This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! 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 Map Is a Lie: the Quest for Power inside Cameron’s Closed Space—Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp
“Theatricality and deception are powerful agents to the uninitiated.”
—Bane, The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Picking up where “The Map is a Lie; or, Metroidvania and the Quest for Power (opening and part one: ‘Origins and Lineage’)” left off…
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Note: If “Origins and Lineage” set the table for applying theory to camp the canon with Metroidvania and ludo-Gothic BDSM, “Interrogating Power” gets down to business; i.e., it’s 74 pages, making it the longest book section in my entire book series! Its extended girth owes to how it examines Metroidvania, but also shooters, in general; e.g., Ion Fury (with extended paragraphs coming from keeping word count down, the same idea applying to extended [sub]chapters). This subsection includes further keywords, as well (which will come in handy when camping canon ourselves; i.e., as Blxxd Bunny [above] and I will demonstrate, during the finale).
To make it more legible (due to its length), I’ve also decided to arrange it into loose, conversational sub-headers; i.e., in the style borrowed from Volume Two onwards, regarding a series of talking points you should be able to glean from the titles alone:
- Interrogating Power (and Reflecting on Past Attempts) during Ludo-Gothic BDSM
- Metroidvania (reprise)
- Camping Canon through Art (some personal and non-personal examples in popular media)
- Further Gothic Devices to Revisit when Camping Canon, Ourselves (re: playing god, the Promethean Quest and Amazons, and more)
- Mise-en-Abyme: Echoes of the Neo-Medieval
- Galatea’s Ilk; or, “Chimeras, Monster Girls and Wheyfus, Oh My!”
- Shadows of Freud (feat. Homelander) and Assorted Terms (e.g., the Male Gaze, exhibitionism/voyeurism, hysteria/wandering womb and bicycle face, etc)
- Back to Tolkien (and Gay Hobbits)
- Pulling a Galatea (when Making Monsters, Ourselves)
- Shooters within Cameron’s Refrain (and Camping Them); re: Ion Fury
- Camp Is Half-Real: Out of Metroidvania and into Real Life as Intertwined with Such Things
It’s argumentative, per my thesis, but holistic, liminal and ergodic much how Metroidvania are; i.e., taking the concept outside such games and into real life connected to said games per ludo-Gothic BDSM. —Perse, 3/28/2025
Now that we’ve unpacked my real-life quest to understand Numinous power as something to map, reassemble and interrogate inside castles, you should have a fairly good idea of my thought process’s journey when doing it yourselves on your own journeys. I now want to walk you through the basic process in relation to Metroidvania (and other shooters, primarily Ion Fury at the end of the subchapter); i.e., as stemming from Cameron, who himself stemmed from Tolkien (we’ll expand this idea to any kind of canonical theatre and monster-making when we discuss “putting the pussy on the chainwax” in the next subchapter). For us and Gothic Communism, interrogation of power and its mapped-out performance is as much a critique of the protagonist within Cameron’s refrain as it is the castle or the monsters inside; we will apply this playing with power to our poetic camping of the Promethean Quest in our own lives, our own creations that interrogate power on maps that resemble Tolkien or Cameron’s (on paper) but play out very differently in practice when we recreate elements of them, ourselves:
(artist: ChuckARTT)
Interrogating Power (and Reflecting on Past Attempts) during Ludo-Gothic BDSM
First, power’s interrogation happens through class war in popular media; for the Gothic, class/culture war is monster war—a battle of the mind, the monster and the method as codified beliefs and behaviors during a shared stage: the “shadow zone’s” map and various environments, but especially the castle as a sex dungeon, a closed space that imperils the heroine in ways that aren’t strictly negative in a theatrical sense (they have cathartic applications).
As “Origins and Lineage” showed, my own extensive and ever-evolving research in Metroidvania examined how cross-media mimetic patterns are shared between Tolkien’s refrain and Cameron’s as ludologized. Their relationship is actually cryptomimetic, involving and describing a ludic meta-pattern/contract shared across a variety of genres out from older mediums and into videogames (“beyond the novel or cinema and into Metroidvania”): whether from Tolkien’s built world or Cameron’s it’s all from the same basic legends, but the aesthetic, context and function during class war (as something to adopt) is different when we examine and camp these authors ourselves; i.e., canon and camp of a suitably “Gothic” kind that announces itself (or forgets to).
Regardless of form, it’s all drawn off the same basic map and theatrical function of the map, albeit at cross purposes relative to class function: Gothic doubles that challenge the pure, aching goodness of Tolkien’s gentrified war and Cameron’s white-savior variant of the cis-het Amazon. The Metroidvania map might be a lie wrought from similar legends as Cameron’s ordinance-heavy updating of the Tolkien refrain, but its cartography needn’t serve the state if the double is iconoclastic, thus campy in ways that Tolkien was allergic to (re: allegory and apocalypse) and which various accommodated intellectuals are in no hurry to express in their own work, especially in relation to their own lives; re: “the infamous discretions of academia waste a surprising amount of time commenting on all of these matters as separate from each other.”
For example, the accommodated faculty at MMU (which, I must remind you, was part of the center for Gothic studies, a network of scholarship)—but also people like Krzywinska, Perron, and other scholars I didn’t meet in person—all hoarded this vital and useful information behind surprisingly archaic and capitalistic paywalls (not unique to the British academic system by any stretch, but in my opinion felt more intensely gnostic and mysterious/trade-secret than my time in American academia; in truth, they all kind of suck). The tragedy of this hoarding is that it was done not to disseminate information, but conceal and contain it in pursuit of their own glory and reputations, first and foremost—the school, then the school’s representatives.
There was a time when I wanted to be one of them, but clearly that is not the case anymore. Back then, it was easy enough to ignore me outside of school, grade my assignments from anonymity and swan about during conferences applauding one another. And maybe I just lacked “the mettle” for such a highly competitive and manufactured world; or maybe I was “too American,” too indiscrete and happy to talk, during seminar modules, about my own social-sex life and its negotiated interrogations of unequal power exchange in relation to the Gothic mode (you know, actually trying to apply the theory in the real world instead of relegating it to the page, screen, or stage). Frankly I don’t care what such a world thinks of me, and will happily die on the hill of this next statement: The point of academia should not be “to be intellectuals” for its own sake (as Christine Neufeld told me once[1]), “discovering” things and putting your names on it; it should be to make workers’ lives better! Anything short of that is complicit in some shape or form. And if my sore words seem to carry a grudge, I can at least be honest and say that yeah, I’m angry with how grad school went; I’m frustrated with how I was treated. But it wasn’t all bad, and I learned something from all of my professors (and many of them, especially at the undergraduate level, were kind to me and supportive[2a] in some shape or form); my critiques are leveled more at the institution itself, which was a business first, a school second.
For the bourgeoisie at large, ideas like “ludo-Gothic BDSM” are doubly useless—the proverbial speaking of Greek, to them, but also not profitable. Instead, the cartographic refrain exists not to teach the means of combating Capitalism, but preserving it; i.e., to revive canonical sentiments of a particular kind during ergodic/recursive (repetitive) motion; i.e., inside videogame spaces of a particular kind with particular heroes against particular monsters: the constant resurrection of the undead, war-like closed spaces and their threats of rape/power abuse. This applies to Tolkien, of course, but Tolkien’s valorizing of the triumphant military hero and death of the Necromancer, Sauron, kind of sidesteps the whole conversation (or tries to, anyways). He also didn’t exist during the neoliberal period, which requires us to look at some kind of videogame castle to apply our arguments to the Internet Age—especially if they are informed by Tolkien’s canon; he much preferred hiking and the outdoors, but still hinted at “old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people” as the pre-fascist Gothic having returned to corrupt his land of plenty as occupied by good men, women, animals, nature, etc: Moria, Mirkwood, the Misty Mountains, and Mordor (all the dark places start with M, apparently). But the refrain—his treasure map—patently sublimates war by always starting from the idea of the West as besieged, threatened by a dark evil force coming from somewhere else—from outside.
For us, the closed space, ludo-Gothic BDSM, and ergodic motion all tie to the Metroidvania (and its mappable space) as something to overwrite Tolkien’s refrain with using an iconoclastic version of Cameron’s. Tolkien’s open map of conquest always put the castle far away from one’s homeland, the land itself treated as one’s own and under attack by outside forces. By comparison, the Metroidvania is entirely self-contained, with little if no outdoors to speak of; i.e., no overworld, like in Zelda (which operates closer to Tolkien’s nature-centric romp). Instead of a lush, green overworld and war on open ground, the wicked castle is abandoned, then found while the hero is already inside of it—i.e., like waking up inside the castle as both the scenario and location of a bad dream. Doing so entirely skips the pastoral, sunny introduction of a boyish Call to Adventure, instead beginning in darkness visible like Paradise Lost did; i.e., as prisoners en medias res, chained to the bottom of a burning lake. In turn, we find ourselves trapped inside a maze-like, all-encompassing unheimlich whose seemingly mappable space conveys some stubbornly unmappable[2b] qualities, but also the Gothic derelict being conveniently left behind as a bourgeois counterfeit meant to close our eyes behind canceled retro-futures: there is no escape, no sunshine, just a narrative of the crypt and its infernal concentric pattern. This is our playground, a dialogic means of teaching sex positivity through the Gothic mode’s chief attraction: the Gothic castle and the Numinous. Including the palliative Numinous as achieved through multimedia BDSM theatrics, this castle ignores the colonized territory (the outdoors) as a place to “save” from “orcs,” and focuses more on the root of the problem: the seat of empire as conspicuously shadowy and fortress-like, but also overrun.
Our praxial aim is overwriting Tolkien’s refrain with a reclaimed, BDSM-centric version of Cameron’s, thus making iconoclastic “war” in the process; but for that I want to go beyond Botting’s critical vacuity and Jameson’s own fantasy/sci-fi bias to emphasize things neither they nor Tolkien could seemingly be arsed to touch: castles, Amazons and BDSM dungeon aesthetics! My aim in doing so is to explain unequal power as something to seek, summon and express: to reel in and study the summoning of power in its routine forms; through anachronistic castles that serve as perennial playgrounds for workers to lose themselves inside and acclimate themselves to future class war as close to home. Furthermore, acclimation needn’t be an endorsement of the status quo, but an iconoclastic process whose understanding concerns traditional navigations of power that generally involve the same language: Tolkien’s “There’s a dark castle over there! Let’s kill it and take its stuff!” which, for the iconoclast, is code for “I want to go to the dark castle of sin and ‘kill’ stuff; i.e., practice consent-non-consent, sodomy and other sex-positive BDSM!”
Note: This portion of the volume touches on ideas we’ve hinted at, up to this point, but which I realize upon checking I haven’t exactly uttered in this volume a particular phrase (which would come later): “To critique power, you must go where it is.” Or more to the point, you must go, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, where power is summoned and stored; i.e., like the Gothic castle as manifestations of capital as a neo-medieval abstraction of itself: a rarefaction (of greed and other virtues/vices) writ in stone and/or flesh (among other things). In turn, the same basic principle works for all manner of morphologies—ranging from castle-like bodies and body-like castles; re: castles in the flesh” (from the Poetry Module). I won’t say the exact sentence, quoted above, in the followed pages, but that’s what I’ve been talking about up to this point (and will continue talking about in what follows being a past moment that flowed into future older moments leading up to me writing this sentence; e.g., Volume One’s “to interrogate power, you must go where it is” or “If you want to critique the state and stop the cycle, go where its heroic power is centered: nostalgic spaces.” —Perse, 3/22/2025
Instead of going somewhere else to commit genocide—vis-à-vis Tolkien’s boyish escapism through the pastoral-to-hell-to-paradise rite of passage and its conquest of the treasure map—we interrogate the castle-like prisons that we’re born inside using operatic language and Gothic poetics having been updated since Tolkien’s time. 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[3] 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[4] as naked, colorful and dark, as if to tease the viewer in the shadows to try something (and also showing my ass to my academic dominators: “I fart in your general direction!”). As the kids say, that’s a mood.
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
Why stick out? you ask? One, because we must in order to survive. Two, because our deals with the devil simply acknowledge our true selves, which the state wants us to reject (the queer version of Top Dollar’s usual wisdom: “Every man’s got a devil, and you can’t rest until you find him”). But also, it feels good to be Athena’s Aegis; i.e., challenging heteronormative power in ways that demonstrate how fragile said illusion (and its gatekeepers) are. State bullies are entitled nerds completely used to getting everything they want, who desire what I will never give them (a form of agency I’ve worked hard for); and completely afraid of nearly everything and will freak out at fairly silly things they have no business getting so worked up about: at people like me, burning down their imaginary churches and those churches’ ideas of compelled order about Capitalism and its gobstopper illusions (those highly unnatural and imprisoning systems of thought that are slowly killing us as a species). Frankly the idea of me being terrifying seems absurd, but as a burning proponent of rebellion constitutes something that still, on some level, represents an incendiary threat that many advertise as the “end times”: Communism… but Gothic and gay! To which I cheerfully put up the goat horns and say in response, “Hail, Satan!” It’s like saying “Ni!” to old ladies.
Our performative and internalized devilry becomes something to join—a communion or pact whose assimilation classically amounts to a devilish bargain; yet Gothic Communism is a group effort, one whose sex-positive class/culture warrior is among a fellowship or pandemonium of equally sex-positive ne’er-do-wells instead of one or more class/race traitors for the elite and their age-old Faustian bargains. We reach towards you, croon “Join us!” and become something to run away with; i.e., corrupting the minds of the youth (women and children) by calling out seductively to them, offering forbidden knowledge/fruit[5] as a chance to go wild/go native by coming out of the closet in opposition to state forces (who will chase us, only to be turned away at the door—”no fascists allowed!”): the truth of things in its totality and not just a white person’s perspective as an outsider to genuine atrocities; e.g., a Lovecraft novella, an overplayed Iron Maiden or Slayer song or the problematic castle of a Radcliffean novel (though these can all be enjoyed mid-rebellion). As Robert Asprey notes, terror and native wit/creativity are the historical tools of the counterterrorist, often being all they immediately have at their disposal; under Capitalism in the Internet Age, labor becomes a huge bargaining chip that Gothic Communism marries to terror during class war as a theatrical, operatic proposition (solidarity and labor action expressed as much through improvised Gothic poetics [improv] as improvised weapons): a means of bringing the oppressed and alienated closer to together in an informed, Satanic act of outer-space empathy and love in the face of state forces. The spotlight isn’t something to hog or monopolize strictly by white nerds but expand and share in a drive towards post-scarcity (through a horizontally-arranged system that isn’t rigged in favor of those who control it because no one person or select group will be in control, in that sense; that’s what anarchism ultimately is).
Doing so becomes second-nature, a way of existing that doesn’t require drugs or sex (though they can certainly be involved if one wants them to); it requires community and love in opposition to capital’s usual bad-faith actors, fear and dogma: persons who blend in for fear of the state, overperforming its doctrines no matter how ridiculous it makes them look. I can understand why they do it (they’re stupid and callow), but short of implied threats of force I can’t begin to fathom why would anyone ever want to listen to people like them; i.e., persons who not only never experiment or try new things regarding gender and sex, but also probably never have had sex outside of abusive and/or vanilla scenarios. They’re exactly the kind of people who act holy but hide behind their privilege as the most deviant ones of all[6]; i.e., prone to abuse their power and harm those under their care. In essence, they treat the Holy Gospel (in one form or another) as a means to abuse others from a position of willful ignorance: by refusing to eat from the Tree of Knowledge because some asshole saying they’re God said so. The point isn’t whether they’re true-believers or that God is real or that God lied about the apples being poison, but what they do with their power and sense of alienation inside the status quo.
For instance, I’m a highly privileged person and have, in the past, felt tremendously alone and alienated. But I’ve worked hard on myself to question the world as it presently exists and appears. In doing so, I’ve learned what I like not because it was handed to me but because I discovered it through years of honest reflection, mid-cognitive dissonance and hard work after to become a better person—not the person the system wants me to be! It’s precisely the kind of self-discovery that high-control groups like the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t want you to do, but also Capitalism in general within the Capitalocene:
the Capitalocene
Regardless of what humans decide to do, the twenty-first century will be a time of “abrupt and irreversible” changes in the web of life. Earth system scientists have a rather dry term for such a fundamental turning point in the life of a biospheric system: state shift. Unfortunately, the ecology from which this geological change has emerged has also produced humans who are ill-equipped to receive news of this state shift. Nietzsche’s madman announcing the death of god was met in a similar fashion: although industrial Europe had reduced divine influence to the semicompulsory Sunday-morning church attendance, nineteenth-century society couldn’t image a world without god. The twenty-first century has an analogue: it’s easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism. […] Today’s human activity isn’t exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate. We argue what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400s, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene [than the Anthropocene] (source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things).
This leads to a variety of counterpoints that emerge in protest to the status quo—a reclaimed language of religion, to be sure, but what I like to think of as “Satanic apostacy[7]” (Satanism isn’t, for all intents and purposes, a religion, but a system of rules[8] designed to teach humane critical-thinking skills): Gothic poetics, fantasy and science fiction that—as transhuman/posthuman[9] forms of expression—have evolved beyond Humanist forms to pointedly and loudly challenge our rationalized/moralized position as the dominant species on the planet (similar to the infernal concentric pattern), including our relationship to each other and to nature as canonically anthropocentric.
