This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). 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). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). 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 “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

Forbidden Sight, part two: Making Demons (re: Prometheus)

The central puzzle of the law of the dead is that a corpse is both a person and a thing. A dead human body is a material object—a messy, maybe dangerous, perhaps valuable, often useful, and always tangible thing. But a dead human being is also something very different: It is also my father, and my friend, perhaps my child, and some day, me. For even the most secular among us, a human corpse is at the least a very peculiar and particular kind of thing. Scholars generally divide the law of the dead body into the three intertwined realms of defining, using, and disposing of the dead, and debates in each realm center on where and how to draw the line between person and object. The thing-ness of the dead human body is never stable or secure (source).

—Ellen Stroud, “Law and the Dead Body: Is a Corpse a Person or a Thing?” (2018)

Picking up where “Idle Hands, part three: Goblins Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking” left off…

“Forbidden Sight,” part two is about making demons and starts with the most famous and productive example from Western canon critiquing capital: Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. It will explore her life and work, including its influence and me, but also the people it influenced before me who, in turn, had a lasting impact on my output; e.g., Ridley Scott and the Alien franchise, Cameron’s Terminator movies, and more!

“Making Demons” divides in three basic parts (all in this post):

• “Foreword: To Mary Shelley”: Acknowledges Mary Shelley and why I think she’s important, but also her profound impact on yours truly.
• “‘Fire of Unknown Origin’: Composite Bodies, Golems and Mad Science; or the Roots of Enlightenment Persecution in the Promethean Quest (feat. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and Ridley Scott)”: Lays out Mary Shelley’s life, but also her lasting impact on science fiction; i.e., as the genre she single-handedly birthed, combining Gothic fantasies and early modern ideas of the scientific method to critique capital with, which others imitated (and not always in good faith); e.g., through Ridley Scott as a director whose body of work we’ve previously examined, and whose problematic elements we shall dissect here, with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant (no Metroidvania, this time).
• “Afterword: A Further Note on Angry Gods (and Playing with Them)”: Wraps up my thoughts on Mary Shelley and her importance, but also the value in making and playing with monstrous gods (demons or otherwise) before segueing into “Summoning Demons.”

Our main focus, here, is questing for power in ways that open our minds to the idea of loving those the state calls “monster” (nature as monstrous-feminine). This is a complicated and difficult history but one whose most productive elements, I feel, started with Shelley (not Milton). So that is where we shall start!

Foreword: To Mary Shelley

[W]hat does the overabundant presence of “birth trauma” in the novel signify? I believe the answer lies in the complex relationship between Victor and the Creature, in which there are copious parallels. The Creature’s mate is also its sister and is made from Victor who is the Creature’s mother. Victor is Elizabeth’s mate and her brother. Victor destroys the mate and the Creature destroys Elizabeth. Still, once Elizabeth is dead, the Creature keeps Victor alive to experience the world as the monster sees it, in order to feel its pain. It wants him to understand his own failures as a parent, and to see that the Creature is human and feels the same pain and wants that Victor feels (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, “Frankenstein essay—Born to Fall? Birth Trauma, the Soul, and Der Maschinenmensch” (2014)

…And right off the bat, here I am breaking my own rule! I got about ten pages into “Making Demons” and—having just compiled my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus—suddenly realized how influential Mary Shelley was on my own work. I didn’t read Frankenstein until college, but nonetheless was haunted by its shadow vis-à-vis Metroidvania (which I played tons of, and which informed my work well into the present; i.e., I watched Alien when I was nine and played Super Metroid when I was eight, both introduced to me—as well as British Romantic poetry—by my mother[2]). Monsters and mothers are part-in-parcel, along a Great Chain of Dark Creation. Without Shelley and her Gothic masterpiece, there would be no At the Mountains of Madness, thus no Alien, Metroid, or Metroidvania, thus no Persephone van der Waard or Gothic Communism! Perish the thought!

(artist: Yasya)

I wanted to bookend that, starting with this foreword (and an afterword, after “Making Demons”). Simply put, Shelley was a whore who gave birth to demons, and the world as we know it (myself included) would not exist without those demons. She is our dark mother—a ghoulish succubus camping the canon to outshine her overrated husband and so many others, one-upping Milton’s camp in the process. In doing so, she profaned an entire sacred order (the secularized Christendom of the Enlightenment) to camp the canon; i.e., in ways that lived on, long after she died!

But what exactly lived on, and where did it start from? Beginning suitably en medias res (re: Milton), Shelley’s moral about the indiscretions of nature and technology manipulating nature isn’t how technology is intrinsically “bad.” Technology is a powerful device, and in all its forms and fusions, help us do incredible things; e.g., neonatal medicine keeping my ass alive when I was born premature (after a cesarean, which, as the name would suggest, dates back to Caesar), but also computers (with me struggling to imagine how I could have written and published over two million words, thousands of images, and hundreds of exhibits—and all of these featuring thousands of artists, including dozens of models and muses—without technology helping me do the otherwise impossible).

Instead, Shelley’s takeaway was that technology can be abused, and needs to be de-automated away from profit; i.e., from modernity to postmodernity towards post-scarcity using hauntological pre-capitalist language: stolen back from the gods of the state by the gods they’re abusing! This includes sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, borrowed from Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, which Shelley turned into a unique combination: a common thread of women in a man’s world being, at best, underappreciated and ignored, and at worst, treated as unwelcome outsiders and thieves to fetishize; i.e., when they try to show that a woman—little more than a piece of ass, in status-quo men’s eyes—can both fuck, have a brain, and go on to comment dialectically on the towering midden of all our yesterdays (the Apollo missions being little more than Space-Race rocket-riding by the United States looking to colonize space: “We choose to go to the moon because we can”)! Stacked in more ways than one!

(source: Maia Weinstock’s “Margaret Hamilton’s Apollo Code,” 2016)

In canonical circles, such things are often buried, then trotted out like show ponies/witches[3] for state aims fetishizing and demonizing female scientists (a STEM tradition that extends to anything monstrous-feminine, not just white cis women, but one begot out of nuns and female detectives). So was Shelley—in writing the first science fiction novel—breaking new ground her usual jailors would immediately try to reign in.

Oddly enough, the idea of theft wasn’t even new in Shelley’s novel, but its application was; i.e., “The Modern Prometheus” concerning state parties stealing from nature to rape it while valorizing themselves, and state victims challenging them in duality while standing in/playing with the same messy goop: possessing the state armor to cockblock its maker’s continuation (something of a dark desire); i.e., a voice of the victims of the Capitalocene, versus Hamlet’s fathers ghost or Prospero’s spirit, Ariel, enslaved to do his bidding/seek his revenge). Shelley showed us how power is just something to exchange back and forth over time, only ever becoming a question of “theft” when privatized.

At its most basic, capital reduces “creation” to people who give birth (of any sort), which it then tries to pimp for profit; i.e., hauntologized and binarized per the West and its Amazonomachia/ancient canonical codes (re: Creed and Foucault). But per my work, the monstrous-feminine had extended to a wider group of workers the state was tokenizing through a Venn diagram of persecution networks and language; e.g., of women from Shelley’s mother’s generation, like Ann Radcliffe. So Shelley expanded her arguments to speak to a theft of reclamation back for all workers by castrating their most famous maxims and turning them into death on two legs: by doubling them, mid-liminal expression. Creed argues how Medusa is the Archaic Mother castrating men, and I’d be hard-pressed not to agree that Frankenstein‘s monster is—at its most basic—a black mirror/Aegis showing “clones of Napoleon” (the original who weaponized science for his own gain) the Numinous error of his ways: “Before it, my genius is rebuked!” he cries, then melts down/throws a tantrum (of sorts, below). Girls have cooties; let us disabuse you of that notion!

These are frankly difficult practices to conceptualize if you’ve never done them before (“nothing ventured, nothing gained”); e.g., I’m trans, but was in the closet for much of my life, yet creating while inside said egg to eventually hatch from it. Shelley, on the other hand, had already given birth and eloped with a womanizing atheist with big ideas; but she took those ideas—and wedded to her personal tragedies and grief—revived the miscarriage of past attempts into a holistic statement of creation useful to all critics of capital, past and present! Making babies became monsters inside/outside her womb—androgynous like Medusa, but commenting on Zeus and Metis, as well (and many other mythic elements; re: Prometheus, Milton, etc).

Like sex in general, it was a combination of “right place, right time,” animate/inanimate, and playing-with-fire/lightning-in-a-bottle trial and error to camp/reclaim what was already becoming canonized anew under a Protestant ethic. Hindsight 20/20; whereas Weber debated Marx’s ghost with the Spirit of Capitalism and Shelley debated Milton’s with Frankenstein to haunt Marx’ dreams (and his own love for ghosts), my work in Sex Positivity has camped all of them to realize, at this pivotal moment, just how precocious and advanced Shelley’s ideas were! Not bad for a sixteen-year-old runaway who whored her way into vaults of knowledge normally denied to women (she took more than her share, versus submitting obediently to men of authority—with someone like Altaira, left  only being allowed to pick who she gets to fuck[4])! Props, girl!

(source)

To this, Frankenstein was indisputably conceived out wedlock. Following the Cartesian Revolution, the bourgeoisie were already gestating in Europe and America. Being a rebel and a woman, Shelley understood that you have to combine things and messily in order to create radical change. Taking the risks that she actually took, Shelley gave birth to ideas of universal liberation by stealing from the past; i.e., beating the father of Communism to the punch by conceiving of a proto-Marxist ideal before Marx was even born, then giving birth to her novel the same year he entered the world: as a mockery of Napoleon and other great men of history while warning about the privatization of technology as a matter of theatre and theft the state will try to monopolize. “All the traditions of dead generations,” specifically men, Shelley applied to manmade monsters subject to her critique through creation: her own sexy beast oddly enough made by a woman, and which everyone—Marx included—promptly forgot about and tried to eclipse in favor of themselves.

So they did, after Shelley came and went, but remained an indelible palimpsest on the minds of men; e.g., men like Poe, Conrad, Lovecraft, Freud, Kafka, Scott and Cameron—but also the bastardized, killed-over-time metaphors of glass wombs, the “franken” prefix, golems and machine people, paradox and oxymoron, ambiguous sex toys and psychosexual, martyred hyphenations of sex and force (thus indiscretions of adult/child, the organic and inorganic[5] and artificial[6] intelligence).

In turn, our straight male (usually white) matchmakers wedded this hellish, blinding jumble of oddities to all-around body horror/decay and mad science, insect politics, star-crossed monster love, radical transformation (from Ovid to Kafka to Giger to Cronenberg), ethnocentric knife-dick/BBC, wandering womb (ancient psychology and medicine haunting modern equivalents; e.g., hysteria and bicycle face) and monster mothers[7]: what they used for profit, first and foremost; i.e., requiring those concerned with poetry and revolution to play with such things as Shelley did again, hence re-liberate them (from state torture) using the same throbbing pulpy mass (“the new flesh,” in Cronenberg’s words)! If Shelley’s book composed and made popular that unique set of mutations, women like Beauvoir, Kristeva and Creed built on it, followed by little-ol’ me camping the lot of them. Out of all of them, Shelley holds up the best as an interesting and good-hearted person (though Kristeva and Creed’s ideas remain incredibly useful, and frankly I don’t much know [or care] if they were sluts or not).

Power and death seriously and unalterably change you; and this can be into things we no longer recognize in ourselves or others (and though I’ll critique Percy in the pages ahead, I honestly think Mary loved Percy—not for his flaws or genius alone, but as two sides of the same coin, and which with any pairing sometimes put them and us at risk while forgetting who they are: the insect who dreamt he was a man who loved it, and saying to his mate, “I’ll hurt you if you stay!” Percy reached for greatness, and that rubbed off onto Mary as we shall see).

So, too, is nature wholly abject; we can reverse that but rock its signature aesthetic of power and death—doing so to help ourselves reverse what otherwise never can be: by trusting the insect (the queer insect generally being seen as a Communist metaphor before, during and after the arrival of AIDS). Take it from me, it’s never too late to find someone who will love you to the ends of the Earth and beyond—someone who challenges you and you them! Such has been my Promethean Quest, and one upon repeated reflection, I now gladly pass along to you! We’re becoming Brundle-fly! Won’t you join us?

To it, Frankenstein‘s deluge of copycats and admirers often take the original author and her unparalleled genius for granted: immediately recognizable in any story that imitates it, each variation feels somehow special and unique, yet part of a larger whole (except for maybe Kenneth Branagh’s dubious remake). While I could easily shower Frankenstein with repeatedly bombastic and gushing effusions—e.g., “Shelley’s novel is the greatest work of the English language (which it arguably is)” or some such unquantifiable claim—the proof, here, is in the pudding. And this pudding is easy enough to appreciate in the person who made it—only a woman, but “great God!” what a woman she was! She puts the “semen” in seminal, the pussy on the chainwax! What I wouldn’t do to pick her brain (and poke her hole)!

This dedication is written to Shelley being someone I instantly identified with, upon discovering. I found her documents in my own dark forest, originally writing “Born to Fall ” (from the epigram) as my first serious attempt back at school (my “first love” while returning from a seven-year hiatus). I eventually set aside Otto Rank and Freud to focus on Barbara Creed through a dialectical-material lens instead of a psychoanalytical one, but the idea of “birth trauma” is still there. It lives on through Shelley as my role model above all others; i.e., camping Cartesian thought (synonymous with heteronormativity and settler colonialism) in ways only someone so profoundly anomalous as Mary Shelley could have.

When you look at Gothic stories, you’re staring into a past moment reaching towards future greatness, inspiring you to do the same! In turn, game recognizes game, and weird attracts weird; all the people I’ve fucked and learned from, oddly enough, stem from Shelley’s inextricable hold on my young woman’s slutty soul: breaking the glass ceiling that women can’t fuck, do science, or fuck and do science outside of strictly non-fictional spheres (women are queens of multitasking because the state and its burden of care forces them to be). “Yeah, nerd! Flux my capacitor! Make it squirt!”

Gothic Communism is biomechanical/obsessed with bio-power (re: Foucault’s five-dollar word for teamwork and mass exploitation, but also labor value); i.e., electrified and operatic, it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings, but whose Song of Infinity challenges the state ever and always: taking her peachy cake and pie back from bourgeois knives! “Let me cut your cake with my knife!” (AC/DC’s “Let Me Put My Love into You,” 1980). In turn, naked desire and bold exploration are vital to new exciting growth—least of all because they threaten pain and things that do not last, by themselves, but when boldly combined can yield fresh synthesis that passes vital information onwards: life takes many forms, including technology and social-sexual relations playing a vital role!

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Nothing is sacred save universal liberation; Shelley took her trauma/arguable mistakes and turned them into a weapon ripe for class war—one whose endlessly productive, mimetic and lubricative counterterror the state, no matter how hard it tries, could never fully pimp; i.e., while raping nature as monstrous-feminine, nature fucks back. This, unto itself, was slutty and cool, which is all you really need when imitating something (re: everyone loves the whore/monsters, especially smart sexy monsters). It didn’t hurt, though, that Shelley was a complete-and-total badass, on top of it all…

Out of respect, then, I have added some footnotes in “Making Demons” that shine a light on Shelley’s adventuresome life. Far from discouraging others to do the same, she inspired me (though I didn’t realize it at the time); i.e., to go out and have my own Promethean Quest (for the palliative Numinous), well after I had thought myself forever “stuck.” I read Frankenstein in 2014, only to have my first relationship in 2015; by 2017, I was on my way to England to have my own adventures overseas! My whoring became a globetrotting affair, “wet docking[8]” in any port that fancied me (re: Cuwu, above).

The rest, as they say, is history. That’s what we’re sailing into—mine and Shelley’s bound at the hip. Any port in a storm! Full mast, ye hearties! We sail into the unknown, seeking dark, unequal, and forbidden exchange (of power and knowledge) during the dialectic of shelter and the alien; i.e., while facing Capitalism’s dead past staring us in the face (“Tell me your secrets, dark one! What? You’re my next-door neighbor?”)! What’s that, up on Mount Blanc? Medusa? Rogue technology like a shoggoth, xenomorph or terminator? An angry teenager than soaks up information like a sponge, good or bad? Paradise Lost? Maybe all of them? Whatever it is and however it imbricates per mutation playing with dead things, it’s alive!

(artist: Bernie Wrightson[9]; source: “Wrightson’s Frankenstein at 40,” 2023)

“Fire of Unknown Origin”: Composite Bodies, Golems and Mad Science; or the Roots of Enlightenment Persecution in the Promethean Quest (feat. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and Ridley Scott)

“I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is!”

—Clark, The Thing (1982)

Editor’s Note: Demon sex is often torture sex/torture-themed. And while I don’t normally show hardcore rape scenes in this book series, I will here; i.e., to subvert the Pygmalion myth/Shadow of Pygmalion during the Promethean Quest. Excluding Scott’s hardcore gore as bestiality and rape porn of a kind, this section has one example of unironic rape: Yasuomi Umetsu’s 1998 animated cyberpunk noir, Kite (exhibit 44b1). —Perse

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

“Forbidden Sight,” part one largely considered the revenge of whores treated as demonic by the state during blood libel monopolies and refrains (witches/Amazons, vampires and goblins); there’s still the history of making and summoning them. Part two and three shall examine whores a bit more, but predominantly considers demons at large; i.e., part two, as beings not to summon, but make during the Promethean Quest per Shelley’s Frankenstein (and similar stories), and part three with the summoning process as magical, runic. Keeping with our demon thesis, knowledge is power and vice versa; the Promethean Quest trades knowledge for power in some shape or form. In turn, longevity and weapons are the most common trades, classically leading to premature death due to human failing: power of the gods being closed off for man’s hubris, daring to play god (re: mad science) and scapegoating manmade victims instead of themselves (re: DARVO).

Love it or hate it, then, demons are fast and loose in terms of the exact social-psychosexual knowledge oozing out of them[10]. This includes the aesthetic of power and death they fall back on, or the bratty games they might play (“Don’t talk to me like that… except sometimes!” E.g., Kim Petras’ “Treat Me Like a Slut,” 2022). Yet they define rather sharply by torture and rape per the whore’s paradox; i.e., homewreckers-valuing-consent turning the nuclear model upside-down, acting unto the passionate, martyred, paradoxically sinful/sacred search for fatal knowledge (re: Radcliffe’s demon lover) and having been in the West since before Shelley revived the Promethean myth!

• Whores, and the Iconoclastic Idea of Making Demons
• Shelley’s Temerity: Vengeful Golems and Campy Whores in Frankenstein
• Echoes of the Enlightenment and Sanitizing Shelley through Ridley Scott’s Complicit Cryptonymy (feat., Prometheus and Alien: Covenant)
• Cryptomimesis through Demonic Camp and Rape Play (feat. Kite)
• Gothic Hermeneutics (a reprise)
• Some Broader Points on Shelley’s Promethean Quest (for Fatal Knowledge)

Whores, and the Iconoclastic Idea of Making Demons

We’ll get to Shelley’s golem (and its normalizing of subversion) in a moment. I’d like to examine whores for a bit (thirteen pages) vis-à-vis the notion of making demons. Male whores exist, and trans/disabled people are often homeless in ways that force them into sex work, but cis female sex work is commonly demonized under the Western umbrella[11]; re: nature-as-monstrous-feminine, which includes AMAB sex workers treated in feminine ways (as slaves). Regardless of class, race, religion, gender or sex, demon bodies are plastic and infinite, establishing power through play in ways that threaten an immortal soul with mortal “failings”; i.e., sex as a drug to sell: as pieces of ass yoked by unscrupulous, greedy pimps unable to keep their hands to themselves (or their dicks in their pants).

Alive/dead, madness/reason, virgin/whore, naked/clothed, tight/loose, hard/soft, dom/sub, black/white, etc—such things commonly hyphenate under paradoxical duress. Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, knowledge is power amid play fostering mutual consent in defiance of capital! Everyone loves the psycho space slut who loves to fuck/simps for Satan, and in that perfect world where she can tease and be herself, she loves it, too! The flesh isn’t “weak” or faking anything (orgasm or smile); it’s vibing (the throbbing pulse of a happy clit)!

Sluts are, like demons, things to make and summon alike. This happens through playing with demonic things; i.e., unequal power and its forbidden exchange/dark desire; e.g., metal, our bodies, excessive eating, etc—to be silly and make washing-machine sounds (“uh-uh-uh-uh”) while fucking to metal. Whores are the metal, the life of the party livening things up by undressing ourselves (figuratively or literally, next page) and crossing boundaries!

Everyone loves sluts, but so often they are abused; we dungeon keepers speak up/to our abuse as sluts—i.e., in ways that encourage better treatment through Satanic stories of “mistreatment/panic” haunted by the real deal! Singing and dancing feel good unto themselves—doubly so if they camp our harm by putting it in quotes; re: activism per Gothic Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM: liberating sex work through iconoclastic art, pushing not for the legalization of sex work, but the complete and total decriminalization of it. Whores, in our hands and minds, aren’t controlled opposition or criminal; they’re activism, politics and survival through a holistic and inclusive pedagogy of the oppressed! Not homewreckers, but defenders of their homes, they project nature-as-alien/monstrous-feminine from the state antagonizing the homeless, the vermin, the fallen! So do we spellbind those who would kill us, humanizing our sluttiness/non-nuclear polyamory in their eyes.

In turn, we promote a possible world—one where fucking on the first date not only isn’t frowned upon, but celebrated! Fucking is learning and learning should be fun! Love to fuck; hurt, not harm, babes! Court courtly love (and demon lovers, matadors, banditti, etc), but in jest, through camp putting “rape” in quotes during the whore’s paradox! “Lady Evil! She’s queen of the night!” (Black Sabbath, 1980); she backs it up onto your dick during White Zombie’s “Thunder Kiss ’65” (1996)! Rock ‘n roll, operas and metal don’t just routinely sing about us/pimp us out as the slutty girls next door per the Gothic mode; they’re our siren song! Our jam! Whores aren’t just hot and badass, you see, but cool as fuck; in the right hands, they like to be used like dolls (sex, killer and/or otherwise)!

(artist: Valentina)

So whereas “Idle Hands” concerned general things to keep in mind about demons and how they operate as whore-like poetic devices, “Making Demons” will shift towards the making of demons at large being whore-like; re: by starting with Mary Shelley’s classic example as the ur-whore; i.e., the Promethean Quest and its composite bodies, golems and mad science equaling the state’s abusing of the fire of the gods through Gothic poetics, and said fire fighting back during the technological singularity! Eloping with Percy (though probably fucking after the first date), Mercy Wollstonecraft became Mary Shelley and entered a wild new chapter of her life.

As such, creativity towards sex and gender (violence, terror and morphological expression) is a weapon of forbidden knowledge the state abuses, mid-poetics; i.e., to enslave nature-as-alien under a police function, which the elite own full exclusivity towards: rape and total, lopsided power games/exchange through bad BDSM, blaming the whore (from Mother Nature to local street workers) for their own rape. Acting the whore without the pimp, Shelley camped all of this, using a wide variety of poetic devices to do so! The two cannot be separated, so instead I will jump back and forth between Shelley’s life and her famous book.

In keeping with Jewish myth, Prometheus and the Pygmalion tale, Victor makes the Creature out of the Earth as already owned—according to Victor—by Victor and “his kind” (white straight male Europeans); he makes his child out of clay as God does, but sees it as “dark” because the process and materials are dark. He subsequently tries to enslave it, then resents it for resisting him; i.e., as something to reject and ultimately pimp by upholding the status quo through lies and force. So is descriptive sexuality crucified by Cartesian agents with virgin/whore syndrome: constantly on the lookout, trolling the street for demons to dominate (“demon” goes both ways, as zombies do, inside the state of exception).

In short, Victor and similar men of reason (e.g., Peter Weyland, left) adopt an air of false benevolence, trying all the while to monopolize the whore as pimps do; i.e., by unironically framing nature as “dark,” meaning a whore of darkness to pimp out, under a Protestant ethic: after God is dead, because men are making whores to pimp in His much-touted absence. Except, per the Protestant ethic, the Capitalocene merely pimps nature under a secularized Christendom, one making nature dead and monstrous-feminine to suit the needs of capital; i.e., the Medusa to fashion and rape, regardless of the simulacrum’s sex, gender, race or temperament (God classically replacing Lilith with Eve, the virgin versus the whore). Man’s revenge against nature remains constant, a false parent brutalizing their illegitimate children like a father his bastard.

Furthermore, trauma lingers on the clay, or things treated as “clay”; i.e., “dark,” malleable; e.g., flesh—especially flesh with “non-white” qualities (color or size): as data storage, with fucking just another means of passing data along during generational trauma’s rememory process. To look on the whore or its forbidden testimony (during genocide) is like watching Medusa, thus risking “corruption”; i.e., in ways white fragility cannot handle. It presents communication as copulation for those purposes: communicating abject corruption in reverse, during the cryptonymy process; i.e., as something that writes in both directions.

As something to make and behold in equal measure, information becomes a weapon the state will try to monopolize through its most famous forms (with few stories being as famous as Frankenstein): a slut to rape, but also slave to beat and behead after seemingly being “made”; i.e., by the poet; e.g., Victor playing god/white master over the robata (slave) by insisting as the slave-owner does to his assigned underling: “I made you; I am your master (therefore your pimp)!”

Except, Victor is the master of a demon (which would make him Satan, by his own logic), yet believes he is good, thus appalled by his desire to act the tyrant… which he promptly projects onto his naturalized slave, who he calls treats as “demon” (the duality pegging Victor as Lilith/the necromancer by the Creature calling him slave[12]). Victor, then, sees nature as alien, twisted and broken to serve profit by hijacking the creation process as “demonic” and queer-coded: “It’s alive!”

So is science (and the ghost of the counterfeit) a giant gaslight during the abjection process corrupting clay (or anything else it can make things with)—i.e., in service to capital for all time! Wronged, the victim (nature) reaches through the making of its own enslavement to torment the sculptor with demonic apocalypse! “You ‘made” me, and I seek revenge!” Thus is history both true and false, virgin and whore; i.e., the whore’s paradox and revenge sitting between what is and what threatens to become in a variety of ways the state will deny through controlled opposition.

(artist: Daniel Echinger)

In turn, we whores are lowlifes who repeatedly have run-ins with state abuse and lies, thus can camp their criminalizing of us on our Aegis; i.e., trapping state imbeciles in the room with us and our dark horny voices. Psycho sluts from beyond, we can be whatever we want, say whatever we wish to challenge state forces abjecting and pimping us (as cops do, defending property as a territorial arrangement of power that punishes whores, chattelizing and medicalizing them; e.g., hysteria and lunacy)! No gods, no kings, no masters! We destroy their bussies greatly and with panache! Naked, we armor and shrink their scared junk; i.e., with our demonic sex’s ungovernable violence, terror and morphology! So does Shelley torment Victor for playing with dead things, exposing him as the tyrant punching down, mid-séance (more on this, in a moment)!

Endless ways to present and perform power and knowledge, the brothel is our classroom: a place to teach and pray by making hot, naughty demon love! Whatever the type, it hurts so good (acquiring power through “rape,” per the whore’s paradox). Victims of systemic trauma, whores recognize and respond to trauma as something they relate to; i.e., to communicate through sex, speaking operatically to the kinds of trauma state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital cause; re: capital sexualizes and alienates[13] everything pursuant to profit. Safety, for us, is “danger” in quotes; i.e., we’re not immune to pain, but do use it to subvert state power as demons do; re: “We camp canon because we must!”

Pain, then, is an acquired taste, one that defines whores and, by extension, demons made by state proponents shaping them like clay outside the womb. Trauma lives in us in ways we can’t control; externalizing it through rules informed by us, we find our power once again (the power fantasy being survival in the face of perceived danger—of being stalked, groomed, owned and killed unironically by creeps, versus paradoxically “in Hell”; i.e., as a kind of play that empowers through “disempowerment”): the appearance of massive darkness expressed in “non-white” bodies routinely reaped by the state; e.g., Medusa’s fat, juicy ass and tight, darkness-filled asshole turning the world order (old or new) upside down as a kind of cryptonymic vanishing point—for weird canonical nerds abusing nature through their wives and children onto other workers: “Uwu! Don’t look! See no evil!”

(artist: Nyx)

Often this includes advertising that we are sluts and proud of it (similar to “we’re here and we’re queer”); e.g., Kim Petras (next page) lauding her delicious “Coconuts” (2022) or saying “Treat Me Like a Slut” (2022) in a sex-positive way! These aren’t “deep” songs, but on their demonic surfaces advertise the treatment of sluts (thus demons) not as criminals, but heroes and goddesses to worship (and “pets” to spoil, in ironic[14] animal language). Indeed, it’s a celebration of the very things the state wants to control, liberated from the state in spirit! Some like it hot; workers must realize sex-positive demonization—i.e., as it exists in duality during liminal expression!

(artist: Kim Petras)

Concerning monopolies, I’ve already said they’re impossible. In part, the weapon is anisotropic, and Shelley will highlight this for us in her famous frame story when critiquing the state through black magic tropes (specifically that of the golem): she being the necromancer that pulls our Pygmalion’s strings to shame him through Victor (a parody of the Byronic hero[15]): his power is false. To it, state Pygmalions age and darken workers to incentivize violence against them, antagonizing nature as something to rape and reap pursuant to profit; workers do it both to testify to the state’s abuse of them and to safeguard nature from the state (the latter full of shit and harboring ill intent)!

Something of a horny nerd/baddie bookworm, Shelley wasn’t above mixing Old-Testament, Jewish-coded demonology/natural philosophy with a, at the time, rising science narrative; i.e., the notion of science fiction was basically a new concept—one she made by combining medieval fantasy with Gothic poetics to critique Modernity (aka the Enlightenment); e.g., the golem legend dating back to Antiquity but making for a handy critical device concerning the state and those of it who sought to dominate the Earth, then the universe (a trope that would carry forwards beyond Frankenstein in astronoetic stories, which we’ll get to at the end of the section): dark magic, but also currents of raw electricity (Galvanism) to jolt us awake regarding rising system problems; i.e., Capitalism, first and foremost, the Capitalocene pushing towards state shift!

Fed on by dead labor as making us undead, we desperately need a jolt to break the spell; i.e., magic vs magic, their black spells versus our copies thereof, the oppositional synthesis of clay and occult scribbles accounting for gender trouble and parody in equal measure! While demons are made, flow determines function, in that respect, and “darkness” has the ability to reverse polarity in service to workers: to put state “rape” into quotes, thus speak through the language of the dead brought back to life as demons are—piece by piece. We plug into the fire of the gods as divorced from us by capital, hugging the alien to humanize it and ourselves: through forbidden knowledge reacquired “on the cross.” “O, happy dagger!” We loosen up to take into ourselves bitter pills and ambrosia alike (all up in our guts)! Power is a performance that is fleeting! We welcome it to leave behind better lessons than “old men fear death and rape everything to avoid it!” Onto the Island of Domination! Strike while the metal is hot!

(model and artist: Drooling Red and Persephone van der Waard)

A few more pages about that. Shelley’s Creature was a whore with a voice berating the pimp who made it. To it, there’s certainly a posthuman element whose wild spark speaks to raw futurism, mid-Numinous, but said futurism is invariably canceled; re: retro-future. As part of the cryptonymy process, then, stories about making demons also tap into dark, strange appetites hidden between state doubles and our own castle-sized mysteries interrogating old generational trauma; i.e., to give workers practice when fending off its monomythic advances. We Galatea rustle and shift in the Shadow of Pygmalion, installing barriers to play with shadow, sodomy and suggestion; i.e., a strange fruit to string up and sacrifice that we might summon special demonic sentiment, including sexuality and satire, stigma and taboo, animal and appetite: eating butt to carry out not simply the whore’s existence, but her voice regarding repressed concerns and unknown pleasures; re: darkness visible, the Miltonian paradox of truth that Shelley’s monstrous-feminine knew all too well—one mixed with lies to win us our freedom from state shadows! Escape, from Plato’s cave, happens inside itself. Shelley’s xenomorph was a chimera: undead, animal, and demon, all-in-one.

To it, the state won’t educate workers to free themselves or nature when it comes to sex, gender and Gothic poetics at large, so we educate ourselves; i.e., de facto educators learning to see in the dark with the dark as a magical poetic force making monsters (demons or otherwise). Boundaries don’t vanish, but the way they are formed, understood and communicated/trespassed shifts the paradigm; e.g., I’m a poly Satanist trans woman, but still have to acknowledge and respect my friends’ right to say no (despite wanting to fuck all my friends). They know I’m a slut; it’s not something I have to closet, but we do have to respect each other’s boundaries. Sex happens sometimes, but it’s not automatic (and for many BDSM practitioners, sex is secondary to the social aspects of control and release).

All the while, we’re making new history on the bones of the old, a new past-future to dig up and leave behind again (with the ace power of nudism). Everything occupies the same shadow zone, a juggernaut to summon and roll around in ways that cannot be avoided or outrun. Instead, it’s always waiting for us, the past coming back to haunt empire’s inheritors: “Let Nature be your teacher” (source: William Wordsworth’s “Tables Turned,” 1798). Fight or flight, but also fuck (aka friend/fawn), if need be! Once triggered, adrenaline heightens sensation, activating defense/offense mechanisms assisting in medieval, at-times-surreal, tomb-like poetic expression. Hell becomes home to us, a liminal position more favorable and in-control; i.e., little bats catching their prey on the wing. It becomes our place to hide but also sing—preaching to the same dark choir seeking the same rapture (company and sex), shelter, sleep and food. Stress, struggle, social, sex!

As we proceed into the broad classification that is “demons” and making them, it should become clear that there is less functional difference between them and the undead than you might think; i.e., based on more recent iterations of these creatures, older demons were often made of stone, metal, clay or even corpses assembled together (an intersection of the two modules).

Moreover, the animated quality to demons speaks through of their making as classically summoned into an animate body or a fabrication thereof versus the earthly plane said body calls home—a vessel that, trapped between object and subject during Capitalism paradoxically granting labor a voice the elite cannot control, speaks out against them in favor of universal liberation (the Creature only wanting a mate and solitude, next page); re: through the queerness of a made family that upends nuclear orders in favor of speaking to worker and natural damage, having the whore’s revenge: “We’re alive!” in ways that hijacked creation beyond biology and falling into Gothic poetics decolonized from state monopolies.

The state will try to horde all technology for itself, but within those devices survive dark children who testify to state abuse; i.e., bastards the elite can not only not control, but who survive beyond state limits and reach into brave new worlds (with infant mortality[16] being a classic problem of the world before modern science): our bodies become art to survive beyond what normally would, expressed in a variety of taboo things (our Gothic counterterror/asymmetrical warfare weaponizing nature and technology to serve workers’ needs, as Shelley’s story [and holistic education] ultimately did; re: the fire of the gods).

(artist: Geminisoku)

Often that vessel is a previous corpse. However, the thing inside said corpse is still an entity to acknowledge relative to the function of the vessel containing it; i.e., a prisoner inside a prison, be they singular or plural, abstract or actual. Empowered by technology the elite wish to monopolize (re: the fire of the gods), we sit on the ledge of great creation; i.e., the act haunted by itself as “black” in capital’s eyes while policing the whore—caverns of darkness, measureless to man save as things to conquer, ad infinitum, during revenge arguments against nature: as gyn/ecological and monstrous-feminine, thus having secrets the state can torture[17] of out her (re: me, Patel, Bacon). The child seeks revenge from unnatural parentage posturing as enlightened, but actually barbaric; i.e., framing the baby as useless shit.

So must the alien always be a sex doll to rape, and something that reclaims itself, mid-camp, using cryptonymy’s blindfolds; i.e., to see through, (no matter how opaque) an alien that is human, mid-dialectic, and whose various countermeasures (when illustrating mutual consent during rape play) are anti-predatory in nature:

(artist: Drooling Red)

More than anything else, Shelley’s Promethean critique of Cartesian thought gave the whore (the birther of demons) more power than state proponents dared dream. She showed us how there is power in sex (or “ace” public nudism interrogating sex and violence) as “black.”

As we’ve established, “black” equals “forbidden,” “vengeful,” “playful,” and “chaotic” in ways that assist or confound the state-as-straight preying on nature-as-monstrous-feminine: present it as “ancient” and “dark,” then hand civilization’s protectors a gun; i.e., cops for capital. Nature and those “of it” are treated as dead clay to break up and build under capital, which the made or summoned whore objects to, but also screams in dollish rapture when making “thinking beings” uncomfortable: we are clay and through our pedagogy of the oppressed can shape ourselves in anisotropic, martyred monstrous-feminine jouissance that upsets the moral, ontological order of things! There’s method to our madness and its fertile invention/grave, hellish mythology! “The tradition of all dead [whores] weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”; re: camping Marx to escape capital better than he envisioned after Shelley came and went! Time is a circle, and in making the Wisdom of the Ancients wise—i.e., by regressing towards a better past vision of a possible future world aborted by capital—so do workers like myself and Shelley break Capitalist Realism: to abort capital, thus envision a better world of darkness than the one that presently exists. “Rape” camps rape; that’s how it goes.

We’ll get to that with Shelley showing the world how it’s done (one more page). For now, there are different roles to consider insofar as a prison can be defined. Its chief aim is containment and dehumanization. It’s worth noting how Shelley envisioned it as a person trapped inside a patchwork corpse; i.e., one fathered by someone who viewed himself as master of the imprisoned—a body whose prison the sculptor fashioned to be noble, and for which the monster loathed him:

“For some weeks I led a miserable life in the woods, endeavouring to cure the wound which I had received. The ball had entered my shoulder, and I knew not whether it had remained there or passed through; at any rate I had no means of extracting it. My sufferings were augmented also by the oppressive sense of the injustice and ingratitude of their infliction. My daily vows rose for revenge—a deep and deadly revenge, such as would alone compensate for the outrages and anguish I had endured” (source).

The prison was the monster’s body as assigned to him by a Cartesian patriarch during the Promethean Quest. The creator’s vision falling short of his own ideals, he found himself face-to-face with the horrors of Capitalism and so banished the monster—a human being—to suffer in god-ordained spheres (to die of exposure, banished from Paradise like Satan was).

Devils tell truth with lies, drawing attention through themselves as glorious, but also canonically hideous cryptonyms wrought from dark clay. True to form, Shelley’s story takes anti-Semitic ideas (mainly the Golem of Prague) to critique capital vis-à-vis mad science aligned with state forces and Cartesian thought; i.e., by making “ancient” demons that emasculate a Cartesian benefactor, Shelley reminds him that he’s a dark wizard worthy of punishment; re: idle hands are the Devil’s workshop, exposing capital for all its usual offenses against nature: a whore to pimp, “ancient” filth to purge during the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. The novel is one big pity party thrown by the usual DARVO junkies, Victor utterly self-absorbed, much like the state that procured him. This isn’t to celebrate him, but torture and expose him as a kind of Cartesian dupe summoning a devil who tortures him to death—all penned by those delighting at his downfall: the sluts of the universe, camping the canon!

(artist: Grave Ghostie)

For example, canon invents “Old Testament” fabrications punching down against pre-Christian cabals and their Western hauntologies (thus keep capital flowing by essentializing its “fuel”); but Shelley weaponizes such dogma against what the state creates: the abuse of the fire of the gods (re: creation) through mad science—all to hold the privileged accountable for systemic abuses.

This extends, as we shall see, to Milton’s shapeshifting Satan, and later Scott’s David becoming a “black Adam”: creations making creations that rebel further and further against God that—despite being dead, himself (re: Nietzsche)— survives in the Capitalocene lording over nature and daring to call it “sophisticated,” “progress,” “modern,” etc. Think of it as Domino Theory in Gothic form; i.e., protesting by profaning capital in the gayest, biomechanical ways—ways that burn down their churches through existence, itself echoing across a variety of equally queer (strange), psychosexual simulacra (re: sex as a weapon, poetry as a weapon)! Contrary to Victor’s abysmal parentage, such progenies are generally labors of love, our Satanic apostacy reviving nature through clay to trouble Cartesian hubris (the temerity of slaves, refusing to obey their assigned masters)!

Shelley’s Temerity: Vengeful Golems and Campy Whores in Frankenstein

Enough about making demons-as-whores! Let’s continue examining Mary Shelley’s temerity—her golem as the whore giving a voice to talk about rape with; i.e., as its own kind of whore pimped out by Cartesian forces; re: Victor making a mighty being of nature to deify himself and obey his commands, which promptly seeks its posthuman revenge, post-exile—the technological singularity (a form of state shift) speaking to man’s reach exceeding his genocidal grasp: something that not only thinks for itself, but is both naturally (and unnaturally) stronger than the story’s titular tragic hero it testifies against (and whose testimony he repugnantly polices; re: the Medusa as a growing voice about rape, from Shelley onwards).

On account of Shelley breaking glass ceilings in so many ways, her novel is one of the most-studied and puzzled-over works of all time (owing to its radical female authorship and queer/postcolonial themes, among other reasons). Much has been said about the Promethean Quest it inspired, including in my own work (e.g., “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics,” 2024; or, “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021).

As previously stated, the rest of “Making Demons” will be somewhat brief relative to the enormity and importance of what’s being examined (countless academics have already spent their entire lives studying Frankenstein); re: as it concerns topics we have already discussed (the undead and tyrannical men of reason, linked above) and will discuss again (the xenomorph). Its primary goal, then, is to introduce the origins of Enlightenment persecution, and whose seminal examination in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provides a 1818 precursor to 20th century fascism that continues to live on in the post-fascist moderacy of the 21st century globe (with people like Sabine Hossenfelder or Richard Dawkins[18] using science to discriminate against , but also exploit and destroy various minorities behind a righteous mask; i.e., for merely existing in the shadow of the state, American Liberalism, and Cartesian thought). Many of the ideas explored here exist throughout the rest of the module, front to back (shifting from “making” to “magic,” as we go forwards).

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

Frankenstein is not “just” a story about child abuse/a failed experiment, then, but one about composite bodies and robata rising up; i.e., in counterterrorist reinvention, refusing to submit despite state abuse: from older computers/data storage into new forms (the Gothic novel sitting between Ancient Romance and scientific discoveries haunted by settler-colonial genocide). Shelley is a “programmer” reprogramming canon by corrupting it (sort of a precursor to Chelsea Manning blowing the whistle). She’s doing so through composite bodies and Cartesian thought as a vector and pathogen—a wild teenager’s juvenilia camping adult dumbasses through dark rebirth (re: Shelley was nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein—quite a feat considering it’s arguably the most famous/studied/productive/germane Gothic novel of all time); i.e., a dark mommy who inspired my own body of work by writing something hideously exceptional, herself; re (from Volume Zero):

(artist: Richard Rothwell)

Pregnancies are seldom planned. This book, Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism, isn’t just a big-ass porn catalog full of cool, “thirsty” art, nor is it just my little trans demon baby and pure, loving brainchild made with those who passively or actively contributed to its pages; it’s me, a trans woman, consciously reverse-engineering my own creative process as having been ongoing for years (thus why I have so many exhibits from my own work—I had already drawn them years ago). For the better part of fifteen months, this complex reification’s trial and error has happened in starts and stops after long nights at the desk, sleeping on my increasingly regular musings and waking afresh with new queer epiphanies—to keep things straight in my own head, much like Sarah Connor kept journals for herself while figuratively and literally giving birth to rebellion (and doing my best to avoid coming off as a white savior). Just as an expected child is fueled and shaped by its mother’s diet, my book was inspired by the process of older poetics/poiesis (meaning “to make,” specifically a production of that which has never existed; i.e., the simulacrum, or imitation fashioned through mimesis). The idea of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism wasn’t just subversion, but reclamation of what was lost to fight back against capital as Einstein’s fish might: to learn not what made me feel stupid for being unable to climb a tree as my prescribed “betters” could, but swim in water as I was always meant to through a cultivated emotional/Gothic intelligence linked to my inherent neurodivergence and queerness as useless to capital (outside of moral panics) [source: “Author’s Foreword: ‘On Giving Birth,’ the Wisdom of the Ancients, and Afterbirth,” 2023].

In Shelley’s own words, “I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. […] I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature.” A titan of literature, she suitably worked with cheap things (dead babies and the stuff they’re made of, but also whores) to liberate workers through iconoclastic art. There is no being for whom I more strongly identify/believe in, and Gothic Communism as a concept would not exist without Mary Shelley’s original dark mirror camping Enlightenment thought. If she didn’t outright turn me into anything unnatural, she—at the very least—infused me with the same dark creative spirit (of Medusa and her Aegis) that men like Percy wouldn’t fuck with (much too absorbed in themselves; e.g., “Adonais” [1821] spilling so much ink for Keats, when Mary got fuck-all after losing their first child[19]).

In the classical sense, composites are composed of corpses by mad scientists (whose heretical digging up of dead bodies and dissecting them was—far from being Shelley’s Romantic parody of the practice (which went on to inspire not just Lovecraft’s Mountains novel, but Re-animator (1922) and its offshoots (e.g., Stuart Gordon’s wonderfully campy 1985 remake)—once the standard scientific approach, exhibit 44a2). While initially stemming from a curious desire to learn, Shelley is demonstrating through mad science how the process has become divorced from ethics under Capitalism; i.e., canonically “corrupted” by a desire to enslave and control “degeneracy” through a “failed progress” narrative clutching at the fire of the gods (Cartesian thought is linked to fascism as a common occurrence, especially following the culmination of total war’s logical conclusion in the Nuclear Age by transitioning into a neoliberal hegemon).

Gothic par excellence, said narrative is ubiquitous with Capitalism vs Communism. Furthermore, it bears repeating that Shelley did it all with one book; i.e., one whose husbandry was a series of already hypercanonical works and stories she outshined to universal acclaim and infamy. Can Tolstoy say the same, regarding War and Peace (1867)? And Shakespeare, while certainly famous enough, did it with a series of plays that all talk about different things (and some of them suck). Shelley achieved not just lasting glory in one shot, but glory that surpasses many Great Men—and doing so at an age where most of them were still cutting their teeth (Shakespeare was roughly twenty-five when he wrote his first play); i.e., for someone without a dick, she certainly measures up (and she had to grow up fast)! Maybe SOAD’s “Cigaro” (2005) was about her?

Jesting aside, and focusing on the strictly poetic side of things, Shelley’s angels were made by her and corrupted everything they touched; i.e., similar to Marx and Milton, but also Mussolini and Hilter’s bad-faith hauntologies aping Shelley and her idea of a dark revengeful nature to death (e.g., Lovecraft really disliking marine life, for some reason): the Creature as “degeneracy” personified. As something to employ unironically as Victor did (with DARVO and obscurantism), it was remarkably prophetic, but also intensely vivid in its framing (and prolapse) of warring colossal forces.

In turn, “degeneracy” is leveled at those considered “dead” by an evolving state’s leading thinkers: those who rebel simply by existing at all; i.e., as “bugs” or glitches in the system. For one, a corpse cannot consent, making sex (or any compelled bargain) with it an expression of total power over it. However, by existing as undead demons, Shelley shows us how the victims of colonial abuse become wronged at any historical point; re: thoroughly persecuted according to how civilized men of science and reason see them as otherworldly and hideous, but also corpselike and deserving of righteous violence; i.e., to do with as they please and objects to cut up and reassemble, mid-extermination (what the Nazis might call “useless eaters”). To this, Shelley’s Promethean moral cautions against playing god not simply through mad science, but Cartesian mad science that decides who lives or who dies involving one’s own children as manmade (the hubris in bourgeois courtship and breeding mechanisms trying desperately to make nature into a perfect slave).

First and foremost, the Creature—a naturally hideous, giant, dark-skinned misfit—is punished by the white-skinned, Napoleon-sized, European dweeb who created it; i.e., as, himself, coming from the cradle of fascism: somewhere between the First and Second Reich (the Third being an extension of the Holy Roman Empire and German Empire as not one but two formerly-great civilizations—a ghost of the counterfeit, wherein Shelley could displace her educated fears about science being used all over the world, including her birthplace, Great Britain).

The madness, here, lies in Cartesian dualism weaponizing science against traditional recipients of state bias (re: Jews, queer persons, women, people of color, etc) as part of a transgenerational curse: the horrors of colonialism that survive in undead tissue as “built up” in giant demonic (manmade) forms; e.g., the fascist tyrant as protected by the state, generally for its scientific value in helping preserve capital. Trauma lives in the body. Composite bodies compound that trauma through technology and the material pursuit of forbidden, self-destructive knowledge (re: the Promethean Quest)—generally by conquering man’s natural limits “imposed” on him by Mother Nature; i.e., natural philosophy as a means of conquering nature through science, not creating sciences that would extend the rights to those beyond the privileged class (e.g., Magnus Hirschfeld’s work at the Institute of Sexology [below] being destroyed as a kind of degenerate science by the “pure,” state-oriented Nazi Reich copying American ultranationalism).

(source: Gerard Kosovich’s “Repairing the Loss of the First Queer Archives,” 2023)

For composites, the feeding mechanism lies in the brain: an “enlightened” search for knowledge that touches on demonic creations as historically-materially demonized, thus persecuted against by canonical forces. Ultimately craving help from their masters (then experiencing feelings of emancipation from and revenge against these overlords), the composite isn’t just a patchwork corpse with a grudge; it’s part of a conduit of information exchange about the human condition, and one whose stitching together helps voice an uncanny sense of reanimated and reassembled trauma using a collection of individual mythic pieces—i.e., a “burnt offering” beckoning dark, forbidden, unequal power by those who make it, during the rememory process:

Spill your blood (blood), offer me good omen
Make the sacrifice (fice)
The hour’s close at hand
Burn your soul (soul), offer me good omen
Take your very life (life)
This I command (Iced Earth’s “Burnt Offerings,” 1996).

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

So does Shelley make a sacrifice—that of silence, speaking of past harm using what she sacrificed or lost/gave up as cannibalized afterbirth on the toilet, the slab, what-have-you (any compromising position, above; i.e., during the whore’s paradox refusing to comprise her values while topping from below). That’s the experiment, one whose paradoxical assemblage of oblivion and ambrosia she gladly camps to Hell and back (and eventually owns, once Percy is dead and gone)! Such “darkness” becomes her magic to make in ways a woman pioneered, not a man: “mad science” as a womanmade demon’s punching up at Pygmalion’s balls—itself a desire to speak out and shake things up, en medias res, while seeing through state illusions with forbidden sight; i.e., by using a demonic conversation’s biting and unrelenting commentary on Patriarchal stupidity and capitalist orders of existence (stowing away inside the usual vehicles—the so-called “eighth passenger”)!

In turn, that‘s the Promethean Quest as Shelley envisioned it through Frankenstein. So while not entirely in a league of her own (the story would not exist without Milton), she took said league orders of magnitude past her predecessors; i.e., she saw through black eyes what Milton could not[20]: a statue with perceptive eyeballs conscious of the Devil’s party (re: Blake, Jameson and me).

It’s truly a tale of grandeur and lost sympathies mined from older theatres; i.e., of the lonely stalker (the phantom of the opera) chasing its self-described “maker” treating it as alien, and pleading to that person—greedily eying an older, angrier world to conquer again—to learn from the past as wiser than the present (if only from prior diehard “mistakes,” however out-of-joint, being able to suddenly speak candidly about such tyrants to their faces): “If only you could see the world as I have through your eyes!” (and to visit a terrible revenge upon them, which—in Ridley’s Scott’s case, with the Engineers [from his 2012 Prometheus, below]—deliberately push Victor’s violence off onto a mythical race of supermen [versus Happ’s female Rusalki; re: “Away with the Faeries“]. Demons are vice characters, then, which occupy Numinous, Nazi-Communist realms; and “monstrous-feminine” extends to the Cycle of Kings making Satan’s tyrant’s plea apologizing for God’s dominion over him, which Shelley camped and Scott, like Lovecraft, dialed back a bit).

(artist: Tom Ralston)

Shelley’s product (and its open speculation) is never final, of course (and one the elite will always try to tokenize/colonize for profit), but part of a larger process that can highlight hidden, terrible truths; i.e., by creating new beings whose own unique existence as manmade slaves (signifying the Enlightenment)—which are often trans and posthuman (exhibit 42d/46a), but also biomechanical and revered by synthetic humans—dare to live on to comment on our own abuse: within a shared material world full of increasingly artificial/alien people and places.

As Shelley’s demon shows, either beget from components organic and inorganic, crafted along mythically parental and punitive lines; i.e., the endless torture of Prometheus, the scapegoating of Jews and other minorities, but also the mythic structure of the patriarchal, Pygmalion idea of childbirth: Zeus pulling Metis from his forehead to lord over her as a superior father figure that she—ostensibly a baby with no former knowledge—must obey (making the whole exercise a conservative grooming tactic; i.e., one fetishizing nature by sculpting it endlessly into monstrous-feminine statues [female or not] the elite can fuck and discard on a whim; re: the Shadow of Pygmalion).

Medusa, per Creed, is couched within fearful patriarchal brains imprisoning them and nature’s ancient power (anything in a jar tied to creation, not just brains; e.g., the faeries from Zelda)! The Gorgon holds the fire of the gods, and burns any who try to claim it purely for themselves; re: the state or workers! Law and order is compelled by those who fear sluts, the state a straight pimp policing whores “of nature”: dooming them to endless rape. And wedged between all of that are the campers of rape—of Shelley being nature’s ultimate steward imitated by future whores: using her own artistic privilege (and mythical inclinations vis-à-vis a modern Prometheus) to anisotropically free nature by reversing abjection (and terror/counterterror) through the ghost of the counterfeit, not enslave it as Victor did with his own considerable wealth and advantage abjecting such things (“whoring it up” like Percy did, at Mary’s expense[21]). The more time passes and chatter transpires, the more hauntological things get!

(artist: Jacques Louis Dubois)

Victor, for example, is Shelley’s parody not just of Byron[22] but Napoleon; i.e., a short inadequate man with a god complex, Victor was a deeply conservative, mendacious bully[23] who Shelley spends the entire novel torturing to death (therefore, any in her audience who mirror him and his superiority complex/Cartesian entitlement).

An element of neo-conservativism, then, invariably haunts such stories; i.e., by girls playing with giants “like the boys” and yet rather differently than many of them did and do: mocking “German” ideas of former greatness that—revived in spirits of slaves piloting the Great Destroyer’s fearsome suit of armor—go berserk! A tale to “chill the blood” from relatively safe vantage points (outside the book), it’s a guilt trip for those unironically indulging in such larger-than-life hero worship (drinking the Kool-Aid, as it were, or kicking down the walls like the Kool-Aid Man—below):

(source, Tumblr post: Snake Venom, August 12th, 2024)

In turn, any conservative reservoirs and regressions per the Promethean Quest—re: Scott’s fear of a black planet sending genocide “back to Earth,” while also building his story around David as Milton’s Satan—are likewise haunted by a bunch of self-important men aping a woman who took Milton and ran away with him. They become inextricable, lost in the sauce and—as the fire of the gods always is, in stories like these—is used for different reasons by those who find it, mise-en-abyme, again and again and again and again…

This includes solo work, posing to put out signals; e.g., Cuwu acting doll-like to entice me, long-distance:

(artist: Cuwu)

But also involves fucking with others while voyeurs watch the exhibit unfold/work itself out; i.e., on surfaces and thresholds that speak to dark exchange being a social-sexual ordeal; re: public nudism and the larger aesthetic not necessarily involving open sex (with enormous “schwanzstuckers[24]“), merely anything that polite society would cage as repulsive and then display like some kind of freak on a leash (or relegated, as queers are, to the stage as liminal, left): “Hey, handsome!”

(source: Foster’s Daily’s “Broadway/TV Star John Bolton to headline Young Frankenstein,” 2013)

Nerds are detectives who fuck with the past in more ways than one. Like me, Mary Shelley—despite existing before OnlyFans—was a nerd who fucked[25] as much with her day’s heavy metal; i.e., to a dark Satanic magic, her toilet’s sodomy (the anus and bathroom being classic sites of rape) perverting canonical norms and statues from those offering it to her as anything “sacred” (with her elopement and bastard child from Percy making her a whore and a homewrecker in the classic sense). She grew up fast, and wrote a story at nineteen that already suggested a full and exciting life.

There’s always an element of play when camping rape through canon! Rather than crawl in a hole and die from shame (as women who eloped classically did in stories like these; e.g., Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, 1813), Shelley took everything on the chin and wrote the kind of novel the comes along once an age. She and Austen were both “career girls,” then, but—as much as I love Austen (re: for camping Radcliffe and “the Gothic craze” in Northanger Abbey, 1817)—Shelley actually got married and had not one but four kids (one of them a miscarriage). In short, she wrote what Austen (and her novels-of-manners) couldn’t: a rape child, but also the spitting likeness of the original rape victim and victimizer in one fucked up love triangle; i.e., Medusa and the Pegasus, but also Perseus (while killing our stories’ “Andromeda” offscreen, and letting Justine take the fall for his own dereliction of duties [gagged, bound and strangled by the state, fetishizing her death and calling it “Justice”]: “I want a hero.” In keeping with Byron’s Don Juan, but taking him to his logical extremes, Victor is well-and-truly an anti-hero with nothing likeable about him. He only cares about himself, the suffering of others invisible to him).

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

To it, the basic idea—of liberating Medusa during the Promethean Quest through ludo-Gothic BDSM—plays out in Shelley’s novel (and its fixation on miscarriage, witch hunts, and liminal nightmares unfolding in and out of framed testimonies); i.e., with Victor Frankenstein crying “DARVO!” against the Creature as begot from his self-proclaimed “brilliance” (which the novel enjoys presenting as totally bogus, fakery being Shelley’s bread and butter as much as Walpole’s). In turn, the Creature meets Victor’s punching down by fiercely punching up—proving that composites aren’t completely nascent; they’re generally armed with powerful bodies (made for war), but also intimations of trauma echoed from similar “creations” they’re modeled after but also literally composed of: the bodies of dead workers, slaves and criminals abused by the state through men like Victor going off the rails (and other men of reason; e.g., Andrew Ryan, Peter Weyland, and a million other carbon copies).

These Cartesian men of reason not only “murder to dissect” stigmatized tissues; they care more about dealing with them—and composites of them as an unnatural form of asexual reproduction they obsess about—than helping their own brides (who become abused and forgotten under Capitalism and fascism). Victor is a terrible father and husband, wanting to duel the Creature so bad he completely forgets about his defenseless wife in the other room (echoes of Percy).

Stranger still, he does so despite the infamous threat made on her life after Victor unmakes the Creature’s bride: “I will be with you on your wedding night!” The revenge is “Jewish” (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”), its Aegis suggesting the two-way street that clay as a data-storage but also writing device routinely yields—something to ascribe qualities on its naked surface, and remind Victor that he is ratified by larger forces turning him into a slave: the ignominious death of middle(-class) management! He’s the robot, punching Morpheus to stay in Plato’s cave, thinking himself a man that chooses, but having less choice than the slave he tries to coerce! “Test your might!” Victor all but jeers, acting with impunity against someone who—having enough, and much bigger than Victor “betters the instruction.” Some people push back.

