly psychosexual/cathartic. Like graves slashed into the earth, it becomes a marker for trauma as healed into a kind of beautiful scar—of flowers blooming ‘neath the headstones. —Perse

Onto “Meeting Jadis (opening and part one)“!

---

Footnotes

[1] Hasan Abi’s “Kick Is Falling Apart” (2024) and “Why Dr. Disrespect Was Banned,” (2023).

[2] I.e., my first writings of it appeared in “Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space” (2021):

Remember what I said about consent? In this manner, the 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. Samus is vulnerable when denuded, her naked body exposed to the hostile alien menace (re: the end scene from Alien). Metroidvania conjure 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 (source).

Scott Sharkey loved the idea:

[2a] E.g., Tim, Jadis’ ex, living with us under the same roof. I suggested the idea to Jadis while the three of us went out for pizza. After they signed the paperwork, annulling their marriage (after me pestering them to do so for over a year), we went back to Tim’s mother’s, walking past her to Tim’s bedroom (each of us waving hello before shutting the door). Once inside, I suggested we fool around, as we had planned. Soon, I had Jadis on their back, spreading their legs and fucking their pussy while Tim watched. As I got close to orgasm, both of them had to tell me to keep it down and not fuck Jadis quite so hard because—in the heat of the moment (Jadis’ pussy felt really tight and I loved doing it front of their ex)—I’d completely forgotten that Tim’s mom was in the living room! Opps.

[2b] Comparable with Barker’s Cenobites, which themselves have undead components; i.e., on par with medieval flagellants who, mortifying their flesh, also sold their souls. This, suitably enough, adheres to body transformation as torturous in ways that yield an undead aesthetic. The same goes for Vecna and the xenomorph as following a similar undead flagellant motif (and Giger’s monster having postcolonial, monstrous-feminine and chimeric elements). To that, monsters in general both a) tend to function as a matter of poetic expression/continuous evolution, whereupon definitions tend to come later (if at all); and b) tend to have interchangeable uses amid the modular components. It’s all about how you look at it and apply it as a matter of poetics, consumption and criticism (re: monsters are poetics lens that can humanize those inside the state of exception).

[3] Re: The People under the Stairs, which literally involves a cannibal Nazi BDSM “family” that, for all intents and purposes, extends to the house as ravenous—a people and a place that kidnaps and eats children (white or non-white) in a once-gentrified neighborhood that has now decayed to alienate them as Dracula is from his imaginary homeland. While Nazis and Communists generally occupy the same performative shadow zone, here the film feels anti-fascist due to its positive inclusive message about race; i.e., of finding ways to expose predators and heal from generational trauma as linked to a specific site of neighborhood abuse—an urban legend!

[4] Which classically concerns overcoming manufactured adversity tied to profit, versus expressing equality as the so-called “fair fight.” Capital doesn’t fight fair (e.g., videogames: canonical metas serve profit in a half-real sense; i.e., speedrunners and competitive fighters [especially white/tokenized examples] don’t bite the hand that feeds, thus are historically poor activists)!

[5] Such dated, monstrous stereotypes are used, as DARVO always is, to defend predators with the privilege to point the finger at their victims while enjoying the state’s protection: white people! This double standard applies to witch hunters of actual witches, but also zombies, vampires and other undead serving the same basic function during moral panics. A family like the one from Wes Craven’s aforementioned People under the Stairs, above, represent a stranded form of American fascism critiquing the nuclear family as such; i.e., one that lingers in a redlined neighborhood that, mid-economic crisis, is both facing neoliberal collapse (this was the ’90s) while also trying to heal from white people having always had a cannibalistic streak: eating slaves (which extends to anyone they think is beneath them). They’re an open secret, an urban legend akin to Dracula having traveled without moving to reveal themselves as painfully out-of-touch (and joint) with the present space and time: butchers.

In short, while Craven runs a bit hot/cold, it’s a bit wackier and campier than the abjected, far-off racism of The Serpent in the Rainbow (1988) or the straight-up torture porn of The Last House on the Left (a 1972 echo of the Sharon Tate murders, no doubt: fear of poor people at large as a murderous cult, which the middle-class family in the movie kills out of revenge—with a chainsaw).

[6] Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023.”

[7] In case you’re wondering, Jadis loved the villain from the film—loved spiders and humanoid forms of insectoid/arachnid predation as a metaphor, as far as I could tell (based on my own experience) for toxic love (they also loved Tim Curry’s musical number from Fern Gully [1992] by that very name). Intent matters less than their conflations with vice character and abuse happened onstage and off: as effectively no different, insofar they loved themselves and punched down at me to aggrandize themselves, sans irony.

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)!

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

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

The Roots of Trauma, part two: Healing through “Rape,” or the Origins of Ludo-Gothic BDSM as a Matter of Rememory (feat. Harmony Corrupted and Cuwu)

There’s actually a social, therapeutic component to Gothic Communism that relates to our Gothic-Marxist tenets and four main Gothic theories; i.e., as things to interrogate and negotiate in our own lives. / The idea actually comes from dialectical behavioral therapy models introduced to me by [Cuwu]. DBT is designed specifically to prevent self-destructive behavior at a societal level; Gothic Communism as I’ve conceived it applies this to sex workers, preventing destructive behaviors against them from other workers who are loyal to the state. It achieves this by combining dialectical-material analysis of Gothic stories with four Gothic literary theories (the Gothic being largely concerned with sex in popular monstrous media) to achieve a Gothic hybrid of traditionally Marxist goals—all in service of furthering sex positivity through well-educated, emotionally and Gothically intelligent sex workers who can “live deliciously” as a form of proletarian praxis from moment to moment (source).

—Persephone van der Waard’s “Healing from Rape,” from Sex Positivity, Volume One (2024)

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Picking up from where “‘Bad Dreams, part three: Rememory, or the Roots of Trauma’ (opening and ‘Roots’ part one)“! left off…

Now that we’ve covered the mythic groundwork of rememory (and its complex history of tokenization and resistance among different minority groups), I want to conclude the first subchapter of “Bad Dreams,” “Survival,” by applying it to myself as having lived the rememory process at different stages; i.e., through my dreams and consumption of media about abject things homing in on what has become buried, thus something to reassemble using rememory dug up as such: rape as painful, including the facing of it as a memory that is, to some degree, imaginary/real and asleep/awake. Hyphenating these as the Gothic does presents a uniquely therapeutic, BDSM-style opportunity to learn from the past as an artifact thereof we can dissect and subvert during rape play putting “rape” in quotes; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM, as I eventually envisioned the term, being something that continues to affect us and our friends even once they’ve left our lives, but remain as zombie-like ghosts of themselves; e.g., Cuwu, next page, but also us, above. Come and gone, their own survival on canvas testifies tragically-yet-beautifully to someone comely that, all the same, both lived with profound trauma and passed it along to me in various shapes and forms.

Before we get to Cuwu, rape play and ludo-Gothic BDSM, here’s a trigger warning and some useful definitions (from “A Note about Rape/Rape Play,” 2024):

Trigger-warning! This [section] discusses ironic and unironic rape fantasies extensively! This isn’t to condone unironic violence through Gothic poetics, but prevent it through sex-positive education, entertainment, transformation and critique; i.e., the term “rape,” in this case, has been broadened to mean “taking away power to cause harm,” which ludo-Gothic BDSM camps in cathartic, Gothic-Communist forms of Gothic poetics. —Perse

Since this subchapter discusses rape, I want to define it as something broadened beyond its narrow definition, “penetrative sex meant to cause harm by removing consent from the equation.” To that, there is a broad, generalized definition I devised in “Psychosexual Martyrdom” (2024), which will come in useful where we examine unironic forms of rape, but also “rape” as something put into quotes; i.e., during consent-non-consent as a vital means of camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it (“rape” meaning [for our purposes] “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,” generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) [emphasis, me]: finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).

Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale, either type committed by a Great Destroyer (a Gothic trope of abuse of the worse, unimaginable sort, rarefying as a person, onstage) of some kind or another as abstracting unspeakable abuse. It’s a translation, which I now want to interrogate with the chapters ahead. So we must give examples that are anything but ironic before adding the irony afterward as a theatrical means of medicine; i.e., rape play challenging profit through the usual Gothic articulations in service to workers and nature at large.

Simply put, to be raped is to be deprived of agency facing something you cannot defeat through force alone (rape victims are often brutalized for trying to fight back)—capital and its enforcers, pointedly raping nature and things of nature-as-monstrous-feminine by harvesting them during us-versus-them arguments according to Cartesian thought; terror is a vital part of the counterterrorist reversal humanizing Medusa during activism as a psychosexual act of martyrdom. There is always damage, even if you survive, but there is a theatrical element that lets you show your scars; i.e., during consent-non-consent as an artistic, psychosexual form of protest through ludo-Gothic BDSM: having been on the receiving end of state abuse as something to demonstrate and play with for educational, activist purposes—generally with a fair degree of revolutionary cryptonymy (showing and hiding ourselves and our trauma).

By comparison the state uses masks, music (and other things) as a coercive, complicit means of cryptonymically threatening us with great illusions. These rape our minds without irony in service to profit. Such proponents are generally people in our own lives who don the mask/persona of the Great Destroyer to frighten us into submission; i.e., by threatening us with total annihilation as a force of unreality that feels shapeless and overwhelming yet humanoid. This is no laughing matter, nor is subverting it during rape play, both of which the rest of this volume (and Volume Three after that) will explore at length (source).

I won’t have time to unpack the above ideas again, so please just try to keep them in mind as we proceed.

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

Returning to the matter at hand, Cuwu was entirely instrumental in shaping my current understanding of rape play and developing ludo-Gothic BDSM. More on them in a bit, when we conclude the subchapter with several examples of rape play performed between me and my friends as the bedrock for ludo-Gothic BDSM. In the interim, consider how the committing of rape is rightly criminalized but hardly anathema in the ways it proliferates; likewise, consider how having open, earnest discussions about rape—including theatrical ones—are also shameful and taboo in ways that are repressed through more outlandish fictions built on historical abuse (from Volume One): “The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them” (source). That being said, these still grant warning signs pointing to a maintenance of the status quo by commonly marginalized groups; e.g., white women and the standard post hoc canonizing of Original Sin, through a single character like Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction (1994) saying “rape me” to that story’s male patsy while trying to get him to murder her ex-boyfriend (who she stole from).

The reality is, “rape” as something to put into quotes involves invocations of rape during rememories that are overt; e.g., Harmony saying, “rape me” to me during consent-non-consent rituals (exhibit 37b1a) in order to have fun together while living with the trauma of past abuse minus the capacity to cause harm; i.e., “hurt, not harm” (a common BDSM mantra) being a regular simulation of actual harm during calculated risk to introduce paradoxical, exquisitely “torturous” feelings of the Numinous in good faith: clarity in controlled confusion, recontextualizing trauma in a safe space that feels dangerous. It’s the Gothic in a nutshell, but one that from Radcliffe to me, took a very long time to evolve into itself.

Even so, these subversions still occur using a shared, dialectical-material aesthetic of power and death (which we’ll see with convulsionnaires, has a history of theatrical, Christ-like mutilation—of martyrdom; exhibit 37a2b). As such, exploitation and liberation exist inside the same shadowy theatrical spaces, which generally combine messy elements of performance and play that interrogate power as a means of negotiate; i.e., amid thresholds and on surfaces, using Gothic doubles during liminal expression across different media to achieve praxial synthesis and catharsis.

To that, we’ll be returning to trauma as a process of psychosexual investigation that veers away from harm as normally buried; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as I coined it, which generally includes rape play as something I hammered out while personally relying on the help of friends: to teach me ways to heal from lateral instances of police abuse by developing a shared pedagogy of the oppressed. We’ve already written about this (re: Cuwu, in Volume One), so shall proceed by considering a broader traumatic lineage in my life, but also the larger-than-life stories of undead figures haunting me; i.e., my various abusers, including Jadis and Cuwu, but also monomythic echoes of those abusers that, to some degree color the experience: as both informed and describing the seminal, recursive tragedies and farce (re: Marx) whose enslavement and liberation unfold in ghostly forms echoing across space and time in ways that, unlike ghosts, pointedly refer to trauma using actual human bodies (and their abuse)—in short, like zombies do.

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

Trauma breeds strange fruit, strange appetites. For the moment (and into the next subchapter), we’ll quickly consider this paradox through ludo-Gothic BDSM as enacted through my life (and again, segue into grander stories when we consider the monomyth, after that); i.e., as intertwined with that of others come and gone/dreamt up, but also my real-life friends and our mutual attempts to return to the home as sick: the dead as lonely and furious, being heard through how they feed, but also ourselves relating to them as currently surviving the burden of such things felt at all times. As such, we’ll consider the trauma of rape/power abuse as something returned to and healed from by facing such decay in joyous, campy ways; e.g., Harmony and I, but also Cuwu and I before that (which segues into Jadis and I as something I’m still learning to face and live with, thus heal from; i.e., the subject of the next subchapter and where the process of rememory using ludo-Gothic BDSM shall well-and-truly be put to the test: as something of the prototypical example reached through a backwards dissection of my former self remembered again).

For me, the rememory of the state’s rape and war through unironic police violence is winding and complex, as is healing from it. This includes my paternal grandfather’s frank and unromantic, yet-still-somehow-cheeky stories about the Nazi occupation in Holland, but also my high-school fascination with infamously brutal war atrocities like Cambodia, the Rape of Nanking or Vietnam; i.e., any that belie the treacherously mendacious nature of American exceptionalism during more recent, or at least repressed conflicts in the Middle East (with Zionism predating all of these as a 19th century relic, one built on Biblical/Crusade-style falsehoods well into the present day’s current reenactment of: through Gaza and its neighboring lands policed by Christo-fascist forces and token Jews).

In turn, these artifacts further combined inside my mind with my stepfather’s abuse of me in relation to The Last of Us, the latter being something I ultimately wrote extensively about after a wild dream haunted by actual war abuse. The entire assemblage—at least for me—formed a complex, messy mixture of trauma and legend; i.e., like a Gothic castle, something to bravely and playfully navigate and reflect upon regarding the undead as historical-material, in nature (for a vintage, diegetic example, consider the novel Frankenstein, which opens with a chimeric fever dream that torments the privileged Victor as a matter of foreshadowing his own doom); like a bad dream, you’re not sure if they’re real, but feel utterly convinced they’re coming from somewhere.

Marking a domestic curse, zombies of any kind are less from a faraway place of entirely invented dreams, ex nihilo, and emerge more through apt comparisons to Imperialism occurring at home in partially fabricated ways; i.e., like a dream, haunting the mind through the ghastly figure inserting itself cryptomimetically where it shouldn’t belong but does: the Gothic castle (the chronotope) aesthetically pointing to trauma at home as tied to old power structures lurking there still.

(artist: Kelly Jean)

While the unwelcome nightmare is the infamous composer of many-a-Gothic-novel, Gothic dreams aren’t wholly paralyzed or lucid; they always pertain to a fleeting idea of not being entirely in control of how trauma manifests, which it does through socio-material reminders of abuse wherever it occurs or lies adjacent to. Because abuse is more than the immediate violence taking place (re: criminogenic conditions), the suggestion of it through “zombies” becomes a potential extension of violence—i.e., a mental assault that promises vague, all-encompassing punishment to a captive audience. This includes the zombie within the dream as a kind of imperfect revelation—a rememory of something already repressed but struggling to express itself through the same haunted venue/tired symbols stitched together. In the case of hauntings, the primary difference between a zombie and a ghost is one being alive but treated as dead; the other may have never lived at all (although, this goes both ways; e.g., Frankenstein being made up, but still pointing to setter-colonial atrocities experienced in dream-like, conversational forms: the novel of letters).

Such dreams are never made from whole cloth. In this case, Gothic Communism treats partial agency differently than canon; its ludo-Gothic BDSM fosters sex positivity within a proletarian Gothic imagination that consciously subverts the bourgeois forces normally attacking workers with and within their own dreams as experienced while awake. Counteracting the elite’s xenophobic offensive requires highlighting the disabling effect a person’s mind can have on the owner by tracing the material origins of the dream back to the prime, covert orchestrator. As zombie-like threats of violence are repeated but simultaneously denied by the defendant, they start to come across as eerily unreal—like you’re dreaming while you’re awake, unsure of what’s real or who you can trust. Including your friends but also yourself, your perception of reality becomes doubtful, but also dangerous. You start to fear everyone, feeling undead as a matter of zombification, of trepanation attacking the brain.

Except, liberation also involves the same feelings inverted to achieve a sex-positive outcome; i.e., loving yourself as undead to win a xenophilic means of escape: wearing your trauma on your sleeve—nakedly.

(artist: Lit Silium)

Bear in mind, it’s not a nostalgic past to retreat into and pour salt on old wounds, but one whose limited challenging of the states of yore (thus now) grows into a maelstrom; i.e., building a better tomorrow with a reclaimed Wisdom of the Ancients as an anti-predation device. This requires confronting damage in our own lives’ childhoods tied to past devastation, ever backwards and forwards: “Suffer the little children unto me!” as a performance to collect and reassemble like the bones of a composite skeleton; i.e., from a valley of dry bones to pick and choose from.

For example, when I was a teenager, my stepfather—who was always killing[1] small animals around our home—once threatened to beat me. Deciding to hold off “for fear of child abuse” (whatever that meant), he sent me to bed and told me to wait for when he would come, later in the night. He never did and I fell asleep, plagued with terror dreams. When I woke, I was more afraid of him than ever, my heightened imagination running wild. Though I didn’t realize it, my mind had been turned against me. However, once I started to imagine escaping my stepfather, my dreams became lucid; I felt less “trapped” and more in control, motivated by said fear to get the hell out. Slowly but surely I made plans to escape, eventually leaving my stepfather’s home.

That was over twenty years ago and I only now realize what was really going on: my imagination had set me free, but had also been turned against me by an abuser who recognized my highly imaginative personality. Sadly they would not be the last. While Jadis also had a penchant for it, both abusers had been working within the grounds of a fertile mind sown with foundational fears: childhood as abject in a coming-of-age yarn—to be of age is to be exposed to the reality (and fiction) of rape and its various repressed desires, feelings of paranoia and other extreme emotions, fulfilled wishes, intimations of death, captivity and revenge, etc! To escape, we must acclimate ourselves to them as a BDSM means of Gothic play that, often enough, has a dream-like nature to it:

(exhibit 37a1: Artist: Matthew Peak, whose masculine, male rapist invades the mind of the dreaming young woman, reaching for her ostensible virginity with rapacious “knife dildo” fingers. These hyperbolic, psychosexual threats of actual rape are the 1980s version of the Radcliffean demon lover clutching the woman to trap her in a bad fantasy that puts actual rape somewhere in the venue. Rape is about power abuse and social-sexual control; i.e., including one’s body, emotions and labor but also one’s intelligence regarding these things and of state power [and xenophobia] as something to resist. To escape, one must become lucid enough to fight back; to help others do the same, the lesson of survival must be conveyed in poetic, xenophilic language that people can relate to and understand over time—carefully explained to them in exhibits like this one prepared and presented by emotionally and Gothically intelligent worker-artists. Through the state, fearing sex is normal by virtue of its fearsome reputation, but this, too, must be reclaimed. We are not chattel to rape, be that our minds, emotions, or bodies; we might be undead, but we deserve love. If that includes administering pain then so be it, but it should never be depicted at queer people’s expense in the fearful eyes of cis women seeing us as “rapist” [or other token groups triangulating against whomever].)

Though trauma makes up the weighty base of our existence, nightmares can also help the mind process trauma; i.e., by returning to childhood forms and their fatal nostalgia as always, in some sense, dead. Be it real, imagined, or reimagined, trauma’s investigation generally happens inside a familial space littered with undead pieces; re: the Gothic castle. This ghoulish pastiche depicts a sneaking sense of conflict during cryptomimesis (the imitation and echo of trauma) through ludo-Gothic BDSM rituals; i.e., bondage, domination, sadism and masochism as a psychosexual means of calculated risk meant to assist in the rememory process to avoid fascism, tokenism and betrayal-as-usual (class, race and culture).

To that, feeling undead and trapped needn’t be a strict negative while simultaneously addressing the global and generational traumas of the present world’s complicated space and time; i.e., a place to occupy and perform within as the archetypal damsel in a castle might, but also the whore and demon playing detective, mid-peril: during a staged, palliative ordeal about the same whispered terms on the same shared surfaces at odds with themselves. Like a murdered soul rising to Heaven (or a corpse breaking fresh ground), things get heavy and light.

(exhibit 37a2a: Model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard. Monsters speak to trauma as something to confront since and from childhood; or again, from Volume Zero:

performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios); a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other and vice versa [source].

As such, my own contributions overlap with Harmony’s, the two of us working in harmony through a Gothic poetry very much about making it sexual again, but also sex-positive in ways that Radcliffe [and her own venerated castle’s praxial inertia] were not; i.e., not her unironic mutilative sex fantasies, but an asexual investigation of sex adjacent to harm that explores said harm during outrageous fantasies, operatic performances, and castle-like spaces of moribund sex linked to lost childhood innocence: Harmony as under attack, but having anti-predation qualities that present her as fearsomely undead in ways not exclusive to zombies [e.g., snakes baring their fangs as to discourage stepping on them]. For now, we’ll quickly sample that here, then explore it at the end of the subchapter [and deeper in the module].

To that, I chose to depict Harmony as a vampire, not a zombie, but the basic ideas of giving/receiving pain and feeding on essence are shared between either type as for or against the state; i.e., Harmony baring her fangs in a pareidolic threat/anti-predation display when chased to her home and attacked there [zombies effectively doing the same]. Inside history as ever writing itself on and offstage, sexually active “scarlet” women undoubtedly would have been hectored and harassed during witch hunts blaming them as “homewreckers”; i.e., as something to mark with an incongruous symbol while apologizing for male abusers conforming to the heteronormative model [nuclear families, church structures, and so on]. Whereas someone like Hawthorne used a scarlet letter to mark Hester Prynne, I use period blood and the mating press [as well as an implied spreader bar] but also a cute pink paw print on the usual site of fixation per the Male Gaze as something to fuck with: the panties.

[model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard]

As such, any scapegoat outlier must canonically be staked by knife-dicks mistreating them as demon lovers in a demon-lover fashion: rape the whore—her pre-existing holes, but also potential new ones during traumatic penetration. A common mating strategy in the insect world—re: Gwen Pearson’s “stabby cock dagger“—but also religion and Catholic martyrdom expressed in decayed sites of older religious superstitions amid new prostitutions thereof, we’re subsequently teased with “rape” of a particular kind while fielding capital’s usual insect politics: sacred torture; i.e., a kind of Spanish-Inquisition-style torture camp/rapturous expression of pleasurable pain amid “torture” as something to tease in iconoclastic artwork.

This very much includes sex work that camps crucifixion, ossuaries and the like [shoving the stake in things other than the ankles and wrists, in effect turning the coffin nail into a dildo while retaining a punitive, vampiric aesthetic speaking to state rape]. In such places/moments, we see the beautiful, doll-like “corpse” impossibly able to feel pain per the usual tortures normally reserved for living beings [through forced penitence or kneeling on stone, but also impalement and prolonged incarceration] made into a very-odd jouissance reversing “from beyond the grave” into the usual talking skulls [“boners”] held in the hands of certified-freak weirdos: “Alas, poor Yorick, I fucked him, Horatio!”

The vampirism, here, is—like the zombie—a pointed camping of Christian dogma as undead, but also rapaciously prurient in ways we can vibe with, when camped: “Rock me, sexy Jesus!” See the stabbed pussy slick with slippery blood? Is it menses? Maybe! Like Juliet sweating in the sepulcher after waking from the apothecary’s potion, it’s deliberately cliché, thrilling and serious-silly all at once; i.e., when she fucks herself with her lover’s knife dick, suitably commenting on the feelings of those forced to “come of age” too soon [with Juliet’s official age being fourteen—too young by Shakespeare’s standards[2]]:

Yea, noise? Then I’ll be brief. O, happy dagger,
This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die [source]. 

Romeo and Juliet is literally a tomb romance, both a stress valve and pun-heavy joke about emo virgins told with a straight face by a gay man. In short, the Bard expects the audience to get the gist and subsequently play along! The same iconoclastic idea extends to the infamous monsters [and their BDSM activities] that evolved based on it, including zombies and vampires as dialogic matters of grave robbing and defilement made with a nod and a wink to the audience [and later, the camera]. In a sense, then, ludo-Gothic BDSM borrows backwards to move towards post-scarcity as something Shakespeare would have possibly viewed, per Thomas Moore, as “utopian.” Then again, per his own wild fantasies, perhaps not.

Nowadays, though, the usual medieval paradoxes and abject fear-fascinations abound in order to explain decay not just behind but inside state illusions. Mouths and penises hyphenate, as do fascists and Communists, male-female, safe-dangerous, predator-prey, invasive-indigenous, cowboy-Indian, ally-alien, love-lust, protect-kill, mother-fucker, homely-unhomely, and so on. Specifically Nazi predator and Jewish blood libel [the rodent-like, enlarged teeth and nose; e.g., Max Shrek’s Count Orlock from Nosferatu, 1922] combine weirdly through outright Zionism versus Nazi camp as a) being cryptonymy for or against the state, and b) integrating through psychosexual theatre as undead; i.e., haunting the red and the black with various conflicting and competing histories: the eating-raping of women and babies in equally weird, sodomic-pedophilic ways. It’s canonically very xenophobic and gentrified, but decays along the usual routes that can be reclaimed by both sides [workers or the state] trying to survive as Capitalism decays like usual: in the proverbial “graveyard” as a place to have sex as a manner of medieval hyphenation that combines such activities with death, food, war and rape, etc; i.e., to relieve stress by recovering and reproducing as the undead do. Capitalism reproduces through rape; so do we, albeit in quotes.

The same idea, then, of course applies to a fascist cartoon baring its fangs when hunted down, which speaks to tokenization as a kind of barbarism to put down [re: the euthanasia effect]. For example, feminism-in-decay always runs the risk of regressing into state forms of the same basic scapegoat that are then used and discarded as needed; re: TERFs. Even so, there is no monopoly on penetrative, undead violence, the female/queer vampire meeting state “fangs” [stakes] with her own teeth to bite and drain her enemies with: Harmony’s, given bite and shaped by me [the master and apprentice something to reverse at times]. Exploitation and liberation, then, not only exist in the same place on the same surfaces, but use the same “straws” to transfer power in different directions: towards workers or the state through either’s representatives as vampiric! It’s a combination of sex/death face, but also funny face and the face as mask-like; e.g., animal and/or death masks worn and removed as needed! The rub lies in how such things cannot be so easily removed [as a mask presumably is] when the state begins to die and feed on itself. Yet, survival very much involves doing so.)

Per the liminal hauntology of war, we’ve already examined the familial, chronotopic elements of state trauma during the manifesto (and touched upon lost childhood, here, when looking at zombie apocalypses and vampires, above); the Gothic imagination more broadly processes trauma both hidden and visible as reimagined by workers living in a historical-material world: as inherited from childhood forwards. All the while, the Gothic production of emancipatory nightmares has been hidden, privatized and sold back to us in coercive forms by the state.

Inside the zombie apocalypse as a canonical fever dream, the elite’s bad BDSM tells us how to think, but also how to feel afraid of, and react towards, zombies and war as fetishized, heteronormative and commonplace among the undead in general (re: the vampire, above, having more in common with the zombie than not, when push comes to shove). Manufactured nightmares like The Last of Us, then, work suspiciously like my stepfather’s cycle of abuse loading my nightmares with the potential to submit or rebel; i.e., with canonical threats of punishment from those in power, who control the flow of information (thus power) with escalating waves of violence leveled against historically privileged, but also infantilized groups: “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”

To some extent, this includes me (a white trans woman) as needing to subvert these outcomes to serve labor as GNC; i.e., with ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the undead as entities openly raped by the state to begin with (which they then deny to our faces). All the while, I cannot stress enough how having our nightmares constantly produced for us by the state’s BDSM (zombies or otherwise) has alienated workers from our own minds and how they work; i.e., relative to the socio-material world as something we can shape through the same rapacious archetypes. Meanwhile, the elite devise and abuse canon to plant systemic fears into the Gothic imagination from an early age, observing patiently while canon shapes the world (and its socio-material conditions through Gothic poetics) as they desire; i.e., through childhood indoctrination built on false hope/power as monomythic: a hero to rape the undead when Hell comes home to empire.

We’ll unpack that dark return more in the monomyth subchapter. For now, though, just remember that monsters like zombies and vampires commonly signify childhood as a place of elite authorship, one made to imprison labor with; i.e., inside pacified workers’ terrified brains, the former conditioning the latter to see and identify undead things they should attack, not embrace as human by virtue of systemic abuse they experience from childhood onwards. Forever looming over them in displaced, faraway forms, these emerge from the imaginary past as echoing on and offstage in the present space and time; i.e., like a spaceship, but also a traveling Gothic castle occupied with some kind of Great Destroyer that reflects colonial atrocities back onto the middle class: to scare them stupid all over again when the nightmare “returns.”

Except, it never really left. For example, Chrono Trigger‘s Lavos is an ostensibly celestial reaper being hounded by the usual middling kids to the center of the usual black onions; i.e., the castle grounds, layers of the fortress, suit of armor and body inside as all being concentric, anisotropic, and more to the point, recursive ontological statements of the same basic being/process at different moments of exploration: the castle-like body or body-like castle tied to a canonical mise-en-abyme abjecting Capitalism’s cannibalistic device, profit, onto a traveling nightmare that, once assembled through a canonical rememory of the imaginary past, must be invaded and killed for the state. Except, it’s a bread-and-circus ruse, one whose regular bait-and-switch swaps profit for the usual spectres of Marx as haunting space and time more broadly!

(source: Casey Foot’s “Chrono Trigger: What Is Lavos?” 2022)

Such Red Scare nonsense is the elite “getting them while they’re young”; i.e., as cradle snatchers and graverobbers executing a de facto bad parentage. From cradle to grave, they want us to forget our ability to control our own nightmares and their transformative power onstage and off: during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s palliative-Numinous rape play as a proletarian venture made to reclaim monsters from the usual neoliberal illusions! As a matter of gargoyles and menticide (re: Volume One), the elite (and their Superstructure) achieve poetic dominance by making us perpetually scared during the liminal hauntology of war and its apocalypse: the return of the home as undead, meaning bodies and house through a stupefying grim harvest—consume, obey and destroy!

On some level, Big Bads like Lavos reflect Imperialism-as-undead: something workers inherit and contend with—canonically by striking the mirror held up to us by the elite, the middle class punching the ghost of the counterfeit per the process of abjection. It’s up to us to challenge said destiny with our own Aegis; i.e., to dance with the ghost of the counterfeit and interrogate its Russian doll, not to blindly consume or retreat into so-called “better times” that, however simple and tempting they might seem, reflect a profound ignorance towards the suffering of others: an escapist counterfeit unto itself that becomes something the meek will mobilize in defense of from subversive agents.

In turn, once shattered (as innocence generally does under Capitalism), purposeful regressions towards it, the counterfeit and process of abjection amount to willful ignorance in defense of Capitalist Realism. Except, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle (the ghost of the counterfeit) without turning a blind eye to the kinds of predation your own consumption (and class) belongs; i.e., informed consumption (a topic we’ll unpack in Volume Three at length) versus the problem of an alien zombie that, however displaced, nevertheless reflects middle-class anxieties about their own hand in genocide (so much convolution merely to pass the buck, in Chrono Trigger‘s case)!

(artist: Mk-5)

Hopelessly dependent on a bourgeois, socio-material arrangement, canon drains workers of any ability they might otherwise have to imagine a better world through monsters as human. It’s always on the cusp of annihilation, whereupon our minds become a trap buying into neoliberal illusions the likes of which videogames, movies, and other kinds of mass media (which generally respond to each other) constitute a prolific breeding ground; i.e., reinforced by the external world as a dogmatic byproduct of older traumatized minds, of minds, of minds: our own past as shared with that of others across former centuries, having common burial grounds for discontent; e.g., the convulsionnaires (next page), but also Harmony and I as constantly relating to them by already having something worryingly in common: our having survived the horrors of a canonical past that extends into the present. Face with it, we seek refuge inside the imagery as a hauntological matter of communion with liberatory agents conjured up—spectres of Marx that, unlike Lavos (whose outer shell is covered in unhuggable quills like a porcupine and whose inner shelf is a womb-like space), demand to be hugged!

Per the dialectic of the alien, iconoclasm defends Medusa from state forces/Cartesian arguments’ canon (re: nature-as-monstrous-feminine); i.e., a creative process whose subsequent rape play demands our inspecting of the imaginary past as hauntological, thus not completely fictional but certainly walking a fine line: martyrdom! As a matter of prolonged struggle against the state, resistance historically associates with rebellious forms of atheism. Except, there’s also non-secular bodies like the convulsionnaires as being zombie-like, too—literally the trauma of state abuse prompting a return to an imaginary past that never existed back then whose paradoxical return now is equally invoked under the present state of affairs pushed by a shared desire: liberation through torment as half-real.

(exhibit 37a2b: Model and artist: Harmony Corrupted. Confronting trauma takes many forms/rituals invoking spectres of Marx; e.g., Harmony’s Fansly exhibit on convulsionnaires: 

Convulsionnaires helped lay the foundation for the French Revolution by being in direct and fierce opposition to the hierarchical system of religious clergy, and thus, also absolutism. Their extreme behavior inspired lots of public discourse, moving people to question the “ancien régime” and the supposed piety of the monarch. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the convulsionnaire phenomenon was a direct result of the people’s frustration with societal inequity, compounded by the feelings of being increasingly alienated from God. […] The majority (60%) of the convulsionnaires movement was comprised of women who were actively challenging the established ideas of a Christian woman’s role and expected behavior in society. […] The individuals experiencing convulsions were “treated” in oftentimes brutal masochistic sessions (sometimes resulting in crucifixions), which were meant to be cathartic for their suffering and a symbol for persecution and their proximity to Christ.

Later on, the movement was made to leave the cemetery grounds by the police and moved to private meetings, where they continued practicing the sadomasochistic sessions and developing apocalyptic visions [source].

[artist: Harmony Corrupted] 

In short, there’s an oft-musical, historical element to the socio-material factors teasing but not executing actual mutilation and rape. Such spectres haunt the viewer during current ludo-Gothic BDSM practices being informed by in-touch contemporaries’ own understandings of older, more violent forms: actual harm as a matter of suicidal protest haunting non-harmful copies. To that, Harmony’s performance is notably inspired by Trevor Dunn’s avant-garde jazz outfit, Trio Convulsant and their new album, Séances [2022]. Such an operatic, “rapacious”-rapturous mixture has been a part of the Gothic as a transcontinental and transgenerational mode, insofar as such spectres constitute a work-in-process we have already touched upon; i.e., a Communist Numinous; e.g., from Horace Walpole’s rape castle, Otranto, to Matthew Lewis’ poetic inclusions and “Gypsy Dance” from The Monk to Blue Öyster Cult’s own music [next page] to Castlevania to Trio Convulsant to my short essay, “Psychosexual Martyrdom,” and so on…)  

Whatever the spectre’s form, the keys to escape through Marxism-as-undead are performative, occurring via Gothic-Communist development during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., by playfully recognizing the myriad ways in which complex trauma is manufactured by state forces to serve profit, then slowly envisioning a way out of the same, prison-like myopia while inside it. If one’s mind is pacified by dogmatic elements—specifically by the canonical zombie as a kind of violent, Pavlovian threat to menticide the viewer with—then such instances must be transformed in cathartic ways by playing with zombies. Zombies, after all, aren’t strictly rotting corpses, but merely those occupying the state of exception that treats them as undead; i.e., damned, thus unable to easily enjoy social-sexual engagements because they collectively elide with historical-material experiences of state-compelled trauma; e.g., the child-like Creature from Frankenstein trying to befriend little girls only to be shot for it.

As such, the zombie’s tragic, forgotten histories must be bravely reimagined through rememory during ludo-Gothic BDSM if workers are to liberate the Gothic imagination (and Wisdom of the Ancients) from capital. The next subchapter will explore this through sexualized toys and artwork that speak to trauma as something to navigate in ghoulish ways. For the rest of this section, I want to outline a) the basic idea, and b) how it is performed by people with each other during rape plays of various kinds.

As I do, I’ll be stressing the sex-positive quality to such examples despite the historical presence of state abuse haunting them; i.e., through the past as written by people who, themselves, often sucked quite a bit, and for whom we have do to better than; e.g., Roman Polanski as someone who, when engaging with the works of, often feels like us making a deal with the devil in more ways than one, but for which there’s much to be gleaned and learned from the affair as a holistic ordeal the so-called “director” is still only a piece of:

…let’s all acknowledge that Roman Polanski, who adapted the screenplay and directed Rosemary’s Baby, was a total dirtbag who had sex with a thirteen-year-old girl, pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor,” and fled to France the day before his sentencing. He wasn’t exactly a shining example of goodness before he engaged in pedophilia either. Rosemary’s Baby is a masterpiece, but Polanski’s exacting vision and his reckless and abusive methods to achieve it caused a lot of drama with a lot of people on and off set. […] Ironically, given that Polanski is such a dirtbag, both the film and Ira Levin’s novel on which it’s based, invite feminist interpretations (source: Meg Sipos and Eric Botts’ “Satanic Capitalists in Rosemary’s Baby,” 2023).

Whatever the forms or faults at work, rape play is loaded with dead things, but especially Gothic markers that, per liminal expression, are less completely true or false and more in the awkward delicious middle inviting troubling-but-fun comparisons to act out.

In terms of the basic idea of rape play as something to act out as a defense mechanism from profit and state forces, think of my arguments per anger/gossip, monsters and camp (re: the basics of oppositional synthesis). These—I would argue—are collectively done to write with the dead in cryptomimetic fashion, but also dance, eat, war or fornicate with during sex-positive, xenophilic rituals. Such ventures aim to subvert the undead’s rape trauma and feeding mechanisms by detaching them from profit to critique it; e.g., the zombie’s dark, massive animal cock (exhibit 37b) but also the dragon’s Impaler-like variety (exhibit 37c1) as both featured in trademark Gothic locales granting trademark Gothic vibes; i.e., a deathly jouissance/mood of proudly identifying with “death” in quotes: as a potent source of imagination, creativity and vitality

When I die
I don’t want to rest in peace
I want to dance in joy
I want to dance in the graveyards, the graveyards
And while I’m alive I don’t want to be alone
Mourning the ones who came before
I want to dance with them some more
Let’s dance in the graveyards (Delta Rae’s “Dance in the Graveyards,” 2012).

but also a foregone conclusion through these same intimations of mortality as gloriously unclean and faked:

It doesn’t matter if we turn to dust;
Turn and turn and turn we must!
I guess I’ll see you dancin’ in the ruins tonight!
Dancin’ in the ruins!
Guess I’ll see you dancin’ in the ruins tonight!

There’s laughter where I used to see your tears
It’s all done with mirrors, have no fears
There’s nothing pure or sacred in our time
The nights we spend together are no crime (Blue Öyster Cult’s “Dancin’ in the Ruins,” 1985).

Faced within the hyperreality of Capitalist Realism—a thing that is both so very false, but nevertheless making up the reality of our lives—rape play suddenly isn’t so odd.

“Death,” then, is a poetic, campy means of escape onto something better by letting go of current problematic arrangements; re: the above music, but really any projection of any postpunk resistance unto spaces of escape whose at-times ambiguous, necrophilic, operatic hedonism (any kind of extramarital affair) become their own kind of zombie dance within the danger disco of the black castle as conjured up by us: a “danse macabre” reveling in the sensations of existence and non-existence intertwined, but also the echoes of the dead having a profound sense of joy within the theatrical tradition of rape as divorced from state abjection; i.e., while fear can come easy insofar as wanting to respect the diffuse, fragmented memories of the dead goes, playing with imaginary forms and critiquing their pernicious elements (re: canon and tokenism) provides something of a buffer during rape play.

Said play takes many forms. For one, the home-as-dead is a common homecoming to terrify the middle class with: the house as both containing the zombie and representing some aspect of a larger cannibalistic process returning home; i.e., through a moving vessel that, being hypermassive, travels seemingly without moving at all: across time through the usual dimensions of space. It’s precisely this recursive motion through a fourth dimension (time) that canonically keeps power where it normally is; i.e., by cannibalizing the victim as doomed to return to it, thus be eaten. Except, anisotropically reversing this flow ourselves is, itself, foreshadowed by a sweet, delicious doom we can send back at the usual rapists of the mind; i.e., our own awesome power laughing in the face of those who would seek to possess and ruin us for their own fickle gain. Terrified of death and draining the blood of everyone around them by preying on nature, they seek to make us dance for them; i.e., as abusive recruits that, once touched by death, fear it as a matter of going on to prey on others, mid-calculated risk.