In turn, these principles manifest efficiently in music, art and culture not as “lesser forms of media” but as an open, quick and honest way that people express themselves regarding the truth of things (which the usual benefactors of Capitalism will cover up by acting like the Enlightenment and Pax Americana is either somehow good for everyone, or neutered forms of futurism that can be envisioned by white men who speak for everyone else; e.g., Asimov or Jameson). It’s hard, at first, to “put on the glasses.” Eventually you don’t need them at all—communicating effortlessly with others who see the way you do because it’s become a part of your culture, the Superstructure. That becomes a powerful bond—in part because it’s saturated through an entire polity versus simply being restricted to a single-dose product.
For instance, whenever Bay and I spend time together online, doing so makes us feel close together even though we live on different parts of the planet. But when we have sex, we’re not doing it to meet some desperate, lonely need (re: “sad cum”); we’re doing it because we enjoy each other’s company and contribute towards a stable, healthy relationship. Our tails wag when we see each other. Within that nurtured, loving bond, we live out each other’s fantasies as those fantasies; and when we do so, we share Gothicized music, traditions, or clothing styles. During all of this, I suddenly feel their presence in a shared space and time: of all those who came before—the weight of the universe and the cathedral of something noble and great the likes of which Coleridge’s touted Gothic art and sublimity is but spitting off a bridge. He doesn’t have the language (not even when he used laudanum) to express our grandeur and might. Stare and tremble, motherfucker!
(artist: The Maestro Noob)
As such, terror through labor action is my weapon, but specifically counterterror by pointing out rather nakedly the stupid things the state fears (for so many of them challenge the profit motive: party music, free love, gender-non-conformance, androgynous M&M candies, etc) and how fallible the mightiest nations truly are in the face of active resistance even when arms aren’t involved; e.g., American landmines and bombs used against American colonizers during Vietnam, but also incredibly inexpensive homemade IEDs forcing the United States to waste hundreds of millions of dollars during the second Iraq war trying to armor its tanks, only to be met with casualties during the usual war of optics[10] (GDF’s “How Iraqis Got So Good at Smoking American Soldiers,” 2023).
The paradox continues insofar as I learned what, how and why through a harmful, abusive emulation of rape fantasy while living with Jadis, which I then turned into cathartic forms having at least partially learned (by accident) the method from my humiliation endured inside an academic setting. MMU’s power imbalance (and research topics) had acclimated me to Jadis’ nefarious bullshit, giving me a leg up by “letting” me stand on their gigantic shoulders (as in, I was going to regardless) but also on the massive, rotting corpse of Radcliffe (which I’ve suddenly realized, in a moment of academic bloodlust, is actually quite fun/empowering[11] to wail on—if only because a) I had to read her long-ass, bigoted books and hear/read the academic praise heaped at her feet constantly while in school and after I left, and b) her zombie [and castles] have started to decay and need to be dealt with).
Simply put, Jadis didn’t have a monopoly on violence, on terror as something only they could use. Rather, I took Asprey’s maxim to heart (“Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it”); I fought back with my own counterterrorist fantasies that Jadis couldn’t control short of raw violence. But due to their overwhelming desire to appear good (ever the centrist), wouldn’t resort to the role of the brutal thug and suddenly I could negotiate my exit (not that it was easy—but we’ll get to that, in Volume Two). In the end, they despised the sound of my voice but also what it said about things we both were interested in; i.e., as the breaker of the spell they’ve woven around themselves when interpreting said things. It got to the point that they—like Beatrice, the annoying blue bird from Over the Garden Wall (2014)—were always asking me to walk in silence whenever we went for a walk despite me wanting to talk about things, of things, of things (odd, considering they loved that show but not how I loved it; i.e., they didn’t want to actually do what Greg was determined to try himself—to actually make the world a better place than how Beatrice saw it: “The world is a miserable place, Greg! Life isn’t fun!” In short, Jadis not only wanted to be in control at all times; they wanted to be right about that horrible supposition—that life sucks—more than they wanted to admit they could be wrong and happily discover that things could change and improve. Isn’t that fucked up?):
(source: “Schooltown Follies”)
Entirely by accident, then, I discovered through bad play (enacted against me by a bad actor/player) that good play amounts to Gothic poetics as a potent means of regaining control through reclaimed implements of terror (the manacle, castle, rapist, slur or baton, etc) but also being that which terrifies the state and its proponents to no end: a refusal to conform or obey (which forces the state’s hand, relying on the veneer of not being the tyrants they’ve spent decades projecting onto Nazis, nominal Communists, and other theatrical scapegoats). Haunted by the ghosts of my youth, I could dance with them and make versions of themselves that could never harm me. I would be in control in ways I never felt before, feeling a presence of “danger” that triggered my prey mechanisms just enough to make the exercise therapeutic; i.e., while showing myself off as a trust-building exercise behind a buffer that stood between me and the world. The whole performance/thought experiment nursed my wounds and made me feel safe without pushing me into the arms of future abusers; instead, I could transform myself and my environment using my education as a negotiation device, the theatre and its effect enhanced by years of academic and lived experience. Suddenly my years of costly and time-extensive Gothic education felt profoundly useful—not just to me, but something I could give back to the workers of the world; i.e., those who had already given me much to think about in relation to their own work as part of a movement I could join through Gothic poetics:
(artist: ikerellatab)
Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios); a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other and vice versa. As such, my own contributions to the Gothic are very much about making it sexual again, but also sex-positive in ways that Radcliffe (and her own venerated castle’s praxial inertia) were not; i.e., tearing her (and her Faustian contracts, castles and various harmful BDSM scenarios) “a new college-debt-sized asshole” while, in the same breathe, addressing my deeply personal, trans woman’s fears of my own penis (e.g., Zeuhl) but also trying anal and other things in a monstrous context (e.g., Cuwu’s choking and rape play and Jadis’ “put your mysterium tremendum in my uncanny valley!”). In short, my playing with new things—activities, roleplays and identity scenarios—had transformative potential relative to my sexuality and gender as highly idiosyncratic. We’re all idiosyncratic[12] in ways Capitalism wants you to forget, so try anal, “chains and torture,” and the Numinous as something to reassemble yourself in some shape or form during liminal expression; the paradox of being free while still “in chains” is a sex-positive kind of theater that is incredibly intense, but harmless (and it’s more fun as a group activity—we are a social species). As the conveyor of these complicated fantasies, my book is a castle with castles inside of itself—built for the reader to wander around inside while asking questions about: to play with, making mistakes that will undoubtedly hurt, but not harm them, and which they can take and apply to their own social-sex lives.
We can use this to camp not just Radcliffe as the end-all-be-all of the castled stage, but also Tolkien’s former interrogations of power presented in poetic language. For example, he saw the fulfillment of the boy becoming a man as swept up in the wish fulfillment of “good war”; i.e., as attained by a return of the imaginary past and its legendary rites of passage: war is something to play at until it becomes real. His boyish naiveté couples the usual defense of home as built on a lie—that the land is both green and good (as opposed to irreversibly ravaged by Capitalism, then covered up by digital fakeries and mapped abstractions of them touted as “eternal”), but also naturalized as “theirs[13]“—paradoxically framed as a battle against boredom and desiring to escape through adventure as a “natural” process (another lie): boys will be boys. This process naturalizes the dark territories the boy walks towards, only to discover that war kind of sucks when one arrives. But Tolkien still essentialized war as a “white man’s burden”/martyr complex—of the colonizer feeling sorry for themselves while still committing mass, industrial-scale genocides against native populations (“the only good orc is a dead orc”). Worse, they routinely dress their victims up in the alienized, settler-colonial language of death (of the dark, savage continent) and view darkness as something to unironically fear and attack (or unironically embody for the state’s benefit). For us, persons and places of war need to be camped, so we might as well start at the heart of the warzone; i.e., to play inside the abandoned castle using its reclaimed language of terror to achieve psychosexual catharsis by camping the source of genocide: echoes of empire as endemic to our own homesteads. Radcliffe’s castles were bad, but so were Tolkien’s and Cameron’s white-saviorisms because they (and their maps) were canonical.
Metroidvania (reprise)
To this, the Metroidvania chronotope is far less green from the outset, but also something full of dark doubles to bring back into the real world and make it a better place with: with iconoclastic lessons of “war” and “rape” that break canon on the same stage using the same theatrical markers and floorplans. In short, a post-scarcity world can only be achieved by facing the darkness at home as something to transmute and inhabit: Tolkien’s fairytale being tragically as much the majestic landscapes he cared so much about as slipping into myth (what Matthew Lewis might call “an artificial wilderness[14]“). As something to play with, Metroidvania’s shadow of war becomes our ally in defense of nature—like Bane except campier and more driven to out Batman as the story’s true villain and phony: “You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it.” In the interim, the parallel space is a kind of nightmare nursery where you can safely fuck up and play around with instruments of torture and death in campy language: the unmappable space of confusion as phenomenological but also architectural; i.e., in ways that don’t make immediate structural sense but whose sites of torture, confinement, and various traps are designed to disorient, overwhelm and subdue in order to evoke the medieval rape fantasy as crossing over into the patently mundane (e.g., Annie’s compromising position in the mysterious laundry room from Halloween [1978] as inexplicably designed to lock people inside as they enter it). It’s a calculated risk.
The varied wreckage of the Metroidvania actually takes many forms, which I call the “Metroidvania Spectrum” (from “Mazes and Labyrinths“; refer to it for examples of each):
Castlevania — Castlevania-style — cross-franchise hybrids — Metroid-style — Metroid
The Metroidvania’s canonical propagandistic function is ludic in a particular sense; i.e., as ergodic in ways that novels aren’t, but traditionally pilfered by a Neo-Gothic hero/token Amazon through violent force or a female detective through non-violent detection, and whose gendered actions are informed by the traditional gendering of such spaces as advertised per medium—their monarchs, monsters, heroes, etc—but also forever updating through gradual, incremental concessions with the middle class; e.g., the girl boss, the subjugated Amazon as a phallic woman/Archaic Mother who serves the state’s profit motive; i.e., as always changing just enough to accommodate the profit motive of the free market, but not actually interfere with the same old ludic scheme and its offer of false power and false hope as profitable (thus useful) to capital.
Male or female, the canonical hero-warrior/detective is a cop, thus class (culture and race) traitor whose actions seek to restore order/the colonial binary by “solving” the awesome mystery through dumb, platitudinal force: property before people, including stories that keep capital operating as it always does when unchallenged by workers (the whitewashed restoration of the formerly glorious and rightful castle at the end of the classic Gothic story). Within this hauntological copaganda, the centrist hero does not fear death; they punch it to whatever degree the ludo-Gothic arrangement allows (summarized from “Mazes and Labyrinths“): the shooter as FPS or run-‘n-gun, the platformer hack-‘n-slash, the Metroidvania’s spatial relationship with the maze or labyrinth according to the Castlevania or Metroid treatment of space (male hero + melee attacks or female hero with ranged attacks, usually). This is a huge problem when Capitalism is in crisis/decay (less “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” and more “the ‘nails’ are zombies and I’m going to hammer all of them on the head!”): terror becomes a state refrain pitted DARVO-style against labor through “counterterrorism” in bad faith. Again, we’re the terrorists, including our seditious identities as having formed primarily in response to state atrocities that we’re trying to interrogate through the same theatrical devices Radcliffe used (to much less success because she upheld the canonical norms through her castles’ happy endings). It becomes a canonical game of gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss—with Radcliffe at the top.
As the Neo-Gothic girl boss, Radcliffe (and her castles) argued for a feminine trembling to interrogate power with, not masculine force. So when Radcliffe wrote in The Italian, “What are bodily pains in comparison with the subtle, the exquisite tortures of the mind!” she is, according to Kim Ian Michasiw, treating the presence of sublime power as “as a signal to sigh and feel exalted” (source: “Ann Radcliffe and the Terrors of Power,” 1994). Simply put, there’s a dealing with power exchange being had that’s ironic, its symptoms of ritualized pain neatly divorced from actual damage but suitably demonic all the same. Even if Radcliffe would never stoop like Matthew Lewis to actually play with literal demons, she is still summoning her own “demons” to play with through rape pastiche: bandits, Italian counts, and pirates pretending to be ghosts (with the armed and confident Ludovico boldly investigating the “haunted” room because he doubts Emily St. Aubert’s testimony and represents the cliché, plucky energy of a male protagonist bent on facing evil, but also defeating it through raw, physical force)—i.e., violent liars that prey upon the imagination of susceptible maidens, threatening them with sexual violence. As a woman, she was making demons she shouldn’t play with that illustrated her own fears, but also privilege as someone fascinated with the barbaric, faraway past. As Cynthia Wolff points out, Radcliffe’s xenophilia and demon lovers are always partially murderous and mutilating in ways that regress towards the status quo: the demon lover as the white, cis-het woman’s thrill of rape that is ultimately replaced by the fairytale wedding. To be blunt, it’s basic and colonial.
Camping Canon through Art (some personal and non-personal examples in popular media)
In the canonical sense, the narrative of the castle’s exploration through masculine violence is a “band-aid”; i.e., one that reliably plays out like Alexander the Great smugly cutting the Gordian Knot with his sword. It’s the same approach Cameron took with his Amazonian Pygmalion fantasies (the white nerd’s wet dream, similar to Sir Peter and Princess Melisandre), except in Capitalism’s case he’s also shearing through Radcliffe’s Black Veil; i.e., dispelling its terror and horror the way a military leader (despot) would: from inside the shadow space filled with all the usual suspects and debates.
In turn, the “playing out” of military optimism inside the Metroidvania narrative historically-materially links war to commerce through Gothicized propaganda that makes us-versus-them not just bearable, but “the only way to be sure”—i.e., through Satanism and other moral panics solved through military optimism: the dark castle is a demon zone to invade, but the invasion comes from within our own domestic sphere as something to ultimately nuke from orbit. It’s the triumph-in-defeat of “the Fall of Saigon,” stuck on loop to disguise neo-colonialism happening right this second everywhere in the Global South; i.e., the disguised revenge fantasy of Pax Americana, pushed into the videogame world (which largely has never been without neoliberalism) and celebrated there as “rebellion.”
This is both a waste of stolen firepower and Radcliffe’s devices to expose the dog-eat-dog[15] nature of Capitalism and Imperialism through the Gothic mode. Mimesis, or pastiche, is simply remediated praxis, wherein we have the ability to transform into whatever we want; function determines what we stand for in relation to capital. As such, traditional femininity and vulnerability can be married to the Amazon as a masculine, violent force, her beauty and brawn a suitably Athenian (androgynous) embodiment of our camping of the canonical castle and Gothic heroine in the same breath (and not simply something for canonical proponents, male or female, to hoard for themselves during equality-of-convenience refrains—”we’re the victims, not you! Stop stealing our spotlight! That’s erasure[16]!”):
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
With Metroidvania (and other shooters), their allegory of class war for workers is generally confined to the same bodies and spaces as canonical interpretations, and their ludo-Gothic BDSM serves as a kind of “flexible praxis.” That is, the exact nature of what they stand for is ambiguous, not set in stone. As such, their liminal interrogations of unequal power manifestation and exchange express as castles, heroes and monsters that can, during iconoclastic interpretations, help acclimate us towards endless war as something to critique but not endorse through enjoyment (with enjoyment being a form of negotiation); i.e., the paradox of the rape fantasy that as much involves us playing the rapist victimizing the world as it does us being “raped” by the threatening sphere of influence between the white castle of the living world, heaven, and light; and the dark castle of the underground, hell, and darkness: Samus is the cop, but I can reclaim her in my own work (above) without compromising the theatrical role or its scenery and props; she looks like a cop but an undercover one that could just as easily not be a cop at all—a “cop” who “rapes” and “kills.” It’s essentially the same argument I made with Ion Fury‘s Shelly Bombshell, in “‘Neutral’ Politics: Feminism, the Gothic, and Zombie Police States in Ion Fury”
The politics in Ion Fury are hardly neutral. This being said, there’s room to enjoy the heroine as a nerd playing a cop, versus a cop whose actions reinforce the game’s underlying police state. The outcome is performative, but at least I have the option—to hold my nightstick like Sarah Connor instead of Judge Dredd (source).
and which I subvert further in my retooled artwork of that character:
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
What is that gun for? Is my version of Shelly a cop disguised as a sex worker (really “committing to the bit” with those tattoos she presumably can’t remove), or a former-cop turncoat advertising sex worker rights while working undercover, or just a dead ringer to Shelly (a double) using Shelly’s likeness to make a point about sex worker rights while infiltrating and subverting the highly fetishized theatre of police work/copaganda in the cyberpunk aesthetic (where cops and “cops” are stationed and deploy from various castles: an occupying army versus a local population that must rely on counterterror, subterfuge and native wit to survive their conquerors)?