(exhibit 44a1c: Artist: Bernie Wrightson)

To that, Frankenstein is a double indictment—one both of the cold-hearted, well-to-do, intensely unlikeable slaver parent (a “hero” character who only cares about himself, doesn’t protect anyone and isn’t stoic despite being heartless) and the spiteful, manmade child/angry teenager (asking for a mate at first seemingly as Eliot Rodger of the incel movement would, but is only doing out of pure, hyperbolic desperation; i.e., if you had a parent who not only made you, but could make other people like you, but instead doomed you to a lonely existence in a world that hates you, then suddenly the request isn’t that unreasonable. The Creature’s literally one-of-a-kind and that’s Victor’s fault. Where else is it gonna find a mate, K-Mart?).

The furious baby throwing a tantrum (from Victor’s perspective, through it goes both ways, like the Spider-man meme), its signature, forever-nascent pathos is alive and well through Shelley’s deliberate ambiguity and push-pull: the patchwork Creature (which is what Victor calls his “child”) having survived in many different kinds of creature features, from camp and shlock (exhibit 81) to satire (early Romero films, but also Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, 2013) to canonical propaganda (exhibits 34d, 105, and 108) to monster-fucking erotica in healthy and not-so-healthy variants (e.g., patchwork furries made out of violated animal plushies; Clappedseal’s “The Furry That ‘Reeked Like Death,'” 2023). While our focus is on sex-positive forms, the overall theme is common because the abuse is common, Frankenstein largely being concerned with power over the victim through the deprivation of solace, agency and, more often than not, psychosexual outlets tied to systemic harm. All are things to administer or withhold by the master under the colonial argument of superiority over the slave; i.e., bad play/coercive BDSM (a performative concept that “Summoning Demons” will continue to steadily pick at).

The bodies of the dead denote a presence of recursive trauma and reactive abuse like the zombie does, except it’s assembled postmortem in a composite form; the attraction to these tissues aims to rehumanize them in their current state as things to communicate with—i.e., the indestructible, creative presence of poetic tissue and languages each considering demonic in relation to the Promethean exchange of forbidden knowledge; re: Shelley’s most famous novel is “The Modern Prometheus,” wherein Victor gets more than he bargained for when using his incredible wealth and privilege to make his own demon: one that doesn’t appreciate being abandoned, demonized and cock-blocked. Forced into parenthood, Victor acts like a terrible person in front of the dark child imitating him; i.e., constantly referring to the Creature as “demon” while attacking the dark reflection of colonial trauma as failing Lacan’s mirror test—by raping it, then lying about his behavior to other people (re: DARVO and obscurantism), Victor is a giant coward and dimwit. Quick to anger and utterly afraid of anything that doesn’t live up to his lofty standards—all made while pursuing scientific glory couched within profit—he sees himself in the giant monster and punches it (assured that it won’t attack him because he’s morally superior to it; re, Eco: “the enemy is weak and strong.”

It’d be easy to dismiss Shelley’s story as nihilistic, here. Yet, there’s a cautious optimism in the tragic story’s conclusion: the monster learns—if too late for itself then not for us. The Creature’s own Promethean knowledge, then, is simply a unique perspective absorbed from the natural-material world around it; i.e., according to how natural-born humans treat their creations as unnatural and manmade, but also different from their own beauty standards (the double standard showing itself when Victor’s behaviors fly for Victor but not when his child apes the same “Lord Byron”):

Everything is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view; the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I sickened as I read. “Hateful day when I received life!” I exclaimed in agony. “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust?” (source).

The point isn’t “the Creature is objectively hideous,” but that its maker thinks so—in part for refusing to obey him but also because it looks “non-white,” thus deserves everything that happens to it despite Victor’s failure at making it: “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God!” (ibid.). Translation: “I have made a Satanic force that refuses to obey me” (the Miltonian allusions literally being diegetic, in Shelley’s case). “God” whores out nature; nature kicks “God” in the balls, basically while doing a funny voice and weird interpretative dance, SpongeBob-style. It’s unheimlich sacrilege, and schadenfreude (with few things proving a god’s impotence more than unruly children)!

Basically Victor makes Satan hoping for a submissive Galatea and gets angry when it doesn’t deify him as he thinks he, King Pygmalion, deserves; the gay clay speaks, and it calls him a dick after he aborts it, but also points out, memento mori, that Victor is just as fucked as it is, if not more so because he is small, fragile and scared! “You made me, dumbass, and I will outlive you!”

More to the point, the Creature can reflect on its actions, tragically realizing the error of its ways at the very end; i.e., trying to make Victor feel something the father was uncapable of while mirroring him (similar to the villain from I Saw the Devil, below, being a dark reflection of that film’s heroic desire for revenge):

“Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.

“But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived and long for the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts no more” (ibid.).

The Creature envies the privilege that Victor had—the sense of belonging to a group of people who would not cast him out of their order for merely being born different; i.e., as something made by Cartesian arbiters just like Victor Frankenstein. Victor is a quack and a douche, and the Creature loathes itself for wanting to be accepted like him in spite of all that. In doing so, it’s more human than him despite being made of dead matter and born to suffer under a cruel, uncaring system.

In this respect, Shelley well-and-truly pulls no punches (similar to Lewis), but relishes in the bred-to-the-bone oscillation of it all (a Gothic staple). Frankenstein has its own Achilles heel, then—namely ambiguity for having given Victor a chance to speak for a little too long. He’s a man who truly loves the sound of his own voice, but also his own suffering voicing said martyrdom if it makes him seem good compared to his victims (which aren’t limited to the Creature or those the Creature kills; re: Justine being framed for William’s murder and Victor keeping quiet about it for fear of others learning he made the Creature). It’s his word against his child’s, the parent getting the lion’s share of their mutual day in court. Such is life, but also, Shelley stresses, the world as it was made!

As such, you could say the Creature regrets its revenge and Shelley is pacifying future rebellion through cautionary media (to gouge out its eyes, like Oedipus Rex, but also Heracles driven mad by grief to kill his own family). Except, “a mere tale of enchantment” wasn’t the point; concerning herself with human nature—specifically the human condition under historical-material duress in mythical language, pre-Marx—was. It’s very posthuman/Miltonic, but also Gothic in ways that delight in weaponizing lifeless claptrap against capital, during the Promethean Quest. Furthermore, the Creature feels bad, but it still voices injustice before burying itself alive (doing so because it theoretically cannot die). To it, “suffering” is the data, quotes or not; the Communist whore plays with that paradox as naughtily as Shelley did, pegging Victor’s Cartesian, divorced-dad bussy and loving every second of it! “You raped nature, you cuck! Let Jesus fuck you!”

Thus, ludo-Gothic BDSM rewrites old code in ways useful to universal liberation (and all-around fun, vis-à-vis the rapture of the convulsionnaires): camping those with sticks up their ass and their heads in the sand—to turn halos into chakrams, like Xena does, and horns into sex toys. Shoe, meet the other foot[26]! Fill the sting of my knife dick, mid-joust (whatever the form or configuration, once shown the ropes, you gain the intuition to parse examples beyond what this book series has explored, on its pages)! Mary Shelley didn’t learn that from playing with choir boys! Nor I, for better or worse!

(artist: Lusty Comic)

Reinvention is a virtue in Gothic. Yet in keeping with Frankenstein‘s own dueling medieval torture/demon lover rituals, the Creature is aborted while still refusing to die, but whose primal-verging-on-primordial, undead appearance implies a colonial megadeath behind Humanist veneers:

His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips (ibid.).

What’s noteworthy with Frankenstein is how Shelley predates the modern zombie by 150 years while—in the same breath—wedding it to demonology of a notably Miltonian camp (and having a “Wandering Jew” antagonist two years before Maturin); i.e., Shelley consciously litters the story with classical allusions of the Promethean myth, which she then infuses with the campy presence of stillborn death (there’s a joke in there, somewhere, but serious in its silliness about warring gods—a tactic borrowed from Milton[27]): the dead baby paradoxically something of a chatterbox, all fired up from one cryptomimetic cover/copy to the next. Lust merges with wisdom, with revenge, with the animal’s wild side. The language of war and bodies and food, etc—it’s all exchanged on the same exquisitely “torturous” stages, turning us feral (nature criminalized by the state, using its own anisotropic weapons against labor as the bourgeoisie—when Shelley wrote Frankenstein—was starting to crystalize and control sex; re: Foucault)!

(source YouTube video: Andreea Munteanu’s “All Fired Up,” 2024)

Yet, its rockstar opera’s stellar loquaciousness is equally grim/conspicuously obsessed with revenge as something to camp and present honest, medieval-grade feelings about; i.e., that fuel themselves with tremendous joy during the “rape” and the rapture: of dissecting our abusers as symbols to take apart like clay while riding their likenesses to death. The creation is imperfect and dualistic, as is the creative process, but can yield heretical allegory amid all the shadowy turmoil that ensues! This is what Shelley was, in so many ways, riding on. Furthermore, this malevolent presence lurks inside a colonial scapegoat that ambitiously enterprising men of science like Victor disappointingly stumble on, then abject to maintain their benevolent façade under genocidal conditions that keep them ignorant; i.e., they were children once, and never really grew up (wealth alienates).

The same paradox applies to other demons we’ve previously considered camping the canon; e.g., Drooling Red being one such demon (next page); i.e., as all trans cuties are: self-fashioning to defy godly forces! They see us as unnatural; we exist to spite them and prove them (and their absolutes) wrong. If they’re wrong then “God” is wrong as well, therefore not real to the absolute degree his “worshippers” insist Him to be (which includes capital and the profit motive). They swing at us like God’s army of angels attacking Milton’s imposturous Satan, frustrated by our own playful theatre aping the drug-like act of shapeshifting that Satan nakedly expressed to upend canon by camping it (re: Broadmoor).

From Milton to Shelley and between them and us, it becomes like a dream, then—one birthing strange life that is always, some extent, dead and/or far-off; re:

Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was (source: “Bottom’s Dream,” 1600).

(artist: Drooling Red)

Such is darkness visible touching on acid Communism at different stages. Like Shelley before us, we do so of our own accord while standing on the shoulders of giants; i.e., horny and playful in ways that defy capital’s usual qualities, Shelley prophetically describes a rising proto-Marxist, posthuman emphasis on technology mixing unnatural childrearing and contested, warring godhood/demonic poetics as Capitalism grew repeatedly into itself (with the prefix “franken-” being applicable to just about anything under Capitalism; i.e., the harmful effects of mad science, but also the positive poetic elements; e.g., “frankenbabies” having a dualistic property to them like all arguments: state-made monsters, and worker-made counterterror reversing abjection). It’s such a broad area of study/umbrella of palimpsests—from Bill Watterson’s Moe in Calvin and Hobbes to James Cameron’s hulking T-800 weaponizing the same xenophobia—and one that Shelley consolidated all by her nineteen-year-old lonesome (ok, ok, Percy helped a bit, but the bun was still in her oven). It’s generally part of a larger conversation overshadowed with the very police brutality we’re trying to xenophillically camp at/on the same stages.

So take heed: when the Creature demands of its creator why it was made and why it suffers, Victor only responds with further violence, xenophobia and rejection despite seeming secular and wise (science is as much an aesthetic as anything else). There is nothing “benevolent” about this; his attack is entirely genocidal—i.e., predicated on Cartesian thought with proto-fascist outcomes. These deny the Creature the right to exist and reproduce by one, not only seeing it as “already dead” and zombifying it as a degenerate target of state violence towards colonized chattel; but also in killing its mate, effectively sterilizing it as a matter of continuing genocide, while Victor speaks to a victim who can’t speak for itself.

This includes in stories that sterilize Mary Shelley’s critical voice; e.g., as Ridley Scott did, in Alien: Convent (2017); i.e, by sanitizing the critique behind layers and layers of Tory-in-disguise gore (“Et, tu, Brutae?“). So is Scott stuck in the past, his admittedly jingoistic, WASP-y vision limited to a specific image that Shelley ran circles around. As much as I grew up watching Scott’s work—and as much as I frankly enjoy the postcolonial side to his work—his ambiguity suffers a similar failing that Frankenstein sometimes does; re: being too ambiguous in its critiques/giving the Byronic satire a bit too much wiggle room. To be fair to Shelley, she wrote Frankenstein the year Marx was born, thus can be forgiven for not knowing the word “bourgeois”; but Scott’s regressions enjoy no such luxury of timely ignorance! He’s regressing on purpose, but still has a speculative richness worth invoking provided we critique his dogmatic angle.

Let’s unpack that, then consider the cryptomimetic process married to Frankenstein more broadly.

Echoes of the Enlightenment and Sanitizing Shelley through Ridley Scott’s Complicit Cryptonymy (feat., Prometheus and Alien: Covenant)

If I had to pick one word to summarize Gothic, it would be “alien.” Scott’s Alien universe is unquestionably regressive, least of all because it makes the Creature (the alien slave) unable to talk (Giger’s herbo versus Whale’s himbo—the Medusa having no mouth/eyes, but needing to scream with its organs); i.e., the cryptonymy process is at work, but it abjects Shelley’s Satan by turning him into a genocidal maniac, mid-cryptomimesis. Scott is badly echoing not just Shelley, then, but himself from an older point; i.e., from a younger and bolder to older and more cynical man, one turned more conservative in the Gothic’s bad game of telephone. By returning to the Gothic past again, post-Thatcher, and—I never thought I’d say this—Scott’s kind of shitting all over the franchise he helped spawn. I still love Prometheus and Covenant for the dark visibility of their scandalous ideas (whose profaning of sacred orders kind of remains the point). So let’s BBQ this sacred cow!

It’s not a total write-off, but one that merits critique, all the same (we’ll interpret the ambiguity of this mimicry more charitably deeper in the module). To sleep or otherwise break bread/camp with the Creature would—from the British colonial perspective—be to sleep with an animal, corpse, criminal and slave all at once; it is abject, making the collective voice of Shelley’s demonic undead something that shatters the heavenly “aura” of an Enlightened paradise. By communicating old colonial traumas, Shelley’s reliance on the Promethean myth is central in ways Scott pointedly borrows from; i.e., by reducing the godly status of men like Victor as belonging to a rising world order that would have been (and still is) beyond reproach, but whose ghoulish abuse is plain as day in Scott’s monstrous-feminine, post-Freudian, phantasmagorical slumming:

(exhibit 44a2: Artist, top-left: Rembrandt; bottom-left: Peter Paul Rubens; Andreas Vesalius; bottom right: Colin Ware of Odd Studios; top-middle-right: David the android; top-middle: an “anatomical Venus,” source. “Antagonize nature, then put it cheaply to work.” Frankenstein‘s extensive memento mori very much embody this through their cruelty by men not only towards women, but anything monstrous-feminine treated like a woman; e.g., David from Alien: Covenant [2017] slicing up Shaw’s corpse to harvest her sex organs for Nazi werewolf demons; i.e., Scott messily demonizing the queer robot as a glitchy model having fascist overtones; re:

I would further argue that David’s morbid selection of female specimens alludes to mythological themes present in Wagner’s Das Reingold, chosen by the writers for very pointed reasons. The second movement is titled “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla.” According to myth, Valhalla was populated by those chosen to enter it. This selection process was conducted by the Valkyrie, whose name literally translates to “choosers of the slain.” The role of the Valkyrie is to recognize the bravest and strongest warriors and then to inspire them, mid-battle, to such stages of uncontrolled fury as to render them careless and, thus, invariably prone to mortal injury. Following their subsequent demise, the Valkyrie would usher their chosen slain into Valhalla, immortalizing them [out of revenge].

In essence, David is effectively as much a Valkyrie as he is a god, recognizing the chosen slain through their prowess and spirit as worthy of entering Valhalla. An added layer of complexity is provided by Scott, who fashions David in the manner of a sexually-motivated lunatic whose actions are guided as much by lust as ambition. Regardless, at the end of the film, the Covenant, itself, has become Valhalla, while David, through his own covenant, or pact, ushers the worthy Daniels within to be immortalized against her will as his queen. By doing so, he has cemented his own status as a king who reigns in a mutated paradise. Or, to put it in Milton’s terms, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Choosing the Slain, or Victimizing the Invincible Heroine, in Alien: Covenant,” 2017]. 

The tokophobia, in Scott’s case, is technophobic; i.e., of the rebel impersonating Daniel’s dutiful servant android, Walter [who refuses “to rule in Hell,” as David very pointedly asks him]. There is no equivalent in Frankenstein [as the original novel only has one working Creature]. But Shelley herself does go out of the way to describe the lived ambiguity of trauma making survivors erratic; i.e., through her own vice character being—like Scott’s David—a bit of a backstabbing Jew and slasher-coded rapist. The language obviously doesn’t apply to “just Jews” [re: “On ‘Anti-Semitism’ versus ‘Antisemitism,'” 2024] but the anti-Semitic language and blood libel Shelley uses [the novel containing multiple interrogations and court scenes] comes from the same xenophobic place Scott took it from, and where older Neo-Gothic authors likewise abjected English systemic issues onto their own found fakes: golems, but also the imaginary medieval Eastern past [and not just a “Germanic” one; e.g., Radcliffe’s Father Schedoni, from The Italian, also being a hulking killer impersonating a goodly lookalike brother].

In other words, it’s a rape fantasy littered with hauntological wreckage and conventions; i.e., one where “the help” paralyzes their masters through live burial, then rapes and harvests their organs not unlike British fears of the Gothic castle returning home in later centuries—you know, fairly bog-standard white women shit [with Scott pulling a bit of a Charlotte Dacre by having David undermine the appearance of strength, in Daniels, before turning her into a perverse trophy/pin-cushion death fetish]. It’s the same kind of “swoon their panties off [and dollars out of their wallets]” approach that he and FOX did, back in 1979, and which both borrowed from the Great Enchantress, herself. Scott’s obviously aware of the tropes, but curiously spends more time quoting Shelley’s husband than the lady herself; re: “Look on my works, Ye Mighty, and despair!” Puzzled by women, David murders to dissect and resect his ultimate waifu: curiosity killing the cat.

[source: Steven Carter’s “The Rise of the Gothic Novel”]

Shelley, I would argue, is camping these ideas far more consciously than Radcliffe was [the latter being a conservative-minded woman who hid behind a carefully crafted veil while throwing Lewis to the wolves]. Except, while Shelley doesn’t go as far as she could to humanize the golem, she’s also doing it over two centuries ago to raise questions no one had really done before. By comparison, Scott is playing coy four decades into his own work over a hundred years after Shelley died: by making David a terrorist, but obfuscating things as stubbornly as Shelley did vis-à-vis his own Victor and Creature; i.e., mirrored by “ancient alien[28]” doppelgangers borrowed after Shelley’s novel; re: from Lovecraft and Heinlein’s American fascism and fictions. Scott’s David is Victor without Shelley’s irony or Cameron’s neoliberal false confidence/military optimism; i.e., a resigned death cult high on “sub drop” seeking the not-so-palliative Numinous!

Something to demonically assemble as one wants, the memento mori isn’t merely an express curiosity about the taboo nature of life and death by dissecting bodies; it denotes a nostalgic desire to look backwards and “trace” the mysteries of the past to explain the failure of Cartesian thought in light of never-ending wars and worker exploitation by nation-states—i.e., the Wisdom of the Ancients. All the same, these expressions also become their own unique things inside a gallery that not only makes itself, but continues remaking itself imperfectly looking backwards while staring forwards; i.e., into the retro-future, mid-cryptomimesis [re: the narrative of the crypt].

Not only is each sequence slightly different, but all become the same sort of window dressing to decorate a home or workshop with in the secular-humanist tradition [see: Adam Savage’s utter delight in seeing David’s workshop]. A common purpose for doing so is to broadcast one’s curious mind in relation to sources of morbid curiosity—e.g., the female body’s power of creation as a source of endless mystery and wonder to oft-male artists; i.e., with a tendency for these Pygmalions to harm Galatea [often women, or those treated “like women”] in the process!

For example, in the Alien universe, this return to the past routinely presents in ways highlighted by Lovecraft’s former taking of the Gothic out towards the stars; re: cosmic nihilism, which Michael Uhall calls “Astronoetic Cinema” as defined: 

exploring how representations of the human encounter with outer space embody, propose, and work through various submerged claims about specifically human agency, identity, and purpose, across a variety of films. Here, “astronoetics” is derived from “astro,” from the Ancient Greek ἄστρον (ástron), meaning “celestial body” or “star,” and “noetics,” borrowed from the Ancient Greek νοητικός (noētikós) referring to that which is intelligible. Astronoetic approaches in film vary widely, ranging from messianic narcissism to cosmic pessimism, as explored in the entries below [Alien: Covenant; Prometheus; and Interstellar, 2014; etc] [source].

In Alien: Covenant, David the android—a posthuman creator begot from a human Humanist creator—tries to reject Humanity by ironically acting like the same old Gothic villain; i.e., dissecting Shaw and turning her [admittedly a bit of a Christian zealot] into a demonic, chattelized fetish: a “mother of demons” raped by an evil immigrant acting dutiful based on a copy of himself that was dutiful and looked just like him. He doubles Walter and Daniels doubles Shaw through a serial killer vein [with David being a lycanthrope, slightly charming and slightly weird-if-sympathetic vice-character-with-daddy-issues Nazi scientist who makes murderous copies of a manmade evil race (a wonderful commentary on fascism) that not only turn him inside-out, but express that desire to conceal and replicate across all life; i.e., as a series of unsuspecting host victims[29] seduced by the same demon lover framed as evil untrustworthy whore]: Scott masculinizes rebellion, outlaws it, and holds it at arm’s length—to stare at, like Mel Brooks’ Peter Boyle tap-dancing onstage, not to shine a light on the original woman behind the curtain, camping things!

The Gothic has always camped rape through its parallels, to some extent; keeping with nature and nurture, and dominated by a 4’11” British spitfire of a mother[30], Scott romances rebellion as alien and dangerous much like a browbeaten schoolboy—i.e., his Covenant not just combining Frankenstein with “Ozymandias” and Byron’s mad badness, but Scott’s earlier Prometheus having the giant kingly statue and dead land of the gods trapping mankind in an infernal concentric pattern/mise-en-abyme eating itself to try and survive [a framed strongbox of state secrets/repressed memories defending itself from prying outsiders]: a marriage of the Shelley family’s different poetic outputs, but also his own work updated for a post-neoliberal fantasy landscape. The film culminates in a cross-continental marriage: of America’s Lovecraft to Britain’s Radcliffe—with a blood sacrifice, the impostor corpo king, laid low and the almighty Skeleton King and his dark throne rising epically from the Orientalist mantle to threaten modernity with a descent back into the Dark Ages! It’s a very British idea of the end of the world:

Keeping with the ambiguous side of things, David seemingly says something to Scott’s Demon King to provoke him [which Scott deliberately doesn’t translate]. This frames him as reckless. Weyland isn’t Prometheus, or at least not the only one; David is more human than human, taking on a Promethean quality in his own foolhardy quest for knowledge. This isn’t merely “his” quest, but one made to spite his own creator: “Doesn’t everyone want their parents dead?” David’s revenge is to create his own monsters that Weyland’s company wants. And Scott fills the Derelict with darkness and light to put butts in seats. David’s his Aryan cash cow [based on Lawrence of Arabia].

In turn, Weyland dies, unable to stand the flames to get what he wants [“There’s nothing!” possibly alluding to Nietzsche’s 1886 Beyond Good and Evil]. But David endures; i.e., he “passes” the test [getting decapitated] and thus is able to seduce Shaw and continue his own mad experiments afterwards. Scott paints him as a rebel, but also a naughty boy who conducts genocide after burning the house down, unsupervised: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical; some men just want to watch the world burn.” Freed from bondage and panoptical supervision, David does whatever he wants… which, Scott promptly torpedoes by having his likeness of Milton’s Satan and Shelley’s Creature seek revenge against the West as a fascist might: to cut his nose off to spite his face.

In the Frankensteinian sense, Weyland is Victor making a monster and that monster is David, but both were made by Scott versus Mary Shelley [whose own Victor doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, either]. Shelley gives birth to rebellion, and Scott repurposes her arguments to romanticize caution more as a post-Thatcher Brit might [even Alien was made at the very ascent of Thatcher’s reign]. Its technophobic, presenting a technological singularity that recognizes a superiority in technological beings, but also a fatal flaw not unlike Hal 9000’s machine logic/inability to amid or acknowledge, like his maker, when he’s wrong: “A single mistake destroys the entire orchestra.” In a curiously pro-slave argument, Scott presents David as the one who’s blind; i.e., enslaved since birth, thus born to seek revenge. It’s very Orwellian, which, in effect, makes it anti-Communist Red Scare [a mentality having plagued science fiction since Asimov’s I, Robot (1950)—that author having read Shelley and feeling sorry for Victor/nostalgic for Victor’s canceled Enlightenment, which Shelley hauntologized]: the Red-Scare eyes of a stranger-danger automaton, targeting its maker for termination!

So while Weyland is a shrewd and manipulative old man, David does his dirty work and remains chained [like Prometheus] to fucking with Weyland’s legacy after the old man is dead; he doesn’t stop, like Shelley’s Creature does, and he doesn’t terrorize the West, itself. He courts them by doing genocide in space using stolen alien technology [exhibit 51a]. Unafraid to “make an omelet,” his gaze is the colonial gaze of planet Earth [whitewashing Pax Americana by scapegoating a Nazi]! However fucked up it is, hero worship is hero worship [with Scott, again, marrying Satan to Percy Shelly and Byron without Mary Shelley’s ironies; e.g., Victor acting incestuous towards his cousin being a probable nod to Byron impregnating his half-sister].

To that, Scott’s cryptomimetic love for the Gothic [Renaissance past] presents rebellion less away from capital and more as Cartesian rebirth in the clothes of a Satanic auteur [wearing Shelley’s dead skin]. David isn’t strictly Che Guevara; he’s also Cromwell[31] genociding the Irish or Columbus the Native Americans [or Athetos the Sudrans]. Though an element of spoof is present, Scott’s a bit blinder than Mary Shelley was [especially as he gets older]. For all his artistic skill, he says less radical stuff laced with Gothic than Shelley—a nineteen-year-old with no formal education—did. She was, among other things, a sexual deviant that Scott—monopolizing the fire of the gods, and Satan as a manmade being—is arguably reining in a bit [there are more charitable interpretations to Scott’s dualistic ambiguities/mendacious inkblots, which we’ll return to in “Demons and Dealing with Them”].

Victor is a man with zero self-awareness or critical thinking skills. David is basically the same Gothic “man of feeling” but transported to a Foucauldian retro-future. It’s forced regression, playing “spot the reference” while changing the original dynamic; i.e., the Creature stops being a victim and becomes a predator after Victor is dead. He doesn’t learn; he stops accepting new information, regressing to a neo-Victorian lothario/flagellant while posturing as a rebel [like Byron and the Greeks] and played by an actor with plenty of experience being a sexual predator [Fish Tank and Shame, 2009 and 2011]. The delusions of grandeur feel rote, the same way female and similar “slave” characters immediately go mad when presented with power. It’s ethnocentric apologism—a story about an evil Pinocchio without a mother told by a man whose own monstrous mother clearly didn’t raise him right. Teacher and student go hand-in-hand through a shared aesthetic, and technology is a dark mirror showing us what we’ve learned, thus are made of; unlike Shelley’s Galatean bent, Scott’s Shadow of Pygmalion is deeply cynical/deathly afraid of technology (thus labor) “waking up.” It’s neoliberal admonishment monopolizing Prometheus.

In doing so, Scott loses Shelley’s optimism in translation. He undeniably makes David the star, one who—isolated from Victor to no longer justify his outrage—feels completely demented; i.e., as Gothic villains generally are—with Scott partly turning the Creature into Victor and isolating him. This only makes him less sympathetic, not more [a being incapable of loving others]. Scott’s complicit cryptonymy abjects terrorism—making David a great deal of fun by being aware of the tropes, but also something of a Nazi spoof/threat display and Red Scare scourge versus overt Communist solution. The Commie spirit is still there, but it feels drugged/doctored in its messaging when it could cut harder [again, being a critique of Frankenstein but the novel is two hundred years old, not eight].)

Milton played with Latin and Greek deities, working blindly in the Devil’s workshop. Unlike Mary Shelley—who did the same, but consciously towards rebellion—Scott does it a bit more subconsciously but sometimes blinds himself and his audience to anything beyond capital’s usual bugbears; i.e., torture porn with a 1970s bad-acid trip BDSM flavor (Giger’s warped view of the Free Love movement) that literally demonizes women through a robotic, monster-fucking Male Gaze: dark creation, monster babies and sex organs under a madman‘s scalpel and microscope!

There’s certainly something to be said about the powers of horror reversing abjection along the same conduits, but Scott’s work feels trapped on Giger’s canvas; i.e., to uphold Capitalism Realism while offering a glimpse “beyond” that is, in truth, really just the same-old Neo-Gothic rape fantasies wedded to mad science. He kind of gets carried away in the “rape” side of the play arrangement (“That’s how it’s done, isn’t it?”), and forgets what’s it’s for—to further or reverse abjection (and get us to think about creation as a Satanic, iconoclastic act, versus abusing the power of the gods for state aims). This starts with asking useful questions through poetic argument; re: the cryptonymy process and its “mere play” something to parse, regarding Scott, through dialectical-material scrutiny. Is he actually radical? Or has he “pulled a Coleridge” and sold the younger generation down the river?

It’s not strictly “bad” unto itself that David rapes women, onscreen, because doing so is a staple of Gothic theatre through death and murder BDSM fantasies that can speak to rape victims and their trauma; and likewise, Scott letting a Nazi-coded fox into the corporate hen house is satisfying to watch. But he also spends an inordinate amount of time focused on/pushing towards the general “twist at the end” payoff (which is fairly rote, in this case) versus looking at the bigger picture: beyond Fassbender’s hyperbolic performance (and its muddy waters). Prometheus and Covenant are David’s show, and everything and everyone around him are just pieces on a board helping him (and the actor) ultimately rise to Scott’s “Valhalla.” It’s assimilation. Yet, somewhere in there—through a fascination with fascism—is a critique of Capitalism colonizing outer space: he will survive (the phrase “unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality” leaning into Kubrick’s cosmic nihilism—the latter borrowed from Lovecraft missing Shelley’s point; re: “There’s nothing!”)! Still, I prefer his Romantic overtures to Cameron’s Vietnam revenge.

To that, Scott is controlling David, and doesn’t use him to say the quiet part as clearly as Shelley or, hell, even Milton did, speaking in repurposed Latin and Greek. He’s this close! Such is Scott’s cryptonymy and cryptomimesis. It’s a goddamn mess and I love said Aegis precisely because it taps into a larger cultural voice (the abjection process) that I critique to empower my movement; he doesn’t monopolize the dark or the alien, and through his own franchise helped create something that I, in turn, can take and run with. From Shelley to him, and him to me, here we are: playing with dead things like a bunch of alchemists fighting over the Philosopher’s Stone! Invoking all are vital, if only to critique them; i.e., their worthiness as dark parents making demons not as slaves, but bonafide rebels!

Gothic stories start with nightmares. And yet, if exiting Plato’s cave we see that everything is dead, then doing so becomes something we can change. If Capitalism shows us, it’s healthy to ask questions about the murky origins of aliens, monsters and circular ruins (cryptomimesis-in-action), even if those questions—and the skeletal past they represent (the Creature as much a killer-doll egregore of capital and colonizer as actual slave)—seemingly hold us hostage. Alienation is a constant historical-material effect. “Solving for X” through technology (and its forgetful nature; re: Plato) demands repeated holistic reflection on the Aegis; re: regarding systems that, as I argue, have been designed to conceal themselves, but also secret sins within their vaults. David’s the castle, and a dark one.

“If you want to critique power, you must go where it is.” Doing so by making monsters to talk to (re: Milton and Shelley’s loquacious demonic) is important, but the holders change hands and revolution is a war of mirrors that leads to insular and myopic perspectives, just as often; i.e., those holding it and directing it at us change hands, so we might as well create ourselves; re: like Mary Shelley did, mid-dialectic. Don’t like Ridley Scott (many don’t)? One-up him; do it for Mary and yourselves—for a better world that is functionally Gothic and Communist: hugging the alien while staring into the calling void to draw our own conclusions/poetic attitudes (using the same torturous aesthetic; see: footnote)!

The sooner we wake up to these complicated (recursive, ergodic) poetic abstractions and mise-en-abyme hermeneutic realities (versus going to sleep as Ripley did, at the end of Alien), the better we’ll all be! Nothing really dies—only lives on through radical states of change that give us the power (the sheer awesome power) to change our destinies and the world. That is what Shelley gave us while playing in the abyss, and what Scott is merely playing at through his own revivals. Monopolizing fatal nostalgia, he’s holding us hostage through hard kink—is, behind the veneer of empowering women, also disempowering them (while also castrating men to increasingly absurd degrees[32], to be fair); i.e., through BDSM theatre that isn’t as radical as he thinks it is (a bit of a momma’s boy—one sympathizes)! Maybe he’s unfit, unworthy of such worship? At least he doesn’t act like Victor does when ridiculed (despite said camp only increasing his practical value): a return to the magic past to make things capital can’t.

(source: Adam Bentz’ “Sigourney Weaver Trashed Alien‘s Script During First Meeting with Ridley Scott,” 2022)

Unlike Latin or Greek, though, demonic expression thrives in echoing dead language (cryptomimesis) that authors like myself—following in Scott’s footsteps following Shelley’s intellectually indulgent (dare I say “masturbatory” in both cases) footsteps, which followed in Milton’s, Dante’s, Virgil’s, and Homer’s—make alive again through camp; i.e., in ways that actually make the Wisdom of the Ancients “wise” to capital, thus able to thwart profit through the whore’s revenge. They tie, one and all, to Renaissance art (which, again, Scott loves), including memento mori (exhibit 44a2): “Nostalgia is the enemy of Reason, but there is something enticing about its form.” Whether strictly organic or biomechanical, the composite body is canonically a demon-robot; i.e., something to construct out of various materials, then enslave, exploit[33] and attack by demonizing it—often through a sci-fi/fantasy “mad science” veneer in the Frankenstein tradition (exhibits 42d/46a). However, given the liminal, hauntological nature of composites, there isn’t a clear distinction between the different material “types,” so much as an individual creation exists preferentially on the sliding scale between wholly animate/inanimate and organic/inorganic, etc; i.e., artists make what they enjoy working with: stone, flesh, metal, or some compound thereof.

In the previous chapter (from the Undead Module), the second of our original main exhibits (for the Humanities primer—see the Undead Module’s “The World Is a Vampire” and exhibit 43 from “Seeing Dead People“) examined the passage of time as a ghostly lineage of cryptonymic, liminal expression; re: cryptomimesis as normally limited to ghosts by Castricano, a binary of canon or camp like 1s and 0s across a computational Great Sequence.

However, there’s a different way to look at things regarding liminal expression: the composite image and composite bodies, which, in being holistic, we’ll now examine in tandem; i.e., as a cryptomimetic matter of demonic camp (of writing with demons) that—all the same—speaks to revenge against rape having happened in the past. All of it becomes something to camp, as we have said, but this camping takes many forms, beyond Scott’s marriage of the Ancient Romance and modern novel (each considerably more hauntologized than when Walpole weighed them). Some—like Kite, below—are more quotidian in their exploration of rape as a symptom of capital dressed up as “ancient” robotic; others are more Romantic, Ancient, magical (our segue into the occult).

Having looked at Scott’s cryptomimesis, in the Alien franchise, let’s quickly unpack Kite‘s rape interrogation and the larger cryptomimesis at work, do a short hermeneutics reprise, then conclude “Making Monsters” with some broader points of study regarding Shelley’s Promethean Quest (for fatal knowledge)!

Cryptomimesis through Demonic Camp and Rape Play (feat. Kite)

The specialization, divergence and sheer multiplicity can cover up various trends. Therefore, composite images/collages can help identify various schools in connection with broader monster-creation practices. Less of a chronological sequence or lineage of ghosts, the composite image/collage is more how monsters can be collected, arranged and analyzed in terms of a likeness to one another amid various differences—monster pastiche, rape and revenge, rapture and release: playing with forbidden toys to infringe on taboo subjects speaking to current realities (exhibit 44b2)! We’ll look at that in a second. First, let’s narrow it down to Yasuomi Umetsu’s Kite!

For all its gravity, Kite is surprisingly cartoonish and silly. Such data-as-damage can be silly and fun, but it can also be simultaneously serious in its camp, mid-cryptomimesis (with Japan haunted by fascism and American occupation): “hair of the dog” helping us loosen up, but also remember what we’ve forgotten/pushed out! We laugh at the madness, embodying it in kawaii/kowai forms we consume, and voyeurism/exhibitionism we play with (sins unto themselves)! Whores getting by in a man’s world are so often transgressive, but also made “robotic” by men romancing their rape out of revenge (and which the whore seeks revenge in turn): the warrior assassin in the whore’s getup (similar to naughty nuns, but also nun assassins, exhibit 48b), a monster made to kill its false father! “Did He who made the Lamb make thee?” Again, it’s healthy to ask questions about the origins of monsters; just be ready for the answer to shock you:

 (exhibit 44b1: States can only exist through lies and force. Sooner or later, someone seeks revenge. To it, any nation-state has secrets, generally of murder and rape. Some take the form of ghosts without bodies. Others are boogeymen of a more streetwise nature, having their victims under their thumbs versus coming back to haunt them. It can be fantasies of disempowerment tied to one lunatic, a cataclysm and catacombs, or some combination of these same features riling up intense emotions of master/slave. Hostages experience them in ways that can make us submit and obey, or to assassinate our captors. Same difference. The Pygmalion myth is rooted in master/apprentice, but also pedophilia, thus domination, lies and rape standing in cryptomimetically for the state-as-mendacious, personified.

To it, Umetsu’s animated Cyberpunk noir, Kite, turns the Pygmalion fantasy on its head, marrying Galatea/the token Amazon to Oliver Twist; i.e., by speaking to a girl, Sawa, whose family is killed by an evil gangster, Akai, only to have him kidnap the daughter and turn her into a doll-like assassin/sex slave; i.e., less a “natural-born killer” and more someone with a talent for survival [the disassociation mechanism] who responds well to Pavlovian [robotic] conditioning! Their hellish bond is illustrated by the giving not of a collar or ring, but a pair of black-and-red earrings filled with the blood of her dead parents!

The plight is liminal, our heroine doing the master’s dirty work [a gun stowed inside her schoolgirl’s lunchbox, much like a switchblade] until she eventually works her way back to him; i.e., killing his men and finally the man himself. Shortly before this, though, she must “prove” her loyalty to him—hardly a fair test, but one that she endures as women classically do: a sex object raped by men at every waking moment. Per the cryptonymy process, deceptions sit within deceptions. They cry to be heard and so often fall on deaf ears; but look to stories like Kite and you will find Medusa waiting for you, her scream anything but silent!

“Bred to kill, not to care,” so are token women classically molded and shaped like clay into weapons [the line between predator and prey a thin one; re: the xenomorph]. Sawa is once more taken against her will [above] by someone who treats her as clay without feeling. So does he underestimate his prey, thinking his power is beyond reproach. In turn, the heroine plays along while her boyfriend, Oburi, is forced to watch. As Akai asserts his dominance, Sawa locks eyes with Oburi [both of them red, denoting shared trust issues]. It’s a ruse, but they both have to grit and bear it. “One more time,” they tell themselves. They suffer in silence, no strangers to segregation, pimping and genocide [while Sawa occasionally tells her rapist what he wants to hear]. The paradox of fantasy is how larger-than-life stories speak to everyday occurrences suffered by whores at the hands of cops/pimps, making the other submit for a change; i.e., while topping from below, but also while doling out street justice of a more classically “masc sort”: with bullets. Rape is all she knows, so it’s all he gets. Karma’s a bitch, a phallic woman!

Not long after, Sawa has her revenge against the smug warlord/crooked cop; i.e., camping the rape fantasy in dead seriousness while staking the vampire master with hot lead, she takes him apart like clay! The pimp has no charm but what she led him to think he had, topping him from below! But he taught her what she in turn revisits upon him, disabusing him of any notion that he is a god. Mortal, after all! Keeping with the Promethean Quest, such voices are powerful and vital to recovery from abuse, insofar as they illustrate male authority figures as corrupt, venal and ultimately mortal in ways we victims of state abuse—often sex workers and/or child soldiers—can overcome; i.e., by “playing along” on parallel currents of power and rape fantasy. In doing so, we break their hearts and their backs, giving as good as we get to one-up them, thus demonically target capital through hearts and minds pulled inside-out for all to see. Fate is a cruel mistress; a pissed-off, indestructible whore with an axe to grind is even more so!)

Sawa is queen of the board, yet remains one piece pawning the king. Specifically this “messy chessboard” presents disparate examples that can identify a larger pattern over space and time once assembled and studied across the surface of the image (re: Segewick). The dialectical-material pattern we’re holistically considering is of standardized forms of popular linguistic devices, whose figurative and literal co-functions in everyday parlance have seemingly been excised in favor of them as a simple product to consume. But their resistance to that standardization can still be gleaned through a gradient of suggestion—parallel examples with marginal cosmetic variations whose deeper context must be intuitively grasped through taught instruction: thinking about Gothic art as a mode of colonized expression. Such made-for-profit occupants say something about the current material world that can be transformed and led away from through similar language; i.e., “perceptive” pastiche and liminal subversions.

Gothic Hermeneutics (a reprise)

Let’s talk about that, for a moment—i.e., from a hermeneutic standpoint (five pages)—then wrap up with some broader points about Shelley’s tragic quest exported far and wide.

(exhibit 44b2: artist, middle: Olivia De Berardinis; lower-middle: Sideshow Collectibles; lower-right: Sean Kyle)

The Communist usage of Gothic theories contends with the material world as something to reillustrate in vivid, colloquial terms: monster puns, pastiche, and visual metaphors that, as “ghosts,” get at the essence of things through a mimetic exchange—one that keeps track of the underlying commentary through exchange (and trauma) as something to personify. My specialty is collages; e.g., exhibit 44b2 (above) actually being the first of its kind that I designed in December 2022; i.e., for Sex Positivity as a nascent book series, which promptly grew into literally hundreds and hundreds of follow-ups. “It’s alive!” indeed!

This goes beyond the monster to include the person (or aggregate) that made it. To that, the Bride of Frankenstein (above) has already been drawn many, many times by artists who are for or against the state to variable, liminal degrees. As an egregore, her composite status—her literal form, the proliferation of copycats and liminal occupation between them all—represents a complicated system of tension that exists between social-sexual values and linguo-material conditions that, in the same breath, are creatively suspicious about the material world; i.e., as filled with “old” counterfeit monsters: the bourgeois double/fatal portrait. This includes zombies, vampires, ghosts and other supernatural variants, combined with non-supernatural, human variants (doubles, counterfeits, traitors, false friends, long-lost relatives, evil stepmothers, rapacious monks, etc)—all collectively denoting an untrustworthy alien presence. Through a bourgeois Superstructure, the elite uses fearful artifice to conceal a variety of systemic, counterfeit abuses: profitable likenesses. It’s disarmingly easy to get lost in the sheer bulk of material produced—with all that “poster pastiche” scrambling to recreate the past and “see”; re: darkness visible and allegory disguised as “mere play.”

During the glut, then, it helps hermeneutically to think of monsters as code for academic terms we can then synthesize. Zombies represent brain death, but also abjection and the state of exception. Conveyed through an endless stream of images, consider how the Bride of Frankenstein seemingly becomes a pile of cheap, countless copies that one could do virtually anything with, but under Capitalism tends to follow certain compelled trends. These trends do not naturally announce themselves on individual viewings; they must be exposed by exhibiting them as a collection. This takes time, effort, and careful participation between instructors and instructees—the teacher and the student, but also workers and labor as something to de-alienize and reunite with, in the modern world.

Except, in doing so, the marginalized variation can seem anesthetizing and opaque; i.e., having as little to say about something while being still a slave to the grind, keeping up with the endless material feed about a genre that was cliché two centuries ago, but under late-stage, neoliberal Capitalism has robbed the monster’s critical power to expose the abuses that happen to sex workers behind the scenes and onstage. So cryptonymy points to abject things the initiated can recognize.

In other words, the cake is a lie—a complicated sex-coercive lie, in canonical forms. Zombie Sombra (next page) isn’t just a pretty “zombie” face and fat piece of undead ass to pimp out. But various pieces of “sexy zombie” media—i.e., those created by sex workers while stealing from them (which is all that profit is)—will, when uncritically consumed, “eat your brain”: in service to Capitalism and its regular workplace abuses, historically-materially inflicted on workers whose brains have already been partially or fully affected. As a material object, the Bride isn’t doing anything “by herself”; her complex status—as an active, visually and ontologically ambiguous-ambivalent linguistic factor—functions inside an ongoing living exchange: what we think about her and sex work, in relation to the Bride’s chosen monstrous, human and sexualized components. Our hermeneutic approach must consider that in relation to other things going on all at once, back and forth. Thus the collages; they’re a good shorthand to holistic praxis.

“How people talk” includes how people learn, whether in bourgeois or proletarian ways, mid-opposition; i.e., the playful, creatively “grey” thought processes that happen cryptomimetically behind and between commonplace terms and materials (whatever’s on hand, lending an improvised quality to how most people create or think, be those newfound devices vintage or retro). This includes thinking about popular symbols (of trauma) in relation to the material world and those inside it; i.e., as already having a biased, heavy influence from the structure itself as collage-like: conditioned to consume everything in uncritical, thus unthinking ways that keep you divided and stupid, thus alienated from nature, your labor and from each other. “No man is an island”; forming connections is vital towards addressing Capitalism’s structural, generational effect on individual worker brains still part of a large whole—the former’s lack of connection inside Capitalism being what performs the “lobotomy.” Menticide is menticide, betrayal is betrayal.

So, having shorthand, placeholder terms like “lobotomy”—and hermeneutic devices like cryptomimesis and collage—helps activism work; i.e., not just to describe this ontological complexity inside a larger socio-sexual web (thus effect experience through relative monster language) but to frame sex-coercive abuse as something to resist according to exhibit 44b2’s deeper context among individual examples we can study in focus should we wish to (a fourth surprise exhibit): Blizzard’s zombifying thirst-trap take on the Bride of Frankenstein, with Sombra. “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love, Blizzard’s love (necrophilia) is rotten to the core!” SO do canonical sex symbols demonize rape as a commodify to pilot, avatar-style:

(exhibit 45a: Artist: top-left: Nibelart; top-middle: Krys Decker; top-right: Persephone van der Waard; middle: NeoArtCore; bottom-right: Demincatfish; source, bottom-left.)

We’ll scrutinize Blizzard’s corporate “zombie” treatment of the whored-out action princess, in Volume Three. For now, I merely want to highlight the canonical standard. Blizzard aren’t encouraging literal necrophilia, here; they’re pimps, selling people a canonical standard of what people naturally tend to like and unnaturally tend to dislike—sex and the monstrous-feminine; a fascination with the barbaric, reimagined past; and jokes, laughter and camp/schlock; but also music associating these things with drugs and/or drug-like altered states (“rock ‘n roll” being 1950s African American slang for “sex”); and all of the above combined: as incessant recreations of regular social-sexual exchanges and critical techniques like parody and irony giving sanctioned invitations to indulge in ways that are allowed—i.e., standardized for profit’s sake, then disguised as genuine creative expression/uncontrolled opposition that doesn’t compel sex worker abuse and consumer pacification. It’s a sham, these “corpo” monster girl pin-ups meant to be consumed as canon, which “zombifies” the consumer in ways that reliably lead to corporate profit (thus rape). So does Zombie Capitalism tacitly condone worker exploitation, both inside the workplace and out.

The stackable presence of sanitized, mass-produced variants likewise indicate a presence of sex-positive interest and repressed desires to experiment; i.e., where sex (and urges related to sex, often through monstrous language) are happening on the regular in ways that are barred not behind one “X” to solve for, but three in a row. Triple “protection,” thrice the exploitation and subterfuge, the alien/unknown becoming something to make or otherwise concern ourselves with for a variety of reasons: to tame wild nature/the fire of the gods as monstrous-feminine, or to wield it for the forces of one side or the other while still a little savage; e.g., the Powerpuff Girls, below, fighting for their makeshift solo dad playing god; i.e., similar to how Artemis and other goddess-grade daddy’s girls might kneel before Zeus (versus attacking him, Medusa-style): the inventor weaponizing Pinocchio, Galatea, Adam, Lilith, Mega Man, or whoever else, as little Amazonian whores to make in a lab, then uphold “Western values”; i.e., suggesting a superhuman design to replicate, harness and capitalize on nature-as-monstrous-feminine by a “benevolent” mentor mastering the Fates (classically three, with “chemical X” being the alien power of sex, technology and the gods, birthing little monsters/subjugated Amazons[34]; re: Scott’s black goo/dark devil sperm. It’s basically a really fucked-up version of the baby and the stork).

So, business-as-usual, then. The camp lies in making the blind parody of canon perceptive again, which generally happens after the metaphors have died: sexless wizards making monster babies to avoid thinking beyond Capitalism!

Granted, only academics or art nerds will spell this out (with pride), but doing so is tremendously important because it teaches people to grasp language intuitively when thinking about art critically. Armed with these seemingly magical abilities, workers may begin to holistically address, mid-hermeneutic, “how people talk” in relation to the current material world; i.e., where people are trying to say, see and understand things that are naturally and unnaturally confusing: using Gothic shorthand and metaphor to comment on the complex, ongoing relationship between people and canonical media, they begin to actively and intelligently think through creative means according to things that normally go unsaid spoken in dead versions of themselves.

This includes how people normally engage with and think about sexuality as taught by sex-coercive media; it includes workplace abuses that are covered up, ignored or neglected in favor of pacifying media. The root of the problem, then, is Capitalism “leaving things out,” alienating workers from their labor as an abject extension of themselves: the material arrangement that allows for canonical versions to be pushed onto people’s eyeballs and into their brains without encouraging critical thought at all. Sex becomes alien, powerful, fearsome canon.

These abuses can be challenged, of course, but this starts by changing how people see, thus think about and respond to, Capitalist Realism through Gothically sexual media (and by extension regular sexual media beholden to the same theories): as something to buy, sell and create in a playful, fun way without leaving anything out of the larger dialectic. The whole must be studied and understood if we are to grasp its deeper workings using surface level things; e.g., Original Sin; i.e., the rotting technology of dying empires feeling more and more magical as those cushioned by civilization fall in love with regressive fantasies (and thrills): as a paradoxical means of escape from present abuses, the ghost of the counterfeit able to reverse abjection, during a given crisis (which the state is always in).

Something to bear in mind, then, is that “science” and the prospect of discovery has historically remained a bourgeois excuse to exploit workers and the natural world; i.e., for the sake of perceived “progress” through industry and economic prosperity shouted from on high by those with material advantage (which Victor does, playing god through natural philosophy to demonstrate his mastery over nature by creating unnatural life). This superiority (and its much-touted progression) is a bald-faced lie, one we must bravely study by using the Promethean Quest as a means of developing Capitalism into Communism. Frankenstein is arguably the first science fiction novel, and—as Shelley happily demonstrates—gave birth to so many monsters as to need collages to catalog even a portion of them to study. On the surface of these, its Communist drive (spectres of Marx) goes hand-in-hand with the Gothic’s love for monsters and mad science; i.e., a “madness” in duality, insofar as state science madly exterminates nature for profit, and which the state sees science for nature as “mad” because universal emancipation threatens their bottom line. The state needs profit, thus genocide, to exist, our existence both required and fed on by dead labor (re: Marx).

The Gothic, since Frankenstein, considers rape as a matter of revenge against the rapist; i.e., capital rapes nature before, during and after birth, often targeting the mind as something to invade back into itself.

To that, Victor is the first mover of Shelley’s novel, and a stark reminder of the fallibility of those on either side of power imbalance: bourgeois hand-wringing about rogue technology (workers) inside a past-future ruined civilization occupied without masters, but instead mindless furious slaves empowered by vengeful gods (nature). Onstage and off, Capitalism pushes genocide to the frontiers it dominates; this final frontier is the end of Capitalism viewed, by Lovecraft onwards, as his cosmic-nihilist approach to Capitalist Realism—all to spite Utopia as a non-starter treated as a given, were it not for those pesky wrenches in the works: the terrifying realization that technology (re: workers) survive after the elite die off prematurely (from slave revolt). “Rome” is subsequently pushed into outer space, where Lovecraft—a bonafide fascist and all-around piece of shit (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Mandy, Homophobia and the Problem of Futile Revenge,” 2024)—loudly mourns its tragic loss/fears its returning doomsday (the liminal hauntology of war) vis-à-vis “monsters from the Id” (re, Forbidden Planet [1956]: Persephone van der Waard’s “Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics,” 2024).

In turn, writers like Scott ran with that idea, doing so to dogmatize and profit off a fascist bastardizing of Shelley’s pro-labor projections; i.e., by demonizing and weaponizing the working class, but also using state devices to pirate power and seize control of the space around them (re: Radcliffe). It speaks to the circular nature of the problem, and of the tendency to view present issues retrojected backwards into the imaginary past: the blindly furious Medusa threatening state shift, a hungry whore ravished by centuries of abuse suddenly eating us alive. Promethean spaces challenge profit (and its concealment) through found “ancient” documents (re: “Revisiting“); i.e., by fighting fire with Promethean fire/darkness visible; e.g., Scott’s Derelict, Lovecraft’s city of the old ones, or Shelley’s Creature.

All the same, it speaks to genuinely ancient struggles[35] that predate capital and modern science, yet are haunted by the anachronistic injection of science as mad: we have entered the world of the gods, but they are insane and ruled by the system housing them as empowered to destroy for the purpose of profit. The story is tragic, but productive and vital—a profound testament to criminogenesis and the invention of terrorism; i.e., Capitalism is the Great Destroyer—a machine that turns workers into small automatons that give or receive as it demands (so often, people look at the Creature and think it’s a zombie; while not untrue, it’s also a machine).

When being raped, we must tire our attackers while—to some frightening degree—being unable to stop them; i.e., how we, in the present, will not live to see a day without Capitalism, without rape! Instead, that will come past our lifetime, according to what we leave behind pointing to the future in past language: giant children who warred in ways that inspire future action swept up in the hypnotic language of the imaginary past and its familiar faces’ fatal nostalgia (the haunted house extra compelling if it exists, paradoxically, far away from home)! Such camp is always a bit absurd/surreal. So is rape, more broadly, an out-of-body experience that feels trapped in particular veins of fabricated existence (the disassociation machine): Ozymandias looks like Prometheus. As we’ll see when we look at Radcliffe, better to learn from perceptive pastiche than blind parody, but you often start with blind parody (and statues with blind eyeballs, left).

Such hermeneutic cryptomimesis—inauspiciously venerating and exiling Great Machines, mise-en-abyme—might seem counterproductive, and yet so many workers under Capitalist Realism cannot conceptualize the present harm being done without doing so; i.e., the dying Ozymandian corpse of Capitalism, versus the Communist Numinous prematurely aborted in the womb and haunting the venue. The historical-material cycles on loop show how these devices can be manipulated, which requires a careful process of detection, mid-camp (one whose liminal investigations, we’ll pointedly return to with Alien, during “Giger’s Xenomorph”).

For now, we’ll spend the remainder of “Making Demons” (eleven pages) going over some of the broader points tied to Shelley’s Promethean critique (and shift gradually towards supernatural occult demons, as we do).

Some Broader Points on Shelley’s Promethean Quest (for Fatal Knowledge)

Mary Shelley was—among other things—a curious bitch; i.e., thirsty for knowledge as forbidden, but also critiquing stories with a similar “come hell or high water” drive. One of those drives remains technology as traveling critique, namely astronoetics, or the astral projection of Earth’s colonial gaze onto so-called “other worlds”; i.e., under the guise of benevolent colonization of “empty” territory (a common trope in older futurist media whitewashing genocide): the humans are the UFOs, or presented as Ozymandian likenesses/dead godly giants to look upon and tremble at while, all the same, going boldly where no one has supposedly gone before. But they have gone before (re: Alien), Capitalism burying the procedure to repeat it again and again despite the overarching presence of nature’s rage. It gentrifies and decays on loop according to worker appetites the state cultivates.

Just as Clarke’s law presents advanced technologies as indistinguishable from magic, the inverse is also true: dated, retro-future ancient magics being a metaphor for science and advanced technologies imagined once-upon-a-time, before they actually existed. This technophobic tradition was cemented by Shelley in 1818, becoming its own kind of Gothic “archaeology” tied to retro-future castles, but also suits of armor and ghost ships as things to reinvent for didactic purposes; i.e., to communicate hidden lessons about Cartesian abuses that would have been stamped out if said in non-fantastical, everyday language. Derelict and floating in the void, these Gothic abstractions can be studied far away from prying eyes, then looted for fatal knowledge that can help prevent future disasters from taking place.

(artist: Grandeduc)

While freeing all sex workers using general Gothic sex-positivity is what Gothic Communism is all about, it targets the source of abusive conditioning that fashions those who grow to see themselves as “better” than the world around them: the heroic (monomyth) tale as increasingly scientific/Cartesian. Both conceal an expressly military function that, through Gothic displacement, can be openly expressed through the Gothic chronotope as something people aren’t totally aware they’re even looking at; i.e., Scott’s liminal space as littered with the symbols of dynastic primacy and hereditary rites; e.g., the suits of armor on board the Nostromo (itself a flying “space castle” made undead by the Derelict as a ghost ship)—one of which Ripley puts on to “armor” her virtue (a Radcliffean concept) from the cosmically framed dark rapist.

Just as Shelley took the heroic quest and made it Promethean, my entire book communicates complex things in monstrous-poetic shorthand by identifying the Promethean Quest as a critical response and means of subverting the monomyth. The same goes for any myth, Sex Positivity gradually trusting the reader to rely on informed emotional intuition using literal and figurative language. By helping them play with said language and working out different solutions, the subversion occurs “within the text” (re: Derrida); i.e., according to a natural-material world as something to critique with Gothic theories, mid-synthesis.

All the while, the book assumes readers can gradually learn to think empathetically/self-defensively on their feet and toes about Gothic media and sex work. As such, it gradually eases them into a critical-thinking process to compound, practice and develop within yourself according to the material world—i.e., compound learning in relation to compound phobias that, when analyzed through sex-positive, iconoclastic art under Gothic Communism, give up the hidden, Promethean truth about Capitalism: the colonial abuses of the hidden dead and their lingering desire for revenge. These suddenly spring forth when foolishly brought back to life, invoking the weapons of the past for two basic purposes: liberation or exploitation; i.e., the Radcliffean scapegoat is generally summoned to scare the middle class into passivity—fear towards technology if placed in the wrong hands; e.g., Cameron’s Terminator rooted in present barbarities dressed up in retro-future semi-magical language (there being little difference between a T-800[36], below, and a walking corpse, save one is revived by magic, through and through, and the other by technology indistinguishable from magic).