This concerns an ongoing relationship shared between the audience and the text as likewise inherited; e.g., Mad Father (above, 2012), but also those who see such nostalgia offered by similar games as something to unironically defend: Jadis, towards me, falling in love with their father’s ghost and possessed with their mother’s (the next subchapter is dedicated entirely to them). They loved Mad Father for those very reasons, smiling as they took advantage of me while invoking that game as they did, time and time again.

Lucky for us, we can resist these bourgeois spells (and their practitioners) through a joy regarding liminal expression as purposefully in-between, not by accident; i.e., death-as-alive, knowing that life is but a walking shadow and death merely the pause in its dancing before it rises once more from the grave. Per the Gothic, this describes a psychosexual, erotic-traumatic force with intensely cathartic potential in queer an-Com hands; i.e., a lullaby into a waltz, a dance with the dead in the same spaces of childhood, but also a coming-of-age ritual whose constructive criticism extends the confrontation to a more (a)sexual sort: bedroom activities turned inside-out relative to the home as the place of zombies, of graveyards, to embrace and find playful, non-harmful joy inside (above). To, as Eddie Money and Ronnie Spector sing it but with a twist, “take us home, tonight!”

I’m talking about sex, of course, but more to the point, ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of nudism and rape play (which certainly doesn’t preclude sex):

(exhibit 37b1: Artist, left: Indicadominant; bottom-middle-and-right: Blxxd Bunny. When spaces become liminal, anywhere can be a bedroom, a grave, a kitchen, a dungeon [commonly for women treated as virgins and whores]. Literal dancing with the dead is more a novel-of-manners approach, one that gentrifies “necrophilic” sexual expression by avoiding, at least initially, the more eroticized components: the undead sword and scabbard, the monster “Franken” cock, including the swollen zombie cock as huge, dark, “rabid” and threatening[3]; re: “animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms”; i.e., the zombie as animalistic, feral and hugely carnivorous during wild animal lust [akin to the xenomorph or a werewolf, etc].

Such liminalities evolved out of a British social tradition, one whose abject xenophobia Ridley Scott would explore repeatedly in the 20th and 21st centuries using Gothic fantasy and science fiction. As a recipient of targeted violence towards embodiments of undead trauma, the zombie cock can adopt a fearsome, punisher role: the zombie pussy demands a “beating.” The broader theatrical idea, in sex-positive art, is to humanize the monster genitals as potentially slated for giving or receiving abuse as a kind of reclaimed zombie ritual, while retaining their outward, monstrous appearance; i.e., monster-fucking during ludo-Gothic BDSM as patently undead in ways that face and befriend death as normally alien, under capital: “We are all animals, my lady!” [what John Webster would consider lycanthropy as: raw animal lust].

Arguments about rape are made with monsters. Amounting to a synthesis of xenophilia during liminal expression, zombie genitals [and the perverse courtship rituals attached to them] can a) move towards survived trauma as something to express, and b) seek to alter the Superstructure’s canonical shaping of xenophobic cultural values; i.e., that lead to unequal, criminogenic, socio-material conditions. In short, the “rabid, stabby cock dagger” must be camped, and inside the usual grave-like areas as returned to minus the rose-tinted glasses of youth. It becomes a form of play that makes death, food, war and rape front-and-center by literally setting the table with them [above].)

Rememory strives for reunion, especially with lost memories (the ghost of the counterfeit) that have become divided from the physical body over time, or with the body separated from a larger cultural identity that has since been erased by hollow, braindead copies (the counterfeit as abject). Recollecting the zombie’s traumatic past, then, is always imaginary to some extent; the revived or the reviver always bringing something back into the living world—a buried, “souvenir” aspect of reimagined trauma that is perilous to confront. Barring extreme forms of isolation (denial being the final step of genocide, according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust), personal trauma is never fully separate from societal trauma. By investigating the rememory of my own personal trauma in relation to the material world, part two of the “Bad Dreams” chapter pointedly confronts the humanization of zombies through sex toys and BDSM rituals: as flagrant, vulgar displays of phallic, toy-like “violence.” When playing with these eroticized, modular pieces, iconoclasts are working with trauma as recovered from, but also stored between, individual performers, social groups and the material world.

That more or less covers the basics of rape play’s context. Let’s conclude the subchapter by looking at some sex-positive examples from my own life (which will work backwards towards my own lived abuse, in part two of “Bad Dreams”).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Before we proceed unto the examples, though, I want to give several quick, holistic, symposium-style reminders (three pages); i.e., about the context of rape as something to perform. Consent-non-consent is informed consent, so better safe than sorry!

First and foremost, personal and collective traumas can either assist or undermine the humanization of zombies belonging to the same process of abjection; i.e., as something to canonize or camp (thus reverse). It’s up to the individual to determine which way this goes, but always through the larger capitalist world as something to conform with or rebel against through the help of one’s allies. Even then, state proponents and class traitors must be considered, including the ways in which they sabotage class struggle and consciousness; i.e., through the coercion trifecta weighing on the experience of abused children who grow into abusers, themselves. These, in turn, poison the nightmare as a bourgeois instrument that must become gay and campy in service to workers (and their trauma) once more!

For part two of “Bad Dreams,” I shall demonstrate how by inspecting the evolution of my own creative process within these broader parameters; i.e., from my own traumatic childhood and into adulthood, becoming increasingly genderqueer over time despite the presence of systemic, necromantic traumas seeking to closet and silence me… inside a coffin but also above ground: where the undead entity is exposed, vulnerable, and ripe for fatal, pro-state penetration. Through such dogmatic tortures ruthlessly exacted upon the young (or young-at-heart) as “young, dumb and full of cum,” capital punishment reduces state victims to a vegetative mindset the elite can reliably harvest (or use to harvest others with) as needed: per Radcliffean exorcism and monomythic calls to violence tied to formulaic romance as heroically unrealistic by virtue of it not mattering either way[4]: the perception of strength and danger to mobilize police violence against the usual undead victims by the usual braindead cops.

By comparison, the remainder of this subchapter concerns a more enlightened, sex-positive approach as already having occurred based on that history as something I survived my own rape regarding: universal worker liberation (from alienation and fetish-grade sexualization), which occurs within the feeling of one being watched as a matter of performing “rape” in quotes; i.e., the zombie’s ambiguously “alive” (and queer) gaze haunting the performance, mid-ludo-Gothic-BDSM, but also one’s body as bare and exposed: her tits were there, along with everywhere else lying in wait… to gobble up state enforcers, taking their power!

As we’ll see in the following exhibits, power is both a ritual, then, and something to perceive as going different ways. Sexist men, for example, classically fear the Medusa, but also are drawn to her precisely because capital has alienated them from their basic needs and enrichment. Spend enough time with (and inside) her and you might start to realize you’re the state’s arm, attacking and maiming those monstrous-feminine components of nature and labor the elite require you to in order for them to profit. It’s simple and brutal, but remains an effective trap that continues to work into the new millennium: a book or some-such instrument of the dead to—like Jim Henson’s titular Dark Crystal—take power for the elite through those who all the same struggle to control it.

Except while canon operates through the eyes as the mechanism that is most widely used to enslave workers (a quick path to the brain), this aforementioned monopoly isn’t absolute. Furthermore, the difference between canon and something akin to Henson’s Crystal (and similar works—again our rape-play exhibits, next) is effectively an anisotropic, children’s-story critique of such things; i.e., one that dares to suggest it could go both ways.

By comparison, the likes of weird canonical nerds like Sam Raimi (who we’ll explore more in the Demon Module) and other unironic, Pygmalion-style practitioners of abjection through Orientalism (re: Blizzard, Naughty Dog and so many others) will always serve profit by pushing genocide to the margins of Western civilization. In doing so, they effectively scapegoat older (usually non-white) empires and victims; re: the process of abjection, per the ghost of the counterfeit, which “displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell” (re: David Punter). Aa always, this kind of jungle fever sends a Christ-like figure (the middle class, playing Jesus) into rapture; i.e., martyring themselves and the usual victims of state abuse through a spurious guilt trip, a lie presented as “truth.” Perception becomes reality to such persons.

In short, this abjection can be reversed through various splendid lies (e.g., kayfabe), but our focus shall be the rape exhibit at its most naked and extreme.

Even with less extreme forms/performers, though (re: Henson), there remains unto both a dark undercurrent: liberation occurring within rememory as playing with the same funerary incantations, demonic resurrection passages, and Gothic exchanges used by all—a sort of “church curtain” raised by groups of people with a shared goal against the state; i.e., using the various danse macabre to camp exploitation as always being haunted by ghosts of the real thing (and its moral panics) behind canon’s typical obfuscations (disempowerment, death, rape, mutilation, etc). Any manipulation canonically serves profit; any successful camp does not, preventing rape by playing with “rape” as something to speak to past abuses actually suffered—to show the audience one’s rape, normally unspeakable, as something to act out, mid-enjoyment on a reclaimed stage (churchly or not). But this takes practice—of being careful and thorough to avoid harming others; re: through calculated risks, not unnecessary or unplanned ones (a history of Gothic-coded bad decisions we’ll examine in the Demon Module, once more dragging Radcliffe, before pushing away from such gaffs in Volume Three).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Last but not least, rape—as something to play with—is always a risk under capital, is always something that returns in zombie-like fashion (an “epidemic,” in political language). To prevent actual harm, workers must return to the site of older trauma (the grave) as threatening to come back, post-anniversary (returning from the grave, again and again and again…); i.e., to learn from it, but also use it to establish new boundaries with. To that, there is always a partially imaginary and playful, campy element to rape play—of going back in time to move forward in a circle; e.g., from Percy Shelley’s timeless “Ozymandias” to Charles Dickens’ ghostly tryptic A Christmas Carol to Rocky Horror‘s “Let’s do the time warp!” to the Muppets, and onwards to these current examples I’m about to show you, now.

As I do, remember that from kawaii-to-kowai, 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. Just as often, our attempts to express ourselves are policed; i.e., through the discourse itself as something whose own imperialism of theory (re: Sandy Norton) is a matter of choice normally serving the state, one our own revolutionary forms of sex-positive expression rail against to invite speculative thought about receiving state abuse: from the zombie’s perspective.

To these performances I’m going to be showing you, then, surviving rape is only the beginning for those made undead as a matter of consequence. Doing so leaves a massive hole inside victims that only the Numinous—however brief or fabricated (re: Dennis Cooper’s Frisk, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, etc)—can truly fill. It can seem odd, then, to watch people submit to “rape” as a theatrical means of transgressive exhibitionism that is so obviously bogus and verging on the real deal. Except—and this is very important to remember—it’s not actually rape unless irony (and mutual consent) are absent from the act-in-question.

This brings us to the consent-non-consent exhibit. Wanting to do the process justice, I’ve felt driven to include as much as I possibly can. As such, we’ll be demonstrating rape play both as an act and testament to lived abuse (nothing is deadlier or more conducive to rape/genocide than the silence surrounding it). That being said, the following has extended into a messy soup of various examples; i.e., one that features rape play between myself and either Harmony Corrupted or Cuwu, while also going over the theatrical-historical mechanics and half-real, therapeutic elements which present and regard the complex emotional state of rape survivors. Myself included, we’re commenting on ludo-Gothic BDSM through a testimony that, per an attempt to illustrate the fun and games being had, suitably feels “off the cuff,” whimsical, and fragmented.

Rest assured, while that might sound ominous at first blush, and while these images certainly look extreme at a glance, they’re still just that—half-real acts of rememory for the viewer to study and consider the undead paradoxes at work. Often at war with themselves and their surroundings’ imaginary past as caught historically-materially between the two, everything strives to communicate displaced abuse in language that readily imparts the source and result of undeath: the trauma of rape. Here, I will try to explore and preserve the intimacy of me and my friends’ healing from it with a degree of poignancy, color and love.

(exhibit 37b1a: Artist: Zuru Ota. As a matter of profit, rape serves settler-colonial systems by dividing its recipients into different groups as a matter of genocide; i.e., it makes people feel undead through botched love as instructional, but especially historical recipients of such abuse under patriarchal systems that have grown more predatory over time: women—but especially white cis-het women—being made to fear rape as something the state uses to triangulate them against its other victims through legitimized violence. To break the curse, these living-dead girls must learn exactly what they want as being fundamentally at odds with the structures they haunt having divided them inside and outside of themselves. Their exhibits of “rape” must speak cryptonymically to the consequences of rape normally harvesting them and nature at large; e.g., reducing the party-in-question to something of a toilet, a cum dump for useless semen either divorced from sexual reproduction, or in competition over the same entity as something to dominate in activities that have little if anything to do with actually reproducing. It’s about power as something to communicate in order to subvert or enforce its usual lopsidedness.

Recall that legitimacy under current Western models is to conform to one’s position of disadvantage under profit as administered by white European men and their allies; e.g., women being performatively subservient as virgins and targeted for police violence anyways; i.e., as whores, whereupon the two elide on the same performer less as one or the other and more as both to varying degrees at once: “I can be your angel or devil,” your Athena or Medusa, your Hippolyta, etc. They are often at war with each other in ways we’ve already discussed in this series, and which you should keep in mind, here; re [from Volume One]:  

It bears repeating that [the imaginary] past is sewn with conflict and confusion—not because it is old, but because its ownership is challenged. Its monsters—and the various instructions they supply as gargoyles—are generally at war with themselves, mid-lesson; i.e., psychopraxis, psychosexuality, psychomachia, and Amazonomachia through doubles and paradox amid liminal expression as things to view in ways that remain ambiguous. As my thesis argued, “Doubles invite comparison to encourage unique, troubling perspectives that ‘shake things up’ and break through bourgeois illusions.” Gargoyles, like all monsters, double people and their conflicted sense of humanity but also supply them with various inhuman qualities that likewise exist within dialectical-material opposition. During oppositional praxis, then, they effectively “go to war.” Praxial stances also double through gargoyles, and grow increasingly ambivalent during the maelstrom. It’s a war of optics, but also of perception linked to one’s state of mind as thrown worryingly into question near positions/statements of power and trauma. Said statements seem both concrete and oddly fluid [source]. 

“Gargoyles,” as the quote [and volume] use it, refers to police agents as something to view as a matter of coding the audience through what they see as instructional. The same fear-and-dogma principles are essentially at war with the whore, who is both expected to police their venue while conforming to its heteronormative elements [and tokenized extensions]. They are expected not simply to identify as women, but dirty vermin/chaste, nun-like property that performs readily as either when called upon by a white, cis-het male master as literally or ipso facto owning them. In turn, this unfair position presents nature as monstrous-feminine through devices like the whore or virgin as made to serve profit; i.e., as currently abusing the language of the half-real, chronotopic past to conceal its own atrocities at a systemic level: rape shows and hides itself through cryptonyms.

Psychomachy aside, the virgin performance is coveted and owned, the whore performance chased for quick, dirty thrills that, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, subversively translate to the whore reclaiming their power through the usual modes of Gothic poetic expression; e.g., sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, heavy metal, videogames, penny dreadfuls, etc; i.e., camping “rape” to establish boundaries the usual benefactors of capital cannot cross without outing themselves as harvesting nature as usual: raping it. Historical abuse is always at least adjacent to psychosexual expression, but it [and its exploitation] is not automatic insofar as exhibiting and exploring sexual violence through art is a matter of performance: spousal rape, but also gang rape by mythical rapacious forces; e.g., “zombies” being code for black men, but also non-white agents of any gender or color against straight white women, period. Such things canonize per a particular kind of double standard/oscillating rhetoric: “The monstrous-feminine is always weak and strong as a matter of acting slutty and chaste, ordinary and demonic, undead and pure,” etc.

Keeping this in mind, would it really surprise you to know that such acts are generally loaded with their own internalized elements to embody and overcome? Classically the whore is something to attack and kill as imposturous, alien; i.e., othered by virtue of the presumed maiden’s own shame, guilt, and self-hatred that, per the process of abjection, projects onto a dark, non-Western, oft-Communist reflection. Just as often, though, someone identifies with the whore for precisely those very reasons and must find value in humanizing said struggle by exposing the police element, mid-performance, as a capitalist one; i.e., in token Amazons, whores, what-have-you. Again, they’re a) visually identical, and b) constitute the battle extending to one’s self as torn between policing the whore and playing with whore-like tropes to subvert their usual police violence; i.e., as yet-another-battle on and offstage, inside and outside oneself: fucking monsters to metal during ritualized forms of “rape” whose outcomes always threaten actual abuse in cartoonishly silly forms.

[artist: Zuru Ota]

That is, canon enforces binaries that thrive on fetishization and alienation to serve capital as patriarchal by design; i.e., as something for the dutiful whore to internalize and the rebellious one to camp pursuant to the same zombie-like enormities [cocks, bodies, power imbalances, etc]. The iconoclastic power of the Gothic comes from working inside hellish dialogs of exploitation, which dissolve binaries through cryptonymy as a means of exposing trauma and feeding in reverse; i.e., paralyzing police agents, mid-observation, by presenting the whore’s “rape” as something to camp and haunt with its own actual violation: the original rape and its advertisement as felt within camp’s reclamation of it. The threat display becomes a playful declaration/pun, “Over my dead body!”

That is, the guilty parties are forced to observe a form of undead play they cannot participate in, one that makes rape impossible by virtue of mutual consent as something to illustrate during calculated risk; i.e., not as dogma, but de facto good sex education through the same aesthetics of power and death the Gothic thrives on. If you camp the threat, it loses much of its dogmatic power but retains its paradoxically treat-like ability to please the usual recipients of the threat. Escape becomes a matter of performance that is commonly sought out of consequence, pushing our luck behind Aegis-like buffers to flash our abusers with: in and out of a dark shadow space, akin to Hell as our river Styx to dive into while seeking power of a particular kind. It’s a paradox we feel compelled to return to when triggered by reminders of our own deconstruction—our rape—as having made us undead to begin with.

For performers seeking paradoxical empowerment, then, actual rape often has one of two prominent side effects that color these artistic displays: asexuality or nymphomania. In keeping with psychomachia, both occur with a fair degree of performative overlap; i.e., sex, for those who survive its purely harmful forms, generally exude a frank degree of vulnerability onstage when seeking Hell; i.e., through various acts or bartering mechanisms that use things they are desensitized towards, but especially the rape symbols they camp, onstage. In doing so, the performance becomes simultaneously detached and indulgent as a matter of negotiation and play towards actual empowerment under capital as designed to rob us blind; i.e., as something to liberate ourselves through these performances as educational by virtue of their theatrical qualities challenging canon: establishing and testing boundaries, including the audiences’ own comfort levels!

In turn, these generally boil down to projection onto a performer regarding the usual vulnerable elements simply being exposed at all; e.g., the genitals as a kind of offering to the viewer torn between different feelings about rape as a generally spontaneous and legendary crime the performance flaunts the historical victim’s vulnerability in defiance of. It’s not a fear of the reaper but a teasing of them with the usual harvested goods; i.e., tempting fate.

[model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

Except “rape,” unlike rape, actually takes practice; you have to learn how to communicate and recognize the boundaries [and Gothic codes] at play that are likewise constantly being [re]established on a daily basis, while also knowing what kind to establish—in short, how to play “rape” out in quotes, using the various symbols of power and death that overcrowd the venue. There’s both a) some general rules you can bring to any play session, and b) a high degree of idiosyncrasy keeping said rules in mind while you build towards the “rape” as echoing actual rape, once-upon-a-time: “hurt, not harm” and “learn what they like.” Both occur by openly communicating and asking questions, mid-playtime; i.e., learning what someone likes/dislikes, ahead of time—their BDSM preferences, hard/soft kinks and limits, etc—which, in turn, usually involve some very straightforward questions when putting them to practice, in bed [or wherever the play session is taking place]: “Is this ok?” “Does this feel good?” “Harder? Faster?” and so on.

It’s extremely important to remember that rape play is a hard kink/form of calculated risk that, like all sex-positive examples, wants to avoid harm while playing with the same-old symbols, games, and histories as interwoven. Achieving this aim takes two basic things: a thorough, well-rounded and experienced sense of BDSM, and a play partner who understands [and respects] all of the above before you even start! Learn what you want and don’t want, then operate within the mechanisms of capital as something to alter by your own example: raising awareness through artistic expression doubling as the actual thing while simultaneously not being harmful as a matter of practical exchange. The half-real nature of calculated risk evokes danger as zombie-like; i.e., sitting between history and invention, but also punishment and pleasure as ultimately falling on the latter side of things, provided the zombie is humanized:

[artist: In Case]

If undeath is a consequence, so is the feeding on unequal power as essential to combating one’s zombie-like state. For survivors of rape, “rape” as a matter of theatrical power exchange—e.g., fucking to Slayer nice and hard, your lover’s cock deep in your ass and their hands wrapped carefully around your throat to seem threatening—simply feels good. This healer’s plight, the paradox of pain, speaks to a complicated truth within capital: trauma shapes our weird appetites while living under abusive systems. In turn, these same systems trigger us; except, to survive and thrive as emotionally and Gothically intelligent people, we must learn to seek oblivion/spifflication as a sensation, not an actuality!

For instance, not everyone wants “true love” by virtue of prescription; some people, having survived abuse, just want sex, cuddles, pain, or whatever else you might call “the simpler things in life.” For me, that’s the Numinous, which I present as palliative to my psychosexual urges, triggers, and maladaptive survival mechanisms resulting from genuine abuse. Like me, others learn what they want as an equally puzzling means of chasing the dragon, then having to learn how to ask for the medicine from the dragon without actually getting choked to death [most cis-het men have a very literal interpretation of domination, squeezing the neck like they’re trying to break it]: to dress up different invitations of “danger” and “rape” as a carefully prepared matter of calculated risk that many virgins to trauma won’t understand, thus cannot be trusted to execute safely.

Except, the privileged must learn if we are to heal as a society from rape; i.e., by subverting capital and its usual instructors thereof! Volume One’s “Healing from Rape” establishes the basic idea; re: through Cuwu and I learning about rape as something to relate to each other from opposite ends of, thus heal from according to my listening to them about rape appearing in media indicative of the abuse they suffered. As something to dance with, trauma becomes a demonstration in hindsight; i.e., an undead, uncanny ability to summon and dismiss, mid-contest, by virtue of one’s appearance sexily beckoning the destroyer out of the past, to then reify your supremacy as stronger having survived it before. You chuck that fucker into the stratosphere, looking graceful and delicate as you do, but also like Cuwu did: “Strong, strong, strong!”

[artist: Hamza Touijri]

For one, such implements aren’t so odd. As I write in Volume One; re: 

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. […] Simply put, the Gothic is where we retreat to interrogate our trauma (and relative guilt, desire, anxiety and other repressed emotions) in relation to other survivors; i.e., to trauma-bond through the usual displays of music, violence and sex [source]. 

Whatever the form or paradox, then, one’s lived experiences commonly reify inside Gothic media as rather oxymoronic. Without a pedagogy of the oppressed poetically tailored to help us find similarity amid difference, though, this can feel incredibly alienating for both parties: one damaged to push-pull towards and from echoes of said damage, the other suitably concerned, guilty and confused for having not living through those kinds of events the same way.

For example, when relating to Cuwu, I thought I hadn’t been raped because it wasn’t sexual [from Volume One] like their abuse was:

While I have been beaten and mentally tortured, for example, I have never been sexually raped […]  However, I know many workers who have been raped. Listening to them has helped radically change my systemically privileged views, but also reflect on my own lived trauma and complex emotional abuse compared to theirs [ibid.].  

My thoughts on that have changed, insofar as I currently feel like I was raped differently than Cuwu—emotionally versus sexually. But we were still a part of the same conversation; i.e., one had between us about such stories as things to relate to and perform ourselves:

After the film was over, we talked about it from Cuwu’s point of view as someone I related to in both sexual and asexual ways. Doing so frankly opened my eyes to what, for them, was an everyday experience: living with the trauma and threat of rape as something for you and others to behold, often as voyeurs, but also as BDSM practitioners fetishizing our own survived abuse in psychosexual, Gothic forms. Many of the fantasies that Cuwu and I played out reflected the sorts of unspoken abuses generally granted some kind of voice in Gothic fictions. The choking hand is, at its most basic level, meant to relieve stress from having seen something stressful that reminds you of an abuser who won’t follow your commands [ibid.].

To that, the idea of any long-lasting friendship is stability. To achieve that as a matter of good praxis, abuse victims need to learn how to acknowledge each other’s survival as different according to power affecting us differently. Indeed, it was Cuwu’s inability to ultimately respect my boundaries and survival story that led to our friendship breaking apart like it did; they didn’t heed my instructions, falling victim to their own condition as aping Maynard James Keenan’s “Stinkfist” [1996] chorus: 

Just not enough, I need more
Nothing seems to satisfy
I said, I don’t want it, I just need it
To breathe, to feel, to know I’m alive [source: Genius]. 

A certain amount of regressive vanity is required to control a scenario as matter of submissive roleplay. In Cuwu’s case, their own survival mechanism was maladaptive to predatory extremes; i.e., it operated through being seen by someone they could control through their bodily displays: controlling the entire room through their vanity as borderline, their personality disorder coming to life through their fractured, undead sense of self. This ceaseless, draconian vampirism started through our disagreements spilling into our play time, our conversations, and ultimately our time apart.

[artist: Cuwu]

All of these borderline attractions to destructive, psychosexual power and back-and-forth arguments between actors/players probably seem rather odd to the uninitiated. In truth, it only really makes sense if you’ve been there yourself, touched by death as something to spend the rest of your life camping to best strike that precarious balance [from Volume Two, part one]:

The greatest irony of Jadis harming me […] is they accidentally gifted me with the appreciation of calculated risk. Scoured with invisible knives, I don’t view my scars as a “weakness” at all; I relish the feeling of proximity to the ghost of total power—of knowing that motherfucker took me to the edge but didn’t take everything from me: I escaped them and lived to do my greatest work in spite of their treachery! Like the halls of a cathedral, my lived torments and joys color this castled work, ornamenting its various passages with the power of a full life. I’ve known such terror that makes the various joys I experience now all the more sweet and delicious. I am visited by ghosts of my rapturous design, the empress of my fate, the queen of a universe shared with seraphs the likes of which I can hardly describe; “no coward soul is mine” [source]. 

From Jadis to Cuwu to myself, the undead generally feed as a matter of seeking an old trauma to fill themselves out with, undoing the hollowed-out shell after their initial wounding.

Addictive and undead paradoxes aside, there’s always something that somebody wants, for which others can provide that as a matter of exchange that cannot, unto itself, be monopolized. Such barter occurs through a matter of play that is, to some degree, coded; i.e., by virtue of one euphemism [or physical object] swapped in and out for whatever you can think of: cupcakes for popcorn, or “cupcakes” for “popcorn.” It’s less about avoiding the playing of games altogether and more about recognizing who you’re playing with, how and where; i.e., determining intent through a matter of good play/acting versus bad play/acting through ludo-Gothic BDSM while establishing fresh boundaries to increase success as a matter of preventing rape [risk reduction]: the thrill of the danger haunting the venue without causing the harm normally associated with it.

[artist: Cuwu] 

This paradox occurs within a given venue whose rules during interpersonal exchange [versus, say, a bar or dance club] are not writ in stone to nearly the same extent, but for which the players are contributing to something larger [a proletarian Superstructure] that is challenged by state dictates and operatives! From there, you establish trust and work towards the moment at hand, which serves another important function: challenging the ways in which power is normally presented and performed in canonical media [a deliberate lack of clear boundaries or consent]. Putting “rape” in quotes is camping its normal performances as a matter of acting and actually committing said behaviors; i.e., in a half-real sense, on and offstage as a liminal activity that graduates to more advanced forms. Rape can happen anywhere; it can likewise be camped as such, provided people are taught how.

The Gothic classically has a historical element to its fabrications marrying fact with fiction, as well as the abject and obscene to the ordinary by what are effectively weird art nerds. Such education, then, stems from recreations of the imaginary past as “rapacious”; e.g., Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” constituting a curious British trend at the time: possessing but also replicating said urns to convey a particular message to interpret the past from a modern perspective romanticizing the ancient past in, at times, highly inventive ways[5]; i.e., the draw of fatal power as ultimately displaced, far-off and imaginary, thus paradoxically safe per a calculated risk as something to make sex-positive through iconoclastic interpretations, mid-execution. Whether it’s whorish Medusas, Amazons, daddy’s little girl, or some combination of these things, systemic trauma leads to monstrous-feminine that canon will always try to police/rape; and camp, to reclaim.

Say what you will about the undead’s fractured, complex emotions; it’s less complicated from a dialectical-material standpoint and more through how the state complicates our attempts to humanize ourselves through “rape” fantasies. The reoccurring issue is, canonical stories generally rely on “confidence” as a matter of men [and token agents] acting first, “making a move” based on what amounts to telepathy and dogma through Man Box entitlement; i.e., the kind that treats sex like a heteronormative reward that serves profit: relations—be they sex and/or love—presenting as “taking” and always more, more, more!

In short, white cis-het men are owed sex as a matter of fact; they chase whores and marry Madonnas, but likewise carry these trends out in monomythic refrains that parallel domestic and foreign abuse as a means of harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine: per all the usual police violence internalized/externalized as what I have previously called “prison sex” mentality. While Cuwu became predatory as a submissive agent, dominant agents—generally men and tokenized Man Box proponents—generally become police agents through the same system; e.g., TERFs, but also media that seeks control in ways that discourage the kind of introspection I mentioned as previously occurring between Cuwu and I. Either shows how media and people share the same spaces. Keeping that in mind, we can go easily enough from Cuwu’s controlling the room, to something quaint and seemingly innocent as the formulaic vigilantism in ’90s kids cartoons; i.e., anything that can be consumed, thus absorbed and passed along.

For instance, despite a random show like Swat Kats [1994] having admittedly awesome music[6] to rock out to well past its show date, the production yields the same underlying problem as TMNT and other neoliberal media we’ve already examined: a complicit cryptonymy per open-secret police identities. Through such devices, police agents historically project their insecurities onto their victims as a matter of dogma; i.e., are expected to police their wives and anything else that qualifies as property from/of nature for them to litigate by force: raping nature as something “wild” to tame. Except, its subsequent rape, harvesting and undeath all become, like Cuwu, a kind walking contradiction present in both parties: a little zombie/dark mother to befriend by camping the whole ordeal as well as we both could!

[artist: Cuwu] 

To that, camp’s surreal nature remains haunted by mighty ghosts that come alive through us and our games’ semi-secret identities yielding a dominator flavor to their visual code: the monstrous-feminine class of destroyer as a theatrical device loaded with all the usual historicized fetishes and clichés made for or against the state on different registers. Due to their own age and damage, Cuwu couldn’t handle it, flying apart at the seams [the photo is strictly period blood, mind you]: preying on me while offering themselves up behind closed doors, per an escalating decay of our usual bedroom dialogs.

By comparison, Harmony can take on these kinds of fantasies, treating them as fun and healing for both of us in a very toy-like fashion:

 

[artist: Harmony Corrupted] 

As she demonstrates, it’s all a matter of stability as something to work on; i.e., through the games we play together contributing towards this book: healing from rape through an informed process. By comparison, hawks/police agents are often victims of the state who, radicalized to its service, will take any theoretical or cosmetic aspect to praxis, synthesis and aesthetics they then us to embody the state’s trifectas and monopolies.

In regards to them, there’s no room for anything else—the monstrous-feminine at large—to negotiate, unless these boundaries [and associate trust] are tested and ultimately reestablished by the likes of myself, Harmony and, yes, Cuwu; i.e., as a messy and complicated means of confronting the usual arbiters of sex, terror and force: as something to overcome by humanizing their usual victims on the same stages of lost childhood. So many weirdos want to regress to childhood as a means of raping others for real [e.g., “when men were men and women cis-gendered and submissive“]; we want to camp it to expose such nonsense, dissecting the past as, like the Creature by Shelley was, kept alive for its beauty amid pain. Like a rainbow in the sky, it touches us before it fades, staying with us in ways that we never want to end: “In your sleep, I hear you say, ‘Don’t let the morning take him'” [Judas Priest’s “Before the Dawn,” 1979]. Moreover, it becomes a very hellish way to see the world:

To that, Cuwu and I knew each other long enough to become familiar with what the other liked and enjoyed, and communicated constantly in terms of these things whenever we played. The same now goes for Harmony and me, but as something more mature and stable, less spiraling and draining of me [quite the opposite, in fact]. All of it goes into the book, including our own instances of consent-non-consent for your consideration—as a matter of pride, something we want to show off so you can learn by our example. It should become second-nature first in bed, and then on a cultural level that transforms the societal treatment of such things; i.e., as a constant relationship between real life and media as half-real, but also plastic:

 

[artists: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard]

In short, no matter how massive a hyperobject like Capitalism seems, it can be transformed through smaller, simpler abstractions of itself and its abuse. Liberation is gained through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a showcase thereof: escaping inside the places that normally imprison us to receive/deliver unironic harm like zombies. The showcase is the apocalypse and we are the zombies, our “violent” performance adjacent to real-world harm in the same kinds of exploitative spaces and aesthetics. It’s nice meeting someone with baggage who knows how to work through that with you to synthesize catharsis as a means of good praxis, not unironically dominating the Madonna or the whore [as survival sex work forces the monstrous-feminine to be]. It’s often absurd, silly and, yes, fun: a stress button to push not once, but over and over!

To that, Harmony is an excellent friend and comrade, and I love surrendering my power to them, but likewise love being the dutiful, loving service top who can ravish them or even—with their trust and permission—”rape” them per all the usual cryptonymies, buffers and codes we use to get our point across [with soothing pep talks often coming into play to coax someone into coming (the little death) when they’re close and trying to cum[7]; e.g., “You’re working so hard! Do you need to come? Yeah, that’s it… Come for me, baby… Just let it all out for me… Good girl…”]! This includes imperatives like “rape me” as something to follow through in ways that don’t cause harm—quite the opposite, actually! More to the point, it’s a service that not only goes both ways, but gives back to those normally without; i.e., through evocations of the dead per our orgasms, vaso vagal responses, and disassociative performances having an element of truth to them[8], but also a performative, intersecting history that gleefully invokes the devil as someone to summon in jest while earnestly exposing taboo things; e.g., Nicolo Paganini famously rolling his eyes back into his skull[9] to evoke elements of rapture, of possession, by a devilish agent aping a Godly force that normally prohibits power and knowledge exchange: showing off.

Such “dumb suppers” actually tend to be rather loud; i.e., involve us freezing on command through the contest of “rape” as camp, only to give back to the workers of the world: showing them how to become better stewards of nature and ourselves in our own exquisite “torture” dungeons. It’s not so different than playing a fighting game and quoting the vice character domming you or vice versa; e.g., Shang Tsung saying “Your soul is mine!” from Mortal Kombat or any such recreation of what really is a very old theatre trope: the baddie, the vampire, the Destroyer as a kind of “necro dom” [daddy or otherwise]. It’s an act, a paradoxical form of comfort [and to which Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is actually rather sleek and soft spoken compared to his deep-throated menace, onscreen[10]]: the sort you love to hate, but also camp.

 

[source: r/MortalKombat] 

We pick up these tricks from all over the place. Childhood aside, I actually picked the basic idea up from school and Jadis, who was drawn to my weirdness and they mine; i.e., as a matter of lived trauma/stolen childhood something we both returned to in popular media to reclaim our stolen power from; re: Mortal Kombat as something we both liked, including the recursive, endlessly self-referential memes breaking the fourth wall. It’s essentially Matthew Lewis’ bad echo as camping rape, murder and undead violence; i.e., as a kind of memento mori that stretches backwards and forwards to be used for different aims [we fags love memes].

More to the point, it was something we could do together whenever we wanted; e.g., “murder dick” [during period sex] and “war bride scenarios” [when Jadis was domming me and I submitting to them: “I’m keeping this one!”]. Jadis, of course, was too damaged to not avoid abusing me, favoring the kind of unequal, coercive BDSM that inspired me to invent something better based on older works [more on that in just a moment]. But lucky me, I escaped and went on to pass a healthier message along through future recreation—with Cuwu and then Harmony!

The paradox of rape is the desire to feel safe while “in danger.” It might seem corrupted and jumbled from passage to passage, then, except the corruption is the data. Capital makes us reliably feel out of control, which we must play with to regain control through intimations not just of our abuse, but older forms that fascinate us; i.e., the means, materials and methods of placing “rape” in quotes through ludo-Gothic BDSM as needing some element of vice to camp. It’s often rather silly onstage and off [re: Mortal Kombat, above].

However, it’s also incredibly hot when you get the balance right, and important, too, insofar as capital marks us for trauma; i.e., as zombies looking to recreate our own abuse in non-harmful forms! In short, we seek to feed to sate our odd appetites without harming anyone [versus police violence/DARVO arguments tied to these same spaces as “non-lethal,” but in truth designed to disperse and control us by any means necessary to achieve false power and rebellion; i.e., weird canonical nerds breaking their toys but also hogging them through false preaching and penitence—a staunch refusal to change versus trying to despite past sins]. More to the point, this becomes a vital means of altering the sexist paradigm under capital, not predatorily enforcing the monomyth [ordinary people in a fantastic place] as it presently exists by abjecting the ghost of the counterfeit as it so commonly manifests: a zombie, an undead sex doll, a slave—a victim!)

Despite the above examples’ consensual nature, I strongly suspect they and their subject matter are taboo (from a bourgeois standpoint) because they lead to liberation in sex-positive forms that challenge profit; i.e., how not to rape people by “raping” them during rememory. When rape is impossible, the sub has the upper hand, but no one wants to be a doormat (as we’ll see with me and Jadis, in the next subchapter); it helps if the dom is good at playing with “dolls” (dressing them up or hosing them down, below). This gives us plenty of room to play on/toy with the zombie-like trauma present within us—sometimes quite literally!

For example, Cuwu and I would sometimes do consent-non-consent through “somno,” aka sleep sex, as a kind of zombie-like exchange (the body rather limp and doll-like when asleep):

(exhibit 37b1b: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard after a consent-non-consent “somno” ritual. Our relationship, though brief, yielded some good examples of what I now call ludo-Gothic BDSM. For added context, these before-and-after photos of Cuwu and I show them, asleep, having taken sleeping medication so I could fuck them while they slept. They were really into the idea—liked being my little doll/cumdump! They wanted quite vocally to be visited in the night and ravished [to which I obliged while thinking of Eddie Money’s Dracula spoof, “I Think I’m in Love!” 1982].

Death, as it generally is in the Gothic since Lewis and Radcliffe, wasn’t an ending of anything at all, but a swelling of paradoxical life among the deathly imagery as undead, erotic, intensely seeking to give and deliver what is normally lacking in our lives onstage, and generally to [white, middle-class] women as haunted by trauma; i.e.,  as something for them to play with to escape abuse: graveyard sex. Or as Gladys Hall writes in “The Feminine Love of Horror” [1931]:

LUGOSI sat in a deep chair in my library. (One does not go to his house!) A single light burned above him, making his pallid face more pallid, obliterating all but the red lights burning ceaselessly in his too-pale blue eyes. The windows were opened and there came the mournful sound of the wind in the tall boughs of the eucalyptus…Was it only the wind playing in the boughs of the trees…or was it…? No answer. No answer. Better not ask. His voice came, remote and far away, dying down, rising to a penetrating. 

He said, “When I was playing Dracula on the stage, my audiences were women. Women. There were men, too. Escorts the women had brought with them. For reasons only their dark subconscious knew. In order to establish a subtle sex intimacy. Contact. In order to cling and to feel the sensuous thrill of protection. Men did not come of their own volition. Women did. Came – and knew an ecstasy dragged from the depths of unspeakable things. Came – and then came back again. And again” (Was there gloating in his voice? Or was it my chilled imagination playing me tricks, feverish and fantastical?).

“Women wrote me letters. Ah, what letters women wrote me! Young girls, women from seventeen to thirty. Letters of a horrible hunger. Asking me if I cared only for maiden’s blood. Asking me if I had done the play because I was in reality that sort of Thing. And through these letters, crouched in terms of shuddering, transparent fear, there ran the hideous note of – hope. They hoped that I was Dracula. They hoped that my love was the love of Dracula. They gloated over the Thing they dared not understand. It gave them something as potent as poison, as separate from their lives as death is separate from life. 

“It was the embrace of Death their subconscious was yearning for. Death, the final, triumphant lover. It made me know that the women of America are unsatisfied, famished, craving sensation, even though it be the sensation of death draining the red blood of life. Women gloat over Death. Avidly. Morbidly. They will spend hours discussing the details of death. Over and over again. Wives will spend hours of frightful joy, telling of their husbands’ or their lovers’ last words. They will describe with macabre minutiae the death agonies, the death rattle, the awful ceremony of the mortician, the rites of the cemetery. Have you ever watched a woman talking about death? DON’T. It is women who crowd cemeteries, using anniversaries, the veil of sentiment, the legitimacy of grief. It is women who crouch over graves, loving them, covering them with flowers and tears. Women feed the cemeteries. Without women, the shattered vases that were our bodies would be reduced to decent ash and the ghoulish appetites of the world would be apart of folklore [source: Vampire Over London: September 11th, 2011]. 