Obviously I aim to be sex-positive, but whatever I say will be challenged by people who aren’t sex-positive. They will colonize my performance with the only interpretation that makes sense to them (thus supports their allegiance to state power): my “Shelly” must either be a cop, or not the real Shelly thus a deviant impostor up to no good (attempting through their own metatheatre to impeach/discredit the rebellious legitimacy/class character of words like “woke,” “punk,” or “anarchist” in the process; this might seem daunting to parse, but them doing so actually makes it quite easy for us to spot them: through their moderate condescension [the refusal to publicly take hard stances] and openly reactionary behaviors that “slip the mask” as many times as needed to expose their base class function). Similar to how Hugo Stiglitz puts on the Nazi uniform in Inglorious Basterds (2009) to kill Nazis, the performative complexity becomes a deadly game of disguise, theatre and show-and-tell on various stages simultaneously compelled by various sets of rules; or how a dominatrix wears fetish gear to reclaim the implements of terror and torture from their original historical-material purpose and theatrical function. In either case, the idea is largely games and theatre, but not divorced from the larger socio-political proceedings and meta context. Indeed, it can get quite messy and confusing.
Consider the fabulous Basterds card game scene (whose own sexist/racist director[17] requires us to reclaim the performance from him): The scene in question has Frau von Hammersmark potentially lying to her British/German Ally spies, including Stiglitz but also Archie Hicox (a British officer specializing in German Hollywood films who also happens to speak German) dressed up as “Nazis” to infiltrate a bar to meet their contact. Except there’s a party going on (that Hammersmark neglected to mention), wherein everyone must place a card on their forehead of a famous media personality (many of them movie directors, films, or monsters) that they have to try and guess. They must do so while staying in character as “Nazi officers,” which is then questioned by a real Nazi officer who also just so happens to outrank them (that Hammersmark also neglected to mention): Major Hellström. During the complicated, onion-like subterfuge, every move is a potential tell, and the whole complicated theatre becomes a game-within-a-game-within-a-game. Not everyone knows the same information, and the players (unbeknownst to us) have guns trained on each other under the table (themselves reflecting the nationalized personality of the rude-looking German luger versus the “sexier” Walter PPK—Bond’s gun).
Amid the ceremony of polite playing along and respecting officer’s decorum in bad faith, Hellström notices Fassbender’s unusual accent, which the other man has a backstory for (fun fact: in real life, Fassbender’s German accent sounds Irish due to his mixed parentage: an Irish mother and German father). Yet the thing that seemingly gives the game away (according to Hammersmark, who confesses while being interrogated/tortured afterwards) is a quaint German custom: “the German three,” held up with the thumb, and the pointer and middle fingers:
(source: Weronika Edmund’s “Gestures Loaded with History That You Should Best Avoid,” 2022)
In theory, Archie—due to his failure to mimic this gesture—was hoisted on his own petard, not knowing the local customs (thus the rules of that particular game). Except it’s entirely possible that the Basterds obvious opponent “playing along” was in cahoots with Hammersmark the entire time (she’s a squirrelly fuck, but also a girl in a man’s world). We never know exactly why Hellström decides to play his hand the way he does, nor Hammersmark. The fun (and verisimilitude) lies in their poker faces and refusal to be entirely transparent even when threatened with lethal force by their “own team.” For all these examples, psychomachy, psychosexuality, Amazonomachia and psychopraxis all play out on the same stage, on which we are the players performing certain archetypal roles over and over (“When in Rome…”); the Trojan method likewise goes both ways, hiding and revealing what the performer of the role wants the other players/audience to see.
Just as rape play can put “rape” in quotes, then, Gothic Communists can play along inside the ludic scheme of the videogame during ludo-Gothic BDSM, but inform its studying through things that we create on the outside: my drawings of Samus and Shelly follow the usual femme fatale schtick, but the visuals go beyond the usual uncertainty to provide some telling clues (the tattoo in particular); i.e, revolutionaries who, at first glance, mostly look like their girl-boss doubles, in-game (or in the usual pin-up style fanart). Except, they’re not (a more concrete revelation can be supplied by dialectical-material scrutiny and good-faith dialogs, except good faith and bad faith also occupy the same stage: through actors thereof, adorned insignias, uniforms, weapons, props, etc). In turn, these subversive/transgressive transformations can help lead us to reflect on the bigger violences committed in-text; i.e., as things to give us pause despite being perceived as the “great victory” moment/cinematic payoff so often emulated by videogames, including Metroidvania and other shooters. They become things to question, not quote and endorse in blind faith/pastiche:
(exhibit 1a1a1h2b: Antiwar is allegory wrapped up in war stories with a sci-fi/Gothic flavor. Some of the most popular and endearing revenge fantasies in videogame canon were based on a cinematic Gothic war narrative “in space!” [Aliens] that came from an older variant [Star Wars]. As we shall explore in Volume Two, sci-fi has its roots in the Gothic and revenge; i.e., Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [1818]. Even Star Wars, which was built around rebellion and surviving fascist revenge, became a Disney commodity franchised for endless conflict, but again with all the bombast of a military parade trumpeted through world-building for the purposes of expanding war. Cameron fell prey to the trap of world-building and “sequelitis” as much as Lucas did before him, “Building better worlds” being the diegetic corporate refrain that Cameron would use to expand Scott’s world for a mock Vietnam reinvasion, but also build Pandora as his white Indians stomping ground.
Tolkien wasn’t exempt, either. In my academic and casual opinion, his best work was The Hobbit because it’s able [despite its racism overtones] to argue some fairly sophisticated anti-capitalist points—all in a fraction of the time that Lord of Rings spends inside of itself doing… not much. The latter story is much bigger and simpler in its refrain; and there’s more characters, places and items to be sure. Everything is steeped in its own lore: including personalized weapons and cosmetics meant to help us easily tell the good team from the bad. But everything is built around war as a basic ludic device, and there are multiple battles, sieges and duels inside all three volumes [capped off with the erupting of Mount Doom]. Also, the story is much shorter on mercy compared to the pity of Bilbo, and humor. In short, by playing god, Tolkien was unable to imagine a world outside of Capitalism; he merely became—like Cameron—a god, thus merchant, of war.)
Popular media is full of monomythic elements to camp ourselves, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., in Promethean ways. Next, I’ll introduce a series of terms we’ve either not touched on, yet (the Male Gaze), or will reiterate here (re: the Promethean Quest, Amazonomachia, the creation of sexual difference, etc). There’s a lot of them to unpack, and given the fairly conversational delivery of this book section, won’t be doing so in any particular order. Try to keep up (consider it an exercise that will come in handy later in the series, when things become more conversational, not less)!
Further Gothic Devices to Revisit when Camping Canon, Ourselves (re: playing god, the Promethean Quest and Amazons, and more)
Allegory and revelation go both ways during class/culture/race war. Canon-wise, the despot’s canonical stratagem isn’t just a sword stroke, in that respect, but what guides its endless mimesis as something to promote in ways useful to the state: the profit motive. The explosions and medievalized violence intimate a Pavlovian urge conditioned through dark desires, vice and sin as instructed; i.e., behaviors whose recognition and punishment are conditioned through fear and dogma as personified by monster girls, chimeras and neo-classical forms (which we’ll examine in “Furry Panic“). All are used and discarded for profit in canonical iterations of the Metroidvania; e.g., monster-fucking and -slaying (exhibit 1a1a1h3) elided through the Gothic dialogic of imagined power exchange told during unironic demon BDSM: the heroine killing the dragon at the center of the “sex” dungeon (Samus is classically a dragon-slayer).
In the case of the Metroidvania, canon’s harmful xenophilia, then, has the colonizer fetishizing the colonized in an Amazonian form trapped between the two: the white woman with a dark shadow. Not only is her monstrous-feminine status blamed for the hero’s moment of weakness (the failure to slay evil forever), but also the fall of the colony and of Civilization at large during giant, orgasmic explosions. In short, the woman is always the monstrous target of state violence in some shape or form, either the unstable heroine or the Archaic Mother “final boss” she rapes for the state. The basic, canonical refrain remains unchanged: “slay the pussy, the weak, the other for the glory of empire, of Man, of the status quo; conquer nature”; re: antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine and put it cheaply to work.
As such, the performer and the avatar are literally and figuratively buried alive in dogma as a closed space, chiefly a prescribed dark libido tied forcefully to the state’s profit motive; the connect between the two’s historical-materialism becomes a sharp disconnect—i.e., forever out-of-joint, displaced from the former cause in the narrative of the crypt during cryptonymy as an act of participation in the false copy’s meta-narrative: invading the imaginary past to conceal present atrocities. Except unlike Tolkien’s refrain, Cameron’s refrain happens according to the Promethean Quest as an awesome mystery to “solve” by meeting it with/meting out colonial violence ad infinitum in hyperbolic, female forms (the destruction of planets, the arrival of flying castles that swallow nature whole, as committed by Amazonian forces).
The iconoclast, then, must express and embody themselves through subversions of the same Amazonian violence and its canonical horrors: the quest for the Numinous as something to weaponize for workers; i.e., class warrior mommies (e.g., Sarah Conor, exhibit 8b; or ones we make ourselves, exhibit 102a4). But doing so first requires understanding the problems tied to canonical power on display. For one, the canonical horror for heroes like Ripley or Samus is how, like King Midas, they destroy everything they touch; as Great Destroyers, they are the corrupt, feral war boss the state must betray and destroy according to the same-old, failed solution. By getting to the bottom of the mystery, the hero acquires god-like power… and is promptly punished for it; i.e., made into the “bottom” and “topped” by the state in bad faith.
the Promethean Quest/awesome mystery
Gothic stories enjoy a sense of awesome power tied to the chronotope or awesome ruin (what Percy Shelley calls “the colossal Wreck,” exhibit 5e, 64c, etc). In the wake of a great calamity is the presence of intimations of power that must be uncovered in pursuit of the truth—i.e., the Promethean (self-destructive) Quest. We’ll examine several in the Humanities primer, including Edmund Burke’s Sublime, Mary Shelley’s “playing god,” Rudolph Otto’s Numinous/mysterium tremendum, and Lovecraft’s cosmic nihilism, etc. All indicate the Gothic pursuit of a big power that blasts the finder to bits; or, in Radcliffe’s case, is explained away during the conclusion of an explained supernatural/rationalized event; i.e., the explained supernatural (exhibit 22, Scooby Doo and Velma).
“playing god”
In canonical language, the hero is crushed for their hubris; in iconoclastic terms, “playing god” is the ability to self-fashion (aka “self-determination” in geopolitics). It is generally resented by the status quo, or demonized for being too dangerous; e.g., Satan from Paradise Lost as a self-fashioning terrorist moving away from God’s heteronormative, colonial-binarized image.
(exhibit 5c [from the glossary]: Two examples of the Promethean Quest/awesome mystery—from Event Horizon [top and bottom, 1997] and Alien [middle, 1979].)
Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, Gothic Communism uses the Promethean Quest (and Faustian bargain, which the Demon Module will introduce and unpack; re: “Summoning Demons“) to interrogate capital—but specifically the punitive role of the infernal concentric pattern as a maze or monster of some kind or another—by looking at canonical examples to subvert them; i.e., examining the playing at god as manly and monstrous-feminine heroes do, and seeking to understand the avatar of power—as a would-be Zeus or Hippolyta that infantilizes for profit—as exploring a kind of “lost childhood” that was simultaneously theirs and never theirs; re: the pimp’s refrain, hence argument, pimping Medusa in all her forms out of revenge for the state. For as much as having one’s full ass out, or as little as a nip slip being equally punished/pimped by said state, anything perceived as female (or feminine)—meaning in monstrous ways that violate the usual order of things—will fall into the state of exception/shadow zone to tokenize/decay and be policed accordingly. Similar to exploitation, this is where liberations exists and occurs; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM as made solo and together (the top image being taken by Bunny independently of our work, the bottom one made in a shoot I commissioned them for): camping the canon on our Aegis!
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Such things diverge not through morphology or aesthetic, but dialectical-material context. As such, the “euthanasia effect” operates on a double standard during canon through the same Aegis (a place to show things in and on during liminal expression); i.e., like a rabid dog being put down, a feral cur whose wild hysteria threatens the status quo of men being in charge. The “rabid bitch in heat” is a convenient scapegoat (which extends to other token scapegoats during the expanding state of exception under state decay). It’s also like a toy chest on loan, which the state reclaims to rinse and reuse after the blood is sprayed off; on and on.
Furthermore, as part of this capitalist scheme, the neoliberal Gothic heroine—even when she evolves or becomes “phallic”—remains hopelessly trapped in Macbeth’s doom. Despite the hope of final victory offered by works like Metroid or Aliens, the heroine—like Macbeth—cannot escape from inside a larger meta-narrative that seems to describe and envelope everything in hopeless gloom. Such gloom, like the Numinous at large, can become palliative under the right circumstances.
Our campy interrogations of castle and heroine double the simulations canonical clichés and fetishes, but also praxial slogans adjacent to the theatres we’re playing around with: Cameron’s heroine is, per the ’80s standard, nothing if not full of memorable quotes (the catchphrase). We embody the Amazon as a contested object of power in a perilous space where the seeking of immense power (the Numinous) is self-destructive; i.e., as something to seek, reclaim and transform during class/culture war as stuck within the nightmare of Capitalism, it’s myopic, virgin/whore historical materialism (and paradoxes/revenges):
(exhibit 1a1a1h3a1: Artist, top-left: Amy Ginger Hart [who take advantage of me in a collab; re: the Demon Module’s “Our Sweet Revenge“]; top- and bottom-right: Just Some Noob; bottom-left: unknown. There’s an ancient struggle to Amazonomachia that’s often coded as primal, primitive, even primordial; “I am woman, hear me roar!” through a colonized aesthetic/aesthete that renders the political standing and explicit motives of the invigilated yawper as something of a mystery. That must be interrogated through dialectical-material scrutiny, which requires tremendous context, time and devotion. In the interim, the symbol of power is also an interrogator of power that is generally exposing systemic abuse/trauma in and upon themselves; i.e., while interrogating and exposing power as something that responds to them and their performance as something to side with as for or against the state [whether they want to, or not]: the side of the state and its acts of terror against workers, and Joseph Crawford’s acute assertion of a convenient “terrorism” whose accusation by state they could waggle at bad monsters that don’t serve their material ends.
Again, “class/culture/race war is monster war” is something to portray and perform under Capitalism through counterterrorist depictions of proletarian monsters; i.e., those having a settler-colonial axe to grind with the state speaking their mind; e.g., Clare, from The Nightingale: “I’m not English, I’m Ireland! [switching to Gaelic] To the devil’s house with all English people, every mother’s son of them! May the pox disfigure them! May the plague consume them! Long live Ireland!” (source). The paradox of Gothic expression is that class warriors and their acts of war tend to, at least a glance, look pretty similar to class traitors [excluding the “billboard”/”graffiti” approach that outs the rebel through more open declarations and symbols, exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a]. The devil is in the details in a militarized sense: a repeated action to execute mid-struggle, often to instill a sense of discipline, but also to relieve stress during combat and its waves of terror before, during and after the expected clash [something is always clashing]. In turn, these actions are generally weaponized against us, so it only makes sense to weaponize them back; terror is art and art isn’t something the state can ever fully control.
The same basic visual idea applies to theatrical renditions of actual class/culture war relayed in war-like depictions of sex, monsters, and heroes that can, and should, look familiar but feel different through our aforementioned dialectical-material context. Some variants of the orc, xenomorph or jungle bunny are sex-positive, thus functional guerrillas fighting asymmetrical war against the same; some are false rebels playing at “rebellion” in service of the state during moderate concessions that afford them particular costumes during various stages of crisis: muscles, body hair, bikinis, etc—all as long as their wearing [and surrendering after] ultimately defends the profit motive. We’re not interested in policing them, but utilizing our own “Trojan bunnies” [white or black, damsel or devil, but also in between] to recultivate the Superstructure and reclaim the Base through Gothic poetics; i.e., from our own imaginary stockpiles of monster ass:
[Artist, top-left and –right: Persephone van der Waard. Kurosawa’s marriage of Japanese theatre with Western ideas provided tremendous allegory in terms of war as something to exhibit to Americanized audiences. Lucas would take a page from his book [especially The Hidden Fortress, 1958]. In turn, we should take pages from each other and show off whatever we can using allegory and apocalypse to take Kurosawa and Lucas’ class critique (thus character) further and further—as far as needed to develop anarcho-Communism through the queer-Gothic mode.]
The material and its procurement/usage are all a bit like Toshiro Mifune’s stockpile of swords and Takashi Shimura’s bow and arrow, except the holistic armaments of our banditti‘s uncontrollable resistance are brandished make the elite [and their proponents/apologists; re: Coleridge, Botting and Jameson] froth at their mouths and crap their collective drawers: symbolic and literal armed resistance to whatever forms of tension and expression Whitey is comfortable with. Real weapons have power but so do images of weapons, of solidarity and armed resistance relayed through art; i.e., the performance of organized resistance and rebellion to state forces and their vigilante elements [warlords and bandits] conveyed through capable-looking members of the Communist movement. Whether through force or terror as a means of resistance, both are legitimate and often overlap.)
The Amazon is central to the Metroidvania formula. As something to reclaim, they can be performed through ironic ludo-Gothic BDSM inside Metroidvania; i.e., the theatrical role of the Great Destroyer as monstrous-feminine expressed as a legitimate struggle against oppression, but also a vulnerable party experiencing Numinous, psychosexual feelings of appreciative peril: to understand, interrogate and value the lived reality that women—or beings forced to identify as women/”incorrect men”—have been traditionally victimized for centuries. In short, it’s not harmful to express vulnerability within the castle because the castle is a place designed for such things; even if these same women seemingly act “like men,” it’s fine as long as they’re not acting as the Man Box does in its standard male/tokenized variants.