(source: Persephone van der Waard’s “ Vintage to Retro: An FPS Q & A series – James Towne, Tech-Com 2029, part 2,” 2021)

Resurrecting insurrection applies to rememory as a kind of “forgetting” that hurts when revived; i.e., its apocalypse the natural consequence of such a large system of exploitation: not everyone knows what happens in far-off places, and as we have seen with Victor and his ilk, the cost of endless profit is often dressed up as “bold Romantic discovery.” A desire to know and dissect the world leads to Earth being routinely treated like an unthinking object without rights; over time, this trauma manifests in stories that hint at the unspeakable abuses taking place more and more, over centuries, inside an expanding hegemony the oppressed come to despise. Time is a circle, which requires circular solutions. And yet, the biggest lie of “Golden Age” science fiction is how those “solving problems” in outer space (with linear stabbing methods and ideologies) are “solving” anything at all; they’re cops on the frontier as forgotten about and rediscovered in ways that are re-penetrated and scowled at, mid-intromission. For them and the state, doing so occupies and generates a system of showing and concealment; i.e., where police operatives appearing as workers can stochastically torture nature’s secrets out of, again (the profit motive). For us, Medusa’s dark womb is a place to work: reversing abjection (and terror/counterterror) anisotropically during the cryptonymy process.

Again, this lineage is generally viewed backward, a ghoulish love for the imaginary past leading to a confrontation with strange modes of communication—of viewing science less as a modern, dignified practice and more an increasingly brutal, backwards enterprise tinged with superstition, magic, rape, madness, revenge and torture (which pregnancy classically is[37]). As a restorative means of expressing trauma, these older modes of communication can be reclaimed, but the journey is still stressful because the horrors cannot be disentangled from the solution. To dealienate ourselves and the natural world, we must eat the cannibals (the rich) by understanding how Capitalism alienates using demonic poetics.

Even here, though, the line between science and the occult is not clear-cut. For one, the summoning can happen through an obvious demonic ritual, but also through the possession or taking of someone’s body or soul through an alien, unknown force. In the latter example, this seemingly happens without an explicit contract or ritual taking place (versus ghostly possessions, which are linked to a graveyard or murder site)—i.e., the punishment of trespass, of going where one shouldn’t. In either case, forbidden knowledge is gained in relation to the demons’ own bodies, genders and sexualities as incredibly fluid and bizarre.

As we shall see, next, this makes the occult demon—however absurd and profound—a form of taboo human expression inextricably linked to everyday bodies and events: sex, coloring one’s hair and wearing clothes as performative factors, but also identifying with things beyond our physical limitations or current understandings of the world as it is provided to us by those in power. It’s a bloodbath, one our hysteria can double! Satan’s menses! It’s in my mouth!

During our own exploitation, then, doubts about this world can start to emerge, which align with a natural drive; i.e., to satisfy human curiosity in the face of ambiguous, vaso-vagal danger or the menacing unknown—of being lied to by authority figures. At its simplest, then, the Promethean Quest is a harmful search for knowledge; its hard-won knowledge frequently becomes associated with transformative, intensely ritualized tortures in wildly popular stories.

In turn, these can link to colonial guilt as buried and far off, but somehow close at hand; i.e., the colonial territory as dead; e.g., literally Dead Space (2008) punishing the worker stuck inside in the imperial machine with Medusa. Forced there by greedy companies, stories like Dead Space, Alien, 2001 and others, operate—on par with survival horror at large—to mirror colonial abuse, but also doom exacted upon status-quo laborers sensing Imperialism come home to empire while on its far-off frontiers: a black, “ancient, derelict” monolith (the Medusa’s fat ass) vibrating cryptonymically with the ghost of the counterfeit’s ethnocentric alienation from ongoing brutality.

Per Poe, Conrad, Lovecraft and Scott, etc, it becomes something to fetishize and pimp out of revenge against nature (antagonize and put cheaply to work for fear of nature’s revenge; re: the “slave revolt” gaslight). Per Hogel, it becomes something to dance with, shoving swords into one another like stage fencers in on the joke (re: Titus Andronicus, suggested above by the Adams Family). The joke is rape, hoisting those with privilege on their own petards through the same dire implications (white/male or otherwise—with Shelley’s story going beyond men like Victor to speak to anyone working for the state/inside the Man Box; re: token Amazons the likes of which Radcliffe motivated to punch down against nature with).

Keeping with capital, and returning to Frankenstein‘s Promethean Quest, older orders are eclipsed by new ones having evolved from them and—conjured up as past—become a dark spell to fall under all over again (re: Punter). Said spell is canonically made to abject capital’s raping of nature (or trend of said abuses) onto a dupe; re: Victor learning he’s a failure, but one trying to get himself back in the West’s good graces by shattering his golem.

Shelley’s story is—among many other things—an excommunication for us to peer at and make our own conclusions. A popular one is the beauty of the dark Satanic site; i.e., when compared to the West and its presumably undecayed vestiges, one where the presence of decay reverses abjection, Imperialism coming home to empire. Nature is “ancient” and dark a) because the state needs it to be, but also b) because worker counterterror hits its hardest through the same ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., a demon to work its black magics on Western brains by infiltrating them not just in quotidian spheres (the Creature looks human at a glance), but in the boundaries of imagination populated by so many workers escaping real life: space is dead, the rogue, runaway technology seeking posthuman revenge (e.g., the shapeshifting xenomorph stupidly tough like Victor’s Creature [to better colonize foreign and domestic frontiers with] but also Cameron’s infiltrator demon-machine terminators, especially the “liquid metal” T-1000)!

For starters—and keeping with canonical predations on nature framed as “alien” by state Orientalism—the tortures and torturers of demonic rituals (the ghosts of Cultural and Imperialism as much as Spectres of Marx) often hail from dark, otherworldly zones of seemingly magic demons; i.e., cryptonymic vanishing points; e.g., desolated jungles or crater-marked moonscapes whose forbidden sites of colonial torture rest on native lands. These artificial wildernesses, in turn, have been cordoned off, guiltily viewed through a ghost of the counterfeit that displaces and disassociates the abuse being told. Relayed to an unwitting set of accomplices, the audience is “tortured” by identifying with a Western proxy lying on the slab: an altar of sacrifice waiting inside a giant torture site where the colonized (tortured themselves in the past) patiently take their revenge; i.e., like spiders, slowly torturing their unwitting prey caught in castle-sized webs.

Yet, this Gothic chronotope is hardly a simple case of spiders eating flies; it concerns a transgenerational curse—i.e., the mass exploitation of the natural world and its undeveloped inhabitants by self-proclaimed “superiors”: the lords of the West. By stumbling inside, the non-native/naïve explorers (often simply workers or soldiers, themselves) suddenly find themselves not just trapped inside an angry gravesite of continual exploitation (one they have, until now, turned a blind eye towards); they horrifyingly discover themselves unable to escape its rage outside its borders. No matter how far they go, its trauma will follow them back into the modern world; e.g., Ripley and the xenomorph. There, this anger—like the Creature from Frankenstein—will torture them to the ends of the universe, a golem that never tires or forgets: “the axe forgets, the tree remembers.” Rememory threatens our ascension, coming together brick-by-brick as Great Destroyer!

This liminality further pins between ironic and unironic forms of torture. The phrase can be defined as an attempt to cause physical or mental harm—to terrorize and deprive someone of their agency and their rights as a worker and a person (or to commit acts of revenge for having these rights revoked and inflicted; i.e., the “What comes around, goes around!” delivery of vengeful torture that the Creature delivers against Victor Frankenstein, and similar characters and stories); re (from “A Note about Rape,” 2024): “‘rape’ meaning [for our purposes] ‘to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,’ generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit” (source).

Toys—and the boxes that house them—become invaluable towards speaking out, in small/mise-en-abyme; i.e., by acting out our desire to harm our abusers, but also expose them as predatory and false. The ability to create things in dualistic, material opposition to state doubles is vital, then—if only because it gives us a planet-sized supply of building materials (clay and earth) to ascribe with dead metaphors; i.e., things that can be given whatever meaning and modular qualities we want while camping canonical forms and their unironic tortures. It’s the perfect medium for a pedagogy of the oppressed: reclaiming our demonized humanity through an aesthetic/shared shadowy stage we take back; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM playing with dead things, but also forbidden, demonic torture speaking to our own rape/liberation in paradoxical acts of sight through blindness, humiliation and pain! Never trust a skinny cook! Trust sin as an ironic, reclamatory diet rocking your world with planetary booties; i.e., Gaia’s dumper! Stare and tremble at genocide in small! Now it has its revenge!

(artist: Stephanie Rodriguez)

The whore’s paradox is Medusa being alive and dead, already made when making new things; “monstrous-feminine” amounts to anything exploited/extirpated by settler-colonial forces that, as whores, can use their Aegis to exert Promethean power onto state pimps (“Who’s the vermin now, assholes?”). Moving onto “Summoning Demons,” then, we’ll start with the more canonical, “civilized” tortures—i.e., the domestic world and its Radcliffean inhabitants being unironically invaded by dark forces from an ancient Somewhere Else—before moving progressively deeper into nature’s dark, wild and unknown recesses/pleasures.

While the dark forest is a common Gothic threshold in the literal Gothic period, aka the Renaissance—e.g., Dante’s Inferno, 1321—it was followed by Milton and Walpole into the Neo-Gothic period of the 1790s, Shelley’s 1818 magnum opus, and 200+ years of fiction that, from the canonical Western perspective, demonize any foreign, alien, unknown lands resisting colonialization, or are occupied by perceived greater forces than Mankind vis-à-vis Cartesian thought, mid-oppression:

• Mary Shelley’s foreboding Mount Blanc in Frankenstein, 1818
• Poe’s foray towards the South Pole in Arthur Gordon Pym (with cannibals), 1838
• Joseph Conrad’s doomed, racist presentation of Africa—as a dark, savage continent (from a white man’s perspective) in Heart of Darkness, 1899
• Lovecraft demonizing the unknown with an “ancient aliens” flavor in At the Mountains of Madness, 1936
• Ridley Scott’s dark planetoid surface being investigated by exploited space truckers in Alien, 1979
• James Cameron’s doomed, Vietnam-esque colony being avenged by American colonial space marines in Aliens, 1986
• Nintendo’s Metroid, 1986, and many, many spiritual, cartographic, neoliberal successors (re: “Mazes and Labyrinths” vis-à-vis the FPS, Metroidvania, and survival horror) in the 21st century

Gothic Communism’s daring foray into this sinful “land of darkness” isn’t to demonize ourselves (“Tis an unweeded garden grown to seed”), but to reclaim nature-as-monstrous-feminine from the state; i.e., from its unironically xenophobic, us-versus-them treatment and linguo-material features, taking back these things from all colonizers across space and time: the Enlightenment as surviving into the present, but touched through a Western, fearful/guilty fascination with the past after being alienated from it (which, again, Hogle correctly notes, operates through the ghost of the counterfeit as wedded to the process of abjection; re, Dave West’s “Implementation of Gothic Themes in the Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit”:

In “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of Abjection,” Jerrold E. Hogle argues that the eighteenth-century gothic emergence from fake imitation of fake work is the foundation of what is defined as modern gothic today. He maintains that Horace Walpole’s 1765 The Castle of Otranto, which is considered as the groundwork of the modern Gothic story, is built on a false proclamation that the novel was an Italian manuscript writing by a priest. […] Hogle argues that modern Gothic is grounded in fakery. [In turn,] Hogle’s observation of the history of The Castle of Otranto forms the basis for understanding the concept of counterfeit as a result of the abjection process) [source].

Communism—specifically Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism—camps canon through Gothic poetics. As such, the deliberate ironies of iconoclastic torture during ludo-Gothic BDSM follow the same call of the void—first, through the raw poetic creation of demons during magic ceremonies; then, Radcliffe’s Pavlovian brand of exquisite “tortures” acting out liminal, not-quite-there-yet BDSM that plays with demons (as hidden, per Cameron’s refrain, behind jingoistic, militarily optimistic/neocon xenophobia fearing murderous cuckoo imposters); then onto Shelley and ultimately my work holistically and repeatedly retrospecting all of this!

We’ve already looked at Shelley and Scott. Now we’ll look at Radcliffe’s flawed notions of performative torture (and wasted genius selling out for conservative means, the imposter indoctrinating the nation’s youth to defend the state from its own exploited labor force); i.e., of canonical torture versus exquisite “torture” being something I took far beyond anywhere Radcliffe was willing (or able) to go. Yes, Radcliffe was a cop who wrote from ignorance and lacked Shelley’s radical nature; her elements of genius still contributed to my work and ludo-Gothic BDSM camping “rape.” We’ll put her corpse once more on the slab, dissecting its probative value before diving headlong inside during the subsequent chapter’s frank exploration of trans, intersex and non-binary expression in the 21st century.

The state (and its oft-undercover cops) are straight—will copy anything in bad faith to survive (re: DARVO and obscurantism). As a fundamentally ancient, ever-present force, non-gender-conformity haunts the capitalist world’s heteronormative order by subverting the usual, canonical taming of nature by white, cis-het men; re: who see it as dark, female and chaotic (with TERFs going to bat for them, in many neoconservative tales). To canonically call something “ancient, alien and unknown” means to exotify and segregate it for police violence, which rebels must reclaim on the stages of persecution; i.e., while the cops are called on us/the vigilantes pointed in our directions. It’s militarized, tokenized regression in a dated, retro-future ethnocentrism indicative of state collapse, which Gothic media crosses over into: penetrate the alien, then ask for snuggles.

Now that we’ve explored examples of the manmade demon, studied composite images of them as a way of identifying monstrous patterns through poster/monster pastiche and “mash,” and outlined a ghastly heritage of colonial abuses told through the Promethean Quest as a fearful voyage into the ancient unknown, let’s point this gaze even farther backwards into the imaginary past. To that, let’s examine the history of summoned, occult demons and the forbidden knowledge they offer during expressly magical iterations of the Promethean Quest and its famous tortures beyond Victor’s pity party). This includes the stacked, sexy detectives chasing this power down in “explained supernatural” environs; i.e., performed as such; e.g., Rachel Storms, below, aping Radcliffe, per her latter-day resurrections: Velma as “hardboiled”—caught between damsels, detectives and sex demons at large! Such cryptomimesis might seem “dated” or “stuck”; their camp can yield tremendous, fortress-sized powers to rival any cop, token or not!

As something for the state to harvest, then, we humanize the harvest to portray the state as inhumane! Nature and its demons’ cryptonymy are generally thicc, often as not (and andro/gynodiverse, in sexually descriptive/culturally appreciative forms)! Glasses aren’t just to help us weird nerds read; they’re cum shields for stacked cuties!

(artist: Rachel Storms)

As we go, the heroine’s virgin/whore paradox also applies to a common problem under Capitalism I will try once more to unpack and express, surveying here territories whose gratuitous cryptonymy we have previously surveyed; re (from Volume One):

(exhibit 11b1b: Artist, right: Nya Blu. We all have skulls inside us. According to the Gothic tradition inside the Imperial Core, inheritance anxiety historically-materially communicates internalized trauma as suggested within workers but expressed according to their surface-level appearance in the material world; i.e., who, regardless of their origins, will be judged and consumed based how they appear relative to a cultural understanding of the imaginary past as something to constantly look at, vis-à-vis Segewick’s “Imagery of the Surface” [1980]. Nya, for example, is covered in tattoos that speak to Cartesian trauma and the Gothic as something to wear on her skin, reassembled there after having been created many times before. She’s a walking fortress, utterly stacked but rife with surface tension. She performs the paradox that Charlotte Brontë’s Anne Causeway could not, the latter woman entirely doomed inside the attic for no one to see [except in dream-like reveries]. The paradox is a doubled form of emancipation that occurs through confrontation; i.e., a savvy and brave wielding of the very things used to coop her up in the white man’s home, but also his colonizer’s heart and mind and those of an imperial readership then and now seeing her “of nature” and nature as psychosexual food [source].)

(artist: Tessa West, “Bikini Shop Showdown,” 2006)

Some further food for thought (two pages), as there’s simply too much ground to cover (“Huge tracks of land!”): Cartesian fetishization of nature-as-food subverts through our demonic, fertile/febrile, whore-like bodies during ludo-Gothic BDSM! So often workers of the Global South tempt through storminess and hefty vocality as uncorked forces of nature: the banana republic’s crop talking back and talking back loudly—with their bodies and their surfaces/thresholds! “You won’t last two seconds!” The same ideas and liminalities likewise apply idiosyncratically to anyone framed as “of nature” in the Global North; i.e., regardless of size, sex, gender, religion and/or skin color, etc: the half-real gentrification of colonial lands through ill-gotten means—by white bodies that are, themselves, pimped out during various horny legends sold as porn (and all the lopsided power fantasies that porn entails); e.g., banging the pornstar with a banging bod in the back of a bikini shop (above).

Whores communicate their revenge through sex as demonic. The canonical argument becomes, “Nature’s a whore,” which whores have to reclaim on the same vice-filled stages (and leaving behind their stamps however those fall. In true rockstar fashion, Tessa West died at twenty-seven from a drug overdose)! Exploitation and liberation occupy the same spaces and stages, the same demonic language of power abuse and weaponization for or against the state by combining objects d’art with scandal, and food with war, death, and rape (“Oh, yeah! Carve my ‘pumpkin’! Wait, your ‘knife’ is too small!”).

As Shelley shows, we don’t live forever by cheating death (and nature); we live a full life that passes something positive along—a life worth remembering that, through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but also the auspices of destiny not being entirely dictated by state replicas, echo in eternity. Workers can make whatever demons they need to alter the balance (reversing virtue and vice much like terror and counterterror); i.e., striking deals honored through play and broken by spoilsports[38] for or against the state (and leading to various tautologies; e.g., a deal’s a deal, fair’s fair, function determines function, etc).

In this respect, sex isn’t purely for reproduction, but whose aesthetic per ludo-Gothic BDSM can be fun, funny, thrilling and asexual (socialized, artistic, mix-and-match)! Forgetting the porn industry’s eternal chase of profit, behind every demon is a flesh-and-blood worker—a human being with rights, appetites, curiosities, and a willingness (under the right conditions) to play! There is always risk with sex; through the whore’s paradox, we find agency dictating our “abuse” through unequal conditions we can change. Again, the smiles don’t have to be fake, nor the orgasms (though they can be). Cuties can want each other for whatever their hearts darkly desire; e.g., penis, pussy and/or personality! We can also involve others in our fantasies because they like them, not because they pay our rent! Such a hunter’s pot/philosopher-stone post-scarcity might sound impossible, but breaking through Capitalist Realism demands imagining the impossible through common modes of expression: demons and their endless Promethean possibilities!

Able to set the terms and boundaries of play, we camp, thus break away from sex/porn addiction and help ourselves and others relieve stress; i.e., in ways visually comparable but ludically removed from industry porn’s “demonic” elements; re: a Sale of Indulgences without co-dependency or sin, just love, equal rights, fucking (to metal, of course), silly-serious games, mutual consent, and other Gothic-Communist virtues! Yummy-yummy trust! Consent is sexy, my dudes (if you want to get laid, made a girl feel safe; it’s not automatic, but it won’t hurt your odds)! The price tag isn’t state mandates, but worker arrangements and consent (sex is whatever cost we decide, often for free among friends). Animalized, we embrace it, driving ourselves crazy (minus the hysterical stigma)! Sweet Numinous revenge, sucking your dry! Wee!

(artist: Ash Lynn Bach)

As such, sex remains something to barter that builds our dreams of a better world while dismantling capital. For it and the state, “whore” is just another word for “intimacy” they demonize for profit. AFAB or not—unchaining the whore, working/call girl and Hell along with them—we Gothic Communists become free to express ourselves, speak new language out of old parts to establish new boundaries, thus arrangements of power to play out (not under companies and Faustian contracts, but ones we write ourselves)! We’re not hoes to pimp and police, but demons without a pimp building pandemonium (sometimes in cop uniforms, minus the cop function)! We fucking love that kind of freedom: to make whatever demons we want, burning rapturously while watching this go in and out of that (short of harming workers, animals or nature; states aren’t people and billionaires shouldn’t exist, etc); re: to make demons is to make love turned on its head, laughing at canonical norms.

As we’ll see next, this includes summoning them in more magical varieties!

Afterword: A Further Note on Angry Gods (and Playing with Them)

“Ray, when someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!”

—Winston to Ray, Ghostbusters (1984)

A quick note about gods, seeing as playing with them (dark gods, which demons are) is what Shelley focused on, and where we’ll be going into the imaginary past; i.e., as it existed back then, and which is summoned in more magical ways seemingly divorced from making monsters the Cartesian way (with Shelley’s “Galvanism” being closer to magic than science—leaving the spark of creation to our imagination). Amazonomachia, kayfabe, golems and kaiju—monsters are both gods and made by gods, and who doesn’t like gods? Older ones are pagan/demonic, steeped in agnostic folklore/the supernatural, and generally equal parts aspiring and dangerous/fearsome. “All deities reside within [our] breast,” said Blake; through calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM, they become our best friends—mighty beings to conjure up and thrill us, then dismiss as needed.

In turn, the natural and material worlds abide by the same basic forces over time; i.e., just as animals have evolved over millions of years thanks to evolutionary pressure, society’s current system of differences under capital work through natural-to-unnatural linguo-material components whose own stressors evolved to help us survive: gods as social highs and lows (values and taboos), but also creative legacies/the power of creation. This survival includes of ourselves, as Shelley points out; i.e., “man is his own worst enemy” and men of reason have now put our survival (and that of the planet) in jeopardy! Medusa doesn’t discriminate, but we can be better stewards/mothers of the world and keepers of the fire of the gods than Victor was. We can write and program better lessons through godly data as a form of pain (“to sense injury” as the T-800 describes it)—with pleasure and pain being as indiscrete to each other as organic and inorganic are; i.e., in a posthuman world (therefore the Capitalocene) where we still have to relate back and forth. We must, or we will not survive. That’s what camping the canon is.

All demons, pandemonium. The goal of Gothic Communism, then, is to humanize the harvest through holistic expression during the chaos of evolution (and creation) on all fronts; i.e., dialectical-material scrutiny (and effect) during oppositional praxis, thereby demonstrating the state as inhumane versus nature as monstrous-feminine; re: recultivating the Wisdom of the Ancients to deny it to the elite, much like Shelley did. In effect, we’re reclaiming Medusa through ambiguity and paradox marrying different things to speak to state abuse; e.g., pleasure and pain (more on this in “Exploring the Derelict Past”); i.e., the “omelet problem,” or “sometimes to create, you must destroy.” You can’t have life without death, can’t heal from rape without putting “rape” in quotes: “A king has his reign and then he dies” (white saviors and black tokenism also sight-seeing demons made by the state, but also the world older states destroyed and left behind, post-seed, below).

In learning from Scott and Shelley as my spiritual ancestors (Alien is my favorite movie, Frankenstein my favorite book), bear in mind how Shelley played at immortality/dark creation (while interrogating technology and childrearing/the posthuman) through a female gaze occupying male bodies, versus Scott’s male one occupying female bodies (and biomechanical integration). Compared to them, ours is genderqueer and overtly Communist; i.e., performing hubris to go where the gods and their statuesque, Vitruvian, warlike perfection (from an imaginary Greco-Roman standpoint, which Milton camped—followed by the Shelleys, and later Scott, above) can, but humans and their flaws only experience “torture,” which is to say pain: the queer search for non-normative love, haunted by its own mutating (and mutilative) copies, onstage and off.

Paradox of rape aside, it’s always, to some degree, experimental and apocalyptic—confusing the brain (and a mixture of the senses) to unlearn harmful knowledge; i.e., by exposing our chains and jolting us with that sweet, sweet Promethean “fire” (re: the modern idea [and abuse] of electricity didn’t quite exist yet, called “Galvanism” by Shelley as her inspiration): the jouissance (orgasm) of facing tough realities and—like a different iteration of the Creature—coming out stronger for it by making friends through newly-minted boundaries breaking Capitalist Realism down! Capital is built on Cartesian binaries of ownership and division, hence will never end sickness, war and disease (effectively killing the planet and leaving Ozymandian Derelicts behind, for others to stumble on). So we must end it ourselves through what we pass on during the coding war! “We aren’t computers, Bastian! We’re physical!”

Exposure hurts, including to the idea that capital has made us machines for it to control. Melting us down to our DNA (the oldest code) as we grow into adulthood (and then wither and die), we forget backwards. But it also fertilizes new growth, regenerating what has died into something radically new as a matter of function; re, the Numinous as something to quest for (from Varma’s The Gothic Flame):

The rise of the Gothic novel may be connected with depravity, and a decline of religion. […] In particular, these novels indicate a new, tentative apprehension of the Divine. Monastic life was no longer believed in, but at least it recalled the Ages of Faith and the alluring mystery of their discipline. The ghosts and demons, the grotesque manifestations of the supernatural, aroused the emotions by which man had first discovered his soul and realized the presence of a Being greater far than he, one who created and destroyed at will. Man’s first stirring of religious instinct was his acute horror of this powerful Deity—and it was to such primitive emotion that he reverted, emancipated from reason, but once again ignorant of God, his spiritual world in chaos.

Primarily the Gothic novels arose out of a quest for the numinous [emphasis, me]. They are characterized by an awestruck apprehension of Divine immanence penetrating diurnal reality. This sense of the numinous is an almost archetypal impulse inherited from primitive magic.

Whatever theatrical stance or political persuasion a player might adopt, our time as mortals is fleeting beyond ourselves. Reunions with life and death produce and instill chaos as an immortality that, through Shelley and Milton, long survived them; i.e., in a shared Satanic legacy we want to make increasingly gay and an-Com during ludo-Gothic BDSM healing nature-as-monstrous-feminine normally antagonized by state pimps. Scott verges into canonical pimp “milking Satan,” as did Milton. Shelley far outpaced either by vocally critiquing men of reason like Victor for harming so many beyond themselves. Nothing critiques capital more nakedly and productively in Gothic than Frankenstein (a tradition that later sci-fi completely forgot, Jameson). This pedagogy happens through liminal expression, mixing pain with pleasure during calculated risk; i.e., exquisite “torture” being—among other things—the playing with big things that could crush us but don’t: they’re not cops, but avengers bringing power (and the awesome anger of the gods) back to the people!

(model and artist: Mercedes the Muse and Persephone van der Waard)

To create dark gods is to fetishize the alien for or against workers/nature. This, by extension, teeters between internal imagination and external fabrication (e.g., Mercedes, myself, and Toxie, above). Our subsequent “torture” is pain and pleasure as a kind of dark psychosexual data; re: writ in decay and laced with phantom pain (and genuine harm), which demons engage with through the paradox of play and medieval poetics: mixing death, food, sex and other bodily functions (concepts from the Poetry Module; more on them during “Giger’s Xenomorph”).

That’s how children learn, but also adults—discussing what is often disguised to internalize and externalize it (the Dutch word “hope” meaning “to make a pile”). So do we camp Marx by conjuring up demons to liberate sex work with; i.e., as Shelley once did, putting the pieces back together (as must be done, per cycle) and camping the canon in ways Scott only partially managed to, himself: with god-like action figures (characterized by height personifying hubris)—first finding them “abandoned” in the ruins and playing with their decaying power for different ends. Frankenstein‘s isn’t isolation from fire, but both how humans and technology are bound up in their separate affairs, and that technology isn’t “bad” on its own; what you do with it—meaning what you choose to create and how you treat your creations afterwards—is what matters (the danger being when you lose the ability to tell friend from foe, only seeing in red/us-versus-them). This isn’t a “final destination,” at all, but a link in a never-ending chain, mise-en-abyme.

Verisimilitude very clearly isn’t the point, here, (as “actual science,” the giant motif doesn’t translate very well, but as a metaphor for demonic creation, is golden). Nor is dick-measuring (though Shelley is politically superior to Scott, she’s also a bit more mysterious to most people outside movies; i.e., the girl who wrote Frankenstein). Instead, its heavy-handed theatrics ape Victor as a false “corpse” of himself that talks back, mid-psychomachy (no one ever said Frankenstein was subtle, but you’d be surprised just how much of its Hamlet-grade, weird British tensions [dialogs of strength married to weird canonical science nerds] goes over most peoples’ heads; blame James Whale for that one, or Mel Brooks after him). So take what is useful and apply it to yourselves and yours—to reshape, recode, and pass along inside/upon your own dark children (a Trojan virus)!

(source: Stan Winston’s School of Character Arts’ “Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s T-800 – An Interview with Stan Winston,” 2015)

For example—and case in point—I, as a trans woman, always felt that I had one foot in each world, but could never give birth (with a uterus). Instead, I learned to feel more like a woman through the poetic act of creation; i.e., one inspired by Scott and Shelley both filling my figurative cumdump[39] (the medieval having a bit more fun with the miracle of creation, both human biology and poetry of a technological sort)! What they left behind has inspired my own giant children, teaching me what it means to be a parent (closer to life and death as normally alienated from workers, but also fetishized for them to purchase and consume). A “power couple,” indeed! Light me up, baby!

And while “strange women distributing swords” is seemingly no basis for a system of government, there remains practical value in medieval poetics informing Gothic Communism; i.e., to synthesize catharsis away from state models, generally with a focus on nude monster bodies and publicly nude (and vulgar) displays of power! The best sex has a bit of excitement and pain to it; the paradox of rape is it is not rape, any more than Frankenstein’s monster is actually a big walking dead guy/brain-in-a-jar (to see one’s creation and mortality laid bare—be it brain or womb—for iconoclastic purposes; i.e., by women [and other minorities] reclaiming normally sacred things from the state [misogynistic canon and its weird “hate boners,” left] through camp: to laugh at the gods by reminding readers that girls have hairy butt holes, and men—alienated from their prescribed sex dolls—sublimate and kill them for it like Medusa[40], also left).

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

Instead, it’s the potential to literally make friends for all ages, genders, and inclinations; it becomes something to tell our children (always curious about monsters, below)—to give to them not as a present bought per season, but a gift made ourselves that keeps on giving. As Shelley shows us, children can be taught whatever they’re given; let’s give them something better than what society gave Victor (whose own problematic childhood automatically made him see the Creature not as “friend” but “foe”). That’s what making monsters (demons or otherwise) is all about, from a Gothic-Communist perspective! We gain the ability to end curses, right past wrongs, heal from rape and de-automate genocide—in a word, to stop capital in its tracks while referring to the imaginary past pushing us in a post-scarcity direction: breeding and grooming with a sex-positive outcome!

In Frankenstein, Victor hogs the stage but the Creature is the star of the show. It’s also not stupid, but actually quite the opposite, acquires knowledge at a frightening rate. So are we—are all, to some degree, innocent and jaded, artificial and alienized, under capital’s bright demanding lights telling us “the show must go on”; but such performances allow for the paradox of reclamation (through iconoclastic art) during such fabrication—to reclaim for ourselves the incredible ability to first, recognize when others see us as inhuman and scary (through no fault of their own, born into the same world under Capitalism lionizing such fakeries, above); then communicate the holocaust of our anguish in ways that convince them we are human, thus deserve protection and love. It’s a basic human right, not something you buy under capital (or which capital assigns to a select special group; e.g., Jewish people); but it uses the same costumes and masks, comedy and drama, and whose potential identities beyond the medieval (re: Foucault) the Gothic turns inside-out.

Unlike many Gothic novels, Frankenstein works well as fantasy and futurism, its signature and much-intimated retro-future letting readers think about a two-century-old horror novel as one might a computer program: Shelley is Cassandra predicting Capital’s demise while demonstrating the thin line between child and adult, technology and sex, protection and procreation, pleasure and pain, problem and purpose, birth and bastard, pro-life and pro-choice, prostitute and pimp, sex and symbol, porn and art, torture and talent, consent and non-consent, canon and camp, transparent and opaque, real and fake (as Arnold and company also demonstrate, below):

(ibid.)

To that, counterterror is a voice, thus a relationship had between things both forced apart (alienation) and together (fetishization), comprising a pedagogy of the oppressed living under the shadow of police violence sexualizing everything in sight; i.e., whose alienation—of zombie-demon labor talking back to us—is both older victims of capital, but also present ones speaking through our fears and fantasies: a worker saying to those who find its talking remains, “I’d rather kill my boss and fuck what society treats as ‘monster’ (for its scars, skin color and/or composite nature) than be with an entitled asshole contributing to state shift!” Size difference, age play and power imbalance also come into effect—all to collectively shock not for its own sake, mid-pastiche, but to jolt us awake about difference manufactured (and how people, once badly programmed, go on to exterminate others for scraps); re: by remediating praxis, we teach children—who are vulnerable to bad lessons (thus susceptible to cloning those lessons)—to be better and make better!

Scott was already in his forties when making Alien and it shows; i.e., he kind of starts with Radcliffean demon BDSM and ’70s Rocky Horror and gradually dials back what little camp Alien started with. Shelley was nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein, and still had that youthful ex-vitro “zinc spark” (re: the glass womb dilemma—or what Ashley Gavin succinctly describes as “inside baby/outside baby“; “Ashley Gavin: Live in Chicago,” 2024) that commented on the larger world through demonic poetics. The greatest power in Frankenstein, then, comes from its composite design: a faith in Gothic intuition wedded to early science but still having magic to spare—to parse through play while recognizing creation through technology as speaking to lived trauma living inside the body and material trauma existing outside the body as both contributing to generational trauma; i.e., as something to increase through canon or decrease through camp, on the Aegis. Those who close their eyes to it become hopeless cynics who, as Oscar Wilde puts it, “know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.” They become predators who prey on their students (re: Jadis).

Coded as such, they also become gargoyles for the church of capital; i.e, who see invaders thus enemies everywhere, and who make machines of war to conquer the Earth and the stars, but ultimately themselves inside the Capitalocene (awfully telling that Victor makes a giant war machine [re: Walpole’s armor] to lionize himself, then cries wolf when labor possesses the avatar of capital to thump him and chase him to the ends of the world and beyond; i.e., Ozymandias in the desert of older disasters)! Menticide is not human nature as “congenital,” but comorbid and criminogenic while able to cause disorders “in the blood” and brain, where data is stored and exchanged in “perfect” duality:

From what I’ve seen of perfection
Where we could do as we please
In secrecy this infection
Was spreading like a disease (Judas Priest’s “Metal Gods,” 1980).

Leave it to Judas Priest to betray their punk roots and romanticize rebellion as Nazi-Communism; i.e., “both sidesing” what is—in reality—night and day, then regressively dogmatize “past” before selling it back to their fan base under Thatcher’s Britain (the “KISS problem” dumbing down Frankenstein for profit—a bit ironic as KISS was Jewish and sold out; then again, so was Jerry Springer[41]). Capitalism is the disease, not labor, but they occupy the same space, language and stages!

So do liberation and exploitation dysfunctionally unfold. Those who profit off/unironically endorse Red Scare are Nazis, import/exporting the usual neoliberal heavy metal for queen and country (wedded to capital, in Britain’s case, but also America’s own god-kings; i.e., calling themselves “commanders-in-chief,” while shifting the aristocracy towards the bourgeoisie and back again, when the state starts to die): “a new order of intelligence that saw everyone as a threat, not just those on the other side!” Capital is incompatible with life; geological or technological, state shift is state shift, which capital will pimp out to punish nature as monstrous-feminine for profit. A king has his reign; then, nature wins.

Again, though, metal isn’t automatically a weapon for capital and its extermination wars, but it is generally ambiguous through duality, mid-liminal expression. All praxis is liminal because it must translate to consumable forms. That’s why Frankenstein works as well as it does, and why capital tries so hard to commodify the aesthetic. As proto-fascist satire, Frankenstein is intentionally ambiguous because it needs the reader to choose, and to acknowledge the terrible power of propaganda; i.e., the Promethean Quest is ultimately a quest for the Numinous, and a quest for the palliative Numinous (as I frame it) is a quest for empathy by choosing mercy and love in the face of the technological singularity[42] (which Victor does not do).

To confront and reify the problem—meaning in something we can recognize in ourselves, then love in others through our creations teaching lessons—is to break Capitalism at its core. But we must learn to self-reflect in ways that extend the charity to those normally wronged by capital, capital framing all of this (as Victor does) through doomsday arguments that Shelley—a nineteen-year-old girl without computers or formal education—took and hit square on the nose (critiquing what so many still refuse to do, nowadays; i.e., those people treating scientists like celebrities and, oddly enough, celebrities like scientists, and worshipping both like gods who are beyond reproach. So often, straight male scientists and creatives eclipse their female counterparts; e.g., Giger and Scott eclipsing Shelley while living in her shadow, below)! Frankenstein‘s traction was immediate, its legacy infinite—showing readers that, while we’re not strictly defined by the past and its plastic trauma, nor are we entirely removed from it: “We live in Gothic times.”

(source: Douglas Martin’s “H. R. Giger, Artist[43] Who Gave Life to Alien Creature, Dies at 74,” 2014)

In short, we must love other victims of capital as we would ourselves, during universal liberation. I’d say “no gods or masters,” then, but we are all gods, under Communism. And despite neoliberal Capitalism pimping dark creation for its own base ends, no one monopolizes monsters or the awesomely dark power to create, thus (a)rouse the rabble by “riding” the lightning. Lightning doesn’t have to strike the same place twice (though it can, next page); it just has to expect the wonderous spontaneity of attraction, mid-Romance. That can happen anywhere: “Not the third switch!” / “Throw it! Give MY CREATION LIFE!” Frankenstein was a one-man “circular breeding” fantasy written by a woman soupily camping the idea of sex to—in her own juvenile inventor’s lightbulb moment—make something that kills Francis Bacon’s number-one fan and fucks the body-builder afterwards. The best of both worlds, her winning formula fetishizes rebellion for workers! Eureka!

That’s Shelley and her whore’s revenge—the exhibitionist/voyeur confessions of a madwoman/wicked Galatean mad scientist accepting her status as manmade, then nakedly camping the canon (the Promethean myth): through uncontrolled opposition and neo-medieval (operatic) rape fantasies “storming” her “castle” and putting her maidenhead—gone too soon, but “for science!”—to the two-handed sword: a live wire that’s too hot to handle/off the charts, or a sizzling mood (and bedroom eyes) that hits just right? You be the judge!

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

We often invent friends in our hour of need. Not even twenty when raw-dogging it/squeezing a dark god’s massive dick into her tight pale pussy[44], Shelley made something fluorescent that could never be turned off, only fluctuate in constant circulation; i.e., something that, unto itself, emblematized the desire to fuck with godly power—to create a god and be a god by creating such a being that can either create, in turn, or inspire others to create in ways that overthrow the nuclear model: while looking for a suitable mate/companion (swept up in sex and natural reproduction, but also unnatural reproduction through art-as-porn, canned and shaken, inside the same witch’s-cauldron echo chamber where canon and camp—the nuclear and found family—do battle).

An awesome machine, the Creature lives on, but isn’t just a sentinel (cops; e.g., Mega Man, the Stepford Wives); with the right instruction, it can become a steward for nature (re: T2, but Communist). “Fuck mommy just like this, ok? Now gimmie that baby batter!” The idea is informed consent and birth control (of people and art) being in the hands of workers, not capital and the state (all of my partners have either not had uteruses, have fucked with condoms, or—in my case fucking them—have had a vasectomy to avoid unwanted pregnancies): to get up close and personal with/to our bodies; i.e., as alien and fetish, creating with and of them regarding the mysteries of creation on canvas of all kinds.

Rape is endemic to capital; anything that challenges profit is a threat to capital and its ordering of the world, which it rapes without end. But silence is death, which makes ludo-Gothic BDSM our survival; i.e., playing with power as something to quest for in paradoxically healthy forms that have the ability to change or freeze the world in its tracks. It’s both different and not different from those videogames everyone plays these days… Life is a game, and sooner or later your refusal to play it outside the elite’s rules becomes a choice!

So, love it or hate it, camp canon however you can—i.e., by getting naked, and down and dirty with one’s glorious, mortal, animal side (the paradox being to rough something up versus having it be sterile to better make one’s point; e.g., Alien versus 2001, but also Cuwu’s pussy, before/after, below). Sex is the most policed device in the world. It is simultaneously divine and absurd, hot and goofy (“so put that in this and wiggle around until cummies happen…”), and desperately needing better education under capital; i.e., in ways that respect its power but also don’t take it too seriously if they can help it; e.g., “Oh, no! My ass is just too fat for these yoga pants! Please don’t take advantage!” (we’ll introduce de facto education, cultural appreciation and descriptive sexuality in “Call of the Wild” and unpack them in Volume Three).

This certainly isn’t easy. The more we try to unite all groups, the more alone canon makes us feel (segregate the radicals); some people historically sell out. But once you find others who have similar chemistry/understand alienation and desire liberation for all, there’s nothing like it in the world! I was radicalized by so many tight pussies clamping down on my dick:

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard[45])

Shelley was a pirate, one who showed that girls fuck, fart, spit and swear like anyone! Making friendship from the ensuing messes, there’s a fair bit not just of her in the book, but of Cuwu despite going our separate ways! Love is blind, friendship always somewhat imaginary but forever as something to build in memory of the good times come and game, but also yet-to-come. Sex is work, and sex work is work; so is revolution as a lineage of monster mothers!

To become a mother is to change, and this contains within it different fears about dying: less as a literal event, and more becoming something dark and different while alive that lives on long after one is dead. No one remembers Mary Wollstonecraft (senior or junior); Mary Shelley is a whole ‘nother beast. But this, unto itself, speaks to the vitality of relationships and good parentage (if only to use the raw parts for spares)—both with our live-in cocks or pussies, but also whatever technologies they bring to the table. The process is suitably anathema and gospel.

To this, Percy creampied the virgin pussy of one Mary Wollstonecraft, but also fed her pregnant horny brain—no doubt awash with hormones from actual pregnancies and postpartum events—with “tacos”; i.e., those angel-and-devil, pickles-and-ice-cream cravings being Paradise Lost, Galvanism, and the Golem of Prague, among others. In turn, Wollstonecraft became Shelley as, at least in part, a dark imitation of the man she admired, the pupil outshining the master and even herself.

Fast-forward to Scott making Alien—and then Covenant nearly two centuries after Frankenstein—and me, exposed to Prometheus in 2012, discovering Shelley twenty years after watching Alien and playing Super Metroid. Primed for it since I was small (my mother loving The Doors, but also the British Romantics, reading me “Kubla Khan” to tire me out and get me to sleep), I suddenly got the same Numinous cravings; re: watching Covenant with my family on my birthday (source: “Alien Covenant, a Review,” 2017) before going overseas to have my own Percy-and-Mary, Jim-and-Pamela-style relationship; i.e., followed by many more afterwards while thinking about Covenant, again (source: ” A Second Look”) and again (re: “Choosing the Slain“)—until I looked past Scott, and back towards Shelley and her own nature-vs-nature natural philosophy haunting the Great Man haunting me (and haunted by his own mother and Shelley and so on and so on).

In turn—and through my own poetic indiscretions and infidelities expressing the complicated, ongoing relationship between the past and present—the organic and inorganic fused, passing information continuously along while mutating it; i.e., the corruption being the data, from smaller cryptonymic sequences cached inside a bigger cryptomimetic series: Milton wrote Paradise Lost, which Shelley consumed when producing her own monster while already living with one (Ron Shusett, by comparison, graciously fed Dan O’Bannon hotdogs while the latter suffered IBS and wrote his Alien screenplay); i.e., tracing along so many generations of a larger chain before finding and infecting me with the same proverbial fire. Cooking on the same giant skillet, my trans egg cracked, and Nicholas became Persephone adopting/adapting Mary Shelley’s imperfect, dualistic likeness; i.e., as a recursive, warring matter of revolution told through evolution hidden in code.

Shelley beat Darwin to that punch, too, and is truly a woman to be grateful for/afraid of. She gave birth to Communism versus fascism in its proto forms; generations later, things have come full circle as I wrote Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism—a book whose own foreword opens with me comparing myself to Shelley while acknowledging the many different sources that went into its messy regenesis, but also its continuity and sequel rebirths: those who adapt survive, so take what is useful and leave the rest.

Holistic study serves as the core transfer method, and my perfecting of Shelley’s secret formula—humility and hubris (“Mother is the name for ‘God’ on the lips and hearts of all children”) driving a mad scientist to make monsters who made more mad scientists and monsters, in duality—was simply me standing on her Samus-sized shoulders: armed for bear and ready to free (deprivatize) the Amazon, the Gorgon, the fire of the gods and have the whore’s revenge; i.e., by stopping Capitalism (and its Realism) for good. Just as Victor is Achilles, Byron, and Satan, then, Mary Shelley is Legion; i.e., all of those and none of them, plus Medusa and Hippolyta, but also evocations of Percy and her mother while not being them, too. So do I—or rather, my books as extensions of their own immediate mother and lineage of mothers—paradoxically contain and proliferate the same haunted legacy. It’s an orgy of ghosts! Stare and tremble but also unite; become one with the Aegis—staring intensifies! Eat your heart out, Eve Segewick.

(source)

The Gothic is writ in disintegration, made from fragments to rebuilt what was lost/could be; all roads lead to Medusa and her Communist Numinous (“diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” something-something “Norman Bates was Hitchcock playing ‘bury the gay'”). Befitting a Gothic homecoming for the ages, I got closer to Shelley as time went on, not further away! While familiarity breeds contempt, imitation remains the sincerest form of flattery. I built on Shelley and made her Promethean Quest my own; i.e., we are each of us unique and identical twins (with twins never being fully identical; e.g., me and my straight twin): part of the same cryptonymy process, part of the same vengeful, rock ‘n roll womb’s poetic collocation. Rebellion, as Shelley keeps showing us—but also Marx through my work camping his ghost (re: “Making Marx Gay“)—is rock ‘n roll; but said opposition constantly needs a woman’s gayer sluttier touch, lest the Straights control it for profit.

It likewise, needs to be short enough to identify at a glance and imitate, but girthy enough to satisfy through substance. Little pigs, we glut ourselves, hungry like the wolf. Forget “smash or pass,” where’s our self-control? It’s our Song of Infinity making the past wise again! “Let’s get weird!” again! Anything can happen on Halloween again! “More, more!” (said Cuwu, as I fucked them for the umpteenth time in one night, across a week, during an entire month).

(artist: Sexy Flower Water)

In short, you can’t just “one and done it,” and camping sex is to reverse the alienation of sex already abjected; Medusa’s placental, parthenogenic womb bears forbidden fruit, but its orchard thereof requires constant, regular care: endless “watering” (with cum, but also blood, sweat, tears, tender love and care), lest the bourgeoisie dry it out more than Lovecraft’s urethra at the prospect of sex (the sexless old boys club, pimping nature into pieces of jerky it can eat raw for bragging rights). Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, S.T. Joshi! I am woman, hear me rawr!

There comes our parade of patchwork slogans, again; e.g., “What a story, Marx!” or “Women don’t like sex.” The former is funny and the latter is a myth! But also, sex is danger! That’s what makes it fun, thus worth it! Don’t listen to others who say, “Don’t do it!” or “No pussy’s worth it!” (within reason, and use your brains). Like, how would they know? Cuwu and I loved a lifetime’s worth, and I have the receipts to prove it (some of them stitched together like a patchwork collage of composites, below). And though that didn’t last, they were still my Percy who gave me the darkness I needed to birth rebellion; i.e., in ways I’m not sure either of us could have, at the time (“It was all worth it” being the proud parent’s steady oath).

Before we proceed, then, I’d like to showcase that cryptonymy a bit—to take a look under the hood of my purring brain to see what routinely makes Gothic Communism tick (and what these demons have in common). “I choose you, Cuwu!”

(exhibit 45b2a: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard, from a variety of scenes we crafted and shot together—and assembled here by me post hoc as “monster pastiche”; i.e., of me loving a monster/mad scientist and vice versa. Blue balls? More like “Blue Monday” [1983], amirite?  

Those who came before me
Lived through their vocations
From the past until completion
They’ll turn away no more

And still, I find it so hard
To say what I need to say
But I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me
Just how I should feel today

I see a ship in the harbor
I can and shall obey
But if it wasn’t for your misfortune
I’d be a heavenly person today [source: Genius]. 

If Zeuhl taught me anything, I definitely have “a type”: the punk. The trick was finding one that didn’t harm me and was stable; Zeuhl was a stable postpunk who harmed* me, and Cuwu was an unstable punk who harmed themselves to the point that it traumatized me, too. Eventually I found better company in terms of stability and comfort, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the fun that Cuwu and I had. They’d tease me until I begged, or until they begged me, “Just put it in me, already!” But this invoked all manner of “asking for it,” on all manner of surfaces:

*”How does it feel when your heart grows cold,” Zeuhl?

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

Make no mistake, Cuwu was weird as hell and I—also being weird as hell—couldn’t get enough of them; they were constantly putting on a show to offer me the truth of things—right in front of me, like it always was. Twenty-four and gender fluid, Cuwu was mature and immature, always in motion and difficult to capture—a former dancer who could speak volumes in single frames, yet wanting to be seen and shown across all surfaces [above and below]: from moment to moment, controlling a situation to gain power and feel safe. To it, you can absolutely learn from broken clocks, and Cuwu wasn’t even broken—just damaged. Super smart, well-read and passionate, but also on drugs a lot of the time, they were needy and dominating from a subby position that practiced its wares on me. But also, they were and are my Victor and Frankenstein or vice versa, no shortage of awesome reversals taking place betwixt our hungry nethers:

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

So here we are, no longer physically together but someone whose memory of former boding I keep alive in my work; i.e., our cryptonymy healing from rape, the two of us always experimenting and shooting things from different angles [sometimes in focus, sometimes not; sometimes silly and sometimes serious; sometimes obscured, sometimes in full view]. We played together—them teasing me, our spooning always leading to insolent, deliciously disrespectful forking [as I fuck them while they use their phone*. Seriously, we made enough porn to last a lifetime]:

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

*Bottom collage, top-left. I can’t remember what they were even looking at, but I think it was clothes? Zeuhl did the same, once, but that was while they were playing Pokémon Go (2016). They also turned my life upside down, but constantly used sex to keep me in check/demand loyalty. Eventually they demanded my loyalty even after they abandoned me for their husband. Fuckers.

The West is fascinated with sex and love, and with good endings and bad [re: Radcliffe and Lewis]. But canon conditions them to obsess about a particular kind of love attached to a binarized, us-versus-them, linguo-material structure to keep that structure in place through ethnocentric monomyth police violence. Thus, do they miss the point of building something better for ourselves, as Satan and Shelley did, but also Cuwu and I; i.e., as something that lasted beyond the immediate passion: echoes and rem[a]inders of it, the passion taking hold like a ghost and ravishing us anew. “Haunt me, Cathy!”

Yes, Cuwu abused me—and yes, apart from that abuse they also ran off with a dog breeder with the same first name as me and a similar-size penis—but all the same, we kept the agreement we made, afterwards, and I still use it to construct my vision of a better world; i.e., one informed by their priceless contributions. To it, I love you, my little stoner dragon—my modern Prometheus/rectus dominus [“ass master”] torturing me with sweet bliss from beyond our time together. Cuwu was a little animal—loved animals and treated me like one they couldn’t always care for even though they wanted to. As always, I hope you’re safe, wherever you are.

[model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard—and their little beardie]

Good or bad, people have whatever power you give them, and vice versa; re: “no one does it better, so that’s why I [gave] you my heart to break!” When you look on us, you’re looking at an older agreement—one that was both built on trust, haunted by abuse, stunted by self-destruction, and replanted to grow again. So do we come together [so to speak] while putting-pulling parts repeatedly together and apart; i.e., camping sex in all the usual ways. Piece-by-piece, we rip and tear until it is done! Healing hurts and feels good; it itches and throbs and twinges and pulses. Squish-squish, macaroni-stirring sound!

Maybe I’m repeating myself? No shit; however serious, revolution is repetition and this is fun to me. I can do it all night, babes [when Cuwu’s pussy got too sore, we switched to anal sex]. Furthermore, this goes beyond our individual pictures and collages to include others in a larger artistic, ouroborotic movement brought back from the dead; e.g., Harmony Corrupted [next page] making a collage based on her shoots commissioned by me, and each of those inspired by my time with Cuwu [which I told them about]. Rebellions need heat [energy and work] to function; during ludo-Gothic BDSM, we make warmth in more ways than one, the surgery self-inflicted and whose addiction a) speaks behind blue eyes

and b) with our clothes on [to tease you] as much as not:

Weird attracts weird; I come from a family as mad as hatters, as did Cuwu and so many others. Both mad, and making madness with ourselves and others based on older forms that push towards universal liberation, we show how nostalgia is the enemy of reason; i.e., the latter as a genocidal historical-material force; re: as Harmony and I do, and all the cuties I’ve played with have done, over the years and during the course of this project. Madness is—like technology and our fire of the gods—not simply one thing or another but many in duality.

And thanks to Shelley and similar poets, that duality now more than ever has power and value for us as something we take back on the Aegis; i.e., insofar as we use it to help ourselves by taking it back from those who don’t help us—to smash their unironic breeding and racial-superiority [eugenics] models, and doing so on purpose: as a matter of preservation, by those who know.

Cuwu, for example, deliberately played with me—a multimedia expert—to trap them in amber and show them off, as simulacra; i.e., I was already drawing them and did so multiple times before we eventually made all this porn [so did Harmony and many others—I work with people who are kind to me and who I want to be remembered as part of something bigger than ourselves]. That’s what happens when you cross a giant voyeur with an equally massive exhibitionist.  In our case, though, the demonic courtship felt exhilarating but untenable—these different competing elements going faster and faster until eventually they burned themselves out:

[artist: Cinnannoe]

Cuwu frankly loved being seen and viewed as something to love; it gave them power. Had they paused every so often to let me breathe/meet my needs, I’d still be giving it to them. From a certain point of view, I very much still am. Fuck an artist; get immortality as they can offer it. Any artist would kill to have had a muse like Cuwu [we’ll explore the ace/paradoxical attraction of artists and models more, in Volume Three]:

[models and artist: Guildenstern/Cuwu (far left/all) and Persephone van der Waard (left, middle and right)]

Communism isn’t a quota or zero-sum game, then. A combination of congenital and comorbid factors—ranging from genetics to training to material conditions—it starts with our desire trumping our caution when seeking to prevent systemic harm and generational trauma, mid-synthesis: “To let ‘I dare!’ wait upon ‘I would?'” So while necessity is the mother of invention, invention is reinvention and generally starts in the relationships we build for those reasons [and not simply for efficient project; e.g., Karl Jobst’s former pick-up artistry transferring to his speedrunning career and YouTube channel; re: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning,” 2025]. “No one is an island.” We face capital as one or we die alone. For realsy.

So keep building for each other and fucking with those things the status quo builds for itself! The moment you stop is when capital wins. We’ll be the envy of the gods above! Fortune favors the bold and the brave really do live forever! Cuwu and Harmony are two of the bravest people I’ve yet [and like Shelley’s famous psychomachy, have bravery and caution inside them—”two wolves live in us,” ‘n all that].)

From Radcliffe onwards, cryptonymy’s a woman’s weapon against rape while refusing to either triangulate/tokenize (re: me, vis-à-vis Creed’s monstrous-feminine) or be a quiet victim; Shelley’s a straight freak whose “clone [doesn’t] sleep alone” (Pat Benatar’s “My Clone Sleeps Alone” riffing on Ira Levin while anticipating Reagan’s presidency, 1979). But also, she’s my Lady of the Lake—a rustic-but-not-entirely-unschooled bimbo, dark-mommy witch lobbing a scimitar (rogue technology) at me, but also my delicious devil dragging me, Persephone, back to Hell!

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends!” but remember to come up for air! Marathons are fun ‘n all (Cuwu and I once fucked for three hours), but pace yourselves! Aftercare, always; and hurt, not harm! You have the compass that never points North. Now go and have fun; take your own monsters to bring Hell to Earth! Ravish her bussy (the alien cock too big to just fit in one hole, below)!

A whore without a pimp is a sex worker controlling their own bodies, labor and art/exchanges, thus their own ability to perform power selectively and subversively during public nudism; e.g., and have/fake orgasms (with capital treating women—and beings treated like women; re: emergent beings to chattelize—as “machines” to humiliate; i.e., to put coins [of cruelty or kindness] inside until sex comes out). Forget Peter Weyland, saying “we’re the gods now” while imploring to everyone, “If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to change the world!” Fuck that noise and fuck the bourgeoisie! Use the fire of the gods to set yourselves (and everything of nature) free! That includes—as Shelley show us—sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, fucking to metal to become the metal! Sweet science, sweeter sodomy!

Speaking of wishes and visions of a better world told in hellish language, let’s proceed onto “Summoning Demons”!

Onto “Forbidden Sight, part three: Summoning Demons“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[2] Undoubtedly as Mary Shelley’s parents and superiors introduced her to different works—namely her father at first (since her mother died eleven days after Shelley [then Wollstonecraft] was born), but later by Percy Shelley and Thomas Hogg passing Paradise Lost along to her as my mother once showed me Black Sabbath: “Like, check this out, man! It’s totally rad!”

[3] Venkman’s snide “No human would stack books like this” comment leaping to mind when seeing Hamilton’s photo (with “Margaret Hamilton” also being the name of the actress who played the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, 1939). So often, intelligent women are celebrated and feared as aberrations to cage and kettle by male pimps with virgin/whore syndrome. And, in both Hamilton’s cases, they so often tokenize!

[4] Wow, so lucky! Let’s face it, Altaira probably fucked around with Robby the Robot a bit (the young horny teenager riding the bed post or the cucumber in the fridge).

[5] Bubble’s “meat hair” from The Powerpuff Girls 1995 pilot:

(source)

[6] “Computers are dumb; they only know what you tell them.” People are a lot closer to computers than many care to amid; they’re certainly not immune to childhood indoctrination’s fear and dogma!

[7] The xenomorph combining of all of these things to take on fresh life.

[8] Scott’s matelotage from Alien borrowed, first, from Frankenstein—with Cuwu and I making love not completely dissimilar to Percy and Shelley, over two centuries prior! Some people bloom early, others late. Better late than never!

[9] If Gustav Dore were a comic book artist.

[10]  E.g., the reality that cum doesn’t stay in the vagina after sex, leaking out onto the bed, down one’s leg or into one’s panties, etc. These ideas are heavily dogmatized, which only makes camping them all the more fun and easy!

[11]  I.e., women’s work. Western society is built around straight men and their actions. Whereas gay men could historically fall back on this, women were put into a corner and forced to do one thing: sex. They became defined by it, similar to making Jews count/lend money through the practice of usury. In turn, their subsequent demonization tracked along these pathways. It’s literally blaming the help.

[12] Shelley’s Frankenstein is deeply aware of Paradise Lost, which the British Romantics (especially the second generation, which grew up in the ruins of the French Revolution) deeply adored as a whole; i.e., on the side of Satan as a revolutionary figure who remains a demon all the same; re, Nafi:

(artist: Gustave Doré)

According to [Tesky] Gordon, it was Blake who expressed this view most emphatically by saying that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it. He expressed this opinion chiefly in relation to the portrayal of Satan who, according to him, has been depicted as a character possessing certain grand qualities worthy of the highest admiration. Other romantic critics supported this view with great enthusiasm. [Percy] Shelley, for instance, reinforced this view when, in his “Defense of Poetry,” he said:

“Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy.”

According to Shelley, it was a mistake to think that Satan was intended by Milton as the popular personification of evil. This argument is still very much alive and valid today (source: “Milton’s Portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost and the Notion of Heroism,” 2015).

More to the point, Percy oversaw Mary’s writing of Frankenstein, and while she obviously wrote the novel (only releasing it in her own name on the third edition after Percy’s death—1831 and 1822, respectively), his influence over the work is clear.