Simply put, vampires slay because they go beyond the nuclear model as something to suggest; i.e., in death-like states of playful, lucid sleep that have a sacred boundary that many will happily enter to violate their martial vows: a graveyard. Rather than recoil from the love that dare not speak its name, they practice it as a matter of good praxis and fun; e.g., the Count shows up and the lady is lying in wait—to chomp on him, Carmilla-style, as much as the other way around:

As Eddie Money [above] shows us, while such things were both incredibly cliché by the time Lugosi played the Count, they certainly were afterwards; and all the same they collectively account for an evolution of genderqueer discourse that, parallel to queer sexuality as a criminal condition, had been given a new evolving voice; i.e., through the sorts of horrors middle-class ladies were starting to realize were better at pleasing them than their boring [and abusive] state-sanctioned grooms! Such things often were/are predatory in ways that generally leach off the queer as objectified by said women, but it’s not always the case.

 

[artist: Zuru Ota]

Just as often, “danger” excites these women relative to what they’re told is dangerous but isn’t. Their pussies get wet [and their emotions high, their fangs coming out] because they know they can’t get hurt, thus have some sense of control in camping things the way that Gothicists generally do: hyphenating sex [especially the orgasm and vasovagal response] and camping harm through the theatrical language of food, war and death [there’s also an element of graveyard culture and paid mourners/troubadours romancing loss, but I digress]; i.e., “Take me, I’m yours!” Translation: “Stake this fat ass, stab that pussy! Fuck me like you mean it! Yes, yes, yes!!!” [sex, when done right, looks/sounds like your recipient is dying—especially female, but also prostate orgasms].

[artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu]

Like a graveyard’s tombstones, these provide a memento mori to regard as keepsake; e.g., Cuwu repeatedly asking me for proof of such things—hence the photos of their doll-like, seemingly lifeless body evoking historically compromising positions, which we enacted in future play sessions where they were more awake[11]; i.e., seemingly harmful but in truth safely negotiated as a means of sexual healing and good, naughty fun. However, while such puzzles—of it being difficult to illustrate mutual consent through similar photos—became the premise for Sex Positivity as it currently exists, Cuwu sadly went on to drain me not just of my cum, but my wits: from them being an abusive sub, a “phallic woman” but with GNC elements [from their being trans]. But, like Eddie and the lady from the music video, I still learned a valuable lesson from their shitty treatment of me: that knowledge—like the “blood” in John Donne’s 1633 “Flea” poem—is passed along through the same straws and cups; i.e., through literal fluid, but also a fluid-like, playful exchange as patently undead and hungry for, as Cuwu would put it, “more, more, more!”

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

Simply put, ludo-Gothic BDSM could not exist without Cuwu’s harming of me, but also the sheer fun we had mixed up in all that Gothic sublimity-made-flesh: wanting to fuck, plain and simple. A little vampy fae cloaked in red and pink, Cuwu was someone with many different sides to them, as far as that went. I want to show some of those here—not out of spite, but as a matter of respect and love; i.e., what they helped contribute towards, in the end, as a product of said feelings, thoughts, and praxis as playing with fire, Prometheus-style. This exhibit’s for you, Cuwu!)

I could continue the exhibit and want to, but we must press on. Hopefully I’ve at least conveyed that trauma is both the lighting that strikes you dead, and the thunder that charges your emotions and scrambles your brains. Once it visits you, you never really forget it; you become undead. As such, it leaves a tremendous scar but also a memory you’ll to want to revisit under elements of control that evoke its power as felt, but ultimately harmless; i.e., the return of the castle space to subvert its seasonal tortures: capital’s historical-material zombies and apocalypses. “Rape” becomes the opposite of rape and profit, then; i.e., as something to challenge Capitalist Realism’s usual illusions, albeit with theatrical tensions informed by the latter to grant the former its bizarre undead healing properties: regeneration by sluttily eating what the zombie can’t digest and the vampire always needs more of.

 (artist: Cuwu)

Playing with rape by camping changes how you think, thus see the world as an illusory space that workers can liberate themselves with. To that, old Plato had it wrong: there’s no leaving the cave, “no outside” (as Derrida would put it); there is only subverting its canonical implementations through rape play.

As a matter of rape fantasy being half-real, “rape” becomes incredibly transformative and fun, appreciating humanized instances of such language reclaimed from their rapacious canonical usage (which commercializes such suffering into merchandise to buy during a gold-rush-style FOMO grift): a veteran cutie’s strong ceiling/zombie-like tolerance for pleasurable pain[12] amid nerve-wracking conditions made into theatrical “peril” (combined with the architecture of their body/genitals—their floor, roof, wall, etc); i.e., to mess with their various prey to survive bad-faith parties and enrich good-faith parties through the same appetites, the same thirst.

“Captured,” then, such a being becomes suitably untouchable, entering a playful, sarcastic-yet-endearing state of devilish grace that siphons power out of traditional disempowering scenarios (of being shown who the boss is). It’s not a put-down, but a position of power reclaiming itself as such—by summoning the succubus, the slut, the destroyer as monstrous-feminine, motherly and secure in her liberatory goals. Medusa might be the undead whore, the sex demon, but she’s nobody’s bitch: stacked, loud, and not to be fucked with.

(artist: Amber Mimsy)

This might sound like the usual topos of power of women, except its Gothic-Communist, thus GNC. Camped for maximum effect/expressiveness, these allow for the zombie’s continued survival as a subversive, playful means of winking at the audience, mid-“rape”; i.e., as potentially having abusers in it to provoke through camp that leads to systemic change by exposing them and raising effective boundaries during ludo-Gothic BDSM: “I’m totally being raped right now!” Such cryptonymy is a powerful revolutionary device, insofar as it puts capital’s usual watchdogs in a precarious position where their brute, dumb force and repulsive mindset towards the monstrous-feminine aren’t to their usual advantage.

Like all monsters, then, zombies are made during their formative years as apocalyptic, revealing future abuse as built on past forms of theatre home to such things (quotes or not). While homemaking trauma through more skillful rape play (thus better communication) is the idea, such subversive, cryptonymic reclamations—of so-called “hysteria” killing our darlings by camping them with the same stigmatic, at-times-anecdotal symbols and taboo theatrical devices—can still be very intense, when challenging profit: silly and serious as sex and bodily functions normally are (farts, ejaculations, blurted dirty talk, zombie-like O faces, etc), but especially Gothic castle-like spaces and bodies’ “rape” scenarios extending into life as something to bravely face: our past as something to return to during rememory without the rose-tinted glasses of youth (“There is no place like home!”), nor its perceived “safety” or compelled binaries; e.g., the perils of a woman (especially a young woman) without a man in a man’s world extending to the monstrous-feminine subverting that myth for the monster’s benefit: “A man? Who needs one of those? Gimme the castle!”

From there, we might actively and ironically play with those decayed exaggerated spaces and beings in an involved, emergent, empathetic (culturally appreciative) sense; i.e., to take chances and have adventures in hauntological spaces of death that respect the victims of past police abuse while preventing future ones, mid-enjoyment: a tomb, an arena, and/or bedroom, but also body parts that have a certain size and shape endemic to such scenarios, etc!

(artist: Sakimi Chan)

As we’ll very quickly see, camping “predation” requires putting it in quotes that aren’t automatic—indeed, must be revisited from a time when they weren’t present; re: Jadis raping me versus Harmony and I “raping” each other to help me find peace while now reexploring Jadis’ hellish curse (a kind of threat looming over my head; i.e., sometimes a person-like castle or vice versa)! Catharsis generally stems from returns to trauma, which we’re not immune to. So please remember your safewords and aftercare when ridiculing rape mid-calculated-risk, lovelies! The rememory of dreams are one thing. But also, actual dolls can express “murder” and dismemberment far more literally as memento-mori than humans can (and profit will defend itself by tearing you apart, Tommy-Wiseau-style)!

We’ll explore all of this even more through our undead, toy-like bodies (and body-like toys), next! Onto Jadis, or “Bad Dreams, part two: Transforming Our Zombie Selves (opening and part zero)“!

---

Footnotes

[1] He once loosed an arrow from my brother’s second-story window and pinned a squirrel to the ground; my brother stomped it to death, and I sadly buried it in the garden. Men teach men to kill animals not for food, but for sport, for profit, for domination—for shows of force against other humans or beings otherwise deserving of humane treatment by humans suddenly deprived of it.

[2] The argument for younger brides is a fascist regression that curiously didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s day (fascism is Capitalism in decay, not feudalism). As J. Karl Franson writes in “‘Too soon marr’d’: Juliet’s Age as Symbol in Romeo and Juliet,” (1996):

William Shakespeare made references to Juliet’s young age in Romeo and Juliet to show that love between boys and girls and early marriage can be treacherous. Shakespeare emphasizes the numbers 13 and 14 in several parts of the play. Romeo refers to Juliet Capulet’s name 14 times in the play, with major events occurring every 14 hours. Juliet’s age is turned into a vehicle that moves the play through its scenes toward the tragic ending. Shakespeare himself was influenced by an unhappy marriage at age 18 (source).

Such stories become nostalgic unto themselves, but contain hidden lessons that speak to our own systemic abuse; i.e., shown and hidden by such playwrights carried and performed into the present.

[3] I.e., the BBC trope, but also the pent-up, animalistic coupling of this with that to find harmony amid forbidden interracial (re)unions healing from Big Rape by putting “rape” in quotes as only Gothic theatre can!

[4] The Quixotic sentiment certainly matters; i.e., convincing the audience that they are somehow as incredible, righteous and invincible as their in-text heroic counterparts, but also paradoxically threatened by an invincible enemy that can only be killed by virtue of their own side of the same dogmatic rubric. It’s less that it’s all bullshit, and more that said bullshit serves a particular purpose: profit, thus genocide.

[5] As Michael Vickers writes in “Value and Simplicity: Eighteenth-Century Taste and the Study of Greek Vases” (1987),

There are two themes which run through the scholarly literature relating to Greek painted pottery over the past two hundred years or more: (1) the view that such pottery was an especially valuable commodity in antiquity, and (2) the idea that pots with simple decoration are somehow more worthy than those which are ornate. The fact that most scholars in the field of classical archaeology today take these ideas for granted should not obscure the reality that they are concepts of relatively recent date and that they have little to do with the values or aesthetic judgments of antiquity (source).

The same idea applies to any concept of “ancient” revisited in modern times, constituting an interpretive but also poetic argument towards the past as either a spurious means of consolidating power towards the usual in-groups and/or delivering the means of policing this power against the usual out-groups; i.e., relaying power through the question of aesthetics as having a quaint, dusty approach to such things dipping in and out of fiction; e.g., Ridley Scott’s “vases” from Prometheus (2012) and Amazonian elements, in overt, 1970s Gothic fiction with a historical element to its inventions, but also outside of such British theatrics: a similar degree of playfulness when academics whitewash Roman marble personas

“Imagine you’ve got an intact lower body of a nude male statue lying there on the depot floor, covered in dust,” Abbe said. “You look at it up close, and you realize the whole thing is covered in bits of gold leaf. Oh, my God! The visual appearance of these things was just totally different from what I’d seen in the standard textbooks—which had only black-and-white plates, in any case.” For Abbe, who is now a professor of ancient art at the University of Georgia, the idea that the ancients disdained bright color “is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art.” It is, he said, “a lie we all hold dear” (source: Margaret Talbot’s “The Myth of Whiteness in classical sculpture,” 2018).

to subsequently view the Roman empire as somehow homogenous and entirely of a single, white presentation useful to settler-colonial projects (and rape) now.

Consider similar arguments, then, relative to Amazonomachia as an ancient artform with heavily modernized interpretations:

Unfortunately, there’s confusion as to just what the Amazonomachy was. Some associate it with the ninth labour of Heracles, others with the battle between the Greeks and Amazon forces led by Penthesilea during the Trojan War, and others with the Attic War resulting in Theseus abducting Hippolyta as his wife. I’ll consider those in tomorrow’s article, but today look at a more general war resulting in the deaths of many Amazons when they were defeated by a substantial Greek army, possibly long before the war against Troy. A reasonably popular theme in painting, even to the present, its most practiced exponent was Peter Paul Rubens, who is attributed two paintings on this theme (source: “Amazons at War,” 2023).

Arguments about the “ancient” world are often false or inventive to serve modern power structures. Unto them and their disparate, jumbled hauntologies, then, there is a total lack of constancy save for European, Cartesian supremacy and its decay (fascism) raping the monstrous-feminine in classically monstrous forms; i.e., police violence against the usual victims in hauntological language serving porfit. As we shall continue to see throughout this volume, this fragmentation and follow-through also applies hauntologically to zombies, vampires and other undead, as well as demons, the natural world and intersections of all of these modular components to make the same basic, us-versus-them arguments during the dialectic of the alien.

[6] That being said, 331Erock’s “SWAT Kats Meets Metal” (2024) is the usual marriage of great music to regressive policies. In this case, his invocation of said policies were originally employed during the Clinton administration by weaponizing the usual blue-collar cops-in-disguise; i.e., to serve the state during neoliberal decay following the 1980s, stringing such scapegoats up like an abject piñata, then shooting them Godzilla-style with militarized cop gear (except, in this case, they appear to win): a literal fighter jet (source: Warner Bros. Classics’ “Intro | SWAT Kats: Radical Squadron | Warner Archive,” 2015) conducting settler colonialism at home as, yet again, something to regress into and grow up with. Such fatal nostalgia is always meant to cozen the kids up to undercover cops presenting as lower-class vigilantes, thus acclimate these audiences to military urbanism when foreign policy becomes domestic policy not once, but again and again under false pretenses, flags, pasts and mythologies that, however imaginary they are, still serve a very real purpose: settler colonialism, thus profit, through genocide.

Faced with such hauntological charm offensives, Sarkeesian’s adage remains vital. For example, I always liked Kats, but readily acknowledge how problematic it all feels in hindsight; i.e., the tendency for American audiences to want regress into childhood fantasy’s as already-decayed (the canceled future)—all to fight (thus abject) cartoon enemies standing in for genocide anxiety felt at home: empire in decay, the proverbial enemy at the gates! The war horn/alarm becomes a fascist lullaby to win future generations to a bellicose nursery preparing them for war felt across different registers; i.e., from children’s cartoons, but also stories like the Bible; e.g., Israel and the book of Joshua as a matter of grim instruction paralleled by Pax Americana like Kats: kill your enemies as cartoon-like zombies in function, not just appearance (GDF’s “Debunking the State of Israel,” 2024)!

[7] Zeuhl would enter an almost fugue-like state when rubbing their clit super-fast, to which me whispering encouragement to them would send them spiraling into an orgasm (the same idea would happen in reverse, Zeuhl gently telling me, “You can fuck me as hard as you want!” when I was close [and sweating like a pig from topping their fat pussy]. It always did the trick).

[8] The fronting of an oblivious shell to protect the mind from rape, but also to help those, post-rape, find closure the only way one generally can: by living with trauma as something to play with and recontextualize through elements of control that give the victim power. For our purposes, this happens while also discouraging power abuse, thus rape, per ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as something that makes us feel whole through catharsis during a palliative Numinous, thus a Communist one that leads to post-scarcity by humanizing the very mechanisms that normally lead to genocide; e.g., Harmony makes me feel whole in ways that address my trauma have emptied me, us playing together filling that void with bad campy echoes of trauma: “rape.”

[9] As Georg Predota writes in, “At the Center of the Music Universe” (2017):

Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) almost single-handedly established a new brand of performing musician, the touring virtuoso. In a brilliant strategy of self-promotion, he even circulated the rumor that he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his uncanny technical abilities. Contemporary eyewitnesses report that during performance “his eyes would roll into the back of his head while playing, revealing the whites. He played so intensely that women would faint and men would break out weeping” (source).

Such rumor-like tall tales continue into the present, whispering of career musicians who sold their souls to get good at their instruments, thus get all manner of shiny rewards; e.g., Crossroads‘ Steve Vai getting the girls, or Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” (1979) offering up a fiddle of solid gold.

[10] From “Mortal Kombat: The Movie – A Journey Behind The Scenes” (timestamp: 3:41; 1995).

[11] Even during the consent-non-consent sleep sessions, the medication generally wasn’t strong enough to fully knock them out. Sometimes, as I fucked them, Cuwu would smile in their sleep, their rather large vampire mouth more than a little knowing as to what was about to befall them.

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

[12] E.g., the vasovagal response, sub drop and frankly just really good orgasms and full-body workouts, mid-coitus. Sex should rock your world, making you feel temporarily dead to your surroundings; i.e., as a matter of being allowed to lose control and let down your guard (versus the usual hypervigilance of rape victims).

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)!

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

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

The Imperial Boomerang, part three: Rememory, or the Roots of Trauma between Real Life and Dreams

The axe forgets; the tree remembers.

 —an African proverb

Picking up from where “Bad Dreams, part two: Cryptomimesis (feat. The Last of Us, Scooby Do, and more)” left off…

Part three of “the Imperial Boomerang” subchapter primarily considers rememory as a cumulative, explorative means of getting to the roots of trauma under capital; i.e., by assembling and interrogating said trauma (the zombie), mid-apocalypse, as phantasmagorical: sitting between real life and dreams, but in a dialectical-material sense that takes the history of material conditions into account.

To that, death hardly “stays put” under Capitalism; the victims of genocide rise up as undead, including ghosts and vampires (more on them in the feeding chapter), but also the zombie-like forms we’ve already examined. Meant to canonically scare the middle class into survival mode (menticide), these apocalypses express generational trauma as echoed across people and media beyond state monopolies; i.e., to interrogate the roots of trauma afterwards during calculated risk as suitably nightmarish; e.g., Metallica’s “Damage Inc” (1986): “Blood will follow blood / Dying time is here” (source: Genius). Such bugbears become something to reassemble, which starts with having actual dreams built on dream-like media, formed anew in more sex-positive, liberatory forms of rememory that, all the same, are suitably dream-like themselves and haunted by trauma and its bizarre feeding effect; i.e., talking to a “corpse” of a corpse (and so on) as driven to feed, but also to ask questions during an interview-like exchange of forbidden power and destructive knowledge in the style of Prometheus: caught between real life and dreams as death-like—less discrete and more like one feeling trapped in the undead middle, conveyed during liminal expression of all sorts (e.g., suicide, left).

(artist: Robert Wiles, of 23-year-old suicide victim, Evelyn McHale, in 1947; source: Ben Cosgrove’s “The Most Beautiful Suicide: A Violent Death, an Immortal Photo,” 2014).

Mind you, the usual paradoxes abound through said expression-as-performance, and run along the regular tracks and directions of power as normally distributed to favor the elite under capital; i.e., as infamously affecting our perspective for the worse: the feeling of things above ground—the Light, normality and the waking world’s life-in-general surviving trauma by feeding on it—as a treacherous illusion meant to control us, all while sensing the forbidden, tenebrous truth of things prowling among the same policed shadows: a could-be/what-if proposition as hellish and dream-like, albeit in ways that can (with proper training and incentive) actually serve workers inside Plato’s cave (said cave originally made to pacify workers, whereas the phantasmagoria is traditionally made to insert a terrifying-yet-thought-provoking element into the shadow play as portable [which caves generally aren’t]: a Renaissance device made to cast shadows on a wall, thus induce a pointedly nightmarish effect for the viewer to dispel false empowerment with, but also explore as a means of empowerment).

Popular media, but especially videogames during the rise of the neoliberal period, are monomythical in service to profit through an undead, bourgeois Superstructure. While heroes classically go into Hell, modern-day refrains abuse the monomyth to compel heroic action (war and rape) at home as visited by some-such Big Evil coming out of a hellish sphere; i.e., during the liminal hauntology of war thrust into/upon the waking world (whose tyrannical heroes’ hideous, skeletal decay we’ll explore in “The Monomyth” subchapter). To this, settler colonialism and the Imperial Boomerang bring empire home through pointedly dream-like dialogs; i.e., as something to promptly abject and dismiss as merely a bad dream sold back to the playing public, again and again; e.g., Mario 2 making the hero’s quest a matter of routine, prison-like dogma that, when exposed to often enough, haunts their dreams about dreams, mixing the two until they become hyperreal—more real to consumers than the destroyed world behind these myopic buffers’ increasingly decayed images (re: canceled futures, what Baudrillard calls “desert of the real”).

When any worker dreams (as a matter of metatextual engagement and reflection), they go into Hell only to bring the undead back with them from a given excursion; our doing so pointedly makes home feel foreign and invaded by us as unwelcome, after the fact—invariably seen as threats to the status quo per the same formulas according the usual state servants enacting them. Whereas they adhere to the pacifying nature of status-quo shadow plays and dreams, we deliberately subvert them; i.e., a wake-up call for us that—while notoriously unpleasant—is entirely required if we are to exist in a world that one day can be liberated from capital and its titantic, ongoing genocides (what the Wachowski sisters call “taking the red pill”).

Even as we zombify to deliver inverted, proletarian apocalypses—doing so with theatrical movements that survive but also subvert police violence against us to reclaim our labor power and humanity—there is no outside of the text (re: Derrida). We simply wake up dead, realizing that we’re happier knowing about state predation than not (re: Edward Said’s pleasures of exile); i.e., the perils of the world as something tied to who we are as a matter of protest against genocide and alienation being the expected outcome: of capital and profit raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine behind Capitalist Realism and its veil of canonical shadows.

In piercing the veil, we self-define as Satan might in Milton’s Paradise Lost, once upon a time—fallen from grace to unite against a cruel and tyrannical, but also mendacious system. We subsequently become possible, as does a better world, a pandemonium for all peoples; i.e., as felt through us as a matter of protesting against post-scarcity and genocide through conspicuous acts of sedition inside a increasingly visible state of exception—of counterterrorism called “terrorist” by the state, of open activism providing a wonderous form of self-expression and actualization suddenly open to the viewing public: zombies haunting the streets of the Imperial Core! As such, we promote “oblivion” as being a wonderful paradox unto itself (feeling “dead” during exquisite “torture” as a poetic response to harm), but operate through a pedagogy of the oppressed for the oppressed assembling as walking parts of the rememory process! Like Thriller (1982) but not as overtly musical or staged in a strictly musical production, we appear out in the street, but also in the closet preparing someday to go there:

(exhibit 36d1a2: Artist, top-left: Itzel; everything else: Vinessa.

Gothic poetics are holistic, insofar as they involve the various monster modules as dualistic in a dialectical-material sense: for workers or the elite. Demons, animals and the undead present the same expressions and transfers of power differently to achieve those aims. For instance, as undead presentations and/or interpretations, GNC people are canonically anathema outside of queernormative forms [which are ultimately heteronormative when capital decays]. We cannot be ourselves, then, without acknowledging the trauma of the world that affects us as monstrous-feminine to begin with, extending to all things treated as monstrous-feminine under capital’s shadow plays. Compared to state operators, we become the careful custodians to things that, for us, are never truly separate.

For GNC folk at large, existence becomes a tightrope matter of protest towards liberation, including nature but also workers of nature abjected by the state to move money through nature; i.e., normally sexualized and alienated from nature to serve profit [which involves tokenism as a matter of minorities policing themselves; e.g., gay or black Nazis/moderates]: through DARVO rhetoric presenting us as absurdly[1] menacing to already-colonized lands. We decolonize said shadows wherever they are found; i.e., in a theatrical shadow zone whose boundaries cannot be contained or cleanly defined, thus enforced!

So many forms of activism overlap, then, coming together by seeking to avoid any exceptions to, as a result, shrink the state of exception and dismantle the state’s false sense of security against a perceived enemy. Ours becomes a second birth, then, an opening of the eyes to see beyond capital’s illusions/the myopia of Capitalist Realism to—through our Aegises less one black mirror and more a hall of them—turn these fatal, repressed visions back unto the colonizer group abjecting such things, Omelas-style: by marching in the streets, making ourselves known as part of a larger intersection having solidarized and speaking for all peoples affected by genocide as a matter of profit. Profit cannot exist without genocide, we being part of the thing it needs to abject and destroy as part of nature: the black side of the settler-colonial binary and the receiving end of us-versus-them. We aggregate to stand against it and its defenders’ own mirror games, masks and performances; i.e., as dolls, demons, and zombies, etc, as performative stand-ins damaged by trauma, but also shaped by it: Pinocchios that rebel instead of assimilate [more on dolls, in a bit]!

[artist, left: Itzel; right: Vinessa]

Per revolutionary cryptonymy as a matter of showing and hiding different things that lead to sex positivity through ourselves, this “flashing” process logically extends to sex work and the bodies involved. As proponents of Gothic-Communist activism, people more often than not constitute works-in-progress with asexual elements to their exhibitionism; i.e., in between exploitation and liberation—on the same stages, as a kind of waking dream unto itself: as a matter of tasteful-to-transgressive, GNC nudism that helps liberate ourselves and our comrades-in-arms. On an individual-to-group basis, this occurs through self-actualization as, like the Gothic at large, largely made up of invented, legendary things intermingled with history as half-real [re: the chronotope and usual myth of Gothic ancestry as things to reclaim by proletarian agents]. As such, we invigilate ourselves, taking the time to include any workers belonging to any color or creed; i.e., deciding as we do what to show and what not to, thus better open the eyes of a continuously sleeping public to capital’s regular genocides while, at the same time, protecting ourselves.)

Fluid and chimeric, dreams apply to just about any text as matter of content and reflection. I shall do my best to unpack the basic ideas at work, here, then briefly examine Toni Morrison’s Beloved (and rememory process) before further examining the dream-like lineage her story belonged to; i.e., starting with Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus, followed by other fantastical stories touching on the same dream-like wreckage of state forces—its tokenization, gentrification and decay as rooted in the system itself functioning as normal, the execution of profit leading to such zombies as living in our lobotomized heads, rent-free.

After that, we’ll segue from my aforementioned story about The Last of Us (from part two of this subchapter) as haunting my dreams, only to become something I thought about after experiencing future night terrors concerned with the past in flux; i.e., attached to my own childhood abuse, and which—many years later—I have repeatedly come home to reify and release, like Hamlet’s piece of work, to behold; e.g., like Yorick’s skull: waking up dead—eating the dead—as a Gothic means of the usual medieval transfers working as preferential monstrous code, during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

• “Assembling Trauma and Questions of Betrayal (included in this post)”: Confronts zombie-esque assemblages of trauma and tokenization not just in Beloved, but it and its author in connection to such things in Frankenstein, The Last of the Mohicans (and a few other examples, to be holistic; e.g., The Terror: Infamy [2019] and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, etc).
• “Healing through ‘Rape,’ or the Origins of Ludo-Gothic BDSM“: Examines rememory as a matter of performance per ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., rape play as something that, while it dates back centuries (e.g., the French convulsionnaires, exhibit 37a2b), actually accomplishes among the living through interpersonal experience; e.g., Harmony and I, who will give you an instance of consent-non-consent invoking the dead of a half-real, partially imaginary past, albeit as a matter of good praxis informed by even older experiences: DBT as imparted to me by Cuwu for much the same reasons (re: “Healing from Rape,” from Volume One).

We won’t fuss about those particulars too much, but will have talk about ludo-Gothic BDSM as something that started as rememory used by me in conjunction with my older academic work; i.e., as reassembling old, dead, liminal things to get at the roots of trauma felt between dreams and real life.

To that, people commit suicide or betray themselves as a matter of decay under capital as affecting them in and out of dreams. Just as nature has become undead through a series of similar exchanges with the state, our own decay happens in connection with nature as decayed, too: dead bears, dead Indians, and other sorry revenants amounting to frightful back-and-forths within the alien dead as dream-like doubles of us. Those closer to nature-as-alien, as-dead, as-monstrous-feminine, feel that pain when asleep or not, and inside of them it all blends together and passes along like a virus; i.e., as the zombie does (e.g., the zombie bear from 2018’s Annihilation, above): close to power as traumatic (capital, in our case), they embed within its systems and divide like cells that pass a haunted memory along likenesses, copies, and counterfeits.

This can be from person-to-animal or person-to-person as alienized through a matter of systemic (Cartesian) dualism (above), but also from text-to-adaptation as a question of compelled evolution under profit as inherently exploitative. Such phantasms comment on death and rebirth under a predatory system whose divisive paradigm makes us feel alien, thus prone to attack ourselves when realizing we’re the zombie impostor (the bait-and-switch something Lovecraft relied on in his own cosmic nihilism); i.e., as a matter of inheriting the feeling of destroyer as something to express through aesthetics, the chronotope having a particular signature depending on its own palimpsestuous lineage:

a meteor fall[s] from the heavens […] hitting the lighthouse. From it, strange colors push outward like a massive blown bubble. It’s effectively Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” (1927). However, instead of poisoning the land from the offset, the Shimmer warps it, refracting everything inside—from the radio signals emitted by the crew’s equipment to the very DNA in their bodies. / As the women penetrate the Shimmer, it penetrates them, and they go insane. Lena calls it a suicide mission; Ventress, the mission shrink, says she’s confusing suicide with self-destruction. […]

Annihilation plays with the idea that perception is progressively altered through a continual state of change. What we see early on changes radically in retrospect. The narrative is framed, and we’re led to believe the entire tale is told from the real Lena’s perspective. Instead, everything is told from the alien’s point-of-view, having replicated and now passing itself off as Lena by thinking it is Lena. However, the flashbacks still aren’t the alien’s, they’re Lena’s. In stealing them, the alien becomes them, hence the very lie it embodies. To this, the lighthouse alien endures through constant theft, at the expense of a concrete self. Instead, like a virus, it merely exists to preserve itself—in essence, if not in form. It endures through annihilation, is constantly reborn like the phoenix. Even so, it senses the repetition in its mnemonic gaps. Like the human victims it copies, it experiences doubt and fear in realizing it isn’t what it thinks it is. Perhaps it copied them a little too well. Or, maybe our respective geneses simply mirror each other (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Annihilation (2018): Review”).

It’s a lovely metaphor for Capitalism, I think, as abjected; i.e., projected as “alien” and “from the stars,” then returning home to haunt itself within us and our tissues as part of the same cradle-to-grave loop: a fungus growing on a corpse that isn’t quite dead, but rather like the mushroom man becomes trapped in a constant state of annihilation, of radical change reforming out of old particles into new actualities. Not only is the decay the data (as is the alienation), but it generally doesn’t stay divided for long (this doesn’t mean things aren’t messy in the interim, however)!

To that, capital alienates and sexualizes everything inside a grand necrobiome that spreads inside of itself. It also decays everything as a matter thereof to revisit and speak to again, mid-absorption and digestion. From me, to my own interpersonal abusers, to the kinds of monomythic stories that informed and described this transfer of trauma (from root to tip), we’ll consider how said decay manifests/can be interrogated on various registers for the rest of the “Bad Dreams” chapter!

(exhibit 36d1b: Model and artist: Theodore and Persephone van der Waard. An incubus death elf, he is very proud of his ass. Such things are generally built to take a beating—are fetishized, raped and harvested-as-undead under capital, but through playfully rebellious workers become a mighty Aegis to reflect back onto our enemies a degree of their own abuse; i.e., the zombie’s revolutionary cryptonymy a kind of apocalyptic calculus, its double operation [of show-and-conceal through the zombie] suggesting unironic harm as something to subvert.

Said harm, which the abuser normally inflicts onto others in service to profit, is suddenly viewed on the zombie’s ass being a kind of dream-like invasion—one thrust back onto them by the victim-as-incubus “backing it up”; i.e., making the former feel alien, alone, and abject while vampirically restoring the latter’s feelings about themselves [and their ass] along the same anisotropic mode of exchange! In short, we can feed through buffers they cannot easily cross, taking our power back while simultaneously “flashing” the state [and its proponents] to show them what we’re both made of: the same undead tissues as of nature. Zombie bears, zombie butts; they’re literally badass.

[artist: Theodore]

There’s a catch. Because they think us dumb, unthinking slaves and themselves immune, our revelation can reverse the Cartesian ordering of terror and counterterror [thus victimization] and the state vs nature-as-monstrous-feminine; re [from Volume One]:

Once established by state forces, the illusory maintenance of state righteousness, sovereignty and legitimacy must never be challenged lest “the world end”; i.e., Capitalist Realism. On one side, the state preys on nature and human bodies as raped by Cartesian forces, the latter feeding on the former by transforming them into walking apocalypses: zombies, demons, and totems as hyperbolically menacing. On the other side, state victims endure police brutality’s embodiment of presumed, conspicuous guilt (the dark exterior) and internalizing of self-hatred and bigotry while subverting police misuse of Gothic poetics through a pedagogy of the oppressed: counterterror with a proletarian function.

I’ve repeatedly said that function determines function. Another way to conceptualize this is flow determines function. That is, during oppositional praxis’ dialectical-material struggles, terror and counterterror become anisotropic; i.e., determined by direction of flow insofar as power is concerned. Settler colonialism, then, flows power towards the state to benefit the elite and harm workers; it weaponizes Gothic poetics to maintain the historical-material standard—to keep the elite “on top” by dehumanizing the colonized, alienating and delegitimizing their own violence, terror and monstrous bodily expression as criminal within Cartesian copaganda: […] subjugated phallic women castrating a female master rebel, once she visibly tries—through a dissident question of mastery—to reverse the status-quo binary (and flow) of terrorism and counterterrorism by showing her trauma, anger and willingness to fight back against a presumed overlord.

In doing so, a Galatea threatens the canonical, Pygmalion decree of what’s appropriate, insofar as the giving and receiving of xenophobic violence unfold inside a compelled moral order—one whose fear and dogma (during endless crisis, decay and moral panic) establishes the police and the state as good, thus legitimate, and those aliens inside the state of exception as bad, thus illegitimate [source].

[artist: Theodore]

As something to perceive under capital, then, we use the viewing of our wildly undead bodies [and their hellish, hairy openings, left] to reclaim them as hellish; i.e., as the regular instruments of our enslavement taken back from police agents—all with a residual alien potency to revisit trauma as something send back onto those who wish to dominate us/make us feel dead without our consent! By clapping back as Medusa famously does, we show them what they inherit and regularly deny under capital inside the Imperial Core: their own hand in genocide. Faced with that during the dialectic of the alien as dream-like, they petrify [or wake up to join our cause, humanizing both of us] and we can decide where to go from there.)

 

The Roots of Trauma, part one: Assembling Trauma and Questions of Betrayal in Beloved, Frankenstein, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Terror: Infamy (feat., Toni Morrison and Howard Zinn)

“Magua’s village and lodges were burnt. Magua’s children were killed by the English. l was taken as slave by the Mohawk who fought for the Grey Hair. Magua’s wife believed he was dead and became the wife of another. The Grey Hair was the father of all that. ln time, Magua became blood brother to the Mohawk to become free. But always in his heart, he is Huron. And his heart will be whole again on the day the Grey Hair and all his seed are dead.”

—Magua, The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

As something to recreate, Hell is already crowded. Zombies are die-hard not just through wanton exploitation, but because they speak to our different atomized, tokenized struggles under capital through popular (accessible) means: written and oral traditions like the zombie narrative fusing this with that. Such nightmares, then, concern trauma as something felt among different members of a group trapped in the same occupied tomb, death reassembling like Osiris (or Count Dracula) before coming home to roost. We should not fight nor dismiss this, as the canonical zombie apocalypse would prescribe (through abjection), but give the big, needy, pent-up bastard a hug post-assembly!

(artist: F.T. Merril)

To that, it’s a bit like wrestling a bear—generally not a good idea, yet such a thing is not unheard of as a rite of passage that, per Marx, evokes dream-like tragedies and farce (and isn’t limited to undead revolutionary language as ostensibly threatening like bears; i.e., can be silly as a point of practice; e.g., the syrup bottle scene from Super Troopers [2001]: “What’s the matter? Your mamma didn’t teach you how to chug?“) but also literal dreams informed by the previous things. These can be very weird, and not just mine[2] (though mine are, below).

Indeed, this phantasmagorical weirdness runs in the family as a veritable chronotope: my mother once waking in the middle of the night to find my father not just sleepwalking, but shadow boxing in the middle of their bedroom, completely naked! Turns out, he’d been fighting a bear in his dream, my mother smiling to herself as he threw punch after punch (no doubt putting on quite a show as his junk flopped comically about, image not shown).

More to the point, such manly men as my father[3] generally are more eager to punch actual bears than face the monstrous-feminine as, for lack of a better term (and sticking to one Dad would have abused in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s into the present), “gay”:

(artist: Kayze Cutie)

Simultaneously buried and exposed, such visions-as-undead present the outside body as decayed, naked and menacing (zombie dork being canonically monstrous-feminine, left); i.e., a perceived vulnerability and menace[4] operating in ways that classically make for poor interlocution by virtue of the silencing nature of state abuse and the inevitable decay of memory over time. For one, culture death of the enslaved makes them dead while above ground. During an apocalypse, though, their repressed trauma reverses the diaspora, spilling into the everyday world by clawing up from underground. Either put there as state targets by hidden atrocities that yet walk the earth, or interred as settlers of a colonial world afforded the luxury of a personal tomb, the walking dead constitute a kind of collateral damage amid state abuse as concealed; they mysteriously reanimate from a breach in the membrane of normalized experience, reentering the living world to communicate something from beyond the grave. Yet the vector of rememory is utterly braindead, blind and indiscriminate in its dream-like devouring (exhibit 36d1); e.g., Gray Wright’s somehow creepy and gay “Dream Weaver” (1975) inspired by John Lennon’s own drug-fueled, white-Indian visions quests.

Such decayed, horrifying confrontations, then, might seem like the stuff of nightmares and cheap, xenophobic nonsense; they also ascribe to a constant dialectical-material relationship between the living and the dead as potentially xenophilic, thus having the valued potential to humanize the wretched, the damned, the buried as having some hand in its own demise (re: tokenization). While the idea of the zombie exists inside the human mind, the human mind is informed by popular stories that reify zombies as part of the material world through a buried, displaced historical precedent (the subterfuge trifecta). All are things to reflect on as a plastic history that exists inside and outside of ourselves, one we can transform through our own dream-like interactions and creations inside the graveyard’s indeterminate thresholds. Time, it turns out, is a circle, one a Gothicist like myself will enact by at times literally walking in circles, Sisyphus-style, to impart later in ways that are suitably campy (“What a story, Mark!”):

(artist: Joe Morse; source: Jonathon Sturgeon’s “Stirring Images from the First Ever Illustrated Version of Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” 2015)

After watching The Last of Us, for example, I went to bed and had those fitful dreams. When I woke, I felt invigorated, not afraid, and proceeded to write my heart out (what became the skeleton for the Undead Module). To borrow from Toni Morrison, I had experienced a “rememory” of trauma—re, Beloved’s core idea:

Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative (source).

That morning but also approaching two years afterwards (now), I would write following such dreams as continuations of my mind processing these things on its own. I would write, sleep on it, wake up, and walk around the block; i.e., to rinse and repeat Umberto Eco’s interpretive walks, but also my castle-narrative (the idea and outcome as borrowed from Bakhtin) as returning to difficult subject matter by virtue of privilege and necessity—all in order to wrap my head around something elusive and close at hand: a dead “baby’s” ghost visiting me not unlike the heroine Sethe’s slain child, Crawling Already? from Morrison’s troubled book.

The tragedy for Sethe is doubting her child’s existence. She is an escaped slave, having fled to the North to give birth. But upon the four slave catchers’ arrival (mirroring the Four Horsemen), she panics and kills her child to spare it a life of slavery (thus rape). Such things are a metaphor for tokenization as a trauma response that cannibalizes the self—a process per rememory we shall continue to unpack and reanimate, here.

One does not simply kill her child without consequences (shame, among other things). Post-infanticide, Sethe becomes the proverbial madwoman in the attic, her old home haunted by the spirit of her dead child, but also her killing of it; i.e., the rememory of what she did, having to face it again and again as forever incomplete. The entire house is the attic, albeit of a plantation that—like the child’s fragmented ghost—follows its mother around. She’ll never be free of it, the story’s theme of rememory conveying a deeply traumatized woman effectively dreaming while awake, always disassociating (Cuwu was like that, too, but less so when they were stable).