In short, it’s possible to be a himbo without acting like a TERF and that’s okay. Equally okay is the added gender trouble of complicating performances by mixing masc and femme aesthetics or performative elements. Doing so lies at the heart of what an Amazon is: neither strictly one nor the other. And if it ever seems “stuck” within the aesthetics of the game screen (the castle space), remember that the screen is merely a stage whose performance can be colored by the player on- and off-screen through their various metatextual and paratextual contributions: smaller negotiations/demonstrations of desired unequal power like player commentary and fanart, but also larger projects like this book or even new Metroidvania (which is an indie genre that, like a Gothic castle, can be made anew by even a single person[18a]).
Contributing to the procession of castle-narrative, Team Cherry’s motto is true to the Metroidvania spirit: “Our mission is to build crazy, exciting worlds for you to explore and conquer” (source: TeamCherry.com). While conquering the castle is to conquer one’s fears, these fears are tied to the historical materialism at work; the knight in Hollow Knight is revealed (in the game’s secret ending) to be the Great Destroyer—one who threatens our BDSM-themed warrior princess with tremendous penetration and presumed death (with Silksong still not being out as of 2025, despite me talking excitedly about it in 2019[18b]):
Having conquered the entire gameworld, the hero is possessed with the spirit of the Pale King’s conqueror past: Zombie Caesar! The game’s “final victory,” then, ignominiously possesses the player’s avatar, causing them to lose control (literally—the player cannot control them any longer) and transform (the knight’s gender is never stated; they are coded as male, but Hornet merely calls them “little ghost”). The knight’s hideous transformation leads them to act like a fascist man—i.e., to go feral, but also release the apocalyptic spirit of genocide throughout the land. Embodying that spirit, he brandishes his “weapon” at Hornet (twisting it menacingly into the ground like a knife into someone’s back). She is smaller than him, but so is her needle; she braces for a combat in which she is sorely outmatched: less Mothra vs Godzilla and more Eowyn vs the Witch-king of Angmar, if said king were both possessed by Godzilla and the size of the Creature from Frankenstein (not titan-sized, but big enough to tower over her).
As such, our avatar’s eyes serve as the proverbial magnifying glass to hold over the canonical narrative’s cycle (of Kings) emblematized by the castle; as it passes out of one life and into the next, we reflect on how the mysterious role of the pyrrhic victory/ignominious death is always one of self-deception, self-destruction and live burial; i.e., it happens through reactive abuse that—like the Imperial Boomerang—comes back around to bite the hero in the ass—our ass. There is no transcendental signified but also no outside-text; instead, the hero’s robes are like a giant’s draped over someone too small (re: Macbeth) but also a person who might normally be the target of state violence, mid-cryptonymy. So while iconoclastic/emergent players can feel the same basic pain as the useful idiot’s (for the elite) during the infernal concentric pattern, it is a tale of sound and fury in which the significance of that pain is highly anisotropic, thus reversible during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Like the classic white-versus-black yielding entropy at every register in and between them, the shared narrative of the canonizer and iconoclast is profoundly unreliable/unsafe in self-deceptive ways designed, through space and monsters, to manipulate the audience by inviting them to play along/with false power and hope. That’s what players camp, Metroidvania or not, onstage or off.
As we’ve already established, Gothic heroines struggle within Gothic narratives, whose narrators, spaces and speakers inside a Gothic castle are regularly unreliable/conflicting artificers and impostors, but also involve the patriarchal bloodline or castle as invented; i.e., a series of concentric, sedimentary palimpsests (maps of maps of maps, stacked on top of each other). In the canonical sense, everything is fetishized, valorized and disseminated, then spread far and wide to cover up the ghost of the counterfeit with more ghosts that further the lie of the West. Iconoclastic variants challenge this fatal myopia with their own counterfeits’ opposing class character—which unfortunately must be told onstage or at least in relation to the violent theatre it projects outward: inside the castle as something to camp by interrogating it in all the usual ways.
As such, our exploring of unequal, deceptive power is a palliative Numinous that requires aftercare and serious reflection, before returning to the same castled hells to interrogate them some more. Canon’s conversely “bad aftercare” makes its unquestioning parties the dupe, in a ludic sense, but also the accomplice to the elite’s fetishizing schemes during class/culture war—i.e., “the Roman fool” who thinks it was all “just a dream” as they stain their hands with the blood of the innocent and destroy the entire world: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” After the Promethean flash, they scream and bolt upright in their beds, telling themselves it wasn’t real, that these visions of desolation must have come from somewhere else (another world, another time):
But they feel profoundly uncanny—linked to the dreamer’s own home, body and mind; the sensation becomes liminal, like a sleepwalker who dreams while awake but isn’t sure what is what. They function, then, as Macbeth’s poor player does, strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage until they are heard no more. The story and its daggers of the mind (from the knight’s nail in Hollow Knight, to Ripley’s M41A pulse rifle in Aliens) survive them and the whole cycle begins anew. Each seminal tragedy is preceded by older ones and eclipsed by even greater ones as Capitalism yawns, stretching wide its maw of death for more and more profit at the expense of chattelized workers. No victory is great enough to stop it because all canonical victories are made to feed it, and its hunger knows no bounds; it will eat every hero it comes across, or drive them mad until they become like it: a terrifying monster that—undead and demonic—devours vampirically for the state’s continued, parasitic survival.
As we shall continue to see, the schemes we embark on when camping canon are equally perilous because they occupy the same space, the same language, the same stage and shared performance fighting over stigmas and what their purpose is: to enforce or reclaim; i.e., being drawn to power like a moth to the flame or a live wire to clutch it and burn up/ride the lightning. All workers play with the dead during mimesis, but the iconoclast’s aim with cryptomimesis is to “play god” inside the narrative of the crypt/with cryptonymy (and the other main Gothic theories) to attain a dark rememory for revolutionary purposes—i.e., to regain what was lost during Capitalism’s grand engines pulling people apart and exploiting them for centuries.
Ghosts
Ghosts are ontologically complicated, thus can be a variety of things all at once: a sentient ghost of something or someone, a ghostly memory or their own unique entity that resembles the original as a historical-material coincidence (the chronotope), a friendly/unfriendly disguise, or creative egregore. E.g., Hamlet’s dad, Hamlet’s memory of his dad as triggered by the space around him; or someone painting Hamlet’s dad as its own thing that isn’t Shakespeare’s version despite the likeness. This applies to other famous ghosts in media—e.g., King Boo from Mario, the monster from It Follows, 2014; or my own friendly ghost of Jadis from exhibit 43c—i.e., Derrida’s Marxist spectres.
In short, we must dodge Cameron’s errors when adding bullets (and Amazons) to Tolkien’s refrain (thus ghost) and do what Milton, Matthew Lewis and Ridley Scott did when making our own imaginary past—what Colin Broadmoor previously described as “camping the canon”: of playing god as Lewis did (a process we’ll further adumbrate here before “shining a light on it” in part three); i.e., a deliberate camping of the “darkness visible” within its usual parallels, paradoxes and aesthetics as “at war” within the castle, with monsters, within praxis as doubled according to appearance, but also to which side each belongs and fights for as cryptomimetically stretching in all directions.
Mise-en-Abyme: Echoes of the Neo-Medieval
“The Gothic is writ in disintegration,” but especially neo-medieval forms (a concept the Poetry unpacks during the entire Medieval section, as well as the Demon Module’s “The Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’“). The mise-en-abyme is classically portrayed as heraldry—the coat of arms, as per Bakhtin’s “dynastic primacy and hereditary rites” of the Gothic chronotope—emblazoned on the knights’ shields, banners and killing implements belonging to the same “walking castles”: castle-narrative becomes something not just to walk around inside one castle, but between castles, outside of castles, inside the giant knight as a castle-in-a-castle; straight castles and gay castles, etc. Derrida’s adage, “there is no outside of the text” rings true, and it is here where class war and culture war are waged in a series of competing lies about the West and its much-touted heteronormative supremacy. Meeting them in open combat is a mistake, but we can challenge them within the dialogic imagination as a much more level playing field: Gothic poetics’ paradox of terror for which the state cannot fully monopolize.
(artist: Angus McBride)
In other words, the classical notion of “playing god” was and continues to be punishment for acting out of line (which invariably happens when doing the state’s dirty work); but “playing god” in camp is rewarded by “ruling in hell” as a wonderful metaphor—liberation not by fighting with the dead as Victor Frankenstein did (trying his damndest to punch his composite child-zombie in the face) but a class-, gender- and race-conscious pedagogy of the oppressed whose postcolonial, LGBTQ-friendly cryptomimesis pointedly dances with our folklore, ancestry and culture as reclaimed from the state’s colonizing double (the elite’s bad idea of a “joke”). As is tradition, those “in the cave” will try to destroy us to avoid facing the horrors of Capitalism uncloaked; re: open aggression, condescension, reactionary indignation, and DARVO in defense of the Shadow of Pygmalion as “kingly” thus sacred; e.g., Hamlet’s father’s ghost.
In relation to Tolkien’s refrain as a map of and for conquest, Metroidvania’s awesome mystery/Promethean Quest survives in hypercanonical authors other than Cameron that also endure as ghosts of themselves; e.g., Lovecraft’s cosmic nihilism revived in videogames like Amnesia: the Dark Descent, (2010) or The Darkest Dungeon (2017), and Radcliffe’s exquisite torture echoed in various “survival horror” titles like the Resident Evil or Silent Hill franchises. To this, Tolkien’s own themes of adventure and conquest are revived in games (thus maps) built top of each other but informed by canonical Gothic poetics and interpretation that go beyond Cameron’s shooter-heavy approach; e.g., D&D, but also seemingly unrelated works like Myth, Everquest, or Mario 64[19] as bent on raising the past before razing it just as fast: find the dragon (the source of worrisome power) inside the castle and slay it. For canon, we’re the dragon to slay through sublimated genocide (“So long, gay Bowser!“); for us, our dragon to unironically slay is Capitalism (while doing our best to reclaim the word “dragon” as an abusive call to violence towards an out-group by an in-group).
To this, Tolkien’s treasure map seems wholly original because so much has spawned from it, but in truth, I think people give him too much credit as “the father of High Fantasy.” I’m not questioning his stamp on things, and acknowledge that he certainly built the ideal, codified world for such nonstop conquering to take place; I’m questioning the value of his work as based off the mimesis of old legends repurposed under Capitalism to feed an increasingly globalized cycle of war—i.e., by blindly mirroring it across a variety of sources (which simply did not exist as we know it when Beowulf was first written). Luckily said pastiche occurs not just on the map, but through its cryptomimesis across many maps (of maps, of maps); i.e., a confusing and myriad bestiary of oddly nurturing monsters that reify absurd, surrealist sentiments and conflicting codes insofar as power’s interrogation is concerned: the Gothic castle (and its occupants) a site/sight of increasing entropy between all parties and offshoots amid the might (and weight) of Numinous spirits utterly unconcerned with any particular allegiance.
This all might seem like a bad joke, but there’s tremendous, god-like critical power in humor and jokes (thus worthy of our seeking of them), and—quite paradoxically—both rape and murder are simultaneously “no laughing matter” and precisely what we should joke about when playing with theatrical variations of such things; i.e., to reclaim whatever language we want when talking about systemic, interpersonal trauma as a sex-positive kind of “gallows humor” with crude, direct Anglo-Saxon (four-letter) flavors of ironic monstrous-heroic rape and murder thrown in to “spice things up” (in and out of the bedroom, on- and offstage): making sex-positive meaning from chaos while dancing with the dead as something that helps us accept that we are ultimately out of control (death always wins in the end; imitators of Caesar or Alexander the Great are always trying—forever in vain—to conquer death by making battles so big they will never be forgotten[20]). While the Gothic-Communist aim is comedy and drama through camp that puts the ritual sacrifice of “kill” and “rape” in quotes, canonical variations ditch the quotations and tell bad jokes in bad faith. In those versions, the monster and its lair must be embodied as unironic variants of itself founded on harmful bullshit; i.e., state apologetics and enforcement through regular sacrifices dressed up in the language of an imaginary past: the sublimation (normalization) of unironic sacrifice (“The rest of your Legion has been destroyed, Alric! What more can you hope to do with this handful of men[21]?”).
The victims of said praxis must be killed and fucked by the heroic warrior-monster… who’s also a closeted sissy “looking for mommy” by fucking “monster mom” (or some other member of that hellish family unit): monster-fucking as an incestuous, settler-colonial scheme that really fucks up everyone involved (these definitely didn’t come from Tolkien, whose closest monstrous-feminine is Eowyn or Shelob). This is our chance not to appease the tyrant, but appeal to their soldiers in ways that bring them over to our cause—i.e., by humanizing ourselves through the liminal position as “their” object of pursuit and conquest that paradoxically can wrap them around our little finger during the prescribed pursuit of power. A friend of mine, Alecandstuff (who I interview in my FPS series: “From Vintage to Retro,” 2021), once jokingly said: “There’s more to life-fu than your waifu.” And yet the fact remains that so-called “waifus” are integral not just to navigating power in Metroidvania (and other Gothic videogames and their meta/paratexts) but also embodying power as a semi-serious/semi-humorous performance. Sex and jokes are incredibly persuasive and can turn the wildest zealot into an anarcho-Communist (case study: me).
Galatea’s Ilk; or, “Chimeras, Monster Girls and Wheyfus, Oh My!”
If that somehow feels difficult to imagine, consider not just my book, but all of the many monstrous-feminine kinds of nerd sex that it catalogs. Here is but a taste; or, in the alleged words of D.H. Lawrence: “Let’s go to the dark gods[22]!”
(exhibit 1a1a1h3a2: This exhibit is two exhibits from the glossary—”monster girls” and “chimeras/furries.”
Top-far-left: Muscarine’s “Profligates” from the Darkest Dungeon [2016] mod workshop. The “Great Waifu Renaissance” of The Darkest Dungeon portrays the monstrous-feminine as waifus to control and embody as much during an ontological power trip as simply being a proverbial dragon to “slay.” Often, they walk the tightrope between the cutesy and the profane, subverting stereotypes while simultaneously being chased after by weird canonical nerds: waifu/wheyfu monster-girl war brides. Procured and dressed[23] by powerful greedy companies [e.g., Blizzard’s “thirst-trap” catalog of Amazon gradients] and given to apolitical consumers, the latter fight the culture war for the former as tied to the state through capital. And yet weird iconoclastic nerds can weaponize these self-same monstrous-feminine to our purposes.
The Tusk, for example, is a sexy cavegirl who iconoclastically stinks—i.e., with body odor being historically-materially denied to women despite their armpits smelling just as much as guys’ do, let alone their vaginas, which guys do not have and can have all sorts of smells: e.g., Zeuhl once asked me to smell their panties, saying incredulously, “Isn’t that crazy?” because their cootchie smelled rather strong [and to which my look of shock, post-smelling it, utterly betrayed me. To be fair, it was rather pungent from us simply walking around my hometown. All the same, bodies smell because they’re designed to; e.g., that same night, we had doggystyle sex and for the first time I could suddenly smell the natural “musk” from Zeuhl’s asshole: a vestigial throwback to a time when humans communicated more by smells than with words]. Apart from the Tusk, the Hood is a slutty Red Riding Hood, and the Fawn is a patchwork animal-girl ninja, etc.
Lower-top-left: nude mods for Muscarine’s Profligates, by JOMO=1. Fan mods operate as “fan fiction,” thus tend to be far hornier [see: Black Reliquary‘s (2023) many Amazon thirst traps, bottom-left] than official canon does[24]. Generally the official art/content for the main game or “faithful” fan art tends to be less overtly sexualized, but no less canonical or sexually dimorphic; e.g., the Countess [exhibit 1a1c] as an Archaic Bug Mom slain by the bad-faith Ancestor [who is frankly a giant dick for the whole game].
Top-right: Persephone van der Waard’s illustrations of four monster girls from Castlevania (a franchise with a whole bestiary of female monsters; source: Fandom). These four are all from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night—Alraune, Succubus, Scylla and Amphisbaena.
Bottom-left: Promo art [source tweet: Reliquary Mod, 2021] for The Darkest Dungeon overhaul, The Black Reliquary].
Bottom-right: Fan art for The Darkest Dungeon by Maestro Noob, depicting what are basically heroic female monsters: the virgin/whore, but also the damsel/demon and the Amazon with a BDSM flavor.
[Artist, left: William Mai; artist, right: Blush Brush. Examples of furries. “Furry” is an incredibly diverse art style. For more examples, consider Volume Two’s “Call of the Wild” chapter, as well as exhibits 65 or 68 from Volume Three.]