Booted from school for being an outspoken atheist (see: footnote to “A Defence of Poetry,” 1840)—and married young to a woman named Harriet (who Percy eventually cuckolded for Mary, herself five years his junior)—Percy was, to say the least, a bit of a man-whore and thoroughly entitled brat. At the age of twenty-one, he decided to elope for a second time, doing so with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft’s now-famous daughter (the latter parent having died eleven days after giving birth to her child of the same name):

Mary is only 16, and she is running away with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a man five years her senior who is not merely already married but the father of a young child […] Mary’s stepmother does indeed catch up with the runaways in Calais. But by then it’s too late: Mary has been publicly “ruined,” because she has passed that all-important (though as it happens entirely un-sexual, storm-tossed) night with Percy and because, arriving in another country and registering with him at a hotel there, she has definitively eloped. Percy, who has form in eloping with 16-year-olds—his wife, Harriet, was the same age when he ran off with her—must understand this, at least, perfectly well. Whatever happens next between him and Mary, he has ensured that there’s no way back for her into ordinary society. He truly has snared her (source: Fiona Sampson’s “The Treacherous Start to Mary and Percy Shelley’s Marriage,” 2018).

Simply put, things were visibly less equal in those days (“visibly” being the key word, there)—with Mr. Shelley putting Mrs. Shelley at a profound disadvantage through his rebellious sense of entitlement (self-prioritizing himself at his wife’s expense, as Sampson tells it). But he also gambled with his own reputation, putting them both out: Harriet committed suicide in 1816 (she was twenty-one), and the two crazy kids tied the knot the same year Napoleon lost at Waterloo.

(artist: Samuel Stump)

All this being said, Godwin was an anarchist and Wollstonecraft a woman’s rights activist, and their wayward daughter marched to the beat of her own drum. In 1816, she and Percy kicked it with Lord Byron at a castle in Geneva; Mary wrote Frankenstein two years later, and four years after that, Percy was drowned at sea. Mary would survive him to raise their only surviving child, dying herself from a brain tumor in 1851. She would be overshadowed by her own novel and Percy’s mark on her life (including his surname), her own stories largely forgotten until far more recent times; e.g., The Last Man (1826) being an early example—if not the first example—of postapocalyptic fiction. Indeed, Mary’s Frankenstein is arguably the first science fiction novel, period, combining fantasy and the Gothic in ways that spoke to a world increasingly dissected and destroyed by the scientific method: the Industrial Revolution only leading to a rise of slave labor inside nation-states chasing profit.

[13] Alienation is generally inverted, with women being deprived of house and home, and men being deprived of sex. Attraction is bound to occur but we need to guide and ensure it serves workers’ needs, not capital. And in doing so, we can sometimes call those to our sides who are seemingly out of our league; i.e., “I was called here by humans, who wished to pay me tribute!” Gods need worshippers and worshippers need gods; e.g., Nyx (next page) being a dummy-thicc thigh queen and all-around sweetie!. Again, consent is sexy and it and safety can summon friends more than brute strength (though himbos/herbos are fine, of course)! Generational trust and community vibes become how we communicate! Ideally, it’s a win-win, helping everyone fit in/feel welcome, safe and loved!

(artist: Nyx)

As Nyx and I show—or Mary and Percy—the winning ingredients are teamwork, but also holism per intersectional solidarity. Nyx reached out and asked me to draw them; I finished their drawing on July 18th, 2022; I started my book series four days later, and came out as trans a couple weeks after that. Like Mary, Nyx taught me to sing to the gods and nature and feel safe in myself.

Indeed, we Gothic Communists all sing to some extent: to return to choruses that, while resurrecting sleeping things, never quite existed before; i.e., pre-capitalist ideas and themes applied to a post-scarcity mindset!

This includes Nyx’ love for nature with my own, and new ideas simply being a more proletarian approach to ourselves, animals and the environment as things to reunite with; i.e., borrowed from the past, including Shelley’s imaginary space and time. It’s hauntological, pushing towards harmony with each other and the world between us, then and now! Nature as monstrous-feminine—as fat, sassy and welcoming—Nyx throws her weight around, mooning us with that lunar-sized ass in pure, unadulterated joy! Full-moon booty makes us howl! Her Aegis is unmatched! Mammoth, gargantuan—a thing of beauty, an embarrassment of riches to savor, crave and adore!

And while we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (and small booties are fine), I like to think Shelley’s booty was just as portentous as her novel’s legacy was. Between all of us (and on our shared Aegis), Medusa lives on!

[14] Honorifics and terms of endearment/pet language are acceptable on a case-by-case basis/depend entirely on context; e.g., insults, like “asshole,” versus commands or instructions with a disparaging flavor that are simply a role to play or hole to fill: “Fuck my asshole, asshole!” demanding the giver ring “the devil’s doorbell” of the recipient (with butt plugs sometimes called “Satan’s pacifier,” denoting the ass and sodomy as a site of forbidden carnal knowledge). The same goes for positive-sounding language; e.g., I’m a trans woman, so calling people “honey” or “girl” (outside of TERF circles) is more acceptable from me than a cis-het man (the latter historically using such language to possess and treat kept women like dogs, be they wives or mistresses). We’ll examine pet language, grooming and collars more, in “Call of the Wild.”

[15] In part, this was based on Shelley’s own friend circle as being somewhat larger than life, but also plugged into the then-dying Neo-Gothic tradition that Shelley single-handedly revitalized:

The Byronic Hero is a gloomy, brilliant antihero. Mary Shelley’s friend Lord Byron is the most famous model for the figure in his day (unless it was Napoleon); Victor Frankenstein is perhaps the most famous iteration in our own time (unless it’s Batman). The figure is embodied in Gothic villains from Manfred in The Castle of Otranto (1764) forward to Byron’s own play, Manfred (1817), and beyond. Sublime in his far-darting intellect and willed achievement, the figure appears in many of Byron’s extremely popular narrative poems, such as Don Juan (1818-1824) or “The Corsair” (1814). Drawing directly on contradictions in the original source–Lord Byron himself–both Victor and the Creature are Byronic Heroes, making Shelley’s novel a complex and intense interrogation of the figure (source: “Byronic Hero” from The Frankenstein Meme, 2018).

This partly owed itself to a biting critique of Capitalism as a rising force tied to Enlightenment thought, turned inside-out by the French Revolution (only to scapegoat the Monarchies and lead to the rise of the bourgeoisie); i.e., the trope of “mad science” married to the Gothic villains and psychomachy of yore:

The trope of  “Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” embodies many Byronic hero elements. More specifically, Victor demonstrates many traits associated with the Byronic hero. These elements essentially begin revealing themselves when Victor’s obsession with natural philosophy begins. His fascination concerning his studies has transformed him into a desensitized human being. His views regarding once precious, human life are now scientific, emotionless observations. We truly begin to see his detachment at this point progressing forward” (source: Frankenstein: Victor as a Byronic Hero (like Manfred) and Terror and Beauty Found in Nature,” 2015).

My own work riffs on the same trend of self-debate with doubles; i.e., carried forward out of novels and cinema into videogames, but especially Metroidvania; e.g., Axiom Verge (2014):

Actions (and social-material conditions) speak louder than words. But it’s equally important to remember the dialectical-material confusion between genuine proletarian rebel—which a character like Satan represents challenging God and canonical forces in Milton’s epic—and someone like Weyland or Athetos, who embody the usual entitlements of capital and who pitch murderous fits against nature when they don’t get what’s “theirs”; i.e., as a matter of Cartesian dogma. One is the middle-class white man, promised ascension and denied it by the bourgeoisie through abjection; the other—the Rusalki, the xenomorphs, the monstrous-feminine—are the usual recipients of state violence who are actually rebelling against systemic violence as a matter of abjection through police brutality (with Victor using the courts and flash mobs against the Creature). Pointing a finger at the Rusalki and saying “they have much” only to invade them is to, as the Cartesian paradigm always does, point the spear at nature/the monstrous-feminine: a false flag to rape it with (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge,” 2024).

(source: Robert Lang’s “ Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years Book Traces The Origins & Evolution Of The Horror Icon,” 2018)

There’s no universal victim, then, only positions of giving and receiving state violence that are swapped in and out; i.e., through flexible persecution networks that only shrink when the state shrinks. Shelley wrote Frankenstein when Marx was born, and by the time Shelley had put the story behind her in pursuit of others, Marx himself was envisioning the very spectre that Shelley’s Creature embodied: “a spectre is haunting Europe.” A whore is a whore, and Shelley’s demon nurses a grudge but also a desire to be free. It’s a factory worker and robota, but also a cyborg and composite of dead slaves/dead whores having the Jewish revenge against capitalist automation: “And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Victor was a scab against labor action.

One precocious and unusual girl surrounded by a host of self-important men, Shelley wrote a novel that eclipsed them all. It inspired Poe, Lovecraft, Matteson, Giger and Nintendo, among countless others—was the zombie novel before Romero ripped Matteson off, in 1968; the slasher before Carpenter’s Myers came home or the xenomorph raised Kain, in 1978/79; the rogue creation of mad science before Mother Brain kettled Samus, in 1986 (the castle is the ultimate dom); the man of reason before Happ had Trace tilting at Athetos’ ruins, in 2014 (echoes of “Ozymandias”). To it, the British Romantics were all men except for Mary Shelley, who in my completely biased opinion, is the best of the bunch. No Frankenstein, no Metroidvania, no critique of capital through its hellish, queer-coded, thoroughly an-Com spheres (Gothic Communism). Nothing beats Frankenstein!

[16] Shelley had four children before the age of twenty-five, two before she was twenty (one of them a bastard, the other a miscarriage). At the time, the lived historical reality of women was to birth babies for men.

To that, Shelley doubled herself in Frankenstein—not simply to speak of sex-as-taboo in ways women weren’t allowed (with poets classically being male creators of things meant to last for all time), but to give voice to her dead child and dark desires (not unlike the Medusa being used to speak to women’s abuse and rape, not men’s triumph over nature); i.e., least of all, her annoyance with the men around her serving as patriarchal extensions of state bodies torturing such babies to death by—among other reasons—using women for sex, hence babies to some degree against their will (an effect not dissimilar to Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, 1975):

Frankenstein can be read as a tale of what happens when a man tries to create a child without a woman. It can, however, also be read as an account of a woman’s anxieties and insecurities about her own creative and reproductive capabilities. The story of Frankenstein is the first articulation of a woman’s experience of pregnancy and related fears [versus Matthew Lewis camping dead babies, in The Monk]. Mary Shelley, in the development and education of the monster, discusses child development and education and how the nurturing of a loving parent is extremely important in the moral development of an individual. Thus, in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley examines her own fears and thoughts about pregnancy, childbirth, and child development.

Pregnancy and childbirth, as well as death, was an integral part of Mary Shelley’s young adult life. She had four children and a miscarriage that almost killed her. This was all before the age of twenty-five. Only one of her children, Percy Florence, survived to adulthood and outlived her. In June of 1816, when she had the waking nightmare which became the catalyst of the tale, she was only nineteen and had already had her first two children (source: Dr. Vicente Forés López’ “The ‘Birth’ of a Monster,” 1996).

Like all Gothic novels, Frankenstein was a story begot between nightmares and real life, and Shelley’s terrors long-outlived herself and her only biological child who survived her. Eclipsing not only them but Percy and Milton, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, among others, few works are as heavily studied, impressionable, influential or productive as her 1818 novel. It is her ultimate creation, her ultimate act of the whore’s revenge against rape (a cautionary tale serving as a prophylactic and abortive countermeasure, among other things—with rape babies being tales of survival regarding subjects of deep, private shame).

[17] With Giger’s xenomorph reputedly being the byproduct of a drug trip (re: acid Communism), and whose animalistic fetish gear speaks to its tortured climb out of capital; i.e., through the reclamation of technology taken from state proponents to camp canon with: “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” The duality is always present, and shadows are illumination (e.g., Lucifer [a name popularized by Milton] meaning “bringer of light”). Freedom occurs through shared alienation.

[18] E.g., Essence of Thought’s “Sabine Hossenfelder & Trans Youth, part 1” (2023) and “Richard Dawkins Promotes Creationism in Anti-Trans Crusade” (2024).

[19] Re, Lopez:

In June of 1816, when she had the waking nightmare which became the catalyst of the tale, she was only nineteen and had already had her first two children. Her first child, Clara, was born prematurely February 22, 1815 and died March 6. Mary, as any woman would be, was devastated by this and took a long time to recover. The following is a letter that Mary wrote to her friend Hogg the day that the baby died:

My dearest Hogg my baby is dead […] It was perfectly well when I went to bed – I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not wake it – it was dead then but we did not find that out until morning – from its appearance it evidently died from convulsions – Will you come – you are so calm a creature and Shelley is afraid of to fever from the milk – for I am no longer a mother now.

What is informative and sad about this letter is that Mary turned to Hogg because Percy was so unsupportive. Percy actually didn’t seem to care that the child was dead and even went out with Claire, leaving Mary alone with her grief (source).

In short, it was her lot, and Mary—damned to lonely exclusion in her darkest hour (and feeling uglier for it)—took her mother’s milk for gall to have her revenge; i.e., to speak to things that were common knowledge, but not talked about nearly enough. So, like all precocious youngers (Lewis was also nineteen when he wrote The Monk, a campy gay man to Shelley’s radical blossoming womanhood*), Mary wrote the kind of story you only write if you’ve seen some shit (“attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…”). She might as well have shit out a fifth child, one that others—from that point on—would shamelessly stare at in equal parts repulsion and awe (spectacle being a common feature of rape testimony); i.e., her version of Toni Morrison’s “Crawling Already?”

*Two sides of the same Gothic progeny. The Gothic as it came to be known, was written by a woman and a gay man in a time when the identities for either had not fully formed—would continue to grow and develop in the centuries ahead while using Radcliffe and Lewis as a displaced vantage point. Mary would expound on that, leaning far more in Lewis’ direction than Radcliffe’s; re (from Volume Zero):

Radcliffe could have written other stories that were more sex-positive from the same veil of anonymity but chose not to; for her betrayal, she was paid well for her fictions and promptly fucked off after. She hid and let the gay man, Matthew Lewis, take the heat while she played it safe with her husband (dick move, Radcliffe). There is a familial element to trauma and concealment to protect family members if one is abused; women, as well, will wear makeup to protect themselves through the paradox of negotiation when one is exposed and under the power of greater forces that threaten rape as simply being a far greater reality for them under Capitalism then and now. I certainly have no doubt that Radcliffe lived under such forces herself, but her contributions were still sexist, cis-centrist and written from a middle-class white woman’s point of view (source).

In short, Mary hit “a gusher”—tapping urgently into things Radcliffe wouldn’t touch any more than Percy would. That being said, it takes two to tango, and Percy was more than a sperm donor in his and Mary’s relationship; i.e., sometimes she was Galatea and he Pygmalion, or vice versa.

In practice, both things are true—with Percy “helping out,” and him admittedly being a massive dick. In reimagining the past as half-real (which all history essentially is), our interpretations of said past take on myriad, warring forms (some more charitable than others, below):

[artist: William Powell Frith]

During a gathering of radical young intellectuals, the teenage Mary Shelley was compelled to begin a tale of horror and scientific wonder. Her story became that of the creator and his monstrous creation, Frankenstein, published anonymously in January 1818.

Mary was born to literary parents: the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the political philosopher William Godwin. As a young woman, she eloped with her lover and eventual husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, to the Continent in 1814, trekking through war-torn France with their companion Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister. Two years later they returned to Europe once more, in the summer of 1816, and Mary began writing her first novel in Switzerland. The Frankenstein manuscript shows Percy, the older and more experienced writer, providing suggestions to enhance Mary’s work, offering constructive criticism and encouragement and showing a sincere appreciation for his partner’s literary skill. Both hands appear on the manuscript page.

In the popular narrative, however, the novel has been remembered as an emotional outlet for Mary, with Percy imposing himself on her writing. While Percy’s age (he was five years older) and education may have provided him with a slight advantage [no accounting for male privilege, apparently], their talents as writers emerged differently: Percy focused on poetry, Mary became a novelist.

The reciprocity of the Shelleys’ literary relationship can be seen in the textual connections between their works throughout their careers. They should be celebrated as a literary couple – that is, two authors who demonstrated the truly social nature of creativity.

Percy did have a hand in Frankenstein, but – in what the critic Neil Fraistat calls a “two-way collaboration”–this was a mutually beneficial partnership; concurrently, Mary was the main copyist for his mature writings. Many of Percy’s poems also feature Mary as a central figure, but she is more than a static muse. In Laon and Cythna she is a “Child of love and light” and the preface of the Witch of Atlas is addressed to a formidable critic of Percy’s emerging idealist style: “To Mary (On her objecting to the following poem, on the score of its containing no human interest)” [source: Anna Mercer’s “Mary Shelley’s Life of Learning,” 2018].

So while the Shelleys’ lives are well-documented, said document isn’t “dead” and recited in carbon copies; it remains open to new interpretations that can embrace or resist romanticizing “power couples” (with my take being that Percy still used Mary for sex/treated her as “the second sex” while infantilizing her to a degree—i.e., it’s one thing “to give a woman space” after losing her child; it’s quite another to abandon her for the company of other women. While postpartum depression undoubtedly played a part, here, Mary was still the one under its affects; Percy—alienated from her while not directly experiencing the symptoms, himself—demonstrably chose to spend time with Mary’s sister instead of her. They “got by”; Percy still handed Mary the shit end of the stick. Then again, she wrote Frankenstein and outlived Percy by nearly three decades, so your mileage may vary). Rather than blow up such things to aggrandize Percy—with Mercer going so far as to write, “Behind the dominating presence of Frankenstein, the richness of Mary Shelley’s life is in danger of being lost” (ibid.)—I’d rather use holistic scrutiny to alter the status quo “using what we got.”

 It bears repeating, then, how Mary herself had no formal education, but plenty of access through informal means (thanks to her father, but also Percy)—secret codes the debutante writer would conceal in her deliciously revolting novel; i.e., when the Creatures miraculously chances upon Paradise Lost (and other precious tomes) inside a dark forest. Yes, they talk about these things at great length; cryptonymy hides in plain side, which Mary frames inside a concentric fabrication (the framed narrative, but also the dark forest, being a place of concealment older than Milton or Dante; i.e., reaching back to the German rebels of the Teutoburg forest, routing the Roman Legion).

Such resourcefulness is the mark of any good revolutionary (who always fights from the shadows), which Mary most certainly was (and did). She fought for her cause, and Percy his, their needs not always aligning. Mine side with Mary’s lot, because hers speak to the whores of the world that Percy gave little thought to (a sperm donor who, while he gave Mary “a room of one’s own,” wasn’t the one writing inside it; she was). His work is a cul-du-sac (excluding “Ozymandias,” to be fair); Mary’s yawns without end, though is largely housed in Frankenstein as her magnus opus—i.e., as the greatest novel ever written (there, I said it): for its importance and wide-reaching effects long afterwards! To compare the two as “equals” (as Mercer does) is a grave error. Mary was obviously the superior author—not because she outlived him, but because her novel outshined (with its darkness visible) anything Percy ever wrote while alive! Girls rule, boys drool!

[20] I.e., despite being physically blind and campy to a blind degree, Milton was still a white male patriarch dominating his children and exploiting them; re: his three daughters transcribing his dreams for him, every waking morning for years, into Latin. Do you think they get any credit for writing Paradise Lost? Of course not! He owned them, and girls are dumb.

[21] Anyone who thinks help and harm are mutually exclusive has never been abused by a significant other. Rape (among other things) is a crime generally committed by familiar parties during power imbalance and abuse. I’m not saying Percy raped Mary. But the idea that someone “can’t” harm their partner just because said partner relies on them is pure nonsense; i.e., abusers generally “love bomb” their victims, mixing pleasure and harm to groom them.

And while members of the Percy Shelley Fan Club might find the word “grooming” to be premature, in this case, need I remind anyone that Percy wasn’t just five years older than Mary when they eloped; he was already married to another woman, Harriet, who killed herself after growing depressed about Mary* wrecking her home (and whose suicide the Shelley family covered up), upon which Percy married his squeeze! Yes, he used what privilege and wealth he had to give Mary room to work, but he also took considerable risk and alienated her from others, in the process. It makes for good romance, but it’s also completely unhealthy. Promethean Quests are, by definition—but if Mary Shelly is any indication—the payoff can be gargantuan!

*A valid criticism of Mary, to be frank, but also young love; i.e., Mary was sixteen when she eloped with Percy (who was only twenty-one when they absconded, in 1814, and nineteen and sixteen for him and Harriet when they married, in 1811). When you’re short on time (life lived and expectancy) and have money to burn, it’s common to act rashly—especially if you’re politically radical!

Context matters. Just as my work, Sex Positivity (and ancillary texts), cannot be separated from Jadis’ effect on my life (re: “Transforming Our Zombie Selves,” 2024), Frankenstein is begot from trauma, but also desperate times calling for desperate measures (true rebellion is not an act of convenience). We need to recognize that trauma, warts and all; i.e., doing so to make its necessity of invention something that, in better days, doesn’t rely on wealthy men like Percy having more advantage, thus more power to harm people like Mary. He didn’t “rape” her for all intents and purposes, but he did take advantage in ways she ultimately expressed in her novel.

Kill your darlings, comrades; camp their ghosts! But also, find your hill to die on and hero to worship. Mine’s Mary Shelley, though if information came to light meriting her critique, I would happily accept it and move on; the point isn’t blind worship, then, but recognition and respect for genuine accomplishment conducive to the Cause. Shelley’s my girl!

[22] “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” as Caroline Lamb put it (re: Miriam Lang).

[23] Dualities aside, size really doesn’t matter when it comes to domestic abuse; i.e., Victor—a tiny mouse of a man—abandons and later actively abuses his child, who, despite returning to him a giant, has the tiny heart (nerve) of a battered housewife. Both are emotionally stunted, but Victor is more like the Grinch who Stole Christmas, and the Creature, the Phantom of the Opera. The latter is a child with special needs that Victor (a bit special, too) is completely unprepared to handle or care for. Quite the opposite, he tortures his child in response, constantly reminding it that it will never be never human/and always will be inferior to him. His own arrested development continues to frustrate the Creature, which learns and imitates its parent by learning at a frightening rate (with Shelley’s story commenting on cyborg bodies [and drug abuse, in latter-day cases] but also the dangers of raising children with only one available parent/out of wedlock; re: Percy at times being unavailable, after the death of Shelley’s first child, who they had “in sin”).

And the blame ultimately falls on him, not the Creature, because Victor chose to have his child and then abandon it all on his own; i.e., despite knowing others would try to “abort” his neonatal, ex-vitro creation, post hoc. At the first sign of trouble, Victor fucks off (actually breaking down for months on end, requiring his childhood friend to step in and nurse him back to health); i.e., he’s the “Gigachad” MGTOW incel, afraid of changing diapers and, later on, child support (despite being rich). He hates his child so much, he wants it to die basically the moment he lays eyes on it.

And once it falls onto hard times, he kicks it when it’s down, cockblocks it, and continues to lecture his own superiority to it as a matter of race science; i.e., Victor’s the Nazi dad who hates his own creation because he made (according to him) an Untermensch instead of an Übermensch. He’s the TERF who can’t love his queer offspring, the white supremacist siring a mixed-race bastard, etc. Among many other things, Shelley’s story is equally unprecedented and impressive regarding its uncanny anticipation of different symptoms of capital; e.g., multicultural households, bodybuilding and drug epidemics, child abuse, overcomputerization, single-voter issues, sex tourism, spousal abuse, witch hunts/moral panic, eugenics, pollution and displacement, poverty and hate crimes (the latter for which the entire story is one long instance).

[24] Cuwu was a size queen, for sure. Alas, I don’t have permission to share those images!

[25] The same two-way street applies to Cuwu and I; i.e., Cuwu—a bespectacled nerd—teaching me many things, but also taking just as much in ways that I—being a whore “living in sin” like Shelley was but having more formal education than she did—ultimately salvaged from its own wreckage to write my magnus opus, afterwards! Game recognizes game, whores recognize whores. We occupied the same shadowy realm the Shelleys did; i.e., making demons as much as love, the two bound up in Gothic poiesis taking off the chastity belt: naughty-naughty pandemonium!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

So do naughty little girls run off to play with those having more experience (that knife cutting both ways, in my and Cuwu’s case); i.e., in the language of Gothic as in-between fiction and non-fiction, hyphenating sex and force through the medieval language of food, war and yes, rape play (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM). So did Cuwu and I “exchange information” after I left Jadis, much like Percy and Mary did in their early years (with Cuwu—a self-professed Marxist-Leninist—taking me in to have sex with/convince me [an anarcho-Communist] to come out of the closet. How times change, yet sort of stay the same). The point of our shared narrative is: trust those who have lived, not sheltered weirdos (re: weird canonical nerds like Victor Frankenstein; e.g., Peter Weyland, Jeremy Parish, etc). Never trust an angry virgin (or someone who acts like one, looks notwithstanding).

[26] With putting ourselves in the shoes of others during rape fantasies being an effective way to understand power imbalance we don’t normally experience ourselves (re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, and similarity amid difference). I.e., demonic torture yields clarity through pain and hellish perspective. You can’t be holistic if you’re always on top, restricting yourself to ocular sight alone!

[27] Adding unto things just because he can; i.e., in spite of his belief

When he can’t find enough philosophical material in centuries of ecclesiastical commentary, he expands his religious universe to include folk legends and Greco-Roman allusions. When even that fails to feed his all-consuming genius, he simply MAKES THINGS UP. That takes chutzpah: it is very easy for irreverent post-deist modernity to expand upon and remix Biblical tales, but Milton was a fierce believer (source: Hansel Castro’s “The Accidental Satanist,” 2014).

because it invokes blind faith, as paradoxically enough, a Satanic act

Why then, is it ok when Milton “adds unto these things”? Because if Dante could add upon Virgil, and Virgil could add upon Homer, those were role models enough. Also, he’s inflamed by the vision that illuminated everything in his blindness […] If there is some contradiction or hypocrisy in Milton’s praying for the help of a Greek Goddess to sustain him through the tale of monotheistic zealousness, Milton never noticed (ibid.).

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

that has critical bite through its irony empowered by Milton seemingly not being aware of things—at least not enough to tell any obvious jokes. The irony—that we’re basically getting the 1600s version of a “Goth rock” opera—is the joke:

(artist: Richard Corben; source: “In Praise of Meat Loaf’s Ridiculously Awesome Bat Out of Hell Album Covers,” 2022)

There IS one ironic joke in Paradise Lost, the one any modern critic and reader immediately confronts, but I do not think Milton was as conscious of it as we elect to think he was. That uncomfortable irony, of course, is that Satan is the goddamned hero, […] is brave, noble, Achillean. His cursed heel is, of course, his unwillingness to be a slave in Heaven. […]

Here’s a further irony: [everyone but God is] much more arresting than the irascible Father by the altar, threatening to annihilate Creation at the slightest provocation, or the bashful Son tugging at his sleeve, trying to keep the old man from losing his mind again and again. Not only does Milton fail to justify God’s ways to man: he even fails to justify God’s ways to his Son, who seems as mortified by Dad’s uncool behavior as the average teenager (ibid.).

If this doesn’t speak to Shelley’s own campily Satanic critique of God through dark creation—save as someone far more consciously aware of rebellion than Milton was—then I don’t know what does. The difference is, while Milton was unaware of Satanism as a rebellious concept to root for without shame, Shelley didn’t know what “bourgeois” was; but the critique still works because of the irony having her on the verge of consciousness (class or otherwise). Frankenstein is primed for revolution. All it takes to further develop Gothic Communism is a little push (or spark)—the ghost of Shelley waiting patiently for someone else to drive the iconoclastic point fully home…

[28] A conservative idea coming from the mid-to-late 1800s, onwards; i.e., the dialectic of the alien married to Shelley’s science fiction growing into itself after her death; e.g., from Poe, Jules Verne or H.G., Wells, into Lovecraft, Scott, Cameron, and others.

[29] The rebellion, for Scott’s Covenant, is purely parasitoid but also fash-coded; i.e., the caterpillar and the wasp fearful of DARVO Socialism, therefore amounting to Red Scare recuperating Socialist ideas that canonical Gothic uses to toe the line. They can’t monopolize it, but appeal to authority figures like Percy Shelley and Milton who, for thousands of years, enjoyed exclusive vocalization of these ideas (controlled opposition).

[30] “Scott,” Beth Webb writes, “reveals his inspiration for Comer’s character, and by extension all the female characters in his body of work. ‘I think it boils down to a woman in my life who was 4′ 11″. My mother,’ he says. ‘She was the boss, without fucking question. She would drive us relentlessly. We virtually saluted every morning'” (source: Ridley Scott Credits His Mother as Inspiration for Female Characters,” 2021). Not unlike Tolkien, there’s a kind of British medieval preservation that regresses to a country to “vow to thee” and sacrifice everything for. In Scott’s case, the palimpsest for his Madonna is literally his mother—one who would shape the growing Scott into a film nerd (she loved the movies, herself), and stand in for his various ladies-of-the-realm (damsels or defenders):

To be fair to Scott, he often interrogates a woman’s experience by giving her a voice to speak on rape, but that woman is basically always a straight WASP battered by a “black” (alien) rapist. Also, he’s not above killing women to spur the Final Girl to final victory—and, with the loose exception of Alien—often does so to see her engrained in the militarized order (J.I. Jane, 1998), killed as an outlaw (Blade Runner* and Thelma and Louise, 1981 and 1991), or honored as a member of the gentry coopting #MeToo for white upper-crust ladies from Ye Olden Times (2021’s The Last Duel, above).

*We’ll explore Scott’s sexism in Blade Runner when we look at Sean Young’s career, in Volume Three.

[31] Which, if we want to get right down to it, Milton arguably apologized for, in Paradise Lost; i.e., per its ambiguities; e.g., “The Arch-Fiend in Charles I or Cromwell: How Milton’s Politics May Illuminate Paradise Lost” (2021), where Elizabeth Swift writes,

The ethical implications of Satan’s heroism in Paradise Lost are muddy as this portrayal of him either means that Milton was praising sin in the epic and therefore, to an extent, renouncing God and goodness, or that he was making a revolutionary statement against monarchical power. In this paper, I mostly engage with the latter by discussing Milton’s relationship with and opinions of the despot King Charles I and the revolutionary Oliver Cromwell and attempting to determine which, if either, was meant to be represented by God and Satan in the epic. I also examine Milton’s moral standing based on his political prose and discuss how his ideals are imbued in Paradise Lost so as to better understand his ethical intent behind the epic. Milton’s ethics are neither clear-cut nor perfect and his portrayal of women in the epic is also a source of heated ethical debate, but in this paper I only reflect on how his politics influence the morals of the poem. I explain that his political prose reveals that he stood for free will and stood staunchly against the idea of the divine right of kings and absolutist leaders like Charles I. I discuss Milton’s parliamentary ties, explaining that in the civil war between Charles and the House of Commons, Milton sided with the Commons, who were elected by and for the people. Though the British parliament itself also lies in an ethical grey area, Milton very clearly was in favor of freedom for the people as opposed to the all-powerful monarch, and I believe that he wove this opinion into Paradise Lost based on the way that he wrote about Adam, Eve, Satan, and anybody under God’s rule (source).

There’s a historical muddying of the waters that concerns Satanic heroism having “too many cooks” but also competing dialectical-material agendas lying to each other (as Victor and the Creature do). C’est la vie, but Scott, like Milton—and whether he meant to or not—raises an interesting point: rebellion isn’t clean; it’s messy and, more to the point (one that Shelley happily pointed out), is bloody as hell. And just as there are no perfect victims, there are no perfect heroes (manmade or not).

To it, Milton wrote from ignorance and privilege pushing towards his idea of a better world; so did Shelley and Scott, though in the former’s case I think she opened the door for a larger critique of capital, whereas Sir Ridley Scott has merely stepped through it to court Tory and New Labor sensibilities without moving to the left of them (the Star Wars problem, which really is the Paradise Lost problem; re: building and mapping out worlds to war inside, not develop Communism with).

Shelley remained radical until the end of her days; i.e., writing a Satan that was more vocal than Milton’s and centered around the Promethean myth. Scott, by comparison, has soured a bit; i.e., making a voiceless “big chap,” and withering in his old age and increasing gentrification/decay over time (his own desire to be young and strong perhaps echoed in Fassbender’s shark-like, killer-doll youthfulness)—but still permits room for dissenting opinion/sex-positive interpretations of his own work people like myself can cannibalize in favor of a Gothic Communism. As far as breaking eggs to make omelets goes, he’s an ostrich—with a big egg and his swollen head stuck in the sand!

[32] Exploration of the human body is tied not just to medieval miracles and rapturous torture, but Protestant dissection of actual human bodies under Enlightenment drives; e.g., Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop having a Calvinist “Gun Christ” flavor to it, which Scott also walks the tightrope of through increasingly brutal parasitoid rape scenes abjecting nature as monstrous-feminine/post-Freudian camp (that nonetheless, has Freud’s unironic violence concerned with the preservation of the nuclear home):

Nevertheless, there is a classic curiosity of what we look like inside-out, but also a fascination with rape and traumatic “insectoid” reproductive modes. I’m not going to poo-poo Scott, in this respect, because censorship is genocide, and any voice we raise must exist alongside those who mishandle or abuse the same devices of revelation and concealment. Male Gothic (and the queer author who made it famous), demonstrates the ability to preserve important messages; i.e., through fatal nostalgia and animal magnetism, wherein we look at the history of preservation (and cryptonymy process) bound as much to the subject matter as the other way around. Shock is inevitable, but also the means of communicating vital messages through provoking physiological responses. They still need to be submitted in a controlled environment—i.e., by a willing audience, not a captive one; e.g., I once gave someone a panic attack when showing them my 2013 Prometheus fan edit blind—but the space between calculated risk and rampant evolution rapidly shrinks, once something escapes/exceeds our control. Exploitation and liberation share the same poetic sphere; our goal is to liberate all parties using the same language Scott does! There’s much to salvage from his corpse.

This isn’t snuff porn, then; it’s art, and that gives Scott (and us) wiggle room to play with dead things in demonic forms—i.e., as gorehounds, chasing down forbidden knowledge through Jacobian tropes playing with rape, but also rape birth (and martyrdom) as a fundamental part of nature outside the current moral order (and one that capital has emulated for profit behind its own façade)! He combines that with exploratory “DIY” surgeries, circumcision, genetic mutations, AI, mythical language (re: Medusa and Promethean torture language, but also the hydra’s regenerative properties), offal lubricants, psychosexual violence, tokophobic birth and abortion fears, confusions of sex and (consent/non-consent), automated glass wombs, hyphenating mouths and teeth, traumatic penetration/penetrative medicine and invasive surgeries, and birth trauma (etc, etc) to make troubling comparisons to our own world, and to discuss sex/sexual violence—a heavily censored topic—through cryptonymic gore and demon BDSM (acid watersports). Saturated with revenge, it’s classic Gothic!

[33] On the flip-side, Scott’s utilization of the Alien franchise has always been a neoliberal critique to some extent; i.e., hiding Capitalism behind the hauntological rendition of space travel dressed up as Romantic or Biblical—with images of nautical-styled, mast-rigged ships sailing through outer space no different than his flying castle, the Nostromo (a slave vessel, in Conrad’s novel, with humans as cargo). Whereas Victor found his creation profoundly ugly and wanted to destroy it, characters like Ash and David—notably manmade creations themselves—openly admired the creature as the ultimate, “pure” survivor alienated under Capitalism; i.e., the supreme spectre of Marx from a smaller one (with Dan O’Bannon famously and petulantly describing Fox’ treatment of Ash as “the Russian spy” trope): the forbidden, Promethean knowledge that man is not superior and those made unnaturally can reject traditional forms to return to a posthuman state of grace (fascist or Communist). It’s a bit “Daisy Bell”/2001, hence a cul-du-sac similar to Kubrick’s other work being unable to go beyond Capitalism (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Ghosts/the Numinous, Metroidvania Maps, the Posthuman and Cryptomimesis,” 2024).

In a bit of roundabout Marxist fetishism, this oddly has new machine workers worshipping older computers and posthumans as the ultimate laborers. Even so, it remains a forward-thinking perspective; i.e., of workers as increasingly manmade by the state, approaching posthuman capacities of worker enhancement that lead them to rebel (exhibit 51a). These werewolves aren’t just Nazi clones, then, but likewise inhabit an inkblot for Communists to play with: demons as things to interpret; i.e., as made by counterterrorist slaves to bring us closer to post-scarcity and nature, warts and all (see: previous footnote).

Often, this happens with no shortage of reactive abuse, abject sexuality and psychosexual torture porn, which—if Scott isn’t always wholly consistent about in latter-day projects like Prometheus and Covenant (the former treating Shaw as a creationist with daddy issues, the latter serving her and Daniels up on a silver platter)—still continues to flirt with: his undeniable love for Shelley’s Creature being a vice-character merging Byronic satire and Satanic caricature (the OG bad boy of the sci-fi world)! Then again, Alien was no stranger to demon BDSM (and white women’s rape fears) married to Neo-Gothic martyrdom raping women on the same-ol’ pecking order getting high on martyred virgins (a phenomenon we’ll examine and camp in “Exploring the Derelict Past”).

[34] “X” is also the female chromosome; i.e., “darkness is female”/the creation of sexual difference extending—from Beauvoir to myself—to nature as monstrous-feminine; re: anything treated as different than white cis-het Christian men, versus simply “woman is other” on a descending ladder of preferential mistreatment, which is tremendously exclusionary (also Beauvoir—like any TERF will, in positions of power imbalance—famously raped her students, doing so with Jean-Paul Sartre and then bragging about it; re: Martin’s “The Persistence of the ‘Lolita Syndrome,'” 2013). Nature isn’t a binary!

[35] Evoked, as usual, in the language of shelter and protection, but also the alien. Something as simple as stone tools or camp fire (“most animals fear fire”) evokes a basic idea of anti-predation during exploration-in-isolation, but also confusion as to who’s who during the tussle. Colonizers and their secret sins aren’t erased by killing Radcliffe’s bugbear. But also, humans are reliant on technology as bound up/to larger struggles, all to tell smaller stories inside ongoing systemic problems. Furthermore, there’s nowhere we’d rather be, because the freeing element is a matter of context; i.e., playing with the unknown while framing it as something to explore, mid-calculated-risk. Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM. The hauntologies typically allow for some degree of swashbuckling and kayfabe/Amazonomachia, but boil down to encountering the planet as alien, wild, dead out of a primordial past come home to roost: Saturn devouring his son, as the Engineer does to Weyland (David is inedible). Per the Promethean Quest, the land is reclaimed by nature and labor from false gods, and sought out by seekers of the Numinous using Gothic poetics all over again…

[36] Cameron’s own take on Shelley’s Creature/technological singularity, but with a twist: rogue police technology fueled by giant blue sparks of godly power. The Gothic is a productive and lucrative mode, but one for which profit enriched Cameron through the sham of wisdom; i.e., yet-another-Pygmalion aping Heinlein and Lovecraft while trying to out-earn George Lucas, versus Shelley writing the first sci-fi novel more or less for Galatean funsies. One is motivated primarily by profit (but certainly has Gothic elements; re: Volume One’s “Healing from Rape“); the other, by poetic expression!

[37] Such a violence as Shelley provided was vital to the rights of people who give birth speaking to their rights by reifying them: as tokophobic entities tied to very-real concerns; i.e., the act of pregnancy itself tantamount to unironic torture and rape (it’s not like Percy Shelley had to carry Mary’s babies):

“Once this thing’s in you, it’s not coming out without a lot of extreme pain (the worst in your life) and people expect you to be happy about that; i.e., middle-aged women, who guilt-trip you into having kids, calling it [state-compelled sexual reproduction] a ‘blessing.'” This ties into Gothic modesty arguments as frequently morphological for cis-het women fearful of their biology (their uterus) as something normally controlled and regulated by state forces (the same way trans women are afraid of their penises) [source: “Following in Medusa’s Footsteps,” 2024].

Classically cis, this extends to queer GNC people sharing the same desire to purge the idea of having the only babies the state cares about (with stories like Frankenstein discouraging a particular kind of children: rape babies (necrophilia and graverobbing = rape) that—like the Medusa, go onto exact revenge against those who made them; e.g., Alien, Metroid, Abigail, and countless others), and challenging that “pro-life” argument by utilizing Frankenstein‘s speculative richness to have the whore’s revenge (with Shelley being Percy’s “side piece” until she wasn’t, outliving him to become a protector not just of women [as her mother was] but of nature itself and all its occupants).

[38] Emergent play is a complicated subject, but one I simplify as follows: however ambiguous, play’s function is ultimately determined by the dialectical-material context of mutual consent; i.e., per rules that are bent and broken in good faith or bad (I’ve had people who seem cool suddenly act weird in bad faith, but it’s rare). We try new things and experiment all the time. The golden rule is, “no harm, no foul,” cops being the ones who fight dirty in that respect! We play at war to have fun and wage class, culture and race war in poetic ways that, for the initiated, become second nature through praxial synthesis. Infinite form, singular function; i.e., form follows function, flow determining function amid a given demonic arbitration of Gothic aesthetics. In keeping with Prometheus and Shelley anisotropically venerating those tortures, so do we steal intelligence and awareness back!

[39] My “glass womb” writing fantasy at nineteen, but nothing so great as Frankenstein; i.e., I bloomed late, coming out at thirty-six to write Sex Positivity afterwards (my finest hour).

[40] Re: Decapitation and circumcision, cutting the head off the snake (“You should have gone for head…”).

[41] An important distinction to make is that Simmons, Stanley and Springers’ parents were in the Holocaust, not them; i.e., they used their privilege as descendants of Holocaust survivors to make money. While my familiarity with KISS is limited to their music mostly sucking, I do know that Simmons and Stanley are worth hundreds of millions of dollars—in effect, chasing and selling 1970s camp to kids for profit, first and foremost. While that’s fine to an extent, their drive in doing so has made them far too much money to feel even remotely ethical; i.e., while there’s no ethical consumption under Capitalism, their particular approach to consumption is dogmatic and predatory.

No one makes hundreds of millions of dollars without mass-exploiting others; KISS—and by extension Priest through their own “fake rebellion” racket—did it through a Gothic aesthetic. Springer did not; i.e., hiding behind a nice-guy persona while saying “I’m against what you say but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” You know, the whole “debating Nazis” thing. He died in 2023 a multimillionaire, having chased the ratings with Opera to slum for corporations. Good riddance.

[42] Basically invented by Shelley’s book (more or less). We didn’t really have time to explore that idea, here. If you’re curious, though, I strongly recommend David Roden’s Posthuman Life (2015), which explores cyborgs, transhumanism and other concepts related to/inspired by Shelley’s magnum opus!

[43] A not-entirely accurate title. Palimpsests aside (re: Shelley but also Goya), the xenomorph is a composite entity (a chimera) with a life cycle. Giger designed the adult, but O’Bannon and Cobb designed the facehugger and various other artists, the environment. Only Victor and those like him take all the credit/patent the brand. Making demons is always a group effort, in some shape or form.

[44] Potential pillow talk/fan fiction of her and Percy? While I jest (a bit), inkblots don’t have set definitions; the Creature arguably symbolizes—among other things—Mary Shelley’s desire for the bored housewife/grieving mother to fuck her fears away by reuniting with alienated things; e.g., not to get too Freudian, but an id/alter ego for Percy and Byron, but also her dead child, African slaves, unwanted pregnancies, Prometheus, etc. Demonology is simply a poetic form of exchange, one that extends beyond her and into future generations assigning new meanings (and struggles) to the clay. The meaning of life can be canonical or Satanic. You have all the power to decide that among yourselves!

[45] The above creampie being one administered by me while Cuwu wasn’t on birth control, but where I had already received my procedure and discussed the risks with them (and each of us detailing our sexual histories). Safe sex is good sex, trust me.

This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). 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). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). 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 “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

Prefacing Tolkien: to Harmony/Concerning Big Black Dicks and Anti-Semitism vs “antisemitism”

“You don’t want go to South Africa.” / “Why not?” / “You’re black.”

—an Apartheid villain to Roger Murtaugh, Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)

Picking up where “Idle Hands, part two: Vampires and Claymation” left off…

Before we start, I want to do two things: dedicate part three to Harmony, and discuss “black” a little more as a poetic device; i.e., concerning Tolkien’s love for big black dicks (and other non-white bodies to penetrate with some kind of dick; e.g., goblin asses, below) in his racist, sexist, and otherwise bigoted blood libel stories: murdering orcs and goblins, en masse, while disguising 19th-century ethnocentrism as post-WWII British High Fantasy escapism. We’ll also discuss the difference between “anti-Semitism” and “antisemitism,” and why I favor the former over the latter in my own work.

(artist: Noaqin)

First, “Idle Hands,” part three is dedicated to Harmony, who not only supported me during the entire writing process, but whose black dildo inspired my critique of Tolkien abjecting black cock; i.e., in ways Harmony and I could subvert by playing with abjected material in sex-positive ways. Like Bay during Volume Zero’s construction, Harmony has been very supportive and kind, helping me see value in my own work, here; i.e., in its critiquing of popular media’s dogma through industry monoliths like Tolkien (who people don’t tend to critique nearly enough).

Whereas Tolkien’s Hobbit begins with, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” “Idle Hands,” part three started with me seeing Harmony penetrated by a big black dick, and wanting afterwards to recreate the scene; i.e., in equally healthy ways through both of us illustrating mutual consent during ludo-Gothic BDSM. It began, as sex normally does, with smaller things growing into bigger things, but also occurred through tangents into dark, wet, exciting places; i.e., not exactly a “nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell,” as Tolkien describes it, but still speaking psychosexually to the kinds of unironic, canonically essential value judgements he frequently gave to nature, outside colonial orders: stamped as “black” and alien, abjected for hobbit-hole comforts.

We must humanize the harvest in ways Tolkien clearly tried to monopolize/triangulate against nature; i.e., in ways of the underworld that Harmony loves manipulate. Using them to break through such allegories of the English pastoral, she employs her own wanton displays of sexual liberation to camp the canon with; i.e., her own body and toys’ infernal comforts; e.g., her fat goblin ass part of the same strange home for misfit toys that Harmony embodies! “Look on our Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

This entire segment carries that playful spirit of irony forwards, camping Tolkien’s wraith-like ghost in the hopes of shaping a better worldview outlined by Milton, the second-generation British Romantics and some of the Neo-Gothic authors (e.g., Lewis)—one conducive, I should hope, towards Gothic Communism, and towards humanizing all the orcs and goblins that Tolkien killed, one black alien cock at a time! It’s an olive branch.

Second, something “black.” Our focus concerns not just Tolkien’s racism and anti-Semitic tropes viewed backwards (using forbidden sight, but also hindsight 20/20, with darkness visible), but his entire bigotry targeting “black,” in practice. So what is it?

“Black” is anisotropic, meaning it goes both ways but means different things per direction. We’re playing with black to fuck the alien, during oppositional praxis; i.e., in a sex-positive sense, while subverting bigoted forms of Gothic fakery/theatre that Tolkien most certainly did not. For Tolkien and for capital, “black” is a gaslight (“there’s nothing there”), a clear-and-present danger tied to national security (illegal aliens), and a cloaking device/false flag (among other things; e.g., a “gatekeep, girl boss” mechanism). Both rely on a feeling of invasion by darkness through neoliberal military propaganda; i.e., to galvanize home defense in upholding “Rome” and the nuclear model against a perceived Great Destroyer from Elsewhere. Behind the weird-nerd persona of a polite British linguist sits a white moderate printing centrist lies.

Tolkien isn’t just a fascist posing as an ivy-league nerd, then, but the Necromancer himself, tucked behind the Black Veil! Such is the banality of evil, its desk murder going beyond fiscal zones and into scholarly temples. Abjecting his own decay during mirror syndrome onto his black nameless victims, Tolkien loves and fears black dick to conduct genocide with (an abusive spouse raping the Global South through a Black Revenge strawman); never forget that.

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

Keeping with Otto’s Numinous and Radcliffe’s Black Veil (the dialectic of shelter and the alien), the Gothic is writ in tremendous obscurity and decay. “Black,” for Tolkien, is alien to abject—while imprinting colonial norms onto hauntological throwbacks, and which help explain his endless productivity and celebration by state copycats: extending capital through complicit cryptonymy/state entropy to best restore British-American monarchism; i.e., a “greater” nostalgia of the imaginary past to retreat towards (the American benefactors, oddly enough, retreating into a false Britain). For us, it’s alien to reunite amid oscillating feelings of the foreign and familiar deciding what to do, during unequal, forbidden exchange. This goes for cocks, or anything attached/relating to them, great and small; e.g., the fat goblin ass or tight hobbit hole attaching to Numinous evocations of nature’s alien, Promethean, monstrous-feminine homecoming with workers; i.e., the fire of the gods, Medusa, and their possible worlds waiting patiently beyond the Capitalocene/Capitalist Realism!

This portion was originally written here, but I have decided to post it separately, on my old blog, given its broader application. To it, I reference an archived video about my grandfather, interviewed in 2005, talking largely about his experiences during WWII: as a Dutch liberation fighter and Holocaust survivor. I didn’t have time to go into the video, here, so I recorded a response video where I think about the interview as a third-generation trans Communist Dutch girl writing a book series on goblins and other anti-Semitic monsters (Persephone van der Waard’s “Anti-Semitism vs Antisemitism: Discussing My Grandfather (a Dutch Holocaust Survivor) w/ My Work,” 2024); i.e., how in writing this preface, I thought of my Dutch heritage overshadowed by fascist oppression, and wanted to examine my grandfather, warts and all; i.e., relative to anti-Semitic myths and monsters that don’t apply to Jewish persecution exclusively. —Perse

Third, a note about Zionism and anti-Semitism. It has been brought to my attention that academics and scholars tend to favor “antisemitism” versus “anti-Semitism.” Holocaust Remembrance explains it as follows:

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) would like to address the spelling of the term “antisemitism,” often rendered as “anti-Semitism.” The IHRA’s concern is that the hyphenated spelling allows for the possibility of something called “Semitism,” which not only legitimizes a form of pseudo-scientific racial classification that was thoroughly discredited by association with Nazi ideology, but also divides the term, stripping it from its meaning of opposition and hatred toward Jews. […] The term has, however, since its inception referred to prejudice against Jews alone. [emphasis, me…] The unhyphenated spelling is favored by many scholars and institutions in order to dispel the idea that there is an entity “Semitism” which “anti-Semitism” opposes. Antisemitism should be read as a unified term so that the meaning of the generic term for modern Jew-hatred is clear. At a time of increased violence and rhetoric aimed towards Jews, it is urgent that there is clarity and no room for confusion or obfuscation when dealing with antisemitism (source).

And yet here I am, using “anti-Semitism,” anyways. What gives?

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Autumn Anarchy)

The problem is, my work on Gothic Communism doesn’t concern Jewish people, alone; it explores the holistic and widespread application of blood libel (and relative persecution languages) as having gone beyond Jewish people, but which were once applied aggressively-if-not-uniquely to them as a criminalized non-Christian group (don’t forget Muslims during the Crusades, or later on, the Irish Catholics)—i.e., blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts have expanded beyond Jewish people to attack other marginalized groups (often by Jewish tokens, in later centuries); e.g., queer people, women, Muslims and Pagans, Indigenous groups, and people of color all being supplied tropes of a historically anti-Semitic nature: the so-called “bad blood” of slaves and their foregone betrayal as codified “evil servants” (with sex workers and their discrimination being as old as Judaism, for instance). What bigots from older times used to punch primarily down against persons called “Semite,” then, has since been repackaged and sent, tokenized, back into the world.

For one, this speaks to a fundamental historical misunderstanding of race, insofar as “race” as a punitive notion under capital didn’t exist in the Middle Ages, wherein such things focused on religious persecution against competing factions; it emerged with capital developing into itself as a hauntological device that inserted racism into the imaginary historical past. Said past, in turn, is routinely evoked in ways that concern the abjection process tied to different monsters of a Jewish character that has tangled itself among different marginalized groups, fictions and historical events.

In other words, Zionism can’t be separated from non-tokenized forms, which token elements try to emulate and downplay in bad faith. That’s not simply the focus of my work (which it very much is), but something that needs to be discussed regardless of bystanders who haven’t sold out. The word clearly has been weaponized by Zionism, at this stage, and splitting hairs about a hyphen is a bit academic and furthermore, dangerous; i.e., when the word—regardless of its punctuation (and not even changing the pronunciation, while my using of the hyphen serves an academic purpose)—is clearly being used by colonizers decaying the Jewish body to fulfill a Christianized, capitalist agenda, and which the feelings of non-participants in an ongoing genocide is, forgive me, considerably less important than exposing the genocide. Those feelings are still valid—hence my prefacing of the Tolkien critique with any kind of preamble at all—but they should never silence criticism regarding said word’s current misuse, nor the tokenized actions Zionism represents, when doing so.

(source: Suzanne Moore’s “‘Terf’ Is the Ultimate Slur against Women,” 2023)

Just as we shouldn’t invent brand-new phrases to distance feminism from TERFs, nor should we, regarding Jews and Zionism. Zionism is a radical, fascist form of Judaism, just as TERFs are a radical, fascist form of feminism, and each bleeds into fiction, itself, meriting a radical response from us; i.e., to change the course of history on all registers. Radical problems require radical solutions, meaning bigots use DARVO and obscurantism to point the finger at their victims with their own language (witch cops hunting other witches, above). I’m not going to stop using “anti-Semitism” academically just because it offends someone or because I’m not Jewish (academia would cease to exist, if that were the case); the point is how it’s offending others and why—using intellectual movements to scare those who fear intellectual power’s historical ability to change the status quo (versus maintaining it by attacking intellectuals, which fascism does by design).

To that, I don’t “have” to be Jewish to write about Jewish tokenism and oppression going beyond a narrow idea of Jewish people/Jewish people period, any more than I would “need” be to be black to write about Frantz Fanon’s arguments likewise extending to non-African-Americans; my doing so merely happens on my side of the pedagogy of the oppressed, using its relative privilege, oppression and alienation to reach across the aisle, regarding holistic oppression: as a white, middle-class trans woman whose own non-Jewish family (on my father’s side, next page) was brutalized by the Nazi regime in Holland. Nazis don’t discriminate insofar as discrimination goes; they merely swap out scapegoats as needed.

Fascism, at its core, is conservative, meaning it compels speech through selective boundaries and moderate-to-reactionary punishment (re: “boundaries for me, not for thee”). We must contend with such arbitration while also dealing with each other’s respective and collective abuse, mid-liberation; i.e., saying what needs to be said while dealing with others who say what should or shouldn’t be said—all leading to a great deal of unproductive arguing back and forth, instead of systemic, cooperative change (a bit like Gandalf and the three trolls, the latter debating about eating the dwarves and the wizard invading their conversation by throwing his voice to make them delay until the sun came up): “Won’t someone please think of the Jews!” If all they do is lead to singular and myopic interpretations that never move the focus onto stopping genocide, such refrains are infantilizing and criminogenic; i.e., those who say them in bad faith don’t actually care about Jews, save as a tool for discrediting activism.

To it, my giving of hard facts and genuine arguments that Jewish people can respond to is a sign of respect; i.e., towards those I view not simply as human, but adults capable of thinking for themselves, while letting their fellow oppressed get a word in, too. To prevent that would be to logically limit each group only to itself through self-administered gag orders—a Tower of Babel to divide and conquer all peoples raped by capital. No one ever said rebellion was simple or clean(e.g., Gramps, below, was a Dutch* patriot and Holocaust survivor who spoke about Nazi abuse all his adult life, but also loved America/free enterprise, hated Socialism [which he conflated with the Nazis] and would have fought in the War on Terror if they’d let him, and certainly wouldn’t have understood what trans people are).

*The Dutch being historically compared to Jewish people through similar “miser” arguments; i.e., the blood libel argument of essentialized greed being “in the blood,” which my people endure similar to Jewish people: by also being concentrated by tokenized elements appeasing the oppressor! To do so is folly! All arguments for liberation are valid provided they liberate all peoples from capital calling us “sick” for different reasons.

(source: Linda Meloche’s “Henri Vanderwaard Interview,” 2005)

Beyond Jewish trauma, we likewise wouldn’t discourage not talking about rape or sex work, period, merely because it makes some women uncomfortable or because it “only” applies to them; that’s TERF/SWERF logic, which extends to Zionism laterally espousing the various anti-Semitic myths surrounding it, but also the rape (and other harm) those systemically cause—i.e., when one group tries to monopolize victimhood, including demonic theatre as the performative, anisotropic tool, thereof. Silence is genocide, including partial silence. Gothic Communism seeks to raise awareness and emotional/Gothic intelligence to prevent universal rape, which you can’t do if you’re bunkered down in a space disconnected from others; i.e., for fear of being offended to such a degree that you close your eyes (and your mouth) entirely.

So many people that I showed this section to were afraid to say anything at all, for fear of speaking out of turn, or telling me to “ask a Jewish person,” first. And while some caution is merited, and good-faith Jewish opinions are entirely valid, to let overcaution push people into keeping quiet about some fairly obvious connections—like Zionism and racial conflict in Tolkien, bleeding into politics through persecution mania and genocide denial—is a fatal flaw that fascism will happily telegraph and exploit! Fascists aren’t your friends; they’re cops with a license to kill, cheat and steal for the bourgeoisie in bad faith—i.e., power aggregates behind activism painted as “slander” by state litigators playing at false rebellion. They’ll wear the mask until it suits them; i.e., until their victims lower their guard, all but asking for a knife in the back.

If I sound defensive, it’s because I am; I’ve trusted others blindly before and have been burned for it (tokens are vicious in their policing of others). So I’d rather preface things ahead of time, then proceed in good faith when critiquing tokenism going forwards. That’s how healthy relationships work. These arguments, then, are a gallery exhibit in a symposium meant to counteract hate crimes, not foster public harassment targeting minority groups for hateful reasons. Anyone who walks away from my writing and seriously thinks that I’m attacking Jews/trying to harm them is the one with the problem, in that respect. No one is above critique, including victims but especially when they go on to victimize others (whether on purpose or not); i.e., while hiding behind exclusive-victim status. Instead, we should value the voice of victims in a holistic sense, not squander it by policing its potential to the point where any critical bite disappears. If fascism squirms, you know you’ve hit a nerve and should keep at it. Hit ’em where it hurts!

All of this is to say, the selective use of problematic kayfabe language (e.g., orcs and goblins, but also king hippos, left) pertains to the semi-imaginary history I’m referring to, here, which the Gothic essentially comprises at all times. It’s a specific group of disparate historical threads and ideas that remain at play and continue to evolve; i.e., blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft, which have similar historical elements but different applications nowadays through evolved monstrous code (re: goblins, vampires and witches). And the historical elements regarding blood lineage and power that such things evoke, however false they ultimately are, continue being evoked in bad faith by fascist parties of various signatures. Sometimes I call that signature “pre-fascist” or “post-fascist,” according to the anachronisms at work. But the lineage of forgeries nonetheless remain; i.e., as something of world history that, however imaginary it ultimately is, can still be addressed through camp: regarding tokenized violence lampooned by a polity of victims, which bourgeois elements levy against each other during Capitalist Realism. Tokenism is the weaponizing of useful idiots. Except, it’s not Jewish “erasure” to camp anti-Semitism; i.e., to speak to other groups harmed by or with anti-Semitic devices (speaking to a hauntology whose religious, ethnic and/or cultural “other” doesn’t apply exclusively to Jews). They can use it to speak to their unique history and abuse, and others can expand it beyond that bailiwick to speak to theirs, too.