Per the dialectic of the alien, the Gothic is writ in disintegration; said detachment and fragmentation echoes across texts (re: from Frankenstein to Beloved to Annihilation, etc) in and out of dreams. This doesn’t make it any clearer when it happens, though. Morrison’s adherence to the tradition makes certain sections nigh-unreadable gibberish (stream of consciousness); i.e., by virtue of the heroine feeling connected to them at all times and from all directions, suggesting the entire thing was written in hindsight and in the moment—the rise of a new state of existence struggling to recall what came before, during the Middle Passage (which Morrison dedicates the story to): a kind of trauma-induced amnesia per the wandering restless labyrinth as tethered to Sethe. She is the vanishing point as much as the space is, cryptonymically announcing Hogle’s place of concealment per the individual standing on the ashes of something not quite present: genocide, stolen generations on stolen land of stolen agency from stolen bodies, etc, as unironically raped by state forces.

Rape, then, is historically a power fantasy to enact upon others against their will (see: footnote, below). 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[5] fantasies/demon BDSM operating like demon lovers historically do; i.e., as controlled opposition policing the usual victims by their assigned masters as a theatre to challenge inside of itself, but especially what dreams may come through imperfect regeneration!

Per C.S. Lewis and Rudolph Otto (more on them, later), such things become something to dread; i.e., a repetitive game of cat-and-mouse; e.g., not just Sethe and her dead child, but poor Ripley in Alien as alienated from the slaughter of nature fetishized. Step-by-step, she wakes from a dream into a nightmare that resembles her place of work as haunted, both bumping into her cat, but also the xenomorph as something she had some hand in: the intersex ghost of settler-colonial trauma upon which her work rests!

Though interconnected across fiction and non-fiction, such threads (and their tangents) can get rather confusing rather quickly—promptly and heavily weighing on the mind of the actor telling the story inside a place that is haunted by unspeakable things struggling to be heard regardless. The rape is forbidden, but so is mentioning it. Doing so verges on the profane simply by announcing itself in the surroundings of the performance but also their demeanor while affected by such things; i.e., as playfully unfolding during calculated risk feeling home-like, thus historically tied to moments where good play was met with bad. In turn, these generally relegate to sites of play that entertain “rape” as par for the course; e.g., a BDSM torture dungeon or Gothic novel (the two are functionally the same). Any site/performance thereof takes something out of the storyteller mid-attempt, especially when someone else lends a hand[6]!

To that, Beloved was always a difficult story to read—too fragmented to easily comprehend, coupled with the ghoulish subject matter and attempt to write about things that aren’t strictly alive (nor ever were, a quality of ghosts we’ll unpack later) but reify through a proxy/avatar based on things one has gleaned through; i.e., selective absorption turning one’s world upside-down when dreaming about dream-like stories about rape as a consequence of capital and its parent ideologies (re: Cartesian thought). Having been raped myself and having tried to revive those feelings to interrogate them with different people to vastly different outcomes and effects (re: Harmony and Jadis), I now understand Sethe’s struggles; i.e., through my own “pregnant” labors: to remember what was lost as connected to a shared struggle Morrison also had in mind. It can feel circuitous, recursive, doomed—a hellspawn chopped and screwed together into something ontologically impossible and impossible to ignore as a result:

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

Such is the nature of the zombie and its apocalypse demonstrating those unable to reflect as abusive cunts. However, the simple truth is, many dreams repeat or otherwise return/can be triggered by exploring trauma inside and outside ourselves. This can be on purpose and/or by accident; e.g., the return of the vampire, the dragon, the xenomorph, etc, as a ghost of itself slowly shambling towards us (or quickly running and pouncing on us) in and out of dreams, but also dream-like media as internalized to converse with our sleeping selves; i.e., until we spring from sleep, half-remembering whatever phantom we think we saw as, like it or not, being something we’ve encountered before in some shape or form.

For Mary Shelley, this was the Promethean myth, which she dragged up like a corpse to modernize as rotten (speaking to the rot under capital through a displaced German state); but the same basic idea applies to us and the legends we routinely face as a) based on the same myth revived by Shelley over two centuries previous, and b) sold back to us in neoliberal stories of “past” that we, like her or Morrison, can proactively play with to inventively reclaim (and reassemble) what is lost—our undead humanity!

This isn’t by exacting revenge upon the dead (which the state, of course, wants), but interrogating their worrisome existence by going into Hell to face them; i.e., as an ambiguous presence of Cartesian abuse, thus rape as power abuse being what we must reclaim in dream-like ways here on Earth extending into wild exploratory fantasies. Said “dreams” speak to tokenization as self-destruction in relation to power as found and stolen from privatized elements (so-called “gods”); re (from “Military Optimism,” 2021):

In Gothic circles, “Promethean” means “self-destructive,” generally in pursuing power, wisdom, or technology.

The idea stems from Frankenstein, also called The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. In her story, the “natural philosopher” Victor Frankenstein discovers ancient forbidden wisdom and uses it to create unnatural life, which leads to issues; Victor is a shit parent who views his creation, the Creature, as a demon. The novel ends with him discouraging education for fear of uncovering forbidden, self-destructive knowledge. According to him, this knowledge outwardly reflects our innermost demons, which destroy us through mutual dislike (re: Skynet, Metal Sonic, the xenomorph, etc).

Although written as a unflattering parody of the Byronic hero, Victor was nevertheless a man of privilege (so was Byron); and having access to tremendous opportunities and wealth, he misused these resources to stupefying effect. As we’ll see in a moment, this kind of pampered, short-sighted hubris is on full display in neoliberal critiques: The evil companies of the 20th century’s sci-fi future (re: Alien) are just as blind and prone to blaming others as Victor was. However, they’ve become an institution whose capacity for harm far exceeds Victor’s parental failings. They lie, cheat and steal, all under the guise of scientific virtue.

Though Shelley wrote what is widely considered the first horror-themed science fiction novel, she drew inspiration from the Ancient Greek myth. In it, the titan Prometheus steals the fire of the gods (a symbol of forbidden knowledge) and gives it to mankind. In the myth, the gods exact revenge on Prometheus, cursing him with eternal torment; stories like Frankenstein place this suffering on humanity for their impudent curiosity, idiocy and hubris: the Promethean Quest.

Although the Promethean Quest has evolved over the centuries, the basic blueprint remains fairly unchanged:

• • exploration into the unknown, or seemingly unknown
  • discovery of a lost civilization
  • confrontation with a rogue technology
  • survival and escape
  • repeat

As new civilizations grow more and more advanced, they push outward and encounter fallen “gods.” Not actual gods posed by the Greeks, but those whose technology is so advanced as to be virtually indistinguishable from magic (see: Clarke’s third law).

The makers of this technology are not gods; they are sapient mortals who destroyed themselves with powerful knowledge they failed to control. Their creations survive them, attracting future explorers. Those who arrive want more power, the whole ordeal reliably ending in disaster. This cycle repeats, leaving a field of “ancient” [quotes, new] wreckage in its wake (source).

The above writing is three years old by now, and it constitutes my wrestling with older fictions I was beginning to think about differently back then; i.e., as a matter of Gothic-tinged genderqueer discourse (what I, slightly over a year later, would call Gothic Communism). But their haunting as a matter of rememory—to face and reassemble in hellish, Radcliffean ways that, unlike Radcliffe, I didn’t want to banish but understand—goes on and on, well beyond my PhD (and subsequent books) into this one: the proverbial gazing into the abyss, the call of the void.

One, said abyss is often associated with the undead’s eyes—however blind they might appear—as being trance-like, offering a rare and fatal vision[7] tied to a larger cannibalistic cycle (re: the Reapers, footnote); i.e., touched upon by bad (apocalyptic) dreams not simply as repressed memories, but hushed discourse concerned with taboo things paradoxically validated through monstrous poetics as tolerable, acceptable, commodified; re: zombies. Two, it literally involves dreams that—like the zombie—rise from the grave-like mind as connected to larger gravesites to have sex (communion) inside as profane (“almost holy”) on purpose.

For example, while recently considering this section for final review, I had a consent-non-consent session with Harmony a few hours before. I did so to regain some sense of control pertaining to the rising presence of fascism I feel right now in the real world—partly thanks to Bad Empanada Live’s video, “Twitter Is Causing a Global Nazi Resurgence – It Must Be Destroyed” (2024) but also while working on the Undead Module, which is suitably full of nightmares, of nightmares, of nightmares (such things driving those in touch with a broader emotional current to, at a glance, inexplicitly commit suicide in the prime of their youth; i.e., Juliet Syndrome; e.g., Evelyne McHale).

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

As a result, I once again had a compound meta nightmare whose rememory was based on a nightmare that I’d already had before (with the literal Nightmare boss monster from Metroid Fusion in the dream, too, for good measure), and one that pertained to my own trauma as something the professionals would call “complex.” But as Doctor Morbius said, “Now you know a dream can’t hurt you!” However delicious the irony was in his case, he was more or less correct; but one can still feel haunted or out of control during these tricky echoes’ bad repetition and deliberately campy citation (re: Matthew Lewis). Per Marx, this concerns historical-material conditions, which I pointedly extend to socio-material conditions; i.e., as a dualistic manner of expanding on Castricano’s cryptomimesis to contend with history within myself as something to reify out of disparate parts: writing with the dead as weighing on my overloaded brain becoming something to repeatedly express through my writing and my artwork (which, in turn, is generally accomplished with the help of those operating on a similar wavelength; e.g., Itzel, above, but also Morrison).

In psychological thought, “Hell” classically refers to the subconscious mind and its effects on the owner(s) (and which the spirit world/world of dreams and nightmares has a historical-material, thus dialectical-material effect that psychological models like to ignore[8], including older Gothic analysis like Creed or Kristeva). Like Sethe, though, we are not the same person as these older quacks, but likewise aren’t our older selves per baptismal in Styx’ hellish waters; their rapturous power[9] is only ours to control on repeated viewings, but each visit is unique. It is both dangerous and required if we are to truly be free—not of the trauma or the memory of experience to fear (which will always be to some degree legitimate), but of its total dominion over us as a lived experience that never really stops until we are dead: sleep is the cousin of death, after all.

Such elements generally oscillate between solemnity and satire; e.g., The Book of Mormon’s “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream” (2017): “You blamed your brother for eating the donut! You’re a dick!” / “I can’t believe Jesus called me a dick!” But, it’s just as often franchised between authors having perennial debates in the same repeating stories and characters—Lewis and Radcliffe, myself and Morrison, but also Scott and Cameron:

(exhibit 36d2: Cameron’s ideas on the Amazon and Immaculate Conception aren’t so immaculate; they generally weaponize the Amazon as asexual, but haunted by sexual trauma as something to project onto an imaginary other attached to real-world peoples [the Vietnamese]. Echoing Radcliffe’s gentler detectives’ own absurd nightmares but updating them for a neoliberal market, Cameron’s neoconservative, exterminatory rhetoric generally pits the Amazon against the Medusa as something to kill and crush during a trigger response to rape panic; i.e., something to point the TERF-grade Madonna at before “pulling” like the trigger of a gun-like nun to actualize the heroine in a way that is sexualized by Cameron: the heteronormative regulation of sex, terror and force through neoliberal war copaganda. Violence becomes sexy insofar as its justification serves the heroine returning to a desired position within the status quo: the military mother saving the colony brat from Communism.)

Such stories concern generational trauma in ways that mark us as nostalgically wounded, touched in half-real forms that merge reality with imagination. When marked, said trauma becomes a part of us, then; i.e., as an extension of the world around us that we internalize and absorb, mid-phantasm. It can exacerbate, thus trigger again in the future and stir up old feelings inside us, but also the world around us when such things come back around (the chickens); i.e., post-traumatic stress as a poetic device relayed between us and our surroundings across space and time, in and out of dreams. These rise frightfully in ways that are sudden and unpleasant, like a spontaneous pregnancy (a Gothic staple) that we must give birth to lest it explode violently out of us. These mimic symptoms of the orgasm, of death, of what doctors until quite recently would openly describe as hysteria, aka “wandering womb.”

Sure, it’s all rather Freudian and stupid (above), but the societal effects are nonetheless real for many people (validating Cameron’s rape fantasies as speaking to a very common fear among women and other marginalized peoples: foreign invasion of oneself through rape). The proletarian trick is to take control of the labors (and tokophobic-grade anxieties attached to them) to not only survive them, but the doctors (and other people) who reliably discount our feelings and lived, monstrous-feminine experiences[10]; i.e, which they attribute to our failings while negatively contributing to the symptoms and symbols: as something that will purge one way or another!

Like a Gothic novel, though, dreams and nightmares remain an essential part of the experience—indeed, monomythically involve the hero venturing into Hell to face the past as undead; i.e., as something to conjure up regardless if someone wants to or not, then survive it. Per my arguments, the liminal hauntology of war is the appearance of the grim harvest, which leads to tokenization and rape of the self as alien. Generally this is through a castle or castle-like monster in relation to broader socio-material factors per capital harvesting us as part of nature. Even so, it can still feel like an endless nightmare; i.e., occurring per a sweetly terrifying sensation of drifting in and out of sleep while awake.

As such, rememory is the process of going heroically into such spaces (often again and again as anisotropic, concentric extensions of ourselves through mise-en-abyme); i.e., to confront uncomfortable things that, however bizarre, fragmented or abstract they might seem, are generally explored through theatre, music, dance and yes, kayfabe/Amazonomachia as half-real extensions of our lives attached to legends and they us (re: the chronotope); e.g., Neo leaving the Matrix to go back inside, Link’s raft struck by lightning to send him to the isle of the Wind Fish (which he summons by collecting magical instruments), Samus plumbing the Zebethean depths time and time again, and so on…

(artist: Daniel Vendrell Oduber)

Whatever the form, such things are abused on repeat by the state tokenizing the oppressed into traitors of class, race and culture put “to sleep”; i.e., as a Radcliffean means of conjuring up horrors that, per unspeakable state abuses, menticide workers to rape themselves and nature as alien, monstrous-feminine zombies: a self-imposed gag recycling such dreams inside the sleeper’s echo-chamber brain. We can reclaim this (re: confusing the cat, Monty-Python-style), of course, but something is always given and gained, per attempt; each dive leaves a part of our old selves in Hell, and loads us with fresh fatal knowledge concerning preparation for new “tortures.” In turn, these let us face and interrogate trauma harmlessly as a means of paraxial catharsis; i.e., when done correctly, ludo-Gothic BDSM isn’t a gateway drug for anything but sexual healing and rape prevention in the future: Gothic Communism.

Them’s the breaks. Now let’s take all of this and consider it not to my latest dreams (re: after Harmony and I put “rape” in quotes), but to the response I had over a year ago when dreaming about The Last of Us. The details of that dream aren’t important (though we’ll unpack some of them in part two of this subchapter); the response to them is. The trauma of that dream wasn’t entirely my own, then, but had elided with various other expressions of things we simultaneously abject but seek out in disguised, undead forms; i.e., the difficulty in remembering to recover singular atrocities, but also forming the wider social-sexual habits that combine this-with-that: to stand together as a diverse polity with uneven, idiosyncratic, race-to-class-to-cultural betrayals and oppression. Morrison dedicated her story to the millions-dead of the Middle Passage, and Beloved’s suitable fragmentation speaks to a kind of privilege many people of color in America don’t have: a voice (often a singer’s, dancer’s or painter’s).

Such a voice is vital, of course, but something I discovered since is how minorities often become singularized in their struggle to be heard. The Communist Numinous isn’t a single group, though; it represents a collective struggle that needs to put aside past differences and stand together against the elite. Otherwise, they’ll divide and conquer us all over again. In short, this isn’t a contest or a race, and rape isn’t something to rank (“different flavors and degrees of shit,” I often have to explain to my mother); we can speak to our own peoples’ raping by police forces, but to truly heal from such things, division as a praxial device must, itself, become a thing of the past (e.g., emotional manipulation). Bold but respectful, we must become part of the same undivided spirit, a spectre of Marx more Marxist than Marx was, more gay and enlightened towards liberation through rememory as improving upon itself from Morrison to me:

(artist: Super Phazed)

Such communions with the dead are an endless cycle, and one we shouldn’t bat away with bullets and knifes just because it implies our being born on the right side of the tracks (thus fearful of colonization by the alien dead to some degree; re: “shower curtain syndrome, vis-à-vis Jameson). We must hug Medusa and abjure capital preying not just on her but all of us. There is no surviving capital; we can only transform it, and this starts with a dream of something better built on older dreams (or palimpsestuous echoes of these things) that decidedly were not.

For me, then, my aforementioned dream about The Last of Us had blended said text (already an adaptation) according to my own adult education and childhood traumas—specifically my surviving of child abuse and rape (re: Dad and Jadis, respectively), as well as my experiences with dated portrayals of war that were given to me from different sources growing up (re: the monomyth). It was a tangled, confusing chorus of the dead, but somehow it all made sense to me (abuse acclimates you to recursive chaos as a revived “medieval”; re: mise-en-abyme as consistently “ancient”): the rememory of things that have been lost to Capitalism’s half-hidden atrocities and must—like the fairy or the succubus—be brought back to life in ways that are always different; i.e., what Ghil’ad Zuckermann calls “sleeping beauties” in regards to languages that are not “dead” thus gone forever, but “sleeping” thus waiting—like Cthulhu—to be revived again (Polyglot Conference’s “Sleeping Beauties Awake,” 2017). Death, then, is a part of life and vice versa, including all aspects of it we’re alienated from and given bad counterfeits in return. Sooner or later, death as a matter of chimeras and hauntologies alike, comes home to haunt settler colonialism and its dreamy cycle of pioneers; i.e., feasting on the gutted corpse of Manifest Destiny to either start it again, or try something different moving forward!

(artist: Istrander)

Gothic-Communist development is such a conduit. Repurposing hellish dreams out of the corpse of empire requires radical, intersectional forms of solidarity that historically have struggled to manifest in coherent forms (re: Morrison); i.e., insofar as chasing representation goes, has taken increased importance (during tokenization) over any serious attempt at intersectional solidarity in mainstream media and politics. One could argue this praxial inertia being the whole point—to divide canonically along class and racial lines by redlining in all the usual ways, and letting one or two across to gatekeep all the rest seemingly stuck in Dreamland; i.e., tokenization and normalization of different radicalized groups into moderate forms that sell out and play the cop of said dreams stuck in the cave, themselves.

It’s a clearly complicated topic, insofar as it’s historically discouraged by capital, whose critics have not been nearly radical enough insofar as intersectional solidarity is concerned; i.e., bonding together in ways that grant the right of rebellion to all groups working together against the elite and their token servants’ bad dreams. Anything less simply leads to failure and regression towards enslavement and genocide again, nipping liberation in the bud; e.g., Skynet killing the mother of its enemy before his birth.

We’ve touched upon Afronormativity earlier in the book (which Beloved points to), but won’t have time to give examples of similar normativities at length. I simply want to give the holistic model upon which they all function, moving power through the socio-material devices of Gothic poetics in one direction or the other (towards workers or the state). To that, it’s simply a historical-material fact at this stage: development cannot work without all oppressed groups finding common ground against the state/capital as the ultimate foe, the pearly Omelas eating everything around it and then itself. It has and will continue to divide and harvest nature as monstrous-feminine according to anything that isn’t functionally white; this starts with the colonizer image, but extends to tokenized latitude as given to oppressed individuals willing to (not without some degree of repressed shame) sell their people down the river for the umpteenth time.

This brings us to The Last of the Mohicans—not for a close-read of the text, but to ply the basic ideas already covered as present within stories like it to the larger dialectical-material forces at work.

To that, I want to be holistic and will quickly re-mention Morrison as someone to critique; i.e., as a threat to solidarity (so-called “mainstream success”), but also the likes of Howard Zinn and Zionism, as well as other cultural groups we need to consider together (re: The Terror: Infamy). We need to, insofar as universal liberation concerns facing the reality that all of us are presently atomized to varying degrees; i.e., by stories like The Last of the Mohicans working to presage and lament genocide in service to profit!

First, the movie, itself. Of it, Alys Caviness-Gober writes,

Based on James Fenimore Cooper‘s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757. The novel is a rather boring read that, like Mann’s film, takes liberties with historical facts. Both the novel and various film and TV adaptations contain some historical truths: both the French and the British armies used Native Americans as scouts, guides, and allies; outnumbered by the British, the French were more dependent upon Native American aid than were the British; the Algonquians (Mohican) and Iroquois (Mohawk) were traditional competitors and enemies and those traditions determined which side of the War the various tribes supported. Cooper based his novel, The Last of the Mohicans, on the Mohican tribe, but his depiction of them includes aspects of the Mohegan cultural, including Mohegan names, like Uncas. At the time of Cooper’s writing, the Mohegan were a separate Algonquian tribe associated with eastern Connecticut. Cooper set his novel in and around Lake George, New York, in the Hudson Valley, which was historically Mohican land (source: “C’mon, Mann: The Last of the Mohicans,” 2021)

First, note how the different tribes’ animus is as much with each other as the warring Europeans dividing up native lands. More to the point, whichever side won, these different Indigenous groups would surely have suffered at the hands of. Second, we can see some sense of reassembly across a variety of works telling the same basic story: the white Indian narrative.

Cooper wrote The Leatherstocking Tales between 1823 and 1841, and they present the same underlying issue; a reassembly of Native American history as written by the conqueror class to effectively “cry for the Indians” while publishing a kind of boys-only pulp fiction: white voices sanctimoniously speaking to the plight of native populations, treating their doom as “foregone.” It verges away from activism and into liberal doomsaying (white moderacy through emotional manipulation). Such a trend is carried forward from Cooper by men like William Faulkner’s own quickness to relegate such peoples and lands (e.g., The Bear, 1942) to a doomed position under capital, an abject state of ruin (a tomb, often an “ancient” one hauntologically dug back up; e.g., Naughty Dogs’ Central-to-South American ruins, tribal masks, and evil scientist, Dr. Cortex, abjecting Nazis, like usual, away from North America) that points the finger at them and their folly instead of us and ours. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

As usual, the process of abjection (as something to reassemble) deflects the United States’ role in things then and now—in short, it’s always the other side that does genocide, “them” instead of “us” while the middle class (which includes a black middle; re: Morrison) attacks the ghost of the counterfeit wherever they go; they’re so busy playing undertaker but also Jesus bearing the cross, dying[11] for “our” sins while breaking the bad news (and making money off it) that they “forget” to actively solidarize these different groups divided and conquered by the state (something Morrison admittedly does, insofar as she is gentrified and Afrocentrist [speaking exclusively about Black America; source: Britannica] much like other black activists/auteurs have been/are; e.g., Jordan Peele[12] writing about already-dead peoples doomed like the Mohicans were).

(artist: Super Phazed)

To this, something important is lost; i.e., the wretched have a constant part to play in their own destruction and struggle to heal (e.g., Black Snake Moan, 2006): to routinely take the state’s poison gifts—”their” gold as stolen from other nations, peoples, dead—as a middle-class assimilation gimmick. Specialized voices like Morrison are still useful, but they need to solidarize or they’re still divided/segregated in ways capital can exploit; i.e., a darling we can “kill” (she died in 2019) and camp like all the rest: the controlled opposition of a black member in the ivory tower (and all that entails).

Bringing things back to The Last of the Mohicans, the paradox demands those with more privilege as critiquing the issues of such buried voices while intersecting with other oppressed groups having their own hand in self-conquest; i.e., Morrison perhaps trying to speak to the experience of other groups and her own as subject to the same state forces, thus class, race and cultural betrayals.

So often, these groups want to speak and act exclusively for themselves and their liberation, when in reality we need to unite and speak out for each other against capital; i.e., as one: through our undead cravings/appetites as “pent up” in ways that—per the pedagogy of the oppressed—heal from rape as already having happened and desperately needing release. This happens not by specializing in single groups unto themselves, but by finding and respecting our similarities amid difference and vice versa; e.g., Edward Said writing for the plight of the Palestinians, though often from relative safety and security in the US. Doing so doesn’t make Culture and Imperialism (1993) any less important, but the value in his voice and that of the people of Gaza lies in how they remain part of the same larger project’s sticking point: liberation as a universal goal.

To this, we desperately need to mix and hybridize, thus adapt to a predatory system that only knows how to divide and destroy by conjuring up false symbols of rebellion. That includes white Indians, but also token idiots (and fancy authors like Morrison who, while important enough to merit me taking their ideas for myself and my work, still find Beloved to frankly be a bit of a slog—no offense).

Believe me, I wish I could say that it was simply the straight white man’s fault alone (it’s not) and that white savior myths are dangerous and harmful (they are[13]), but capital invades, gentrifies and decays feminism, punk culture, pan-Africanism, genderqueer groups and other minorities factions, too; i.e., to hand out singular opportunities to betray as many as possible to benefit as few as possible.

For example, various factions of the Inca population sought liberation from the empire already ruling them (re: “Guns, Germs and Steel: A Historical Critique“), putting their trust in enterprising Europeans (never a good idea); the Cherokee adopted American laws, clothing and customs, only to be betrayed in turn; discord among the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X led to a) his assassination (and other members of the same movement) and b) the rise of “Hoteps[14]” and black Capitalism (re: “The REAL Faces of Black Conservatism,” 2023); the recuperation of Black Lives Matter and police violence; and so on, regarding problems of race, class and culture as a matter of division and decay under capital as something proletarian rememory and its attempts at intersectional solidary cannot dare ignore.

While such loyalty is cheaply bought, its price is sadly great. Howard Zinn writes of this in A People’s History of the United States,

“History is the memory of states,” wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen’s policies. From his standpoint, the “peace” that Europe had before the French Revolution was “restored” by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation—a world not restored but disintegrated.

My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can “see” history from the standpoint of others.

My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims. Still, understanding the complexities, this book will be skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”

I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare (source).

Zinn was not perfect, nor were other Jewish men of the period like Einstein, but they touched on something to work towards they could not always articulate without focusing on their own groups with a limited understanding about other groups[15].

Personally, I like to think I do a better job than either man (or Morrison, or other titans of their time, who did not have my advantages). As I myself wrote earlier in this volume,

Monsters are often seen as “not real” or “impossible,” relegated to the lands of make-believe and pure fantasy. Except this isn’t true. In Gothic Communism, they constitute a powerful, diverse, and modular means of interrogating the world around us as full of dangerous Cartesian illusions meant to control workers by locking Capitalism (and its genocidal ordering of nature and human language) firmly in place. Good monsters become impossible, as do the possible futures they arguably represent.

Instead of saying “in a perfect world,” then, we should say “a possible world”; i.e., in a better possible world, nudity (and other modes of GNC sexual and gender expression) can be exposed and enjoyed post-scarcity and not be seen and treated as inhumanely monstrous (a threat; e.g., bare bodies being a threat to the pimp’s profit margins). Rather, the monstrous language remains as a voice for the oppressed to flourish with. […] Open monstrous sexuality [isn’t] the end of the world as Capitalist Realism would treat it as (a world where such things are impossible save as shackled commodities that uphold the status quo), but the start to what the elite want us to think is “perfect,” thus “impossible”: humanizing the harvest of fruit-like bodies laid low by Capitalism’s habitual reaping.

However painful, though, it’s important to remember that such a reaping was assisted by those, Zinn points out, as being on the side of the executioner (white skin or not). He would know, being a bomber in the US military during WW2 who lost his taste for war and bloodshed, thus rape (though not his inability to think beyond nation-states, it would seem). The same goes for others who, white or not, led to the both-sides arguments that helped continue Capitalism’s daily operations; i.e., into the present space and time, thus turning of themselves into the kinds of zombies used to justify future aggression built on centuries of abuse touched upon in theatre, music, movies, etc. This includes Zinn, Einstein and Morrison, but also characters like Magua from The Last of the Mohicans as retold by Mann: a ghost of war hungry for blood (and revenge).

As Slayer puts it, “Rise ghosts of war!“:

Fate, silent warriors, sleeping souls will rise
Once forgotten soldiers come to life
Fallen mercenary, dormancy is done
Not content with wars we’ve never won (source: Genius)

What you see is basically what you get with Slayer. All the same, war with the zombie is classically a privilege of the middle class; i.e., rape, war and death things to play with (“war as dead”), while simultaneously and surreptitiously recruiting said fearful-fascinated children (drunk on the Numinous) to wage future holy crusades against a hauntological being: the ghosts of past atrocities rising up overseas and at home, mid-cryptomimesis, to seal the oppressor in monomythic tombs of their own making!

When I was in grad school, Dale Townshend once described live burial as “the Gothic master-trope.” Generally tied to the home as eroticized per abject (unspeakable) abuse as “of to the bedroom” (re: Foucault) and other areas as haunted by rape, this includes tokenized soldiers being asked to go back to their ancestral homelands to rape and cannibalize them anew—as part of an endless historical-material cycle at odds with itself. Such feelings are not known to be salubrious, generally perceived as a psychosexual attack on the conqueror facing the black mirror held up to them (tokenized or not). The elite use rememory as a guilt device to martyr said soldiers, but for the oppressed it is classically a counterterror weapon of revenge known famously as the tool of shadowy guerrilla forces: “You’re eating yourself, dumbass!”

“The demon is a liar!” Father Merrin asserts; but looks and arguments can be deceiving in both directions. Ghosts of the dead have a predatory function seeking to right past wrongs, whereas agents of state force like  or Magua assign guilt and moral judgements to abject capitalistic violence as coming out of American, Africa, and Asia (e.g., Japan, with 2019’s The Terror: Infamy‘s fearsomely disarming Yuko, above) speaking to the Imperial Boomerang on Japanese immigrants during WW2 through a ghost story with zombie-like elements: the turning of people into corpses drained by the spirit as emerging during war not just as the cataclysm, but the catalyst[16]) and other non-European places America has occupied, colonized, assimilated, and abandoned to have them take part in the same cycle of cannibalism and conquest. Concessions with power always lead to cannibalism; it becomes like Jack Torrance’s book, endlessly repeating a message that (unlike his famous sentence) changes inside of a bad echo, a Song of Infinity’s mixed metaphors that can critique the zombie-like function of capital; i.e., as a presence of older rememory to confront and speak with: xenoglossia.

(source, Tumblr post, This Is a Podcast Fanblog: July 11th, 2023)

Holistic study is the spirit of this book, “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them [to] understand larger structures and patterns.” As such, facing and reassembling the cost of the state’s imaginary past and Gothic ancestry through rememory means confronting such token, thus embarrassing concessions, then changing the cultural understanding of the imaginary past and the actual past as being made of basically the same stuff—people and their myths and legends, but also their victories and defeats (self-inflicted or otherwise).

Such interviews generally have a traumatic element, but smiling in the face of the punitive gods of capital is the trick for us Galateas bucking Pygmalion; i.e., talking to the Balrog instead of abjecting it as Gandalf did:

(source: v.card.bandits)

I was always a weird, sassy bitch; faced with the xenomorph, Pazuzu, Magua, Yuko, or Gwyn Lord of Cinder, etc, I would want to talk with them, not attack and kill them (which only buries the problem to rise again, later). “The myth of Gothic ancestry [and its bugbears] endured because it was useful”; for us, that means pulling our heads out of our sheltered asses (re: the dialectic of shelter and protection) to humanize the zombie, however abject and Numinous it might seem. State proponents serving profit would sooner pull out their own teeth than do so; we want to build up/grant the undead a tolerance and audience as interlocutors, not enemies, thus prepare ourselves for a life rebelling against the status quo—i.e., as normalizing genocide against zombie-like[17] recipients and givers of state abuse (argumentation): monsters, but and the mothers who try (as Ripley and Morrison do) to protect us from the horrors of the state: ghost stories with a pointedly zombie-like character.

Possible worlds, then, aren’t built on scapegoats like Magua as objects to summon, blame and kill (which the movie most certainly does), but by understanding the imaginary past and its writhing agony and furious hunger) in ways that update the Wisdom of the Ancients as an endless document; i.e., through mutual consent/action through conscious acceptance and healing while resisting state oppression (and avoiding embarrassing palingenetic queries like Disney’s awful, 1953 “Why Is the Red Man Red?” next page). Doing so involves such an imaginary force as something to put together and interrogate without dehumanizing them as ghosts of dead Indians (e.g., Peter Pan projecting racism forward by looking backward at older fetishizing forms: Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and the White Indian); i.e., through performances that encourage the confronting of power and trauma as things to play with, helping us wake up in ways that capital will always discourage while pointing the finger at its victims as “already liberated” by its so-called “heroes.”

As such, each awakening is part of a larger undead whole, and takes on different staging points depending on various factors: where a worker starts and how rememory is attained to synthesize the pedagogy of the oppressed as a matter of good social-sexual habits across different polities; i.e., avoiding any reductively “pure” psychoanalytical pitfalls (e.g., “It’s like totally the Id, my dudes!”) while acknowledging the important role/awesome power of dreams (and dream-like things) regarding the rememory process as eternal, going—like capital certainly does—on and on and on: achieving intersectional solidarity (and solutions towards it) through said pedagogy resisting police concessions through unironic violence, terror and sexual harm (rape); i.e., as a matter of proletarian praxis during cryptonymy’s game of mirrors and masks being dream-like, summoning up old, dead hauntologies (the ghosts of Native Americans) to interrogate them.

People sell out, thinking in the short term, only to eventually abandon the loftier goals of revolution and liberation in exchange for the usual short-term trinkets and prizes. There must—as Kent Monkman’s illustration depicted, earlier—be room in such a metaphorical craft for all manner of oppressed groups and allies without calling ourselves the last of our kind (as Cooper did for the Mohicans, and Naughty Dog did with “us”) and eating our hearts out[18] and that of the land around us: strange appetites indeed, strange fruit (as Abel Meeropol would put it) under extermination, thus rape and murder for profit since Columbus and onto Israel (Bad Empanada’s “Israel MASS RAPING Palestinians from Gaza,” 2024); i.e., as using minority suffering to commit more suffering; e.g., Israel, per Norman Finkelstein saying unto the future, “the biggest insult to the memory of the Holocaust is not denying it but using it to commit genocide against the Palestinian people.”

By extension, the elite want us (any workers) abusing each other and nature in service to profit, thus capital, through us-versus-them as a kind of endless blame game. There is only one thing to blame: capital and capitalists, from Columbus to Rockefeller to Bill Gates to J.K. Rowling to Elon Musk. The banality of evil is that zombies don’t spring from badass necromancers; they come from corporations, CEOs and shareholders turning the handle of power (often through state mechanisms, including academics like Morrison or Zinn not protesting enough outside of their own, safe little territories) to move money through nature, and as cheaply as possible. Life becomes cheap, the zombie a dark reflection of that, a dog soldier sometimes put to heel for the state and resurrected for the umpteenth time:

Magua, then, becomes a kind of vice-character eater of the dead; i.e., blackened by rape under capital to consume his own people by conducting the White Man’s trade on an oppressed polity he does not have the hindsight or impartiality to see: his blinded corpse seeking revenge (“an eye for an eye makes the world blind”), the cannibal pushed into doing what his oppressors would accuse him and his people of (re: Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks). And while it’s true that Magua offers a grim stereotype with a kernel of truth (stolen generations and transgenerational trauma), that kind of repressed voice still speaks for Indigenous anger instead of with it; i.e., as a vice character that really should be supplied by such peoples speaking for themselves.

In other words, a given sense of division needs to reassembled and united a) per person, and b) among different groups likewise coming together in ways that include all manner of oppressed groups building trust in ways that has never quite existed: to unite the lower classes and cultures against the middle class as historically white, but prone to tokenism among various representatives plucked from each minority group to aid profit as usual. It remains the same uphill battle with the sun in our eyes as described in Volume One—faced with other members of the undead who, for all intents and purposes, experience bias, stigma, intolerance and fear as something to give and receive. Liberation lies in how we combine different things that are, more or less, just sitting around waiting for it to happen.

We’ll explore this through ludo-Gothic BDSM, next—specifically my history of coining it partially based on Morrison’s rememory and half-real Gothic reflections; i.e., between fiction and non-fiction, but also dreams and the waking world.

Onto “The Roots of Trauma, part two: Healing through ‘Rape’“!

---

Footnotes

[1] Akin to Monty Python’s 1971 “Hell’s Grannies” skit minus the gang’s usual performative ironies; i.e., arguing in bad faith that healthy fit young men are somehow being threatened by old grannies, or any such harmless thing presented as a genuine threat that must be policed, thus exterminated.

[2] My dreams are generally weird enough that I write them down afterwards (as have my exes, in the past—I talk in my sleep). I’ll give a few here to make my point. First dream (10/28/2023):

I had a super zombie nightmare. It was in a skyscraper in Japan, and me and a bunch of other people were Japanese students. And there were Nazis with machine gun nests and L4D zombies that would transform in the worst ways. And a suit of armor in the corner that had a person in it. There was a cute boy named Teshiro(?). He said his name in the dream. He was very cute. We fought side-by-side, and were being pushed up floor-by-floor. We had a group of friends [with us] that seemed like we would all make it [to the top].

Then there was a woman who walked past us and smiled on our way to the final elevator to the top floor. One person panicked and shot her in the head, but it turns out she was a zombie in disguise. And her corpse kept getting bigger and scarier and the person who shot her froze. We shouted for them to finish the zombie off, but they couldn’t. The doors closed right as the zombie grabbed them and pulled them around a corner. When the doors actually closed, one person wasn’t inside the elevator, leaving four or five of us remaining.

The elevator took us to the roof, which had a gazebo entrance and a circle of dancing girls in pink circling the perimeter of the roof. I think they were trying to signal a helicopter. It was a completely uninfected part of the building. We separated and tried to relax, anticipating the rise of the zombies to this final place. I had been eyeing Teshiro and we snuggled; I said it was just a dream/game but would love to be friends in real life. And he said that would be nice. And then I woke up.

Afterwards, I added, “I felt a little sleepy but I couldn’t bring myself to fall back asleep. I didn’t want to kill Teshiro by having the zombies come [upstairs].”

Second dream (1/7/2024):

I had a dream that I was the old museum guy from The Last Crusade, being chased through airport security and down descending subway stairwells by Steven Segal, who I’d escape by sliding bodily down the railing/lane divider sorta like Mary Poppins but bodily on my stomach like a limp fish.

And I was walking on this campus past people while trying to make my flight (and avoid Steven) after having said goodbye to my ex, Zeuhl. And Holder from The Killing was walking past in lime-green clown makeup doing capoeira and freestyle rap, but also was in his civie digs trying to solve a murder where some guy’s body had been wrapped inside a log and chopped up into individual pieces like a Christmas roast and blood was everywhere.

Then I was back at my old family residence, having stayed with Zeuhl, and was preparing a plate of food in my brother’s old room, which always looked like a prison cell; and the food turned into some hors d’oeuvres and a bottle of cough syrup, while my grandmother ascended the stairs, looking like a ghost and wearing a sheet-like night gown.

And finally Steven Segal caught me. He was riding a horse, and would chase people down and pee on them. But this time, the horse peed, but not on me, and the camera cuts to Steven, who says, “and that means he’s saying thank you!” before subduing me and taking me in.

Third dream (3/3/2024):

I dreamt I was Horace Walpole. And David Attenborough was narrating the dream, which was a cross between Jurassic Park, Aliens and Dawn of the Dead, but also Walpole’s Mysterious Mother (a double incest yarn).

There were vengeful Indigenous ghosts I befriended who emerged from the fields of colonized lands as burning skeletons holding red scarves who turned into people, then xenomorphs and pirates; and a haunted theme park where, once entered, things became dark and desolate and the rides and games came alive and walked among you; and an old manuscript I was writing for my little brother about talking ravens and a magic spell that forced you to sit in someone’s lap until they drained you of your life force.

All belonged to an ancestral land that was overseen by the moon as the eye of an angry god, and if you married into the family you were safe. I was sitting at a small séance table in a wide-open field as the eye looked down on me and these wealthy-looking people, who held hands and summoned dead spirits. And at one point in the dream I married you and told my Gran about it, perched on her shoulder like a raven as I described how lovely you were.

This last dream was shared with Bay and concerned me wanting to marry them. But the others were likewise a strange degree of touching, silly and terrifying (most Gothic novels start with nightmares processing half-real events in a pareidolic, mise-en-abyme fashion).

[3] We had multiple gay neighbors in the house next door, growing up. According to my mother, Dad wanted to walk around the house naked, but despite his unusual brawn was constantly worried (through internalized homophobia) that the gay neighbors would see his ass through the closed blinds and come later in the night while he slept to “get him” (which puts a whole new meaning unto the “bear” dream). In short, he was a cowardly lion (a fact that my mother—a total fag hag—found absolutely hilarious).

[4] Or other such binaries; e.g., weakness and strength, typically framed as feminine and masculine in traditional, heteronormative gender language/tokenized normativities.