A chimera isn’t simply the Greek monster, but any kind of composite body or entity, often with elements of multiplicity or plurality [e.g., the Gerasene demon]. Conversely, furries are humanoid [commonly called “anthro”] personas that tend to have humanoid bodies, but semi-animalistic limbs and intersex components tied to ancient rituals of fertility but also gender expression relating to/identifying with nature. While Greek myths are commonly more animalistic, the [mainstream] furries of today are often closer to the Ancient Egyptian variety: an animal “headdress” or mask over a mostly-human body. There’s plenty of morphological gradients, of course—with “feral” or “bestial” variants being more and more animalistic; and the “Giger variety” being more xenomorphic and Gothically surreal [the xenomorph (exhibit 51a/60c) being one of the most famous, if contested, chimeras in modern times]. A general rule of thumb, however, is the genitals tend to be human; however, “monster-fucker” variants very quickly move away from humanoid bodies [and/or genitals] altogether, often with abject, stigma animals like the insect, leech, reptile, or worm. Likewise, while “fursonas” [furry personas] tend to be sexualized, they aren’t always; in fact, they primarily function as alter-egos with many different functions: the political [see: alt-right furries as well as “furry panic“], the dramatic [Fredrik Knudsen, 2019], the horror genre [see: pretty much anything by Junji Ito, but also Five Nights at Freddy’s, 2014; or its various wacky clones, source: Space Ice, 2023] and also for general fandom purposes; i.e., furries are not automatically fetishes [Vice, 2018] but are criminalized similar to Bronies [though any popular fandom that has a large underage audience is going to attract sexual predators and outsider bias; see: Turkey Tom’s 2023 (admittedly problematic) “Degenerate” series on Bronies or Five Nights at Freddy’s; or Lily Orchard’s pedophile escapades, hidden behind sexualized Brony fan fiction—Essence of Thought, 2021].)
Regarding monster girls and chimeras (above)—as well as their parallel spaces/lairs inside Metroidvania, “dungeon crawlers,” FPS, and other ludic spheres—their canonized performances/staging all follow a similar bourgeois take on the infernal concentric pattern vis-à-vis Cameron as imitating Tolkien’s famous treasure map/sanitized variant of Cartesian dualism (Tolkien’s odyssey through a Biblical nature being an elaborate distraction from the West’s imperial scheme): crawl the dungeon, kill the monster and take what’s “yours.” A monster girl is also a popular trope in Japanese shonen media, whose war culture ludologizes the monomyth in ways that illustrate the Cycle of Kings as passed back and forth along the infernal concentric pattern. Along with their castles, the evil king and queen always come back (exhibit 1a1c) and they and theirs must be met by the crumbling forces of good to restore their declining greatness. The monster girl or chimera, then, is an anything-girl monster made for men to unironically kill, but also to rape/undress-with their eyes; i.e., a war-bride “waifu/wheyfu” reified in the global market as built around frontier war and infinite growth (with ties to the Amazon as a kind of war bride; re: after she kills the Medusa):
waifu/wheyfu
The waifu is a war bride in shonen media; i.e., the promise of sex, generally through marriage as emblematized in Japanese cultural exports that fuse with Western bigotries to make similar promises to entitled, young male consumers (and older bigots and tokens). While the “waifu,” then, is any bride you want—be she big and strong, short and stacked, skinny-thicc, tall and slender, or some other “monster girl” combination dressed up as a pin-up Hippolyta, Medusa or some other hauntological trope—the “wheyfu” is conspicuously burly and chased after by entitled fans (this relationship can get performatively complicated, but the basic difference is coercion versus mutual consent). Within oppositional praxis, then, the waifu/wheyfu becomes yet another disguise within class war for operatives on either basic side to utilize.
Of the two, the “wheyfu” alteration is essentially a burlier example designed for your more “sissified” Japanese heroes; i.e., the bishonen genre effectively a symptom of Japanese subjugation by Western forces, traditional Japanese crossdress and theatre—e.g., Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)—living inside the Japanese variant of Bretton Woods and Neoliberalism.
In this strange zone, Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference
the creation of sexual difference
Popularized by Luce Irigaray, her flagship concept is summarized by Sarah K. Donovan as follows,
In other words, while women are not considered full subjects, society itself could not function without their contributions. Irigaray ultimately states that Western culture itself is founded upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through her.
Based on this analysis, Irigaray says that sexual difference does not exist. True sexual difference would require that men and women are equally able to achieve subjectivity. As is, Irigaray believes that men are subjects (e.g., self-conscious, self-same entities) and women are “the other” of these subjects (e.g., the non-subjective, supporting matter). Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
collides with the Japanese soldier/male worker as wanting to regress towards childhood, but also being an adult who is told they cannot and furthermore, lacks the means to do so in a healthy sense (we’ll examine how this zone expands in between countries, in Volume Three—i.e., TERFs, in Chapter Four, but also in Chapter Five as we examine how shonen anime and manga are exported back and forth, perpetuating their harmful, incestuous stereotypes like moe and ahegao as things to unironically internalize, embody and endorse/despise).
Shadows of Freud (feat. Homelander) and Assorted Terms (e.g., the Male Gaze, exhibitionism/voyeurism, hysteria/wandering womb and bicycle face, etc)
As the following exhibit and additional keywords will demonstrate, this commonly plays out in superhero media (which the Amazon and Metroidvania belong to) as exported back and forth in the global market; i.e., during an incessant exchange of unhealthy Freudian embodiments of power and theatrical relations: to unequal power exchange vis-à-vis exhibitionism/voyeurism, but also hysteria/the wandering womb as something not just to stare at but utterly destroy using an incestuous Male Gaze:
(exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1: Model, top-middle-to-right: Tyler Faith [whose “mom bod” also makes an appearance when we critique the “mother” archetype as something to subvert through revolutionary cryptonymy—exhibit 104c]. Any AFAB person is monstrous-feminine under heteronormative power schemes. Inside these stages and their performances, the hypermasculine/monstrous-masculine’s toxicity—of decaying masculinity during crises thereof—will prove his “superiority” against the mother archetype as “false”; i.e., failing to live up to his incestuous standards of motherhood. In turn, she is “kept,” forced to babysit the killer baby as an infantilized adult who can rip her apart with his gaze [Shue was right; babysitting is dangerous[25b]!]. Worse, she is forced to compete for the “privilege” within bourgeois [state/corporate] power structures that figuratively [and sometimes literally] strap a bomb to her chest and force her to negotiate with her “false child” while under duress; i.e., as a captive audience.)
the Male Gaze (appropriative voyeurism/exhibitionism)
Popularized by Laura Mulvey in her 1973 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the Male Gaze goes well beyond cinema; according to Sarah Vanbuskirk in “What Is the Male Gaze?” (2022), it deals with female objectification under Capitalism:
The male gaze describes a way of portraying and looking at women that empowers men while sexualizing and diminishing women. […] first popularized in relation to the depiction of female characters in film as inactive, often overtly sexualized objects of male desire. However, the influence of the male gaze is not limited to how women and girls are featured in the movies. Rather, it extends to the experience of being seen in this way, both for the female figures on screen, the viewers, and by extension, to all girls and women at large. Naturally, the influence of the male gaze seeps into female self-perception and self-esteem. It’s as much about the impact of seeing other women relegated to these supporting roles as it is about the way women are conditioned to fill them in real life. The pressure to conform to this patriarchal view (or to simply accept or humor it) and endure being seen in this way shapes how women think about their own bodies, capabilities, and place in the world—and that of other women.
In essence, the male gaze discourages female empowerment and self-advocacy while encouraging self-objectification and deference to men and the patriarchy at large (source).
Appropriative performances of voyeurism/exhibitionism (watching or showing sexual activities) that cater to this Gaze uphold the status quo. Those that do not are appreciative (thus sex-positive) in nature, but generally remain liminal and ambivalent.
exhibitionism/voyeurism
A desire to show off or to look, generally tied to kink and BDSM. As with those, these activities can be sex-positive or -coercive; i.e., rebellious/furious flashing (exhibit 53, 62c, 89a, 101a1, etc) vs cat-calling/scopophilia from a totally unwanted audience (Norman Bates and Marion Crane) vs the liminal, half-invited Peeping Tom (Jimmy Stuart and Miss Torso from Rear Window, 1954; George McFly and Loraine Bates from Back to the Future, 1985; or these two tennis guys [above] and an anonymous female streaker—source tweet: Peach Crush, 2023) vs the transphobic flasher (exhibit 62c) vs fully consensual voyeurism/exhibitionism (exhibit 101c2).
Unlike our horny tennis players (above), Homelander‘s Male Gaze is both femicidal, but authenticated through its legitimizing relationship to the state’s perceived monopoly of violence (and terror); under it, the female “top-dog” is—as usual—at his mercy while being viewed as the scapegoat to all his woes: the chaos dragon/wandering womb as a thoroughly stupid but nevertheless internalized idea:
(source: Joseph Stromberg’s “‘Bicycle face’: A 19th-Century Health Problem Made Up to Scare Women away from Biking,” 2021)
hysteria/the wandering womb
Hysteria is a form of moderate condescension/reactionary control tied to Cartesian dualism, but also the gaslight, gatekeep and girl-boss trifecta that argues women are “less rational” than men; it tends to diagnose them with bizarre, completely absurd medical conditions to keep them inactive and scared, but also under men’s power (e.g., bicycle face is one [above] but here’s a whole list of odd disorders/female causes of ignominious death invented by male “Pygmalions,” including “night brain” and “drawing-room anguish”; source tweet: Dr. Daniel Cook, 2021). However, it also tends to frame women as mythical monsters/mothers that need to be killed for men to “progress”: Medusas, Archaic Mothers, Amazons, etc.
Silly or not, Homelander feels he must rape the wandering womb in increasingly brutal ways; i.e., to blind Medusa in the classical sense: skull-fucking her (obviously) to death with his lethal Male Gaze. And yet the carcinogenic conclusion to this veiled ultimatum is foreshadowed in power fantasies that, under neoliberalism, are packaged and sold as “mommy fantasies” of the domestic, ordinary sort married the otherworldly kind that are well at home in Gothic fiction, including comic books: state versions of the man-made monster that women (or beings coded as women, or at least inferior on a sliding scale to white, cis-het Christian men) are forced to babysit/nurture; i.e., insane brutes nursed and fucked by unwilling mothers of Grendel. As such, the monster mother becomes the domestic abuser’s de facto sex toy and punching bag.
In other words, the archetypal mother is canonically someone to kill by so-called Supermen protecting the image of themselves as useful to the state’s heraldry and “walking castles.” This unironically psychosexual, psychomachic Amazonomachia of art/porn oscillates within the global market by young (or infantile) men who internalize the matricidal refrain (which Metroidvania canonize thanks to Cameron’s pillaging of the womb of nature). They (and tokens of them) frustrate easily inside the Man Box and act out through intensely childish and violent outbursts when they don’t get what they want. Indeed, Homelander’s faithful imitators (and token groups) are taught to want and not want at the same time. In Gothic-Communist praxis, sex-positive workers can push back against all of this through the counterterror of Athena’s Aegis, challenging the status quo through the monster mom as wheyfu warrior (exhibit 102a4) or dark mistress (exhibit 102b) as often subverted from videogames’ profit motive to be nurturing in an active, class-conscious “mommy warrior” sense (exhibit 111b). Forget “make love, not war”; making absurd love to/with our self-fashioned “dark mommies” while we smile at the gods (vis-à-vis Camus) is (class/culture) war! Nerdy and kinky (my friends and I are all like gay wizards in our towers, having naughty-naughty demon-wizard nerd sex; “stare and tremble” at that, Coleridge)!
Faced with such psychopraxial weirdness that Freud festooned, I imagine that future fancy-pants critics like Jameson, Botting and Coleridge have about as much to say about it as they do about Metroidvania, or the Gothic’s puppy play and war chiefs being collared and “raped” by Hippolyta or vice versa when she’s collared by a man and forced to wed: “that boring and exhausted paradigm,” at whose “Gothic redundancy” “we stare and tremble!” As accommodated intellectuals, they’re simply not equipped to handle or discuss the material, hence glean the psychopraxial patterns that emerge out from its endless bedlam (a shortcoming we’ll address more in the symposium and preface, and at the end of Volume Two); they pray at different alters. Yet, “all deities reside in the breast” rings true to what Gothic Communism can contribute to: by speaking up for ourselves as monstrous-feminine, and whose opposing praxis challenges the status quo upon cartographic spaces just like Cameron’s refrain (the Metroidvania). This generally happens by making our own gods when drawn to their power as stemming from older variants we then interrogate by making our own monsters and castles/theatrical space—i.e., by first looking at total weirdo fuck-ups like Homelander from The Boys (2019, a killer baby if ever there were one; the Creature as the colonizer instead of the colonized, but still fathered by Cartesian hubris) before camping it.
From there, Gothic Communism places “rape” and “kill” in quotes, reversing the process of abjection within the narrative of the crypt as per our cryptomimesis deliberately flowing countercurrent to the status quo’s own class-dormant/traitorous “darkness visible.” We can confuse and rewire the state’s canonical trauma response by being dark mommies to those who have partially (or fully) been conditioned to harm us and themselves. We don’t have to date creeps or try to “fix” them by catering to their idea of a perfect fantasy (in short, giving them what they want); we can merely dress up and perform in ways that get inside their heads—that freeze them in place while living our best naughty social-sex lives with the people we do care about (and who care about us) making and expressing ourselves through sex-positive art.
Whether putting makeup on for ourselves, wearing pretty clothes, or having anal sex with a mommy dom and dressing it up as art to sell as pedaled wares, we’re doing all of this for us as weird iconoclastic nerds, not the weird canonical nerds who—given the chance—would rape and kill us for real if they don’t get what they want. Power aggregates; canonical power aggregates to defend its useful, mighty idiots, so we must aggregate and mobilize to defend ourselves against them when recultivating the Superstructure. This includes exposing its own supermen as infantile babies. The paradox uses their own logic against them: a god cannot be a super manly-man and a baby[26] at the same time, right? It becomes something they cannot openly acknowledge, defend or even begin to explain (which helps us not just keep tabs on the usual bad-faith people, but openly and routinely[27] demonize them as hopelessly pathetic and hypocritical chasers who clearly aren’t getting their needs met by Capitalism).
The “man(made) baby” argument is dualistic, and goes back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). We don’t have time to go into it (and posthumanism), here, but the Demon Module’s “Making Demons (re: Prometheus)” chapter unpacks the idea at length. —Perse, 3/29/2025
Canon deifies poetics in defense of a patriarchal status quo that historically-materially privatizes said process and demonizes anything else as a dark degenerate god, a false idol or mother of demons; the Satanic rebel of the Miltonian tradition challenges all of that by questioning Heaven as a fictional idea of Hell—not God’s, but a pandemonium of our own making wherein dark, Gothic poetics are a literal, counterterrorist act of war waged against the status quo (and whose “rape” and “killing” are also an interrogation/reclamation of our own psychosexuality inside the psychosexual fortress as something to raise our flag within). Making our own psychosexual monsters (and ludo-Gothic BDSM castles vis-à-vis Metroidvania and similar narratives) is vital because it gives us a voice, a human face through which our labor is reclaimed by us through our own creative negotiations: to be as gods are by creating whatever we want to become/come about; i.e., fashioning traumatic representations outside of ourselves (effigies[28], but also maps) that spit in the state’s eye and call it a liar without saying the exact words.
Furthermore, our mere existence says the quiet part out loud through Gothic theatre. While canonical heroes transform all the time (re: Beowulf or Ripley), they’re ostensibly allowed to turn back into their former selves, thus receive a human(e) reception. For the marginalized, coercive demonization amounts to perpetual states of exception according to the monopoly of violence and terror; i.e., our slaying by “good” monsters like Beowulf, whose taking of our “goods” extends to token proponents of rape culture during the Call to Adventure as concentrically mapped out. Class betrayal intersects with heteronormativity and race betrayal during the colonial struggle as ongoing. As such, the Call itself is a blood oath/feud mirrored in real life by its false, imaginary copies fueling the fiction (the crisis, scarcity and competition).
Back to Tolkien (and Gay Hobbits)
This goes back to Tolkien, who—despite his allergy to constant darkness—can still be critiqued the way we’ve critiqued Cameron’s refrain in Metroidvania; i.e., his monsters (which travel out from the darkness to trouble Tolkien’s “new Eden”). Tolkien’s 1937 revival of wealth-through-conquest (in his children’s book, no less) spawned more and more fictional war foreshadowed by a canonized “second conflict” (The Lord of the Rings) whose implied historical materialism predicted a real second world war that, in turn, prompted the return of the Necromancer out of the East; i.e., the Barbarian Horde but also the Deceiver as a betrayer of all that was good and bright in the free world: a dark lord on his dark throne in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.
This wasn’t a coincidence; the Nazis of the Third Reich were expanding their own version of Manifest Destiny through a radicalized call to war informed by Americanized fiction, which Tolkien capitalized on through his own mythology as pilfered from Beowulf and various other legends built around the Western idea of war and conquest as Old English: a reimagined British past as yet another false copy. In either case, the ones spearheading the continuous blueprint were the American elite because they had the capital to do so—i.e., enough to put out the false-copy copaganda stories (the Superstructure) but also to sell both sides their guns from afar (the Base) that made the wars that added to the narrative of the crypt’s process of abjection (the person who benefits from a gold rush or a war mania is the person selling the tools but also the propaganda).
As a centrist bigot, Tolkien critiqued war as a white cis-het British man in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s would—someone who certainly wasn’t immune to the colonial standards of the British Empire; he stories are riddled with racial stigma—e.g., Anderson Rearick’s “Why Is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc” (2004) being a question I asked myself when I wrote “Dragon Sickness: the Problem of Greed”: Where are all the good goblins?