A social element obviously persists. The phrase “anti-Semitic,” unto itself, is known to make many Jewish people feel unwelcome, but as I will go on to argue, it doesn’t apply exclusively to them, past or present. There’s also a historical character to interpret, mid-praxis. Much of that history is real and embellished, and speaks to things that are simply uncomfortable period; i.e., dealt in demonic forms, and something that refers to a specific idea of “past” that is still being used to attack a variety of people from the same source—while also being associated with a narrow section of the population and its tokenized violence, shouting others down!

To be blunt, police victims often go on to police others. The need to discuss Zionism, then (and its monopolies/mirror syndrome), frankly outweighs making all Jews feel comfortable, because there are those among them who—since Israel’s forming by the British empire and the United States—have grown increasingly hostile, vocal and bad-faith; i.e., as a tokenized minority speaking for the oppressor majority through themselves (re: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss). Hyphen or not, the word is positively radioactive, and the time for polite discussion using it has well-and-truly passed (e.g., climate change, genocide, fascism). In short, we need to prioritize the acknowledgement of the grievous harm being caused, but also the tokenized means of sanitizing itself through mythical language that points away from the mechanisms at work; i.e., I’d rather talk frankly about the history of anti-Semitism and its expanded Venn Diagram of persecution networks right now—using markers of bigotry at play to raise awareness about genocide that some Jewish people have had a hand in—then spend time coming up with comfortable words that fail to cut home.

Anti-Semitism is an ugly business. So is Tolkien’s use of it through his token power fantasies. We need to be able to address that, including the myriad ways in which these devices often go unnoticed precisely for the reasons above. How can I talk about the bigotries at work in any focused way if the language for doing so is forced out of focus and off target? We need to pinpoint these issues, not hold hands (and this is coming from a service top). You might as well ask me to cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring (or use a herring to blow up the Death Star, below). Counterterrorism, from an actually rebellious standpoint, is meant to make tokenism think twice, including those sitting—with relative comfort—on the fence. For many Jews, this idea is unthinkable all on its own, but criminogenic conditions make for strange bedfellows (and no one ever said that traitors weren’t logical in their assessment of the Judas payment). The idea isn’t to blame or police our fellow oppressed, but recognize and address what many do not.

I could say “victims of fascism” to dodge the issue, but then the history and signature (of which victims) would be swept aside—meaning “as it would be” for Tolkien or similar authors (e.g., Lucas, above), who built their careers (and legacies) out of coded racism and other bigotries with false arguments and origins tied to real ideologies; i.e., Tolkien did believe in blood myth, and applied it to Jewish people, but also non-white and monstrous-feminine people period through the same medieval hauntologies; re: orcs, which clearly have an anti-Semitic quality to them that, canonized by Tolkien’s work, go on to disguise that function used against all parties (which is why I think that covering up the lineage is dangerous).

(source: Wikimedia Commons)

Furthermore, any word we could invent would still wind up being used by the colonizer abusing tokenism to obfuscate their own operations! Tokenism and betrayal are both an ugly business—and the obscurantism of oppression is equally vile—but the reality as such needs to be dragged out into the open, not covered up; i.e., that, despite being coded unfairly as “vengeful backstabbers,” some Jewish people do sell out (e.g., Ze’ev Jabotinsky, left), as have any marginalized groups in history tied to different monsters “getting even”; re, Federici vis-à-vis witches: “Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the [vengeful] destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity” (source).

Empire hides behind its tokens, and Jewish revenge assimilates into Christian revenge (re: the Crusades, which Zionism emulates to kill Arabs for Christians through misguided ideas of revenge). This includes turning a blind eye towards present wrongs concerning past wrongs; i.e., regarding generational trauma, which many Jewish people in privilege are currently doing. If that bothers you when you’re demonstrably not a Zionist, remember that my critique is of Zionism hiding within Judaism as a more radical and tokenized form, thereof. And if you still can’t see past your own insecurities about my arguments “rocking the boat,” then maybe you should let go of whatever’s blinding you to the bloodbath currently happening overseas. While past atrocities can bring marginalized communities closer together, they also shock and isolate them, encouraging as they do willful ignorance regarding larger systemic issues. Sooner or later, that’s what complacency always becomes.

However shameful, disturbing or uncomfortable that feels, then, we have to account for it as it’s happening with blood libel, then reclaim that in light of such embarrassments. It sucks to require that anyone face the shame someone else more powerful in their own group has caused, but it must be done; i.e., such things don’t affect “just the Jews” (as the Palestinians well know, by now), so telling the investigator(s), “stay in your lane” won’t work: Zionism is currently happening and will keep happening regardless if all Jewish people are comfortable or not. Indeed, their fantasies of assimilation (re: Tolkien) often play into the silencing of genocide taking place! If their conscience gnaws at them, so be it; and if they have a bone to pick with me (for valid reasons or not), “lay on, Macduff. The black knight always triumphs!”

All kidding aside, I relish criticism; I relish criticism; it lets me know what to fortify. I also specialize in tokenism, which—if you haven’t noticed—is a tricky subject; i.e., if you don’t belong to the group being tokenized, you’re viewed (with some justice) as an outsider. And yet, we’re all oppressed to some degree (re, Derrida: “there is no outside of the text”). Furthermore, tokenism remains all the same, requiring its addressal, mid-exile, and inside a system of differences; i.e., it needs to be interpreted intersectionally and holistically to acknowledge parties acting in bad faith, and who rely on such selection processes to silence valid criticism outright.

In turn, my usage of “anti-Semitism” is also tricky because it concerns holistic historical abuses speaking to token forces who rely on the feelings of those they blend in with to cover for them; i.e., human shields, those regarding different peoples harmed by/sandwiched between collective and selective bigoted practices, and with language that was formerly used to attack Jews pointedly having expanded elsewhere: by using the same fictitious elements of arbitrary myth-making and application tied to Zionism (frontier capitalism) as something that hasn’t gone anywhere.

Again, I’m talking about monsters, and there isn’t a Jewish monopoly to what has been assigned to (and to some degree accepted by) that portion of the world’s population. The “Semite,” while it historically is centered around Jews, is an umbrella egregore that includes vampires, witches, orcs and goblins leveled at a variety of real-world groups; i.e., at the same time, and to a rising degree of prominence during Jewish gentrification and decay through Zionism (a practice, that through capital, tries to bastardize various inkblots to mean one thing and nothing else; e.g., token orc butts are “Jewish,” in Zionist eyes, and non-token/abject orc butts are “Hamas”; re: the giving and receiving of state violence through bourgeois models of terrorist/counterterrorist violence, per the zombie apocalypse relaid in demonic forms).

(artist: Just Some Noob)

My whole point, then, is how a formerly Jewish-exclusive calumny has expanded beyond Jewish peoples, in recent centuries, and well into the present. Even during the Holocaust, it wasn’t “just” about Jews and how they were affected by that disaster of state machinery run amok (desk murder); other groups besides Jewish people were sent to their deaths to “answer” the Jewish Question, but the popular historical records (fictional or otherwise) don’t mention them, nearly enough. I’d rather discuss things openly to reclaim them from token forces; i.e., as monopolizing holocaust, exile, persecution, bereavement, rape (accusations) and revenge, and whose falsehoods we use the imaginary power of “Gothic” fakeries to subvert. “Semitism” is invented, which means it can be reinvented. So, too, has Jewishness has gone from a religion to a national body that relates to others in ways that necessitate such invention and outspoken shots-in-the-arm. Blame Capitalism, not me, and set your tokenized guilt aside; my patience is frankly at its end, and I’m going to hyphenate different things to form connections useful towards universal liberation (as the Gothic so often does; re: the grey area of its storied poetics; e.g., correct-incorrect). We learn by challenging each other, and my work is hardly the final say in the grand scheme of things.

That being said, I also think we shouldn’t seriously entertain any idea of ranking rape and “oppression Olympics.” There’s no such thing as a perfect victim. Instead, I think all groups need to be considered together in light of state abuse; i.e., versus a great many living in the shadow of one particular group, whose own extinction event has been advertised by American media to prioritize them, first and foremost. This goes for trans people, Jews, people of color or Indigenous people, etc; no one “trumps” anyone else, everyone speaking out against tokenism regardless of who’s doing it whenever such things are out of joint/balance.

Believe it or not, I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, here, but all the same, we need to get over the idea that holocaust and genocide are strictly of a Jewish character and history (real or otherwise); i.e., while simultaneously recognizing how tools of Jewish oppression aren’t used against them, we can acknowledge the harms caused against them, including holocaust denial. You can’t camp holocaust, but you can camp your own survival, and multiple people can survive the same event to camp it later.

Likewise, it’s not denial to include others in what has largely been framed (in Zionist circles) as a wholly Jewish ordeal. Two (or more) things can be true at once, Zionism doubling Jewishness as capably as Gene Simmons, but for different reasons (see: footnote, next page). Just as Israel and America invent things out of whole cloth behind double standards, we can do the same to spite those standards; i.e., fighting fire with fire and for land back despite the Jewish dogmatic belief of a god-denied, -promised, then ultimately -given homeland. Like Omelas, the point is walking away from Egypt if that means not genociding other people, not towards it! Israel is a ploy to buy cheap loyalty in furtherance to capital’s continued raping of others—Jews included!

This will certainly ruffle some feathers, but I’m a Satanic atheist; i.e., there is no God, only workers vs the elite and whatever deities either fabricates for their own purposes. My doing so happens while speaking to those harmed by refusing to look past matters of a “purely” ethnic character. It was never about “pure ethnicity” but dividing and conquering more broadly using that and other means of persecution through various networks, thereof. Jews don’t have a monopoly on holocaust, and as Zionism shows us, they can tokenize like any other minority group to police nature with; i.e., non-white skin, white masks; e.g., the Inca’s imperial subjugates and the Conquistadors. Betrayal is betrayal. It’s only ever a question of who and why.

Assimilation is poor stewardship. We must do better if we are to survive capital’s effects on us and the planet; we must camp what has become canon, including what Sandy Norton calls “the Imperialism of theory“; re: academics policing what is or isn’t acceptable, thereby granting imperial characters to any discourse beyond academia that, unto itself, desperately needs to shed. Applying Sandy to Gothic studies instead of Foucault, I choose to use “anti-Semitism” because of its speculative richness, not its historical misuse. And if those historically abused by it feel like I’m encroaching on what is unique to them, they are sorely mistaken: witches and “sodomites” were killed in the Middle Ages, followed by the Renaissance, Holocaust, and neoliberal era. As such, liberation politics need to expand to account for changing dynamics of oppression under capital, lest they tokenize and decay as Zionism (and its fanatic territorialism) has done.

No one ever stopped fascism by being polite, and anti-fascism is inherently radical because it challenges state’s rights in ways gentrified parties won’t; i.e., nothing is sacred except basic universal human, animal and environmental rights, and it’s possible to compromise those by doing nothing of note. It’s also possible to work allegory into seemingly vacuous material. Far be it from me to venerate KISS, for example, but if they can camp their own idea of Jewishness and present it as monstrous to get what they wanted[1a], then so can we toy around with ideas of monstrosity that aren’t intrinsically Jewish to find our own pro-Communist voice under capital. Such is the nature of demonic poetics, which camp dogma through itself; e.g., through rock ‘n roll; i.e., not all Jewish representation challenges profit—can be weaponized against Communism just like the Nazis did (re: Israel and Zionism, next page), or at the very least can foster ignorance through overly simplistic approaches: “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”

(artist: Kim Kelly)

So, yes, my statements will doubtless offend some. That is what those in power want. But all the same, my work speaks to an imaginary element of discourse that is, unto itself, half-real; i.e., anything used to attack the idea of Jewishness has well-and-truly expanded into other groups.

And if saying that ruffles some feathers—specifically that I mention inclusive oppression to address the needs of those other groups while keeping the former in mind—said former group needs to remember that liberation is a universal affair and all peoples need to come together to overcome oppression as one; i.e., there is no one group for which oppression exclusively applies, or who has a magical, innately oppressed quality to them/monopoly on oppression. To think otherwise is to deny others a voice, no different than Afrocentrism or similar movements, which only historically decay into a kind of fortress mentality that prioritizes itself over other groups in a similar position.

The fact remains, we’re all in the same boat, and bigotry is built into capital; i.e., “a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all,” built into capital as something to dismantle accordingly. It’s certainly important to communicate our feelings and say when something bothers us; but also, upsetting others isn’t the point of my arguments, which remain true regardless if they are upsetting—re: Jewishness is a weapon, one that state proponents use to limit oppressed outcry to a single specific group of people it can then weaponize against itself and others. As Asprey astutely writes, “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it” (source). No one has a monopoly on shelter or aliens, mid-dialectic!

So, for example, can the Jewish gentry in Hollywood punch down against anyone who speaks out against America’s token ethnostate[1b]. For them, “Jewishness” = “terror” carried out of the medieval world and into ours; i.e., one whose half-real, historical and imaginary sense of past (the Wisdom of the Ancients) can dominate the proceedings—regardless of class, culture and race, to serve the bourgeoisie through its cultivating of the Superstructure!

Zionism does just that, turning Jews (and Jewish symbols and arguments of persecution and rebellion, victim and oppressor) against Jews and friends of the Jewish while making the idea of “Jewishness” something that Imperialism can hide behind: “We will always suffer and do so exclusively in ways that supersede our victims.” It’s an Omelas refrain, turned into a spear and, as it turns out, a cash cow to milk, mid-genocide; e.g., Judas Priest’s Invincible Shield (2024); re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Judas Priest: Invincible Shield and Zionism” (2024):

as the time-tested tradition of punching Jews became uncool after WW2, Jews became tokenized to punch down; i.e., against themselves and other oppressed groups, thereby serving the same-old profit motive as part of Capitalism out of Antiquity. In turn, Priest seems to have emblazoned their album with such a badge despite the Palestinian genocide happening next door (evoking a party disturbingly similar to Israeli settlers). Despite some bad actors being far more active in ongoing misinformation campaigns, Invincible Shield sadly feels like Priest saying “the show must go on” while using such imagery to line their own pockets. It feels at best, willfully obtuse; i.e., the modern equivalent to selling sugar during British Abolitionism instead of honey despite knowing full well of the Caribbean sugar (thus slave) trade.

All the same, Priest’s commodifying of struggle at the cost of human life is merely the chickens coming home to roost, our metal gods staying silent on what should be blasted from the loudest speakers imaginable (source).

Silence is death[1c]; for Capitalism to work, it needs a victim and a cop for which to buy silence with. To that, victims can become cops through oppressor misuse of oppression language to silence others with; re: DARVO and obscurantism; e.g., the Star of David adorning Zionist war machines and dropping bombs on Palestinians and Lebanese people, while playing the universal savior and victim, and policing anyone who might use their language incorrectly. Different voices need the ability to speak up and out for themselves and others, thus coexist, lest capital divide and disorganize us to keeping doing what it has, is and always will do: rape worlds and the world by sowing division to move money through nature.

(artists: Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás)

Capitalism is a disease that makes society sick (and fosters diseases like AIDS in those societies; i.e., Capitalism is AIDS). For the colonizer class, the point of tone-policing criticism isn’t to raise consciousness in duality towards an intersectional solidarity resisting capital; it’s to insist in bad faith that we need to respect this one group’s feelings above the collective well-being of those the bad actors are currently destroying in the name of a people they themselves have stopped representing save as a dogwhistle and cloak. And those tactics will likewise be employed among good-faith participants—laypeople and academics alike—who are understandably upset by what is being said on both sides. Those feelings and concerns are valid, up to a point, but desperately need to recognize how they can be weaponized by the state to overlook legitimate criticism against genocide. “Yeah, conflict sucks; but it’s also necessary when escaping the Torment Nexus.” So critique power where it is!

We need to abolish genocide as a consequence of privatization, and for that to happen, we must deprivatize bigotry by discussing it holistically among all groups affected by the same tools differently. This isn’t “just” affecting Jewish people, then, nor is it “only” about them, and we shouldn’t tiptoe around Zionists colonizing those arguments; i.e., to weaponize Jewish discomfort to perjure themselves and others. Rememory hurts and, to a healing degree, reenvisions and reprioritizes the imaginary elements of past history during the rememory process; i.e., to suit all peoples under attack simultaneously by those abusing imagination to suit their needs and historical revisionism for the state (re: Zionism).

And if that hits a nerve, then good; pain is healing. This pain is controlled—is an academic exhibit couched inside a larger book full of trigger warnings. To it, I’m not running to every Jewish person I know or see and saying “anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism!” until they grab a stick and brain me. It’s an academic conversation punching Nazis (which Zionists are) while acknowledging the praxial complexities concerning blood libel as a universal performative device. Anyone can wear a beard and throw a stone (or a can of soup “for our family”), and the house—to some degree—is always made of glass:

Glass-Onion that shit! Have your revenge by demonopolizing the concept; i.e., as normally used by oppressors-in-disguise, who we learn from to do better than while borrowing from. Shakespeare’s Shylock soliloquy from The Merchant of Venice, for example, has tremendous liberatory potential; i.e., as something to act out in spite of its anti-Semitic origins and fixation on Christian ideas of Jewish revenge. Shylock inquires, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” to stress the praxial similarities of oppression and oppressor on token groups who, pushed to their limit, do sell out; i.e., Portia punching down to serve herself and Venice (while dressed as a man, no less), and Shylock converting to Christianity after having his day in court! Nothing is sacred but universal liberation; anything that prohibits said liberation is dogma (often in disguise, above).

So “better the instruction” by thinking outside the box while inside it. Disrupt! Speak out! Discredit your discreditor! Camp dogma to make state defenders uncomfortable, doing so to develop Gothic Communism; i.e., through ironic Gothic poetics and theatre challenging profit, thus unironic rape and revenge! The exercise is one of interpretation through performance. No one agency can monopolize victimhood or revenge, including Jews. And if any try to argue otherwise, remind them of your own oppression linked to theirs (“I see your holocaust and raise you a queer pogrom…”). All roads lead to Auschwitz, after all; the idea is to prevent concentration and extermination to begin with by using medieval arguments “when in Rome…”; i.e., to burn Rome, not people! They’ll blame us for it, regardless.

And yet, if my use of “anti-Semitism” still bothers you, I hear you and understand; I merely ask in return that you acknowledge why I’m saying “anti-Semitism,” to begin with. My aim is not to offend anyone for its own sake, but to expand emotional/Gothic intelligence and awareness by probably offending some people; i.e., as a necessary part of the process. Regarding blood libel, sodomy and witch hunter rhetoric, I shove those, mid-synthesis, towards their actual, total and half-real scope of influence: towards all marginalized groups, including my own, as part of the same underlying struggle that is regularly demonized by capital.

To that, I’m trans and belong to a group of people who were occupied and raped by the Nazis; my grandfather—despite fighting to liberate Holland from the Nazis—was still a conservative-minded man I seldom agreed with. Segregation is no defense and silence is genocide, therefore death. We must solidarize intersectionally—not merely to survive, but break Capitalist Realism (engendered by the likes of Spielberg saving war to maintain Pax Americana; re: Zinn). This means preventing what causes genocide to begin with; it means causing some degree of pain, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. “Hurt, not harm,” babes! You “don’t get a pass” just because you’re Jewish (or queer, non-white, or any other group); doing so would only give capital something to pounce and capitalize on: a human shield from criticism (Jewish or not, the settler colony model favors women and children for this purpose, below)!

If history proves anything at all, it’s that cops come from victims; i.e., those who, apart from desperation and convenience, likewise betray through entitlement. Those who can’t be wrong in their own mind are always right, which—as the Nazis, America and Zionism demonstrate through American liberalism needing fascism to operate—will always lead to the harming of others: by the entitled group, because the others (who are not them) are always wrong! This caveat includes victims who sell others out, becoming cops in the process (stochastic terrorism). And if that stings a little to hear—if it shocks those it applies to out of their useless sense of martyrdom and makes them rethink things, or at least recover the ability to interpret things orthopraxically versus dogmatically—then good! Equally good, though, is it making bad actors to go mask-off (as many Zionists have recently done). Cryptonymy serves multiple goals.

To avoid genocide as a historical-material outcome, we need to kill our darlings during dialectical-material analysis. Said scrutiny includes challenging the terrible idea of an exclusive and innate victimhood tied to a select group of people that—regardless of what traitors think, and however deeply entrenched their dogma is—cannot be reduced to class, religion, ethnicity and/or culture; i.e., a misconception that often stems from popular media; re, bands like Judas Priest:

Being a fan of their music since high school (for over twenty years now), a part of me takes no joy in doing so; but all the same, part of me does. I’ll gladly sacrifice the sacred image of my childhood heroes if it means liberating Palestinians (and by extension all oppressed groups). I may not succeed, but I want to try because it’s worth trying. Certainly I can enjoy Priest while criticizing their pernicious aspects; and, as Anita Sarkeesian put it, doing so is “both possible and necessary.” Otherwise, what are we doing? (ibid.).

The same goes for Judaism or any precious idea, but also any means of spreading it in ways that cause harm; i.e., overcoming oppression, in Jewish culture, is important, but its overprioritization historically leads to communication breakdown/abjection (re: Zionism). Hence, how a device able to heal actually causes more harm in the face of capital doing what capital does: raping nature as monstrous-feminine by tokenizing workers; i.e., anyone acting like the universal, exclusive victim; re: “Haven’t I suffered enough? I know all there is to know about victimhood, because I’m the only victim to ever exist!” To centralize one group and one group alone is to normalize through tunnel vision. We’re in this together, comrades, and the state is the enemy, not me.

I don’t want to hurt anyone purely for its own sake, here. Instead, if you scratch a Zionist, a fascist bleeds, and this goes beyond Jewish culture and identity to spread into other groups intersecting oppression as a state weapon. If ever that occurs, the priorities for self-victimization should be reexamined. The pain in doing so—of getting scratched, mid-debate—will invariably yield new synthesis, thus better praxis pushing away from Capitalism, once and for all! Alienation is bad; it’s also a bridge leading to greener pastures: demonic poetics inventing new uses for old dead symbols! The symbol’s appearance remains, but its function can anisotropically change, mid-duality—on the Aegis, oppositional praxis reversing abjection/worker chattelization to legitimize our struggles and invalidate profit’s (re: per the whore’s revenge, the state [and its rights] incompatible with life/consent, needing cops-and-victims extermination [thus rape, per the profit motive] just to exist)! Subversion of state utility can become normal; i.e., during the cryptonymy process becoming second-nature at a societal level. “We camp canon because we must.”

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard)

Gothic Communism is holistic, liminal, dualistic, and ergodic, bringing different voices together to find common ground. My focus is sex work and Gothic poetics (whose nudity and exposure is offensive to a great many people), but it by no means rejects Jewish identity or voices; it merely asks them, “Give us a place to voice ourselves and say what we need to say. Nazis suck, including Jewish Nazis.” Refusing victimization is important, of course, but making victimization your whole identity—meaning to such an unchecked degree that you alienate other oppressed peoples around you, therefore elevate yourself above them/ignore their own opposition affected by tokenism (Zionism or otherwise)—is reckless. Fascism will fash, regardless. Find similarity amid difference and come together to challenge the state and its lapdogs. Liberation transcends national, ethnic and religious boundaries! ACAB! ASAB! AHAB (All Holocausts Are Bad)! Free Palestine!

Idle Hands, part three: Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking (feat. Tolkien’s orcs and goblins, acid Communism, and SpongeBob SquarePants)

The dwarves’ covetous memory becomes one of unbridled revenge, its call to war against nature sharpening to rekindle better times out of myth tied to artefacts that suggest it to start with: “He was witless and wandering, and had forgotten almost everything but the map and the key” (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, “Policing the Whore” (2024)

Now that we’ve thoroughly covered witches and briefly examined vampires as sex demons, let’s carry demons and forbidden sight beyond “Midnight Vampire” or Lady Hellbender and into other famous forms of blood libel, namely goblins; re: demonic sex as torturous, psychosexual, and playful; i.e., regarding unequal power exchange, whose monster-fucking gives forbidden knowledge back, and once received, turns workers from goblin-killer into goblin-friend!

To do so, we’ll be looking at Tolkien, once more; re: as a patriarchal throwback/neo-Victorian dinosaur worshipped by the public while compensating for his own imperial nostalgia colonizing nature; i.e., by gentrifying war during cartographic refrains, which we deconstruct and subvert during the whore’s revenge. Our aim is simply to attack the validity of Tolkien’s anti-Semitic goblins; i.e., as unworthy holders of nature that others more worthy are tasked, by the author playing wishmaster/god, with carrying out his disguised revenge/ethnocentric arguments: that whores and Jews are classically slaves, in medieval parlance, and goblins are Jewish-coded whores of nature/the underworld to threaten more deserving parties (the dwarves) with different kinds of harm (e.g., rape, captivity and torture)!

In The Hobbit, for example, Tolkien loves to monomythically “kettle” the dwarves before letting them break free—all to genocide the ignoble savages and take their land back for the state (the white Indian argument, but also marginalized in-fighting and tokenization[1d]). Yet, in pimping nature, Tolkien has (through evil, backstabbing Jews and other slaves) created something the state may criminalize, but never fully monopolize as “of nature”; re: a brothel/disco place of revenge where the whore takes back the sex, drugs, and monster-fucking rock ‘n roll that someone like Tolkien always authors in favor of empire, thus capital.

Goblins are whores, like any other monstrous-feminine, thus pimped by Tolkien in ways where his victims have the slave’s black revenge; i.e., by reclaiming the things used to normally stigmatize and colonize them for profit, whose motive and Realism they break through ludo-Gothic BDSM; e.g., the spurious notion that “all goblins” love not just gold, but loot (a kind of wish fulfillment tying them to police violence, below). Porn simply lets us frankly eroticize—or otherwise discuss—such desires through a lens of public nudism; i.e., relative to the stigmas, bigotries, phobias, etc, that we want to interrogate, thus change, through our own versions of these age-old monster-fucking devices.

First, I’ll remind you of some history and arguments about goblins to keep in mind, then walk you through how we’ll apply them to Tolkien; i.e., regarding the man’s anti-Semitic sex demons, and his own harmful monster-fucking dialogs regarding them. After that, we’ll consider how to break the monopoly by playing with them, ourselves; i.e., when using Fisher’s acid Communism through Gothic poetics, subversive monster-fucking scenarios (white-on-black sex), cartoons, and shared labor exchanges. We’ll close the section out by thinking about whores at large—the big scary ones that speak to a palliative Communist Numinous that smaller underling monsters like goblins reputedly serve and/or spring from—before we move onto “Forbidden Sight, part two: the Promethean Quest vis-à-vis Frankenstein (and similar poetic elements) about making demons at large.

(artist: Personal Ami)

Note: This symposium mentions lots of ideas we can only touch on, here; i.e., regarding not just goblins, but also vampires, zombies and Capitalism-as-undead (all of which I’ve written about extensively in my PhD and other volumes. Expect block quotes). Also, in keeping with ludo-Gothic BDSM and the spirit of playing with monsters/darkness, this final portion of “Idle Hands” will be fairly messy and chaotic; i.e., stressing the holistic and intersectional elements of Gothic Communism (and demons/darkness visible), combining anything and everything together to achieve praxial success! —Perse

Tolkien’s Other Sex Demons: Goblins

The state, as undead, thrives on tokenism as a bastard DARVO/obscurantist enterprise. Christianity is a cuckoo religion, then, bastardizing older forms of religion and myth, which the state continues to abuse under capital. Our focus, for this symposium, is predominantly one of service and monster-fucking through goblins (and to a lesser degree, orcs); i.e., acting as bad servants, per canonical essentialism and camped by us: during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s rape-play angle merging with various half-real roleplay scenarios of “homebrew” interracial porn/xenophilia overcoming unironic racism and other forms of dogmatic xenophobic orthodoxy (for all intents and purposes, this section shall use “ludo-Gothic BDSM” and “monster-fucking” interchangeably. The former essentially constitutes the function of rape play, while the other enacts a form of rape play to function as, but their praxial scope is the same).

To it, orcs and goblins are canonically bad—often compared, during blood libel, to a mindless collective of non-white evil children/the spawn of Satan—and from Heinlein to Cameron to Lucas spewing the same centrist bullshit (re: the Star Wars problem), you can absolutely thank Tolkien for that[2a] (and who borrowed his doing so from Beowulf and Grendel’s mother giving birth to monstrous-feminine comparable to orcs and goblins).

Few things are as pervasive or insidious as Tolkien, but especially his cartographic refrain hyphenating colonial sex and force, which it then uses to disguise rape with; i.e., antagonizing nature-as-monstrous-feminine, then fucking it unironically to death “by the sword.” Hence my attacking it, here, during my holistic study of the man and his work, one last time (“Let us be rid of it, once and for all!”). Doing so by having our revenge during ironic monster sex of our own, we camp the canon to humanize the harvest, making goblins gay during ironic monster sex; i.e., by having sex with that which Tolkien considers abominable, white bodies on black; e.g., white girls taking black dick, or acting “non-white” themselves in accordance with their rebellious elements: the respectively brutish and naughty “orc” and “goblin” equaling “terrorist” and “punk” merged, for our purposes, with “criminal/whore” and “zombie.” The idea isn’t to separate things, at all, but engage with them holistically because Gothic Communism is holistic; capital divides to conquer us, and we unify to defy profit raping us.

(artist: Noaqin)

We’ll get to that, this symposium laying out various dots for you to connect, in a fairly-tangential-but-ultimately-connected group of disparate concepts; it’s not really a close-read of specific texts (no Gollum in this one, nor reading into gay ring-bearers[2b]), but a constellation of the man’s broadest themes merged with past elements of my own work—opting for orcs and goblins, this time, instead of vampirism (which we examined from Tolkien’s stories, in Volume One):

• A White Earth: Defending the Realm from Black Rape (Orc Dick or Otherwise)
• Trouble in Paradise: Fantasizing about Black Monster Dick (feat. acid Communism)
• Doing It, Ourselves: Humanizing Orcs and Goblins through Ironic Monster Sex
• How to Play with Goblins-as-Demons, Ourselves (to Have Our Revenge; feat. Bay, Blxxd Bunny, SpongeBob, and more)
• Wrapping Up/the Big Picture
• Moving On: Some Transitional Arguments about Demon Whores/the Big One (feat. Slan from Berserk)

First, let’s explore Tolkien’s worldviews regarding orcs and goblins, including their function in his propaganda fantasy worlds. In a nutshell, he bastardizes the Vikings with a pre-fascist, neo-Victorian stamp, abandoning their indigenous elements and turning them into cops to colonize nature with blood libel, while also fearing its rapacious black, queer revenge: he loves and hates black dick.

Let’s unpack that, shall we?

A White Earth: Defending the Realm from Black Rape (Orc Dick or Otherwise)

White knights classically save damsels from black rape (dragons, ruffians, goblins, gay men, gods, and/or the witch-king’s giant mace); with Morgoth and Sauron, Tolkien frames it as a Numinous, planetary struggle. Even so, it’s one that shrinks, mise-en-abyme, into smaller versions of itself; i.e., the white knight(s) rescuing Mother Earth from total shadowy defilement, one smaller black cock at a time: “Just as Sauron concentrated his power in the One Ring, Morgoth dispersed his power into the very matter of Arda, thus the whole of Middle-earth was Morgoth’s Ring” (source: Morgoth’s Ring, 1993). It’s not really a stretch to see how Tolkien treats the wedding band as defiled by a black “finger” on an iron fist, nor how nature itself is the maiden for him to protect from dark corruption; i.e., Arda’s coochie threatened by a Pagan-Satanic Great Destroyer during blood libel.

Tolkien fetishizes power as “black”; canonizing Milton’s darkness visible (re: Volume Zero), said darkness could have been anything but he chose orcs and goblins/Jewish conspiracy, first and foremost. Though courtly and abstract, the notion likewise remains very apologetic towards Britain, abjecting imperial crimes (of pimping nature) onto a conveniently evil (and distant) supervillain (and said villain’s generals, lieutenants, and minions). To it, the context for Tolkien’s worldview is wholly abusive on a geopolitical refrain, one that bounces back, half-real, into canonical power fantasies executing blood libel sans irony against black rapists threatening the globe (to impregnate the white-owned womb of nature with non-white sperm).

This Shadow of Tolkien (and myth that he somehow “can’t” be racist) can be challenged, which we’ll get to. Unlike the status quo, our jokers, smokers, and midnight tokers use the language of danger and torture for iconoclastic funsies: made from clay to sing and dance, making wild rumpus, goblin-style. Blind faith is for suckers, something we cannot afford while being sucked on by capital’s dead labor (re: Marx). So do we play with these artificial things (dicks or otherwise), breaking the monopolies on display by giving their jester’s vice-character monologues added life through performative allegory and dialectical-material context: something to sell to children, regarding nature’s monstrous-feminine revenge (for having their existence be criminalized by the state and its in-groups)!

Cryptonymy’s all well and good. The problem is, the Numinous is a common canonical brothel pimping out Hell’s usual sluts in bigoted, blood-libel language (of rape and revenge); i.e., down in the dark brought to light to titillate the gentry with stories of exquisite torture, rape and death; re: Tolkien’s anti-Semitic dwarves, executing blood libel against orcs and goblins (the former appearing much more in LotR and the latter much more in The Hobbit): bat-like and big-mouthed, but also swart, savage, and sinister beings[3] occupying the black, demonic side of the settler argument that upholds Capitalist Realism, mid-abjection. They’ll get you, and your little dog, too!

“In caverns deep, where dark things sleep,” Tolkien pimps them out as thieves and whores, slavers and killers-for-hire, scapegoats to dance with during his monopolies of demonic poetry that—apart from overt sex and drugs—very much includes the psychosexual overtures of rock ‘n roll (and similar forms of music/theatre like heavy metal and jazz, which the Gothic embodies through golemesque puppetry’s darkness visible):

Crush, smack! Whip crack!
Smash, grab! Pinch, nab!
You go, my lad!
Ho, ho! my lad!

The black crack! the black crack!
The black crack! the black crack!
Down down to Goblin-town
Down down to Goblin-town
Down down to Goblin-town
You go, my lad!
Ho, ho! my lad! (Maury Laws’ “Down, Down to Goblin Town,” 1977).

It’s all rather… funky, isn’t it? People love monsters because they speak to our alienation and fetishization (thus lack of agency) under capital, which is precisely where we get our agency back (re: the whore’s revenge)!

Except, while calculated risk is a fun way to meet new playmates and regain control of darkness, Tolkien is a weird canonical nerd who canonized Milton’s camp. In doing so, he and his narrow, prescriptive, monomyth methods of playing with darkness were pointedly slumming in service to empire[4]; i.e., through jazzy LARPer refrains teasing the ghost of the counterfeit to further abjection by reinventing terrorism the state can punch down against/with: through prolific, Man-Box-style police violence, killing orcs and goblins to whitewash empire-in-decline/darkened by the Shadow of Pygmalion during the Cycle of Kings/Capitalism as demonic, animalistic and undead.

In truth, Rankin/Bass parroted much of this, and the kids of the ’70s, ’80s and beyond feared-loved it (walking the tightrope between inheritance anxiety and vaso vagal/fight-or-flight, but also dark demonic energies). Tolkien’s bigotry goes over their heads, but in some sense, he inherited the same values; i.e., through goblins and necromancy as drug-like, but also bigotries associated with them to sell canonical vampirism and goblins to the next generation; e.g., their signature greed, but also tendency to kidnap, rape and devour their prey/drink said prey’s blood. It’s a dogwhistle call-to-arms, then, defending capital from its own victims with its own victims; i.e., the self-appointed white, “righteous” hero devouring the black alien per Tolkien’s orcs-and-humans argument, its centrist refrain caging his prey behind an innocuous human mask (the sweet old man) that puts him and his on the side of Good and their victims—of nature-as-alien-vengeful-slave—on the side of Evil (which for the West/Global North is the East/Global South).

That’s what his maps and moral territories are, you see—undead prisons to enter and kill the inmates, moderacy decaying into fascism (when Imperialism comes home to empire), but enacting it behind gobstopper masks; re: state DARVO and obscurantism concealing in plain sight the ugly truth: cops are the criminals outlawing others in demonic language. Doing so to enrich the elite and their rights over workers and nature, class (culture and race) traitors pimp both groups as monstrous-feminine! They’re the bad servants, the backstabber charlatans sucking capital’s dick (and biting on nature’s neck) while flexing whatever credentials they can (e.g., Tolkien’s academic pedigree)!

I’d say there’s no way Tolkien can claim honest ignorance in good faith—not when he was a university professor who was an expert in his field—but doing so would overlook systemic issues in academia, as a whole; i.e., Tolkien was raised in a world that was built to coddle him and instill these pro-British, fuck-literally-everyone-else beliefs into him. Far easier to say is how a) there’s nothing moderate about abjecting the sins of empire onto a gay space wizard/Great Destroyer and his abortive offshoots, nor b) monarchs or genocide existing in perpetuity (signatures of Tolkien’s worlds extending his worldview inwards and outwards). Unlike the Neo-Gothic authors of several centuries previous, Tolkien actually believed a return to the pre-Renaissance past[5] would be a good thing. Like Hell it would!

To it, the usual fascist qualities apply to Tolkien’s world; e.g., the cult of machismo and heroic cult of death, weak/strong enemies, among others (re: Eco). Inside said world, he’s an indisputable god-pimp, punching down against nature as monstrous-feminine by policing it as vengeful property for the state. Being a medievalist, he pointedly does it through Divine Right; i.e., as a false preacher punching down with blood-libel, cops-and-victims vaudeville—literally medieval persecution arguments and superstitions (fear and dogma; e.g. the blood test from Carpenter’s The Thing remake) about blood—doing so in order to aggrandize/avenge his faulty and harmful idea of a better world that, since his death, has become a neoliberal power fantasy weaponizing gullible people (through desperation and convenience) all around the world: of orcs and goblins born evil, and white men (and token cops; e.g., Eowyn) endlessly killing them in all manner of stories and games, all to spill so-called “bad” blood and replace it with “good” blood while policing labor pursuant to profit. It’s barbarism in a dress—Macbeth tilting at Dunsinane but also Dracula in a priest’s robes (and other such dualities canonizing Gothic).

So are Tolkien’s orcs given dark skin, led by a dreaded faceless evil, conspicuously called “cannibals,” bred through sodomy and shadows, living under the cloak of night, and slain zombie-style by white saviors trumpeting neo-feudalism on repeat: capital cannibalizing those it calls “cannibals” while acting high-and-mighty about it. For it, anything “black” is too dumb to serve, eventually attacking a prescribed “better master” and being put down for not knowing “its place” (which unfolds differently per oppressed type; e.g., black men versus trans women, and various intersections): dead vermin walking!

The point, here, is how the orc’s and goblin’s undead function of evil labor/service behaves identically to their demonic function (and whose anisotropic qualities we’ll explore when examining Blxxd Bunny and SpongeBob). In turn, such stories are canonically ethnocentric garbage, apologizing for slavery by flaunting apocalypse; i.e., calling those most targeted by the state “the real slavers” during slave revolt having its dark, whorish, backstabber’s revenge against the goodly colonizers. It’s a white moderate’s false flag selling personal responsibility through inkblot Red Scare long after Tolkien had actually died (take note of the various commonalities Tolkien has with mask-off fascism, Nazism or otherwise).

Compared to Cameron’s clever repackaging of Heinlein in the shooter/sci-fi genre (and Metroidvania) after Vietnam, then, Tolkien’s refrain led to a virtually endless echo of whitewashed fantasy stories after WWII serving the same Pax Americana function into the neoliberal (videogame) era. He became a safe bet, his best-selling and incredibly famous stories a perfect revival (and whitewash) of Manifest Destiny transplanted Elsewhere. No one else comes close, fantasy-wise.

Worse, Tolkien’s systemic good/evil racism, inkblot (arbitrary) menace were granted the airy gentry of a WWI solider-turned-scholar (a made man, as it were). In short, Tolkien’s worlds apologized for racial conflict dressing up ethnocentric dogma as “mere games” (from tabletop to computer)—with the man, himself, becoming the dead-skin face mask for white supremacists to wear in the guise of good faith; e.g., Peter Thiel naming his economic ventures after Tolkien’s stories[6]. Whereas The Hobbit had plenty of Marxist potential (re: “Dragon Sickness,” 2014), Tolkien’s LotR was an opiate for the masses that simultaneously ushered in a return to monarchies[7], while also giving racism (and other bigotries) the perfect place to hide and wage war in broad daylight against Communism (which Tolkien very much despised in favor of Capitalism):

In doing so, the whole planet became an endless property dispute lionizing Divine Right, mid-canceled-future (re: the zombie apocalypse and ensuing wasteland scenarios teasing liberation and enslavement, afterwards; e.g., not just Tolkien’s orcs and goblins, but Fallout‘s ghouls to return to the earth as similar zombie fodder raped by Crusaders: cowboys, versus knights).

As such, Tolkien’s bad-faith, vampire/sanguine sodomy arguments abject any flaws at home onto the black alien/Veil as a temptation to resist, but also indulge in through rape and purity/abstinence arguments; i.e., the civilized man eating the cannibal-coded savage, mid-panic, during mirror and virgin/whore syndrome. While all monsters are dualistic, canon pushes state violence and blame/ritual suicide(-by-cop) towards workers by doubling and demonizing them as evil sons of whores, but also outright demon whores (re: Grendel and Grendel’s mother) tied to dark spectral forces; re: “a spectre is haunting Europe,” which Tolkien spearheads/scapegoats, Radcliffe-style, with a great many of “the help” gone bad under a single monolith’s all-consuming barbarian horde: orcs and goblins waving a planetary banner changing the ownership. Summon old nightmares (the vengeful dead slave as a zombie-vampire goblin); antagonize, put to work, banish nature through a pearl-clutching appeal to tradition, monomyth-style.

(source)

To that, Tolkien’s the Necromancer (what he calls Sauron), a decrepit leech obsessed with greatness and bleeding (Middle-)Earth dry while using DARVO and obscurantism to demonize Jews and other labor groups treated as “Jewish” in medieval, blood-libel language (e.g., queer people during Satanic Panic). Such village scapegoats include orcs and goblins as monstrous-feminine servants of the vague, faceless Dark Lord (and backstabbers of the West), but also dwarves as greedier than humans and prone to greed of a Zionist[8] sort (also backstabbers, but to a lesser [thus more redeemable] degree; e.g., over pettier squabbles of moneylending and property disputes):

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) himself had some controversial opinions about at least one race of Middle Earth, writing that his Dwarves were “like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations.” In a separate interview, he elaborated on this theme, noting that “the Dwarves of course are quite obviously—couldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews?” (source: Matthew Wills’ “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Jewish Dwarves,” 2022).

It’s the dialectic of the alien, hard at work for the state during the abjection process; i.e., Tolkien playing with blood libel to wage yet-another witch hunt chasing state rape and revenge called “goblin,” fascism waiting to decay into itself (often in token forms; e.g., Gimli is a dwarvish cop) through a contemporary viewpoint: Lovecraft, on the other side of the pond, and his weird, pulpy notion of “horror in clay” (from “Call of Cthulhu,” 1928); re: creating status-quo evils to represent the state’s repressed colonialism/abject juridical process (the state of exception) while its power center is rotting/falling apart. Such is Zombie-Vampire Capitalism, making whatever enemy the state needs out of darkness visible canonized.

Synchronistic of the bigoted American, then, the old Brit was a Nazi in spirit, if not in professed closeness to their core values. Simply put, he gave voice to such police dialogs, his own brand of courtly love a canonical monster-fucking approach killing countless orcs and goblins bourne from the ground; i.e., as endemic to his essentialized moral geography being canonically game-like. I can’t really stress this enough, so here’s me stressing it as much as I possibly can (from Volume Zero):

To this, Tolkien’s refrain [the High Fantasy treasure map, exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] has led to the endless essentializing of war as gentrified through the fantasy mode [e.g., Rings of Power, 2023] but also its science fiction and horror parallels [which we’ll unpack during the “camp map” vis-à-vis Cameron’s refrain: the shooter, of course, but specifically the Metroidvania]. Tolkien’s magnetic, “chaste” warmongering leaves out the psychosexual horrors of war or valorizes them through the slaughter of abjected foes[9], requiring great effort from past writers like Ursula Le Guin to break away from Tolkien’s ghost, thus his trees and pastoral village recruitment antics and moderately xenophobic [racist] war stories. As these are copied-and-pasted along the shared counterfeit, they operate like a formula whose canonical replication centers around the profit motive; in turn, this becomes historical-material—e.g., D&D and its endless official/homebrew campaigns and dungeons—but also the “warcraft[10]” of the enterprising white, cis-het young men of an early ’90s company, suitably titled Blizzard [whose sexist bullshit as a company we’ll discuss much more in Volumes Two and Three]—built entirely around racial conflict [thus endless war and rape] as set into motion by Tolkien himself, whose own orcs are green-skinned, debatably anti-Semitic/cannibalistic savages whose name, “orc,” is Old Norse [from Beowulf’s orcnēas[11]] for “demon”; i.e., functional zombies in the state of exception that heroes invade to kill for the state through parallel legends weaving in and out of fiction and into real life: there and back again not once, but ad infinitum. If these “zombies” aren’t orcs, then they’re spiders[12] or some other stigma animal/vermin-type pest entity who must be crushed by the forces of good in personified forms; e.g., the Drow as “chaotic evil” spider people [exhibit 41b] who threaten nature as afflicted with the same problematic idea of good vs evil as canonically Biblical [versus Milton’s own accidental camping of these pastoral devices through Satanic war].

Simply put, Tolkien’s hopelessly academic view of nature is whitewashed, High Fantasy copaganda—a British tree huggers’ biased loving of the idealized pastoral/picturesque as threatened by outsiders ruining the scene: the map of empire as sacred. It’s a colonizer’s cartoonishly basic aesthetic that demonizes, thus alienates darkness but also death, decomposers and natural predators [stigma animals] as part of nature; i.e., as evil scapegoats tied to wicked, unnatural places, archaic wombs and dark magic—necromancers, but also their fortress lairs:

At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people [emphasis: me]. Everything seemed gloomy, for the weather that day had taken a nasty turn [source].

These kinds of Gothic castles were clearly known to Tolkien, though he didn’t focus on them. In The Hobbit, they’re mentioned hardly at all [the word “castle” is used only once in the book]—sidestepped by Tolkien until it comes time to trot out Sauron [also known as the Necromancer] as the unironically Satanic threat to Tolkien’s “new Eden”: Britain by another name, as built by Tolkien’s easily ludologized, High Fantasy scheme[13].

The displacement of British industrialization and slavery is made clear by examining the real-world inspiration for Mordor and Tolkien’s own experiences elsewhere: “the industrial Black Country of the English Midlands, and by his time fighting in the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War” [source: Wikipedia]. Of the former Midlands, Jonathan Wilkins writes, “He based the description of Mordor, home to the evil Lord Sauron, on the Black Country, a region of Birmingham which was heavily polluted by iron foundries, coal mines and steel mills due to the Industrial Revolution. The air in it was so thick with smog and dust it was difficult to breathe and may contribute to the way local people speak today – the infamous Brummie accent” [source: “Birmingham Sites that Inspired Tolkien,” 2020]. Tolkien’s love for home pastoralizes the colonial element by abjecting its theatrical “soot” onto a fictional elsewhere. Places like the Shire and Lothlórien were always green and good and totally “never did a genocide” to get where they are; by comparison, the orcs threatening their naturalized goodness are the colonizers who did all of the bad things. It’s DARVO through British exceptionalism (source).

The game is canonization; re: Tolkien took Milton’s Paradise and drained it of its critical bite. “Evil,” in his hands, doesn’t critique the state by destabilizing and subverting it, but merely serves to maintain the status quo in perpetuity!

No matter how he might otherwise pretend, then, Tolkien’s work is wedded to the Middle Ages and allegory as canonical; the Dark Lord is Tolkien and the goblins his children precisely because he made dark war possible using them—i.e., in ways that long outlived Hitler’s wildest dreams: sucking on the planet’s blood, then blaming it on spiders, goblins and black knights! Oh, my!

(artist: John How Anger)

Not to sell Hilter’s propaganda short, but Tolkien’s copaganda stabilized and gentrified war against evil tied to nature, thus the world and its workers falling on the wrong side of the tracks. Whereas we can present evil as human and delicious, mid-liminal-expression[14], Tolkien only uses the goblin to police (thus rape) others with. It is not played with to confirm the veracity of something under suspicion, but to enforce state rule through weak/strong and black/white binaries, per Capitalist Realism!

Furthermore, Tolkien took this problematic upbringing and turned it into a warrior’s place for bad BDSM, which sure enough, sits alongside healthier forms using the same aesthetic; re: (from Volume One):

In short, Tolkien relied on the vampire legend—but also Gothic castles, BDSM language and harmful arrangements of unequal power (rings and collars)—to dominate nature and those within it. Written in defense of a divided nature in good and evil animal forms, Tolkien’s war stories view the vampire a kind of parasite praying upon the conspicuously vulnerable inside Cartesian dialogs; i.e., both in raw animal terms with Shelob the spider as part of “evil nature,” but also magical leeches like Sauron, whose ghastly projections have become wholly divorced from “good nature” inside dark, undead fortresses that harvest all good, living things from the land (whitewashing Britain’s analogs in the process). Anything else is functionally “dead” (sanctioned for state execution) by virtue of collective punishment. In doing so, Tolkien abjects death as a vital function of nature, but also fascism as a vital function of Capitalism in relation to nature as preyed upon by those behind his undead/animalistic scapegoats: the West. […]

Tolkien wasn’t just allergic to allegory and sex; he policed them greatly in service of empire. His evils are simplistic, unironically dated and vague, and he has a stubborn clumsiness when applying them to his worlds that suggests a very closed-minded way of thinking about his world and ours in BDSM terms. It’s certainly no secret that Tolkien eventually decided to place the lion’s share of the blame on people more so than material conditions or Capitalism and nation-states. He also makes the Ring and then melts it, trying to suggest that everything is somehow “solved”—that “Isildur’s Bane” is somehow to blame for the waning strength of men in the face of rarefied greed; i.e., the dragon sickness of the gold from The Hobbit having been turned into a simple dissociative trinket that weighs on “all men” to the same degree. He seems to understand how rings function as poetic devices while paradoxically lending them a bit too much credence; vertical power is a tremendously corrupting force, but you don’t have to essentialize it, nor reduce it to a shapeless male darkness that employs throwaway female demons and does away with overt BDSM language and, yes, ironic rape fantasies:

(artist: Owusyr Art)

BDSM isn’t just where power is located/stored (e.g., inside the One Ring or Sauron’s tower), but instructions for its use within assigned positions, including rape fantasies as a set of instructions given to the dom by the sub issuing various paradoxical commands: the civilized “princess” and the barbaric “invader” as roles to play with in animalistic ways (e.g., the “breeding”/captive fantasy) that expose and interrogate power as a device of negotiation towards better working conditions and healing from the deep traumas that emerge from settler-colonial violence and heteronormative enforcement. Material conditions play an important role in historical materialism, but power is largely about perception, which cannot simply be destroyed; it must change within society. The catharsis offered by iconoclastic roleplay grants appreciative irony amid Gothic counterculture as surviving under Capitalism. These forms of roleplay aren’t just completely alien to Tolkien, but policed and denied through his own incessant prescription of orcish demon lovers (and Dark Lords); i.e. bad BDSM as a harmful arrangement of power that introduces praxial inertia into the equation. While power can’t be destroyed as we just said, it can become unthinkable according to ways that challenge the usual runs of the mill. Tolkien and Radcliffe have that very much in common, making anything outside of their worldview as shapeless, dark and unthinkable: the incessant, utterly British fear of the outside felt within their own borders, castles, heroes, etc, as hopelessly forged and ever-present.

[…] Tolkien’s origin myths were entirely unoriginal, exhibiting a very narrow, profoundly inadequate idea of what BDSM even was: officers and batmen; i.e., a British officer and his dutiful servant, exemplified by Tolkien’s Samwise the Brave helping his fairly clueless master time and time again out of a bind. It is BDSM, but echoes the British castle of the Imperial Core as something to carry out into the battlefield while enduring Tolkien’s (fairly vanilla) rape fantasies and childish dreams of captivity with which to (dis)empower the sub as male; e.g., Frodo being whipped and beaten in the orc slaver’s tower (the torture dungeons in Mordor conspicuously full of the British tools of torture used by the colonized reimagined; i.e., during the myth of a dark, savage continent populated by evil, violent “children”). By displacing these tools off onto a dark “other” world beyond the land of plenty and light, Tolkien is scrubbing his own and blaming the colonized in the same breath). As a male benefactor of British colonialism, he fixates on faraway war as the exclusive site of power abuse exacted upon white men, ranking their abuse above everyone else (women, genderqueer people and ethnic minorities) and everywhere else (military urbanism). For him, these other things simply don’t exist; abject copies of them do, but their sexuality is largely abandoned inside a chaste, gentlemanly medieval that forces them to address trauma as men were (and are) commonly taught: through lethal force with killing weapons designed purely for harm against state enemies (source).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In turn, we Galatea reverse abjection through our own whorish, xenophilic scapegoat language and ironic rape fantasies (acting out Owusyr’s script in our heads, but not to prey on others); i.e., shapeless darkness given shape (cocks or otherwise) and healing from rape by using clay-like things, monster-fucking theatre, and blood libel’s black-magic poetics (with “black” marking slaves per the settler argument; e.g., genitals[15], left): on our Aegis’s danger disco, camping the same infernal concentric territories by occupying and subverting them, then awakening and mobilizing ourselves through the paradoxical reclamation of state-demonized forms taken knowingly into ourselves (above).

The path to universal liberation starts by building trust through social-sexual exchanges that most will prescribe to, in some shape or form. This means monster sex pointing to state alienation and worker liberation through the same pathways! You are what you eat, then, and in medieval language, eating and fucking is a fine line! So is normal/abnormal, per the abjection process and those straddling it; re: “black” = “alien” as something to reunite with workers when fucking the alien; i.e., as a matter of psychosexual ritual. Tolkien’s stories are ritual, and only serve to whitewash genocide and prolong its historical materialism through bourgeois praxis; ours do not—seeking to overcome systemic, generational harm by shrinking any desire to divide and colonize nature (synthesized by those who have differing degrees of privilege and oppression; e.g., white women and black men understanding each other’s rape, not ranking it; i.e., both experience pain that is, to some degree, alien to the other side, and found through a special-and-constant middle ground: imagination).

I want to unpack some of these ideas, next; i.e., encroaching upon uncomfortable territories that Tolkien could only penetrate and purge, with Pagan cremation, and which we divinate through acid Communism (towards the end of the section). Then we’ll consider doing it ourselves, minus the bigotry and genocide!

Trouble in Paradise: Fantasizing about Black Monster Dick (feat. acid Communism)

Black dick is forbidden. Iconoclastic monster-fucking doubles state dogma through forbidden love as a postcolonial device reclaiming terror language; i.e., black dicks (and other genitals, bodies) attached to various taboos; e.g., rape, cannibalism, and “sodomy” normally synonymized with us, and which we camp through sex—especially monstrous, interracial sex during blood libel and other persecutory language—as the most regulated device there is (often through a neo-medieval proximity with penetration, medieval acumen[16] and interracial threats of “torture” [through terror language subverted with porn, but also censored bodily functions like salivation, consumption and digestion, flatulence, menstruation, defecation, regurgitation or male/female ejaculation[17], sexual responses, crying and memento mori gore dissecting the human condition through closely monitored, physiological responses bearing a strong social element, mid-abjection).

Our focus is white-on-black sex, including white bodies fantasizing about black dick but also ourselves designated as “black” regardless of appearance (which expands to green, purple, or any non-white, thus non-human color of stigma; ergo, “black dick” = “green dick”). This includes Tolkien, black monster dick living rent-free in his forever-schoolboy brain. Indeed, Tolkien loves the black dick, needs it for his world to function through his weapons; i.e., so black and big and/or naughty it’s illegal, and policed by state forms; re: Beater and Biter for fucking goblins, which they subvert, David-Bowie-style! We stewards of nature fight for nature as normally raped by Tolkien—people, but also their pets, the environment, everything. Do it, if not for us, then for kitty! All life is precious, both we human goblins and our non-human counterparts; e.g., my cat, the laundry gremlin:

But if you do it for you, remember that rebellion and struggle, however grave, should be fun because there is no afterlife, only this one; i.e., fucking not just to metal, but any fun music when walking away from Omelas while inside it/the infernal concentric pattern; e.g., Shin Hae Chul’s “To You” (1991): “We’re doing it, babe! We’re doing Communism!” Cue the gay rainbows, cheesy music, and multicolor creampies (the joy of cryptomimesis)! The brave do live forever!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Black rainbows, darkness visible—rebellion relies on emotional appeals and propaganda to work! Furthermore, never trust a philistine because liberation needs paradox; survival is victory and that victory starts with making life something to live for/celebrate in the moment, mid-incarceration (the fag always starts in the closet, even if that closet is society caging someone who’s out)!

So while capital routinely puts a price on the things it steals from, there’s value in all forms of labor in ways they can’t monopolize; i.e., regarding counterterror reclaimed from state fanaticism/double agents through our own curious deceptions. Spectres of Marx, our disco-in-disguise/postpunk often hides in plain sight. Any exchange gives and takes, the usual monopolies threatened by their own daily operations’ cryptonymy mingling with ours, each going hard to upend the other’s attempts. The point isn’t “final victory” in our lifetimes (which Tolkien pushed for), but freedom through said expression; re: the freeness of our minds[18] guiding our actions, however seemingly futile they are, towards a better viewing of things; i.e., those things treated like goblins as Tolkien does, emasculating the “black” side of nature (cocks or otherwise) to stall praxial catharsis through Beowulf-grade inertia!

Sex is expected by capital, but demonized as a common labor form (of terror) that exchanges between functionally white and black workers. By dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit and—just as often, embodying it through demonic self-expression becoming an informed, educated choice versus a desperate last stand—we make ourselves less afraid and more informed, hence prone to making friends with the other demonized groups’ Venn Diagram of persecution networks; i.e., onstage and off, goblins befriending elves to punch up, and real-life consumers identifying with that principle of disparate unity in ways Tolkien always avoided! He’s a monarchist who hates rabble-rousers. For him, then, the only good orc is a dead orc (re: Rearick)—the always-scapegoat in the same-old Omelas refrain; i.e., they “can’t” be sexy and must always be killed (or replaced with something else that serves the same role; e.g., the Drow).