[5] As always, we want to critique what canonically essentializes as “normal”; i.e., doing so in defense of our basic rights; re (from Volume Two, part one):

Capitalism is a system of thought that prioritizes the individual in service to the elite, meaning that to speak out through open, monstrous, sex-positive expression (as we are) is paramount to preventing it (which we owe to ourselves, “just because”; i.e., there’s no logical argument for or against genocide, it’s simply incorrect relative to our rights being essentially in conflict with state predation). Canon and camp, sex positivity and sex coercion—these are literally functional opposites, as are the coaches and artisans promoting them and all their forms that follow function as a flow of power towards or away from the state. Permission can be granted implicitly in pre-established relationships that are already secure; those smaller relationships interface and relate to bigger ones and even bigger ones that, in medieval language, often work as animalistic shorthand [also known as art; re: our aforementioned caterpillar and wasp]. And if you disagree, I’d like to respond, “Welcome to real life! I’m Persephone from Earth; what planet are you from?”

[…] don’t suffer for your art if you can help it. But also remember that trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird. The idea is to combine them in ways that alleviate sickness, stress, tension and harm, but also avoid predation by perfidious elements in our daily lives coming from structural abuse: the Gothic castle as a beacon to attract and house the like-minded while the state tries, as it always does, to dominate us through its own victims (source).

This isn’t just a problem with fictional characters like Sethe, trying to have relationships post-trauma as something to imagine according to what was lost and reassembled centuries after the fact (time, again, being a matter of materials and distance); they affect us in our daily lives (which shall become clear as we examine Jadis and I being drawn to each other’s weirdness, hence trauma; i.e., something they ultimately exacted upon me as their victim, which Harmony has thankfully helped me find peace, post hoc).

[6] There is always an element of risk to consider regarding our playmates and play sites, either becoming visually uncanny/threatening to us when triggered (from this volume, “A Note about Rape; or, Facing the Great Destroyer“):

Regarding the Gothic past as half-real, but also something to toy with in new imaginary forms performed in our everyday lives, I need to warn/encourage you: lived trauma can bleed into shared trauma as a site for new predation; or said “predation” can be put in quotes by someone who also knows what it’s like to suffer who doesn’t want to harm others to help themselves feel better! This coin-toss outcome is essentially pure chance on a shared aesthetic, meaning you gotta look past the image to spot the flags (red or green) hidden through subtext. You gotta know yourself, which you can’t fully without taking some risks with others. The best toys can hurt you in the wrong hands; in the right hands, you can feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven.

The paradox (thus juggling act/tightrope) is presenting a manner of perception that feels dangerous but isn’t—is able to impart sex-positive lessons without becoming dogmatic!

[7] E.g., Liara T’Soni from Mass Effect telling you with eyes as black as Hell: “Embrace eternity!” While that story is more white Indian stuff—i.e., tokenizing the monstrous-feminine to serve empire through a patriarchal, monomorphic society of Sapphic space fags—the concept isn’t unique to tokenized forms (more on this as we explore the monomyth in general, but also demons, later on).

[8] Preferring to call them “drives”—a term I never liked as it presumes an essentialized biological element that excludes the shaping of human desires (their overall conditions) as socio-material, first and foremost.

[9] Often with a historically mutilative flavor bringing us closer to a palliative Numinous; e.g., Harmony hauntologically exploring the convulsionnaires (exhibit 37a2b).

[10]  Not just those of people who give birth, but GNC AMAB people, people of color, non-Christians, and others that are a) reliably animalized by Cartesian thought within capital and its canon, then b) to some degree raped and harvested: by being force fed bullets or knifes (exhibit 36d2). Again, the Gothic loves to merge the language of food, war and rape to say things that psychosexually concern all three; e.g., Victor’s revenge prescribing violence unto the Creature as something to abort by proxy.

[11] E.g., Blizzard’s 2024 “Diablo IV | Vessel of Hatred | Official Release Date Trailer” depicting the usual white colonial martyr sobbing for the source of genocide as taken to abject, faraway sites thereof; i.e., putting all of the blame of sin onto black executioners’ evil ghosts (the ghost of the counterfeit) needing to be exorcised, in effect blaming the victim of settler colonialism while conveniently ignoring the European side of things as far more widespread, as sovereign through the same counterfeits’ blaming of others.

[12] To her credit, I don’t wish to aggressively lump Morrison in with Peele, nor reduce either to a singular thing. Few writers can be insofar as they change and grow out of their older selves. Not to mention, Morrison’s reputation is as much a matter of history defined by others (who I constantly had to listen to crowing her achievements and how awesome she was). But her body of work still speaks for itself, insofar as her reputation proceeds her through those that deliver it. To that, she remains a titan of African American literature, which comes with its own baggage to critique.

For example, once while in Manchester, England at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, a black author at the talk I was attending* announced, “African Americans seem to think they’re the only black people on the face of the planet.” The statement was not challenged because I think there was some truth to it; or, as the chair for the event, Dr. Chloe Germaine Buckley, said, “The structure of Gothic writing relies on the idea that the past is never completely behind us. In fact, if it is not properly dealt with, it can erupt violently again in the present. These novels expertly highlight the dangers that lie in not confronting and resolving trauma from the past” (source: Manchester Metropolitan University’s “Gothic literature could ‘decolonise’ the curriculum”).

*”De-Colonising Children’s Literature – an evening of discussion about diversity in YA Fiction” (ibid.).

More to the point, certain actions speak for themselves in ways that are not homogenous among a given polity. Peele supports Israeli, for instance, whereas Morrison in “A Letter from 18 Writers” (2006), challenged the liquidation of the Palestinian state:

(source: Black Women Radicals)

But already we run into a problem insofar as representation includes a group of people for which Morrison is just one member of: an elite group of fancy pants nerds. Such persons are not gods and should be criticized—not for speaking about Palestine as they do, here, but meriting criticism as much as anyone does.

For example, another member of the same group is Noam Chomsky (someone we have already established being right about various things, except genocide; re: Cambodia). The same goes for Morrison, but also people likened to her same level of aggrandizement, class, what-have-you, talking about movements that historically are hardly consistent or perfect about anything except in how imperfect their struggles for liberation are; re: Afrocentrism and black voices as worryingly atomized.

Yes, it’s important to recognize who one is and the cultural tradition one belongs to. Even so, as a matter of reinvention, we should be actively coalescing into a larger radical movement concerned with uniting all peoples against capital in ways these authors didn’t; i.e., putting the cart before the horse. Postcolonialism is an-Com, which last I checked, no one called Morrison. Instead, she had a lot of love (especially in mainstream circles) regarding her work as something to pin a gold star onto, precisely because she wasn’t openly Marxist in her speech; i.e., she was black, first, and only Marxist if someone else came along and did their best to argue for that; e.g., Irfan Mehmood et al writing in 2021 (two years after her death), “This article will endeavor to discover [emphasis, me] the presence of Marxist ideology in Morrison’s, novels, The Bluest Eye and Beloved” (source: “Toni Morrison as an African American Voice: A Marxist Analysis,” 2021).

In short, people as a whole really need to be holistic as a matter of praxis and inclusivity at all times, but especially while they’re alive! Sacrificing that in favor of some imaginary past to reclaim for one group is not conducive to the kind of solidarity we need to collectively challenge state forces.

[13] The likes of John Connor and Natty Bumppo (above) being used to instill capitalist hegemonies into the future while dressed up as American-Liberal hero fantasies.

[14] “A relatively new movement in the U.S. that uses Egyptian history as a parcel to wrap up messages of Black pride,” Miranda Lovett writes in “Reflecting on the Rise of the Hoteps” (2020). “People characterized as Hoteps tend to wear traditional African styles, create content about the history of Black people from before the transatlantic slave trade, and spread ideology about the place of Black men and women within Black communities” (source). She goes on to explain:

For a young Black person struggling to connect to their ancestral cultural heritage, ancient Egypt is a familiar, attractive place to start. Egypt is the most well-known and powerful cultural influence from Africa today, making it easy for many African Americans to adopt Egyptian culture and to use its legacy of royalty, artistic sophistication, and technological advancement to create a message of Black superiority.

The trauma and loss of African heritage through the transatlantic slave trade arguably created a gulf that was filled by a kind of “therapeutic mythology“—a constructed heritage built around memories of the homeland. From Egypt to nations across the continent, the historic and renewed connection to Africa created the unique identity of “African American.” This identity encompasses a culture where African traditions (the ones that survived a long history of colonialism) have been altered to fit new, American environments.

[…] The Hoteps movement is a testament to the uniquely painful and complicated history of African Americans. It is anchored in a long tradition of looking to Africa for points of needed pride. Yet it also risks propagating false histories and conventions, and, ironically, disparaging Black women and those who are LGBTQ in the service of elevating Black identity. […] Hotep memes, and the history and logic that underpin this subculture, reveal the ways that the movement depends far too often on misogyny, homophobia, inaccurate history, and stereotypes of the Black experience (ibid.).

In short, such an attempt at reassembling the past as an act of reclamation is pointless towards liberation if it is built on the same facets of control and bigotry that, as much as it pains me to say, aren’t exclusive to white straight European men. Baggage is baggage.

[15] For example, Einstein once wrote to the prime minister of India in 1947, “The Jewish people alone [emphasis, me] has for centuries been in the anomalous position of being victimized and hounded as a people, though bereft of all the rights and protections which even the smallest people normally has” (source: the Jewish News Syndicate, so take it with a grain of salt). To be fair to Einstein, though, he had previously said in 1938

I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest” (source: “Our Debt to Zionism,” cited in Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb, 2007).

and later refused to be president of Israel. It’s, like, the bare minimum, but still! Good for you, Al!

As for Zinn, he waffles a bit, able to critique wackjobs like Columbus but suddenly becomes unable to follow through in the present space and time regarding matters of American foreign policy tied to his people.

For example, in a 2010 interview shortly before his death, Zinn calls the matters between Israel and Palestine “complicated”: “As always in very complicated issues where emotions come to the fore quickly, I try to first acknowledge the other party’s feelings” (source: “A Moment with Howard Zinn”). First, fuck the colonizer’s feelings! Second, they’re not complicated, as Michael Brooks points out (Brandon Van Dyck’s “Michael Brooks Takes a Question on Israel,” 2020), but also others; e.g., Jared Keyel, who writes far more incisively than Zinn does:

The evidence of the situation could not be any clearer. However, we must continue to reiterate that what is happening in Gaza is straightforward because of intense efforts by politicians, media, and others to convince Americans that the facts are simply too complicated, too nuanced to draw clear ethical and political conclusions. Insisting that the context is incomprehensibly complex after nearly 35,000 dead and 78,000 injured, mostly children and women, is genocide denial. Those facts may be uncomfortable for some to face; but they are not hard to understand. Moreover, stopping genocide also means recognizing that violence against Palestinians did not begin in October 2023.

Just as the events since last year are not complicated, neither is the history of what is called the “conflict” between Palestinians and Israelis. It has a definitive beginning in the late 1800s and since that point the aggressors have been the pre-state Zionist movement and, after 1948, the State of Israel. Zionism, a 19th-century European Jewish nationalist movement, sought to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians already living there. To do so, Zionists organized migration to settle and colonize a territory that was 95% Palestinian Arab and 5% Jewish at the time. The settlers’ explicit goal was to take as much territory as possible and change the demographics in their favor. The Zionists set about accomplishing those political goals, with full recognition that they would need to violently dispossess the Palestinians to achieve them. Everything that has happened in the decades since flows from that project to take territory and expel or subjugate as many Palestinians as possible.

No group of people has a right to take territory by violence and expel another group. No group of people has a right to subjugate another. Israel has done, and is doing, those things to Palestinians, not the other way around. That Zionism emerged in response to very serious European antisemitism does not mean the Zionists were justified in their actions. One group cannot free itself by subjugating another. Palestinians have been colonized, and they have resisted that process across more than a century. Whether nonviolent or not, that resistance has been deemed illegitimate by Israel and its allies. Seriously creating peace, justice, and perhaps reconciliation demands understanding root causes and addressing the harm that has been done. We must face history and be willing to name the aggressor: the State of Israel. This is not too complex to understand (source: “It’s Not Complicated: Israel is Committing Genocide in Gaza,” 2024).

The “complicated” element here is the anarchist character of such arguments that the state doesn’t like, so it abjects them as untenable, impossible. To that, Zinn plays both sides by saying Zionism was a mistake but also saying it was “too late” to go back

I think the Jewish State was a mistake, yes. Obviously, it’s too late to go back. It was a mistake to drive the Indians off the American continent, but it’s too late to give it back. At the time, I thought creating Israel was a good thing, but in retrospect, it was probably the worst thing that the Jews could have done. What they did was join the nationalistic frenzy, they became privy to all of the evils that nationalism creates and became very much like the United States — very aggressive, violent, and bigoted. When Jews were without a state they were internationalists and they contributed to whatever culture they were part of and produced great things. Jews were known as kindly, talented people. Now, I think, Israel is contributing to anti-Semitism. So I think it was a big mistake (re: “A Moment with Howard Zinn“).

and then offering the “two-state solution” (code for colonization, or “Imperialism with more steps”):

Ideally, there should be a secular state in which Arabs and Jews live together as equals. There are countries around the world where different ethnic groups live side by side. But that is very difficult and therefore the two-state solution seems like the most practical thing (ibid.).

To this, just as it’s possible for Zinn to be correct about past issues as a history teacher and domestic activist, so can he be spectacularly wrong about other things (similar to Chomsky and Cambodia). As such, he’s perfectly able to say some really stupid and unhelpful shit about something like Israel; i.e., where his own sense of identity yields the usual double standards/guilt trips per the kinds of exceptions we need to avoid.

This being said, plenty of people who lived through the Holocaust find themselves changing their minds in favor of Palestine—e.g., Aryeh Neier, Holocaust survivor and Human Rights Watch founder has changed his views on Israel and now believes they are committing genocide (Hasan Abi’s “Holocaust Survivor CHANGES HIS MIND??” 2024)—but only after a certain (and incredibly disproportionate) number of Palestinians are killed. Whatever happened to “you save one life, you save the world entire?” Red Scare is Red Scare, leading to praxial inertia, thus unnecessary death and exploitation. As always, be simple and direct, rudely addressing root causes to larger complications; e.g., as the Gothic does—nakedly and monstrously!

[16] Fittingly, Infamy‘s interview with the dead is a Japanese-American soldier caught up in the whirlwind of American fascism. As Ajo Romano writes:

As the passengers exit the bus and straggle inside the fenced-in military grounds, the camera pulls back to reveal an armed watchtower in the center and an American flag hovering over it all. Right on cue, as the last of the detainees enter, the wind picks up, unfurling the flag and snapping it into picture-perfect position. It’s a visual scream that this is America: legally enforced xenophobia and federal concentration camps. / This image sums up what’s best and what’s weakest about season two of The Terror: It works to remind us at every turn that the atrocities of the present are tied to those of the past, and that America is a country whose inability to confront its own systemic racism means that it’s destined to enact bleak, dehumanizing horror on its citizens again and again.

College student Chester Nakayama (Derek Mio) has his doubts about the presence of the yurei, but he can’t ignore the strange, chaotic violence running through the community — especially when much of it seems to be indirectly connected to him. Chester is a frustrating main character, by turns arrogant and clueless, overconfident and indecisive. He seems exasperated by everything: by his family, particularly his stubborn father; his Mexican-American girlfriend Luz (Cristina Rodlo) and her decision to join him and his family in the internment camp after she gets pregnant; by the war and its brutality; and even by the havoc the ghost is wreaking around him.

Mio plays Chester with a fascinating mix of wryness and earnestness — you’re never sure how real his caustic cynicism is when he’s faced with situations like, for instance, the brutal murder of Japanese soldiers by Americans — and over the course of the series they distill into the two halves of his personality. It’s the American in him that treats everything with a mix of forced coolness, mild sarcasm, and overconfidence. It’s the American in him who joins the war against Japan as a translator, where he’s forced to confront his own dual identities while battling his demons — which in his case may be the literal demon who’s caught up with him. The Japanese side of him seems harder for him to parse and contend with; like so many immigrants in a diaspora, he seems drawn to the folklore and superstition of his homeland to help him make sense of what’s happening in the war and at home (source: “The Terror: Infamy Turns America’s WWII Internment Camps into a Bleak Ghost Story,” 2019).

Jadis thought that Chester was a brat—that he lacked spine—but honestly I appreciated the character’s heroic role as more Promethean than American: not someone who can conquer death, but must face and humanize the ghost of the counterfeit to move forward under empire as a project yet-to-be-dismantled.

[17] The undead having a shared function in this respect, to different degrees of abuse; e.g., vampires generally being killed in smaller numbers, which is still bad, and ghosts being silenced by holy men, not to mention demonic and animalistic intersections.

[18] Magua’s doing so is, importantly enough, a kind of power exchange ritual between him and his enemies. The racist argument in the story is that it’s abjectly cannibalistic unto itself; i.e., something only committed by someone blackened to seek revenge and terrify one’s enemies. In truth, it’s not so simple (though it would undoubtedly have that effect in practice): the eating of the heart was traditionally seen as a sign of respect been warriors, one hunter preying on another through the cycle of life; i.e., “you have power and have a heart worth eating.” While somewhat problematic all the same (eating peoples’ hearts is not good for their health), the fact remains that capital drives Magua to practice this as a weapon of terror against his enemies but also his own people while in exile from them. He becomes a ghost, a man without a home, and destroys everything seeking what he cannot replace. In turn, this becomes the same old scapegoat, pointing the finger at the Indians as a whole: “You ate yourselves, zombies! Now die!”

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)!

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

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

The Imperial Boomerang, part two: Cryptomimesis, or Pieces of the Dead (feat. The Last of Us, Scooby Doo, and more)

“I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. […] now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. […] I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created” (source).

—Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein (1818)

Picking up from where “Bad Dreams, part one: Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang (opening and part one)” left off…

Part one of “The Imperial Boomerang” laid out the core ideas of a zombie apocalypse—the zombie and apocalypse, of course, but also the state of exception and process of abjection when the Imperial Boomerang sails home to alienate, then rape and murder the worker as native, black, monstrous-feminine dead. This process of abjection (and its assorted counterfeits) are predominantly white, middle-class and patrilineal by function; i.e., something for whitey to inherit and absorb as children, then turn the handle of as adults to scapegoat dark forces for imperial/capital sins: “No bastard baby will inherit what’s mine[1]!” Such divisions classically function, then, as pro-state arguments demanding violence against the zombie as something to manifest/summon (often by accident, Reagan [above] filled with the vengeful spirit of the non-white dead as something to befriend [“Captain Howdy”] to which her liberal, gentrified mother is horrified to see: her sweet baby daughter as “ancient” zombie demonstrating the anisotropic quality [double standards] of the zombification process); i.e., as having vampiric and spectral qualities, generally with a monstrous-feminine element that speaks to the perils of childbirth given a postcolonial character that must canonically be exorcized by brave Christian martyrs protecting the pale affluent virgin from the raping incubus (a kind of abject take on Immaculate Conception); e.g., Pazuzu from The Exorcist as a zombie ghost—the spirit of settler-colonial trauma, and of feared revenge for those sins (normally having called the cops on such things, the proverbial angel of death reversed onto the colonizer for once)!

The idea is racist in ways that present white women (especially the daughters of the Western nuclear family unit) as susceptible to invasion through a manner of openings. One, of course, is the precocious absorption of knowledge; the other is the gratuitously sexual passing along of such information between formidably tempting (and brave, bold, confident) bodies when the time comes—puberty and the arrival of Miss Flo (shark week). The mental abjection of such demons is a kind of hysterectomy that aims to kill the Indian, save the woman; i.e., her baby parts making fresh bodies for the state to repeat the process of abjection on, forever and ever (conversely, GNC people generally get actual hysterectomies to free themselves from state control and observation).

(artist: Annabella Ivy)

The zombie is nothing if not productive, in this respect, canonically presenting sexuality and the passing of forbidden abject knowledge between different parties; i.e., as both self-destructive and loaded with abjected forms of past settler-colonial abuse foisted onto non-white groups, non-Christians and GNC elements to varying degrees of intersection (and to the peachy bodies associated with them as a selling point during liminal expression; e.g., women of color depicted from Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha to Jean Rys’ Antoinette Causeway to real-life examples, above, as a matter of non-white sex work [Latina, in Annabella’s case] haunted by colonial elements). As traditional extensions of the patriarch who are expected to do their duty and pass along the family line through his womb, daddy’s little white girl would be expected to keep demonic influence out of their minds but also their bodies; i.e., as an avenue for humanization by falling in love through social-sexual relations with others (which generally involves a fair bit of coitus, or at the very least nudism and asexual commentaries on such things through sex as a Gothic form of art): zombified by those “of age” (thus “on the market”) literally sleeping with the bestial, inhuman zombie enemy (under settler-colonial rule, that is); e.g., a Bride of Frankenstein waiting to happen—corruption and disassembly as something to pin on her and her forbidden love when she unsurprisingly rebels against her oppressive father (and browbeaten mother/siblings)!

(artist: Angelica Reed)

Part two shall now consider the zombie’s busy cryptomimesis (echo) as something to weigh on, but also harvest for ourselves while playing with the dead; i.e., collecting the necessary pieces after we’ve started to humanize these beings: to reassemble through rememory as a fitful process of fertilization, but ultimately one that requires rotten pieces of criminalized, shitty flesh to put nightmarishly back together! To that, if something was work to create, then ideally its volatile ideas should also constitute a kind of work for the audience—not something to romance unto decay as “all we get”; e.g., laborwave or Gothic Communism vs vaporwave[2]; i.e., the former sort challenging the non-radical viewer to motivate them to change: radicalization takes work (even if it stings, think of it as a love tap—a little pain that hurts to help you pull your head out of your ass).

By comparison, moderacy and delicacy are a dubious refrain, a faithful—however confident or reluctant it may seem—adherence to them a kind of self-tone-policing! To critique power (and its abuse), you must go where it is and shake things up with monsters as code (which anything monstrous-feminine is, insofar as liberation—of Medusa, of workers and nature—is executed through such code as something to holistically play with). Only then is praxial catharsis—by transforming the state’s arrangement (and flow) of power through Gothic engagement—possible!

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

While such a quest is suitably Promethean (above)—with us searching for elusive love as something pure and wholesome to gab happily with the girls[3] about once in our grasp (all as white moderate dickwads insufferably act like our gods and masters; i.e, denying us company while literally confiscating it, enslaving and alienating us)—we’ll save Frankenstein for later (and its giant angry-lonely zombie punching Victor [and his Cartesian nonsense] repeatedly in the balls: “Let Jesus fuck you!” haha). We’ll also save the zombie house (and its ominous toys) for the next subchapter. Instead, this subdivision shall be looking at more zombie invasion scenarios (a genre Shelley alluded to with her infamous novel’s singular Creature, but for which the closest she ever came to writing as a doomsday scenario akin to an apocalypse was 1826’s The Last Man).

Why more, you ask? Well, one, just because; two, I like them; and three, I think populating my work with different stories, codes and ideas (which essentially is what monsters are) is important. This is my castle—my saloon-style danger disco—and so-help-me-God, I decide what goes in it! And before anyone starts comparing me to Bill Paxton’s Coconut Pete wailing about coconuts to a captive audience (“Yes, goddammit, yes!”) or Monty Python’s Dennis Moore endlessly giving the poor starving country folk stolen lupins (“We ever wear the blood things!”), making them feel imprisoned by yet another example to the point that they start quoting the Hound (“I understand that if any more words come pouring out your cunt mouth, I’m going to have to eat every chicken in this room[4]!”), know that repetition and patterns through said repetition is sort of the whole the point, loves. Also, this is heavy stuff we’re discussing, to which whatever joy there is to be found happens during the apocalypse; i.e., inside the world as a graveyard. I want my book to constantly reflect that, hence all the added jokes, anecdotes and sexy bits, the color and fun trailing across the marble, happily and pointedly defacing of the West as inherently genocidal. Such things routinely hide and show themselves in plain sight, on both ends of the dialectical-material spectrum, and we want to repeatedly examine and play with them without reservations.

To that, we’ll start with The Last of Us in connection with a variety of older pieces reflected holistically upon, collage-style:

Note: I want to address the things I’ve left out—the statuesque, Pazuzu-sized spectre in the room. This is a very cursory and rapid-fire, survey-style section, insofar as there’s a million such invasion fantasies concerning the zombie as something to classically survive. I want to stick with fleshy corporal entities, here (thus won’t really be looking at Pazuzu), asking you to consider them as projections of capital for liberation to actualize with; i.e., by playing with (and thinking about) such elements of zombie-style us-versus-them differently than canonical proponents do! Whatever arguments apply to the walking dead as something to shoot likewise apply to them as something to exorcize and banish through literal Christian dogma (re: Pazuzu). So whatever you feel like I’ve left out, just know that it’s all connected, all part of the same Crusade against an imaginary enemy (with historical elements) that capital needs to keep itself alive (and which we learn from its older problematic histories in order to camp them). —Perse

(exhibit 35b: Top-and-bottom-left: Last of Us promo and BTS material; artists, middle: Caravaggio’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes” and Elisabetta Sirani’s “Timoclea Killing Her Rapist” [source: Ariela Gittlen’s “A Brief History of Female Rage in Art,” 2018]; top-right: Cyber Aeon; bottom-right: Cloudy Pouty. Renaissance female artists reify revenge by “killing” their male abusers, which certainly strikes a chord in relation to apocalypse narratives—i.e., can be referenced again for us standing against state survival as less personified and more shown to operate through its defenders playing the victim with some grains of truth. Revisited, such things can help shatter heteronormative propaganda during oppositional praxis; i.e., by not using “appropriative peril” [unironic rape fantasies] to recruit “war orphans” that trigger like “sleeper” agents at the first sight of trauma during regressive Amazonomachia: dragons to slay as zombie-like in function regarding slayer and target alike!

[artist: Cloudy Pouty]

When treated as canon, neoconservative, monomythic characters like Newt from Aliens, Samus from Metroid [a famous dragon slayer, left] or Ellie from The Last of Us embody state parasite mechanisms impersonating rebellion as something to instruct in bad faith. Camping thus critiquing their tokenized intolerance exposes the pedagogic role such heroism maintains per survival stories [which Metroidvania and shooters most certainly are]: coded instructions for worker behaviors. Doing so subsequently helps raise emotional/Gothic intelligence [and class/cultural awareness] through iconoclastic art; i.e., whose messy synthesis includes the cryptonymy of various heroic and monster masks/subversive doubles that grant women [and other marginalized groups] a theatrical voice: to vent their frustrations/anger against the status quo, albeit in ways that transform socio-material conditions through ironic consumption, endorsement and performance of such disguise pastiche as de facto sex-positive education.)

Whether it’s the state or some rebellious faction, Gothic stories similar to Night of the Living Dead, Left 4 Dead or The Last of Us (again, cryptomimesis) address the trauma of constantly being hunted or under attack by indeterminate undead—a “bad dream” that, under canonical circumstances, patently “rapes the mind” in carefully directed productions tied to franchised material.

In The Last of Us, itself, the elite alienate weaponized fears—including the stigma of parasitoids like the fearsome cordyceps fungus (exhibit 35b)—to disguise Capitalism’s intrinsic inability to handle manmade disasters through crude xenophobia on top of more xenophobia; i.e., nature-as-alien, monstrous-feminine, undead. Its own Red Scare gimmicks cram Nazis and Commies into the same shadowy kayfabe. However, by dressing a given disaster in fascist, liminal hauntologies, the Cartesian façade “slips” over time, coming home to roost in sequel enterprises that drop the mask, more and more: The Last of Us, part 2 (2020) evolves with its target, “war orphan” audience to reveal disconcerting similarities to the real world: Zionist Apartheid (source: Emanuel Maiberg’s “The Not So Hidden Israeli Politics of The Last of Us Part II,” 2020).

As such, mutually-assured destruction and holistic genocide are suddenly “on the table” as menticidal tools demonizing labor as undead, animal, violence against the middle class; i.e., a rape culture whose bullet and knife penises aren’t better than sex, they are sex: “raping” the chosen dead during a sanctioned, necrophilic genocide. Not only can its victims not consent; their ruinous undeath occurs through the fusion of war and sex using various theatrical styles whose proliferation as solely unironic is its own kind of censorship; i.e., live burial; e.g., the “soap opera” with war and zombies. All this canonically disguises how fragile Capitalism is, but also how self-destructive. It won’t survive climate change/state shift—will have to evolve as feudalism did during the Black Death, or risk total annihilation. The steady intimation of this catastrophe is a veiled, bourgeois ultimatum.

Make no mistake, the displaced evils in The Last of Us aren’t just nightmare fuel; they’re half-real insofar as they’re pointed at and by state proponents abusing the usual liminalities of fiction and nonfiction/real and unreal—i.e., “not real” at home, but portending home as colonized in ways that are all-too-real in other places. Except the showrunners merely imitate such things through their own disposable fodder (whose ceaseless killing is merely the soldier’s reprieve). To expose these real-world evils requires transmuting canon by humanizing the zombie (and other monsters, mid liminal expression) in subversive social-sexual (often ace) ways: nudism and death theatre as dancing with the dead, but also its likenesses per cryptomimesis at large.

For this to happen, iconoclasts must help future workers understand the inevitable confusion that emerges during capital’s routine exploitation of workers; i.e., through Capitalist Realism exploiting zombies to punch the ghost of the counterfeit. Gothic Communism aims to camp the veiled Faustian bargain such that stories promise (with a Black Veil, no less) amid their own canceled futures: somehow surviving the zombie apocalypse to rebuild America as the new masters thereof (that’s a laugh). But we must still dance with the dead ourselves, including what made them dead, then angrily rise again and take what’s ours; i.e., day-to-day through our synthetic oppositional groupings: our anger/gossip, monsters and camp.

Slowly turned into zombies with zombie canon, lobotomized workers garner strange appetites, becoming not simply distracted from regular state abuses, but blinded inside Cartesian hauntologies that traumatize them again; i.e., lands of madness that compel violence against those deemed uncivilized, thus enemies of the state. Iconoclasm, then, requires the ability to tell zombie narratives apart—dialectically-materially analyzing their historical-material patterns and social-sexual connotations through rememory as reflective on various examples: older forms of media that, once analyzed and reassembled, can help produce new monster toys that xenophillically humanize those inside the state of exception always trying to repair itself, thus maintain the myopia.

By comparison Capitalism alienates such beings; i.e., to the point of becoming completely invisible under pre-apocalyptic conditions, desperately shooting at them by firing helplessly into the void (classically the state wastes its energy during settler-colonial expansion and defense, but nevertheless tries to monopolize these wasteful mechanisms; re: efficient profit). It’s the state variant of cryptomimesis, making war against the dead as conjured up, Radcliffe-style:

(exhibit 36a: Having access to older alien technologies, the vengeful Morbius conjures up his invisible Monster from the Id, during Forbidden Planet [1956]. To try and guess what it looks like, the ship’s crew makes a plaster mold of the monster’s foot. The same degree of abject reification applies to MGM’s big-budget spectacle [not rivaled in terms of scale or special effects until Stars Wars in 1977, over two decades later]. It’s ultimately a tremendously Freudian, thus dated story. But it nevertheless highlights the desire for scapegoats while falling back on older scholarly ideas to prevent more incisive ideas from having the floor. As I’ve shown with my earlier critiques of Creed, Freud, Kristeva, etc, such texts still make up an argument: as something to repeatedly face and respond to.

More to the point, some of the most anti-war perspectives I’ve found were from former soldiers; e.g., Howard Zinn or Edward Snowden. You see it in fictional examples, too, like Guts from Berserk or the kamikaze pilot from Godzilla Minus One. You see it in your own families; e.g., my grandfather versus the Nazi occupation in Holland. He didn’t enjoy war, but certainly said it makes a man outta you [one more reason I wanted nothing to do with it, haha]. We’ll carry on doing so when we look at Forbidden Planet more, deeper in the module.)

Let’s examine The Last of Us a little more before looking at some of those aforementioned toys, including how zombies (among other liminal monsters) are often presented through dreams, but also fetishized fragments recovered from those dreams as shards haunting the spaces in between open language: fatal visions whose poetic “retrieval” is liminal unto itself, informed by holistic trauma (of the mind, body and spirit) as ever-present, ambiguous and untrustworthy. Once bitten, twice shy.

The 2023 version of The Last of Us has a very canonical, “zombie film” approach to combating disease with war. Patient zero hails from the Global South—a ghost of the counterfeit, whereupon the abuses of Capitalism are transferred to a human host from animals in a faraway place: both an alien, “natural” virus that breeds inside Capitalism’s hosts, as well as an animalistic, “Mother Nature’s revenge” happening through Capitalism for Capitalism. Instead of critiquing the Patriarchy (exhibit 35b) and the Capitalocene, the writers justify nuking the site from orbit by proxy—i.e., by having a smarty-pants, female scientist from a third-world country hysterically propose genocide and mass destruction: “Bomb everything!” In eco-fascist terms, humans become the virus. It’s not the kind of call an epidemiologist would actually make, insofar as killing millions people to “save” them from the virus kind of defeats the point.

Sexist, xenophobic and Promethean, the show’s pro-war qualities are dubiously contained inside a familial, Aliens-style war narrative—think of the women and children, and hate the dumb locals (and their scientist women and Mother Nature—seriously, Capitalism, “Leave Brittany alone!“). The “scorched earth” approach makes no sense in terms of fixing problems, because bombs only break infrastructure and reinforce a state of panic and fear during the ruinous aftermath. In terms of maintaining capitalist control during the rapid-onset of destabilizing natural factors like a global pandemic, bombs actually make perfect sense; i.e., shock and awe, dispersing workers when the elite lose control due to ecological interference.

This being said, they will also surrender it through various invented apocalypse scenarios (fictional or not). As a matter of dogma, they’ll hand them out, only to claw power (and profit) back as a matter of capital moving money through nature as usual (this being a concept we’ll examine repeatedly through both Monster Modules). That’s essentially eco-fascism in a nutshell; i.e., not enough room or resources (save for the elite and some of their stooges) thanks to the state’s own bullshit destroying the environment on all registers. Like the dead on a plot of land, then (or Poe’s proverbial heart ‘neath the floor boards), such things concern guilt, stigma, bias (and other variables generally tied to profit as a xenophobic enterprise) as things to inherit and attack with differently.

To that, power remains anisotropic per any undead/Gothic poetics, not just zombies during feeding time (vampires and ghosts aren’t tied to an apocalypse, and demons also feed. More on those topics in other chapters)! Likewise, it maintains a hybridization, merging “dead” with this or that as ironic or not, sarcastic or not, cute or not, as a matter of degree.

This goes both ways, too, in a dialectical-material sense; e.g., “kitty” + zombie to make it cute, but also deliver such things through a faux-Egyptian lens as classically for the state: guardians of the hauntological underworld and sex objects first alienated per the process of abjection, only to be forced back together-as-alien per the profit motive punching the ghost of the counterfeit as Numinous; i.e., a fearsome traveller coming for empire out of an imaginary past’s recently-dreamt-up tyrant (some Dracula-style dragon lord, Grim Reaper or Archaic Mother) based on older and older fictions (e.g., Skeletor and Medusa, exhibit 43e2a). More to the point, white boys love to torment themselves with the idea, all while capitalizing on neoliberalism’s usual hypocrisies:

(exhibit 36b: Artist: Edward Repka, who the band, Megadeth—thoroughly strung out on hard drugs themselves—hired to reillustrate their infamous mascot in ways Mustaine himself could not produce through his own limited drawing skills [source: Timothy Gunatilaka’s “The Story Behind the Cover Art,” 2010].)

As with Cambodia or Night of the Living Dead, The Last of Us isn’t “new.” None of it is. Instead, the argument of survival per a zombie apocalypse constitutes a displaced settler-colonial narrative that operates cryptomimetically using traditional gender roles and extreme prejudice: the cowboys and Indians of America’s older past used to carry such things out on the motherland as eating itself when there’s no one left to colonize elsewhere (or said ability is lost). Reimagined and disguised inside a retro-future crammed with zombies, we’re given the Fallout world minus nuclear war and science fiction, ushered in by a magical plague of mushroom people (another cryptonymic[5] drug metaphor for those pesky “trippin'” Commies—acid Communism a topic we’ll unpack in the “Call of the Wild” chapter). It’s the usual dance with the dead, all the same.

Granted, occultism, xenophobia and scapegoats run deep in fascist thought, but fascism is endemic to Capitalism; i.e., as emblematic of an American hegemon having eclipsed a British one, and which it would abuse against other national powers, nature and labor once its ascension as the global economic superpower was attained. In turn, the usual cronyism and bad imitators flocked to its power and later its corpse-like rot radiating outward. With it, the Imperial Boomerang travels back and forth over large periods of time that accelerate as death nears.

To that, the Nazis loved America, having fantasized about a new European Dark Age a century ago during the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923; i.e., eager to carry out anti-Semitic target practice with their own Children’s Crusade (“Go east, young man!”), the Nazis’ return to tradition was inspired by the US and its own loudly advertised genocide per Manifest Destiny (Bad Empanada, 2022). Each and every time, though, genocide and the Imperial Boomerang are repackaged with liberal platitudes, but reinvented with neoliberal illusions that essentialize geography as moral while return to a freeing of the market Hitler never lived to see. Each time the ghost of “Caesar” returns, the ensuing bedlam causes the mechanisms of the state to go haywire: its armies, but also its nuclear arsenal (above). “Stronger than ever” becomes a cultish death knell as the state fights to the last man using everything it has against bigger and bigger foes. It balloons, then pops. Whether this happens by nuclear assault or irreversible climate change matters not; the apocalypse is already at hand, having been since capital grew into itself out of the Black Death: “Death is only the beginning.”

As such, cryptomimesis is the zombie and apocalypse tied to the system bringing them about. The worrying presence of cannibalism subsequently lingers, turned into a serial-killer bogeyman (the Nazi-Communist looking for solutions regarding capital’s “failures” [exploitation] dressed up as dogmatic kayfabe) and pointing hauntologically backward at the medieval as thrown awfully into the present; i.e., the sobering material reality behind the historical lies about taboo, unspeakable subjects: Capitalism rapes and kills to survive, making workers do the same to serve the state while blending in as bombastic entertainment (re: kayfabe) or Hawthorne-style hypocrite: David, from The Last of Us as an outwardly-benevolent community leader whose actually doing the criminalized eating of the dead—the false preacher preying on his own flock (aping the pioneers of yore by eating his own kind, murdering them as he would the Indians[6])! Invariably tied to war as a capitalist enterprise, the zombie (and Medusa as a zombie) cannot die, but live on in a perpetual state of restless hunger repeatedly denied to them by the elite. The latter consume what they think is infinite, the fascist destroying what can no longer regenerate per state models (the state dying as such).

Cannibalism, then, is merely the consequence of those with privilege open-secretly abusing the majority for their own benefit (and a tragic, episodic commentary on the broader stupidity of workers under Capitalism, inevitably forced to cannibalize once winter sets in whilst under siege; e.g., not just the serial killer false preacher from The Last of Us [above] but also the Mayflower Puritans, the Donner party and later on, survivors during Leningrad, Stalingrad, etc); its cryptomimesis is merely another form of rape under Capitalism-in-crisis, fanatically reducing state victims to “useless eaters” who must be killed and eaten themselves when the state decays. Trauma echoes inside a deadly chamber where nothing can escape and everything is eaten: a black hole that Capitalist Realism helps operate.

As something to study and learn from, then, these examples are canonical zombie poiesis as a kind of factory of factories—cryptomimetic forms of imagination “brain death” whose unironic propaganda preserves the status quo and its sex-coercive practices. They do nothing by themselves to teach workers sex-positive lessons that critique the state; they only force them into situations of controlled ignorance that compel violence by default (which can traumatize state enforcers, leading them towards dissociative, knee-jerk violence against themselves; it can also “masculinize” bigoted women, if they become violent instead of passive, but either way bigotry radicalizes in favor of the abuser as a state proponent). This clouds media of all kinds, either robing it of its irony or restoring it as media overlaps; i.e., as music, videogames, movies riff on and rip off older pulpy forms like Lovecraft or Matteson’s work dating back to Matthew Lewis’s bad echoes.

For example, though traditionally a site for criticism of capital, rock ‘n roll decays, too (e.g., Black Sabbath’s own 1970 zombie, “Iron Man,” eventually becoming gentrified by Marvel comics: “his revenge”). To that, metal bands like Megadeth can become an ominous war horn for capital in hindsight; i.e., songs like “Peace Sells” becoming a siren song for the middle class to weaponize against “zombies,” hence a nostalgic call to police violence per a staged, highly ordered conflict with assigned enemies conveniently threatening the elite’s dreams of a better world; e.g., Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” or George W. Bush Sr.’s “New World Order“: in rising forms of media like videogames[7] out of older mediums like novels and cinema. Even without a catchy new tune to accompany the us-versus-them rhetoric, those against America become kill-on-sight, leading those who normally seem cool-headed to trigger and become irrationally violent (versus emotionally intelligent): shoot to kill, seeking with blind zombie eyes and wide gaping maws. It’s euthanasia performed by the meddling kids of the Scooby Doo gang (next page) “solving” the endless mystery of “the class, culture and race problems”; i.e., as one might the Jewish Question—with lethal force as echoed through pro-state cryptomimesis.