Even though the races of Middle-Earth are distinct, they remain connected with common threads. The calling of elves as Good People feels quite similar to the Shakespearean Venetians considering themselves “merciful” Christians (at the same time, the rare and elusive “good goblin” is never described in The Hobbit) [source].
This would be a question I would try to answer years later but—in fact, already had—as a weird iconoclastic nerd: You have to make them, generally in relation to your own trauma as congenital/inherited (the same idea applies to Cameron’s xenomorphs, of course):
(exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a: Artist, left: Persephone van der Waard; right: Lucid-01. Here, Glenn has been patently devised as a sex worker’s approach to billboard/graffiti activism [exhibit 62a2/exhibit 100c6] but also stripping and invigilating an exhibitionist’s psychosexual exploration of exquisite torture [exhibit 98a1a] to illustrate sex positivity in action through my “creative successes,” but also art commissioned by other artists for the project. To this, Lucid was drawn to my work because they liked Glenn, and their style appealed to me enough that I commissioned them to draw a piece for me [creatively directed by me but executed by them] to be a part of this book.)
As Galateas challenging Pygmalion, the language of terror is something we have to reclaim during our own Gothic poetics. I realized this when looking back on my shapeshifting, sex-changing and gender-swapping goblin, Glenn (above, one of the mascots for this book and coming from older juvenilia left incomplete, exhibits 0a1b1 and 94c1). I had made them as a sex fantasy of sorts, but realized it was really me acting out my desire to be trans (and strong and green)! As I write in Volume Three, “I used to think people became trans. Only when I recently thought about Glenn again did I realize that I was and always would be trans; teenage me just didn’t have the language to describe how she felt!” I made do. However, once I did have the language, I wrote a whole book and drew lots of pictures. Just like Tolkien (and Cameron, an accomplished screenwriter and illustrator in his own right)!
So far I’ve been quite critical of Tolkien and Cameron, but honestly could be harsher if I wanted, but I want to avoid a subtle trap: punching the bigot until I get carried away and my argument is nothing but ad hominens. While the American elite shoulder much of the blame, it’s far easier to blame the obvious-looking villain or exceptional asshole that proves the state’s “innocence.” Simply put, I have bigger fish to try and Tolkien and Cameron hardly are the worst of the individual cases out there. Indeed, they birthed stories with tremendous centrism at their hearts, but also queer potential. It doesn’t take much to revert Cameron’s alterations of Ellen Ripley back to Scott’s neoliberal critique (re: my art of Amanda Ripley, celebrating her vulnerable status as an imperiled-yet-capable worker trapped inside a Gothic space). Likewise, the hobbits can be gay if I want them to be, if I make them to be. And I’m not the only one who thinks so; e.g., Molly Ostertag’s “Queer Readings of The Lord of the Rings Are Not Accidents,” 2021, and lovely artwork, below. Her own Galatean work takes a symbol of stigma—a hobbit, basically an Englishman’s quaint, early-20th century whitewashing of a leprechaun—and makes it gay through a sexually descriptive interpretation:
(artist: Molly Ostertag)
So while I could keep pounding on the “Tolkien is a bigot” drum, the larger problem isn’t really Tolkien because he’s dead and we can just camp his canon if we want[29] (and far better than Kevin Smith did in Clerks 2 [2006]—his moderate homophobia being used to out the fascist LotR fan while somehow conflating queerness with eating shit: “After the Sam-and-Frodo suck-fest, Sam flat out bricks in Frodo’s mouth”). The state and its defenders are the problem: centrists and fascists tied to copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex as a heteronormative loop of monomythic canon (and all its historical-material effects). These are broad categories that we will have to unpack later in the book more than we already have up to this point.
For now, just know that centrists are the smug, milquetoast types who “debate” fascists with theatrical variations of their own; fascists look, sound and act crazy—will say and do anything to acquire power, then hold onto it afterward. Both copy Tolkien and Cameron’s blueprints in service of capital, but fascists play more aggressively when radicalizing the blueprint and pitching a fit: This includes gay hobbits being anathema of course (or Amazons to drool over and closet), but also black actors fighting for their right to be in a neoliberal product profiting off what is basically the undying ghost of the Tolkien estate:
For the past week, I’ve been bombarded with messages of hate, called the N-word, told to go back to Africa, and called on to be executed. The reason? The Lord of the Rings. It would almost be laughable if it wasn’t so profoundly sad. A wealth of stories, and a willingness to believe in wizards, Balrogs, [evil] giant spiders and magical swords. But allow people of color to exist in Middle-earth? Well, that is an affront to all that’s good and decent. At least that’s the primary argument for those ruinous trolls apparently review bombing and harassing fans of color over Amazon’s Rings of Power series (source: Richard Newby’s “A Racist Backlash to Rings of Power Puts Tolkien’s Legacy Into Focus,” 2022).
The above debate seems reasonable, but it misses the larger issue by a mile. Fascists aren’t just random weirdos to be challenged with finger-waving and a shrug. They come from companies like Amazon existing in the first place, whereupon the middle class radicalizes to defend capital. You can’t stop them by being polite, like Tolkien was (whose treatment of people of color in his stories is dubious at best, and doesn’t indicate he’d treat real-world non-WASP persons any better). Hell, even if you punch them, the etiology remains intact. You have to go after the source: capital (which is what Amazon is; a trillion-dollar mega-company that makes Sauron’s devastation look like an absolute joke).
The real problem, then, is the commodified moderacy of men like Tolkien’s “good war” and Cameron’s “military optimism.” At a glance, no one put it better than Martin Luther King:
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection (source: “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 1963).
But since King’s literal assassination (and death of his ghost’s class character vis-à-vis neoliberal appropriation), the “good will” that King attributes to the white moderate has revealed itself to be a performance made in bad-faith by men like Cameron (whose own white savior antics and Conrad-level racism project dated antiquations onto future fictional worlds filled with his white man’s idea of a solution: white Indians[30]). The larger issue, then, is a refusal to put down the rose-tinted glasses, stop kissing up to canon, and actually acknowledge the source of moderate and fascist rhetoric having their “civilized debate.”
Pulling a Galatea (when Making Monsters, Ourselves)
In short, we have to “pull a Galatea,” making sex-positive demons and embodying them not accidentally as Milton’s Satan did, but on purpose vis-à-vis Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, H.R. Giger and Ridley Scott[31]—all hugging Medusa during the dialectic of the alien (re: “Brace for Impact: Some Prep When Hugging the Alien“). Refusing to do that only allows things to go on as they reliably do; i.e., with the usual interlocutors largely ignoring our plight as monstrous-feminine “of nature” (extended beings) pimped by the state (and thinking beings): while simultaneously commodifying our struggles and resistance in the very language we reclaim from canon as demonizing us to begin with. Nothing else will do, lest Capitalism go (as it always does) from crisis into swift decline—whose current, short-lived and unstable form of Capitalism (neoliberalism) regresses towards the hauntologized versions of privatized war (mercenaries and privateers), dogma and persecution mania dressed up in videogames/neoliberal canon since the 1980s: functional/performative cannibalization, necromancy and the ancient blood magic of the vampire; i.e., of the Catholics and the Western view of pagan culture, including the Romans: blood sacrifice and blood libel (tied to sodomy and witch hunts, which the Demon Module will unpack at length; re: “Idle Hands“).
In this department, I will say that fascists are far flashier than their holy cousins. But unlike sex-positive demons who shapeshift to survive the state, fascists shapeshift to enter the halls of a weakened bureaucracy to possess and occupy its instruments for their own gain. Their MO is the same, just cranked up to eleven: waves of terror and vice characters (menticide and death theatrics) in order to steal wealth through subterfuge and violence. It’s schoolyard bully tactics with a knack for dark, over-the-top and unironically vengeful theatre—specifically the bully’s own xenophobic and occult-obsessed pathos; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection as also radicalized until it becomes a Promethean Quest for power that invokes theft from the powerful, not a shitty bargain (which is what fascism is). The fascist might not believe their own lies at first, but eventually their tenuous hold on power demands a megalomania in order to sell such expanding performance-based deceptions and outright falsehoods. Before long the mania becomes terminal, by virtue of the thief stealing from the elite and not just the Communists and the marginalized the elite brand as “terrorists.” Doing so is a death sentence, leading the elite to mark fascists as “mad dogs” whose centrist counterparts (the paladins) must not only put down, but cut down in holy kayfabe (thus reestablish the elite’s hold on things through a gentler variant of the same Crusade-like counterfeit; e.g., Jedi who [according to themselves, of course] don’t crave excitement or adventure).
(exhibit 1a1a1h4a: Just because centrist theatre demands a bad guy for the good guy to punch doesn’t mean we, as workers, should just unironically embrace this role [and the historical materialism/punching down that results from it]. We can punch up and still enjoy being ironic “heels,” who love our big, bearded, ostensibly gay himbo and protector-of-Russian-skies, Zangief.)
Note: Below is a deluge of additional holistic terminology that unfolds interdependently during capital’s historical-material boom-and-bust; i.e., that which workers more broadly must camp the canon of to dialectically-materially have the whore’s revenge against profit: by achieving universal liberation through the same Gothic aesthetic reversing abjection (doing so with Metroidvania, Amazons, and/or anything else they possibly can). To it, these are big ideas, and ones far too big to unpack here. We can only introduce or reiterate them, returning later multiple times for fresh synthesis; re: holistic expression demanding repeated reflection on past reflections, on and on; i.e., from Volume One’s manifesto to Volume Two’s modular Humanities primer to Volume Three’s proletarian praxis, and back around again. —Perse, 3/29/2025
Within these crises and their haunted, bogus treasure maps, the consequences are anything but false. For one, the monster is very much real as a codified belief system and target of state violence. Both the killer for the state and the target of said killer’s violence, canon informs the sexual orientation, gender identity/gender performance and performance-as-identity (which synonymize under the false dichotomy of man/woman and male/female under the colonial binary) that exist between predator and prey as a liminal performance; i.e., one that can be adapted by any worker the state needs to manipulate thus profit from. Both positions are sexed, gendered and expected to perform and identify in highly specific gender roles that are lucrative for the elite: according to heteronormative assignment as starting at birth funneled towards war-as-a-business.
In turn, their monstrous legion is binarized, reflecting in its sex-coercive language as part of the Superstructure allowing room for controlled opposite; i.e., that which the elite cannot own, but can cultivate to shape how people think, thus react to perceived threats (worker action) towards the careful cultivation of copaganda and nation/war pastiche in popular media made through what they do own: the means of production, the Base. Their palingenesis drives capital as “a system for exploiting workers, nature and the world, whose resultant genocide and vampiric devastation is synonymous with profit for capitalists” (from the glossary) as something whose unequal material conditions/privatization of property is built around endless war as a holy business in secular/non-secular forms. The entire enterprise, as the ghost of the counterfeit/narrative of the crypt, becomes hyperreal: one, a map of imaginary desolation to hide the actual desolation currently happening all around us, whose decaying surface eventually shows glimpses of an endless ruin behind the map; but also to cloak the devastating “brainwashing” effect Capitalist Realism has on our minds: menticide (the raping of the mind by propaganda, which Volume One will unpack; re: “The Nation-State: Remediating Modern-day “Rome,” Gargoyles, and the Bourgeois Trifectas”). Point out the decay behind the map and you’ll be shot for ruining the picture (re: Le Bon).
As part of this scheme, the police of canon include the witch cop/war boss as the policer of Gothic media on- and offstage within culture war as part of class war—fighting over the former significance, but also the current/future interpretation and production of such stories: Metroidvania’s castles and monstrous-feminine, psychosexual torture; as well as Cameron’s other shooters, and before those Tolkien’s naturalized colonialism[32] out on the open battlefield, overshadowed by dark castles. Regardless of the genre, canon’s fear and dogma become things that weigh on the minds of dutiful consumers, artists and patrons, making them ignore worsening living conditions and individual lives by colonizing media to keep it canon (thus preserve the canonical image of the author no matter the cost).
The biggest casualties, then, are basic human rights and positive freedom (freedom to act) for workers, whose sex-positive potential is sacrificed in favor of negative freedom (freedom from consequence) for the elite as historically-materially sex-coercive. Yet, amid this broader dialogic imagination (re: Bakhtin), genocide is sublimated, dressed up as fun, harmless, and cool; legitimate critiques are recuperated into “defanged” forms of controlled opposition that lack conscious class character/utility during class war (the struggle to achieve class consciousness), and by extension, intersections of culture and race. Rainbow Capitalism will even attempt to “whitewash war with rainbows,” recruiting token minorities (starting with white cis-het women) from the underclass as a kind of assimilation fantasy (which is then sold back to nerd culture: the Amazon war bride, exhibit 1a1a3)—i.e., one where they punch down against themselves inside cyberpunks, Metroidvania, and similar canceled-future dystopias during marginalized in-fighting/internalized bigotry instead of punching up against the elite, aka divide and conquer via conversion therapy by promoting material advancement and societal climbing through class, culture and race betrayal through assimilation fantasies imitating the colonizer (e.g., Franz Fanon’s “black skin, white masks” or Shakespeare’s Shylock). It’s very “pick me,” Judas levels of selling out for scarce little in return, considering all that was lost: connection, dignity, humanity and trust—and all for a false copy of a treasure map whose ensuing gold rush wasn’t for workers at all, but the elite carefully manipulating them to fight amongst themselves.
Next, I’ll give a quick example of this I’ve already written about that isn’t Metroidvania, but ties into the same shooter model per Cameron’s refrain: Ion Fury.
Shooters within Cameron’s Refrain (and Camping Them); re: Ion Fury
As the Nazis spilled into Western Europe (due to American isolation, arms sales and economic interference through lend-lease and the Marshall Plan), Americans read the stories and newspapers and volunteered to fight; the elite sold them “their” shovels, helmets, and guns (real or imaginary). The American soldiers’ bargain was Faustian, the German quest Promethean, and a lot of people died so the elite could carve up the globe and its map yet again based on lies, of lies, of lies (as nation-states always do). From here, Tolkien and Cameron (and their defenders) cut their authorial teeth through cartographic refrains defended by current-day TERFs and other mask-off bigots, the latter apologized for by men just like Tolkien and Cameron in the 21st century. 3D Realms, for instance, have brought their own nostalgic-heavy approach to war pastiche as its own recursive, unironic lie: the Build engine FPS of the late ’90s. Acting as its own refrain parallel to Doom or Metroid’s direct link to Cameron, 3D Realms swapped out the Metroidvania operatic Gothic castle for a different locale, music and fetishized violence: police brutality during military urbanism.
Speaking of lies, heteronormativity lies at the center of all this manufacture, coercion and subterfuge; i.e., an ongoing and accelerating problem (the Imperial Boomerang and military urbanism/the police state) whose endless synthesis occurs through the canonical relationship between fiction and reality as something to perceive, first and foremost as Capitalist Realism yawning into infinity. Cities function as castles, being presented as increasingly hostile, concrete graveyards occupied by two distinct groups flooded with guns (criminogenesis): the fetishized armory of police weaponry being leveled by the usual givers of state violence against the usual receivers (who make do with stolen or improvised weapons—i.e., the paradox of terror). During the advertised war on crime, both sides are dressed up as cartoon zombies and demons. And in the middle, the Amazon plays a similar role that Ripley or Eowyn did: being a humanizing face (and piece of ass) to whitewash the ensuing massacre, thus make death seem noble but also rewarded with a Valkyrie orgy in the afterlife. All business as usual, leading the state to not simply eat itself, but shoot itself in the foot and chew up its labor force (which again, is expendable by design):
Life planned out before my birth, nothing could I say
Had no chance to see myself, molded day by day
Looking back I realize, nothing have I done
Left to die with only friend, alone, I clench my gun (Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes“).
Like a small child, the soldier is utterly terrified of an imaginary enemy the gun cannot destroy; like an obscene pillow, the gun gives no comfort and the soldier will probably die (or be scarred for life), but within capital they will have served their purpose either way: profit for the elite.
Being a canonical process, though, all of this can be camped, which is where our “camp map” comes into question beyond just the Metroidvania ludo-Gothic BDSM negotiations we’ve examined up to this point. Indeed, now’s the time to make things gay at large; i.e., by camping all canon as ours to interrogate, then reclaim and recreate though proletarian Gothic poetics: making our own monsters, maps and labor action plans, vis-à-vis Shelly’s catchphrase, “Imagine the future, ’cause you’re not in it!” taken as a challenge to overcome; i.e., seizing control as much as we can and populating the critically empty and desolate gameworlds of Ion Fury, Metroid and Doom with sex-positive, anti-police sentiment—the kind that challenges the very sort of public sentiment that I write about in “Zombie Police States in Ion Fury” (an extended quote, because it’s relevant to what we’re up against):
Ion Fury‘s exploitative representations of power matter because their symbols are tied to public sentiment; this includes all persons relative to power as something to exploit and express: the abusers or the abused. Historically the police abuse, because they have the power and state-expressed permission to do so; minorities, the perpetual underclass, are forever on the receiving end. It stands to reason that symbols detailing abuse or targets will remain ambiguous as long as power disparities remain, or threaten to return: As something to kill, the police state, like a zombie, rises from the dead; in turn, it transforms people into zombies—cops into heartless, mindless killing machines, and civilians into dead men walking (whose immediate termination requires no explanation).