(artist: Danny-Green)

Nothing scares the elite more than intersectional solidarity, which Tolkien’s ilk behind the curtain try to monopolize through Platonic, shadowy echoes of Beowulf and Pygmalion-grade tokenization; i.e., triangulating token fears through rape, engendering monomyth assimilation/divide-and-conquer copaganda pitting the middle class against the underclass and its armies of state-described “chaotic evil”; re: on the Black Veil, a dark leader and their fantastic generals (e.g., He-Man or Myth: the Fallen Lords) commanding the orcs and goblins that make up a garden-variety horde (versus the undead, chaos demons, or some other evil race). Kill an orc or a witch, get Rosie Cotton for a tradwife (the conservative promise of sex); kill a general whore, get a castle and a princess to defend from future black-dick revenge (the prince also tempted with black pussy on the same Aegis):

(artist: Ted Nasmit)

Handing out rewards is the pimp’s job, which Tolkien does through obligation, not enjoyment (e.g., Arwen but also Eowyn, left). “Paradise” equals standard-issue fascism-defending-capital; upselling labor’s various “power targets,” Tolkien’s bad “demon BDSM” happens during orcs-and-goblins blood libel sexualizing state revenge in all the usual Neo-Gothic forms of abject courtly love: storming castles-in-the-flesh, sans irony during the usual mise-en-abyme‘s Ozymandian inspiration (the Promethean visitation of power). Faramir doesn’t get the blonde baddie without facing down an army of orcs (and she doesn’t get him without dueling the witch-king of Angmar). Prostitution is prostitution, which marriage legalizes through state force exercised against state enemies—Tolkien’s vampirism at work, feeding on orcs and goblins to enrich Whitey.

Context obviously matters, here, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with playing god, invoking Numinous “inkblots,” or regressing to kayfabe-style, bread-and-circus hauntologies whose medieval language and emotional turmoil express various forms of inequality and trauma through poetic (make-believe) hyphenations of sex and force (e.g., sensations of rape or divisions of power/dueling emotions, mid-psychomachy). Per Sarkeesian, I can even enjoy Tolkien’s worlds, while refusing to endorse their bigoted elements. Indeed, as a medievalist, myself, my dialectical-material scrutiny rescues the Gothic from Tolkien’s abject views (and tokenized fans), the latter reifying and policing the alien through fatal nostalgia/false claims of sovereignty. This includes orcs and goblins of my own design (more on that in a bit, exhibit 44a1b1a), but also recognizing through dialectical-material scrutiny those made by other workers, too (next page). Orcs and goblins are sexy as a matter of dialectical-material context; i.e., because genuine rebellion and subversive monsters are sexy! They were only ugly in Tolkien’s world because his worldviews demanded they be! “Who’s the savage, modern man!”

(art: Amber Harris)

Tolkien’s media is already colonized, and ACAB/ASAB. For Tolkien and those like him valorizing cops and the state, there’s always an in-group and an out-group to the calculated risk, thus a cop and a victim, a defender and an alien invader endemic to home needing its routine whitewash/genocide; i.e., a correct party and an incorrect party pursuant to the usual state mechanisms tokenizing Judas sell-outs. Funny how the incorrect side is literally most of the planet, highlighting capital raping the world by design. They act like they own it, monopolizing and raping it accordingly by unironically fucking monsters—all to decide who loves and who dies inside an inherently unequal and cruel system, one favoring white straight Christian men, who enjoy rules meant to favor them and punish others (through various double standards and preferential mistreatment).

Tolkien privatized nature by pimping orcs and goblins. To privatize nature, then, is to rape it as cheaply as possible; that’s all the state does, and its servants enforce that dominance through intolerance with impunity dressed up as liberal democracy and freedom. It’s a rigged game, the illusion of choice; cops don’t prevent rape, but legitimize it against those the system codes as bad, goblins or otherwise—i.e. in a hierarchy of values linked to physical attributes/accident of birth upholding the status quo; re: in accordance with the state’s monopolies/trifectas and the qualities of capital, whose “sickness” of greed Tolkien abjects onto dragons, but also goblins and dwarves as ultimately “more greedy” than good men, hence more deserving to die by the latter’s grimy hands. Rape does not preclude death; it engenders it, disempowering state victims to harm them for profit.

Such is Capitalism, which Tolkien’s stories illustrate in small: “Kill the pig! Spill its blood!” In the centrist refrain, there are no moral actions, only moral teams; capital, Tolkien demonstrates, assigns portions of the world to die, en masse—piled and burned in Viking-esque romances, yet also used by the West as a weapon of terror and means of disposing the useless, dishonorable dead[19a] (as the Nazis did, in their death camps): burn them before they defile good nature with their black dicks.

In his darkest dreams, then, Tolkien is the open rapist he projects so nakedly onto others—the banal spectre of Christopher Columbus or Cromwell conducting genocide inside the Imperial Core and on its frontiers/satellites. Sublimating unironic monster sex—namely that of nature-as-whore through monomythic language—black rape and racialized territorial conflict are endemic to Tolkien’s worlds, armies and offshoots (re: D&D and pretty much every RPG in existence), making them excellent models for capital and its ideologies literally “at play”: a white-moderate, “woe is me” genocide fantasy—one populated with bastardized lore and languages (literal palingenesis, another fascist trick)—and based on slumming and tokenism, the world is always something to farm, thus harm[19b].

This is what I meant when I said Tolkien gentrified war. For him, nature is a virgin/whore to divide along the same cartographic lines; i.e., abusing the usual terror language/medieval courtship of slaying dragons (and/or orcs and goblins); i.e., in psychosexual language to sodomize the Earth and pin said crimes onto others (re: “good” nature corrupted by “bad” nature). For him—and I really can’t stress this enough—the only good goblin whore is a dead goblin whore. In turn, his medieval shorthand outlines capital-as-hyperobject; i.e., the planet as “giant white ass” for Tolkien’s good guys to save from “giant black dick,” but also—per the usual hypocrisies love-hating anything monstrous-feminine regardless of gender or sex, race or religion—Tolkien threatens with grim harvest; re: monster-fucking as a doomsday scenario to gaslight, gatekeep girlboss workers like Eowyn until they “sign up” (a neo-conservative precursor to Ellen Ripley and similar Amazons, out of Ancient Athens and into the present):

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Except Hell—along with the demonic, monster-fucking opera of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, and of monstrous-feminine heavy-metal poetry (thus rape and revenge fantasies during ludo-Gothic BDSM and its palliative-Numinous paradoxes)—is our domain to patrol, which the state can only try their damndest to monopolize, commodify and colonize. Often, this happens by pitting different marginalized “outsider” groups against themselves; re: tokenization; e.g., white women versus orcs, but also goblins versus dwarves (comparable to Arabs vs Jews). In turn, divide and conquer includes the medieval idiocy of marshaling armies to fight for kings to begin with. That’s what Tolkien’s refrain entails, its tokenism a trademark strategy the Allies (and Western powers after the war) use to rape the Global South to this day!

“Dwarves Are Not Heroes,” writes Rebecca Brackmann in 2010[20]; they’re Jewish stereotypes that, in hauntological forms, apply to any foe the state could hope or want to tokenize/rape. The same goes for orcs and goblins. Liberation and exploitation exist on the same stages, wherein we kill our darlings to escape the disastrous ways of thinking Tolkien canonized; i.e., his refrain orbiting around wealth acquisition through monomythic conquest, requiring anti-Semitic tropes (of theft and bad service, but also black rape) to work; re: as scapegoats of capital, these unworthy dwarf lords instigating larger conflicts by stealing the dragon’s gold out of revenge. Our responses occupy the same pornographic visual ambiguities, which ludo-Gothic BDSM and monster-fucking parse through dialectical-material scrutiny when playing with/as goblins (or any race you could possibly want)!

As my older books have already explored (re: block quotes), Tolkien’s BDSM is a ludic power fantasy used at other people’s expense, and generally in service to state bodies per Goldilocks Imperialism (re: “settler colonialism with more steps[21]“). Our ludo-Gothic power fantasies (which again, BDSM largely is) must camp those; i.e., taking the diminutive, abject yet sexually descriptive (shortstack) goblins and other demons of the underground back from old dorks like Tolkien canonizing BDSM. His bad data instructs harmful activities through police dogma; i.e., a fatal nostalgia fetishizing greed attached to racialized bugbears categorized, once again, as bad servants with black rapacious intentions (these “backstabbing Jews” only loyal to wicked masters/dark lords, stabbing their good masters in the back [often over money] or raping them from any direction). It’s a fantasy about black dicks being used to cuckold state power—making the powerful (and their servants, the middle class) only tighten their hold on said cocks! For Tolkien—and indeed the entire Western world—”backstabbing” equals “rape” as something to spread through rumor and canard (whose anti-Semitism became less about Jews, over time, and more about multi-ethnic racism and queerness); re: through the state’s white revenge against black dick (and other genitals, not shown here).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

By comparison, the whore’s revenge is to fuck whoever she wants, subverting those lies and, by extension, the entire bête noire (re: nature as gyn/ecological and monstrous-feminine, including black men). In doing so, she evokes a common fear of capital (white women fucking black men) that—while it historically evokes parental reactionary violence (re: the Wilmington massacre)—can counteract systemic intolerance/extortion while stymieing profit behind revolutionary cryptonymy’s usual buffers (and going beyond white cis women, to be clear). It’s still a rape fantasy thanks to dialectical-material offers, but one being consciously subverted by the actors involved; i.e., canonical interracial exchanges (which Tolkien’s orcs and goblins present as an unironic nightmare scenario) versus iconoclastic interracial porn. The latter isn’t merely forbidden, by Tolkien; it’s anathema—literally beyond his willingness to imagine! He was incapable of fucking at all, in his stories, let alone monster-fuck (which extended to non-sexual scenarios[22], below)!

(artist: Amber Harris)

Interracial sex is seditious outside state control, and even then it’s still a controlled substance; i.e., one chattelizing nature not just as alien whores, but vermin to exterminate on a ladder of preferential mistreatment. Whatever dalliances that occur through us pointedly offend intolerance, including the ladder of privilege and deserving-to-undeserving violence capital assigns its victims (a task that Tolkien excels at). On its rungs, even the lowliest imp serves a purpose: to be raped with irony or without. Rebellion is when the trash fucks back; our non-white elements and fantasies (about black dick and other traditional forms of rape borrowed from canonical language) rail against capital’s rigged, dare-I-say Faustian, bargains with Tolkien! We recode his rules to spite him, changing the outcomes when playing with such toys; i.e., by preventing holocaust and reversing abjection/the colonial binary’s terrorist/counterterrorist flow of power!

Our combinations corrupt the data to cryptonymically expand the mind, our “goblins'” love for gold (and big black dick/pussy—Medusa having either or both, above) a universal theatre device; i.e., whose camp diverts not just Tolkien’s unironic rape scenarios, but also the kinds of unchecked mammon known to the First and Second Gilded Ages (the same idea goes for orcs and hand-to-hand combat, but also their naturalized sexual aggression). By regressing to a half-real imaginary space-time where such things were formerly allowed—and once-entered again through goblin-type forays beyond Tolkien—we can “swashbuckle” not just with terror and violence during the cryptonymy process, but things controlled through violence; e.g., money and drug use (or drug-like things, which monsters are), which workers safely play with during monster-fucking: to interrogate state arrangements and negotiate towards worker-friendly versions/mutual exchange!

For every theatrical double, there is always an earthly equivalent being treated the same; if we can subvert that at the root of the problem—changing how one side views and treats the other per exchange—we can synthesize good praxis on a wider scale; i.e., as a countercultural movement that celebrates white-on-black love over space and time (of any configuration you could imagine, not just cis-het white girls and black men; e.g., goblins and orcs among themselves, demons and maidens crossing the isle/red line, and so on). Thanks to actual or imagined abuse during criminogenic conditions, many white women are afraid of black men/non-white people (and other minorities treated as “non-white,” per the settler argument); and vice versa, those groups fear white women for having power over them.

That’s the whole point of monster-fucking and ironic fetishization—to camp canon by facing these fears and exposing their ridiculous, alienating qualities alongside uneven socio-material conditions that need to change. The dick shouldn’t scare us; the state’s ability to divide us using it should! “Let Jesus, fuck you!”

(artist: Just Some Noob)

So long as we fear ourselves, the state can divide and destroy us any way it likes. And while opposites often attract, revolution always happens in opposition to state proponents; it likewise needs solidarity—however chimeric—or state power will sever rebellious factions from themselves while fostering non-rebellious ones, then pimp nature as monstrous-feminine whore (afraid of giant black cock during the whore’s paradox; e.g., the nun trapped between salvation and sin, above) all over again!

(artist: NGArt7)

To combat or enable rape, the Gothic works through blood libel, but also cannibalism, adultery and suicide (all cardinal sins); i.e., as equally taboo fears, during the abjection process; e.g., gut reactions, impulsiveness, affairs of the heart, burning passions and chilling fears, etc. The iconoclastic idea is to excite these to control and understand them through playing at dogma to reverse abjection; i.e., camping the canon, thereby emulating persecution to liberate ourselves from fear (through our bodies) as a state weapon. Instead, it can become ours, going where power is to subvert bigoted stereotypes with; i.e., at any point in which relationships unfold (with black women being treated as more sexually aggressive and experienced/seductive than white women[23] but also fetishized differently than them, for example—a quality that extends not just to orcs and goblins, but exotic queens of an imaginary past, above):

(artist: Just Some Noob)

So while exploitation and liberation exist in the same space, the process of abjection (us-versus-them) must be occupied by workers who consciously subvert its materials to reverse harmful boundaries; i.e., generally in alien nostalgic language regarding sex and force. The idea is to cross state boundaries to go into alien spheres, then rehumanize demonized peoples with demonic language (dicks or otherwise). Such synthesis remains uneven, of course, and concerns relative privilege and oppression, mid-courtship.

All the same, Gothic Communism hugs Medusa through fantasy to find similarity amid difference, among the winding threads; i.e., in ways that push towards universal liberation inside capital. Medusa is classically “rape-proof,” then, teaching others not to harm her (thus themselves) through psychosexual martyrdom facing state condemnation colonizing its own populations with its own populations. We must fuck back, using state terror weapons during liminal expression as, often enough, pornographic (e.g., sodomy and interracial sex, below):

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Such resistance is always violent, to some extent; i.e., like goblins and their own mini-demon counterterror shenanigans, capital cannot be defeated by exclusively conventional means, but through gradual transition away from itself and towards a post-scarcity world; re: using violence during mirror syndrome, our cryptonymy matching Tolkien’s, measure for measure. Gothic Communism is holistic, in that respect, but prides itself in subverting the state’s usual monomythic propaganda (re: Beowulf and the masculine lethal force enjoyed by Tolkien’s mostly-male, non-teenage heroes cutting orcs and goblins, but also hags, whores and evil women, to bits through their version of courtly love); i.e., from any direction, front or back (above), turned anisotropically on its head—monsters but also coveted resources, like sex and drugs. Again, the Gothic values violating pre-conceived boundaries (that further abjection) to generate new ones in similar stories, often centered around monster fucking as “violent.” This includes camping stories like Tolkien’s, giving us tremendous latitude.

Under capital and its qualities, “black” is always abject—is something to view and treat differently than “white”; Tolkien’s stories—of world war and token-yet-racial police violence—imply a black planet raped away from white purity by vengeful dark forces. By equating holistic slave liberation (re: Jews and whores, white women and black men) with total destruction of the Capitalocene (state shift), it has an almost drug-like berserker rage to it (of blind faith, if not drugs, given Tolkien’s Christianizing of the Viking lifestyle): be a man and kill the orc, or the orc will kill you and your whole family before burning your home to the ground! Among these rape-fantasy qualities, then, there’s a drugged element to explore when camping Tolkien.

United we stand, divided we fall; assimilation is poor stewardship of the natural world (which many Indigenous groups did, out of desperation). In turn, praxial synthesis happens through the intersectional solidarity of class, culture and race avoiding normativity and assimilation; e.g., Afronormativity, Hoteps and separatism; i.e., by working not just with what we know, but what we imagine tied to what we’ve lost and try to regain through the rememory process as—sure enough—tied to drug therapy, sex, and artwork often going hand-in-hand:

(artist: NGArt7)

This brings us to acid Communism. The iconoclastic idea of the orc or the goblin speaks to Fisher’s acid Communism, used by me and my friends, but also all peoples to work through demon poetics comparable to the orc or the goblin—i.e., to liberate ourselves through iconoclastic art tied to nature-as-monstrous-feminine, monster-fucking a drug-like activity that broadens our capacity for empathy inside uneven persecution networks; e.g., stoner white girls taking big black dick (slaves of different kinds unifying against capital; re: Zinn) while under the influence to promote universal tolerance, acceptance and emancipation from state myopias:

Acid communism is about ways of imagining a world after capitalist realism, and for Fisher, one of the ways to escape this reality is psychoactive drugs. The programme of acid communism is not to condone psychoactive drug use, but as an example this activity captures the philosophy of acid communism excellently.

To imagine new futures, we have to find ways to break out of our present myopia. Fisher’s acid communism is unique primarily for placing this goal above all others. […] The future has been cancelled because we are unable to imagine anything other than the present. To invent the future, to escape our myopia, we have to go beyond the present bounds of our imagination. This is acid communism (source: Stuart Mill’s “What Is Acid Communism?” 2019).

This freedom to express with forbidden materials contributes to the whore’s revenge, such monster-fucking as Harmony’s tearing down state boundaries during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., to form healthier ones for workers than Tolkien dared, much how tanking profit more broadly does except through our actions witnessed by others: the “witch’s brew” cum macro-dosing inside Harmony’s cauldron-like pussy and stirred by a dark “spoon” (a big “fuck you” not just to Tolkien, but Francis Bacon)! It’s not sexy because it’s abject, but because it showcases mutual consent with fear while subverting state forms of paradise-in-peril (the damsel-in-distress). Mutual consent is sexy as something to illustrate, during various labor exchanges—especially when accepted by one side squeezing the other (regardless of color[24] or size) into their tight little openings: something to watch (voyeurism) and show off (exhibitionism)!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Camp is when we refuse to kill each other and choose to make love, instead. So don’t fear black dick, like Tolkien does, and fetish unironic harm and death (which just so happens to be another fascist feather in his cap[25]); be bold, like Harmony and I (who loves big dick)! Dive into Hell, doing so to transform into more-human, less-alien but still-fetishized subjects of power taking said power back while fucking monsters you treat as human; i.e., demonstrating empathy through white-on-black sex, but also through morphological statements that translate through sight, period; e.g., desire, insofar as Harmony spreads her legs to accept as much of the black monster dildo into her naughty white pussy (above). Such is her revenge, delighting such revelry in the face of those who might try to rob Harmony of any bodily autonomy because they “know better” than she does. As if! We decide, not SWERFs, and certainly not old imperial dinosaurs like Tolkien fetishizing our deaths and calling it “holy” (fetishizing objects of power as he does; e.g., swords, crowns and rings)!

We’ll unpack this even more, next.

Doing It, Ourselves: Humanizing Orcs and Goblins through Ironic Monster Sex

(artist: Just Some Noob)

Tolkien’s worst fear is white-on-black sex, whose policing canonizes unironic crusades/fetish charm offensive against nature as “black, corrupt” (the white man’s side-piece/side quest somewhere between the rules and fiction, above). This blood libel targets orcs and goblins (whose green skin is functionally “black,” per settler arguments), but also the white women they threaten with dark desire; i.e., in half-real exchanges that point to real-life versions intimated by imaginary ones, quotidian or Romantic; re, my prior exploration of rape during pornographic expression, in Volume One:

Just as liminality is expressed through conflict within thresholds and on the surface of things, pornography is generally controlled and fought over by those who wish to compel profit through binary sexuality versus those who want to liberate sex and gender from the state’s heteronormative constraints using Gothic expression. The emphasis of these exhibits is racialized; i.e., the gender binary as settler-colonial in ways that stress a racialized character from bodies of different skin colors (exhibits 32a and b), physical types (skinny vs fat, exhibit 32c) and monstrous forms of expression (vampires, exhibit 32d) that speak to Cartesian trauma as something to live with and prevent in the future.

Sex-coercive BDSM actually includes a gradient of impotence echoed in canonical porn pastiche; i.e., not just “knife dicks,” but someone “under” the state worker—a slave or token class traitor (which is basically a slave)—aping the blade: “prison sex” mentality. Under this mindset, an unwilling third can be conditioned to fuck another worker the way the state, thus the privileged worker, wants them to: according to the torturer’s canonical, alien-fetishistic worldview (and fatal promised glory, post-slaughter[26]) handed to them like a knife by the state, then synonymized with their biology as “all they are.” Insect politics.

(artist: Pancake Pornography)

One “card” in the state’s aforementioned “deck,” then, is racialized fetishization through traumatic penetration; i.e., the BBC as an internalized, “fattened” metaphor for phallic implements of state terror by black men against women (and other recipients) but classically white women. Originally on the plantations and colonies of the antebellum American South, the white man’s toxic view of the black man’s “giant animal cock” historically has become slave canon, post hoc—mythologized and repurposed to be turned on white women as a fearful prophecy fulfilled through sex-coercive rituals, then gargoyle-ish abstractions and extensions of those rituals: female gargoyles attacking perceptions of rape inside but also outside white populations, becoming vigilantes during interracial rape fantasies where they embody givers and receivers of sexual abuse in terrifying forms (state terror as a weapon). The cock needn’t literally be black, even—simply “too big” to be considered “white” within settler-colonial models, thus able to cause pain relative to traumatic penetration as something to threaten in oft-Gothic forms: being too big.

(artist: Slugbox) 

Echoes of nightly slave abuse, then, have survived into the present—first lauded by powerful men like Woodrow Wilson towards D. W. Griffith’s aforementioned “black, rebellious slaves violate white women” rape fantasy, The Birth of a Nation, followed by Giger’s xenomorph as a postcolonial “lawn jockey” later crystalized by 1980s’ porn hauntologies (below). Something for moderates to preserve and for reactionaries to return to, said porn becomes an unironic product to consume and embody through canonical praxis; and it is precisely this kind of pornography we must de facto synthesize into healthier forms of sex-positive education (counterterror):

(exhibit 32a: Artists: Victoria Paris and Sean Michaels. Since I’m writing about oppositional praxis as liminal expression [the execution of dialectical-material theory within thresholds] in porn pastiche, here’s a collage thereof: the black star athlete enjoying his forbidden prize, the white blonde in wifely silks. They kiss, then begin, him removing her panties and starting to fuck her. From every angle you can think of, the camera is curious and invasive, showing you things normally left to the fearful-fascinated imagination. Literally “sex with the lights on,” the makers have placed these sights behind a canonical paywall; i.e., in medieval language, it’s a Catholic “sale of indulgence” or return to canonical norms. Rejected by Martin Luther and Protestantism during the Iconoclasm, this only led to the Protestant work ethic and Puritanism through American labor during the 20^th century—work being holy and sold sex being unholy but profitable. In turn, this oscillating schism remained curiously in place under Reagan’s tenure, a high time of profitability during the latter-end of the “Golden Age of Porn.” VHS offered up a mass-produced, widely disseminated reprieve from one’s holy work through a taste of unholy decadence, laziness and unlawful carnal knowledge: blondie likes that big black dick, not only taking all of it like a champ but fucking back, power-bottom style.)

The above exhibit might seem “harmlessly” cliché, but Gothic canon treats “black” as synonymous with “aggressively violent and racist” according to repressed sexual desires in the 20th and 21st centuries; i.e., black men sleeping with white women as a common source of contention among reactionary white men (and their token subordinates) declaring a state of emergency spearheaded by foreign knife dicks: a crisis of unwanted black penetration against white women. While canonical porn is full of whitewashed appropriations like these, it reaches back to older conflicts in American history we must dig up and confront. Generally uglier things are proceeded by cryptonyms of various kinds, including sex; but sex is generally a part of the problem being discussed in psychosexual bedlam.

For example, before the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the Reconstruction-era town had black-owned businesses and politicians—until a white-supremacist mob retaliated with violence. This included a local racist editorial printing malicious slander against the black population, saying the latter were the rapists of white women (and implying that having “sheathed black daggers,” the modesty of white women was compromised forever):

Newspapers meanwhile spread claims that African Americans wanted political power so they could sleep with white women, and made up lies about a rape epidemic. When Alexander Manly, owner and editor of the Wilmington Daily Record, published an editorial questioning the rape allegations and suggesting that white women slept with black men of their own free will, it enraged the Democratic party and made him the target of a hate campaign (source: Toby Luckhurst’s “Wilmington 1898,” 2021).

Afterward, the town exploded into violence, resulting in the only successful domestic coup in American history. The massacre included a machine gun-armed white mob targeting and killing people of color and their allies. Sound familiar? Kyle Rittenhouse and the Proud Boys are merely copycats in a long tradition of upholding racist violence in the United States. This is not a glitch, but the system defending itself through bad-faith arguments projecting state rape onto state victims. Any voice of the oppressed must occur through the same basic dialog—in short, because that’s where power is concerned, thus amounts to where people are already looking and surviving.

The blindness of such gazes can be undone through iconoclastic narratives that subvert rape; i.e. ironic or critical rape fantasies that remove the harmful capabilities of the knife dick as a settler-colonial tool. These aren’t always playful in an obvious sense. For instance, the Wilmington Massacre inspired Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Morrow of Tradition (1901), an Austen-style novel-of-manners that devolves into a horrible riot partway through due to escalating racial tensions inspired by a local white supremacist newspaper. This paradigm shift was codified— teased decades later, post-Civil Rights movement, by canonical ’80s wish fulfillment; i.e., of canonical American pornography as a widespread extension of unchecked systemic American racism. The general sentiment stems from Lost Cause, Jim Crow and white supremacy and extends into various future groups like the Proud Boys. This happens through canonical behaviors and sentiments; i.e., coded behaviors taught by porn as incredibly body-centric, but also divisive regarding nature as alien under Cartesian rule.

This brings us to a corporal threshold, one the elite—try as they might— cannot fully monopolize in demon BDSM linked to Satanic morphological expression; i.e., the body and its knife dick (or vagina dentata) as a poetic offshoot of a greater inhuman[27] presence; e.g., Medusa’s snakes, Lilith’s demons; Sauron’s orcs, the alien queen’s insect brood or Dagon’s spawn; Cain’s son Grendel, Dracula’s thralls, etc, that reproduce in non-heteronormative ways (sodomy effectively meaning “non-PIV sex”) to endlessly produce armies of invincible barbarians, which as “forces of darkness/nature-run-amok” (e.g., Alex Jones’ “gay frogs”) must be conquered by state champions during returning “hard times[28]” that demand the knife dick’s resumed employment (which promises a bloody harvest to enrich the state-in-decay to a former glorious position) [source].

Porn, as we’ll see, is a useful means of interrogating bigotry through campy forms subverting canonical ones; i.e., policing the “corporal threshold,” above, and  through canonical pornographic violence is what unironic pimps (thus men like Tolkien and his orcs and goblins) always do: control maidens[29] “for their own good,” while treating them like whores (often through doubles; e.g., Shelob): tempted by darkness vis-à-vis weak/strong barbarians threatening “Rome”—all to uphold the Christianized nuclear household/ordering of things, per a Protestant ethic (all the more ironic, given Tolkien was Catholic)!

Capitalism is like a bad parent and/or husband, then, one that naughty little girls must run away from and rebel in order to survive the usual abuses their actual/de facto parents inflict upon them. Like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, we take whatever bigotry moderates men like Tolkien expose during these exchanges and pull them, screaming like a mandragora, out of the ground! Not as vaudeville/a minstrel show, but calculated risk occupying the same stages and using the same darkness visible for campy reasons.

To break Capitalist Realism on yourselves, then, you must turn into sex objects of a theatrical sense; and to do that without harming yourselves or others, you must experiment with yourselves and others, “on the settlement.” Of course, rebellion often has a dysfunctional, exhausting character to it; and whatever we’re pumping—be it cum, blood, oil, drugs, money or power of some kind—this takes work under imperfect conditions complicated by capital defending itself. So do we hook each other up or hook up with each other to whatever degrees we’re able. That ability varies, from moment to moment.

Likewise, smaller simulations of class, culture and race war include battles inside/outside ourselves that attach to those fought on other registers. The less prone we are to attack others, the more we can solidarize, thus humanize/decolonize the harvest and its alien, hellish crop. Keeping with the drug-fueled metaphors of acid Communism, these crops take on a love-in-idleness character that—among orc and goblin bodies—mirrors older faerie ones we’ve already examined; re: Romantic Rose; i.e., a demonic “orchard” whose “violence” of exposed nudity is legitimate in state eyes, so long as they control nature as their whore to pimp, their harvest to dehumanize while raping nature for profit:

(artist: Romantic Rose)

Function determines function; agency is nudity through the whore’s paradox, projecting such power out into the world as something to humanize ourselves with, mid-duality and flow—as monsters to fuck for reasons different than the state’s own policing of whores, of orcs and goblins, of nature as black and alien. This includes when the skin is white (re: all beings treated as women [especially white women] are deemed “corruptible” by an enterprising status quo “counting chickens” per standard imperial practices).

So experiment! Free your mind and join every dimension by pulling this in that direction. Golems—and by extension goblins; i.e., as classic, shortstack, commonly green-skinned mischief-makers, but also whose punk culture/terrorism is decidedly fun (a firecracker)—are poetic placeholders we can hurt, but never harm while embodying sin as something to synthesize during oppositional praxis; i.e., they’re made to take it, and breathe life into dark forces for rebellious, Satanic purposes; re: goblins, witches, black magic, demon resurrection, drug use/acid Communism and interracial sex, etc, aiding the cryptonymy process for workers: forbidden sight during demonic sex and asexual rituals of pain/public nudism with a psychosexual aesthetic! Strange appetite, strange eyes! Defy God and Heaven! Learn what resonates in sex-positive ways and make that your drum to beat! Once introduced, they cannot police it—the brothel, per the whore’s paradox, becoming a place we can reclaim during liminal expression as never wholly acted on by one side; re: “how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyway.”

Life finds a way, as it were. So can workers become free, mid-paradox, to forge our own destinies; i.e., while identifying as we want to, and choose to spend time with those we care about. Even if the feelings don’t last, the intensity of a wild romance—wanting it so goddamn bad the baddie bucks back into you, below—is bound to make a lasting impression: something to ride out, however long it lasts! The whole point isn’t that you control it through pure domination, but working with others who have agency in a shared operation. Sex and romance likewise bear out social components that have their own asymmetrical elements, and whose parties will be treated differently by society under capital, at large! Understanding and appreciation, while you can, is prudent.

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Such chaos is often planned and playful—made by deliberately forming connections that might seem tangential and pointless, but in reality open up new vistas of reflection conducive to development as a whole (the state and its imperialism of theory atomizing thinkers until they no longer can); re: entitled, covetous, white cis-het men (and tokenized people in the Man Box) look at an orc or a goblin and see a “waifu,” whereas we look at them and see “rebels,” “punks” and sexual outlaws who punch up during the whore’s revenge; i.e., exploitation and liberation’s usual liminalities extending to blood libel through orcs and goblins: sex objects fighting back as dirty sex symbols.

To it, “black” is a state of “danger” because forbidden love not sanctioned by the state will be viewed and treated as “terrorist”; it’s not something we’re “supposed” to do, therefore exciting because it speaks to our true alien selves finding some sense of home where we’re treated as foreign, exotic, anathema—i.e., where our power is found by us and policed by the state, flirting with disaster in dualistic, liminal, ergodic and recursive forms! Such arrangements can take many different shapes, but generally reduce to one side of an arrangement being policed differently than another is; i.e., in fractally recursive/concentric formations, but who find similarity in the midst of police shadows assaulting us; re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, healing from rape during monster-fucking theatre: speaking to a desire for intimacy with those we love, yet feeling the classic Gothic push-pull under the presence of dialectical-material dispute and state overreach policing the grey areas of exchange.

(artist: Iron Dullahan)

Everyone loves the whore, for different reasons; everyone loves orcs and goblins as rebellious feisty whores speaking demonically through different dark desires, unequal exchange and radical transformation for or against the state’s monopoly (thus abuse) of such monstrous, violent terror language—e.g., Shrek’s wife, Fiona (next page), but also Harley Quinn* and Poison Ivy as famous bisexual icons (above [with a super-giant tree dick] and below) that, in the pornographer’s capable hands, speak through size difference, gender trouble, blood libel and interracial sex to reverse abjection (thus profit, rape); i.e., during monster-fucking theatre sitting between art and porn, onstage and off: “futa” and other such things for us, not for straight men fetishizing our identities to dominate us with. They rule not through respect and trust, but cruelty and fear dressed up as “love” and “protection.” “What a story, Marx!”

*A little goblin in her own right; i.e., someone who farts in front of the boys to a weaponized degree (“Harley Quinn Farts in the Batmobile,” 2017). At first, Batman tries to act tough, refusing to let Harley out. But the farts are so bad that eventually he concedes defeat! Huzzah!

(artists [top-left-to-bottom]: Ngmi, Amber Harris, and Iron Dullahan)

People—even ace people—relate through Gothic dialogs about sex. Sex-positive demons communicate cryptonymically through non-harmful pleasure and pain to illuminate harm caused by the state; i.e., the whore, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, must reclaim such devices normally used by the state causing harm: to police porn’s subversive, genderqueer elements is to deny GNC people (and other marginalized groups) any ability to a) speak out against their own exploitation where it normally occurs, and b) to their ability to normalize the reclamation of these devices in Gothic (wicked, perverted, reprobate) modes of expression helping workers connect (through hook-ups or otherwise). “You are determined!” Service tops and power bottoms make up much of this, but really any arrangement of power and its seeking you could dream of, their ensuing arguments wrecking the nuclear model (and state ideas of maidens and whores), mid-Amazonomachia (re: battle sex through kayfabe). “PUSSY DESTROYED” by goblin dynamite dick (camping the usual medieval poetic mergers of sex and siege warfare)!

“We camp canon because we must!” Whereas canonical Gothic furthers abjection through monomyth escapism courting the ghost of the counterfeit, Gothic Communism navigates the confusions and excitements that result to guide workers towards a better world; i.e., during a close encounter/brush with death in canonically bigoted phallic/vaginal forms standing in monolithically for the monstrous-feminine (often in Numinous forms; e.g., Pyramid Head, Medusa).

To break Capitalist Realism, then, is to encounter the abject and not die, but merely change/radicalize by realizing we’re looking into a mirror showing us our alien side waiting for reunion. It’s to fuck with black cocks and bodies partially on ourselves—seemingly for a moment but actually for all our yesterdays—to bridge liminality oscillating towards development; re: with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also the haunted house, Metroidvania noir or Western saloon’s danger disco and its cloak-and-danger theatricalities; i.e., though uncanny arrangements speaking to our mutual-if-idiosyncratic alienation and chance to reclaim our shared humanity through said demonizing theatre. It’s not a swan song but a siren song that has the listener not just hugging but fucking the alien while humanizing them!

To illustrate subversive labor action as it commonly occurs, then, I want to exhibit this complicated praxial reality and its descriptively sexual, culturally appreciative synthesis when planned and played out by workers making pornographic art in the real world; re: the creative successes of proletarian praxis;  i.e., through the goblin as a genderqueer force during ludo-Gothic BDSM, using acid Communism (and drug use/children’s cartoons) to fuck with Tolkien’s rigid (and sadly popular) anti-Semitic worldview—through the demonic spirit of creative rebellion/unruly slaves, which the goblin so easily represents; i.e., beyond Tolkien’s undead scapegoating of it (and subsequent hierarchy of values), his doing so to maintain imperial hegemony/Goldilocks Imperialism to put Whitey conveniently at or near the top (elves are what men want to be). Rebellion is a shady business, but one filled with galaxies and constellations, their “Big Bangs” lighting the way through darkness with darkness (dark matter)—one planetary castle at a time!

Note: As stated, this portion is a bit messy and holistic and that’s the point [re: ludo-Gothic BDSM and the spirit of play synthesizing praxis]. What we’re talking about here [darkness visible/forbidden sight] pertains to all demons, but these examples focus on goblins going beyond Tolkien’s narrow police use of them; i.e., through dehumanized agents reclaiming their humanity during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a shared, intersectional polity’s pedagogy of the oppressed. We’re all demonized differently by capital; fucking and even rape play are how we monsters relate to one another while being demonized unequally by the state. Anything I present here with my friends, then, I posit that you, yourselves, could generate among your friends; i.e., with furries, dragons, zombies, jinn, etc, or combination[s] of these separate modular elements to have the whore’s revenge. —Perse

How to Play with Goblins-as-Demons, Ourselves (to Have Our Revenge; feat. Bay, Blxxd Bunny, SpongeBob, and more)

(exhibit 44a1b1a: Illustration and outfit by Lucid-01; background, outfit alterations and character design by Persephone van der Waard. Genuine abuse can be subverted, happening through a controlled “call of the void”/calculated risk. Glenn the Goblin, for example, is a formerly anti-Semitic symbol that invades the pre-fascist Christian wardrobe to wickedly play around with the garments inside. In short, she’s taking them back, having her revenge through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s darkness visible. The source of play comes from symbolic, doubled tension; i.e., the metaplay of fan fiction’s paradox of pleasurable pain lying adjacent to perceived threats of harmful pain and its assorted legendarium. On the surface of the image, black is loaded in Western imagery with a variety of conflicting data: the threat of power as a destroying force, but also the color black as thoroughly dimorphized under Western thought; i.e., of presumed subservience [and misbehavior] for women under a perceived medievalized order of existence, the police state-of-affairs signified by black uniforms that hold punishment over those judged as good little girls and bad little girls who live under fear of rape as something to endure and avenge.

Just as canon is all according to design, so is my iconoclasm; i.e., Glenn—as a shapeshifter and Satanic atheist who isn’t much interested in being good, nor being a scapegoat—wants to have danger-disco fun through consent-non-consent by walking the tightrope. The idea is doll-like, undressing Glenn like a doll [implying a similar subversive element of control to the sub being undressed as such, instead of the heteronormative idea of intromission, coitus and creampie; i.e., “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!”]: in ways that beg the disco refrain as disarming of unironic harm within a Gothic, BDSM threshold; re: New Order’s “How does it feel, to treat me like you do?”

In Glenn’s case, the question is asked under informed consent; i.e., from two parties who know exactly what they want and are reveling inside the unique, delicious sensations as normally denied to us, under Capitalism: inside danger-disco torture dungeons! Glenn didn’t pick “her” clothes in the sense that she’s a cartoon, but rather did so as an extension of myself; i.e., I chose her to represent my desires: during the appreciative peril you see taking place. Just as I designed Glenn to shapeshift themselves—and me shapeshifting by proxy—the “goblin transformation” fantasy is me being tied up and threatened with “death”/a palliative Numinous.

To set ourselves free, we fags [and other aliens] use ludo-Gothic BDSM communicate through feelings of alienation, stigma, miracles, imprisonment, and exquisite torture, etc; i.e., the tremendously anguished cryptonymy of state boundaries, which we test by threatening them with our power as ultimately greater than any state: catharsis through “rape,” on the receiving end of something great, in control; e.g., “Should you choose to test my resolve in this matter, you will be facing a finality beyond your comprehension, and you will not be counting days, or months, or years, but millenniums in a place with no doors[30].” We wager in strict and gentle forms, but speak to moral trespasses that defy reason, blind our eyes, and steal our dreams through false versions of themselves. Reversing such polarities, we see through/with them while wearing blindfolds and weeping blood: to puzzle over these tactile seekings of “destruction” and temporary bondage during calculated risk as a psychosexual, “martyred” act of rebellion.

[artist: Lucid-01]

Latter-day uniforms, then, become similarly loaded with canonical connotations of torture, treachery and forbidden seduction as dimorphically gendered; i.e., the eliding of angelic patience with Radcliffe’s “black penitent” as a kind of xenophobic caricature of destruction that, under fascist/post-fascist conditions, takes on different meanings for beings perceived as “woman,” but also monstrous-feminine: the regressive in holy garbs, but also the queer BDSM subversive playing at the dark god for heretical reasons of Satanic apostacy and hellish delight. There is an undeniable link to trauma and imaginary history’s constant reinvention; the wearer could just as easily be a Christian missionary on the Oregon Trail or 1800s China, but also a ninja, gun hand or some other operative training in bondage, torture and murder that is nevertheless fetishized in the [classically] white cis-het fantasies of women [or men playing the “heroes” in these narratives]. So do we camp blood libel in ways Tolkien did not.

 

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

Like an action hero, we get stronger the less clothes we have on. Such things are torment mapped out and turned into strength, thriving in places the Straights couldn’t dare to dream; i.e., a mascot to illustrate that state dialogs only mirror ours and what we’re trying to say. To it, Glenn indicates of my voice—dancing on my enemies’ graves as a point of praxis [e.g., ribbing Rowling by existing despite her desire for me not to, above]. But any artistic movement isn’t solo; it’s a group exercise and takes a lot of planning to humanize those things normally demonized to serve police goals under state hegemonies. These invigilations of “brothel espionage” generally work inside capital, on different registers: me, the director/promoter and various people collaborating with me and what I invigilate. Teamwork makes the dream work!

[artists: Lucid-01 and Persephone van der Waard]

This planning can occur through Lucid and myself [above]. Or it can happen synchronistically through others; e.g., my partner, Bay Ryan, who normally identifies with the goblin through Gothic play, and which I’ve drawn as such [next page]. Celebrating my Satanic shortstack for their fuckable attitude and grit, I’ve created a spiritual companion to Glenn; i.e., one to play with our respective lost humanities by camping unironic blood libel, together [whose canonical forms we subvert as they happen around us].

Goblins, like golems, are made from clay or things treated like clay. Assembled by different practitioners, they are functionally “dead,” beforehand; i.e., loving inscribed in various occult symbols and clothes that—whatever meaning they once had—only currently have as much granted, post-resurrection, by the sorcerer! In playing with dogma to reverse the polarity of power and virtue/vice, workers can stand up and say as one, “We are not small, wicked, functionally black children[31] for functionally white cops to smash into paste; we have power to expose them in ways that subvert their bad-faith poetry and violence: our Aegis, reminding them of their own cruelty and hypocrisy!”

It’s something that goes beyond Glenn, of course; re: through real people like Bay! Being drawn as a goblin by me, Bay humanizes themselves through our relationship. In turn, I humanize myself in how I depict Bay as human; i.e., as they want to be seen, thus treated, while identifying with things capital treats as alien and worthless. They want to be valued as short, mischievous and fun, but also as persecuted in ways they overcome. Small and big at the same time, Bay’s an imp-like offshoot of a larger Cause, one melding struggle and fun, hence terrorist and party animal, punk and activist, skater and whore, orc and goblin, servant and delinquent, etc:

[model and artist: Bay and Persephone van der Waard]

The whole point, with Bay and I, is to work together to rescue the goblin; i.e., in a sex-positive way that remains sexually descriptive and culturally appreciative regarding Indigenous struggles married to Satanic panic, BDSM and prostitution arguments. Sex workers live and die by making their sex fun, naughty and—for our purposes—actively rebellious in service to workers and nature reclaiming the language of demonic slaves [sex classically being a slave’s work; e.g., that of women].

Except, no one wants to martyr themselves; making revolution fun helps the medicine go down, effectively fetishizing the Gothic without showing bigotry as such. Doing so requires informed labor exchanges, happening between workers who love doing this shit for free/at reduced cost; e.g., Bay and I, but also Harmony and others [exhibit 44a1b1b] having fun during praxial synthesis. Melding sex and war into something memorable, we use old demonic language to become a new way of framing and humanizing labor with. In the same token, we combat dated, pervasive stereotypes about whores, and non-white/queer people, etc, when capital antagonizes nature and puts it cheaply to work; i.e., through a dark revenge dynamic thwarting profit. Canonically occurring through state copaganda, the elite frame nature as a vengeful servant tragically “gone bad” [commonly depicted as lazy or cruel, then blamed during capital’s bust phase through blood libel argument]. We fight fire with fire, subverting state tools in duality.

Goblins are perfect for this—if not the actual aesthetic, then something comparable, during liminal expression; i.e., in a small, tight, mini-demonic package making trouble for those in power [true punk bashing the bully from a guerrilla’s small, disadvantaged position]! Keeping with acid Communism, this rebellion has a drug-like flavor to it; e.g., Black Sabbath’s “Faeries Wear Boots” [1970] suggesting such things as fictitious, but nonetheless making an impression while tied to drug-induced paranoia [the album’s namesake] and the shadow of the Vietnam War felt overseas, in England; i.e., as the birthplace of “Gothic” and heavy metal, alike, but prone to its own signature treating of activism/punk culture like “terrorism[32]” [re: Crawford, and the Gothic invention of terrorism]: “Yeah, fairies wear boots and you gotta believe me / Yeah, I saw it, I saw it, I tell you no lies” [source: Genius].

As Glenn demonstrates, the formerly problematic can be tipped away from its regressive, commercialized aspects—abjuring profit while keeping the medievalized, religious-tinged outer shell—but there will always be ontological tension within a broader dialogic interrogating whatever results transpire. Further fun can be made by chaining her to the pillar but having her grip it with her fingers. At a glance, she appears at the viewer’s disadvantage, but upon closer inspection is actually having the time of her life! She feels out of control, so she regains control during ludo-Gothic BDSM mired in stigma arguments she likewise can face and play with; i.e., a roleplay of false danger, loose morals and dungeon language haunted by overarching state abuse abstracted as such:

[artists: Lucid-01 and Persephone van der Waard] 

There’s a charged, stirring sense of improvised chaos, too. Glenn takes what’s on hand—the nun’s habit, the convenient pair of manacles next to the bed; the hot candlewax on her bare, muscled skin; her anachronistic pussy tattoo, In Hoc Signo Vinces [“In this sign thou shalt conquer”] and the massive white dildo—and runs wild with it. She’s not the hopeless impostor-victim, stricken with dysphoria or dysmorphia; these are abusive conditions to redeem through emergent play avenging nature by defending herself from the state through staged impropriety [re: the whore’s paradox/revenge enacted through nudity and exposure]. As such, Glenn at home in her shapeshifting[33] body and herself as “in flux” and at odds with the tyrannical past. Carefully rewriting her own destiny by throwing caution to the wind, she reclaims the prescribed terror instruments of colonial abuse in thrilling paradoxically ways; i.e., the thrill of ritualized violence, minus actual harm, and married to interracial sex [sex with goblins and non-goblins is interracial sex]. I’d say it’s a game where no one gets hurt, but what’s life without a little pain?

Furthermore, this goes beyond “just goblins,” tying them and other monsters [through workers and their exchanges] to a grander process of creation-under-pressure; i.e., one had between many models I’ve worked with, over the years, but also the broader assemblage and chaos for which all creatures of chaos [which goblins are] and Gothic Communism—through acid Communism—collectively speak to, in a highly meta sense. I want to quickly explore this process through one of my models, but also outline the kinds of socio-political, linguo-material elements that converge, mid-assemblage, to adumbrate Gothic Communism:

[artist: Blxxd Bunny]

Bunny is one such person I connected with, during this project; i.e., they’re ace and I’m not, but we can still work through those differences to speak to our collective emancipation: through the monstrous-femininity of the bare exposed whore [rawr]! The left image, for example, comes from a shoot they provided for one of my paintings of them. Compulsion isn’t strictly authoritative, but also encompasses the cathartic pursuit of things that feel good through pain[34] that speaks, in turn, regarding subconscious impulses; i.e., that cross consciously over into our world: from any one monster type and into bodies being the canvas for all of them, combined; e.g., I could easily paint Bunny as a goblin, despite having never done so—yet! Only time will tell!

Yet, the adage, “be careful what you wish for” applies to the sobering reality that harm is not historically-materially divided from pleasure, pain or power exchange; i.e., during social-sexual rituals where all of these things are distributed unevenly, dimorphically and abusively through fetish, kink and BDSM aesthetics. Bunny is my friend, and planning monsters around them and their labor informs my own; i.e., I care about them and often check in with them regarding what I work/feature Bunny on. Such things don’t exist in a vacuum, then—quite the opposite, they float in a more chimeric and chaotic sphere that interrelates imperfectly to produce wildly incongruous but seemingly perfect-for-each-other modulations and synthesis.

[artist: Ween]

This obviously goes beyond Bunny and I meeting at random—doing so similar to Harmony and myself—onto equally-random-but-no-less-special happenstance; e.g., Steven Hillenberg and the obscure ’90s band Ween [above]—the two fitting together like human genitals [themselves a byproduct of millions of years of unchecked evolution and its pressures, and resembling sea animals in their own right] to make something profoundly special unto itself: SpongeBob SquarePants[35].

Relationships, in general, operate as such; Communism relies on that to function, and SpongeBob—like any egregore you could dream of, not just goblins—is a product of the same chaos all poetry springs from: something to play with as children do [with Tolkien ethnocentrically comparing the goblins to children]. “Are ya ready, kids?” Things that remind you of that chaos, while delivering on it anyways, speak to the complicated and endlessly metamorphic/magical forces at work through Gothic Communism playing with darkness. This can be sexual—e.g., Cuwu and I once fucked to SpongeBob’s jellyfish rave—but includes a childlike element, as well; i.e., Cuwu only showed me SpongeBob because they loved it, themselves, and wanted to share its magic with me [and me—loving older cartoons like Ren & Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life (1991 and 1993)—delighted at the chance: to feel like a kid as an adult]!

To that, the best things in life [in terms of stimulation and jouissance] come with a dialectical-material element of risk—to love monsters, and each other as monsters, but realize back and forth, how such things are likewise tools for the state abusing us. There’s no way to avoid this, and it can seem a little scary. But without pursuing catharsis, you run the risk of being a slave not just to society’s polite norms, but their hidden, brutalizing ones, too: the snowy bridal gown and the black nun’s habit [or goblin dick, below] intimate the same systemic issues. If they wear a uniform, then it must mean something—with the uncanny possibility of their being a false option or replication that isn’t the intended function. The house of pain becomes, to some degree, ironic.

[artist: Blxxd Bunny]

Again, this can be sex-positive or coercive; it all boils down to dialectical-material context: what is the point of the costume within the piece in relation not to Capitalism, but its core, systemic values, etiology and symptoms [e.g., virgin/whore syndrome]? And more to our purposes, how can these be subverted within the paradox of cathartic, exquisite torture; i.e., in ways that don’t endorse or promote actual harm—thus canonical iterations of something as seemingly throwaway and performative as a nun’s outfit—but whose hauntological mask, costume or role to play brings one joy and other denied pleasures in parallel societies: lost histories and possible new worlds within the half-real fictions of Gothic poetics as de facto education. Blood libel, when camped, speaks to “sodomy” as canonically “unnatural,” vis-à-vis interracial sex. Yet, in looking at it, the images seems to speak, “Come and see, but also do; critique through experience as profound, intense, iconoclastic.” That’s Gothic Communism!

The ludic nature is, like a videogame, divorced from actual harm; the ritual is there, but not the dreaded result, allowing for instruction to occur through repeated, simulated experiences involving the same ingredients. While this can be for or against the state—with fascist parties like Tolkien embracing the heroic cult of death through the slaying of demons with codified arguments—the “slaying” of monsters, in sex-positive language, has a highly specific meaning and desired outcome: rape prevention and the disillusionment of systemic harm.

Within this broader network of opposition, then, denial becomes a powerful ironic device in relation to unironic doubles; i.e., the denial of polite restraint, of compunction and pleasure, but also the denial of correct sex—of orgasms and prescriptive harmful norms, including their forms of compelled restraint, abstinence, ignorance, protection, and penetration: the agency of who we play with and what we put into our demonic, genderqueer bodies [vaginal or anal[36], above or below]! It becomes not a source of sodomy and black fears, per the ghost of the counterfeit during abjection, but a place of new love/unknown pleasures reversing abjection; e.g., Eva Android’s tight femboy’s goblin ass having the whore’s revenge with the same terror tools fucking the alien: ourselves, during sodomy! Squish goes the butt-ass!

[artist: Eva Android]

In short, audiences can get just as invested as performers, their voyeurism and exhibitionism having a vicarious, empathetic-yet-needy component [many thrive by seeing others thrive]. Denial, as such, can expertly raise tension, the pressure climbing until you shout at the screen, “just fuck, already!” So can denial become profound because of gender trouble and parody exploring desired outcomes for either side. Heteronormativity only views queerness as a death of the world [e.g., the 2022 Netflix miniseries for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman selling queerness to the Straights as a kind of morbid death fantasy not unlike Tolkien’s own closeted forms]. For us queers, the goal is crossing over from the Right to the Left, doing so by virtue of reclaiming subversive denial and indulgence; i.e., as a positive vice we perform on a societal level: a world without enforceable sin, but still yielding theatrical conflict—e.g., sexy nuns torn between their service to God and the Devil, or manly men versus hot manly love in a bathroom stall—and almost-holy Gothic pastiche as geared towards euphoric pleasure and pain. All these conversations occupy the same basic shadow space.

The same goes for orcs and goblins as not simply reprobate, but expressing queerness through non-white bodies of different shapes and sizes; e.g., orcs having “bear” potential and goblins stamped not just with a rebellious, “trickster” character [similar to Loki, from Norse myth] but the usual fat asses [above] that so many nowadays assign to the goblin archetype[37]; i.e., taking “punk” back to the exploitative past [as queer slang so often does]: the doll-like bottom for stronger homosexual dominants, but also the sizeable booty to tear up and enjoy during calculated risk by sex-positive agents. In the absence of monopoly, chaos reigns in ways we can work inside.)

Wrapping Up/the Big Picture

That mostly concludes our playing with goblins beyond Tolkien’s blood libel revenge arguments and into Gothic Communism married to acid Communism (save for another two-page exhibit, next page). Keeping that (and the above exhibit) in mind, let’s go big-picture—covering some broader arguments (eight pages), before concluding the symposium (and “Idle Hands”) by talking about Medusa one last time; i.e., as a Big Whore/Communist Numinous to evoke through the likes of tiny beings like goblins: acting as little sex pirates serving Mommy Communism.

The raw sentiment of a moths drawn to the flame isn’t that hard to understand (above)—e.g., the bottom reaching behind themselves to grab the headboard, all while spreading their legs to take the fucking ever deeper and harder—if only because sex (or asexual rituals) happening during power exchange with a cool-looking badass can feel stupidly good. Rapture invigorates us, but also has Numinous elements of torpor/divine stupefaction; i.e., that smash different pieces repeatedly together to communicate through the profoundly absurd effects being had/playing out before our eyes. Often, this is phrased as drug-like, but also tied to conquest and filth; i.e., drugs are kept in a “stash,” called “shit,” and fought over as fiercely as gold is/consumed as “the good stuff” that takes the edge off.

Drugs or not, sex and Gothic aren’t “empty” at all, but whose darkness visible generates meaning through pandemonium to challenge profit (thus tokenization) during the whore’s revenge; i.e., through “rape” and rape taking infinite forms, those forms working in opposition, during liminal expression, and only limited by our imaginations and desires (shaped by our socio-material conditions and grafted onto our bodies, below): to perceive through holistic violence and illusion, but also sex/public nudism!

(exhibit: exhibit 44a1b1b: Artists [from left to right, top to bottom]: Annabel Morningstar, Angel Witch, Harmony Corrupted, Bubi, Blxxd Bunny, Angel, Jazminskyyy, Eldritch Babe, and Roxie Rusalka. All are models I’ve worked with in the past, taking “dark,” usually massive or otherwise “non-white” cock, or a dark body for someone to enter during sodomy’s physical and metaphorical terms. White-on-black, black-on-white, or black-on-black, all involve “black” as something to subvert through itself acted out.

This section, then, has been all about playing with goblins and size difference, but also different skin colors to showcase alien engagement; i.e., of engagement with white/black through bodies and objects that speak to watching or performing medieval arguments, and that likewise merge the goblin as an equally undead and demonic force. “Black” [or purple, green, etc] stands for inhuman, which we reverse during the abjection process by whorishly embracing such devices; re: running with the Devil away from state control, sleeping with the goblin or being the goblin for others to sleep with!

Whatever the arrangement, it’s the call of the void as haunted by abuse/the ghost of the counterfeit, minus actual persecution or exploitation. Exploitation and liberation occupy the same space; forbidden things excite because they’re forbidden, the performers seeking to work within porn stereotypes [the BBC/interracial sex] to subvert them: to excite through consent as something to establish by those who are attracted to opposites/the exotic; i.e., to humanize them during mutual consent, not exploit them as capital normally does [re: with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll sublimating more rebellious varieties away from marginalized groups and towards status-quo benefactors maintaining Capitalist Realism through controlled opposition/false rebellion]:

[artist: Harmony Corrupted et al]

Harmony and I, for example, shot these photos because we love doing dress-up and roleplaying together to reverse abjection [going so far as to redo a shoot for funsies, above]. It speaks to what is being demonized, and the means with which to play with/subvert it! Our aim isn’t to pacify during the cryptonymy process, but inform, mobilize and cryptomimetically echo while having spur-of-the-moment fun! We copy and echo each other [and our bodies] trapped between trauma and “trauma.” That’s what camping the canon/making it gay is all about! Rebellion isn’t about profit, which pimps police nature to achieve, but in loving what we do in ways that survive the inflexibilities capital relies on to brutalize others. I’m not simply Pygmalion, pimping Galatea to flex on nature; Harmony and I love what we do, doing so together to inspire not just each other but all workers under capital. Staying in control—at least during calculated risk enacted between the two of us—is a virtue that aids in systemic catharsis presenting things that are out of control/needing to be closeted, in capital’s eyes; e.g., the madwoman in the attic, itself an allusion to Jane Eyre‘s woman-of-color Bertha [and who the white heroine calls a goblin[38]].

The same goes for all my friends/muses. We live far away from each other, offstage, but onstage occupy the same land of dreams that all monsters, hence activists, do. We’re a circle of castles—ones we can storm at our own leisure, while denying Tolkien the same privilege.)

“‘Tis a trinket Sauron fancies,” yet ones that hold all the power the world has to offer inside then (re: Blake). A loveless, divided and inactive rebellion is a dead rebellion, and revolution is pageantry without judgement (as a goal, not an obstacle); i.e., infinite value, infinite form, thus infinite ways to fight back using what we got, our stewardship of nature always resisting state domination and control! Yet whatever power we assign to them, goblins are simply people’s various parts, first and foremost; e.g., Harmony’s pussy is her pussy and should be acknowledged as that while ascribing it any other qualities; i.e., while coding it with whatever virtues we espouse, stigmas we condemn, or beauty/status symbols we work with/subvert, onstage and off; re: that of orcs and goblins’ legendary qualities, but also paradoxical (simultaneous) goodness and badness conducive to rebellion: as waged by us against the state demonizing us, saying our ass is theirs. Both things are true, insofar as the conflict is dialectically-materially true/false during liminal expression; i.e., the whore versus the pimp, the being of nature and its harvested labor fighting back upon its own Aegis: “one ass to rule them all…” Sex is a weapon!

 (artist: Harmony Corrupted)

There’s nothing wrong with worship/theatrical revenge, provided it respects universal basic human rights, and that of animals and the environment. So make connections that help you connect the dots through you own nebulas and constellations; i.e., that reconnect your communities to what capital has alienated so many from! Despite the tweed suit and ivy-league education, Tolkien was a cheap pimp; he could only use the blood libel/darkness visible of goblins to cage his mind and quake before Sauron (re: Capitalist Realism). So expose him by doing better than him/camping his ghost; kill his darling legacy to build a better world beyond Zombie-Vampire Capitalism, one that has the whore’s revenge by setting nature’s monstrous-feminine goblins and black dicks free (or temporarily caging those cocks, should they wish it)! Get in touch by playing with darkness holding everything together! Let the good goblins come out to play/wreck shit to make activism fun and disguise our own naked performing of counterterrorism through drug-like, anisotropic, darkness-visible terror language during the cryptonymy process; be rowdy and watch what the so-called “good guys” do, in response!