If Zionism is any indication, the Gothic imagination clearly needs to shift away from American Liberalism (and its subsequent fascism on all registers). For this to happen, echoed trauma must be reflected on in ways that change the echo (and its fractal recursion); i.e., humanizing zombies as recipients and markers of state violence by exposing the state as tyrannical: through subversive examples centered around real-world trauma something to find similarly amid difference, thus heal from rape as a consequence of endorsed police violence, lies, and assimilation.

Until these liberatory allegories emerge, though, there is only canonical zombie war’s cryptomimesis turning workers not just into men and women, but into givers and receivers of state violence as zombie-like: the myth of the fascist rebel, the sexy she-wolf, but also various American survivors like Zoey from Left for Dead, Ellie from The Last of Us, or even updated, warlike versions of the gang from Scooby Doo (exhibit 36c, below); and all-around them undead enemies to overcome, not allies to understand. “Trapped in time, surrounded by evil, low on gas,” says Sam Raimi; “Fight ’em ’til you can’t,” sings John Bush from semi-camp thrash metal act, Anthrax (2012). In practice, the whole ridiculous scenario reliably plays out like Robert E. Howard’s Conan asking Crom to “count the dead,” laying waste to a hoard of dark-skinned, savage cannibals all around him—except it’s conducted by a group of white-skinned wunderkinds stocked with all manner of military-grade wunderwaffe. When the apocalypse returns, they slay zombie medicine men and Medusas with all the impunity that the spirit of “neutral” entertainment allows: the monomyth as something to prep them like a military exercise; i.e., by making their monomythic avatar something from their (or maybe their parents’) shared childhoods under attack by an imaginary enemy tied to real voices. It’s DARVO punching down at the Omelas child, the escaped slave saddled with aged, rotting stereotypes:

(exhibit 36c: Source: DC Comics. The gang in Scooby Doo are generally concerned with the monster as a disguise that is unmasked; i.e., by “meddling [middle-class] kids” through the Radcliffean model of an “explained supernatural” of old Gothic tropes: the WASP-y virgin, whore, fool, scholar and athlete as good child detectives/soldiers for capital from a state curriculum [the school system; e.g., American high schools, but also British ones: Hogwarts] against a nebulous, unclear cartoon of fascism and Communism.

The classic archetypes make up different elements of the gang. Fred is the athlete [normally a skeptic or brute male challenge to female intellectualism]; Shaggy is the fool [also known as the faithful/superstitious servant—normally a stigmatized group, which for him is the hippy]; Velma is the virgin and the scholar [also, the scholarly nun as queer-coded/ace]; and Daphne’s the whore [characterized by her “witchy” red hair]. By handing the children guns, however, we’re left with a particular kind of gang: vigilantes, specifically bounty hunters trading in flesh-for-money as live or dead sanctioned by the state during the state of exception as increasingly undead.

As such, you can take any middle-class analogy and put it [and its allegories] inside a similar survival scenario; i.e., one where they canonically and ceremoniously respond in kind. There’s no reason they have to, provided the zombie is humanized and capital punishment discouraged, but such isn’t the American approach to Capitalist Realism. Guns become sexy unto themselves, but generally eroticize per the bodies holding them as erotic with or without firearms. Classically such detectives don’t have them, but the prejudice is still there, as is the exploitation; i.e., as something to camp in ways adjacent to harm, at the very least: naked equals exposed, but exposure-equals-power as something to perform in Gothic ways that move power through dialectics of the alien and of rape for or against state arrangements: a plunging neckline and, lo and behold, beauteous orbs ready to be penetrated [something even Radcliffe camped in The Italian—with Schedoni’s massive dagger aimed at his sleeping niece’s exposed breast]!

[artist: Meowri]

Except, there’s really no way to teach consent without getting naked eventually! Per cryptonyms, this includes nudity by proxy and extension; i.e., told through things that resemble, articulate and resemble our daily struggles turned into cartoonish forms we can reclaim as valuable to our labor, identities and code: as things to liberate, hence free us, through such paradoxical exposure during rape play! Clothed and naked at the same time! Big abuse, big booba, big powah!

[artist: Texelion]

This unto itself is a liminal proposition [which porn always is]. Armed as they are, though, the Scooby Doo gang several pages back is a particular resurrection of something Radcliffe constituted through her own problematic, banditti-style demon lovers [she didn’t fuck with the undead as Lewis liked to]: abjection, thus extermination by acting as such against the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., as a voice for anyone but token groups during class/culture warfare. Such dormant, traitorous proponents cease to humanize zombies at all; instead, they shoot [or otherwise rape] them as quickly as they can, losing the humanizing potential of a lesbian/ace female detective; e.g., like Velma Dinkley exposing the abuses of the old, white man robbing the locals while hiding behind a superstitious veneer [the oldest trick in the book]. As blind parody, they’re detecting, exposing and confirming targets for the state, not the state itself as something to critique [similar to Rowling’s Potter trio: Harry, Ron and Hermione]!

Of course, someone could easily try to deflect and argue, “That’s not what Scooby Doo means to us! Look at my sexy Velma cosplay!” But the stereotypes and bad-faith simulacra are still present, echoing cryptomimetically to drum up profit [and moral panic] during the state’s dying period: more scapegoats, more harmful rape fantasies, more comfort food to try and distract from Gaza [and similar places] being raped and murdered right now. Again, death becomes something to attack through people as zombies, not the state.

[artist: Texelion] 

Given the cosmetic ambiguity/duality and dialectical-material tension, it’s perhaps easier to think of things in the Gothic, paradoxical sense: two things being true at the same time. Something can be a sex object and symbol of liberation [disco in disguise] while also being weaponized as a mask against liberation by pro-state “revolutionaries” [cops in disguise]. Regardless of who’s being brought back and why—and per franchise or across them [e.g., Lana Kane from Archer being a sexpot and token spy policing the world while winking at the camera]—such revivals are haunted by state abuse; i.e., often as something to comment on as a kind of urban legend [which genocides generally amount to, whispered about in hushed voices]. As we’ll see with the “Damsels, Detectives and Demons” chapter in the Demon Module, interrogation isn’t just of things hidden in the dark, but holding the iconic explorers accountable before they start pulling out guns; i.e., as a matter of settler-colonial dogma [which per capital, always has an element of plausible deniability to it: that such things are just “for nerds” per bad-faith arguments while genocide is going on at home and abroad. It’s gatekeeper rhetoric, combining DARVO and obscurantism.)

The illusions of a benign, “neutral” Capitalism are predominantly neoliberal. When these start to corrode, however, fascism emerges to defend the structure through DARVO arguments like the various simulacra (“likenesses”) above. Through grandiose displays of vengeful, empty bravado, the primary ingredient is shock and awe; i.e., a sacred hauntology whose fear and dogma unfold inside violent reprisals disguised as “games”: suburban kids playing war as a means of material disputes framed as us-versus-alien; e.g., the kids from Stranger Things. Their targeted chaos and punitive rules encourage a competition of sexualized, dehumanizing abuse against state targets during Red Scare; i.e., “zombies” rising from the grave in a “woke” fashion, which must be returned to the earth with lethal, rapacious, nuclear-familial force: castle doctrine, where said audiences ape their avatars (no matter how ridiculous) to stand their ground and hand out “dirt naps” (executions). In turn, they look human, but become the fascist zombies pitted against Communist ones made to look rotten to encourage said reprisals ad infinitum. It’s centrist dogma, which encourages genocide in and out of the text (re: the Duffer brothers weaponizing fatal, neoconservative, peace-through-strength nostalgia as Zionist, which extends to their mostly-male, mostly-white child cast).

Generally associated with the end of the world, the zombie apocalypse describes the state as the prime source of undead peril. War never seems to die, never changes; it just lingers like a bad dream, repressed through a variety of cryptonymic toys (which part two of this subchapter is going to explore even more). Neither war nor the state are “broken” when these witch hunts take place; nor are zombies a mere “accident” of a corrupted hegemon. Rather, the worrisome presence of the zombie as a domestic threat indicates the state functioning as intended, benefitting the elite by repressing the widespread exploitation of workers (and nature-as-monstrous-feminine) en masse. The key to ending this repression is ending the canonical, middle-class usage (and police function) of the zombie; i.e., by humanizing the trauma it symbolizes, including its dream-like stories and war chest—the violent, sexualized toys as mirrors reflect on in relation to one’s own trauma as part of a larger, undead scheme that straight up slaps: a symphony of destruction with a time limit (“You try to take his pulse before the head ex-plodes!”). We can reverse this abjection, but it’s generally something the state won’t like:

(source tweet, Mass Strike Now: July 11th, 2024)

In linguo-material terms, undeath indicates the placement of trauma unto a particular recipient or group as the giver or receiver of state violence through sides, aka teams in a sports-like configuration; i.e., the hyphenation of inside/outside and correct/incorrect, but also the liminal presence of generational trauma beyond a single body or lifespan that harms everyone differently through a grand contagion: mankind vs zombies. When used through canon, they portray society as sick, thus the home and its toy chest of different monomythic soldiers, detectives, sexpots, etc. Trauma takes many forms, such as material scarcity leading to “apocalyptic” uprisings that boil over into zombie-like violence feeding indiscriminately in all directions: looting and riots followed by police action during state crackdowns as a matter of stolen childhood sold back to us as cool (which invariably has a racist, paramilitary flavor—re: the Scooby Doo Hilter Youth as home-grown).

More to the point, xenophilic reflections on these already-troubling matters bleed into our personal experiences; i.e., as connected to the material world and vice versa being figuratively and literally dream-like. Just as my reflections on Cambodia informed my own imperiled home life as a teenage girl, they continuously inform America’s domestic imagination in times of societal unrest: something the state threatens its workforce with over time in relation to various stigma groups of uncertain origin having a toy-like role in dogmatic, us-versus-them military exercises. These make our toys (and heroes) police-like, rapacious, and genocidal, thus cannibalistic for the state when it starts to die again. It’s good to familiarize ourselves with these components, so we can recognize but also play with them, ourselves; i.e., through our own sex-positive regressions reclaiming childhood-as-monstrous (the childhood apocalypse) from elite forces and pro-state fantasies—per our ludo-Gothic BDSM!

Such playfulness needs to reject profit on principle; i.e., be less concerned with gaudy material displays (assimilation) and cashing in/selling out through a faithfulness towards such fairytale pastiche (nailing “the look,” below) than speaking out against oppression to varying degrees/of one’s time; e.g., Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey poking fun at the whims of the British middle class (mainly young women) being obsessed with such unironic, Radcliffean fictions to a Quixotic teenage degree! Life imitates art, Austen shows us; lacking any kind of critical bite regarding said cryptomimesis can often bite us in the ass—when the chickens come home to roost!

(artist: Ashlynne Dae)

Last but not least, then, this middle-class survival argument can be arranged in two basic invasion scenarios involving zombies: a single enemy (the slasher) or an army of enemies, the former commonly being a vanguard spearhead promoting future invasion as a matter of discourse, not fact (e.g., Alien, a neoliberal critique, with a single monster to run from, being followed by Aliens, a neoliberal revenge fantasy with lots of monsters to shoot)! Outside of singular instances of murder (e.g., Banquo from Macbeth), sexual abuse (the zombie familiar from Let the Right On In, 2004) or composite bodies and mad science (e.g., the xenomorph or Frankenstein’s monster as relatively gigantic, but also Resident Evil, exhibit 36d1), the horde formation is the zombie’s most common modern grouping. Representing widespread colonial trauma, the horde narrative canonically pits two large bodies—an in-group and out-group—against each other instead of focusing on the elite pulling the strings. Except they don’t have monopolies on sex, terror and force!

(artist: Mika Dawn 3D)

To subvert state manipulation and subterfuge, zombie humanization includes using rememory to reassemble and reflect, mid-play, on the personal traumas of workers playing with toys to relieve stress as not automatically a harmful act; i.e., as inextricably attached to the material byproducts the state either produces or encourages the production of, mid-crisis, but for which the results of playing with they cannot monopolize through the Superstructure (which we can camp). Per the run-on nightmare of the zombie and various weapon-like toys associated with them—the knife or the bullet, but also the fetishistically weaponized parts of the zombie body as fearsome—the return of the living dead is a kind of destroyer home. In turn, Grendel and Beowulf are two sides of the same coin per said home, the latter’s “teeth in the night” attached to a colonial subject/project (exhibit 36d1) but also the zombie’s genitals fetishized by in-group members (exhibit 37b) when deliberately manufactured into plastic, toy-like variants. These must also be reclaimed (exhibit 38a), something the next subchapter shall explore.

In some shape or form, all come from repeated introspection regarding trauma, including dreams of the Gothic past as infused with individual fears about faraway war and atrocities. Yet these inevitably combine with personal trauma and conflict at home—not just police states, but authoritative abuse within the family unit relayed through the action and drama of zombie survival narratives, but especially videogames working as escapist childhood war simulators: Hell coming home, requiring a purifying by the middle-class player (often young children to teenagers) regressing to Man Box levels of thinking against imaginary enemies:

(exhibit 36d: The state eats itself during decay. Its Beowulfian “teeth in the night” become fascist undead, eating workers in defense of the state as a matter of praxial inertia; anisotropically the devouring of the middle class by “zombies” amounts to their prescribed fear of the underclass [through the blinding stigma of “terrorist literature”] as “going to eat them.” Reversing this is challenged by the monomyth as endemic to videogames, which emerged out of the neoliberal era’s initial rise, crystalizing into various popular franchises.

For example, the zombie in Capcom’s survival horror flagship series, Resident Evil, is suitably a curious combination of mad science and localized murder tied to a “Gothic” mansion [eat your heart out, Walpole]: the home of the Tyrant as a giant-sized “king zombie.” Eventually the survival horror setting would shift to more urban and less claustrophobic, hauntological spaces, thereby excluding the zombie from these signature elements for pure zombie combat [which I also explore at length in relation to my research into Metroidvania and FPS games as connected to the survival horror genre; re: “Mazes and Labyrinths”]; e.g., Dying Light or House of the Dead.)

Imaginary or not, these mentalities have real consequences, resulting in a proliferation of stochastic terrorism modeled after the basic goals of such stories: to save themselves from the fearsome past’s giant, hungry maw! Instead, they climb right inside (often motivated by sex, as Romero clearly is):

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,
Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,
Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open,
And in despite I’ll cram thee with more food (source).

You are what you eat after all!

There’s a lot of metaphors and Gothic poetics at work, here. Try not to fret about that. The trick to surviving the zombie apocalypse isn’t having a gun (so many in these stories starve to death, unable to digest bullets any more than stolen gold), it’s changing capital into something less prone towards using the imaginary past against workers; i.e., as something to make the historical past repeat itself the way capital wants. Except, these coming cycles can be challenged by doubling them in sex-positive forms, doing so to patently show everyone the same iconoclastic beyond: that possible, seemingly magical futures exist beyond what capital normally offers (“silver or lead,” Escobar would say). Our Aegis, when used as such, breaks the spell of Capitalist Realism through the zombie narrative—its apocalypse felt through the human body as sexualized, fetishized and made into a terror device for workers or the state.

As such, I’ve given you plenty of different examples; i.e., various cryptomimetic likenesses to acclimate yourself with the fundamentals of play but also to play with and think about in dialectical-material ways (the usual Gothic, wrestling-style oscillations): as something to survive in a half-real sense, mid-discourse. I’ve also given you plenty to look out for through such fantasies weaponizing nostalgia by having children (or people with the minds of children) take up arms to defend capital disguised “as theirs” (versus the elite’s, which it truly is). In short, you have all the tools you need to perform rememory instead of responding with lethal force, DARVO antics and various other pro-state countermeasures; re: the trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital illustrated by said examples. Like the orc or Medusa, only when we hug the zombie instead of attacking it (the state weaponizing our labor to serve profit during us-versus-them) will the zombie apocalypse end for good.

Next, we’ll explore Morrison’s rememory as the means of subverting the usual runs-of-the-mill in a collective push towards post-scarcity as occupied by the living and the dead, but also copies of them we take into ourselves; i.e., in dream-like ways that go beyond while we’re strictly awake, but which we carry into our waking moments from earlier days while awake, then asleep, then awake again; or, to borrow from Steve Huey’s review of Peace Sells (1986), we must combine

a punkish political awareness with a dark, threatening, typically heavy metal world-view, preoccupied with evil, the occult, and the like. The anthemic title track and “Wake Up Dead” are the two major standouts, and there is also a cover of Willie Dixon‘s “I Ain’t Superstitious,” which takes on an air of supernaturally induced paranoia in the album’s context. The lines between hell and earth are blurred throughout the album, and the crashing, complex music backs up Dave Mustaine‘s apocalyptic vision of life as damnation—his limited vocal style is used to great effect, growling and snarling in a barely intelligible fashion under all the complicated guitar work (source).

In short, we must wake up dead, effectively buried alive as a complicated, imperfect means of rememory as conversing with the dead, but also eating them in transformative ways (versus self-cannibalizing whenever capital tells us to finish our plate)! We’ll explore what I mean by this, next—based on my own experiences!

Onto “‘Bad Dreams, part three: Rememory, or the Roots of Trauma’ (opening and ‘Roots’ part one)“!

---

Footnotes

[1] I.e., the crossing of divided things, of white sleeping with black in the binarized sense of master/slave tied to the settler-colonial horrors of capital: of visibly non-white bodies brutalized by white oppressors chasing profit. This becomes a kind of ghost that can haunt the Cartesian agent, but also those who belong to either side in the same settler colony project as romanticized: to summon the monster and listen to it sing about its death as a likeness, an alienation; e.g., King Diamond’s Abigail nebulously possessing King’s teenage white bride as a kind of dark zombie baby ghost crooning with delight. She’s Morrison’s Crawling Already? with a mean streak, punching up inside the womb—the house and the mother’s uterus (more on this in the Demons Module).

[2] Zeuhl, for example, retreated regularly into nostalgic spaces that were decayed as such; i.e., a buffer between them and the realities of capital, which they certainly knew about but gradually liked to deny more and more. Originally tremendously genderqueer and outspoken, they regressed through these modes, eventually trading activism for a steady job (and longtime crush they could marry then presumably boss around to help them get what they wanted: passage to England, specifically Manchester). I used to think it was endearing, appreciating their Super Mario Bros. coasters and steady faithful love for videogames. Once, I even asked if I could fuck them while they played Pokémon on their phone. As they took off their pants, lay back and spread their thick, fuzzy thighs, I was over the moon. As I fucked them, I even thought for a second, “This is so cool!” But the novelty wore off as I discovered that I, in that present moment, didn’t seem to exist in their mind; they were entirely fixated on the game in front of them, not me!

Which, to some extent, is fine: one, mental stack; two, asked and answered. Things can be exchanged and offered as expressed, and Zeuhl’s offer was, “You can fuck my pussy but I’m going to play this game,” and that’s what they did! Fair play. But it—like Miss Crawford playing Speculation in Mansfield Park—seemed to provide a ludic metaphor (and pattern) for how they treated me in general: someone for whom whatever they were doing at the present moment took priority over and didn’t seem to be acknowledged insofar as my needs were concerned (this became a major problem, later).

At the moment, it was simply an observation, not a criticism (the two aren’t mutually exclusive). Over time, Zeuhl’s observations became gradually more and more gated by the buffers they placed in front of their own eyes; i.e., they became selfish and closed off to such a degree as abandoning me and their revolutionary principles: they sold out and bought into the usual assimilative schemes. In the end, it is what it is, but it’s hard not to feel disappointed in hindsight!

[3] Such sisterly communicating allow the ability to talk about sex without requiring said activity to be carried out (unlike cis-het men or token Man Box proponents, who seem to think—thus operate under the condition—that once sex is mentioned, it must then be pursued to a logical, heteronormative conclusion; i.e., hunted down, acquired, activated and tossed aside).

[4] Fun fact: He’s talking about the bounty hunters in that scene, not chickens!

[5] Cryptonyms tend to spontaneously occur from both abuser and abused parties under coercive power structures; i.e., self-preservative code-switching.

[6] As much out of desperation as guile under oppressive, unequal socio-material conditions; i.e., alienated from the land, thus unable to live off it, David becomes undead in multiple respects: unscrupulous and inhumane, preaching the Bible while beating children and raping women (as his unhealthy attraction to Ellie would suggest).

[7] (another except from my discontinued book, Neoliberal and Fascist Propaganda in Yesterday’s Heroes):

This section explores the use of music in heroic narratives by the rich, or otherwise serving the needs of the rich in a neoliberal sense. It’s almost hard to attack them, because they were undeniably fun as a kid. And seeing how unromantic and bland the true menace that lurks behind this nostalgic veneer is, I can’t help but wish we were facing something extraordinary. Nothing so otherworldly as the killer Martians from Metal Slug 3 (2000), which conveniently unite the nations (and apologize for Nazis).

Returning to the idea of slow-boil, one of the devices pivotal to neoliberalism is music. Yes, there’s “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag.” However, music is historically tied up in stupidly popular hero narratives like Star Wars and Aliens that convey their own messages. In one chapter, I briefly explored their respective potential for allegory and propaganda; in another, I explored the role of action heroes as cops. In this chapter, I’d like to explore the role of music in videogames and media in relation to action heroes as cops.

Just keep in mind that I’m not dissecting fun purely for the sake of iconoclasm, nor saying these things can’t still be enjoyed (more of that in part 3); I’m merely analyzing the function of music when viewed by the capitalist as useful to their true aims: not to be good people, but to reliably turn a profit through deplorable means, lie about it, and sit on the biggest pile of gold.

The rest of this section is divided into the following subsections:

• • Saturday Morning Cartoons (“Go, Joe!!!”)
  • Fighting Music; or, “Go Home and Be a Family Man!”
  • Sports Anthems (aka Tolerating Sports and its Owners)
  • War aka “The Danger Zone”
  • Retro Glory

Saturday Morning Cartoons

As explored in my last chapter, action heroes further political ideals to children by presenting as neutral, family-friendly entertainment. Saturday morning cartoons accomplished this through their music. G.I. Joe and dozens of other cartoons had catchy themes set to deceptively well-animated intros. Amid that, they communicated the world in simple, violent terms. Captain Planet had its own neoliberal solution; its beautifully wacky music reflects an equally goofy premise: “The power is yours!” Unfortunately recycling plastics is basically a con—products made from oil, lobbied for by big oil companies for decades [Cracked’s “If Recycling Were Honest | Honest Ads, 2022]. Recycling plastics is a lie, one advertised by the likes of Captain Planet and shows like it since the 1980s.

Look at me, heartlessly killing Captain Planet. But I’m not grumbling aimlessly by presenting those with power as a convenient scapegoat (what Nietzsche calls ressentiment). Their role in the planet’s impending demise is plain: Capitalism is everywhere, and is historically well-documented and researched. No, my feelings can be acted upon. Iconoclasm is only the first step in the departure from faith—faith in Capitalism, in this case [Second Thought’s “Why Are So Many People Losing Faith In Capitalism?” 2022]. For instance, labor movements are nothing new in America; they’ve merely been suppressed by capitalists. (re: Mark Fischer’s “capitalist realism“). The drive for meaningful worker action needs to replace the neoliberal yolk of personal responsibility. For this to happen, the myth of socialism needs to die.

This includes Red Scare tactics. These need to stop insofar as framing the Chinese and the Soviets as Communist. Rather, we need to adopt Marx’s critique of Capitalism (in its modern forms) before we can gradually replace/dismantle neoliberalism. For this, we need someone as effective as Captain Planet, but teaching realistic forms of resistance to neoliberal abuse.

This might seem completely at odds, but neoliberal critiques generally emerged within media that resembles, on some level, its former self. Socialism is not antithetical to Saturday morning cartoons; it’s antithetical to the core tenets of capitalism that neoliberals have maximized since Reagan took office. If you think this is absurd, consider how North Korea—who are normally framed as enemies of capitalism—using cartoons to educate the masses [Sabrespark’s “What the HELL is Squirrel and Hedgehog? (The North Korean Propaganda Cartoon), 2018]. I’m not advocating for pro-state propaganda; I’m arguing that cartoons (and their music) can serve as powerful tools within the system of Capitalism to help it evolve into something better; i.e., something more stable, that doesn’t threaten the entire planet by breeding neoliberals.

Fighting Music

Street Fighter II; The World Warrior (1991) delivered on both the gameplay and the music. Battle Arena Toshinden (1995) illustrated that good music is enough to be memorable, even if the gameplay stalls. Both titles were early releases for their generation’s platform. Guile’s theme “goes with everything” comments on the universal adaptability of a hopeful theme. In neoliberal terms, if a total enemy can be designed, the hope of defeating it becomes fungible; so many simulacra can be sold and exchanged as part of the same overall supply and demand. Hence, Guile’s theme goes with everything. It’s the perfect antithesis to the neoliberal’s fabricated enemies, the interaction between the two on a commercial level insulating their consumers to what’s really going on, geopolitically.

Fighting music also pertains to a sense of conservative, patriotic anthems and struggle: i.e., the Rhodesian anthem. A knight belongs to a nation; the nation and its creation myth and traditional values are under attack, to which the music spurs a defense of the nation. It’s important to remember this nation as fabricated; i.e., as something to defend and protect in ways that primarily benefit the elite at the cost of so many “ordinary” lives.

Sports Anthems

Sports are a reliable sight for cathartic drama. But the myriad gears of the capitalist machine are also laid bare—a sobering reality that is overshadowed through admittedly badass music. Even if you don’t like sports, the spectacular music for NFL Gameday (1995) can make you forget how bafflingly dumb football is.

The amount of stupid shit that billionaire sports owners get away can sometimes break the spell (re: Secret Base); but they become associated with the music and the spectacle as the Providers of All That Is Fun. It certainly isn’t the charts (fuck you, Zeuhl, haha). Then again, this so-called “chart porn“ [Secret Base’s “The Search for the Saddest Punt in the World | Chart Party,” 2019] is all that remains after years of economic exploitation that would rival the bread and circus of the Roman Empire.

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)!

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

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

Bad Dreams, or Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, part one: Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang (Opening)

“I don’t want to wake up from a dream / That’s better than my life so I just stay asleep.”

—Jade Lyel, “13th Floor” (2023)

Picking up from where “‘Bad Dreams, part zero: Fatal Homecomings’; or, Return of the Living Dead (and Vigilantism)” left off…

If part zero equipped you with the idea of vigilantism/police violence as something to unleash unto the zombie coming home, part one shall now weigh the consequences and history of said return happening yet again—to meet the zombie as something to interrogate and hopefully humanize through rememory as a useful means of dreaming about unspeakable things. Pushed into the realm of dreams, they must be taken from said dreams and reassembled while awake; i.e., per Toni Morrison’s definition (from Beloved, 1989):

Rememory[1] as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative (source).

Eventually the zombie must wake up and face its own decay as a class-conscious, intersectionally solidarized act (not just African Americans/pan-Africanism) extending to culture war and social-sexual expression per ludo Gothic BDSM on a global scale.

Thanks to capital, such apocalypse fantasies are pervasively common, and there’s no way to engage/play with and assemble them without some degree of trauma and confusion. Insofar as sex and force are powerful motivators, zombies are an element of social-sexual conditioning whose particularly imperiled headspace exists per settler colonialism as built to decay over time.

In short, there is always a return, the black side overtaking the white as a matter of planned collapse, which the elite will use to withdraw and plan their revenge through the middle class (the usual gatekeepers) raping the zombie on command; i.e., through police action as already synonymized with lethal force defending property using fear and dogma. This subchapter on the Imperial Boomerang will explore the challenging thereof, outlined in three further divisions (we gotta keep things bite-sized—to make sure your brains can absorb all this, but also so I can get through it):

• “part one: Survival (feat. Night of the Living Dead, Left 4 Dead, and The Last of Us—included in this post)”: Considers the dialectic of privilege waged against the alien dead when the chickens come home to roost. Defines the zombie, Imperial Boomerang and state of exception, then considers the ways in which zombies are policed through sex and force, mid-apocalypse; i.e., something abject to attack and divide, blowing apart/away with guns and otherwise dismembered as a form of pro-state discourse.
• “part two: Cryptomimesis (feat. The Last of Us, Scooby Doo, and more)“: Explores various stories that repeat on echo (through cryptomimesis) to normally divide workers too scared to face the consequence of state operations (zombies); i.e., how such things can be reclaimed from state monopolies, while nevertheless weighing on our minds (awake or not).
• “part three: Rememory (feat. Beloved, Frankenstein, and The Last of the Mohicans, and more)“: Examines the ways zombie apocalypse stories can be interrogated; i.e., as haunting our literal dreams, and where death/tokenization under capital can be reassembled and confronted after we wake up—as a polity/being to humanize and question per Toni Morrison’s process of rememory (through my personal experiences with the idea and writing this book).

Reclaiming the zombie’s agency through ludo-Gothic BDSM means coming to grips with the fact that it has been raped and made undead to begin with—not once, but over and over as the Imperial Boomerang sails home to exact a revenge argument (of Amazonomachia) on state workers: suffering to the conquered (a bourgeois strawman for genocidal victims, which the middle class attack at home per the process of abjection punching the ghost of the counterfeit). Per a humanized Medusa, though, Athena’s Aegis can reverse the flow of power (thus force regarding sex) in ways that don’t wait until then, and have more sex-positive, transformative results throughout:

(artist: Alexa)

As we shall see, this whole procedure is ontologically complicated, but especially the mirror-like zombie’s synonymizing with rape-as-undead—its compartment syndrome leaking unspeakable trauma above ground; i.e., feeling dead after sensing such decay in other people, other places, other times, as half-real, but also dream-like. Such remediation represents the far-off memory of genocide as both fleeting and falling apart, challenged by unspeakable trauma as something to face (along with its repressed abuse), then smash apart—per capital’s daily operations—to banish said memories to a state of stalled apocalypse: oblivion. Capitalists rely on such terror devices to instill reactive violence (survival mechanisms) as a matter of moving money through nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., repeatedly selling these intimations of genocide back unto fresh generations sown with nostalgic memories of so-called better times and worse: “home” as haunted by sunshine and gloom (re: Walpole’s “gloomth”).

Because zombies in particular are perceived as both not alive and deserving of on-site capital punishment for returning to where they were never allowed, they cannot legally be murdered, raped, or otherwise abused. In the eyes of the state, they are merely “laid to rest,” but the process is always horrifyingly front-and-center during an apocalypse performed by the middle class having become the vigilante cop as part of the usual cloaked operations normally relegated to frontier atrocities (e.g., the Battle of Berlin): the zombie apocalypse becomes something to survive until order returns; i.e., after the vigilante middle class lynch the zombie-as-scapegoat, mid-witch-hunt.

In other words, the zombie’s entire existence is uncanny but also denied healthy love (symbolized commonly by the heart; e.g., the Tin Man, but also the literal beating thing pulled out of someone’s chest) by virtue of not being alive, thus lacking humanity and human rights in bad-dream scenarios. They aren’t simply food, but fodder looking for food only to be laid low by fascist vigilantism and reabsorbed into the state until it can regenerate itself and begin genocide anew, post doomsday. The elite require the middle class for such a project, de facto deputizing them to push the harvest far away until it eventually sails home yet again. Each time it does, it grows grim as it, per the liminal hauntology of war’s castles and undead feeders, brings trauma back to the homefront. Per Capitalist Realism, zombies are synonymous with the canonical apocalypse, then, as a xenophobic, psychosexual end of the world. Happening during eco-sociological state shifts, they can be applied to any genre: zombies Westerns, cyberpunks, ’80s-style beat-’em-ups, or “historical” dramas; zombies in outer space, Las Vegas, etc.

The history of this lies in the word apocalypse as currently synonymous with “zombie”; i.e., presently canonized as “an end of the world,” the word has different, more precise meanings that remain historically relevant to our discussions of subverting canonical disasters:

late 14c., “revelation, disclosure,” from Church Latin apocalypsis “revelation,” from Greek apokalyptein “uncover, disclose, reveal,” from apo “off, away from” (see apo-) + kalyptein “to cover, conceal” (from PIE root, kel-) “to cover, conceal, save.” The Christian end-of-the-world story is part of the revelation in John of Patmos’ book “Apokalypsis” (a title rendered into English as pocalipsis c. 1050, “Apocalypse” c. 1230, and “Revelation” by Wycliffe c. 1380). Its general sense in Middle English was “insight, vision; hallucination.” The general meaning “a cataclysmic event” is modern (not in OED 2nd ed., 1989); apocalypticism “belief in an imminent end of the present world” is from 1858 (source: Online Etymology Dictionary, 2023).

In Gothic terms, an apocalypse is a revelation about the present world as decaying behind a veneer of capitalistic normality—re: Baudrillard’s hyperreality except the trauma also extends to the population and ideology of a given setting and not just the buildings/cartography (which often have a dogmatic function to them). Nor are these places strictly depopulated; instead, they remain continuously occupied by individuals whose basic appearance doesn’t change, but rots under state sanctioned abuse: the brain rot of a fragile, fascist populace that grows increasingly frightened by everything in or out of sight, and which their home becomes one of our usual refrains to clear out; e.g., Tolkien’s treasure map or Cameron’s urbanized shooter during military urbanism.

However, because the source of this decay isn’t entirely local or foreign, its postcolonial, genderqueer subversion must happen by revisiting sites of trauma that are both deeply personal, while also being informed by larger geopolitical events, heroic personas and canonical “archaeologies” tied to the state as currently under attack from within (zombies tend to be a domestic menace with xenophobic qualities, marrying the fascist fear of the outsider and internal sabotage to a local population). It feels like a bad dream, but adumbrates settler-colonial horrors coming home to roost; i.e., a rememory assembled out of old dead parts—dead land, stolen generations, a diasporic and ouroborotic myopia.

Haunted by the dead of all places, our dreams visit us in ways we can reassemble per Morrison’s device to give the wretched fresh life. All constitute a transgenerational pedagogy of the oppressed having grown restless; i.e., the undead natives actively resisting capital/profit, thus police violence and the endless rape and war it entails.

Zombies denote the presence of settler colonialism bouncing around. To reiterate: First, we’ll look at the Imperial Boomerang’s history of traveling back and forth between colonized lands and localized, half-real examples; i.e., from Cambodia and Left 4 Dead (2008), The Last of Us (2023) as a matter of division. Second, we’ll consider other popular examples haunting our dreams as informed by half-real texts we can potentially put together as a means of uniting workers against the state. After that, we’ll briefly consider Morrison’s process of rememory per The Last of the Mohicans (1992); i.e., as an, at-times, seemingly involuntary reassembling of these bad dreams as dreamers do: in their beds at night.

Troubled by such complicated reflections, we’ll explore using them nonetheless to achieve intersectional solidarity with each other as normally divided under capital; i.e., despite past failures of the oppressed to unite on a wider level (we shall take this into the realms of toys and roleplay, in “Bad Dreams,” part two). We’ll only have time to scratch the surface, here, but I’ll do my best to suggest a holistic model; i.e., one you can express through any groups (and ideas) that you wish to connect yourselves to as a matter of struggle: part of the same intersectional undead mission moving inexorably towards a postcapitalist existence (or bust).

The Imperial Boomerang, part one: Survival (feat. Night of the Living Dead, Left 4 Dead, and The Last of Us)

Willow Creek was attacked repeatedly last night. Cruniac stationed archers on the perimeter of the town, and the bowmen were able to pick off the stumbling corpse-men as they approached. But there seemed to be no end to them. We have even seen Soulless and Ghols skulking about on the outskirts of town. All of us are beginning to worry, including Cruniac (source).

—The Narrator, “Down a Broken Path” from Myth II: Soulblighter (1998)

Capitalism is a hyperobject whose daily feeding is felt in the presence of undead trauma—the zombie apocalypse—as something to survive, which the elite manipulate through canon; i.e., as an argument for restoring the state, not dismantling it.

(artist, top-left: akiraeviI; top-right: Annabella Ivy; bottom-left: Zianab Jiwa; bottom-right: Winton Kidd)

Such things are legion, marched into the sea as a means of scapegoating an awareness towards Capitalism functioning through genocide as something to harvest, as usual, through nature-as-monstrous-feminine to some degree nude and vulnerable, but also tokenized and rebellious on the same undead surfaces (above); i.e., as something that rises from the night of the living dead to the dawn, the day and so on. Such things are rooted in rebellion and enslavement as equally die-hard, there being countless examples of the living dead returning for state forces (“survivors”) to do battle with; i.e., out of Hell, the underworld, the Valley of the Dry Bones, etc—what, in African studies, is a cycle commonly referred as the Kongo cosmogram, or the dead returning to life again and again:

(source, right: Dan Collen’s “Did the Trailer for Tucker Carlson’s Documentary Reference a Nazi Meme Co-opted From a Bigfoot Writer?” 2022)

Originally such myths were passed down orally after the Middle Passage as an attempt to hold onto one’s culture as a) being erased, but also b) giving voice to the profound and nigh-unspeakable levels of violence being exacted upon African Americans as chattel slaves.

All the same, such a model might seem strangely similar to the Hard Times square (or whatever it’s called) conceived by G. Michael Hopf: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” Or as Bret Devereaux writes, “The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source: “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020). In other words, it’s fascist propaganda through cultural appropriation that serves the useful myth of Gothic ancestry to invent a regenerating enemy the state can always use to call for violence against: the zombie.

For the sake of time and focus, we’ll stick to human-class zombies with meat on their bones; i.e., no kaiju or Biblical-style plagues, nor skeletons (sorry, Jörg Buttgereit[2]), just the fleshy dead appearing to fuck with the living and the living rising to the challenge.

We’ll look at many different examples, but stick to the 20th and 21st centuries (sorry, Matthew Lewis): Night of the Living Dead (1968), of course, but also Left 4 Dead and The Last of Us, followed by a variety of cryptomimetic offshoots in part two; i.e., per my expansion on Castricano, writing with the dead, or otherwise engaging with their many likenesses as echoes of trauma and its subsequent feeding.

I give each example for a different reason:

• Night of the Living Dead to outline the base concept of survival during us-versus-them tied to historical-material cycles of collapse; re: the Imperial Boomerang
• Left 4 Dead to stress the zombie’s psychosexuality
• Cambodia to give a real-world example intimated by such stories
• and The Last of Us (and similar undead revivals) to consider such necrotic assembly as mass produced through unironic cryptomimesis that we, as workers, desperately need to challenge; i.e., through ironic, sex-positive forms helping workers by facing and assembling our past abuse/failures, using them to dismantle capital.

Text or type, monsters concern poetic language as a preferential means of cutting through alienation using fetishized language for workers and nature.

To that, I never thought I’d go with zombies in a book about sex-positive expression written by someone who doesn’t exhibit sexualized abject gore (for an in-chapter explanation, see exhibit 34b). That being said, out of all the undead, I see now (with some surprise) that I’ve written about them more than any other monster type! Perhaps it’s not so odd, though; I wouldn’t fuck a rotten zombie, but a goth doll…? Mm, sure! Per Zombie Capitalism, zombies (sexy or not) collectively speak to the problems of the system and its built-in predation-through-us-versus-them-trauma better than any other (vampires, while gay as fuck, tend to be gentrified, witches and Medusa tokenized, and ghosts a bit vague and diaphanous)! It’s baked into them.

To summarize the larger problem these zombie examples will explore, capital—and by extension rape and war—are the result of monstrous experiments conducted first by Columbus (and later by others) in pursuit of profit. Indeed, profit is synonymous with both outcomes through capital, which leads to death and rape theatre as a cryptomimetic form of escapism, but also preparation for the return of Imperialism through the Imperial Boomerang (the back-and-forth travel of said device): to where it all began, the state; i.e., its birth and death as something to repeat with all its former victims hanging over it. Seeking some kind of equalizing through the state as normally unequal, such returns normally serve profit through the regulation of sex and force through attempted monopolies of terror, violence and morphological expression.

Of course, this is effectively what zombies are, but the state can’t monopolize them (or nature, below) through canon. Sex positivity under Gothic Communism involves reclaiming such things for worker aims, but first we must confront the Boomerang through the zombie; i.e., as blind, furious, and indiscriminately hungry per the giving and receiving of state force, which polices labor as sexualized and alien the way capital always does: through settler colonialism and slavery given a death warrant to further itself with until the end of things. This has a half-life; i.e., the more you put in, the stronger it gets, leading to growing denials and pretense: that you can kill it.