Ion Fury openly glorifies lethal force to justify permanent martial law (the sort prophesized and critiqued by James Cameron’s Terminator films). This feels highly questionable in a time where protests against police brutality in America are at an all-time high; equally dubious is Ion Fury‘s presentation of a halcyon police state—the peaceful point whose equilibrium is interrupted by a rebellious martial power, Heskel the mad scientist. Neo D.C. is a “shithole” headed further down the drain, this symptomatic regression encouraged by those already in power. The heads of state encourage their city’s decay through smaller, rival gangs they can persecute; the mass incarceration and slaughter of these violent minorities becomes ritualized, celebrated (an unironic homage to the War on Drugs, hinted at [by the game’s problematic Read Me: or as Bay aptly says, “‘Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girl-Boss,’ the Game!”]
through the racist statement “cracked out,” which refers to the state-enforced assignment of crack as the black person’s Drug of Choice). There’s no attempt to humanize these factions in Ion Fury. Through a monstrous lens, Ion Fury reminds me of Night of the Living Dead, and how George Romero demonized the civil [disputes] that followed the Civil Rights movement. Alas, the further you move away from a specific historical moment, the less its monsters represent actual people; the undead become “just zombies,” floating signifiers to blast apart. I love zombie pastiche—a playful literacy of pop culture undead interpreted through games like Left 4 Dead. There’s certainly fun to be had, even if the critical power of the zombie is gone. They’re simply targets in a cinematic hall of mirrors.
If anyone’s to blame for this shooting gallery approach, it’s Aliens. Cameron’s movie formed the FPS blueprint (and premise) adopted by Doom, which so many “clones” afterwards also copied. The xenomorphs were supposed to represent the Vietcong—the biggest casualties of the Vietnam War. Instead, they’re simply targets for Ripley to lay waste to. Similarly the mutants and cultists in Ion Fury are monsters for Shelly to blow away. Not only are they trapped in a crumbling necropolis; they’re relegated to the sewers, the city’s dumping ground. The cultists can at least speak, but fare no better than their voiceless counterparts. Faced with these pitiful wretches, I can’t help but think of Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception. To summarize, “constitutional rights can be diminished, superseded and rejected in the process of claiming an extension of power by the government during a state of emergency.” That’s literally what martial law is, and what Shelly’s fighting for. She’s the arm of the law, an extension of a military government whose chokehold on the city’s denizens dehumanizes everyone involved—the zombies, but also Shelly (whose uniform, in practice, turns her into a faceless, expendable cop).
Under the city’s power, the mutants do not die; they linger unhappily between life and death. They scream as Shelly sets them ablaze, evoking the voiceless wails heard in Death’s “Suicide Machine” [1991]:
Controlling their lives
Deciding when and how they will die
A victim of someone else’s choice
The ones who suffer have no voice
Manipulating destiny
When it comes to living, no one seems to care
But when it comes to wanting out
Those with power, will be there.
“Those with power,” in this case, are “there” through Shelly (someone with power—i.e., associated with or on the side of those in power). The cast of Ion Fury are either cops or criminals, and cops punish criminals. It’s the totalitarian, concrete jungle realized by Judge Dredd, another Ion Fury palimpsest. Dredd’s not a vigilante; he’s a champion of the state, a paragon of force praised for his lack of empathy towards those he plugs. So is Shelly. An expendable captain of the GDF’s Domestic Task Force, she literally heads homeland security. She serves the state, not the people—is literally the game’s judge, jury and executioner.
If all this sounds a bit doomsday, Ion Fury doesn’t preach this stuff; it passively advertises it. This isn’t wholly positive, though. Noam Chomsky refers to advertising in Manufactured Consent as “de facto licensing authority”: “Media outlets are not commercially viable without the support of advertisers. News media must therefore cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers.” Those with money have the power to influence others in a capitalist system, including the media. Media isn’t neutral. Videogames are media; videogames aren’t neutral, either.
In this respect, Ion Fury tries to be “just a game” (no politics here, bro); except it’s a form of advertising whose parodic images complement its central Read Me message. Like the preface to a novel, the Read Me message is the imprimatur that colors the action moving forward. As testified by my naïve playthrough, a person can easily enjoy the game separately from its inner politics—to enjoy nostalgic action for its own sake. Nevertheless, the shadow of the ’80s weighed a little heavier on me the second time around.
(exhibit 1a1a1h4b: Artist: Blur Squid Art. “The cake is a lie.” Gun porn is commonly tied to gun sentiment granted a nurturing quality while pressuring for its continued sales and usage everywhere and on everyone [the Dirty Harry effect]. Women, then, are commonly used to fetishize and whitewash the climbing sale of weapons in an ever-growing market that—more and more and more—conflates women with guns in the cliché maxim: “Your rifle is your girl.” These are not “peacekeepers,” but tyrants at home and genocidal implementers abroad working in concert. For the women involved, even if they never see live duty or combat, they are still propagandists by virtue of what they’re contributing towards.)
We clearly can’t just play games “apolitically”; we need to act out to expose those who act in bad faith so they won’t kill us (the people who show up to college campuses with assault rifles, and who look at Ion Fury with rose-tinted glasses, but also treat it as rose-tinted glasses with which to view the world around them: a killing ground of us-versus-them). This makes our function as iconoclasts somewhat complicated and unsafe: the Gothic princess-faggot and the rodeo clown waving a big red flag at the bull acting tough in his bailiwick! But it needs to be done because otherwise we’re dead meat. We’re not dead yet, but Capitalism will surely make us that way if we stand idly by and put our faith in white, cis-het (functionally Christian) men like Tolkien and Cameron, but also their Cycle of Kings expressed in future authors like 3D Realms continuing the nostalgic, bloodthirsty refrain unaltered (and whose every sequel enterprise/revolution of good vs evil is profit for them and death to us).
With Metroidvania, by extension, we can camp what they made through a palliative Numinous inside our own castles; but to fully corrupt the twin trees of oppositional praxis, we also need to go beyond Tolkien and Cameron and camp all of canon, on and offstage, using ludo-Gothic BDSM—in short, “starting a thing” however we can, or “putting the pussy on the chainwax” (which the next subchapter will hopefully make a little more clear): the shooters of the world, and their cinematic and novelized equivalents’ copaganda informing the Military Industrial Complex abroad and military urbanism’s de facto deputies/stochastic terrorism and widening net of state abuse in all directions, inwards and outwards. In short, camp is half-real, as is ludo-Gothic BDSM.
Camp Is Half-Real: Out of Metroidvania and into Real Life as Intertwined with Such Things during Ludo-Gothic BDSM
(source: Volker Janssen’s “Why Was Dresden So Heavily Bombed?” 2020)
During WW2, the Nazis didn’t try to exterminate the Jews instantly any more than the American colonist did the Native Americans; it started with propaganda that gradually hinted at, then reached, the final solution—of putting them into concentration camps then death camps—near the end of the war (and radicalized in the face of certain defeat while harboring an utmost certitude of final victory while still [more or less] having total control over Germany’s armed forces—a position solidified by a real state of emergency where one did not exist before: “Desperate times call for desperate measures”). In short, the Nazis were excellent propagandists but bad capitalists; as a bad copy of American propaganda/public relations, they had bought into their own poorly copied grandeur and, like Icarus’ wings, were suddenly coming apart at the seams. But they live on in American copaganda like Ion Fury (and its multiple sequels), whose endless war for territory oscillates on the ludologized cartography of Tolkien and Cameron sublimating real-world atrocities. Genocide is half-real, making its chronotopic subversion through cryptonymy and hauntology to reverse abjection (thus profit pimping nature as monstrous-feminine) all but required when camping any Pygmalion’s refrains.
Within their outdoor/indoor refrains, the colonial marines butcher the xenomorphs as “pure evil,” and Tolkien’s forces of good annihilate the orcs in similar settler-fashion (exterminating the local population) through the likes of D&D and Blizzard’s Warcraft franchise, etc); and Shelly Bombshell does the same thing seemingly far closer to home during military urbanism. We, as Gothic Communists, must interrogate said power (and its paradoxes/doubles) through our ironic reclamation of an oft-Numinous affect, vis-à-vis the unironic torture dungeon/psychosexual vaudeville as something to reassemble in our own artwork, pornography and performances of various kinds (the shooter being closer to George Miller’s Gothic Western). Our counterterrorist iconoclasm will be policed by other members of the public who see our doing so as a threat to the Base and the Superstructure beyond a particular army or castle; i.e., the twin trees whose Symbolic Order/mythic structure is ultimately the Shadow of Pygmalion: the enemy of Satan as a rebel force during oppositional praxis.
Note: I mention Lacan’s “Symbolic Order” a few times in this book volume, and never really go back to it; i.e., while Gothic Communism stresses dialectical materialism (with anarchistic, social-psychosexual elements)—emphasizing them throughout its varied hermeneutics—said Gothic mode and means of study still push collectively away from psychoanalytical models; re: Freud, but also shadows of Freud haunting Kristeva, Creed, and others. We’ll still mention these authors in the pages (and book volumes), ahead—and obviously stress Kristeva’s process of abjection and Creed’s monstrous-feminine as we do—but nonetheless shall strive to remind people that Freud and his ilk, the psychoanalytical school, were largely used as 20th century buffers that purposefully screened Marx/concealed him cryptonymically from view!
While Gothic Communism wants to camp Marx (re: “Making Marx Gay“), to do so requires cutting through the bullshit; i.e., which psychoanalysis largely is; re: Lacan, but also Jung, Rank, Zizek, Peterson, and many, many others. We’ll touch on camping Kristeva and Creed during the Symposium, then lay into Freud and his tacit/overt supporters (and their signature queerphobia, which Marx and Engels shared) throughout the rest of the book series. —Perse. 3/29/2025
(artist: Nasta Doll)
This largely concludes our two-part examination of Metroidvania (and shooters) in relation to Tolkien’s refrain and vice versa, and how videogame canon is neoliberal, thus heteronormative through the ludic scheme of monomythic war and its liminal, BDSM hauntologies as fractally recursive in a cartographic sense; re: the endlessly concentric offering of false power/hope through the Faustian ludic contract as map-like, but also a Promethean Quest (re: stealing “fire” from the gods) that obliterates the hero once followed to its fearsome and all-consuming central conclusion.
We’re now very near at the final stage of our “camp map” (exhibit 1a1a1i), which will connect to a) the manifesto building blocks (and trees) that we laid out in the thesis statement and b) the arguments we’ve made regarding the importance of finding our own voices within the narrative of the crypt as something to reclaim for our own rebellions; re: camping Metroidvania or things like Metroidvania with ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., in defense of the proletariat by going after capital and its pimp’s propaganda policing nature as monstrous-feminine at large: the Superstructure and the Base as things to camp and reclaim/recultivate inside themselves “by starting a thing” (which Gothic Communism most certainly is). We must flesh it out (so to speak)—to tease the viewer-as-student by stripping and dressing things up again, as needed!
That’s essentially what we’ve been talking about but now I want to shine a light on it, next; i.e., what good proletarian praxis looks like in opposition to state forces while cannibalizing their language to form our own voices, rememories, and muster in whatever space we choose—as monsters, putting the pussy on the chainwax!
Onto “Shining a Light on Things, or How to Make Monsters“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] “What do you do when you get tenure?” I asked. “You become an intellectual,” they replied with a shrug.
[2a] Virtually all of the faculty at EMU were angels, and if not outright nurturing at least gave me the time of day (Sandy Norton went above and beyond and really encouraged me to pursue my work: “You’re a tremendous intellectual, Nicholas, and you have a great heart.” I don’t know if I lived up to what you saw in me, Sandy, but I hope my book helps convey the difference you made in my life). The faculty at MMU, on the hand, tended to act like they were living on borrowed time and threw the book at me whenever I tried to schedule time with them (“we’re not required to meet with you except…”); they could be disarmingly polite to your face (especially when the initial introductions were made, and in class), but generally gave off the impression they’d rather be somewhere else than speaking to some asshole exchange student from America: researching. To that, the college itself really liked to advertise the specialists per module as Gothic experts in their respective fields of study—it was a selling point for the school (the one that convinced me to go). At times, they felt like show ponies being forced to trot in front of the student body for the school’s benefit, and they always seemed tired, overworked; but they also seemed self-absorbed and prepared to do the bare minimum for when they actually had to teach (they were professors at a fancy school, after all).
All the same, the researchers were incredibly passionate about their special topics. They really knew their stuff and I generally respected their work a great deal, but felt almost immediately like there was something generally missing from the student-teacher equation: a human element tucked away behind their suits of armor under a neoliberal scheme that seemed to say, “We don’t owe you anything” (the usual university-as-a-business bullshit, wherein I felt discouragingly trapped between the formidable logistics of traveling overseas and studying abroad for an entire year [re: Quora] and the uncanny politeness of seemingly apathetic instructors who all had better things to do). All the same, Linnie Blake was an exception. I appreciated her willingness to meet with me outside of class, as well as her effusive praise; it felt measured and fair and I welcomed it. Thesis-wise, my supervisors could be a little distant (especially in e-mails). Paul Wake was more pragmatic but affable enough, putting in what was required; Dale Townshend who, despite his ball-busting approach (and confession that he’d never played “a computer game” in his life), was actually willing to sit and listen to me about my personal troubles while at school (thank you for that, Dale). To both of you, I appreciate how you pointed me towards some excellent scholarship; e.g., Bakhtin and Juul. It made a big difference in my future work.
[2b] When I approached Dale Townshend to be my thesis supervisor and told him about Metroidvania as a mappable gameworld, he recommended considering the idea of Radcliffe’s spaces as fundamentally unmappable; i.e., their trauma, but also their recollection after the movement through them had been completed. In Metroidvania, especially on the Metroid side of the spatial equation (the maze), the Gothic heroine is both masculine and feminine in the traditional sense; i.e., is a princess and a knight, but also a banditti in the Radcliffean story (which, per the outlaw stigma, has pro-state and pro-labor forms). And yet, movement through a Gothic castle for a feminine heroine always threatens rape in some shape or form, which Samus famously checks by acting like a man traditionally would towards the monstrous-feminine; i.e., by stealing its shit and shooting it in the face with its own (stolen) guns.
[3] Gloomth is the gloom and warmth attributed to Horace Walpole’s gothic villa, Strawberry Hill, 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).
[4] 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.
[5] This experimentation comes with a steep tradeoff, of course. During Socialism, we a) come out of the closet/hiding to slowly regain control of our own bodies, labor, food and identities, but also b) shed the veil of ignorance to reunite with death as something to embrace and dance with, as well as stare down as oracles of the unbelieved, Cassandra sort that are also declared as devils, heretics, whistleblowers, castrators, bubble-bursters and iconoclasts by the faithful: the horrors of Capitalism as endless fields of exploitation, but also the subtler unheimlich where one gets an awful feeling—that one’s home and inherited identity is unironically monstrous and harmful (as are one’s usual means of escape: copaganda, unironic rape play and military optimism). The food will taste better and the sex will hit harder… but you have to be prepared to let go of childish things, including ignorant escapism into spaces of total, unironic enjoyment (repeat Sarkeesian’s adage if it helps). Instead you will have to experience both sides of something so honest (unlike Capitalism): getting spit-roasted by heaven and hell. Shakespeare called the cause “slings and arrows,” Coleridge called the condition “sad and wiser,” and Mae Martin called its solution “sap.” Of all three, I call it “the Wisdom of the Ancients” (I hesitate to call this one of my terms; i.e., I picked it up in grad school and it’s also an allusion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and “natural philosophy” as it appears in that text).
[6] E.g., Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” but also Matthew Lewis’ The Monk. The latter serves as a biting (and hilarious) illustration of the (not so) Silent Majority’s abuse of privilege to indulge in guilty pleasure and wish fulfillment inside the closet (which is an awful, violent place), but also the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. It’s “boundaries for me, not for thee” for those who—alienated from everything around them except fear and dogma—act precisely the way that Capitalism needs them to: as hypocritical bullies. As I write in Volume Three:
manufactured scarcity deprives sexist performers of safe, nurturing sex (not just condoms or birth control, but consensual sex, too). They become sex-starved and information-deprived—killer virgins embroiled within a prolonged state of fearful ignorance beset by “evil” as instructed by formal institutions of power. On par with Ambrosio from The Monk (1796), such persons revel in bad play through violent fantasies geared towards achieving sexual control through coercive dominance. Indeed, Matthew Lewis cemented these within Ambrosio himself, a religious man obsessed with raping Antonia, a woman he barely knew (and his penis frequently being compared to a dagger or vice versa). Hidden virtuously behind a veil, her impeccable modesty bore no protection against the perfidious cleric (assisted on his horny quest by a crossdressing, devil-worshiping woman named Matilda). For Lewis, these opposites—Ambrosio’s nefarious aspirations and Antonia’s besieged virtue—were less imagined hypotheticals and more Lewis satirizing England’s social-sexual climate within displaced and outrageous, but also queer language (re: Broadmoor). Moreover, its patently Gothic nature gave him the means to speak on taboo themes: rape as a material byproduct of violent cultural attitudes, not isolated nut jobs misled by the metaphysical devil. Ambrosio even blames Antonia for tempting him and Matilda for setting it all up, fulfilling the binary of temptress and rapist working in tandem while dumping his own blame fully onto women, not himself. This works as a pre-cursor to the whole “no fap” thing that many sexist religious men today endorse: blaming women for taking away the “essence” of their strength: their semen, but also their control; cumming is a sign of spiritual, physical and mental weakness.