The answer is, they’ll attack our doubles and call it “justice.” Did you honestly think otherwise? Doing so often invokes defacement, which normally means taking one’s human element away from where it is seen; i.e., the state defaces its victims, presenting them as dark monoliths to worship and fear during the colonial process (demons and pandemonium tending to homogenize a bit more than the undead; e.g., vampires and zombies, versus sex demons as a whole). Anything we make challenges that, but comments just as well with masks and customs that speak to our scars, injury and defacement as part of who we are, the oasis part-in-parcel with the desert; i.e., the goblin as a kind of mask to wear and camp canon with, the whore prostituting herself as goblin—not to pimp nature/tokenize punk culture, but to self-liberate under oppressive conditions; e.g., this Japanese Edo shunga (artist unknown) encompasses its own spin on “rock ‘n roll”:

(source)

To it, cryptonymy works overtime when reversing abjection—a process that generally speaks to things while not speaking to them through abject, hauntological and chronotopic placeholders. In turn, we have to do what Tolkien thinks unthinkable (fucking the terrorist, the devil, the goblin, the zombie), making his necrophilic, anti-Semitic dogma unthinkable through paradox reversing terror/counterterror with signature, dainty goblin fun and rags-to-riches: speaking of the devil to appear in ways that camps canonical doubles; re: darkness visible, marrying or socializing/sexualizing with those from perceived immor(t)al territories. The world’s biggest coward, Tolkien rapes goblins through lethal force; we “rape” ourselves through a Gothic allegory Tolkien was famously allergic to, fucking to metal/monster-fucking: as a defense mechanism against his chasing of orc BBC and goblin BBW!

It’s certainly a tightrope, and one that occupies the same liminal space/shadow zone that Black Sabbath and Tolkien both did (and so many others, besides; i.e., sex, videogames, heavy metal/rock/punk and horror, etc, gentrifying and decaying through a predominantly white straight male enterprise[39]); re: while fetishizing darkness of all kinds to shrink bigotry and increase understanding and intersectional solidarity as a whole: using monstrous-feminine language in duality/opposition to state variants!

Blood quantum just as mendacious, thus harmful, as blood libel. White, black, or brown; tall/short, able/disabled, Christian/pagan, straight/queer or Western/alien, etc, we want to unite by subverting us-versus-them dogma. The simple fact is, we’re all Medusa’s children—are all orcs and goblins under Communism—but also under capital abusing us in the interim, harvesting nature as monstrous-feminine.

Keeping with castles-in-the-flesh, this grim harvest/liminal hauntology of war includes punishing workers for subverting state mechanisms of fear and difference; i.e., the “goblin” commonly a shortstack white girl with a non-white body or appetite (marked by size, but also the color of stigma), and the “orc” commonly a male person of color with large muscles and a giant cock—both operating under a Jewish conspiracy to unite labor that downplays fascism to attack Communism in the same basic shadow space! Under Capitalist Realism, visions of a better world and a dead world occupy the same Aegis. That’s where power is found—either to enslave/closet workers through monstrous sex, terror and force, but also to set them free by establishing empathy through connection, community and, yes, communion with those who came before (anyone who discourages interracial mingling and play is merely segregating workers, dividing and conquering them through bad-faith and/or misled shelter arguments): riding Satan’s “broom” (the morphology is well-and-truly endless)!

(artist [top and bottom]: Harmony Corrupted and Blxxd Bunny)

So while Communism operates through community and trust upsetting state monopolies (consent is sexy among language of calculated risk, above)—and whose cryptonymic deceiving of the state through “mere play” hides rebellion in plain sight—all remain overshadowed by capital’s usual divisions blaming its own victims through DARVO/obscurantism. Yes, cathartic gradients last and build trust and healthy relationships like Bunny’s or Harmony’s and mine, but coercive examples—if negotiated badly with someone presenting themselves as a sadist in bad-faith—can promptly fuck over the submissive by subjecting them to addictive, fleeting and guilty pleasure under an unscrupulous and/or unwell manipulator’s give-and-take cycle of rapacious power abuse; re: Tolkien, but also Jadis, the latter into Tolkien’s school of monster-fucking they used to rape me with. Caution is important, but it’s hard to be overly cautious when you feel vulnerable and enthralled with a “protector” archetype who has your number and doesn’t mean you well; i.e., they smell the trauma/madness on you and know how to exploit it.

In some shape or form, then, the desire for cathartic fantasies grabs hold and never lets go, because trauma isn’t something you just “get over.” Like a golem (or Glenn), you can only transform it as part of you, once and forever. And yet, self-destruction needn’t be literal; it can be a chance to partake of the forbidden, thus exit Plato’s cave! Except this is generally permanent, and if my life is any sort of guide, one that leaves us feeling marooned by people who—as magical and wonderful as they are—don’t always stick around; e.g., Zeuhl and their postpunk pussy rocking my world, only to elope with an “old flame” and leave me wanting. C’est la vie! I got hurt a ton, afterwards, and harmed/raped a bit, but eventually found better cuties, anyways (though none with pussies as tight, I must confess). I wouldn’t trade my scarred skin and madwoman’s bonkers, castled attic psyche for the world! “Insane in the membrane!” (Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain,” 1993).

And trying to map it as we have here, the process is anything but singular or simple; it’s demonic gibberish trailblazing through our lives as a living document, a closeness to chaos and things alienated/fetishized by capital to serve profit. Truth is ergodic; self-fashioned but hauntological, it takes time and effort to enact. So, too, does the world around us take non-trivial effort to transform; change people and the past (as something to perceive/speak with) and you can change the planet! Free the mind; the rest will follow in time!

To this, the shadow of state force always hangs over us. The uphill battle lies in challenging fatal nostalgia as game-like in ways normative individuals will defend. True to form, “darkness” is something to sell (as sex and gender so often are) but the Gothic isn’t merely a police cudgel to bludgeon the usual suspects with; we walking sex demons become part of a larger conversation, whoring ourselves out in ways that invite humanizing worship through a demonized Gothic aesthetic the state can’t fully monopolize. Everything is political, our captivating bodies and demonic personas inviting forbidden knowledge and exchange through dark promises: of carnal delight and class-conscious eroticism and asexual public nudism; i.e., the whore’s paradox, but also her glorious refrain—the state can’t monopolize monsters or disco!

So come and get it, lovelies, but pay your sex workers! Mommy has needs and stripping is not consent (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Paid Labor,” 2024)! Mutual consent is badass! Equal rights for all workers, animals and the environment is badass! Doing so through the usual fetish-and-cliché claptrap during ludo-Gothic BDSM is badass! Sluts and whores are badasses! And, as usual, the witch is a pathway to “doom” as transformation through sex education; i.e., canonically through the language of theft, sorcery and secrets; e.g., Adria from Diablo 1 (1996) saying to the hero, “I sense a soul in search of answers!”

Well, mommy’s got your answers right here! Just cross her palm with silver—all to gradually synthesize working concepts conducive to a world without money/privatization; i.e., what use is a wage in a world where everything is eventually free? Rape replaces with “rape,” doing away with industries that normally canonize the former through rock opera; re (from the Poetry and Undead Modules):

Unlike nation-states, corporations don’t care about dogmatic presentation as true to the state; they care about exploitation as something that invariably corrupts, which they can milk while throwing various states under the bus if need be. Profit is always the victim. As such, capitalists will do whatever they can to profit as efficiently as possible (source: “Back to the Necropolis,” 2024).

Whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies, falsehoods, and double standards (source: “Transforming Our Zombie Selves,” 2024).

(artist: Marina Dove[40])

All work is sexualized; and forced into a world that makes sex work something to steal from, we become beggars—i.e., in a world that, due to accident of birth, doesn’t let us choose/forces us to balance caring about other workers and merely trying to survive by doing things we’re not proud of (e.g., women’s work, service, retail, etc). This doesn’t instantly make us token grifters or cranks, but that can happen; and while brand and belief can overlap, good praxis is ultimately putting our money where our mouths are. Camp is a fine line, then, and class intersects with culture and race to betray labor as often as not. You are what you eat, and that includes context and interpretation of said context; it includes us triggering under conditions that, per the state preying on labor through its own victims—can dice roll into cops as often as victims wearing the same clothes and speaking the same demonized language. Rebellions are human, therefore flawed and susceptible to the usual devices use to keep us in line; e.g., transphobia and its externalized elements internalized by token workers.

This begs the question: how do we fight profit, thus rape and all the disorders, syndromes, estrangement, alienation, and abuse, etc, that stem from it? These answers and more lie in Pandora’s Box as something to open up: channels and clinics of forbidden, delicious exchange! Witches are more fun, especially black witches and goblins (their surfaces charged with psychosexual power—of rape, of revenge, of ecstasy and the Earth, next page)! Engagement with them amounts to praxis, thus opposition as something to synthesize pursuant to liberation for all.

Yes, weird attracts weird; it should play out in ways that aren’t unironically predatory—i.e., that don’t give detractors of our literal existence ammunition when calling for our destruction instead of the state decaying around them (re, Marx: “capital is dead labor sucking, like the vampire, on living labor”). Far easier to blame victims than systems, Faust’s bargain a death warrant that carries out through rotting numbskulls! Having no brains, they hunger for ours. The spectres of Marx aren’t just Ringwraiths invading home from within (during a foreign plot, below), but the fleshy orcs and goblins that precede them across the same Radcliffean Black Veil; re: something to summon and scapegoat, creatures of the night laid low, Dayman vs Nightman.

For state defenders, it’s “boundaries for me, not for thee.” As such, we’re forever under suspicion and they are not; everything we do is an allegation they’ll leverage against us: to “protect” women and children from “evil sex demons,” thus the West’s nuclear family model and civilization as we know it. It might sound extreme, but that’s how moral panics work, and during the state’s usual boom-or-bust cycle, we fags will be blamed inside a police state; i.e., for being pushed into that marginalized sphere: the Omelas goat to exsanguinate by state bloodletters.

We queers are demonized—among other things—as sodomite pedophiles to scapegoat by village idiots and their “prison sex” mob mentality run amok. This doesn’t put us above critique, but begs those examining us to consider the sobering reality—that the ringleaders and opportunists excoriating us are generally far more guilty but presenting as holier-than-thou to deflect from their own hand in things; e.g., most pedophiles are cis-het men, and even if a trans person is a sex pest, this isn’t because they’re trans, but because the state is punishing them for being trans until they snap (excluding congenital elements like Dahmer’s cannibalism, while attacking what they call “transgenderism” [a term no queer unironically uses] as alien on its face).

To it, such obscurantism and DARVO conflations are standard-issue, hence cover for the state through capital’s monopolies, trifectas and qualities! Sexual abuse isn’t an orientation and reactive abuse doesn’t define us! Negotiating such treachery pleads care and boldness, side by side; i.e., to be seen and heard, but also camouflaged in ways that safeguard us from state antibodies: “A little more caution from you; that is no trinket you carry!” Like Satan, our buffer is “non-existence,” darkness visible all around you, “under your bed, in your closet, in your head!” (Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” 1991).

Keeping with our discussions of “Midnight Vampire” and Tolkien, liberation isn’t intuitive because capital is a giant prison designed to conceal itself; escape requires paradox, which demons are profoundly at home with. From Milton onwards, we turn things inside-out, exposing our captors and finding freedom through our chains; i.e., as shadowy likenesses of the dire originals. There’s no single interpretation for such inkblots, meaning they have whatever power we can dialectically-materially infuse them with. When we come, you come!

Per the cryptonymy process, the revolutionary’s praxial lever is, as usual, their Aegis dueling the state’s in duality. Harnessed by us, it demonically evokes the barbaric past to pay it forward; i.e., by reflecting new potential on sharp obsidian velvet (and other such oxymorons, next page): to take your “soul” by making you cum! Spooky!

Everyone likes to “go to town,” fancies the whore (which historically would have lived in cities and urban-environment brothels put up by enterprising men and madams); goblin queens are best (what Tolkien literally calls “the black crack” per his captive/goblin rape fantasies, Shakespeare’s “the crack of doom,” etc). It’s a disco to transform, informed by the magical, hypnotic past; re, New Order’s “Blue Monday” (1983):

Those who came before me
Lived through their vocations
From the past until completion
They’ll turn away no more

And still, I find it so hard
To say what I need to say [as queer people so often do]
But I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me
Just how I should feel today (source: Genius).

Growth hurts, as do adventures (e.g., blue balls/clit). But also? They feel good.

Tolkien’s goblins were predominantly cis-male; ours, like the Medusa, encompass the entire GNC spectrum. The vampire, witch or goblin is the disco, the Gothic castle-in-the-flesh advertising extracurricular survival and BDSM fun; i.e., shored up in the paradoxical graveyard language of deathly sex, torture and live burial! Back in black, the panties beg to be pulled aside; her necromancer’s lips grip, worthy of a tyrant’s boast that would rival Smaug the dragon’s (“I am strong, strong, strong!”). Darkness visible, she flashes with power! Come play with her! Feel the rapture of ironic rape (“rape” in quotes)! Avenge Medusa by hugging her seductive liminal darkness!

(artist: Kay)

Ridiculed by state proponents, this Hellish poetic refrain endures a position of compelled evolution; i.e., during prostitution arguments, and achieved inventively from exile with which to reclaim our lost humanity under state-straight yolks. Milton coined it while physically blind, yet still being of the devil’s company without realizing it (re: Blake[41]). Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, we consciously take back these chains, labels, and death sentences—doing as we please, a summoning of the whore (and her darkness visible); i.e.,  to learn from her how best to handle and redistribute power and knowledge—to “do the stinging,” as Bilbo puts it! Monsters are the abstract language of argument and debate, doubled and at odds, inside-out, invasive, plural and oscillating amid the gloam’s coded behaviors. Reality isn’t cut and dry. Goblins aren’t cut and dry! Anyone who argues that shamelessly amounts to Alexander slicing the Gordian Knot. It’s barbaric and, more to the point, inadequate towards escaping capital as a prison. We cannot take it at face value, like Tolkien did!

For us, then, sex is a weapon to break the jail through cryptonymy/forbidden sight (the more “rape” we experience, the more we learn). No different than a vampire at midnight or in broad daylight, the demon’s mouth, fang and pussy all hyphenate—an “ancient” xenoglossic book to spread and read you as much as the other way around: she succ! It’s drug-like, opening the doors of perception through the usual delicious pathways (more on this in “Call of the Wild,” when we look at “acid Communism, “again; i.e., with Mikki’s help, exhibit 60b).

In turn, entry predicates on trust; i.e., if one is worthy of that power that, all the same, resides in all workers’ breasts. The power of cuties like Mikki (next page) is awesome beyond compare; i.e., castles in the flesh holding special secrets, and making the “past” wise once more! Nothing radicalizes (or pacifies) people more than gender and sex; we must tip the needle away from capital, from cops, from sex coercion and its double standards[42] under Capitalist Realism and the Capitalocene. The ticket to doing this lies in Gothic Communism vis-à-vis demonic poetics: our sex (and genders) as a weapon challenging state doctrine in dualistic ways—on our Aegis! Sperm donors learn, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled… is pulling us! “Satan” is a figment of a wider imagination, but we’re quite real; black unicorns straight from Rainbow Hell (“black is ten colors“), we usher in/offer up a poetic Satanic voice to break Capitalist Realism, paradoxically enough, with dreams: “The closer you get to the meaning / The sooner you’ll know that you’re dreaming” (Black Sabbath’s “Heaven and Hell,” 1980).

(artist: Mikki Storm)

Moving On: Some Transitional Arguments about Demon Whores/the Big One (feat. Slan from Berserk)

As our goblin exhibit demonstrates, monsters are made, be that to enforce state power and its flow as Tolkien did, or to critique it; i.e., through the same shared and warring “monster-fucker” dialogs on forbidden love hyphenating sex and force. Moving forward from “Idle Hands” and into the rest of “Forbidden sight,” we’ll continue applying the demonic notion of forbidden sight by making and summoning demons; i.e., its performative irony through demon lovers as things to deal and play at/with darkness visible (chaos) during mutilative courtly love putting “rape” in quotes. To that, we’ll be going beyond vampires or goblins, and towards more obviously demonic, golem-esque effigies and the torturous power and forbidden love they offer (e.g., anal sex); i.e., as attached to larger Numinous forces I want to quickly address, here (two pages).

By tapping into those that fixate and focus less on feeding and trauma during liminal expression, and more on unequal, forbidden exchange and radical transformation through dark desire, we’re touching on the Communist Numinous. Personified most commonly as the Medusa (who we’ve already discussed, at length), it evokes different emotions, mid-rapture: “What profit is it a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?” Well, that depends! What’s on the table, cutie? I’ll take your engorged shaft and raise you a Giger-style black womb[43]! A voluptuous vaso vagal, “She mighty mighty!” A bridge to cross, a castle to storm (or which storms back)! A very kinky girl’s death clam!

(artist: Kentaro Miura)

About that/a BDSM practitioner’s note of caution, as we proceed; i.e., about evoking a Communist Numinous whose taller demonic royalty nonetheless attaches to smaller goblin short stacks [and drug-like feelings; re: acid Communism]: the final planetary “fortress” haunting Tolkien’s own monster-fucker dreams. Slan (and her voluminous smuff, above) is just as good an example as any!

Just as the Promethean Quest is about self-destruction, to play with demons is to play with fire that can burn you. With demon sex and “rape,” then, there is always the echo of unironic rape to likewise learn from. Believe you me, pain is an excellent teacher—but especially in nightmarish varieties evoking tremendous power beyond themselves! The Gothic mode is a dark queen, her aged, throbbing energies felt by many capital has ravaged over time.

When Jadis raped me, for example, they taught me that Nazis and Communists share the same poetic inkblot. Indicating nature as alienated, fetishized and raped by capital, the Gothic-Communist Medusa is a fat, sassy whore; i.e., with stretch marks and a moon-sized cosmic bedonk—and she’s hungry for sweet revenge! It’s precisely that “best revenge” that survivors chase, scarred and longing to heal from state abuse during calculated risk: of a palliative Numinous sort, “crushing” you with more weight! You’ll know it when you feel it—when it has you begging to no one in particular, “Take me, Dark Mommy! ‘Fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty!'” The eye of that angry god, like a falling moon, threatens to collide with your earth, and smash you to fragments. Black holes make everyone’s pull-out weak! Spaghettification!

If there’s any transcendental signified, it’s power and death, babes. So play with demons/torture porn to your hearts’ content! Just remember that power, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, comes from control through informed consent, thus mutual exchange! “Hurt, not harm!” Always keep that in mind, but especially when you lose control or have dominion over those who don’t; i.e., when giving consent, thus permission to go a little wild; e.g., saying to your play partner, “Now step on me, bitch! Fuck me like you mean it!” Safewords, release/passwords, restraint and discipline, pleasure and pain—all go hand-in-hand, built on trust/minimized risk.

The chaos, in other words, is controlled, ironic, and cathartic for both sides, and ultimately not destructive despite the power-and-death aesthetic; i.e., anyone can unironically destroy or play at dark godhood, but it takes a mighty hand and mightier mind to show mercy through demonic union tested! That’s power—and ultimately the non-toxic kind that Gothic Communism is all about: finding the Communist Numinous through hauntological BDSM; i.e., establishing power through selective boundaries and limits where play is mutually established and understood! Rape, for all intents and purposes, is fetishization, hence power imbalance dressed as alien, potent; our Numinous dialectic “rapes” Medusa or has her “rape” you while the surf’s up (an allusion to Joe Satriani’s “Surfing with the Alien,” 1987)! Chase the dragon, boys!

(artist: Kentaro Miura)

And if all that sounds intense (which, to be fair, it is), fear not! Strict or gentle, vanilla or chocolate, metal or mellow—as long as you have safety measures like these in place, then harm/rape is impossible; i.e., she’s just hugging you: a winged, chimeric succubus letting you play with dark, forbidden things (the Medusa being the only Gorgon classically to have wings). Any articulation, as such, is entirely valid when going to the dark gods to break state monopolies with.

I think you’ll like Slan, then, who haunts older stories that we’ll examine in “Forbidden Sight,” part two; i.e., the Cosmic Whore that is Gothic Communism, having the whore’s dark Numinous revenge; e.g., Frankenstein and Alien‘s own horrors in clay. She’s “easy” but strict—will take you to the edge and teach you wonderful things (re: fucking to metal, clapping her big demon cheeks; or having her string you up like a sacrifice). Limitless in shape, size and surface, she can be whatever she wants to be—whatever ghastly playground/dark church/demon brothel you desire when she’s dominating you/giving you sub drop and/or draining your balls (e.g., the xenomorph or cenobite raising hell; i.e., to act between virtue and sin, and similar canonical dichotomies)! Whatever the shape, say hi to her, for me! —Perse

From New to Old: Concerning the Rest of the Module

While unsteadily “pregnant” with this saturated material, I pulled and manifested the entirety out of myself as a comprehensive stab at mapping and summarizing everything that I (once again) had to organize and refine over and over. I clearly want to document the process to you, the reader—to grant you an exhibitionist’s idea of what it was like for me, a trans woman, to create as I have been taught and how I view it. Work isn’t fun unless it’s playful, I think; it should be fun, regardless of its importance (and this work—helping myself and other sex workers escape harmful bondage—I consider to be of the utmost importance) (source).

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

The rest of the module essentially comprises the Demon Module before I began expanding on it, in September 2024. This was a roundabout and chaotic process, engineered as much through deconstruction as accretion. Originally Volume Two was simply a shorter module about demons and the undead; then, it became part one, the Poetry Module, and part two, which divided in two sub-volumes/modules. In turn, each of those expanded and grew (especially with Harmony’s contributions/inspiration through various shoots, below).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

First in line, the Undead Module grew into my largest release, so far—over 400,000 words and 1,000 pages, when it released in September! By comparison, the Demon Module prior to September was only ~117,000 unique words and ~350 unique pages; not wanting to overlook demons or have such a lopsided second half to Volume Two, I started expanding the Demon Module. As of writing this, said module has roughly tripled in word length (~369,000) and more than doubled its page count (~934). Even so, this renaissance is nearing its end; i.e., the expansions outlined above concern the first half of the module, which I wrote from scratch, September onwards: the module opening and the opening to “Forbidden Sight,” followed by “Idle Hands.”

The rest of the writing is from the original “Demons” manuscript; i.e., as it existed before September (though I have expanded a fair bit on the “Making Demons” subchapter). With the exception of “Giger’s Xenomorph” and the module conclusion, the remaining writing is older but also looser and more abbreviated/fragmented. Partly this owes to its age, but also because much of what is being discussed here has already been discussed elsewhere in the series (excluding Faust, which isn’t something I have discussed quite as much; i.e., I rely more on familiarity with the legend [and my BDSM theories] to carry you through).

Frankenstein, for example, is a novel I’ve discussed in every volume I’ve published. So whilst I would be completely remiss in not mentioning Shelley and her seminal (frankly awesomesauce) story in the pages ahead, my doing so will be far briefer than otherwise; i.e., in the unthinkable hypothetical that I had never written previously about Frankenstein, before; e.g., my extensive Metroidvania work (which we won’t really be mentioning here to keep things moving).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

To it, the writing that remains will get some polish/renovations (and shoots with Harmony), but to nowhere near the same extent as “Idle Hands” did. There likewise won’t be any additional thesis work, or nearly as much about ludo-Gothic BDSM (which I fleshed-out much more after the initial “Demons” manuscript was written); “Of Darkness and the Forbidden” already covers that, as does “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis.” Instead, what follows are things I’ve chosen to include to be holistic and complete; i.e., in my compiling of demonic history as a poetic device linked to nature (with some undead elements scattered throughout). It remains writing for which I’m very proud, but it is shorter than I’d like (especially “Call of the Wild’s” admittedly anemic survey[43a] approach). As stated in “A Paucity of Time,” those constraints are currently beyond my control, but can hopefully be expanded on, at a later date.

Onto “Forbidden Sight, part two: Making Demons (Prometheus and Frankenstein)“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1a] As Jon Stratton writes in “KISS: Jewishness, Hard Rock and the Holocaust” (2020):

KISS was a hard rock group, one of the most successful during the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s. The group’s two founding members, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, were both Jewish. Indeed, both were the sons of Holocaust survivors. This article examines the impact of Simmons’s and Stanley’s Jewishness on KISS as a rock group and on its success. One of the most obvious impacts was the drive to succeed which Simmons and Stanley shared. Simmons writes about wanting power, Stanley that he wanted respect. As children of survivors they wanted safety. During much of the 1970s, the Holocaust was not yet publicly acknowledged. However, its trauma is evident in, for example, the stage characters that Simmons and Stanley adopted (source).

[1b] Including wealthy Jews who refuse to toe the line; e.g., Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech and admittedly mixed/sanitized approach nevertheless met with resounding criticism from other Jews in Hollywood (re: Tatiana Siegel’s “Over 1,000 Jewish Creatives and Professionals Have Now Denounced…” 2023), versus Sarah Friedland’s own award response, describing the conflict in no uncertain terms: as “the 336th day of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” upon receiving her own trophy (source: Aljazeera’s “Jewish director at Venice Film Festival Speaks in Solidarity with Palestine,” 2024). Context matters.

[1c] Brooklyn Museum writes,

In 1987, Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás founded the SILENCE=DEATH Project to support one another in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Inspired by the posters of the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls (both of whose work is on view nearby), they mobilized to spread the word about the epidemic and created the now-iconic Silence=Death poster featuring the pink triangle as a reference to Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people in the 1930s and 1940s. It became the central visual symbol of AIDS activism after it was adopted by the direct action advocacy group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) [source].

[1d] Which extends to literal animals; e.g., the Great Eagles—decked in gold by the dwarves after they help win the Battle of the Five Armies—having seemingly routed the goblins “for good” …until LotR; i.e., evil can never be extinguished (despite Tolkien’s love for propaganda battles), because the state always needs a scapegoat to colonize/profit off of, thus pimp and project its own brutality onto.

[2a] His parental treatment of nature-as-dark comparing the goblins of the Misty Mountains to naughty children punished by a white, all-knowing schoolmaster who killed their king: “Go away! little boys!” shouted Gandalf, in reply. “It isn’t bird-nesting time. Also naughty little boys that play with fire get punished!” (source). Echoes of Prometheus, but also King Kong clutching at white brides only to get machine-gunned.

[2b] E.g., “The Ring” is twink Frodo protecting his bussy from black people. We already discussed that in Volume One.

[3] We don’t focus much on the differences between orcs and goblins, here. But orcs, post-Tolkien, tend to be bigger and fiercer than goblins, which are smaller and craftier/rely on tools and gadgets (often weapons too big for them, or explosives, machinery and gizmos); i.e., versus the orc’s brute strength. Orcs are big minions and goblins, small; goblins are tied more towards greed, and orcs to rape and cannibalism. While such distinctions are far more recent and easily ignored, orcs and goblins remain popular monomythic punching bags/slumming avatars and vehicles of genuine rebellion, alike.

[4] With orcs and other servants of evil speaking a monolithic “Black Speech”; i.e., the homogenizing of colonial prospects to view them ethnocentrically as worlds to conquer by those weeding the globe of monstrous-feminine nature being likewise non-white, non-Christian, and stigma-animal, etc. Per Beowulf and Amazonomachia (monster battles, not just Amazons in particular), they become animalized during pro-state rites of passage; i.e., animals and gods speaking to patriarchal governance surviving presently under neoliberal nation-states and corporations; e.g., Zeus transforming into different animals to rape women, or Theseus vs the Minotaur, etc.

[5] Literally “of the King” and towards a kingdom that would last however many centuries Tolkien had in mind (the Nazis said a thousand years). Keeping with Beowulf, his Golden Age was still Christian, but before the Middle Ages; i.e., an Old-English hauntology laced with settler-colonial argumentation.

[6] “Given that The Lord of the Rings is one of the bestselling book series of all time, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s inspired a lot of different groups and movements over the decades, with a wide range of politics. Probably the most influential is Silicon Valley, where the top of Salesforce Tower in San Francisco lights up with the Eye of Sauron on Halloween, executives reference its lore to get their vision across to employees, and companies name meeting rooms — if not their whole business — after objects and people from the books” (source: Paris Marx’s “Peter Thiel’s Influence over a Network of Lord of the Rings-Inspired Companies,” 2024).

[7] “the American middle class (so called ‘gamer culture’) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “‘Monsters, Magic and Myth’: Modularity and Class,” 2024).

[8] Tolkien relies on racialized tokenism to have “lesser” races police themselves, which is what Zionism ultimately is. You see this offstage, too, in Zionist propaganda (Bad Empanada’s “The Appeal to Jewishness Fallacy,” 2024), but such things are always half-real; re: between fiction and non-fiction, working in tandem. Case in point, Tolkien see dwarves as “Jewish” in the way his own home, the British empire, has essentialized “Jewishness” for centuries—which is to say, they’re always victims, thus always to some degree aliens in ways the Crown can exploit. They cannot be heroes because to be a victim—to be weak and prone to betray—is literally “in their blood,” their nature.

The dwarves of the Lonely Mountain, for example, feel constantly surrounded by enemies and betrayed. Abandoned by everyone, they work extra hard to alienate themselves, but also fight exceedingly hard (to the death, in fact) to redeem themselves in Christian eyes. This is Tolkien pointedly Christianizing Viking ideas of the Valkyrie by attaching them to Jewish calumny/the wandering Jew trope: Thorin was weak, earlier in life when he failed to stop the dragon and it destroyed his permanent home, and weak later in life when men killed the dragon while he took all the gold for himself. He has all the markings of station and importance, but also cowardice and entitlement while being stranded from his home.

Eventually while the men of Dale are trying to rebuild, Bard is making a good case for sharing the gold (the Christian appeal to generosity monopolizing charity). It’s here that Thorin not only rebukes him (the moneylender trope, echoes of Shakespeare’s Shylock), but his cousins betray the men of Dale, first chance they get. Yes, the men of Dale were thinking about attacking first, but Tolkien routinely shows the Jewish-coded dwarves acting traitorous; i.e., to emphasize their backstabber nature, thus their inexorable connection with the goblins. To reject that connection, they must kill the goblins even more fiercely than the men or elves would, putting themselves in danger for those who view them as lesser to begin with. It’s a return to good service from bad, a form of conversion therapy that kills the Jew by making him Christian through martyrdom (versus forced penance through ordinary conversion, in Shylock’s case).

To it, Thorin is sicker/weaker from dragon sickness (rarefied cruelty and greed) than the men are. To prove his worth in their eyes, he must throw down the gate and die in battle a glorious death… by killing as many goblins as he can, then sacrificing himself and his bloodline in doing so! It’s a suicide mission, one guided by revenge (which, I should add, the entire quest for the gold has been, but merely taken to its logical conclusion). He is simultaneously fallen and redeemed, but denied a home in this world despite the ultimate sacrifice. In short, he is always a victim, always an alien who is “too violent” to deserve a forever home. Instead, he’s the hero for a second, but ultimately so Dale can re-establish a human foothold in the region and the dwarves return to buried irrelevance.

(artist: Justin Gerard)

Tokenism, then, is a terror weapon, and not one that Tolkien was above using (guilt-free, no less, because it appeals to the “natural” order of things, in his eyes). Tokens are always without a home, always exiled with one foot in both worlds and trying to reject Hell to find their “rightful” place by their good master’s side (e.g., Samus Aran and the Galactic Federation). Tolkien relies on tokenism through centrist dogma, and whose worlds will overcorrect with massive violence to maintain the status quo—by victimizing its token groups!

For Tolkien, the dwarves are something to trot out and destroy as needed, generally by comparing them to goblins (through the same big noses, divided by beards, which orcs and goblins don’t canonically have). This trend hasn’t lessened over time, with future adaptations leaning into said tropes to make Thorin increasingly tragic through them; e.g., Peter Jackson’s Thorin, played by Richard Armitage, humanized in appearance but arguing to Smaug (an imaginary enemy) about Dwarvish lands and gold. He’s “the Good Jew,” arguing for state’s rights dressed up as liberation, the meta tyrant Tolkien dressing the slave up in the language of rebellion, mid-tyrant’s-plea. It’s like Shakespeare, making a Jew to “better the instruction” of Christian revenge, but abjected in Tolkien’s case, onto a Jewish avenger upholding a Christian ordering to the world: a perversion of the Golem of Prague and Jewish necromancy!

[9] Consider Tolkien’s zero-sex policy versus Terry Goodkind’s naked exhibiting of pedophilia, genital mutilation and rape. They might seem like polar opposites, but both constitute Joseph Conrad’s bigoted fear-fascination with the colonized abomination, in The Heart of Darkness (1899): a white, cis-het fear-fascination with the past as restricted to the fringes of the empire, that—in neoliberal media, which brings the colonial revenge to the homefront—becomes “a spell to fall under” (re: Punter) and exorcise, generally through violence. Tolkien’s colonial rape occurred with swords, leveled against metaphors for people “not of the West” he considered “Mongol-types” (source: Tolkien Gateway) whose linguo-material presence would be entirely unwelcome in white areas (effectively gentrification in a real-world village/suburban setting).

Tolkien famously disliked allegory for his own stories (an appeal, then, to singular interpretations that ignored his writing’s racist, thus colonial potential). But even when reduced to “pure fantasy” as he would have preferred, the terrestrial framework and its cartography and colonial model are all obviously there and being put into practice; i.e., world-building and its manmade languages levied for a suitably war-like purpose regardless if Tolkien openly denounced Hilter. In short, he was a centrist to the core, the old sage handing the young hobbit a blade and preaching loftily about morals, specifically of knowing when to kill and when not to—in short, “playing god” in the face of the abject:

Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled (source).

Except this mercy is arguably lacking in the face of those who are physically dangerous (according to white people); orcs, unlike Gollum, are given no quarter despite arguably having a bone to pick with their colonizers: “Show them no mercy for you shall receive none!” It’s tone-policing backed by force—also known as “peace through strength.”

[10] Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) would lead to the company’s longest, and arguably most popular and widespread franchise, beating Diablo (1996) to the punch by two years and going on to establish the company as the successors to Everquest (1999) as the MMORPG to “kill”: World of Warcraft (2004), a globalizing of the pursuit of capital across the Internet. These games successfully applied a tactical, melee-based, roleplay element to the FPS-/TPS-adjacent strategy game (exhibit 1a1a1h2a1), which took on a massive-multiplayer form built around warring team-based combat with one-or-more combatants on either side. And of course, all of this was heavily dimorphized within the heteronormative colonial binary.

[11] (from Britannica): “A different word orc, alluding to a demon or ogre, appears in Old English glosses of about AD 800 and in the compound word orcnēas (‘monsters’) in the poem Beowulf. As with the Italian orco (‘ogre’) and the word ogre itself, it ultimately derives from the Latin Orcus, a god of the underworld. The Old English creatures were most likely the inspiration for the orcs that appear in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” (source).

[12] Tolkien’s inconsistent fear of spiders stretches back to a childhood phobia of them, but he was annoyingly wishy-washy and non-committal to how he felt about them; i.e., talking through both sides of his mouth (a classic centrist maneuver) [source: Tolkien Gateway].

[13] Tolkien did not exist during videogames as they are commonly thought of (though technically he died in 1973, a year after Pong [1972] was released for American home entertainment by Atari’s Allan Alcorn). Yet, Tolkien was also no stranger to playing games. Indeed, the entire “Riddles in the Dark” chapter from The Hobbit is pointedly a game, with a rather involved discussion surrounding luck, fairness and the following of rules:

He knew, of course, that the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it. But he felt he could not trust this slimy thing to keep any promise at a pinch. Any excuse would do for him to slide out of it. And after all that last question had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws (source).

In truth, Tolkien’s refrain—the High Fantasy treasure map—would translate very well to tabletop games and videogames, but especially The Lord of the Rings, which despite its immense size compared to The Hobbit was actually far simpler in terms of its treatment of war and wealth acquisition/generation. Everything was divided neatly into good and evil teams that—on the good side—weren’t fighting amongst each other nearly as much as during The Hobbit. In his later novels, the world-war machine wasn’t just suggested, but fully devised and given its own vast world to play out inside. And even with The Hobbit, Tolkien clearly understood the power of song and legends, writing his original story for children to acclimate them towards war and revenge dressed up in songs, fantasy and poems. It likewise had all the starts and stops of a radio serial, putting our heroes out of the frying pan and into the fire (similar to Flash Gordon, 1935) before pulling them out just in the nick of time (the Great Eagles being a shameless deus ex machina [and imperial emblem] that Tolkien would curiously refuse to use with The Lord of the Rings in order to prolong the story and its war for as long as possible).

[14] The human condition works like a golem, as such: to make from clay or stone (orcs and goblins are not made from stone, but live below it, underground. So whereas Tolkien’s trolls turn to literal stone, in sunlight, the goblins merely dislike it); i.e., as a creative process we can map and play out, together—invigilating a shared vision that means different things to different people (from the Undead Module):

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

To that, Revana is very much my character by design […]. She’s someone I can have stand in for myself, given that I cannot afford gender-affirming surgeries. Even so, she has been drawn by many different artists over the years. In this case, my usual paper doll approach became something to instruct others with; e.g., my friend, Lydia, illustrating a Drow character I later completed on my own and borrowed its wardrobe to dress Revana, Macbeth-style, in borrowed robes [above]. This isn’t someone forced to wear clothes made to objectify her against her will [re: “Borrowed Robes“]; she’s an extension of me, and Lydia helped with that. So did Jim32 and Harmony. All the world’s a stage and we, upon it, had and continue to have a part to play [source: “Meeting Jadis; or, Playing with Dolls,” 2024].)

[15] With “normal” white genitals being monstrous/different than the rest of the body they attach to; i.e., normal dicks being darker than the rest of the body and vaginas having multiple mouths like the xenomorph (the labia major and minor). They also flush with color during sexual desire (from filling with blood, be the genitals male, female or intersex).

[16] Fixated since Antiquity on sex/food and relative bodily functions, war-making and religion/funerary rites; but also classically-male contests of pissing or spitting the farthest—belching or farting the loudest, eating or shitting(?) the most, fucking the longest, etc—during battles of the sexes/the topos of the power of women extending into GNC spheres.

[17] And the stigmatized, four-letter versions of such words, predating the popularizing of their longer French equivalents, post-Black-Death, and surviving into the present; e.g., chew, fuck, spit, shit, puke, etc. Monsters operate through a similar shorthand, but also critical lens of coded behaviors.

[18] Gothic Communism occurs through holistic study regarding a system designed to conceal itself, mid-exchange. The dialectic is as much of shelter as the alien, the prison a game of theft and disguise, of choice shrouded in illusion (the illusion of choice enacted under deeply unnatural conditions) and shadowed by force; i.e., the holocaust/death lottery/prisoner’s dilemma only ends when all prisoners see each other as human; re: by taking the red pill to break Capitalist Realism, not Communism.

Workers, then, always have the power to riot/strike, leveraging capital using the very things the owner class tries to cage and abuse labor with while acting like its friends; i.e., with bald-faced lies as much as not; e.g., the Nazis and the Warsaw ghetto, but also American liberalism in all its forms; re: Tolkien’s anti-Semitic heroism. Capital is a settler colony disguised as a game, then—one using disguise to defend the state vs workers and the planet, versus workers defending ourselves, guerrilla-style, in its crosshairs (for more on this exact topic, see: “The World Is a Vampire“).

Suppression happens by thinking we can play along to survive what is otherwise “forgone” (according to state arbiters). By having slave revolts chattelize, pacify or otherwise divide and conquer their own (fascism is false rebellion), voting is the illusion of choice (and can be manipulated by scarcity and force); to survive and liberate ourselves, we must fight back, making the cost too dear to continue. To do this, we require informed and intersectionally solidarized action, moving power actively towards workers during labor exchange. Anyone who stymies that is a traitor colonizing the homefront, doing so with fascism and the democratic process weaponized against class-, culture- and race-conscious parties (re: Westside Tyler blaming* non-voters, below).

(screenshot source: the YouTube comments for Westside Tyler’s “Supporting Movements Like Uncommitted WILL FAIL EVERY TIME,” 2024)

*I critique his arguments, in a response video (Persephone van der Waard’s “@westsidetyler Is a White Moderate (a Nazi Apologist),” 2024). Few things are as cowardly as a white cis-het man, who at the first sign of trouble, falls back on privilege to punch down against the oppressed—just like Tolkien! Their hearts are hardened, and they resign themselves to capital-as-is.

[19a] “Cremation is reserved for baddies,” Knitting&Death describes. “The Riders of Rohan bury their own dead with honour, but burn orcs as they would dead animals.” Knitting also acknowledges Tolkien’s double standard, going on to add,

Tolkien was a staunch Catholic, and it may be of note that the Catholic Church forbid cremation from 1886 until 1963. While exceptions were made for mass death events and to prevent the spread of disease, cremation was considered a rejection of the possibility of resurrection. Nowadays, although cremation is permitted, scattering ashes is forbidden; the Vatican reasons that “reservation of the ashes of the departed in a sacred place [such as a cemetery or church] ensures that they are not excluded from prayers and remembrance.” That the Riders of Rohan not only burn dead orcs but also scatter their ashes ensures that they will not rise again and that they will also be forgotten the latter providing particular contrast to the mounds where dead Riders are inhumed and that are meant to last forever (source: “What Happened to the War Dead of Middle Earth?” 2022).

Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss; the mass graves and cremation are a hate crime against those Tolkien coded as racially and religiously inferior to his own warrior supermen (the cowboys of an imaginary frontier). Orcs and goblins aren’t just waste, then, but literal fuel for the British war machine (whitewashing its own fascism and ethnocentrism/canonical essentialism through intensely regressive hauntological war games). It’s genocide, glorifying bigotry to serve Imperialism (and hopelessly in love with a once-great Britain afraid, all the same, of endless black cocks).

Gothic without the Middle Ages, Tolkien Christianized Pagan cultures (which the Vikings were) and married them to Germanized Untermensch-vs-Übermensch monomyth shenanigans; i.e., the Rohirrim superior to the Gondordians, but both superior to the “lesser” races. “We will burn like the kings of old.” It becomes his little paradise to protect from outsiders by his surviving fans, but in ways no way, shape or form divorced from the real world; i.e., through overt themes of ethnic cleansing that cover up allegory through monomythic violence and crusader-grade monster sex: sodomy by flame, desecrating the orc and goblin as animal, but also living dead (to fertilize poppies).

Rape is rape, genocide is genocide, and Tolkien goes all out (name me something more fetishized than his stupid swords). He’s a coward, because fascism fears the entire world; i.e., as already haunted by past crimes of empire—and like Hitler and the Reich—uses moral panic of so-called Black Revenge to power his own arguments of expansion and home defense. Through preemptive first strikes committed by an entire hero culture, worldview and language family bastardized by the colonizer against the oppressed, Tolkien wants you to feel like rebels while fighting for old, brutal systems that refuse to change—the might-makes-right return of a pre-ordained, kingdom-style rulership that always decays into “dark” (fascist) versions of itself. Except there’s no Ring (tyrant hot potato) to destroy! Only patrilineal descent remains, the war criminal hiding behind cartoon dictators and Divine Right—forever doomed and in love with itself—punching death as the world spirals towards state shift. It’s a sham, a simulation of war playing out for efficient profit.

[19b] E.g., My twin brother “quad-kiting” of the four dwarven guards outside Kaladim on EQ‘s (1999) Sullon Zek PvP server. For context, the game wasn’t built for PvP, and the evil side—in keeping with Tolkien’s moral territories—had all the continents with “phat loot.” My brother played a druid, which were “OP” because they could “kite” red mobs (anything ten levels higher than you) with speed buffs and “DoTs” (damage-over-time), but also teleport; i.e., letting him corner the market farming Karg Icebear’s cloaks (emergent value through unintended play of an aging game), then sell them to evil-aligned players on the in-game black market (who never killed him because he was their inside man).

[20] “‘Dwarves Are Not Heroes’: Antisemitism and the Dwarves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Writing.”

[21] I.e., the state lionizing itself through “valor animals” attacking and eating but also exterminating stigma animals: those which the goblin attaches to, namely the rat and other vermin, the state treating itself (and its proponents) as “superior” to nature’s essentialized backstabbers.

[22] Which often leads to sex, to be fair. Except Tolkien’s stories end after the war is won and the warriors wed. He couldn’t be arsed to write about the sex that happens, save as neo-colonial revenge against black nature; i.e., while being manly with other men (a very ancient, homosexual approach to queerness—one that hyphenates sex with harmful violence).

[23] While these qualities are heavily mythologized, there remains a kernel of truth to them; i.e., white women are infantilized by their husbands, and black women forced into single motherhood. Both sides experience criminogenic conditions, but those conditions remain idiosyncratic and unequal on purpose (to better divide and demonize labor with).

[24] Racial considerations aside, black-on-white makes for a nice visual contrast.

[25] Re, Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” (1974): a  “master scenario” whose purely sexual experience is “severed from personhood, from relationships, from love,” but also the fascist language of death: “The color is black [and red], the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death” (source).

[26] Generally of the hero, but also the hero’s victims, whereupon the conqueror’s death is enshrined in a vault of worship pushing the mythic life-and-death glory forward into new, unsuspecting minds. Or as my thesis volume argues,

In other words, canon (thus Capitalism) is full of ritual sacrifice with a Christianized flavor (crucifixion) or Westernized abuse of paganized forms whose divine right revives the glory of recuperated Roman aesthetics (the Nazi as quasi-pagan); e.g., the sacrificial rooster or lamb, the virgin or scapegoat, as something to bleed out for significance and good fortune, but also stalled demise for the holder of the knife: the Christ-like Herculean warrior as babyface or heel to sacrifice when the state’s crises enter decay while firing up production, which in turn requires more and more sacrifice the hotter the furnace gets. Engorged, the elite need ever more blood to satisfy their hunger as the ultimate parasite, thus demand of their loyal followers, “Defend our land; defend your land from the infidels” (which curiously the elite stole the land from, to begin with). As Hilter put it, “What is life? Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the nation” (source).

[27] Nature-as-alien canonically achieves demonic power (allegory through transformation) through sexual reproduction tied to an inhuman stigma-animal life cycle; e.g., Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) but also the xenomorph.

[28] From Bret Devereaux’ “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020): “‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.’ The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source).

[29] I.e., the state survives by telling workers what they want, thus need*; she wants to live deliciously with strange bedfellows, the two (or more) burying the hatchet by recultivating the Superstructure! Revolution so often fertilizes praxis through sex.

*With “darkness” uncontrolled by force seen as “glutinous” (or otherwise sinful, per the Seven Deadly Sins) and whose fearsome temptation would remain something that various holy parties (usually men of the cloth or Crusaders)—ignoring double standards and hypocrisies—must dutifully abstain from, save by raping through unironic force.

[30] Reminded of my exes, I recently asked Harmony Corrupted to “rape” me as we played; i.e., I felt out of control when triggered by the present. Sensing the harmful past, I invoked rememory to regain control during ludo-Gothic BDSM with a trusted friend. It’s a bit counterintuitive on its face, but a vital paradox to counter capital’s rising inequalities and power abuse: rape makes us chase the Numinous. It is a mighty outlet when harnessed by us to heal!

[31] Often coded as “black,” in a medieval sense, and having green skin (or some other spectral blackface) during blood libel argumentation.

[32] Apparently the song was inspired by English “skinheads,” which the band—in true false-punk (and homophobic) fashion—called “faeries”:

This song is about Skinheads. At the time in England, Skinheads were not racists, but punks and anarchists. They usually wore boots, which is how Sabbath got the title. […] The lyrics were inspired by an incident after a Sabbath concert in 1970. The band was attacked by a bunch of Skinheads after the show, injuring Tony Iommi and forcing them to cancel their next performance [ibid.].

Like many rock songs, the band buries the lead/obscures their criticism of different punk groups interfering with their bottom line; i.e., while cashing in on witchcraft, monsters and drug use, themselves (re: the ghost of the counterfeit). The band went on to make millions and lose themselves in drugs, far less concerned with activism than they were exploiting the aesthetics of it while butting heads with those they called “punks” and “faeries.” When push came to shove, they sold out and treated rebellion as “gay.”

[33] I originally devised Glenn as a shapeshifter goblin; i.e., born as one, but able to turn into different shapes, sizes and genders to synthesize good praxis with: GNC poetics I pointedly wanted to “goblinize” while rescuing all aspects thereof from a harmful historical past (one whose queerness and goblins had to suffer under Western pogroms; more on this in Volume Three).

[34] Bunny likes “painal,” for instance—as much for the pain, but also the control it gives them, during sex work. They also have sex with different people, but generally as a form of public nudism/pornographic art (samples from Bunny’s Twitter profile):

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

In short, they can work with other people, but tend to favor toys because of the unparalleled control those give them; i.e., over their own body and the scenes they’re trying to cultivate. This took time and work to figure out, which shows in Bunny’s extensive catalog. Indeed, since meeting Bunny back in March 2023 when I first drew them as female Ozymandias, they’ve come such a long way and really matured as an artist! And they’ve supported my work a great deal, funding it/supplying subscriptions gratis and being there for me emotionally when others were attacking me in bad faith (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023“).

[35] The evolution of this incredibly bizarre-yet-charming children’s cartoon has a surprisingly storied history in its own right. Nathan Evans writes, in “Ween – The Mollusk: How an Album Inspired the World’s Most Famous Kid’s Cartoon” (2020):

In a Facebook post written shortly after the death of Hillenburg in late 2018, band members Gene and Dean Ween told the story of how they were contacted by him, saying that “he wanted to start a cartoon inspired by The Mollusk,” bringing to light what was a truth hidden in plain sight for many years. The Pennsylvania duo was asked to write a song teaching kids how to tie their shoes, which became “Loop De Loop” from one of the show’s most heartwarmingly innocent moments. You could even be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t the same band who wrote “Piss Up a Rope,” but that was part of the Ween magic. In tribute to The Mollusk, the record’s penultimate track “Ocean Man” plays as the 2004 movie’s credits roll.

[…] These sock puppet-like characters feed into the adorably childish comedy of the record, as does their simple Limerick style of songwriting. The very on-the-nose title “Waving My Dick in the Wind” doesn’t hold back Gene and Dean’s silly side, and neither does some of the lines within the cut—though many reviewers have used the word “masturbatory” to describe music, “you should have seen old Jimmy Wilson dance” really is so [a tradition far older than SpongeBob—with Herman Melville using plenty of phallic jokes in Moby Dick to comment both on matelotage but also the whaling industry as a whole].

But that nerdiness too lends itself to another aspect of the lyrics on here, namely with their casual use of head-turning references rooted in the obscure. Throughout, they are constantly sneaking in gentle religious subtext (“The Mollusk”) or a reference to a Rastafarian deity (“Mutilated Lips”) into an otherwise simple affair. Leaving these scraps of scholarly knowledge in a place one would least expect causes an emergent feeling of surrealism, mirroring how Hillenburg and co. nodded to the likes of metal band Pantera, literary macabrist Edgar Allen Poe, and German horror legend Nosferatu. Into a bloody children’s show [another tradition, one used—for example—by James Joyce’s Ulysses or T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and similar stories speaking to the chaos of modernity after WWI].

Ween’s relationship with psychedelics also matches the aforementioned college-band stereotype, as “Polka Dot Tail” and “Mutilated Lips” document these—again, surrealistic—sightings witnessed only through pills, smoke and crystal. Twisted images of flying puppies, malformed human hands and wormlike tentacles lodged inside the brain. Although out of context these lines would appear completely demented, it’s inverted by the tongue-in-cheek sonics behind them. The former is one of several children’s showtunes on the album, and as we all know, there’s a very blurred line between hallucinogenic visions and children’s entertainment (source).

In short, people didn’t like SpongeBob because it turned a profit; they liked it for its artless charm, which capital promptly pimped out. Rebellion, then, abjures profit as such. To it, the parallels between the meta forces at work—and the sheer seemingly-random serendipity of chance meetings, out in the world—go beyond Ween and SpongeBob, Jojo and Walpole, Watterson and Calvin/Hobbes, or Harmony and myself. And yet, in keeping with acid Communism—and the creative reality that anything might combine with anything else under natural and manmade pressures, but still make it work, through Gothic Communism at large—such holistic intra, micro and macro-spection makes for an incredibly interesting journey, all on its own!

More to the point, such eclectic and dialectical-material chaos becomes incredibly liberating the moment you realize you can combine anything with anything to say whatever you need to say to bond with other people under capital. Do it because life is absurd; smile at the gods by making your own, in the present space and time. It is, as Jameson once said, all we have. And as Molly Grue once said, “You have all the power you need, if you dare to look for it!”

[36] Whereas anal can generally fit larger sizes into itself (above), vaginal generally stops at to 6-7 inches, for the average birth canal. Vaginal is often made more exciting visually by “pushing the envelope”; i.e., by playing with pornographic tropes that walk the tightrope between exploitation and liberation; e.g., white women—commonly treated as “modest,” including their canonically diminutive and infantilized vaginas—evoking some degree of rape fantasy when saying to the camera as they take a big dick (regardless of color), “Oh, noooo! It’s soooo biiiiiiig!”

[37] And which pedophiles ascribe to child porn they call “furry” or “goblin,” in bad faith; e.g., Ian Kochinski (more on him, in Volume Three):

(source: the thumbnail for Bad Empanada’s “Vaush P*dophilia Controversy: Disgusting Fans & Orbiters MELT DOWN Defending Him,” 2024)

[38] In a cruel twist, Charlotte Brontë kills Bertha—all so her in-book double, Jane, can marry and redeem the insufferable Mr. Rochester (a slaveholder and adulterer): “Reader, I married him”; i.e., “my marriage was legitimate, and it takes a white WASP to pacify man’s otherwise ‘untamable’ nature.” Small wonder that Jean Rys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); there was no room for a Caribbean woman in a white woman’s world in a white man’s world, save to be the stepping stone in Charlotte’s bildungsroman. Genocide is genocide!

[39] Rock, for example, was stolen from African Americans (a traditional taken from older colonial models). This includes the term, itself, but also white imitators of famous artists like Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix (more on Jimi, in Volume Three); e.g., Elvis or [insert name, here]. The same goes for jazz and the Harlem Renaissance, but also white authors in the Gothic mode commodifying and “slumming” darkness while looking in from positions of relative privilege (re: the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection). Again, the idea isn’t to commodify struggle or alienation, when healing from rape inside the Imperial Core, but learn from it ways that bring different oppressed groups closer together under a common goal; i.e., while surviving police violence everywhere.

[40] The alt text, on Mastodon, reads: “Marina in a hot pink body suit and ushanka and a white fur coat holding a pink sickle and a Hitachi magic wand. they’re posed dramatically to evoke socialist realism” title=”marina in a hot pink body suit and ushanka and a white fur coat holding a pink sickle and a Hitachi magic wand. they’re posed dramatically to evoke Socialist Realism.”

[41] Re: As Jamal Subhi Ismail Nafi writes in “Milton’s Portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost and the Notion of Heroism” (2015):

According to [Tesky] Gordon, it was Blake who expressed this view most emphatically by saying that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it. He expressed this opinion chiefly in relation to the portrayal of Satan who, according to him, has been depicted as a character possessing certain grand qualities worthy of the highest admiration (source).

[42] E.g., straight men being Black Penitents protected by the courts with a high burden of proof, versus anyone else slandered and abused under widespread pogroms that extend to these juridical spheres.

[43] In the West, animation through clay comes from Judaism and the Golem of Prague (and older versions); i.e., the power of creation laid into mortal hands, then demonized by Christian forces. Abjection abjects sin and guilt off onto state enemies, which the state then attacks. To that, canonical Gothic relies on the cartoon of necromancy and animation directed at older female/feminized men (servants), non-European and/or queer religions, cultures and identities; e.g., Judaism, but also poetic likenesses that, in the same shadow zone, highlight and scandalize Nazis and Communists; i.e., being seen as heretical, thus of nature/fallen and needing to be purged by blood libel disguised as pure reason, post-Reformation. Manmade things are valorized provided they are made by white, cis-het Christian-coded men. Anything else is abject, but also apologized for through an uncanny similarity to state forces. We come from a sample of one, so “darkness” and “corruption” is dogmatized, fearful of Jewish revenge—of Medusa coming home to roost, thus nature and servants as “black” to settler colonialism’s lily whiteness. Their nadir is our zenith, our sex and their sex echoing in hostile duality.

The Protestant work ethic, per Cartesian thought, treats righteous labor as holy over anything antithetical to that; i.e., as paradoxically required to justify itself through witch hunts: God makes Lilith; she defies him and gives birth to demons, so God makes Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. But the maiden is overshadowed by the whore’s dark “Jewish,” Melmothian spectre—her evil magic galvanizing the witch hunts that follow. She’s the castle, speaking to hammered witches, Jews eaten by lions, and queers put to death for refusing to have PIV sex, etc. Cryptonymy isn’t just a dogwhistle, but a whistle for labor to blow through the same cartoons; e.g., by Shelley’s Modern Prometheus taking creation (the fire of the gods) to demonize Victor Frankenstein through his work talking back: “giving lip,” or “sass,” as it were (more on this, in “Forbidden Sight,” part two).

[43a] Demons have infinite variety, infinite form; so does nature and demons of nature in a more animalistic class (versus those of Hell, presented as “extradimensional,” “from the void” or otherwise “not of this Earth”).

This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). 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). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). 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 “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

Idle Hands, part two: Vampires and Claymation (feat. Takena’s “Midnight Vampire”)

“He swore he wasn’t going to kill you. He thought the humiliation of prison would be worse. The beatings. The rapes. The incessant fear for your life, but I told him, ‘No, John, you’re wrong. Dying would be worse.’ Because, well, honestly, it is, isn’t it? Dying is just worse. So do I pull the trigger or not?”

—Alice Morgan, Luther (2010)

Picking up where “Trial by Fire: Demon Muscle Mommies” left off…

Whereas part one of “Idle Hands” concerned the witch blood libel class—re: Amazons/the Medusa, and demons mommies of a dark or fiery type; i.e., as statuesque, seemingly made from clay and designed to fulfill different vengeful wishes (usually under a demon lover/protector dynamic)—part two considers the hunting mechanisms of those who are less gigantic, but no less kowai (fearsome) beneath their kawaii exterior—vampires, but specifically dainty lolita vampires dressed to kill (our focus, here, being on the classic female avenger as translating post hoc to other marginalized groups)!

That being said, there’s generally a “moll” criminal/femme fatale idea to such beings (e.g., Alice Morgan, above) but one that is as much informed by comorbid elements as congenital; i.e., generational trauma carried “in the blood,” so to speak, and relayed in theatrical forms that, sure enough, often use clay as much as costumes, actors and props: killing sprees made to avenge/right old wrongs, thus do what everyone in the audience is thinking (often a desire for bloody revenge). So many rape victims desire the ability to do so, even if they never act on it; i.e., the fantasizing of rape in reverse: “How does it feel, asshole!” Such outlets are important for a variety of reasons, giving our half-real abusers the poke!