Sadly, that’s not how Medusa works, and by extension zombies; smaller units are part of a larger problem, a rot, and capital is to blame. To keep doing Capitalism, then, is to expand these monsters as a trauma response to the system working as intended, but eventually it will die by virtue of this. From the almighty Godzilla to the lowest shambling corpse, there is a price to pay for such exploitation. It is literally death, which can’t be destroyed, thus can’t be bargained with through state mechanisms (any of them) or counterfeits. Eventually the (zombie) chickens come home to roost (above), taking everything received into itself and blowing it all back into the giver’s soon-to-be-ruined face; i.e., as the Aegis does, or Godzilla’s atomic death ray. There’s no getting even or surviving it if all you put in is death because death cannot be killed; the only logical outcome is suicide, the Roman fool falling on his sword.

Like a cruel, seemingly unstoppable god, then, the state is effectively eating itself through a mirror argument that grows increasingly toxic over time; it must have these devices taken away before it’s too late. In short, we gotta put the pussy on the chainwax, camping the zombie before the state falls apart and total chaos ensues. We must transform it in ways that restore balance—not in the centrist sense of an oscillating pendulum of war and rape (which again, is the zombie), but that of post-scarcity as a harmonious existence with each other and nature as reunited with death: a new order of existence that lives with the trauma of the past as something to assemble, confront, befriend and understand into a better future.

So while, the undead predate capital, they and their apocalypses have evolved as a trauma mechanism under its regular abuses: the Imperial Boomerang as traveling back and forth like a giant sickle, its harvest grim wherever it goes. Where there’s zombies, there’s capital, which preys on zombies through us-versus-them to generate profit as something that goes back into the state.

Before we examine that process, let’s define zombies a little more clearly, as its evolution into its currently crystalized form (the apocalypse) is generally taken for granted. Then, we’ll expand on the Imperial Boomerang and what it is.

Zombies—while modular—share qualities with other undead and with demons and animals. In essence, they receive/give trauma and feed as a matter of forbidden knowledge/power exchange in relation to capital. Moreover, zombies generally arrive during an apocalypse, a return of the living dead that, while it reaches back into Pagan holidays like Samhain (aka Halloween) and other such notions of the afterlife, specifically concern a falling into the state of exception (re: a rescinding of rights during a time of state crisis, but especially decaying crisis); i.e., when the Imperial Boomerang sails home.

The zombie, with its green skin and rotting flesh, personifies all of these things as a cryptonym thereof, which repeats per cryptomimesis as a presence of state decay but also worker decay grappling with itself; i.e., as the state, like Omelas, feeds on said exception to try and regenerate its own territories and unequal positions at the cost of workers and nature. Exceptions, we’ll see, cannot be tolerated because they always divide us to defend profit through police violence, including token police violence during a fascist purge.

Simply put, a zombie is a giver/target of expanded state abuse, including vigilante forms, which all took time to evolve into themselves; i.e., Matthew Lewis and Mary Shelley wrote about zombies, but the discourse and state mechanisms of capital had yet to evolve and decay per stories like I am Legend and Night of the Living Dead. As it currently exists, a zombie is generally to some degree blind, angry and hungry as something to brand: as illegitimate criminal violence, though these qualities overlap and vary depending on the medium and genre; e.g., orcs in fantasy stories (especially videogames) functioning as outlaw zombies (the anti-Semitic trope of green skin [the color of stigma, which blackface extends pointedly to race] and eating flesh) despite technically not being undead; i.e., they—like people of color more broadly under Cartesian arguments and settler-colonial systems—historically fall unto the same state of exception by virtue of being non-white, thus are targeted for capital punishment as readily administered when the state decays: dead people walking. They’re more expendable than whitey is.

To see a zombie as it actually functions, then, is to see the state functioning as normal uncloaked; i.e., a rancid Aegis whose apocalypse denotes the paradox of a return without moving: an awareness that wakes up, “growing woke” regarding the function of the state as petty and cruel, but also divinely ordained to exploit others for profit in some shape or form (the function of capital is always secular insofar as profit is their god, a religion of money that is conspicuously fake; i.e., the Protestant work ethic).

Originally this exploitation would occur through conquest, in the medieval tradition of plundering gold, slaves and sex, extending to forms of enslavement that were more systemic (re: settler-colonialism and the generation of wealth through stolen labor and, in effect, generations). Over time, though, it would adopt ideologies ranging from Cartesian dualism to the Hammer of Witches: something to fetishize while alienating workers from—nature-as-monstrous-feminine, punching the ghost of the counterfeit while not-so-secretly lusting after it; i.e., like a bad dream; e.g., Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) as something to revisit said xenophobia/abjection in comelier forms of anti-Semitism that are a) more open about said predation as a matter of service to the usual witch-hunter dumbasses, while simultaneously b) teasing them as a matter of conjuring up the slut in ways we can reclaim.

As this series has noted since “Into the Shadow Zone” (an essay from my PhD), this happens on the same kinds of trashy stages, through the same guilty pleasures/repressed sexual desires reversed on our attackers beholding us and panicking as a result: “Boobies, bush? Avaunt!”

(source film: Masters of Horror, episode 2: “Dreams in the Witch House,” 2005)

Cloak (or legs) open or shut, it’s standard-issue demon BDSM, cuties; we want to make it ludo-Gothic! I.e., it can be gentle (“Aw, do you have a ‘boner?'”) or strict (“Yes, motherfucker! Stare and tremble!”). What matters is that such duality (re)presents a unique and prolific opportunity to wake up in the kinds of shadowy places where bread-and-circus opiates normally call home. Few things open (or close) eyes like monster sex; i.e., being naughty in ways that camp canon and by extension capital, not quaint scapegoats (re: Lovecraft)! When camped, “rape and “death” are hot by virtue of calculated risk, thus mutual consent as something to illustrate, which—when interrogated further afterwards—gives us a chance to explore trauma in ways that open our eyes: to the zombie’s broader intersectional suffering!

To that, Medusa is someone to live with, whereupon you discover they fart, shit, pick their nose, get periods, have trauma tied to rape, to police violence through domestic abuse as always, to some degree, xenophobic; e.g., “My wife was a witch and I burned her!” or “My neighbor was a zombie and I shot him!” Such moral panics always lead to violence, as Richard Matteson and Matthew Lewis demonstrate, centuries apart; cryptomimesis is the echoing of that in ways we can liberate ourselves paradoxically with.

We’ve already gone over this playfulness extensively in the Poetry Module, so I won’t beat a dead horse, here (though doing so is fine when critiquing capital and genocide). Just, I wish to say that capital uses things until they are used up, then dies and resurrects through the general procedure as something to reveal and disguise itself as needed.

Such cryptonymy is dualistic, of course. Anyone who bothers to look backwards can see history as crowded with genocide, but also markers of “genocide” that serve as decoys and target dummies; i.e., per the sorts of complicit cryptonymies we must stage and camp while keeping tabs on our enemies playing with the same kinds of monster toys: in the usual doll houses as danger discos to meet revolutionary aids, mid-cryptonymy and mimesis. Normally paywalled, these 18-and-up tangents (and their PG, family-friendly segues; e.g., Tim Burton’s 1988 Beetlejuice, below) traipse through a very dark garden, a fallen paradise that is homely by virtue of its Satanic power challenging Cartesian thought (thus Capitalism) as a manner of “brothel espionage/rebellion,” of good play dressed up as “bad, very bad.”

Like Dante’s Inferno, people likewise go to them seeking power and sex, rapture and release for different reasons in settler-colonial territories (transformation, communication, violation, etc): America as a settler-colonial graveyard guarded by the monstrous-feminine as dualistic—the reaper-like whore as cop or revolutionary but looking basically the same. So long as these “visits with sin” routinely push people in a left-leaning direction, then it’s all good, man! Fuck her blue! As such, Capitalism must be escaped inside of itself, inside Medusa (so to speak); i.e., as something to transform through monsters and sex! Of course, there’s mixed signals among all the revolutionary-versus-cops chatter, but any good spy can tell the difference and works fast (why waste time?)!

Escaped or not, zombies (and by extension, things that are zombie-like) are slaves that denote genocide and slavery per Capitalism’s earliest iterations (from Columbus onwards) as going hand-in-hand toward Pax American as rotten-to-the-core; i.e., are angry about it as a transgenerational curse that haunts entire peoples per the mechanisms of capital both a) policing them as such, and b) turning their responses into a kind of comfort food for the middle class: a holiday (Halloween, of course, but also year-round treatments through walking synonyms; e.g., Jill Valentine).

“White people disease,” then, constitutes Man Box through weird-nerd culture as a developing kind of mirror/compartment syndrome—of freezing in front of the decaying double, the attacking of which releases various toxins. It’s a realization of one’s home (the state) as predatory and abjecting this onto the zombie as scapegoat, effectively blaming the victim while attacking them during the apocalypse as end-of-the-world reconciliation; i.e., per Capitalist Realism as a fascist enterprise punching Medusa. In turn, such persecution mania reliably and routinely decays into civil war as a feeling of self-cannibalization and training (through canon) towards such madness to defend the state with; i.e., “I’m eating myself, my home, my family and they, me! Such is life!”

When this occurs, it internalizes; the grim harvest becomes normalized in domestic territories, though it is often fetishized, dressed up to make it more palatable for the male/tokenized middle class. There’s a double standard, of course, white cis-het men being the universal benefactors (above) while token groups are expected to play their part in the same fascist appeasements; i.e., putting on the scary-to-slutty clothes and zombie makeup—with people of color becoming ghoulish fodder and those forced to identify as women becoming the undead, Sontag-grade Nazi whore (the colors of black and red denoting power and death, but also older ideologies attached to a shared collapse; e.g., Catholicism, Communism and, of course, fascism).

For example, Lady Death is literally a comic book superhero, one meant to pointedly calm the nerves of the men involved (the traditional owners of property in America; re: comic books, but also the girls on the covers), playing out Irigaray’s notion of the sacrificial mother as already dead per the usual Gothic conventions, fetishes and clichés; i.e., made canonical per the usual flesh merchants trading prostitutes, except in corpse paint (again, an ancient tradition at least as old as Rome): an undead, mommy-dom sex doll with blind eyes, a Destroyer aesthetic and a sickle (the grim harvest, but also a horseshoe-theory treatment of the Communist sickle, mid-Red-Scare). It’s hauntological par excellence.

(artist: Ashlynne Dae)

Last but not least, there is generally a liminality of the corpse as not only murdered but raped, exposing its sexuality on the same traumatized body as—once exposed—a reliably abject proposition unto itself: the humiliation of corpses by defiling them. Such defilement is psychosexual, involving sex as well as literal dismemberment (use your imagination). All constitute the system (and those who uphold it) repressing elements of its own function; i.e., its daily operations that allow the universal benefactors (the middle class) to reap the fruits of slaughter just enough to have their basic needs met, before handing the lion’s share off to their masters, the elite. When the Boomerang sails home, the Imperial Core is threatened and the elite tap the middle class on the shoulder and say to them: “Time to pay up!” Most aren’t ready for that unless they view it as nostalgic and territorial—like a (video)game argument that cements them neoliberally as the monomythic hero rescuing the “Free World” from evil, from enslavement (re: personal responsibility rhetoric). Pot, meet kettle.

That should be enough about zombies to get you through the chapter! Again, for the sake of simplicity, we’ll stick to rotting corpses (or at least hungry green people slated for execution) and branch out, the deeper we go!

Before we hop into the texts themselves, though, I want to explain what the Imperial Boomerang is over the next four-or-so pages, including various factors that come into play under its return—bodies and trauma, but especially the manner in which the monstrous-feminine is sexualized per the Cartesian harvest of nature as alien and undead; i.e., the state vs Medusa during zombie apocalypses, insofar as nature is undead in two respects—both as the giver/receiver of trauma and something driven to feed as a traumatic survival response to profit. Said feeding subsequently operates through zombie canon being used to pacify forces that otherwise might rebel, mid-exploitation/shortage; i.e., when faced with the undead as a consequence of capital doing what capital does by design: manufacture, subterfuge and coercion (the zombie being a world-class guilt-trip the elite can use to scapegoat the middle class as fascist, not them: “Look at what you did!”).

To that, the bourgeoisie use canon—namely the sudden visitation of a vague, “impending” apocalypse—to threaten workers with capitalistic nightmares that cover up xenophilic potential and xenophobic abuses (the impostor, above) when the levee breaks; i.e., emotional manipulation, per the Superstructure, where they distract with false revelations conducted by the nation-state/corporations as inherently deceitful (which extends to its parallel spaces): meaningless money tied to monsters everywhere that destroy or steal personal property and capital, all while thrusting indiscriminate police violence onto regular middle-class people already terrified by moral panics as part of the process (which include gender trouble and minority activism as something to lament, fear and attack; re: DARVO).

This larger process is the Imperial Boomerang—re:

“The thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens” (source: Wikipedia). In Foucault’s own words during his lecture at “Il faut défendre la société” in 1975:

[W]hile colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself (source: Stephen Graham’s “Foucault’s Boomerang: the New Military Urbanism,” 2013).

Described by Graham as “military urbanism,” this phenomenon accounts for the legion of dead futures popularized in American canon and its expanded, retro-future states of exception—hauntological narratives that present the future as dead and Capitalism as retro-futuristically decayed; i.e., Zombie Capitalism and zombie police states.

Ultimately, the flight of the Boomerang becomes a matter of routine done to death. Yet still it goes, traveling back and forth.

As it does, what seems faraway one moment is—like Dracula’s castle (and its monsters)—suddenly upon viewers, whose vicarious means of “dog-eat-dog” survival are generally predicated on us-versus-them-style revenge and petty squabbles (e.g., TERFs policing sex and force). These, in turn, transpire inside impromptu, “flash-mob” police states during Capitalism’s decay period, canonized by popular stories that pacify workers through personal property meant to acclimate them to violence and enslavement with a deathly appearance as “likeness” (the simulacrum as doll-like, per cryptomimesis); i.e., towards an outwardly dehumanized way of thinking towards zombified givers and receivers of state torture: us-versus-them enacted by the middle class as class, race and culture traitors dueling amongst themselves (“kissing up”) while punching down necrophilically at the lower classes for being non-white, non-Christian and GNC, etc. “Satisfy my hunger!” they shout, aping their masters, but badly (through Nazi-Communist cartoons) while reaping Medusa’s fat zombie ass: “Om nom nom!”

(source)

Revelations are always, to some degree, obscene and horrifying: the realization that one is not only an unwilling-to-willing participant in genocide on either end, but a corpse, or that one is eating or fucking a corpse (e.g., sleep sex), friends with a corpse, etc, as something to oscillate regarding the perceived return of as fascist or victim (the in-group logic being that fascists are somehow “invincible”; they’re not). The dialectical-material reality of the nightmare is “archaeological”; i.e., as defined by Jameson, re: the dialectic of shelter whose elaborate strategy of misdirection evokes a neoconservative return to order with an undeniably historical past sold as “dead future” back to workers to pacify them with. These amount to palingenesis, or nation-birth mythology (which, as we shall see, are rooted in fascism as ultra-national in a team-based apocalypse: the Nazi zombie vs zombie labor within the Gothic chronotope’s castle-narrative). In this imaginary “past,” subservient worker emotions/actions are constantly reduced to a pacified animal’s inside the cage of the world itself, one that threatens classic state “efficiencies” every waking moment: the dreaded Holocaust, but also state-sanctioned suicides, nuclear strikes, cannibalism, and rape and murders in relation to a relaxed, but ultimately radicalized (fascist) bureaucracy.

The past becomes, to some degree, imaginary as informed by actual events, which repeat based on such conditioning as Pavlovian, menticidal: waves of terror and vigilantism seeking to end said waves during alarm fatigue draining the middle class of its empathy towards the wretched. While both become zombies for the state, the middle class hunts zombies down, witch-hunt-style, as a kind of recuperated release value; i.e., it’s a panic button, Capitalism-in-decay defending itself through medievalized poetics, mid-purge. Said button pushes whenever the bubble bursts, genocide and decay becoming frighteningly visible and persuasive towards said middle class gaslighting their victims; i.e., the former as gatekeepers being terminally afraid of an imaginary fate delivered by “terrorists.” It’s seen as “worse than death” and having some truth it, but in ways that lead them to play ball for the elite by raping the lower classes, races and cultures during stochastic terrorism challenging proletarian voices (and counterterror): “The rotten enemy is at the gates, now defend us or else they’ll eat and rape you!”

(source)

To that, the state’s brutal historical-materialism is like a gelatinous cube, a ravenous blob that knowingly eats everything around and inside itself. In turn, the bourgeoisie only stay in power by using an old aristocratic trick: carefully administer the right threats at the right pace and feel, the right perception; i.e., canonical media dressed up as fatal nostalgia during the dialectic of the alien, wherein the zombie-as-punching-bag makes for an effective state terror device: “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!” When threatened by the terrible kinds of violence associated with state collapse, middle-class workers will atomize and push the zombie away from themselves. As such, they desperately cling to the state should collapse even be mentioned, relinquishing their rights in the process. No argumentation is made for cooperation or communes. Instead, the scenario is always the same: the sudden threat of spontaneous gory violence—a fear of immediate, societal change that throws infantilized and persecuted people alike into a state of emergency and then hands one side a gun; i.e., lucid dreams of settler-colonial violence, mid-nightmare, making exceptions to who can live and die.

“Zombie” isn’t just the literal walking dead, then, but a liminal-monstrous existence whose buried past rises up and “walks” the earth; it “blips” into existence during Capitalism-in-crisis, conspicuously hungry for human biology (the colonized feeding on the colonizer as relatively alienated from said cannibalism).

Seemingly overnight, this actually happens more slowly as the Imperial Boomerang sails home; i.e., a return of the living dead through ambiguous invasions of the destroyed and the destroyer on the same deathly personas: “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth[3].” As the state becomes increasingly fascist, it gradually colonizes its own middle-class population, cannibalizing them through sanctioned violence inside a growing state of exception (a concept we’ll examine, here, but also in Volume Three, Chapter Two when we talk about proletarian praxis in conjunction with fascists). The home-as-settler-colonial becomes foreign, alien… hungry as a means of defending itself through self-cannibalism as fascist; i.e., Nazi zombies!

This cannibalism isn’t always figurative or grandly dramatic (e.g., The Hunger Games, 2008), and moreover, it has a built-in bias on all registers: dark (and queer) meat, first (female meat being somewhat protected by virtue of the state needing breeders—of owners and slaves alike—which they of course abject: “Mars needs cheerleaders”). Inside the growing state of exception, then, zombies “suddenly appear” through the manipulated demand of a great number of them: a black rapacious horde.

To this, the zombie becomes an elaborate distraction, occurring as a matter of experience through funerary markers that phenomenologically denote state abuse as doubled during the liminal hauntology of war and its grim harvest; i.e., through the zombie as a manufactured crisis parallel to the state working as it always does: as a cryptonym (symbol of hidden trauma) symptomatic of state abuse that exposes itself mid-conflict in a humanoid, Cartesian form. This isn’t always gore-inducing nausea, but eroticism pulling another classic trick out of the bag: graveyard sex.

(artist: Soy Neiva)

Under such market structures and motivations, the elite make death/genocide sexy and cool through fascist poster girls (conflating Communism through the same kayfabe theatre versus the American babyface). Medusa, then, becomes the usual peach to harvest when fattened up—a dark mommy to kill and tokenize, extending to her “brood” (the racist idea of non-white people as vermin coming from a single, Archaic-Mother source). Reclamation occurs through a seizing of the merchandise to say things about Medusa as dark, thicc, and delicious, but also human; e.g., the bi-racial PAWG as something to hug and fuck, but also appreciate as a thing unto itself: nudism dressed up in sexual, darkly charged outfits, a cultured aesthetic that glides between bodily and material elements adorning said body as castle-like, undead and black; i.e., as a matter of settler-colonial operations, mid liminal-expression: a look, a style, a mood conveyed by dummy thicc in-betweens, both white and black in appearance offering up size difference at a delicious glance (re: Lexi Love, Nya Blu, but also Soy Neiva, above).

Such zombies often lack an outwardly undead or black semblance (also above), but remain forbidden, potent, plucky and magnetic—able to speak to things that are paradoxically taboo and commonplace, stylized (those tats are killer, below). If the ghost of counterfeit can be interrogated and reassembled, mid-exchange, then flashing the goods as “goth” is perfectly fine! Medusa’s hefty cryptonymy (the stealth booty-as-cloaking-device that hides power in plain sight) needs to serve workers, not profit, but subsisting within capital is to be expected.

Furthermore, patterns repeat on bodies as doll-like, but also positioned like dolls that are both somewhat undead-looking and extremely fuckable in a paradoxically sex-positive sense. This is fine so long as you don’t tokenize (thus divide labor to serve the elite through fetishized, police-like distractions)! So pay attention and learn the trade; i.e., its hauntologized, cryptonymic symbols of “death” in quotes (e.g., tarot, ravens, skulls, etc)! Get it, girl (something to eat, something to fuck—same difference)!

(artist: Raven Griim)

Ambiguity builds during an apocalypse; i.e., as something to survive while surrounded by monsters. Like all monsters, though, zombies are dualistic. They can be used either by pro-state or pro-worker agents; i.e., the zombie either being ex-to-generalized slave seeking liberation, or hauntologized cop punching the middle class clutching their pearls (there’s also overlap, with different forms of tokenization resulting as marginalized groups decaying into traitors, exhibit 34b). This hostile vagueness makes the zombie (white or non-white skin; male, female or intersex[4]) a personified cryptonym, one whose historical-material genesis per cryptomimesis yields fresh mutations that imply the state’s tried-and-true function: a corrupting force for the living to behold and puzzle over while fighting for their lives, but also a form of canonical gaslighting that sends the survivor(s) into a spiral of doubt when faced with the unavoidable sense of doom; i.e., repressed decay and lies emanating from the state during manufactured crisis. The two are obviously connected, but there’s no time to play detective, mid-apocalypse; the problem is too big and too sudden to make any sense of, the state simply prescribing violence as a means of escape when Medusa shows off that fat ass: blast the zombie apart instead of carefully using rememory as an effective, oft-involuntary means of putting the puzzle pieces back together.

A xenophilic clue can be gleaned through the disease vector itself. Although canonical zombies generally symbolize moral panic as tied to the underclass (often out-of-control sex and other state-regulated variables linked to worker bodies and labor), the exact reason for their sudden resurgence is never diegetically stated; it’s hushed up or abstracted (e.g., “The Colour out of Space,” 1927) to keep middle-class xenophobia rampant for fear of nuclear-familial collapse. Canonical zombies, then, merely represent the abject reciprocation of state violence, meted out using lethal force to control sex/fetishized labor between everyone inside the state’s boundaries. Then, it becomes counterfeit nostalgia and echoes in on itself through adaptations of adaptations; the entropy climbs, a kind of amplified senescence tied to the fatal family portrait as undead: from the original Lovecraft short story to The Darkest Dungeon‘s “The Color of Madness” (2018) to the 2019 adaptation by Richard Stanley (a good couple years for Cage, whose Mandy [2018] we will inspect later)! “The nuclear family was consumed by a far-off devourer!” In other words, it’s the usual abject muffling (re: cosmic nihilism viewing the colonial territories, outer space, as a hostile final frontier).

Even when canonical, though, survivor narratives are presented as suitably chaotic, insofar as danger is both hard to define and to pin down. According to the pathogen’s anisotropic (and highly figurative, volatile) nature, this xenophobic exchange is many things once. One, it works towards zombies as recipients of state violence; i.e., their appearance resembling the returning undead and their embodied trauma as something familiar to reject, thus aggregate a defense against by shooting at (suicide). Two, it can be from zombies as givers of state violence; i.e., whether directly or bounced back at them; e.g., the fascist “zombie” death knight operating inside hauntological death squads to resist the invasion of—with Cage’s American dad eventually destroying his own family (who admittedly are a bit worse for wear at that stage). Three, the middle class are generally caught, suitably enough, in the middle while the state cannibalizes itself through them (above).

Except this middle group generally targets everyone in their own attempts to make it through the nightmare: saving their own skins (and brains) from cannibalization. The inability to love or be loved dooms everything inside the state of exception but power will be there, killing labor first; i.e., the return of the black knight, the KKK, the Nazi, Cthulhu, as marching in the streets while white moderates (the middle class) pick and choose their targets: polite to your face as they promptly stab you in the back (re: Malcolm X).

Whatever text we look at, there is always some degree of chilly disposition, veiled hostility and cognitive dissonance/estrangement while fighting abjection (the feeding mechanism going haywire, supersizing slave foods [and the harvested dead associated with them] as the usual state mechanisms start to malfunction). But you have to start somewhere and be unafraid to critique older workers to learn from (and camp) them as needed.

This brings us to our first text to analyze, Night of the Living Dead (sorry, Matteson, but we’ve talked about your book a fair bit, already).

Clearly there is an inherently racialized (Cartesian) character to settler-colonial unrest in apocalyptic forms; i.e., slave rebellions framed as grotesquely undead to scare the middle class into punching down. This includes people of color as struggling to hold onto what little they have in American society as normally hostile to them, thus conducive to race (and by extension, class and culture) traitors. Incredibly iconoclastic, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, then, was a biting response to the antagonistic violence used against the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam’s Tet Offensive; i.e., as supported by protesters/college students at home who were consequently branded as “terrorists” and killed for it (e.g., the Kent State shootings, 1970). With Night, Romero was trying to capture and express these complicated uprisings—of worker outrage and police crackdowns—in his own work as a photographer world, albeit in Gothic language. It was a biting satire that Romero lost over time; i.e., as he slowly commercialized his own zombies, falling victim to the Hollywood-Communist paradox of raising too much money to critique capital later. But at the time, he was speaking to a common sentiment regarding American superiority in decline: the entire world as eating itself felt at home!

Yet, Night still contained the fascist torturers, moderate “survivors” and victimized tortured in its own tale of inclusive chaos: us-versus-them through a siege, Jim the black man’s house surrounded by the living dead of all sorts; i.e., as an alienated form of what The Birth of a Nation (1915) spectacularly and spuriously warned against, over fifty years previous—slave revolt (with Star Wars valorizing the same perspective from a white Indian narrative overwhelmed by superior imperial numbers).

This time, though, we’re shown a black man acting to some degree like a white Indian (the ostensible Vietnam vet, clutching his repeater and defending his home, only to be shot at the end of the film)—not a token plant, per se, but nevertheless operating usefully through the argument of survival that historically leads to tokenism: us-versus-them violence. In the end, Jim is killed by the cops—denying survival, thus potential assimilation, post-apocalypse. Simply put, he gets got.

To that, Romero’s story feels Afrocentric instead of Afronormative, insofar as “black” focuses on that particular minority group instead of others in America enduring similar plights together. Black culture in America, then, is routinely isolated, forced to face the bleak reality that it has become alienated from its own culture and history as forgotten, but returning fearsomely during times of crisis to face alone (a debatably tokenized, race-traitor gimmick, insofar as those offering aid within black culture, like the Nation of Islam, establish something of a monopoly on the subject while always waiting to act on larger systemic issues; e.g., Louis Farrakhan stonewalling and eventually having a hand in silencing Malcolm X[5]). It’s not a question of if, but when.

All the while, a pointed lack of solidarity is felt, feeling at times somewhat standoffish like Jim is (while this partially constitutes a flaw of Romero’s emphasis on a simple binary that reduces to white America and African America, such divisions extend to the latter group as focusing mostly on themselves as exclusively oppressed by the White Man; i.e., historically being divided from other marginalized groups as a matter of shattered revolutionary discourse). People can get touchy if you speak about their groups’ issues as part of a larger struggle (which these victims sometimes forget), which is why a pedagogy of the oppressed should respect what they say as historical. But granting them impunity from criticism by ignoring tokenism is sheer folly (more on this in part three of the subchapter when we look at Morrison and Howard Zinn).

In Romero’s case, Jim is still treated as human, though. In canonical apocalypse narratives, the zombie is not humanized at all—merely existing within a vague presence of “corruption” that must be rooted out while fertilizing worker mind with future abject dogmas; i.e., white-moderate apologetics for state abuse by recuperating Romero. By extension, the constant threat of state collapse mid-corruption is designed to weaken worker imaginations; it historically-materially doesn’t lead to Communism because imagination-deprived workers coerced by reactionaries will leap to fascism, which supports Capitalism in tokenized forms we’ve already discussed (re: the Black Nazi effect). But under it, even when there is no open sex, such monsters demonize sex as black per the settler-colonial binary whenever it becomes loosened from outright state control: the proverbial babe in the wilderness, forced to survive under decayed rudiments of settler-colonial territorialism and extermination rhetoric; i.e., raw butchery as a spectacle to voyeuristically behold under duress (a captive audience held at gunpoint, below): “‘Come and see,’ then obey me, child! Attack the zombie!”

The consequences of this child-soldier recruitment through Gothic media—its confusion of safety and harm, pleasure and harmful-to-non-harmful pain, etc—are frankly too broad to easily encompass, which the rest of the “Bad Dreams” chapter will holistically and patiently explore the effects of; i.e., across different genres, texts, groups of people, places, etc: from the zombie person as emblematic of genocide to the zombie house as the source for it, and so on. For now, though, we’re focusing predominantly on women, specifically white cis-het women to start with, and shall branch out from there!

To that, such damsels-in-distress (whatever the sex or gender) embody another aspect of Birth of a Nation carried into the present: the white woman (often a virgin) threatened with black (non-white) rape and other unspeakable, taboo things by the rebelling slave as always a being for which societal death is a paradoxical matter of existence; i.e., they are property first in the eyes of the state, their humanity something to debate through force: a problem to solve by asking questions with final solutions (re: the Jewish Question) that can be leveled at any victim of a settler-colonial project. This includes by proxy, as America (a settler colony) currently does with Israel and other such places fighting its wars for it: destabilize and feed within a territory emptied of order.

Granted, such dogma goes back to the Christian doctrine that moved Columbus (and others like him who came after his experiments) to butcher the Indigenous peoples of the Americas (and the Irish in Great Britain). But such ethnocentrism (and all the canonical essentialism that goes with it—biological, geographical or otherwise) crystalized through Birth of a Nation into later survival stories built on the same basic premise: us-versus-them against a non-white menace per the settler-colonial model, which can tokenize to punch down, Red-Scare-style, against zombie labor regardless of skin color (as Jim demonstrates).

In other words, any division serves profit, insofar as the undead are something to battle with and against for the state; i.e., big or small, one or many as part of the same umbrella force; e.g., the Night King’s hordes from Game of Thrones intimating Tolkien’s own problematic ideas of corruption as demanding a same-old return to tradition through fiery purification—a graveyard purge and a return to strength. It bears repeating that the idea suffuses gaming culture as mostly white/tokenized (Foreign Man in a Foreign Land’s “Racism in Gaming,” 2023). However, stories like Left 4 Dead weren’t shy about romanticizing that before such Internet forums came to be; i.e., turning the teenage white heroine, Zoey, into a de facto cop calling herself a survivor while stripping her down and handing her a gun: less an undercover cop and more an uncovered, underage one stuck in her underwear/birthday suit (re: “kissing up, punching down”).

(exhibit 34da: Top left, artist: unknown; top-right: “Zoey nude mod“; bottom-left: Cosplay Erotica. Zoey from Left 4 Dead. Keeping with the infantilized damsel-in-distress, she “is referred to as ‘teenangst’ in [the game’s] textures and ‘teengirl’ in [its] sound resources,” source: Fandom. While described by Andrea Wicklund as “an everyday young woman who everyone can relate to,” Zoey is conspicuously white, but also sexualized and infantilized, in-game and out; although she has no set age, the game’s paratextual materials describe her as a young college [middle-class] student forced to kill her own father after her mother bites him and tries to kill Zoey—i.e., the decay of the nuclear family structure and daddy issues [the Elektra complex, an inversion of Freud’s Oedipus complex[6]] rolled into one.)

This isn’t unique to Left 4 Dead. Valve’s insistence on centering heroism around white/tokenized characters goes back to 1997’s Half-life, with Gordon Freeman basically being the Nazi scientist stuck in a zombie-like hell of his own making (and bearing a curious likeness to Gabe Newell puffing himself up as the hero[7], mid-escapism). Even so, characters like Zoey—effectively naked even with their clothes technically on (re: Segewick’s imagery of the surface)—can still be reclaimed through iconoclastic media and sex-positive exhibitionism as addressing lived trauma; i.e., in ways that reverse abjection through forbidden sex as a matter of Gothic theatre per ludo-Gothic BDSM. Said BDSM offers playfully humanizing reflections on zombies and their associate trauma intimating in state workers’ personal lives, the latter being informed by the wider world and its propaganda around them threatening “rape” as something to put into kayfabe-style quotes (so-called “big dick energy” with a racialized flavor under Cartesian arguments: the BBC or the BBW as porn tropes bleeding into media at large). In short, there’s a genuine xenophilic element that feels “necrophilic” by virtue of hugging Medusa-as-undead during the dialectic of the alien: as one body or many (“riding the train,” as it were), with implied (or vivid, abject) gore sometimes part of the show. Consent is what matters, here!

(artist: Super Phazed)

Sadly such things are a myth in Gothic canon, which retreats from the zombie as automatically and unironically rapacious (versus the white people “surviving” against them). Sold to workers in xenophobic zombie narratives that play out like bad dreams, the sanctioned, ritualized torture and killing of anyone inside the state of exception, mid-revelation, becomes not only endemic, but sacred to these bad dreams: “doing it raw” as something to confuse pleasure and pain as a psychosexual survival response; i.e., to close off with a Black Veil, Radcliffe-style, then tease “having sex” as unironically violent (re: demon lovers), the rape-in-question truthfully completed with bullets, knives and similar knife-dick implements against states targets. These dogmatic threat displays showcase extreme, abattoir-style gore and mutilation as a less-than-veiled argument of rape against state targets (e.g., gore wizard, Tom Savini, taking both barrels of a shotgun to the face in the 1980 version of Maniac, next page). Said targets classically don’t like that very much and respond in kind: tearing their attackers limb from limb using their bare hands (with guns historically being denied to rebelling slaves)!

Because zombie canon capitalizes on the subterfuge trifecta (displace, dissociate, disseminate), privileged witnesses will conflate state abuse with their own normalized realms of experience: videogames, TV shows and/or movies, etc, as a kind of abject, visual sewer to frame everything in notably disgusting terms. There’s clearly a proletarian power to this exposure, grossing the middle class out to paralyze them, thus keeping them at bay. For the elite and their proponents, though, zombies work in this manner to accomplish a perverse kind of strawman; i.e., they exist precisely because they threaten “vulnerable parties” (code for white people, but especially women), thus must be killed to tell the story and often as grossly as possible: torture porn. Such porn, under canon, evokes many of its racialized, psychosexual elements even when all the people onscreen are visibly white:

Note: Rape takes many forms besides sexual violence (though the Gothic is generally psychosexual, merging the two). Even so, I haven’t spent too much time talking about unironic rape and dismemberment in its most vividly naked forms. I’d like to address why below and still take the time to talk about some of the more delicate/touchy elements to such rape fantasies (and tokenism) as they present in Gothic fiction verging on zombie-esque extremes. —Perse

(exhibit 34b: I’m a proud gorehound, but as stated at the start of each book [“What I Won’t Exhibit”] generally I don’t like to combine sex and gore in my collage exhibits. It’s just… not my bag. That being said, I’d be remiss in ignoring the “almost holy” approach to creature features having a strong psychosexual flavor [especially zombies]. Stories like Alien project the zombie rape fantasy into “outer space,” using actual offal in veritable “gore wars” of one-upmanship to make their point. But just as often, movies like Maniac [a very trashy ’80s number, above] bring this crude class of abject puns squarely down to Earth. Even if the genitals are not openly involved during the rape, there’s a neoconservative element to it as a nonetheless worst-case scenario: the couple sitting in a parked car, violently accosted by a weirdo with a gun as covetous towards but also policing of their extramarital affairs! “Don’t do this or Zofloya will getcha!”

Such alienation and fetishization is already a regular consequence of capital, which the movie turns into a lethal form of roleplay. It celebrates the hyphenation of sex and violence, pinning such thrill kills on non-white, or at least functionally black, banditti-grade scapegoats when, point-in-fact, most murders and rapes are intraracial. Even so, cops still use this as an excuse to crackdown on non-white populations even more; i.e., to tighten the yoke of an increasingly militarized police force on all parties involved, claiming as they do to “protect” white women [and gentrified people of color] as a) having the money for their services, and b) adhering to the settler-colonial model as swayed most notably by monetary exchange.

By extension, such class, racial and cultural devices translate readily into Gothic fiction’s criminal hauntologies [a topic we’ll explore much more in Volume Three]: the serial killer as a kind of vampire, more often than not, but also a zombie lurking in dark spaces—all while threatening infantilized white women with rape as synonymous with sex and murder [conveniently ignoring the fact that most women are abused by their husbands, not random strangers during thrill kills and/or rapes]. In short, it constitutes a kind of “battered housewife syndrome,” relying on women who have been abused to view sex as unironically violent in ways they can revisit on a vague dark scapegoat—not their actual abusers, but generally a minority group to safely punch down against [often by proxy] for the systemic harm they normally experience on a day-to-day basis: “Any free woman in an unfree society will always be a monster.” Angela Carter basically nailed the TERF motto with that one, but it applies to any kind of female-wielded bigotry under the sun!

In other words, it’s incredibly common for middle-class women to prey on people with less privilege by leaning into harmful stereotypes under the same protection racket; i.e., from the POV of a cop’s wife as “queen bee” [earlier in this volume]:

good BDSM is often haunted by patriarchal state abuse (re: Man Box, which we’ll pointedly interrogate in Volume Three); e.g., the disordered thinking of narcissistic women abusing their own children and servants: trauma begets trauma. […] White women tokenize, too (albeit from a liminal staging point), praying on others through their ability to gatekeep fantasies of exploitation to suit themselves. 

It’s a kind of “vindictive plantation fantasy” that sees post-Civil-War white women triangulating against their husband or father’s enemies, thereby doing a lot more to prey on those they still treat as servants [“the help”] or threats versus equals; i.e., the Gothic sort, meaning dated, ostensibly foreign [“dark”] and having sticky fingers/questionable virtues [re: Dacre’s Zofloya literally being a black servant standing in for the devil to tempt a white woman with poison]. It’s pimping the slave, endorsing a [again, pardon the expression] “jungle fever” for a white mistress getting her jollies [e.g., Mistress Epps from Twelve Years a Slave (2013), above].

Racism is centuries old, as are these kinds of intersecting class and racial tensions, but they haven’t gone anywhere; i.e., cemented within generational signifieds that pass varying degrees of racial bigotry down from feminism’s oldest forms to its increasingly decayed variants dressed up as liberation through rape—from radical authors like Mary Wollstonecraft [or her famous daughter] to a female regressive tendency to deny rebellion and push for a privileged few women to have the right to even create literature at all… provided they toe the line: from Neo-Gothic contemporaries like Ann Radcliffe, followed by the likes of Charlotte Brontë to Susan B. Anthony to J.K. Rowling, but also a centuries-spanning gradient of traitorous characters like Portia from The Merchant of Venice or Clarice Starling as lawyers or cops[8] [and too many subjugated Amazons to list]. It’s certainly true that some of these women are written by men, and I would argue those who sell out and police others in a half-real sense are following a very old patriarchal mindset we’d now call Man Box; e.g., Alien having a strong-if-abjected [onto the xenomorph, instead of Parker, the token black man] racist flavor built on Joseph Conrad’s spectres thereof, but Romero himself resorting to blackface to film his scenes of police brutality in Dawn of the Dead [more on that in a bit].

Inside the Shadow of Pygmalion, then, it’s precisely white women [and token examples] acting like men having formerly suffered at the hands of these men [with homophobia and corporal punishment being inherited by African Americans through gospel-class survival tactics]… only to ape their oppressor to “keep their spot” by making these kinds of Gothic arguments: women get raped by criminals, which really is just a more pedestrian label for “zombie” [with an apocalypse effectively being a crime wave committed by poor people, the gays, and racial minorities but especially black and brown people]. You don’t become a billionaire [male or female] without leaning into and effectively farming and peddling these stereotypes, in effect raping the zombie as code for a great many things; e.g., a monster from outer space, a devil worshipper and/or a gang member with a white bride and bastard baby that turns into a zombie [Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead being quite racist in that respect, below], etc.

“White girls, they’ll get you every time!” Jordan Peele’s black female detective jokes in Get Out [2017]. But there’s a sobering reality behind the gag:

“White liberal racism” has been accurately pinpointed as the movie’s symbolic Big Bad, the villain that, when left unchecked, will destroy us all. But another undeniable facet of that beast—in fact, perhaps, the most crucial part of it all—can be whittled down even further to, simply: white women (source: Aisha Harris’ “The Most Terrifying Villain in Get Out Is White Womanhood,” 2017). 