[7] A phrase I coined in “I, Satanist; Atheist” (2021) to describe the Numinous as I pursued and envisioned—not as gendered, but merely a desired response to any who summon it:
In short, Otto sees ghost stories as an offshoot of the Numinous, aka the Mysterium Tremendum or divine wrath. There needn’t be a god for this sensation to work. For me, enjoyment of this “presence” amounts to Satanic apostacy. My cultivation of “exquisite torture” is wholly cultivated, prepared by me with the expectation of a desired response. Similar to the uncanny as being predictable, this doesn’t denote the presence of a Christian [male] god (or any other); it simply means that certain thoughts excite me, but not at other peoples’ expense (source).
[8] E.g., the Satanic Temple “About Us” reads: “The Mission Of The Satanic Temple Is To Encourage Benevolence And Empathy, Reject Tyrannical Authority, Advocate Practical Common Sense, Oppose Injustice, And Undertake Noble Pursuits” (source). Similar to Gothic Communism, they have seven noble tenets (one more tenet, and probably as foils to the Seven Deadly Sins) and focus on humane ways of existing and presenting themselves. I describe Satanism as follows (abridged, from the glossary):
Like furries, Satanism is generally treated as a regular scapegoat during moral panic (with “Satanic” historically being used to scapegoat members of the LGBTQ community as “groomers” during the 1980s into the present; source: Caelan Conrad, 2022). However, Satan is a complex figure and can personify different forms of persecution and rebellion. For example, I have explored Satanism before—in my own past time (“Dreadful Discourse, ep. 7: Satan“) as well as my own living experiences: “I, Satanist; Atheist: A Gothicist’s Thoughts on Atheism, Religion, and Sex” (2021). Satanic churches aren’t ecclesiastical in the traditional sense, but their implementation in Western culture isn’t always implemented well. Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan is a bit overly hedonistic and dated, sounding painfully cliché and sexist. The Satanic Temple, on the other hand, is far more accessible, while ostensibly refusing to compromise on the humanitarian issues they seek to confront in society as structured around organized religion (America wasn’t simply founded by the Puritans, but founded on their awful principles, too). This being said, the Temple isn’t fallible, and its leader Lucien Greaves isn’t exempt from using the Temple as a for-profit money funnel while punching down against marginalized, non-profit forms of Satanism; e.g., four queer members of its own Washington state chapter, which it sued using money raised by the church, itself (source Tumblr post, Queer Satanic: October 24th, 2024); i.e., the Temple is registered as a church for monetary and legal reasons—an act meant to protect it from the state, except Greaves then used it to attack its own members in a cult-like way.
[9] From Roden’s Posthuman Life:
Self-fashioning through culture and education is to be supplemented by technology. For this reason, transhumanists believe that we should add morphological freedom—the freedom of physical and mental form—to the traditional liberal rights of freedom of movement and freedom of expression […] to discover new forms of embodiment in order to improve on the results on traditional humanism [and according to the World Transhumanist Association, 1999] “to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives” (source).
[10] Which only works if the state population is indoctrinated and/or kept in the dark.
[11] At first I hesitated, only making shallow hesitation wounds, but soon I got into it and really went to town. It’s not like Radcliffe’s gonna fight back, and her rotting ideas/castles need to be challenged; i.e., cleansed of their stupidity and bigotry. Doing so makes my work, here, feel not only useful, but therapeutic: my discovery that I actually really dislike Radcliffe and that’s okay! Lewis > Radcliffe.
[12] Case in point, I’m incredibly different from my three brothers; they were all right-handed straight dudes, and I’m the left-handed girl-faggot (with pride, muthafuckas). This includes my identical twin. We call ourselves “mirror-imaged,” but I still feel that “identical twin” is a giant misnomer. Apparently opposing orientations for twins is not unheard of—e.g., Laverne Cox and her brother, M Lamar (source: Mey Rude’s “Laverne Cox’s Brother Tearfully Explains How Much She Means to Him,” 2022)—but is more common, from what I understand, than twins who share the same exact orientations (who aren’t straight); e.g., the Canadian pop-duo twins, Tegan and Sara, openly identifying as butch lesbians.
[13] The Western lie of “our land” as actually stolen land the invaders colonized after stealing it from someone else; i.e., the so-called good guys chosen by God as “having always been there.” “We were here first and there’s no more room.”
[14] From The Monk (1796):
In all Madrid there was no spot more beautiful or better regulated. It was laid out with the most exquisite taste. The choicest flowers adorned it in the height of luxuriance, and though artfully arranged, seemed only planted by the hand of Nature: Fountains, springing from basons of white Marble, cooled the air with perpetual showers; and the Walls were entirely covered by Jessamine, vines, and Honeysuckles. The hour now added to the beauty of the scene. The full Moon, ranging through a blue and cloudless sky, shed upon the trees a trembling lustre, and the waters of the fountains sparkled in the silver beam: A gentle breeze breathed the fragrance of Orange-blossoms along the Alleys; and the Nightingale poured forth her melodious murmur from the shelter of an artificial wilderness (source).
[15] Per settler colonialism, big nations eat little nations.
[16] Moderacy generally argues from a position of limited aid; i.e., there’s only so much help to go around and we have to “be realistic” and help the biggest groups first (usually white women), then kick the can down the road for everyone else. Token normativity generally tries to expand this site of privilege to include their group, but not others; but again, in times of decay such token agents will be demoted and excluded once more.
[17] Quentin Tarantino once defended Roman Polanski in 2003: “He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape… he had sex with a minor. That’s not rape” (source: “When Quentin Tarantino Defended Roman Polanski in an Interview with Howard Stern,” 2022). In truth, many actors did, including ones you might not expect. Tilda Swinton, for example, publicly defended Polanski in 2009. When interviewed by Variety in 2021, she upheld her decision, saying it was “just” for Polanski’s extradition from a “neutral country.” In other words, she refused to take a hard stance and reject the industry giant for his notorious and long-known crimes of rape (Dreading’s “The Case of Roman Polanski, 2022”).
A such, when reclaiming the Nazi or the cop, we have to do it through other art that we’re responding to as a “ghost” of something—an echo of someone’s name, likeness or reputation that likewise must be reclaimed by separating it from the original, unreliable artist; i.e., by generally working against institutions of power defended by said artist as a director, writer or actor whose personal reputation conjoins with Hollywood and its royal class: guilds of privileged workers that preserve the reputations of royalty (and themselves by association) instead of having our interests at heart. When pressured, people like Swinton and Tarantino close ranks and look after their own, and by extension help protect the institution of the rich and powerful they and their actions represent. It makes them seem hollow and disingenuous, which is important to expose insofar as we can stop seeing the world through the rose-tinted glasses they supply us with.
Also, Tarantino regularly pimps marginalized groups for his movies; i.e., by monetizing and fetishizing their perfectly valid revenge fantasies for his—a straight white man’s—gain (and all while actively searching for opportunities to say racial slurs, onscreen, and fetishizing women’s bodies [mainly their feet] every chance he gets, and demonizing the poor and other racial minorities in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; re: the Demon Module’s “Dark Xenophilia“)! Tarantino flat-out sucks (so does American Hollywood in general, to be fair).
[18a] Thomas Happ designed Axiom Verge entirely by himself; Team Cherry (the makers of Hollow Knight) originally consisted of two men, Ari Gibson and William Pellen (though they have since brought on an additional coder, Jack Vine, to help with Silksong).
[18b] Persephone van der Waard’s “Hollow Knight: Silksong – As a Metroidvania, Will It Be Gothic?” (2019).
[19] The idea of speedrunning as “magic” is not an unusual concept. But in already weird games like Mario 64, the deconstruction of the gameworld is eerie on multiple levels—the aesthetic, of course, but also the player-invented game-inside-a-game: escaping the space through the solving of incredibly difficult, seemingly impossible puzzles (Bismuth’s “The Complete History of the A Button Challenge,” 2023). These are not simply uncanny to witness, but founded on arcane, esoteric mysteries on the level of a Renaissance trade guild. It’s all very hush-hush and competitive, even more so because the gameworld itself does not audio-visually teach or support such adventures. You have to seriously break the game open, and even here, it will fight you every step of the way. Such abilities evoke White Wolf’s Mage: the Ascension or Shadowrun through a kind of “cyber spell” dressed up as magic, and functionally no different; e.g., “the devil’s spell” trick from The Lost Levels, 5-2 (Summoning Salt’s “Mario: The Infamous History of Level 5-2,” 2023).
And if all of this sounds self-serious, it pays to remember that some of the most fun to be had lies in challenges that we, as players, invent for ourselves—not what Capitalism sells to us through intended play but as “spoilsports” who make our own meaning. For a lovely example of this idea, consider CirclMastr’s solemn testimony upon hitting level 99 before the reactor boss in Final Fantasy 7 (1997):
Life does not have inherent meaning; to say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious. No matter how grand our achievements or how broad their scope, time turns all to dust and death destroys all memory. But that does not mean we cannot ascribe our own meaning to what we do. It is because nothing has meaning unto itself that we are free to create meaning, to make metaphor, and in doing so reflect on ourselves and our world. Leveling to 99 in the first reactor is pointless and meaningless. So why do I do it? I do it to express my hatred, and more importantly my disdain, for Dick Tree. I do it to express the camaraderie I feel for those of us who have followed this topic for years only to be disappointed by [Dick Tree]. I do it to prove to myself that I can persevere. The act is meaningless; I give it meaning (source: James Vincent’s “Final Fantasy VII Player Gives Life Meaning by Hitting Level 99 before First Boss,” 2017).
It’s very Sisyphean/For Whom the Bell Tolls, thus apt for the kind of invention that all workers need to employ during the struggle to develop Communism in our own daily lives. Use Gothic poetics to make Capitalism your Dick Tree (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d see).
[20] Or as the Narrator from Myth: the Fallen Lords puts it, “In a time long past, the armies of the Dark came again into the lands of men. Their leaders became known as The Fallen Lords, and their terrible sorcery was without equal in the West. In thirty years they reduced the civilized nations to carrion and ash, until the free city of Madrigal alone defied them. An army gathered there, and a desperate battle was joined against the Fallen. Heroes were born in the fire and bloodshed of the wars which followed, and their names and deeds will never be forgotten” (source: Fandom).
[21] Said Balor the Leveler to Alric, one of the Nine (a group of good wizards called Avatara, representing the West) in Myth: the Fallen Lords (we’ll examine Bungie’s Myth franchise extensively in the Undead Module’s “A Lesson in Humility“).
[22] An allusion to Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) from Sophie’s Choice (1982):
Leslie Lapidus: Have you ever read D.H. Lawrence, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”?
Stingo: No.
Leslie Lapidus: He has the answer. He knows so much about fucking. He says – he says that when you fuck you go to the Dark Gods. Stingo, I really mean it. To fuck is to go to the Dark Gods.
Stingo: Let’s go to the Dark Gods! (source: IMDb).
[23] These “women” do not choose their own clothes; as I write in “Borrowed Robes: The Role of ‘Chosen’ Clothing — Part 1: Female Videogame Characters” (2020), videogame women, even active avatars the player can control, are historically “dressed” in skimpy outfits chosen by men or at least in the service of men. We will return to this idea repeatedly in Volume Three.
[24] We will explore the paradoxical horniness of fan fiction (when written by [a]sexual authors) much more in Volume Three, Chapter Three.
An interesting film in its own right. As I write in “Room for Both: Horror and Social Commentary in 3 Japanese Classics” (2018):
[25a] An interesting and intensely GNC film in its own right. As I write in “Room for Both: Horror and Social Commentary in 3 Japanese Classics” (2018):
In Funeral Parade of Roses, we are presented with something altogether different: a “queen,” or man who dresses and acts a woman, including sleeping with men—in 1960s Japan. This seemed largely to involve performances—makeup, body language, upspeak—rather than surgical procedures. Needless to say these persons aren’t always accepted: they skirmish with surly women, whilst their own male lovers uselessly fawn over them from a distance.
Wanting to be different, the protagonist, Peter, walks around, troubled, not simply because he is a queen, but how he became one. Towards the end of the movie, his past is shown, with his mother scolding him fiercely for wearing makeup like a girl. The son explodes, killing his mother—along with an unfamiliar man whilst the two adults are about to have sex. It’s a very violent ordeal, brought to life with terrific blood effects. Peter’s tendency to explode builds, eventually leading him to gouge out his own eyes, like Sophocles’ Oedipus. The gore, here, is equally fabulous, using makeup and prosthetics to rival the sort of digital visual effects showcased in much newer movies.
Being shot in black-and-white, Roses reminded me of a much bloodier version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). In that movie, Hitchcock used chocolate syrup for its famous kill. I’m pretty sure Matsumoto didn’t, with his actors. Blood is hard to get right (while far from the greatest movie ever filmed, Brian O’Malley’s Let Us Prey [2014] at least manages to). In particular, fake blood in older movies generally looks pretty shoddy. For example, in William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) it looked way too thick, like ketchup; then again, in newer movies, like Tarantino’s latter-day output Django Unchained (2013) or The Hateful Eight (2015) the blood looks oddly like paint (this is a stylistic choice, not a technical limitation, however). Whatever the reason or method, Matsumoto’s blood looks fabulous; his characters wear white, and their pure clothes are coated in black blood that stains, runs and ruins (source).
[25b] From Adventures in Babysitting (1987).
[26] Phillip Pullman argued this nicely in His Dark Materials (1995-2000) novels. In them, God is an infantilized old man, and the Metatron is a brutal, Zeus-like bully riding around on a chariot. Two sides of the same patriarchal coin: the bully and the enabled, exclusive regressive.
[27] This can’t be a singular event; it needs to target all aspects of society’s heteronormative canon at the same time. It’s not a simple game of tag or one-time exposure (the scapegoat), but a stress test that forces the entire system to change. Doing so is a coordinated balancing act between the destruction of icons and property and labor action internalized at a socio-material level; it is too big a process to ever fully control or supervise so it must be, to some degree, internalized and second-nature.
[28] Think Calvin’s homicidal, memento mori snowmen (source: Thayer Preece Parker’s “15 Best Calvin and Hobbes Snowman Comic Strips,” 2023).
[29] An author doesn’t literally have to be dead for this to happen, either; i.e., the proverbial “death of the author” when we critique and camp Cameron’s canon for sex-positive reasons while Cameron is still physically alive. In relation to the ludo-Gothic BDSM of castles and monsters, this basic idea can be called Gothic counterculture (which Volume Three will continue to explore in relation to living sex workers making their own money and art).
[30] This problem applies to “Hollywood Marxists” who generally profit off their own bigoted monster canon; i.e., Tolkien’s estate, but also Steven King and James Cameron. As I write about King and Cameron in Volume Three:
Yes, Steven King is a weird canonical nerd—profoundly “weird,” but generally playing it safe and not very Marxist-Leninist (let alone anarcho-Communist). Hollywood just loves his monsters, but he profits off them far too much and says far too little in Marxist language to be considered a useful ally. The same goes for Cameron. Even at his most critical (when he was poor) he still pushed the girls around and called the shots; now he’s just a billionaire Marxist franchising “war” as activism but having no shortage of racism against Indigenous Peoples following the 2009 original and its 2022 sequel, The Shape of Water. Much of this has to do with Cameron’s blue-washed, white savior/Indian mentality for his own endless “war,” which ultimately lacks critical bite but makes white-owned companies billions of dollars:
In 2010 Cameron said something that did not exactly help his cause. He had been protesting against the building of the giant Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Amazon. The dam’s construction threatened the way of life of the Brazilian Xingu people. While speaking to The Guardian, he said, “A real-life Avatar confrontation is in progress. I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace and they were being given some form of compensation. This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar – I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future… and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation… because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society – which is what is happening now – they would have fought a lot harder.” Many took that to mean that he was suggesting that the Lakota should have fought their colonizers harder (source: Kshitij Mohan Rawat’s “Native Americans Boycott James Cameron,” 2022).
In short, Pygmalions like Tolkien and Cameron can’t say the quiet part out loud; they just overcompensate with lots and lots of centrist war theatre.
[31] Whose own counterterrorism in Alien: Covenant (above) is something we will continue to examine in Volume Two’s Demon Module; e.g., “Making Demons.”
[32] The men, elves, dwarves and wizards of the West are its guardians, its self-absorbed cops; e.g., Thorin Oakenshield (which Tolkien nicely camps):
“We are met to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices. We shall soon before the break of day start on our long journey, a journey from which some of us, or perhaps all of us (except our friend and counsellor, the ingenious wizard Gandalf) may never return. It is a solemn moment. Our object is, I take it, well known to us all. To the estimable Mr. Baggins, and perhaps to one or two of the younger dwarves (I think I should be right in naming Kili and Fili, for instance), the exact situation at the moment may require a little brief explanation—” This was Thorin’s style. He was an important dwarf. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without telling any one there anything that was not known already. But he was rudely interrupted. Poor Bilbo couldn’t bear it any longer. At may never return he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel (source).
Conversely Thorin and the dwarves are definitely anti-Semitic caricature; re (the Demon Module’s): “‘Anti-Semitism’ vs ‘antisemitism.’“