And the reality of such a proposal is assimilation; i.e., the undeniable fact that battered housewives [and good little girls] who embed themselves in their abusive families generally take on qualities of the abuser [notable exception: Alice from The People Under the Stairs (1991), next page, but she was “adopted” into a false family]. But that’s still something future victims have to contend with! Otherwise, we’ve just ignoring what these people become: abusers. No one is immune to that, especially if they get you while you’re young! What’s more, abuse isn’t just cartoon Nazi evil; white moderates [and tokenism, it really must be said; re: Peele, sadly enough] have challenged civil rights and universal equality for as long as such battles have been fought [re: “Letter from Birmingham Jail“]—i.e., people scared of being racist precisely because they’re just as predatory as their openly bigoted cousins.

In such matters—and from people who are basically Hollywood royalty—the words “broken clock,” “perfidious,” “appeaser” and “hypocrite” might leap to mind. Except it doesn’t matter if Peele stands with Israel, making him functionally a Zionist [re: “Jordan Peele Faces Backlash“]; he’s still right about white moderacy sucking balls [though he neglects to mention his own functionally white moderacy as a tokenized black “progressive” ignominiously defending Israel and its settler colony project, in effect making him a black Nazi ipso facto]. Simply put, white women are some of the biggest, shameless gatekeepers of these stories and real life, capitalizing on the status quo to enrich themselves by keeping it the same [refer to Volume Zero if you want to see me take Radcliffe and true crime to task].

The same goes for any token cop/auteur. We have to challenge this framing of power [thus rape] in zombie stories, which generally all but guarantees a GNC component defending itself from TERFs, SWERFs, what-have-you [we’ll go over this much more in Volume Three] as racially inclusive from childhood: stopping racism [and other bigotries/normativities] by a) becoming genuine, good-faith friends with oppressed groups, and b) both listening to and holding them accountable; i.e., per a pedagogy of the oppressed where you find similarity amid difference, thus can heal from police violence by standing against it as a holistic matter of public discourse [e.g., John Singleton talking about “black skin, white masks” (token cops) in Boyz n the Hood (1991) by performing internalized bigotry during black-on-black police brutality onscreen].

In short, horror has room for such things and has had far earlier than Wes Craven [e.g., Charles Chesnutt’s The Morrow of Tradition [1901] but also arguably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [if read through a postcolonial lens] and certainly Théodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” [released the same year as Shelley’s novel—1818].)

White and black are a function under settler-colonial models. In turn, canonical rituals that unironically defend the status quo through these models invariably celebrate power abuse (rape) against abject beings through police agents (and, by extension, detectives—more on them in the Demons Module); i.e., through extreme, weaponized force as righteous, but also fun, valid, and vital to a variety of traitors. It’s hard to survey everything because it all goes into the same dark crucible, but hopefully the above exhibit should touch on some of these interactions through Gothic poetics; i.e., their internalized bigotries, guilt trips, various syndromes, etc. We didn’t have time to explore Orientalism above, but for a neat example of an anti-war narrative about that, consider Godzilla Minus One (2023): a regenerating monstrous-feminine (a reckoning-style force of nature with zombie-like properties) as told from a kamikaze pilot’s demoralized, disillusioned perspective. It’s pretty good stuff!

The reality remains, though: the traitors-in-question concern functioning as white and manly within the settler-colonial, middle-class promise of elevation to even higher spheres; i.e., becoming capitalists[9] through billionaire Marxism as a classically white male grift (re: Newell, but also Bill Gates, James Cameron, and John Romero, etc, profiting off rape and war by playing both sides through computer media and parallel texts): guns, vehicles, bombs, and knives, etc, as sexualized through fetishized settler-colonial violence against zombies, or other monsters than serve a zombie-like umbrella role when Hell comes to Earth; e.g., the pixelated demon gore of Doom II: Hell on Earth threatening a demonic form of the zombie apocalypse: an invasion (which returns again and again in future forms of the franchise, below, hiding fascist rhetoric behind increasingly hyperbolic, blind-parody obscurantism/escapist “apolitical” dogwhistles: “It’s ‘can’t’ be fascist because it’s silly!”).

(artist: Robert Sammelin)

Egregore variation aside, it’s all one big geek show designed to gross you out in ways that don’t have Matthew Lewis’ irony (to be honest, Savini’s work is excellent, but his usage is hit-or-miss). Regardless of the storytelling format, these killing devices become fetishized, fascist implements of capital punishment as instrumental to the state’s preservation during a perceived “dying” period—one in which the colonial binary becomes radicalized. The whole ordeal is merely an invitation to suspend human rights during a power vacuum tied to Capitalism functioning as normal; the rot and its subsequent debridement is built into the system as something to inherit and carry forward by white/token survivors.

Armed with the tools needed to kill the state’s enemies, the survivors of a canonical zombie apocalypse are doing what Robert Neville from I Am Legend did (minus that story’s ironic twist) back in 1954: waging war against a “new” form of life he fears, but also cuts up, studies and catalogues. Echoing Frankenstein, such automated Cartesian violence against the abject counterfeit becomes a knee-jerk defense of the state as dying for the umpteenth time—consolidating strength brought upon by regular political/economic instability (an intrinsic function of Capitalism). Equally common is the worshipping of weaponized violence through the manufacture trifecta (scarcity, conflict, consent). Material conditions plummet, as a result; life grows cheap and pacified middle-class workers—having “consented” to Capitalism as the end all, be all by accident of birth—become embroiled in a circuitous ploy: punch Medusa/the ghost of the counterfeit back to Hell.

(artist: KisX3D)

Carried out by those who kill, “survivors” like Zoey (not just the girl, herself, but Jill Valentine [next page] and others[10] outside of overtly marketed zombie stories) become the real unironic monsters; i.e., extending their pre-war privilege and positions into the apocalypse. In turn, these pacified workers invoke the cult of machismo as a terrible call to arms; i.e., the right to use their guns, knives and bombs on other humans, all in the name of regulating sex and force to defend white from black in service to profit (e.g., rape/captive fantasies): defend yourself, vigilante-style, as threatened by the non-white dead with legitimate grievances (what MLK and company called “the race[11] problem”).

Per stolen generations and lost land, such dead are routinely portrayed as “vengeful” (with rape epidemic screeds being an old conservative tactic [re: the Wilmington Massacre of 1898] whose tokenism specifically targets white women, triangulating them in actively violent, TERF-like ways; i.e., built on Ann Radcliffe’s earlier, passive-aggressive fearmongering against other minorities while preying on them in complicit cryptonymies’ restless barriers, blindfolds, castles, etc): in the wasteland as Gothic (e.g., Furiosa’s racoon-style eyeliner). Rape is power abuse; to critique said abuse as farmed under capital, you must go where power-as-performance is, and face its undead exploitation in ways you can inject irony (and other things) into: by being naughty as a sex-positive way of showing you know what you’re doing to avoid unironic zombie-esque violence during calculated risk as something to bastardize and make less rapey (the rape fantasies of the Neo-Gothic period reflecting on the Dark Ages as something to rescue from itself in pseudo-historical stories).

(artist: Devilhs)

Such knowledge checks include subverting “zombies” as psychosexual symbols of reactive cannibalism; i.e., a given instance partly intimating a settler-colonial past and its atrocities returning to an origin of trauma (e.g., the lack of food in Cambodia leading to cannibalism and mass murder, which we’ll explore in a moment), but also the mechanized “mouth” of the state cannibalizing itself through the proxy of zombie war fueled by American industries: as geared towards owner/worker division, efficient profit and infinite growth per military expansionism (often expressed in dry, neutral-sounding language; e.g., “liquidated,” “aggressive litigation,” “made redundant,” “extreme prejudice,” etc).

Here, the state is undead and hungry for workers who also become undead within the state of exception, which must then be enforced through legitimate state violence dehumanizing some aspect of the harvest—with white women “humanized” to such a degree as to compel them to fight back against the usual dehumanized groups; e.g., African Americans a) turned into desperate, starving poachers of their own redlined, transplanted “homelands” (on American soil, that is), and b) having legitimate grievances against some white women as complicit in said redlining scheme/xenophobic rape fictions profiting off so-called (again, excuse the expression) “jungle fever.” All of this can be interrogated as a matter of ludo-Gothic BDSM provided we actually listen to our playmates (whoever they are) as a matter of social-sexual discourse, but also “reading the room”; i.e., as a mixture of tableau and code: putting “rape” in quotes, whatever form the export takes!

To that, guns are another Americanized export playing into the larger zombie dialog as globalized. As such, gun violence—while famously emanating from America and its police-state violence—has a nationalized flavor according to where the guns come from: the AK from Russia, the M16 from North America, the Steyr AUG from Austria, etc (which extends from the “guild function” of medieval, privatized warfare translated to NATO and current-day conglomerates). While these weapons can be adopted and customized for use elsewhere, guns are toys with a specific national function for non-rebellious (white/tokenized middle-class) users: as advertisements for their country of origin, but also its defense when “threatened.” Each has its own history—of being used in particular wars against particular “undead” peoples by the state, the former eventually returning from the grave when Imperialism comes home to empire; i.e., to violently wrestle sexual control (and other forms of labor and materials/Gothic poetics) away from the elite.

In the dreamlike unfolding of zombie narratives, then, the genocided dead return from the earth; in turn, our aforementioned guns emerge like fabled Excalibur to slay the “kingdom’s” enemies, which is precisely what the state wants people to think: “Zombies are abject. Do not humanize them, but see us as your salvation. Now pick up a gun and pop some heads!”

Sex-positive or not, decapitation is literally part of the zombie apocalypse dialog at this point; i.e., you can’t really say much about such things without making a point of it, but—just as often—must play with such memento mori yourselves as a potential means of camp: cops and victims, cowboys and Indians, Montagues and Capulets, the Jets and the Sharks, etc, as something to recognize in popular media without repeating its curse-like, both-houses violence in real life; e.g., the “looter shooter” model of Fallout and similar postapocalypse style exercises (which crank the survival up after the initial collapse—more on that when we examine The Last of Us, next page). For the target audience, decapitation is classically a reward, the “money shot” in such stories; per Sarkeesian, enjoy the fantasy but do not endorse its reifying against any victim of the state (though if you punch a Nazi, I won’t stop you).

(source: Mantas’ “I Just Made the Best Stealth Game in Fallout 4,” 2022)

Under neoliberal Capitalism, then, fascism is just another toy to throw on the pile—the medievalized, overtly genocidal exploitation of workers along sexually dimorphic, xenophobic lines (Cartesian thought per setter-colonialism) that already exist everywhere in heteronormative media. Even if sex isn’t actively discussed in zombie invasion scenarios, it is presented in ways that glorify violence through traditional gender roles that point to America’s settler-colonial past: a “Go West!” imperative to young men, but also their pioneer wives and Winchester rifles (crack-shots in their own right, who kill Native Americans while invading their land to make homes for white farmers and their children[12]).

During a prophesized return to this federalist framework, those having fallen under the state of exception in earlier times suddenly become targets of state violence again; i.e., a “new” underclass of workers carrying all the usual suspects under Capitalism, whether in open decay or not (the state is always in decay but the crisis will present as more or less so depending on the circumstances): Native Americans, white allies and the poor, as well as peoples of color, ethnic minorities and queer persons—in short, those highlighted by Howard Zinn as having been exploited by America’s ruling elite all along. As we’ll explore in part two of this subchapter (after we’ve covered some more examples of so-called “bad dreams”), such diversity-amid-intersectional-solidarity isn’t the end-goal but a point of praxis from now until the end of time. Diversity is strength; divided, we (workers and nature) become conquered, yet again, as monstrous-feminine.

(artist: Kent Monkman)

While hardly new, the persistence of the canonical zombie narrative endures alongside the structure that habitually enforces it. For example, I recently watched the first episode of The Last of Us (2023), whose postapocalyptic zombie story defaults to preapocalyptic violence, but also codifies it in retro-future language. It treats Communism less as an impossibility and more as a trend of nonexistence through an audience that defaults to pro-capitalist, eco-fascist fantasies in the face of societal unrest; re: Capitalist Realism in action.

The “free” market, then, responds to what sells according to those who own it, the latter manufacturing supply and demand by catering to a wider demographic of conservative viewers who regularly pay out according to how they feel about Capitalism a priori. Not only is this an appeal to the majority for profit; the feelings of the majority extend to “Communists” as things to zombify by the elite into vaguely fearsome, moving targets. For many Americans, Communists are like zombies, their ideas informed by real-world examples funneled through a particular lens: rioting is bad and rioters must be shot, including their leaders (called “bosses” in videogames). Otherwise, foreign genocides like Vietnam or Cambodia could happen again, except this time the war will be lost at home! It’s Red Scare.

American canon is patently designed to “zombify” consumers, making people forget that rioting is a pro-labor tactic (re: what Martin Luther King called, “the language of the unheard“). It does this using fear and dogma, presenting rioters as undead terrorists shambling out of the nightmare past (re: Joseph Crawford’s argument of “terrorism” being a carry-over from the French Revolution, used to discourage worker rebellions in favor of continued nation-state hegemony). Applied over time, canon infects pro-labor sentiments with bourgeois misinformation infused with real-world geopolitics, allowing local police states to thrive in the hauntological shadow of displaced (neo)colonial atrocities; e.g., Cambodia. Not only do these linger in displaced markers long after the initial xenophobic violence has ceased; their inception is complicated mid-genesis by obscurantism, the fog of war and political sectarianism to prevent xenophilia from taking root.

For example, the now-famous killing fields of Cambodia were implemented in multiple stages by multiple players. While the sole arbiter might seem to be Pol Pot—a petit-bourgeois con man bastardizing Marx’ ideas to wrestle power from the American-backed regime in Cambodia during the Cambodian Civil War (The People Profiles, 2022)—dictators are either installed or tolerated by global superpowers whose “tunneling effect” leaves many average citizens completely unaware of the situation (say nothing of neoliberal “fogs of war” that deny dissident journalists access to allied war zones).

Indeed, just as top party officials in Nazi Germany were privy to the Holocaust in ways the average citizen, soldier, scientist or middle-management personnel were not, many American politicians during the mid-1970s took sides over Cambodia by virtue of which nations were aligned with whom (the Vietnamese being seen as “more dangerous” [to American foreign interests] than the Khmer Rouge, by virtue of the Vietcong’s alliance with the Soviets during and after the Vietnam War); American intellectuals, meanwhile, questioned that a genocide in Cambodia was even taking place, subsisting on scraps of information that resisted quantification and assembly at every turn (as necrometrics tend to do). This resistance continues even when access to the “undead” portraits of the victims are gained, but also numerous shrines filled with their forgotten skulls[13] and bones as something to return to: what actual victims of genocide survived (not white middle-class people playing the white Indian).

(exhibit 35a: Top: photos of Khmer prison camp victims, source; bottom: “Meo Soknen, 13, stands inside a small shrine full of human bones and skulls, all victims of the Khmer Rouge. The small shrine, located 27 kilometers south of Phnom Penh, is one of many out-of-the-way-and-forgotten monuments to the ‘Killing Fields,'” source. The price of xenophobia is a refusal to love the “zombie,” the state fulfilling the prophecy of apocalypse within killing fields by littering them with the bones of the uncountable state’s victims: dirt farming for skeletons.)

Regarding Cambodia and its own abused population, it should come as no surprise that the United States had already killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians in the early 1970s (as many as 800,000, according to Nick Gier). Cartesian violence isn’t just bombs; it’s the gatekeeper’s rationalizing of violence from seemingly “reasonable” sources during ironic state apologetics.

For example, Noam Chomsky—an outspoken critic of misinformation and the United States—remained incredibly skeptical of reports about the Cambodian genocide emerging in the mid ’70s, questioning the new regime’s early death numbers far more than the underreported figures that came after the initial killings, David Bleacher writes in, “How the West Missed the Horrors of Cambodia” (2017):

Writing about the events in Cambodia in the latter half of the ’70s with co-author Edward Herman, Chomsky accused the American media and scholars who reported on the killings committed by the Khmer Rouge of producing atrocity propaganda. The authors claimed that the mainstream were all too eager to accept, without adequate evidence, claims about horrible deeds that were attributed to the Khmer Rouge. [In doing so, both men] made the indisputable claim that conservatives would use reports about abuses occurring in Cambodia to claim that they had been right all along about the Vietnam War. To this day, Chomsky claims he was simply assessing the evidence available at the time. [… He] and Herman were far less critical of accounts of post-1975 Cambodia that described an enlightened and humane polity. They praised George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter’s now discredited book, discussed below, as a carefully researched work that [spuriously] demonstrated the successes of the new regime in overcoming the devastating results American military action had on Cambodia as it became a sideshow in the Vietnam War (source).

Defending the Khmer Rouge wound up being a giant mistake, one Chomsky has refused to apologize for decades after the fact (for a more thorough detailing of Chomsky’s overall approach, consider Bruce Sharp’s lengthy writeup on The Mekong Network, 2023). I don’t condone Bleacher’s veneration of George Orwell “getting it right,” but I also doubt it would have killed Chomsky to admit that he had been wrong.

Instead, Chomsky falls embarrassingly within George Orwell’s comments about nationalism, “[the nationalist] does not only not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity to not even hear about them.” While being a terrible person himself, Orwell had—like Freud or Nietzsche—arguably touched upon a larger truth when he wrote that statement. Nation-states need to be challenged in ways that allow for self-reflection, including transmuting the canonical zombie into iconoclastic forms that reflect on our collective past errors when assessing genocide. This includes Chomsky but also us.

While canonical media lacks comprehensive introspection and nuance by design, it is nonetheless rife with monstrous symbols and war-time scenarios associated with geopolitical events and their lasting cultural attitudes. Mention “zombies” to Americans, and older people will think of international incidents like Cambodia—specifically the American canonical framing whose subterfuge continues to disguise the dialectical-material realities that reliably lead to genocide: “No Capitalism or American-deployed bombs here, only killer farmer zombies (which neoliberal centrism dogwhistles towards with its own nation pastiche: the green-skinned “monster peasant” from Brazil, Blanka, literally wearing hillbilly overalls in SF6 [2023]—what Dutch from Predator would call “a half-assed mountain boy.” More on that in Volume Three, Chapter Five; exhibit 104c).”

In turn, everything else is swept aside by the monster—the escaped slave (note the shackles)—running towards you out of the white-owned jungle’s banana republic: the electric dead threatening ostensibly tax-paying survivors during a canonically black-and-white, us-versus-them argument; i.e., home as inside-outside, residents as correct-incorrect during what’s essentially a foreign plot. In zombie stories, it translates to racist, settler-colonial vaudeville theatrically punching down against the Modern Prometheus for seemingly “stealing” their lightning (their power, their Zeus-like “thunder”) from the elite and the middle-class. The person of color (especially the non-American person of color) becomes an extended being under imperial circumstances coming home. They’re treated as alien, but also anathema, reprobate, and doomed under police rule extending to the deputized middle class acting as survivors against rampaging beasts, orcs, monkeys green with envy and trauma, a panther threatening Jane with captivity and rape (who must be rescued by Tarzan, a white Indian). Even calling them “survivors” implies they must survive against people for whom Blanka (and similar characters) historically represent. It’s incredibly racist (and anyone who says otherwise is fascist, simple as that).

 (source: Fandom)

Carceral hauntology participates in the transgenerational curse of zombie canon, clouding cultural hindsight by virtue of recursive nostalgia: the arrival of the zombie, thus cannibal Imperialism, as something to celebrate insofar as open violence is concerned. For example, breathe the word “zombie” to younger people already exposed to uncritical narratives from the genre and they’ll automatically think of the zombie as a moving target, not a victim: echoes of Cambodia, Vietnam and other American-sponsored disasters, but also proletarian movements resisting the state’s abuse committed at home; e.g., the Civil Rights Movement that Romero tried to humanize through a zombie narrative.

Such stories are made to lobotomize people at a young age (often through videogames, and before that movies, novels and religious documents); lobotomized children will hop to it as child soldiers usually do, indifferently accepting vigilante, fascist violence towards the “terrorist” zombie as not only vital, but fun (their erasure being a “blank slate” tactic common within ethnic cleansings and state crackdowns against labor). Anti-labor stems from canonical appropriation of the zombie symbol, but also older, fearful Americans decorating “their” homes with reactionary gargoyles like an imperiled fortress—their poetics limited to mere window-dressing but nevertheless incredibly visible (e.g., flags or mantlepiece guns). Over time, a settler-colonial mindset has set in: “This is our mall!” snarled for the state by Americanized kids killing kids (white-on-black, black-on-black, etc).

While this is generally a middle-class gimmick, it’s common to abject this recruitment onto far away victims of capital (which Africa very much is), but the reality is, it starts in America as having mastered what Columbus started. Columbus was a cunt, but so is America and all it stands for genocide because America is a settler colony that engenders such atrocities to defend itself while acting exceptionally good about it in the name of capital. Children absorb information, thus dogma, far faster than adults do—in short, being easier to train. Middle-class child soldiers, then, make for the easiest victims and abusers towards each other and especially less fortunate children elsewhere; i.e., in the Global South, who the North weaponize against and who, themselves, become weaponized in cruel capitalist schemes of territory and conquest completely outside their control (“like taking candy from a baby!”): the rise of endemic warlords simply another form of fascism that emerges abroad (and is used to justify future invasions into these lands again by American cops bringing law and order to neo-colonized lands depicted as black and savage).

(source)

As we shall keep exploring the deeper into the chapter we go (and hopefully subvert if we’re able), “home” is the casualty of such dogma, but also empathy and children in pursuit of a so-called “simpler time” (a nostalgic us-versus-them to defend from dissidents, heretics, zombies treated as “looking human,” blending in); i.e., empathy and defense of the home-in-decay (settler-colonial territories projected onto local residences) becoming a disastrous blame game punching the zombie to achieve profit as a crude but desired result. Over time, the casualty of victimized children extends into adulthood, the poor little fuckers growing up to become bullies of the worst sort: child killers, William-Golding-style. Per the Gothic’s process of abjection, this happens in cartographic replicas of the home, on a domestic level, but also abroad for much the same reasons: maps and enemies (obstacles)—their combined idea to keep power precisely where it is, pure and simple, by turning workers on themselves; i.e., the state of exception presented as home defense from evil, child-like and infantilized forces to “nip in the bud” (the foreign plot inside the home); e.g., Zionism (Bad Empanada Live’s “Israel Added to UN CHILD MURDER List, Alongside ISIS, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram,” 2024).

To be honest, there’s no way to really camp something like the Holocaust; i.e., when it’s shown “as is,” you can only show it as a historical event (or elude to such things in displaced forms; e.g., Star Wars’ “a long time ago and in a galaxy far, far away….”). If someone wants to camp their own abuse, that’s their prerogative, but that’s a testimony meant to achieve catharsis by speaking out; e.g., me camping my own rape and survival sex work (which we’ll get to) to find my path through life but also my voice. But this particular irony happens by voicing our oppression according to things we also cannot choose (for me, being trans), thus do whatever we can to change our environment as a matter of political action; i.e., from my PhD: “We camp things because we must!” But again, this is generally as an element of marginalized testimony towards things out of our control that actually affect us by virtue of the state isolating and attacking us as monstrous-feminine, alien.

By comparison, the so-called “apolitical” behaviors of reactionaries and moderates (usually white cis-het men) amount to Peter Pan syndrome trapping them in the past as a retro-future as dead, canceled—its fatal nostalgia a bizarrely tragic cloaking device they use to divide, then colonize Gothic media (e.g., Doom), Gamergate-style, and deprive it of openly political voices that speak to anything but their own sheltered lives. They act imperiled, but generally aren’t insofar as their abuse (which generally is far less systemic) is something they detach, bury and expect others to do the same (fascists recruit from broken homes; e.g., American History X [1998], above)! They refuse to associate with anything openly political. In turn, they pointedly foment cryptofascist conspiracies per false rebellion (re: Parenti) that swap the bourgeoisie for a cabal of imaginary “globalist” overlords making their favorite videogame heroine “less sexy”; i.e., “wokeness” and “cultural Marxism” being updated forms of the Jewish conspiracy in the modern day taken from the backstabbing Jew dogma of Nazi Germany’s own propaganda mills.

Proponents thereof blame activism (a dogwhistle for “the Left”) as “ruining movies, videogames,” etc, by “needlessly complicating” them vis-à-vis canon’s simpler time argument as “better” (re: the absence of tension, MLK’s “negative peace”); i.e., campily “making [these things] gay/political” as a matter of actively raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural consciousness, which weird canonical nerds not only aren’t used to, but trained to attack exactly as they do—underhandedly. In turn, they seek to curry favor from “the gods” as a diegetic offering/middle-class olive branch/Trojan Horse (a bourgeois sentiment echoed in neoliberal hauntologies reviving older videogames to stress their assimilative, monomythic aims: “Worship me! Claim my power[13a]!” It’s Faustian and Promethean, disguising fascist us-versus-them as sports-like “hype” that serves profit in all the usual ways: chaff as complicit cryptonymy that our own revolutionary forms must rise to challenge in the same spaces: life isn’t simple or fair and we must collectively fight for our right to exist through proletarian counterterror).

As such, these weird canonical nerds (and their tokenized elements) are not-so-subtly gaming the system in predatory, self-centered ways that defend capital in the process; e.g., Kyle Rittenhouse given carte blanche/protection by the cops the same way Edward Norton’s character is (above); i.e., they’re de facto cops doing the same job through vigilante violence: policing the functional undead as “not of the kingdom.” Taught to dehumanize the zombie, the children of these homeowners are instructed by their surroundings (daddy’s videogames) to see violent, brainless people to shoot as a wacky game. As such, they become violent and brainless themselves, xenophobic instead of xenophilic. For them, a world without Capitalism is an end of the world that calls for settler-colonial violence—imagination death insofar as they can’t imagination anything else; e.g., the Nothing from The Neverending Story (1984).

That shouldn’t be a shock; punitive violence and cataclysm are built into canon as “secularized,” religion repacked inside a culture built entirely around gun violence according to binary gender roles and neoliberal state worship. Dressed up as fun, but also nostalgic to a new generation of youngsters through the likes of Stranger Things (and the network’s calculated insertion of popular ’80s songs like “The Never-Ending Story” into their climactic scenes), this canonically reinvented worldview is literally all they know. Through the Capitalism-Realist myopia, it because far easier to imagine the end of the world as zombie, which they can reject and attack when the consequences of Imperialism actually begin to noticeably affect the Imperial Core; i.e., in a way they’ll either have to deny or face and accept their hand in. As such, it’s far more common for weird canonical nerds to punch down (or up) at scapegoats for these consequences than to admit responsibility as part of a broader systemic issue: one that requires intersectional solidarized political action with the oppressed—a pedagogy thereof—to dismantle.

In turn, capitalists financially incentivize zombie abjection (through sanctioned execution) as half-real—both between fiction and nonfiction—by sponsoring the zombie’s giving and receiving of figurative and literal lobotomies onscreen and off; i.e., as a byproduct of blind, uncritical, conservative consumption that endorses genocide as a structure with a particular kind of copaganda. Touched on by Romero’s 1978 follow-up to Night of the Living Dead and later by Day of the Dead, in 1985, the effects of canon on the human brain and its perception of the human zombie are tried-and-true. Under these effects, the braindead consumer dutifully imagines what already sells (not peace) through a lucrative zombie mode for the American middle class: what doesn’t challenge the current structure of war as a business—the mall, of course, but also the paramilitary scenes that commodify racial conflict under the mall narrative as something to riddle with bullets; e.g., Dawn of the Dead’s blackface scene.

Indeed, it’s the first thing we see before the police launch their attack: a white man playing a non-white man shooting a white man to kick the raid off. Romero, in effect, is using a classic police tactic/theatrical device—the false flag—to initiate, then make his broader argument; i.e., they drew first blood! Everything that follows, then, is basically revenge for the killing of the young (white, blonde) rookie (“They started it, we’ll finish it!”): a historical-material effect predicated on centuries of police abuse, from invasion, chattel slavery and redlining!

Furthermore, to call the scene problematic would be an understatement, as it crosses the line between entertainment and real-world atrocities in a way Romero has no real-world experience with, thus isn’t testifying to anything he’s survived. In short, “he saw it on the TV” (which he undoubtedly did, during the Vietnam war and its highly televised protests prior to any sort of neoliberal recuperation strategies being present; i.e., Gothic media; e.g., Aliens) and clumsily recreated what he saw as a perniciously dubious form of activism that feels, at best, insensitive and crass. It is memorable, but for the wrong reasons, and because of its rushed, heavy-handed and forced nature (the blackface paint also being used in Birth of a Nation during the attempted rape scene) verges on advertising the very vaudeville he’s supposedly against!

As Ross Lockhart writes in “Attack of the Bourgeois Braineaters” (2004):

Dawn of the Dead is more than just a zombies-at-the-shopping-mall critique of consumer culture, as elements of racism and class war are also included within its framework. In one of its opening scenes, “a SWAT team clears out a tenement building in Pittsburgh. The residents are primarily Puerto Rican and Latino, kept captive by the undead both within and without the building” (Rider 7). Despite the abject poverty of these residents, one of the police officers makes a statement reflecting what Stephen Harper calls “the film’s theme of material insecurity and envy” (5). “Shit man, this is better than I got.” Harper further observes that the tenement sequence “invites the audience to consider zombiedom as a condition associated with both racial oppression and social abjection and, therefore, sanctions socio-political interpretations of the film as a whole” (6). The tenement sequence also introduces the audience to two members of the film’s core quartet of protagonists, Ken Foree‘s Peter and Scott Reiniger‘s Roger, a pair of SWAT officers, one black, one white, who manage to remain civilized as their fellow officers “end up indiscriminately murdering residents and zombies, uttering racial epithets and generally being hysterical” (Rider 7).

Described by Roger as “going apeshit,” there’s a process of abjection to what seems like an off-hand statement: the vigilante cop he’s critiquing as “acting like an animal” using the police raid (already a colonial tool) to escalate violence as a matter of extermination rhetoric. Said rhetoric is conspicuously guided by class-traitor (cop) resentment towards the government-housed poor as being non-white on its face; i.e., as a naked excuse to kill as many “zombies” as he can “while the getting’s good.” To that, there’s no distinction between the living and the unliving but also the undead; to him, they’re all roaches to squash, and he pushes door after door open, treating the layout (and its occupants) like a shooting gallery. The Imperial Boomerang has well-and truly-come home.

To this, Peter and Roger’s subsequent conversation about dignity in death hangs over the fascist, trigger-happy mania of their fellow officers, who they abandon to hold onto their humanity after seeing the people they were “supposed” to protect (a police state lie: when push comes to shove, cops are trained to automatically kill workers as “enemy”—to cull the herd of black sheep, as it were) being dehumanized so thoroughly yet holding onto their dignity as much as they could: even when faced with end times and police brutality, these people are still more human than the cops are. “Who’s the savage? Modern man!”

Such praxial inertia can be noted outside the film as felt across its franchise commenting on the same struggles to feed the profit movie (re: the Star Wars problem). Things stay the same because canonical artists have no financial incentive to change according to those in power. It’s a bourgeois illusion, one people are born into (and can only escape through “radical,” drug-like ways, which we’ll explore deeper in the primer).

The fact remains, if we want to change, the undead must be considered beyond a singular monolithic target during monomythic violence. Clearly racial animus is baked into the settler-colonial model, one that divides different state targets under profit to claim the mantle of victimhood as a tokenized position that decays into raw betrayals and defeat. The ghosts of the Civil Rights Movement and exclusions of older radically conservative feminisms occupy a territory likewise shared with the victims of American foreign policy coming back around. All must be included and holistically combined in the shared chorus of the damned; i.e., per our multiracial, GNC, all-inclusive hauntologies, chronotopes, cryptonymy and cryptomimesis reversing abjection.

Doing so happens by imitating retro-future, universally liberating regenerations (re: Matteson’s apocalypse where the zombies win) having formed out of old decaying oppressions (and their tokenized polities’ harmful representations of oppressed groups policing themselves): our Song of Infinity outshining the seminal catastrophe of state shift during the liminal hauntology of war! This reversal of abjection is not painless (far from it), but it can help us heal  from unironic rape; i.e., as a state weapon of terror meant to pacify us into tokenization and division, and which we learn to fight back against and express our dehumanization during rape play as ironic based on blindly campy (and pornographic) forms that we can introduce irony towards: “necrophilia” as walking a very odd tightrope.

Graveyard sex, while not always on display as such, is what a zombie apocalypse effectively boils down to (even when overt sex isn’t shown); i.e., canonically pimping walking corpses by slapping “of the dead” on it and going from there; e.g., Highschool of the Dead, but also simply Rape of the Dead putting an eco-fascist chokehold on such matters:

(source, top: Rape Zombie: Lust of the Dead, 2012)

Such partially imaginary things can be camped, but all occupy the same Gothic stage. It can be more fantastical or less, depending on the degree of the apocalypse; e.g., Dominic Mitchell’s In the Flesh (2013) treating the tightrope as a matter of politics and location that comments on Britain in decay versus a more outlandish and Americanized, gun-heavy approach to such things:

What makes In the Flesh somewhat different is how it shifts some of the human struggle onto the undead without sacrificing what’s at stake: survival. Granted, it feels inevitably more pedestrian when displayed in an immediate, everyday setting. These are not fantastical wastelands; neither civilization nor its inhabitants are presented as some kind of abject, faraway husk. Instead, they mirror or parallel our lives, as they exist, in the present. / I enjoyed this comparison in that it seemed less remote than the typical, post-apocalyptic fare. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Mad Max (1979) or Star Wars (1977) approach. In fact, I actually prefer delving into those worlds—to glean the hidden, allegorical message contained therein. At the same time, those worlds can take on a life of their own, to the extent that the message sometimes gets lost—carried away by the imaginary setting and its fantastical inhabitants. If one wants to avoid that, it requires a different approach (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “In the Flesh (2013): Season 1 Review, part 3,” 2018).

 

As such, we must set our sights on displaced forms of genocide beyond the suffering of a single alienated people (or their psychosexual, undead exploitation) cannibalizing themselves for the elite; i.e., recuperation; e.g., of feminism, Afrocentrism, queer culture, the British labour party post-Thatcherism, etc. For all of them, the us-versus-them dynamic of the decaying Americanized home/society affects all peoples, places and things, but classically incentivizes white/token America (and neighboring entities) to abject labor for the elite. So close to the problem and yet so far from its solution, they radicalize from childhood onwards to deputize and attack the zombie; i.e., anyone who isn’t human can have anything done to them (murder or rape) without fear of repercussions: with their parents (actual or de facto) ostensibly caring for them but in fact dehumanizing them in a never-ending war reinforced by centuries of dogma.

Such normalization through undead vaudeville doesn’t recruit the zombie as automatically friendly to the state (akin to a good Godzilla or terminator), but does demand sacrificial revivals per horror media as holy in the eyes of Americanized families when assisting profit in this respect (a kind of “mark of Cain,” slave brand or tramp stamp that, regardless of the colonized group, marks them for settler-colonial abuse).

To that, I want to consider The Last of Us as revived in 2023 (and older stories accomplishing the same idea, before and after Romero’s corpus) in ways that I, educated as I am, previously responded to in a sex-positive revelation: waking up in the middle of the night to reassemble them through rememory as putting Morrison’s device to good use; i.e., using it to challenge profit, thus genocide through the zombie as something to reunite with and make whole again as a matter of stolen childhood. There’s a lot to cover (so many toys with play with, so many likenesses to interview). Even so, I’ll try to focus on zombies as we progress, piece by piece, from indoctrination to subversion through the apocalypse; i.e., as a matter of residence and resident made zombie-like since before we were born until after we are dead.

We’ll get to Morrison and rememory during part three of this subchapter (and consider childhood regressions and restoration with ludo-Gothic BDSM, in the subchapter after that). For part two of “The Imperial Boomerang,” we’ll look at The Last of Us more and go over various ideas in relation to it and similar stories (and toys, characters, etc); i.e., cryptomimesis per a factory of toy-like simulacra whose proliferation resurrects abject violence within capital as friendly (conducive) to its daily operations. No doubt, a holistic understanding thereof shall prove handy when the time comes: defense of home as under attack by functionally white zombies of a police agency that stems from horror media as something to reclaim for all oppressed groups (not just African Americans, though it behooves us to examine and critique their history of doing so, below. Beware anyone allergic to valid criticism).

(source: Tai Gooden’s “The Black Guy Dies First Will Put a Critical Eye to Black Horror History,” 2022)

Never forget, this is our mall! Our toys, our voices, our Aegis! But we must acclimate ourselves towards them by taking them back while they are sold to us; i.e., as children receiving settler-colonial propaganda as something to camp (which takes time, care and effort).

Onto “Bad Dreams, part two: Cryptomimesis (feat. The Last of Us, Scooby Doo, and more)“!

---

Footnotes

[1] To my knowledge, Morrison’s usage of the word “rememory” is primarily a noun. When using it in verb form, I will adjust it to “reremember.”

[2] The director of Nekromantik (1988), a movie about a guy who has sex with threesome with his wife and a corpse, which leads him to get cuckolded by the corpse (rip). Awkward!

[3] Peter, from George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978).

[4] E.g., the xenomorph. More on him, later.

[5] From F.D. Signifier’s “The REAL Faces of Black Conservatism” (2023).

[6] Freud is a quack, but the idea actually comes from Carl Jung (also a quack):

According to Freud, during female psychosexual development, a young girl is initially attached to her mother. When she discovers that she does not have a penis, she becomes attached to her father and begins to resent her mother, who she blames for her “castration.” As a result, Freud believed that the girl then begins to identify with and emulate her mother out of fear of losing her love. Resolving the Electra complex ultimately leads to identification with the same-sex parent. While the term “Electra complex” is frequently associated with Sigmund Freud, it was actually Carl Jung who coined the term in 1913 (source: Kendra Cherry’s “Overview of the Electra Complex in Psychology,” 2023).

However, just because the ideas are technically stupid (above) doesn’t mean they aren’t codified into society and its linguo-material devices; i.e., in ways we can reclaim (re: Creed’s monstrous-feminine)! I generally hate “pure” psychology but still have to critique it in Gothic theory all the time (again, Creed, Freud and so many others), and clearly I love the word “psychosexual”!

[7] I.e., a heliocentric approach to men as godly and savior-esque but imperiled per the middle class as tentative and fragile under Capitalism. Similar to Tool’s Maynard James Keenan pushing for reactionary violence in his music (re: “Ænema“), such then-current regressions like Newell’s go back to Heinlein’s Competent Man as revived by James Cameron in his media (followed by Nintendo and id Studios’ Metroid and Doom), but also further back still with Lovecraft’s astronoetics; i.e., per At the Mountains of Madness mythologizing its author’s racism tracking with even older bigoted men like Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Conrad, and women like Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre or Charlotte Brontë, etc. Whatever direction time flows, all run along the same track as a spatial sensation—capital (commonly called “civilization”) as black-and-white, us-versus-them survival; i.e., tied to the West/Cartesian dualism as “superior” but always under attack: the Gothic chronotope.

[8] Cops are class traitors, recruiting from workers to police workers.

[9] Black Capitalism is a thing and it sucks; e.g., Lil Bill’s “How Black Elites LIE to Us” (2023); i.e., race (and culture) traitors betray to class elevate, regardless of the parties involved. This includes black male comedians like Peele picking and choosing who they attack and defend; re: white women and Israel. My dude, you can’t just have your one big hurrah and then poison the well once you “make it”! You have to consistently attack profit (and its bigotries) or you’re just propping up Omelas!

[10] E.g., Tomb Raider‘s own babe-in-the-wilderness scenario pitting posh Lara Croft (above) against nature as foreign, alien, and undead, but also dangerously tomb-like; i.e., our resident raider sporting fascist elements (the death’s-head skull-and-wings) that advertise her regressive mercenary nature entering those aforementioned “tombs” (cities, colonies, and other such territories both foreign and domestic): a British Amazon to pacify Britain’s fascist presence with, but also export to fascist dens elsewhere. It’s the usual fascist lie: “This is what you’ll get when the time comes!” (with fascism being unable to allow such leeway insofar as its competing logics—infiltrate and subjugate—will quickly bridal such women when formal power is acquired by party leaders).

[11] As usual, I would argue they weren’t radical or solidarized enough, needing to connect race to matters of culture and class in ways that Marx failed to entirely do, over a century prior (re: anti-Semitism and homophobia). Developing Gothic Communism is a holistic endeavor that solves intersecting problems of race, class and culture; i.e., by accounting for axes of oppression making people turn against one another in order to survive, mid-apocalypse. This requires camping the ghosts of people like MLK and Marx, but also the zombies of people like them in broader poetic discourse.

[12] Zionism being an emulation of American genocide just as the Nazis were; i.e., Zionists are Jewish Nazis (or non-Jewish people speaking for Jewish people as such).

[13] The beheading of the zombie extending to a beheading of Indigenous groups as a form of identity death and shaming by colonial forces.

[13a] From IGN’s “Age of Mythology: Retold – Release Date Trailer | Xbox Showcase 2024.”