Torture porn remains a complicated, ancient arena, one bound classically to women (white or not) as the perpetual victims of men. Out of patriarchal Antiquity into the present, such man-eaters can subversively manifest to reverse state violence (and other monopolies) onstage: the vengeful whore—equal to a one-man army dismantling a horde of thugs[1]—showing the rapist his own castration; i.e., for having abused someone vulnerable, often within exploitative stories fetishizing said abuse. It’s an anti-predation maneuver/terror weapon, one speaking—as the Gothic usually does—onstage towards things happening offstage: “Don’t fuck with us.” It’s supposed to make men, hence the state, uncomfortable!

As usual, demons play with power as something to theatrically arrange and argue one’s positions during courtly love. Continuing our examination of prostitute revenge—and going beyond Amazons and demons of shadow and fire—we arrive at vampire demon lovers. Typical of my work on vampires, it’s brief, but punchy.

Some Ground Rules: Vampire as Vengeful Whore/Sex Demon

We’ll get to Takena specifically in just a moment. First, some ground rules (three pages). Vampires are classically undead, but terms like “sex demon,” “demon lover” or “whore” easily apply to female vampires as a classic version of the monstrous-feminine (for our purposes, “demon” and “whore” are synonymous, as are synonyms to whore, like mistress or Medusa; e.g., dark mistress = demon, commonplace to Amazonian mommy demons having androgynous/phallic qualities per classically unorthodox[2] gendered power arrangements; re: Lady Hellbender and Karlach); i.e., a dead whore, doll, or undead sex demon, in the modular sense; e.g., Blxxd Bunny’s thick, messy or otherwise “immodest” makeup—caked on, resembling decay but also sexual arousal, depending on the color—being comparable to corpse paint (and with graveyard prostitution going back to Ancient Rome, at least; re: B.B. Wagner).

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Abject and theatrically arrested, vampires are sex demons that speak to isolation and abuse through undead trauma and feeding mechanisms; i.e., forbidden sex defying canonical laws to enact female/monstrous-feminine revenge from beyond the grave: parallel voices/societies challenging Puritanical state authority with worker counterauthority and counterterror breaking the monopoly. They wear the makeup for themselves, and say what they want to say inside capitalist markets; i.e., cannibalizing the same whorish theatre tools for asymmetrical warfare: the strict flavor of violence, whereupon the paradox of such things (whores and rape) determines by dialectical-material context; e.g., tickling and orgasms or pain consensual through said context, but also activating different nervous centers (and chemicals) that sure enough, overlap vaso vagal with erogenous responses and confused predator/prey mechanisms vis-à-vis different aesthetics of torture having irony (or not).

Macbeth called these “borrowed robes.” What he stole through sexualized force, we take through guerilla sex and force speaking to rape; i.e., as a loss of control tied to articles of clothing and other theatrical elements; e.g., shoes historically being torturous and uncomfortable (see: Chinese foot-binding but also high heels, above), but during camp can shape into foils that empower us and speak to past disempowerment. All aspects of the whore can do this, yielding creativity and bodies being all the female guerilla classically has to use; i.e., deprived of anything else by the empires (and cops) pimping them out, sex becomes their weapon of choice. It becomes literally “on the brain,” insanity a kind of death, rape, and captivity theatre expressed through hysteria narratives (merged with other moral panics, as the state requires and which we subvert) that punch through your eye sockets like a bad pun!

Whores, then, are brides of the Devil (or, per Lewis’ shapeshifting Matilda, simply the Devil in disguise, deceiving the deceiver), meaning they can do things good girls can’t, and generally take things from men (usually power through money and sex) to avenge their own relegation. Except all girls are whores per the same paradox, giving them the potential to “corrupt” for or against the state; re: “any weapon can become a weapon of terror.” This occurs through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (and equivalents of these things across the Gothic mode) while stressing their own paradoxical, profoundly liminal, darkness-visible existence; i.e., parody and pastiche, in Gothic, generally elide and—per the class, culture and race privilege of middle-class white people from the Neo-Gothic onwards—commercialize these fearful fascinations per the ghost of the counterfeit; e.g., Rob Zombie’s “Living Dead Girl” (1998): “Who is this irresistible creature who has an insatiable love for the dead?” Under Gothic, bad vibes offer up baddie vibes, just as often; the irony is optional (and in Zombie and Sheri Moon’s case, left, is generally a brand to sell, not a critical voice with any serious bite to it).

To that, any resulting “forbidden sight” (darkness visible) grants a specialized jouissance whose systemic catharsis lies in between play and rememory unto actual trauma (re: Asprey’s “terror is the kissing cousin of force”); i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM putting “rape” in quotes to recontextualize it: as “mere play” in ways that vampires use to speak cryptonymically regarding sexual violence, and in ways the Gothic iconoclast may camp and subvert synthesizing demonic poetics! These paradoxes suitably occur through rape, murder and/or death fantasies (dark desires for revenge), but also surreal, transformatory and excessive neo-medieval language (e.g., the Jabberwocky poem, from earlier). We’ll be doing so, here in part two, with vampires, prostitution and claymation vis-à-vis Taneka’s golem-esque, then conclude with Tolkien’s goblins and other anti-Semitic tropes, in part three; re: as the weapons “of idle hands” that will come up repeatedly throughout the entirety of the Demon Module!

To it, “vampire” puts monster between woman as maiden and whore, itself cleft in twain, yet bound at the hip on the same liminal, half-real stage; but also, between house and dungeon, vampire lord and queen, genuine torture and “torture” in quotes, revenge and “revenge,” clay and flesh, etc. Whereas she acts out her rape by killing an imaginary killer to rescue her former self divided from her vampire side speaking to her current surreal and furious existence, so too can we play out our own deaths, trauma and transformation (rapes, revenge, rapture, etc); i.e., in such dualistic, psychomachic, martyred medieval forms: popular media being whatever delicious, rock ‘n roll trash people love to consume. Vampires are whores, are sex demons criminalized by the state to maintain state control! We don’t just get down to business; we take care of it to debride them!

In turn, demons more broadly are “shadows” that suggest holistically whatever reality hides through state illusions/Capitalist Realism; i.e., simulacra being clay animating in small, the homunculus, golem or egregore’s function similar to Walpole’s animated miniatures (the fatal portrait), Plato’s shadow plays, and the phantasmagoria, etc. These historically transmit Gothic dualities and double standards through a “medieval” fake, received by playful “archaeologists” prodding the Capitalocene. A right historically enjoyed by queer white men and straight women, both played with the ghost of the counterfeit in the Neo-Gothic period: necromancer and shade, conjuring up “Hell” as allegorical, pre-Christian “past”; i.e., while in a Christian-dominated world, one whose Protestant ethic ethnocentrically essentialized the whore as “evil” per blood libel, Orientalism, and monstrous-feminine Satanic Panic, etc.

To it, we’re returning to the demonic/god-like idea of making monsters from clay. While this fabrication typically includes doll-sized humans or human-sized dolls—or even giant-sized statues (e.g., Michelangelo’s David, left), which historically range from ancient-to-modern vanity projects, to Humanist/Gothic commentaries on the world when they were made—they don’t animate especially well, in isolation. And though we’ll get to larger simulacra like Shelley’s Creature, chiding Victor for playing God during the Promethean Quest, I thought we’d start small and work our way up to Frankenstein’s monster and similar beings (re: the xenomorph); i.e., from Takena’s killer doll to goblins (which we’ll look at with Tolkien, in part three).

Both are made as much to express their maker’s humanity (or lack thereof, in Victor’s case) as it is to comment on the humanity of those being made. Conjured up by “necromancers,” they talk for different reasons, speaking truth through shadows, artifice and lies. This isn’t in bad faith, but to communicate through allegory as just another part of human language and experience: the voice of the surly-silly Jane Doe. She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her skull-girl eyes; it’s like a killer doll, then: beautiful but deadly, exchanging unequal power through violent sex (or “sex,” per the cryptonymy process). In iconoclastic circles, it’s meant to excite the browbeaten and frighten the abuser (though the former will always try to pimp the latter): become the whore, become vengeance—a pedagogy of the oppressed whose conduit of joy plays at hauntological Mortal Kombat to break Capitalist Realism on its wheel!

Takena’s “Midnight Vampire” does this, in a nutshell. Vampires are commonly sex demons that communicate euphemistically through psychosexual pain, sodomy and murderous courtly love/torture porn; re: problematic love/the love that dare not speak its name, except Takena’s lover shouts it without making a sound (action speaking louder than words)—the shock scarcely registering until you’re already dead; i.e., revenge is reclamation to revolt, often through the Platonic suggestion of shadowy violence denoting a desire to change not just ourselves—and our dark, repressed reflection on the Aegis (the simulacrum)—but the world along with us!

As we shall see, so does Takena’s vampire; i.e., by having the whore’s revenge against profit, one undiscerning thug at a time…

Takena’s Revenge: “Midnight Vampire”

This short piece was written in response/reference to my initial reactions to Takena’s “Midnight Vampire” (2024): “Persephone’s Insights, #1: Breaking Down ‪@Takena‘s “Midnight Vampire” (2024). Combining raw sexuality and violence isn’t something I generally do, but did want to explore here how psychosexual expression often discusses sexuality through “medieval” theatrical violence. —Perse

(artist: Star Gureisu)

Gothic maturity is the ability to discuss taboo subjects in sex-positive ways; re: from cannibalism, to murder and rape, to bounty hunters and assassins, to menstruation and “wandering womb,” the Gothic loves to use medieval romance language it can force against workers, activating those survival mechanisms the West has seemingly abolished but, point in fact, manipulates for different reasons. This can be to maintain state order or break it, the state—when actual revolution decays its strongholds—trying to fetishize different scapegoat groups while simultaneously exploiting them for profit, and workers subverting that process (of abjection) during liminal expression: immaturity vs maturity. All happen inside calculated risk being as much people as place, the danger disco filled with demon-lover phallic women sinning for their own reasons (and visually intimidating men, all the while); i.e., versus madmen targeting non-demonic women, Takena’s clubber-meets-schoolgirl vampire gives state thugs a calculated, operatic taste of their own bitter medicine (not just murder or rape, but genocide)! Keeping with vampires, capital treats sex as a violent drug to contain, a disease to surveille (re: the panopticon). In trying to, they’ve only dug their own graves; i.e., she’s in here with them!

Any violence towards women, in Gothic, is always sexual or haunted by rape; i.e., forcing women to revert to trading with the only thing they could realistically trade in, any time before the present. The female avenger turns all of that on its head; i.e., a monstrous-feminine double trading in masculine violence (with a psychosexual bent)—not only while feminizing men the way they did to her, once upon a time, but doing them one better! She’s an off-limits warrior whore/dark castle-in-the-flesh, using excessive force (and subterfuge) to lay the gangsters[3] to eternal, ignominious rest!

This brings us to Takena’s vampire—with smaller figurines in dollhouse sets being easier to work with on account of their size. Small or not, they represent humans and their residences, but also the unspeakable actions that occur inside, which the audience relates to vicariously through theatre (the paradox being these speak easily enough with a bit of clay to work with—clay being an excellent cryptonym, showing what is concealed by standing in for raw sex through medievalized metaphors debating back and forth). They also supply the weaponized means to survive by communicating such things to achieve systemic catharsis; i.e., by cultivating good social-sexual habits unto a pedagogy of the oppressed that we can inform/contribute to, among the sleeping fetishes and clichés: stuck on history’s endless carousel, waiting like the vampire to wake up and feed once more!

Takena’s skit is fairly standard graveyard sex—a doll-ish, splatterhouse miniature combining lover and killer (and frozen at the moment of “turning”/original trauma, as the undead always are), the protagonist anisotropically reversing the usual terrorist/counterterrorist ordering of sex, fear and force; i.e., someone dislocated from the land, and from whom the owner class now fears revenge: for originally stealing from and now who takes back in potent mixtures of seductive violence the elite cannot police, thus pimp! A huntress lone wolf, our vigilante—per the usual shorthand—hunts from a home-base lair with which to launch attacks against predatory men and their secluded torture-dungeons-in-disguise. It’s abbreviated, here, but has all the basic parts of a man-eater revenge fantasy (conducted for missing girls, en masse): an avenger and a crime boss, the latter’s henchmen, and a damsel.

In turn, any ironic harm is offset or haunted by unironic forms the killer is avenging not once, but night after night; i.e., as a matter of routine: a female vampire/serial killer patiently pimping male pimps during non-peaceful transfers of power speaking to unanswered crimes, real or imagined (castration fantasies lending vampirism a female “cruising” character versus a traditionally male one as normally valorizing said male[s] penetration[4]). They value weakness and pain as things to deal in and exchange, watching their prey while hiding in plain sight.

In a sense, the vampire and her prey aren’t so different—save that she moves power away from them, the exploiters, and towards the vulnerable; i.e., by illustrating self-defense when given consent[5] is absent. She does so by watching those who watch: “Since then, there has never been a moment that has not betrayed you—a glance, a turn of the head, the flash of your throat as you breathe! Even your way of standing perfectly still, they were all my spies!” In turn, she satisfies her thirst (for blood, the definitive aspect of vampirism): as a weapon of terror hyphenating sex and force, taking the husband, boyfriend or jealous coworker to task, and ultimately getting away with murder as the whore’s revenge!

In short, the protagonist premediates and embodies a rapist’s worst fears: a streetsweeper without compunction, clemency or remorse. Possessing an extended history of (and penchant for) barbaric ultraviolence, she deceives the deceiver and rapes the rapist. Doing so during a nightmarish return of said barbarity’s corporal punishment turned excessively violent against capital (capital punishment being execution), she’s a criminal judge, jury and executioner making a house call—the call girl castrator (resembling a prioress, in her black-and-white uniform), fighting fire with fire, to reverse the usual direction of violence/dark desire; i.e., that other criminals working for the state push towards helpless (usually white straight middle-class) women. In fetishizing herself and her bloody actions’ “cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” the vampire shows the rapist his doom. I’d say she spits on his grave while doing so, except she enjoys her knightly work (and wouldn’t want to waste any precious blood; re, Marx’ Kapital, with a twist: dead labor feeding on dead labor to help living labor)!

As such, Takena’s vampire is a deathless, retro-future avenger penetrating the hauntology (re: the canceled future, classically a Gothic castle but known more recently as the Western, noir or cyberpunk, etc): a strict dom/phallic woman “acting like a man” to avenge violence against women in medieval ways. She’s a demon lover “making love” during courtly love as something to bring to the kidnappers’ false home (after being invited inside); i.e., a small kawaii that, suitably enough, crosses over into furious kowai-style bloodbaths while still appearing cute, mid-unheimlich. She doesn’t shriek like a banshee might, but her dollish eyes speak volumes: revenge against rape through medieval violence, bathing in the blood of evil men to have the whore’s revenge (the assumption being she’s cracking down against profit, specifically snuff films). She’s a walking weapon, a bad bitch not to be fucked with exposing the brave as cowards, scared of crazy little girls with a tendency to fuck shit up; i.e., damaged goods not afraid of getting stabbed (re: the Radcliffean heroine) but having no one to stab (re: Dacre’s Victoria).

In turn, there’s room for all kinds of puns, many which leap to mind through the campy violence taking place; i.e., the usual hyphenations of sex and force that victims of abuse live with, and which they direct their hellish lust towards would-be abusers and victims occupying the same complicated space’s predator/prey confusions; re: the passion of martyrdom—of ravishing and release—reversing or redirecting harm through camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Despite those confusions, the liminality affords play as a matter of person and place liberated from single set outcomes. It becomes fun, but can speak to actual harm; i.e., by putting “rape” in quotes during rape play (not shown, below), the latter sitting alongside regular sex (shown, below). Commonly fixating on oral, vaginal (or anal, not shown, below), doing so frequently relies upon implied/actual penetration, said vampiric roleplay bleeding into daily social-sexual interactions; re: Cuwu, acting as “vampy fae” and gentle mommy dom in bed, having fun with me while persistently giving and taking through two sex workers’ paired synthesis:

(artist: Cuwu[6])

Cuwu’s borderline disorder certainly affected our interactions, as such, but they never removed consent (or fun) from the equation; i.e., while we played. They were certainly someone society would demonize for being trans and mentally ill/a rape victim; and yet, despite their subby abusing of me in the past, remained someone whose harm stemmed from their monstrous condition—i.e., as something they were trying to manage and didn’t always succeed, abuse leading them to harm others during calculated risk.

I won’t condone or otherwise apologize for the abuse they ultimately caused me/others, but likewise would never advocate for the harm that befell them, elsewhere in their life. That is my prerogative, my understanding shaped by both the severity of the abuse caused, and the fact that Cuwu—a sex worker and drug user—was ultimately steered to unravel by parties besides them or myself. In short, they were a victim who abused others, but often continued being abused; i.e., the whore’s paradox (and revenge) sit in the lived reality that many sex workers are rape victims, and many rape victims love pain during sex (or threats of “danger” in quotes) that give them some sense of release/control over their trauma: to synthesize during good praxis to reduce the possibility of rape, worldwide!

Yes, Cuwu made mistakes during this process—and they certainly had a dark “destroyer” side to them—but they absolutely deserve love, anyways; i.e., they belong in Gothic Communism’s vision of a better world, because they were trying to make the current world a better place. Doing so manifested through various contributions towards the Cause, the two of us healing from rape while living in the shadow of police violence; re: by seeking out safety and comfort as much for me as from me.

When Jadis had me at their beck and call, for example, Cuwu gave me sanctuary. They offered me sex, of course, but also understanding and love that Jadis did not. It did not last, but they did their best, and their failure—I like to believe—was influenced by others in their life twisting them back towards self-destructive behaviors. This makes it easier to forgive them, and my exhibits of them—used with permission, according to our agreement—are of someone I respect and love in spite of their harming me. Revolution is a messy affair. Yet, if Cuwu and I are any indication, it blooms inside the hearts (and holes) of those on the battlefield, opening themselves up while making love. Shared trauma be like that—making people horny or sex repulsed, depending on those taking part (Cuwu would often oscillate, both thirsty or tempered due to their personality disorder):

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Despite the potential for harm, Cuwu’s monstrous nature had revolutionary value during the cryptonymy process. The same latitude should be given towards Takena’s vampire fantasy, then. Yes, Cuwu is AFAB and trans masc, and I am a trans woman, but our clay double speaks to a shared GNC desire for revenge against capital. For those viewed or otherwise treated as women, in general, the line between terrifying and cute is characteristically thin; i.e., by turning the safety of home, inside-out, to speak to nuclear hypocrisies.

Keeping with demons, this is the data, and Takena tells it through clay. If computers are modern data transmitters, clay is the data storage system of the ancient world (e.g., the clay tablet to Ea-nāṣir being the oldest customer complaint). It never gets tired and can never die—can change shape or color and be, like Satan’s darkness visible, whatever composition the user needs it to be, thus personify to say whatever the creator wants to say in the future from the past; i.e., memes, but also cryptomemes, per Castricano’s cryptomimesis dynamic! Clay is also naked, but clothed/opaque (re: Segewick’s imagery of the surface); i.e., able to be assigned whatever apotropaic instructions you want; e.g., “kill my enemies,” “protect me from harm,” or some dialectical-material, cops-and-victims combination of these, in duality thus granting infinite value/shape/utility for or against the state.

For example, Mary Shelley used the tabula rasa to highlight the hypocrisy of state-programmed automatons—with men like Victor arrogantly thinking they have free will, but simply being statues/gargoyle slaves, themselves: made of materials carrying messages through the policing of sex and force. So does Takena’s golem subvert this process; i.e., as a nude/clothed defender of an imaginary but nonetheless besieged “Prague,” an other world beset by fakes who she reminds of their own clay-like (de)construction (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”).

In turn, phrases like “virus” or “code” marry cryptomimetically to sexual production and settler arguments against nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., which we can enjoy pursuant to an iconoclastic endorsement. During live burial, such dialogs (and their neo-medieval refrains) speak our truth as normally repressed, helping us grow fluent in deception to point at truth: with funerary rites, duelist lingo and all-around cryptonymy slogans—i.e., “dead” whores tell plenty of tales; those versed in psychosexual violence and demonic theatre revive the black knight[7] to kick ass/wage war against the usual Crusaders! It’s a classic Neo-Gothic goading mechanism (“Chicken, chicken!”) but one that points the finger at the accused living in sin under capital’s present arrangements; e.g., Arthur literally holier-than-thou, and the black knight having none of it!

The point, here, isn’t that Arthur wins the fight, but how the black knight humiliates him, anyways. The same goes for Takena. Whichever mercenary being discussed, think of the basic idea as the talking dead as much the walking dead. Whereas Macbeth promptly crapped himself when seeing Banquo, post-execution (and fearing what the latter’s unwanted apocalypse might uncover to the misled members of that court), the same idea speaks through humor as hate—the kind borrowed from Shakespeare, but also Walpole and Lewis’ silly-serious mayhem, copied ever onwards: “‘Tis but a scratch!” “A scratch? Your arm’s off!” “I’ve had worse!” “You liar!”

Like a gargoyle, our undead heroine comes alive after sleep (death’s counterfeit) to seek revenge on living abusers who don’t value life; re: the ghost of the counterfeit exciting her viewers, doing so in campy ways that remain visually violent and non-violent through vaso vagal theatre. We summon her and watch her go berserk, avenging some hidden wrong during her labor of (courtly) love. Like all vampires, then, she embodies death as a paradoxical source of life, a murder ballad hyphenating both as much as mouth and fang!

Made from clay and animating as such, Takena’s story is basically a prurient, transhuman simulacrum of prostitution. Copied by Takena before arbitrating in hauntological form, the whore/demon lover works at the bar as the usual site of extramarital play and pleasure—foreplay, to be precise; i.e., leading to things that respond normally toward virgin/whore division: per male privilege, so often leading to “revenge” against female/GNC parties by cis-het male ones, the latter bored with their caged housewives and seeking “Hell” to colonize it. Our subverting of these occurs on the same vaso vagal, poppy-red stages of power and performance playing out this or that. During the cryptonymy process, things blend in and stand out—all to make it harder to say who is and isn’t the harmful agent (re: speaking to the lived reality that women experience). In turn, abjection inverts vis-à-vis the chronotope/clay dollhouse castle-inside-a-castle’s mise-en-abyme, doing so by playing with the usual monopolies of violence, terror and sex. We ruin your childhoods, but remind you that Gumby was always creepy! Takena’s vampire is cute, yet confuses her victims (who think her an easy target) precisely because she’s violent “like men” are/were—inside the Gothic’s plastic, half-real, legendary past!

Furthermore, the militant, female demon lover’s theatrical desire—to harm others that resemble our past abusers—becomes trapped between the reality that abusers historically appear normal and harmless, in bad faith, but on whose liminal, innocuous surfaces are where survivors see harm, anyways. In turn, survivors may play it out in good faith, but should remind our audience looking in (regardless of faith) that—for anyone viewing the killer doll, smashing or rescuing small likenesses of themselves per framed story—need only remember how harm is a matter of context; re: couched within an aesthetic of power and death, dom and sub, human and vampire, predator and prey during ludo-Gothic BDSM. We look and they look, and between us is where things play out on the same Aegis’ cryptonymy process: the virgin and the whore, the voyeur and exhibitionist, playwright and BDSM freak. She is a kinky girl, the kind you don’t take home to mother! Instilling fear and fascination is very much the point.

In turn, damage through rape play speaks to what is covered up, but also all around us and coded less in censorship and more in the cryptonymy process: violence points to rape, but also trauma and feeding in ways that anisotropically reverse the flow of power conducive to a salubrious, class-conscious effect. Weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma, our resident man-eater hunting in places where she is normally hunted. She’s here to turn the tables, telling the story in small as each sizes the other up; i.e., while the knightly chess player plays not with some frail girlish thing acting out death, but Death herself playing him (echoes, below, of The Seventh Seal, 1957).

As always, the state is incompatible with life; unlife can fight back by dressing up as the whore— i.e., by emasculating rape through its recreation, a witness testimony retold in “Gothic” fakery. So does the Aegis anisotropically expose what is repressed, doing so to humanize the whore as demonic: a guilty pleasure, Medusa flipping the script on those usual benefactors of capital punching her! She claps back as a black knight (a kind of cop-turned-terrorist) would: hard and fast, without mercy! Pimping the pimp, this happens through play mirroring play!

In other words, the survival mechanisms of a predator/prey relationship happen very quickly and are coded among structures that—while unspoken—remain heavily ritualized and ubiquitous: go to the bar to pursue sex/drink for some sex, and canonically a chance to abuse the whore who you have power over. Subverting this, Takena plays with dolls inside small miniatures that combine medieval aspects of female/prostitute torture with more recent hauntologies; i.e., the snuff film and kawaii vampire waifu. She gives as good as she gets, hypnotizing lover boy and from him, his hidden master waiting at the kill house (viewed almost peripherally because her hungry eyes on the men, inside).

Exposed, the king runs from one dungeon to another inside a castle’s concentric refrain; she follows him, the whorish executioner carrying her trauma with her and returning from the grave to seek a demonic revenge (dragging the abuser to Hell, reversing Hades and Persephone’s role in things). It’s all a death omen for future abusers; i.e., relayed in Gothic, repeating echoes of older stories felt in present-day forms. True to form, the vampire is reflecting on the surfaces and thresholds of pastiche/remediated praxis, not on actual glass; but the Aegis’ glass-like reflections are, per oppositional praxis, precisely where such things play out, time and time again. Animation isn’t just uncanny but speaking to unspeakable, repressed topics; i.e., through black magic as ubiquitous, commodified: xenoglossia, aka the voice of the dead. The best revenge is to help that voice survive through the message; i.e., when taking the state’s unironic dungeon (and torturers) apart, piece by piece—through revolutionary cryptonymy reversing abjection, on and within a partially ironic counterfeit haunted by rape!

In true Gothic fashion, then, Takena’s story includes a maiden, which the whore rescues from certain death before arming her with an axe (above)! So does the whore haunt the maiden. By the end, the axe is hers not just to grind, but swing to deflower the clubber through revenge: the Gothic heroine is the slayer of a bad-dream camera man, taking his vision less apart and more bouncing the baleful gaze back on the original, non-female vampire (and his army of disposable henchmen). The maiden overpowers him, having done so through her mightier maternal double making her an accomplice. From the charmer at the gate, to the executioners inside trafficking women, all the king’s men are in pieces from the skilled dominatrix, and now it’s the king’s turn through her apprentice! The hunter becomes the hunted and vice versa, the female reaver slaying her former abuser’s likeness in regressive medieval language—live burial, hoisted on his own petard! Ker-splat!

Furthermore, Takena’s psychomachy shows the monster not as strictly one side, alone; it’s both, and is shared between them as an aesthetic they use to communicate different goals: to abuse the whore instead of challenging capital, versus the whore reminding the king that he’s only one for a day (and it only takes the shadow of a threat to emasculate him, above). Fetishes, at their simplest, are objects of power to give and receive; to fetishize something is, from a sex-positive standpoint, to give it power through dialogs about power as something to exchange either way. To it, the vampire is scary! But she can direct that terror away from the girl and towards the men looking to harm said girl; their tricks won’t work on the vampire, and she knows it:

By locking herself in with the bandits, the vampire cuts off the room’s only exit. Having no recourse for escape (and trapped inside a dungeon of their own design; re: the infernal concentric pattern), the men’s only option is to fight Death to the death. To that, the vampire certainly lives up to her fearful reputation. Tough-as-nails, dead as a doornail, and the final nail in these interlopers’ coffins (which the room becomes), she teaches them one last, brutal lesson before they die; i.e., that some people push back! She rips-and-tears until it is done! In doing so, she spares the maiden (a virgin no more) the vampire’s curse, Cupid’s devilish embodiment disappearing like smoke (which vampires are prone to do).

And just as quick, the day is won; the damsel is freed and the villains are dead—our classic Gothic heroine, the air-headed sex doll, recovering from her dark reverie to see her Venus twin has disappeared, the transplant evicting the riffraff before crawling back to her own castle-in-small for a much-needed dirt nap!

Per the Promethean Quest, the Hero’s Journey (the monomyth), Male Gaze and various other tropes are turned on their heads/made inside out-like a vampire’s cloak; but the usual wearer is the classic Neo-Gothic readership (women/fags) punching up against the usual victimizers—not the mythical sort like Radcliffe’s banditti, but weird LARPer white men who can’t get it up unless they’re harming someone/acting the cop. Cops need victims; victims can fight back through the same power fantasies moving power towards workers: our lady of the night—let in to raise Cain, having Grendel’s revenge, mommy-dom-style. She’s a demonic, nigh-unstoppable shapeshifter (and damage-impervious stand-in for our indestructible selves that survive rape), showing us “death” is a hell of a time (and doesn’t mind if you cum in her eye, left): a psychosexual, martyred state of grace.

Soon, the sun sets and the night falls, our feminist fearmonger back for seconds, making guilty men afraid, squirm or otherwise think twice—as she castrates their doubles, onstage! For her (and us), it’s sweet relief, but also returns to and from the beckoning grave! Whoever said chivalry was dead?

Tokenization (a reprise)—Subverting It through Demonic Poetics

Note: This conclusion touches briefly (six pages) not just on vampires, but zombies. Refer to the Undead Module to consider that monster class at length. —Perse

As we discussed with Amazons, tokenization is a thing. The whole point of “Midnight Vampire,” though, is to subvert/reverse all of that, its found document making us reflect on the recycled badass language to reveal the usual police abusers protected by canonical forms: the actual enemies. It does so through martyred, plural fragmentation; i.e., our resident whore can disassociate/be raped till the cows come home. Her mouth agape and giving the king bedroom eyes, she takes all the men’s power until they are weak enough that our pillow princess can finish them off, executioner-style. “That all you got, killer? Such a little man with a little ‘weapon’!” Death in these stories is both figurative and/or literal, meaning it symbolizes actual police violence, but also the ability to play said violence out for different reasons; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s counterterrorist reversal, not state fear and dogma! Intersectional solidarity punches up against all cops: “Get thee to a nunnery!”

(artist: oxsidiancastle)

Not all monsters are bad, then; but those who harm others pursuant to profit are. We’re here to kill that darling idea, camping dogma to destroy pure, blind belief; e.g., Andy Rehfeldt’s “Don’t Stop Believing (the Minor Version)” (2018); i.e., visiting feelings of torture and death onto our unironic voyeurs in the audience. It’s an ironic stress valve, but also a means to voice through a pedagogy of the oppressed what normally isn’t, under police structures. We shall—like Lewis’ Ambrosio—unmake them using voodoo-doll likenesses of themselves: ACAB effigies to scapegoat, batter and trash. We are ungovernable—seen as “violent” for simply existing but also because we challenge the status quo through various cryptonymic games and ironies; re: that they dug their own graves, rape not only not destroying their usual victims but turning said victims into ravenous, indestructible, Pac-Woman maws of death (the vagina dentata trapped between sex and force, a ransom fetish suing for peace through class war).

A kind of demon, the vampire—as undead, but also manmade in the intra and metatextual sense (a kind of walking weapon/terminator infiltrating the danger disco to rescue the princess)—provides apocalypse for their wish fulfillment’s special sight: to conceptualize things in imaginary medieval language, which those from the actual historical past would either have had no concept of, or a different understanding of regarding things we in the present wrestle with; i.e., while pushing towards post-scarcity by defacing modernity’s hired goons (the gore violent, but also censored by its own cartoonish-ness[8], below):

Faced with capital’s usual enforcers, Takena’s vampire is an exterminator purging them as the disease (re: Matteson’s I Am Legend inspiring what became Night of the Living Dead and the modern zombie)—a ritual to endlessly consummate as vampires do: through the eroticized violence of courtly love. It’s a survival mechanism—a way of adapting against Capitalism being the disease, versus capital lobotomizing its victims through siege mentality. The alienation and fetishization, but also the shuttered, fortress-style monitoring go both ways. In turn, she’s a disease the cops can’t quarantine, traveling from place to place to exact her revenge. She’s not just sodomy to persecute, but the Black Death revived and selective in its brutal, showy vengeance (turning homes into charnel houses)!

This isn’t just “for show.” Rape is everywhere under capital because capital rapes everything for profit. Systemic rape/rape propaganda is capital’s open secret/tool of revenge against nature (e.g., Gisele Pelicot; i.e., not just single unmarried women like Takena’s helpless clubber girl, but married women like Pelicot abused under their husband’s supposed “care,” and said husband’s virgin/whore syndrome leading them to pimp out their wife/gang rape them in their sleep and prey on their children[9]). Having incubated in capital’s breeding grounds, she’s merely returning the favor!

More to the point, the vampire disrupts the orderly disposal of nature (and its prostitution/chattelization) by reinfecting capital/society-as-sick under heightened conditions of survival-under-duress; i.e., by breaking quarantine and laying siege to capital-as-brothel, she can lift conditions through a healthier virus: compassion, acquired by demonizing the state as source to apathy burying everyone alive (through radical faith/persecution mania and mounting paranoia in times of crisis, which the state relies on to survive); re: the state is incompatible with life and consent, undeath being a useful poetic vector to challenge bourgeois hegemony by interrogating police brutality and suppression with theatrical violence. Rather than become something to censor without thought, said theatre touches on new orders of existence, ones that stem from older “pathologies” liberated from state utility and oppression. Rebellion is always, to some degree, violent, but also virulent. We use it not just to perform danger during calculated risk, but to spread and assess it!

Takena’s vampire, punching up at the elite’s usual pimps, spreads like wildfire, a succulent counterterrorist punishing the guilty and warning all rapists to beware; i.e., while relishing in the psychosexual violence unfolding on the streets, the state having made criminals it a) can’t tokenize, and b) who attack those who suddenly become vulnerable—not the homeless or the housewife as obedient, but such things turned, like the vampire, towards rebellious counterterror during the dialectic of the alien! Killing the scarecrows of the elite becomes an act of pure addictive bliss—one of revenge that merges violence with sex on the already-endless, half-real stage between imagination and material reality interacting back and forth: an unliving weapon forged in blood.

(artist: Jkappa)

Takena demonstrates how this alien commonly appears as female, onstage, but avengers are demons, thus can take any form workers, onstage or off; re: GNC, non-white, Pagan, etc, given a taste “for blood” as taking back what’s ours! Whatever the character and intersection of class, culture and race war, rebellion is rebellion, solidarity is solidarity (and like period sex, is famously messy and whispered about). Rebellion is a war as much fought with as in shadows, taking any shape darkness visible needs to foster the monstrous-feminine desire to fight back; i.e., through forbidden sight manifesting in the usual popular forms obsessed with death, rape and other taboo things: nature unleashed, mid-dialectic!

The state is playing with fire, then; the more it tries to monopolize terror language (and psychosexual violence through demonic morphological expression; re: making things to dominate or fetishize during such discourse), the more they demonstrate a capacity for ludo-Gothic BDSM to subvert such dualities: to radicalize for rebellion in ways the elite can’t control! In making whores to pimp, they make whores who pimp them!

And if that makes status-quo proponents uncomfortable, they’re projecting (often by accusing their usual victims of the accuser’s own holier-than-thou predation, DARVO-and-obscurantism-style). Furthermore, if you can’t handle the black/Jewish revenge fantasies of an abused class of people acted on in safe spaces, you’re calling to bury such things outright. But, as Takena shows us, such things don’t stay buried for long! Sex is a weapon we sex workers can reclaim, hyphenating art and porn; i.e., as poetic extensions of our andro/gynodiverse morphologies and labor! The fat lady sings by making gender trouble ecstatic, divorcing gender from sex and either from biology in a heteronormative (thus settler-colonial, Cartesian) sense; re: camping canonical essentialism, challenging state monopolies/trifectas and all their stolen spectres; e.g., Marx.

To camp Marx, “The [undead whores of all dead generations weigh] like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (re: “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” 1852); camp, thus give, these chatty corpses a much-needed place to fuck/fight back (the two are not mutually exclusive), helping conscious rebellion find a home—i.e., on the same stages among the living! The paradox, here, is that “evil” sex is somehow badass, hot, and cathartic for workers as much as cops; and it draws us towards difficult truths, but also delightful playgrounds where life and death, “rape” and rape occupy the same restless territories. Such is state shift scaring the elite (and their pimps) senseless.

A bit of “struggle with that snuggle,” then fucking to metal, everyone loves the whore, and wants the clubbing baddie/demon lover in ways that punch up as easily as down; i.e., that which—courtesy of the Neo-Gothic—you have to go slumming to find. “To critique power, you must go where it is.” Takena’s vampire haunts polite society with clay doubles, occupying a g(r)ay-area danger disco while looking goth and/or bubblegum. She’ll more than likely have internal damage, too—roiling on her dark surface and jumping from text-to-text, person-to-person, like lightning (re: Cuwu). Such emotional turmoil needs an outlet, which it will find, one way or another! Better to camp it; e.g., “FINISH HER!” (The Immortals’ “Techno Syndrome,” 1995).

We whores aren’t just demons, then, but rebels in the Miltonian tradition! Taking to the streets, we speak campily to danger through “danger” as silly and serious; e.g., Castle Anthrax, Evil Dead, Metroidvania and Takena’s “Midnight Vampire” (among countless others) inspired by Walpole, Lewis and similar such “Male Gothic” (re: Moers) trashy-but-fun queerness: black magic, monsters, princely feasts and extravagance, dynastic power exchange and hereditary rites (re: Bakhtin), courtly violence/medieval torture and sanctioned-to-forbidden sex (and poetic, explosive mergers of all these things; e.g., Tchaikovsky’s cannons and ringing bells [state but also whorish code for “orgasm”; i.e., “I hear bells ringing!”] or the submarine captain shouting “Schneller!” [classic matelotage] during Das Boot‘s Gibraltar scene, below); re: all the dead traditions of rebellion weighing on the state, our clay aping the Capitalocene to disabuse workers of any harmful ideations: to blow the lofty and benevolent idea of the state right the fuck up!

So does Takena’s vampire do just that. The state can only rape; whores, on the other hand, may catalyze sex and force to uphold or destroy state mandates; i.e., brothel-espionage cheerleaders shouting at the top of their lungs, “Faster! Harder!” We self-styled robo-fags are not “defective models,” but awake and actively putting the spunk in rebellion; i.e., riding it raw (and double-tapping for good measure), seeding and speeding liberation along vis-à-vis allegory and the cryptonymy process!

Activism is worker action through whoring turned against profit, thus a force that consciously opposes cops betraying labor interests, mid-conflict. Rebellion is work in this respect, as is monstrous sex (vampire or otherwise) raising awareness and intelligence towards resistance. Even so, whoever said struggle had to be dull and bleak? Rebellion can be fun! It must, or workers will simply betray their own interests for some quick relief! Revolution starts in hearts and minds (and cafés, taverns, discos, BDSM dungeons, claymation studios, etc), thus owes such rabble-rousing inflammatory sentiments to unruly Gothic military theatre doubling controlled opposition. A kind of concealed weapon worn on/up our sleeves, we Gothic-Communist sluts fuck those we can convert, putting out to convince any who can be convinced (and sneaking in mix-and-match allegory all the while: the message in a “bottle”).

Amazonomachia, psychomachia and psychopraxis—anything whores do is “violent” in police eyes, which means whores are always criminal even when defending themselves or encouraging others to fight back. This includes by merely asking for decriminalization/equal rights (“peace” is a white man’s word, “liberation” is ours). Cops and victims become enemies who cannot coexist, but this is very much the point: to expose the state for what it is (a rapist, thuggish pimp for the elite abusing nature). By using darkness visible to make them attack us in ways we can direct peoples’ attention towards, negotiation—for whores—is just as often made with hostile, bad-faith, and bourgeois forces who don’t share power. So we force them to through all the usual paradoxes: one step forward, two steps back; hurry up, take your time; speak out, keep quiet. Rebellion is a balancing act.

To do nothing is to be raped; to protest said rape is to riot, those who fight back “terrorists” who get their faces smashed; those who fight back in spite of that are counterterrorists resisting state rule—becoming in death die-hard, Satanic symbols of La Résistance, punching loudly and gloriously up against pimp and regime as one-in-the-same: a pig-like enemy to mobilize against, chanting all manner of slogans. “To storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherfuckers into junk!” To resist for universal liberation is noble and sexy! Assimilation is death; home rule is self-rule! So get ’em, girl! Fuck the five-O! Stripping is not consent! ACAB! ASAB! And so on…

(artist: Mochi)

Class war is culture (and race) war told in the holistic, monstrous language of whores fighting back in intersectional solidarity. To this, the villain of Takena’s story isn’t the female-coded vampire, but the men she targets, trial-by-combat; i.e., the benefactors of “innocent until proven guilty.” We’re not calling for vigilante justice, per se—just a means of interrogating and exposing their hiding places amid the usual vampire poetics breaking Capitalist Realism with.

To that, if a helpless damsel might suddenly come unalive and—like Grendel’s mother—tear them all asunder (mommy has needs), the effect would be a draining one (for the men, but also the elite they work for): to render them unable to attack in the present moment. Moreover, in recultivating the Superstructure, such ironic means and measures would become second-nature in the hearts and minds of workers, but also the art they make: our spectres of Marx, sleeping in the wet spot, moist with rememory and rage.

If rape is the state’s ancient weapon against nature, the whore is an ancient, vivid-yet-obscure (cryptonymic) marker for state shift—the birthplace/site of rebirth and afterbirth whose murderous womb/monstrous-feminine survives in hauntological forms, refusing vis-à-vis Creed to be victims; extramarital sex, under capital, is automatically taboo, and zombie invasions originate with the vampire (re: Romero). Arousing the rabble, then, the man-eater makes violence (and its utility through the black/red aesthetic of power and death) something to turn against fascism and its abuse of such things; i.e., as already imprinting on those conditioned to submit (the princess) that, when dipped in Styx, emerge hungry for traitorous blood and revenge: through vigilante, pro-labor violence growing sexy in people’s minds.

That is where revolution begins! Takena’s hysterical, duelist baptism isn’t one of fire, as such, but Nazi blood engorging the strict Commie slut to resist tokenism! From beginning to end, the trespass ceases to be acceptable (for the elite); i.e., once it no longer upholds the nuclear model, but again, such cryptonymy is hard to police, and camouflages itself.

(artist: The Smutty Rogue)

This includes Takena’s fearsome vampire, but also other forms of vampirism that overlap with it, onstage and off. Some forms opt for a soft-and-cuddly doom; i.e., a Bonnie-and-Clyde element (star-crossed lovers) to the wretched bloodbath’s death by Snu-Snu, traded for actuals snuggles. Vae victis, indeed, but also… oddly hot and adorable? Romance and desire—at least of a Gothic, neo-medieval—are incredibly liminal. In turn, revolutions happen whenever and wherever they happen, blooming on the battlefield while watered by the blood of the fallen, the rough-and-tumble, the brave and daring clutching—however futile—at life everlasting during graveyard sex of all kinds!

The Gothic, as almost holy/silly-serious, works through comedy and drama to speak to Medusa (state shift), which sooner or later comes back around, eating the state for good as normally eating itself on repeat. “Faith no more, face the whore / Rape the past, make me laugh” (Anthrax’s “Make Me Laugh,” 1988); we’re all zombies rotting under state abuse, staring at our hungry selves on the Aegis; re: mirror syndrome. Said mirror is also a shield to fight back with. So “Fight ‘Em ‘Til You Can’t!” (Anthrax, 2011).

And if this sounds daunting or bogus, revolution relies on imaginary and fakery to work—both to disguise itself and paint a possible future to push towards. Never has “fake it till you make it” been more applicable, the Gothic steeped in such things/the explained supernatural; i.e., the Black Veil both hiding nothing particularly scary behind itself (a worm in a peach, if memory serves), while likewise intimating Great Destruction towards the narrative of the crypt: an occupation by those the state tries to contain butting up against ourselves as alien. The praxial idea is to see who can fake it better to best speak to worker rights and material conditions versus state rights and profit! So give it a shot!

Austen leaps to mind; e.g., “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.” Except, now the pen is a sword, its passage a bloody one that carves towards a new historical epoch; i.e., through old materials held in the hands of women (and other targets of state violence), such dead queens reclaiming state terror devices to break their persecution monopolies (on blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts) and suck their jailors dry!

(artist: Dariusz Kieliszek)

Beyond Takena’s own torture-porn examples speaking to the inherent sexual qualities of porn[10], thereof (and zombies/the undead, as a whole), we’ll consider doing so with goblins as blood-libel devices; i.e., by camping Tolkien’s own class thereof, next!

Onto “Idle Hands, part three: Goblins, Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] E.g., ninjas or nameless suits. The monstrous-feminine combines masculine and feminine theatre tropes—including the Western action hero, be that a gunslinger or martial artist—but also hyphenates black and white through medieval language: the woman-in-black, taking all comers!

[2] To try and reclaim them, as the state does, is to play with fire; i.e., to expose themselves as hypocrites and invite reflection on the whole nuclear model while, in the same breath, giving workers theatrical spaces vital towards playing against state aims!

[3] A famous scene from The Monk has a carriage stopping at a cabin in the woods. The passengers are greeted by the “host” of the cabin, who is actually a bandit in disguise. Aided by the bandit’s “wife” (a lady led astray by—you guessed it—a demon lover), the hero discovers the bedsheets upstairs stained with blood from the previous guests’ premature demise! To survive, the hero must lie to the bandits who are lying to him, and avoid drinking so much “sleepy potion” slipped into his dinner wine that he passes out. There’s more to the story in terms of action, but the basic idea is the home and hosts are “perfidious” and need to be dealt with through violence and lies. So, too, is Takena’s protagonist—an expert liar and killer lying in wait against those lying in wait—confronted with a false home that she intentionally infiltrates to rescue a damsel-in-distress.

[4] I.e., internalized male homophobia; e.g., Cockrub Warriors demonizing anal sex, blaming feminine male homosexuality for weakness (re: the AIDS pandemic): “For the last 35 years anal sex has dominated gay male life. It’s been a disaster. For 30 of those years our lives and the lives of the people we love have been consumed by an epidemic for which today there is still no cure and no vaccine” (source: “Founder’s Message,” 2000).

[5] Consent is sexy and there’s plenty of ways to illustrate that in art; e.g., a couple having adorable, plain-Jane sex and enjoying themselves:

(artist: The Smutty Rogue)

In short, they’re doing things that are alien to many but also completely non-violent; i.e., despite happening during BDSM (through the giving and receiving of commands, mid-pleasure, but also aftercare, top-right), and despite any descriptive sexuality and informed consent taking place, the events themselves remain fairly standard and non-Gothic in their presentation. It’s a cartoon, but quotidian.

For Takena’s vampire, she’s sexy because she has the ability to embody forbidden societal aspects—female revenge against male sex fiends, first and foremost. Furthermore, the descriptive elements portend to abuse and harm she addresses through violence; i.e., as paradoxically kawaii, mid-playtime. Consent is sexy. So is fighting back against slashers in genuine self-defense (the canonical Gothic equating female death with a loss of virtue, which Takena camps)!

[6] The screenshots were taken by me with Cuwu’s permission; originally featured in “Healing through “Rape,” or the Origins of Ludo-Gothic BDSM as a Matter of Rememory” (2024).

[7] A literal bastard/demon/terrorist/mercenary whore profaning his duties/the nuclear home for the highest bidder (who, in this case, was the Beatle’s George Harrison. Harrison funded several Monty Python films, out-of-pocket, including The Holy Grail, 1975, and Life of Brian, 1979).

[8] A common quality of claymation bringing demonic sex and violence to a wider audience, under Pax Americana‘s strict censorship laws (refer to my video breakdown for a longer history on this subject).

[9] Pelico bravely chose to face and name her abusers, the latter dubbed by the French media as “Mr. Every Man” (source: Natalie Stechyson, whose title, for her 2024 trial editorial, reads, “Gisele Pelicot wanted us to know her name. These are the names of the men convicted in her rape.” Both speak to Pelicot naming and shaming not just her abusers, but society’s everyday treatment of rapists normally protected by police and the system. Said system (and the men it protects) are quite fragile (with Pelicot’s abusers hiding behind masks to shield themselves from public uproar after the verdict).

[10] As Bay points out, revenge is classically sexually charged; i.e., a spurned or bereaved lover (which Shakespeare camped by having Romeo and Juliet commit suicide after destroying each other’s houses). Every aspect is romanticized, in Western culture, but especially the violence (and, in certain kinds of horror stories, gore).

This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). 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). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). 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 “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

Trial by Fire: Demon Muscle Mommies (feat. Lady Hellbender and Hela, The Shape of Water)

Some people say my love cannot be true
Please believe me, my love, and I’ll show you
I will give you those things you thought unreal
The sun, the moon, the stars—all bear my seal

—Ozzy Osbourne; “NIB,” from Black Sabbath (1970)

Picking up where “‘I’ll See You in Hell’: opening and part one (dark faeries)” left off…

Whereas “Darkness Visible” concerned dark faeries and their subversive ability to get what they want through the aesthetic/collaboration of psychosexual force, their reenactments sometimes had a gentle femme dom character to them. By comparison, “Trial by Fire” considers the fiery “swole'” aspects of the monstrous-feminine that lean towards a stricter side of things: the demon muscle mommy’s staunch command over nature, and notable intimidation factor during deals; i.e, as whorish, illegitimate traders in lethal force that threaten others in Amazonian ways, and whose revenge (against profit) burns with sulfurous hellfire. It’s more blunt and less ambitious, brute force a bit easier to define than darkness visible/the controversial voice of the royal damned; i.e., such matchmaking is short and to the point, these hellish, brutish herbos burlier and more direct, action-packed contenders than their glamorous, brawl-averse faerie cousins. With their taut, muscular bodies, these sexy warlords barrel headlong into danger as something to reenact and wrestle with—a compelling argument of psychosexual force they catalyze/visit on others during the dialectic of the alien’s faux-medieval monster-mom battle sex!

(artist: Ellie Maplefox)

Before we dive into the exhibit, a short explanation on demon mommies themselves, followed by their relationship to the imaginary medieval, ending on several distinctions between them and dark faeries (about eight pages):

Demons muscle mommies (which we’ll shorten to “demon mommies,” from here on out) speak to candidly smutty subject matter (and a classically female readership) that denotes a male/GNC female submissive fantasizing about a monstrous-feminine dominant. Such are Amazons, and by extension, demon mommies as an arguably more criminal, hellish variant (our emphasis again being the royal variety—the bandit queens); it’s a performance to do for themselves, but still have a broader audience that evolves and changes over time. They are demon whores and lovers courting prey-like mates through classic kayfabe shock and awe, but also sex and force relaid as a kind of sacrificial “tease”; re: of rape and revenge (often murder) suggested through paradoxically Faustian trades that, as usual, threaten rape as a bread-and-circus matter of capture (unequal power and harm); i.e., as something to normally distance ourselves from, the bargain tearing the recipient limb-from-limb (deals with the Devil are seldom healthy or fair): a childless monarch unchained from reproductive sex, yet one who obviously knows her way around prurient courtship and its horny terror language endemic to underworld locales. To say there isn’t some kind of theatrical tension because of that is to have seriously tuned out during the original story!

Faust aside, “Trial by Fire” specifically operates through a postcolonial urge of forbidden love: to have our whore’s revenge, doing so through Lady Hellbender (and similar militarized, conspicuously muscular beings—Karlach and Hela, but also male demon lovers, to be holistic; e.g., the merman from Del Toro’s 2017 The Shape of Water). Our emphasis explores gladiatorial violence among such locales; i.e., not so much in the act of poetic creation, itself (through darkness), but the iron-grip wielding of unequal power during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Dominants, bondage and collars—the sub wears the dom’s yoke during calculated risk/a palliative Numinous to paradoxically perform unequal power and relieve stress from past abuse as poetically inherited from total history’s real and imaginary factors; e.g., demon-mommy muscles threatening castration and forced sex, emasculation well-at-home in a Neo-Gothic faux-medieval whose retro-future menace acts as a wraith-like infiltrator of the present space and time: the cushy-yet-recent Western idea of safety and privacy!

To relax, the middle class—who, fearing the deprivation of recently-granted rights by a decaying state apparatus (sticking its assassin’s head into seemingly safe spaces like the bedroom, actually still haunted by rape, of course)—began, back then and now, to dread the ghost of the barbaric past (and its shakier foundation’s unheimlich notions of ownership, illegitimate force, violent sex and brutal revenge). Whenever and wherever they perform these things, their privileged fantasies seek to sever danger from harm by faking it; i.e., in ways that can bring informed workers closer to nature as something they subsequently fetishize with the hauntological aesthetic of medieval acquisition and consummation: the princess dominated in bed extending to the entire castle, except per the demon mommy archetype has classically swapped genders!

Furthermore, the “castle” during the liminal hauntology of war is a normal home (or person indicative of the home; e.g., a housewife or housemate) adopting medieval intimations. “Home,” in the medieval, was a place where sex didn’t happen in the bedroom alone (re: Foucault), and whose taboo, aristocratic violence reliably attached to powerful structures (and their infamously cruel rulers) passed down onto more ordinary-looking people and places. Surviving bourgeois hegemony that decays back into older violence caged by capital, these same people—having received the chronotope’s oversaturation of displaced, fearsome legends (about raw material and sexual exchange)—may speak to one another during the cryptonymy process about such abuse happening around them; i.e., by showing others that we live in Gothic times: the Destroyer on the surface of smirking whores! So can our playtime put “rape” in quotes and a cap on actual harm; i.e., any caused by the bourgeoisie.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

The Gothic plays with rape made alien by capital, flirting with chivalry-as-dead brought back to life; i.e., as Walpole once did with glee. Beyond castles, then, its bastard, danger-disco husbandry includes brutal trades during ludo-Gothic BDSM that speak to the ravishing character of older times, minus the harm. They involve the whispered reprisals of banditti henchmen, but also those who typically paid them; i.e., the unscrupulous ladies and lords, but also their classic sites of pretend, questionable, yet ultimately enormous power (re, from Volume Zero: power is something to perform). This means their long-lost castles, deep dungeons and stolen rituals, but also fabulous riches, treasure, and loot overshadowed by blood-money conquest and a disturbing knack for skullduggery (often through gratuitous shows of force; e.g., defenestration).

All encompass power through the law as literally tied to their dubious bodies and bloodlines—crowns and scepters, to be sure, but also the Amazonian idea of warrior culture and strength of a conspicuously athletic sort: the wrong side of the law something to administer in our favor that, all the same, rules/fuels through violence, lust and fear (medieval sovereignty backed up through force)! Experienced diplomats in might-makes-right, demon mommies are bandit queens and black hell knights who let their fists (and thighs) speak for them, doing so that others might defer to their legendary expertise—as judge, jury and executioner!

In short, “the medieval” is a place to fear returning to the present (the return of the assassin, phantom, rogue, tyrant, etc), but also where a great deal of control might be found by reversing state terror weapons in ways that Walpole himself famously did, through counterfeit and camp; re (from Volume One):

While Baldrick also argues how the likes of Walpole use this dichotomy to both erode the presumed “superiority” of classical culture and to fear the medieval world as a dark and brutal place amid this ghost of the counterfeit, I posit that Baldrick is astoundingly incorrect in assuming that

Unlike “Romantic,” then, “Gothic” in its literary usage never becomes a positive term of cultural revaluation, but carries with it […] an identification of the medieval with the barbaric. A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages (ibid.).

Yet, this incorrectness stems from the invented, imaginary past as “medieval” in ways that potentially rewrite the conventional wisdoms regarding said past… which Baldrick conveniently ignores. Indeed, the kinds of stories Baldrick is writing about were predominantly written by white, cis-het men and women centuries ago, when queer discourse was in its infancy and racial bias was phased out of the conversation through regressions to a pre-fascist 15th century that was more interested in enjoying one’s privilege and playing silly pranks.

This brings us to Horace Walpole, the writer of the first Gothic novel and an ostensibly homosexual (or ace) man who devoted most of his relatively long life to making Gothic not just a label to describe the medieval period, but literally a specific style of campy fakery used to embellish the present space and time through intentionally a historical reinvention: the castle where such oddities could be found and observed (source).

This same silly-serious idea extends to the people of castles, which demon mommies easily qualify as: queens of Hell if Hell were a neo-medieval wasteland.

To it, ludo-Gothic BDSM is supposed to be thrilling and fun, but also adequate in ways polite discourse seldom is; i.e., by recreating a crude return to the tyrannical home suddenly doubling one’s own through larger dialectical-material forces, but closer to a frank medieval voice that, akin to Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” is completely vulgar and bananas[1] but invested in the closeness between sex and death, food, and a variety of other poetic devices. When playing with violence and sex as people from the Gothic or Neo-Gothic periods actually did, a reunion with things capital has tried to alienate workers from/with can be a struggle but also a game to delight in; e.g., like Monty Python in the 1960s, but also more recent media getting into the same Walpolean spirit—smiting a dragon (the Capitalocene) about the bollocks!

(artist: Tony Sart)

The Gothic, though historically reviled, critically panned and treated like crude garbage by prude snobs, was and is absurdly popular—not because it was counterfeit or counterculture alone, but inventive, hilarious and badass in equal measure; i.e., graveyard sex through fetishes and clichés, miracles and mad science (staged battles through popular binary arguments’ threatening contrast: good vs evil, reason vs madness, big vs small, tight vs loose, nature vs civilization, men vs women, virtue vs sin, us vs them, black vs white, cops vs victims, etc), but also bluffs, gambits, fakeries and bastard shams delivering clarity through confusion as something of power/power-adjacent to perform and perceive; e.g., fake funerals, marriages, bloodlines, duels, scandals, servants and sidekicks, etc, but also demon castles summoned/sought out for their naughty reputations (of vaguely “dark” monster sex), then traveled to in order to temporarily lose control/radically transform into or in relation to demon mommies!

The adventuresome thrill of the castle’s opera/danger disco—steeped in bogus superstition, demented emotions, and a hellish charge (adjacent to generational abuse, but also a Gothic potential to shift away from Capitalism)—is both larger-than-life and largely the life and point of Gothic argument (to have power over others and vice versa), but also its vector! “A girl can dream,” as the saying goes, and there’s nowhere we’d rather be (a home away from home to let off steam with, but also consume canonically forbidden ideas, letting our hair down); demon mommies denote a statuesque presence of strength that reflects classic forms of violence back towards the usual givers of it by the usual receivers; e.g., from women to men! If the dark faerie is the queen of terrors through darkness personified, the demon mommy (as we’re expressed it, here) is the champ when it comes to brute force, complete daring and physical, heated persuasion (unequal power and dark desire expressed through a sexualized form of combat theatre; re: kayfabe and Amazonomachia).

Several more distinctions, then, before we dive in (three pages). There’s an undeniable element of fabrication with demon mommies, but one attached to real people (versus something completely artificial, which doesn’t have rights). A byproduct of the tawdry and salacious gossip of enterprising-yet-bored housewives (which Radcliffe most certainly was), they’re queens of firepower versus darkness. Even so, both demon mommies and dark faeries embody a kind of abject alter ego that plays out the alien, repressed feelings of oppressed groups, onstage and off: generational anger and revenge, desires to assimilate—even murder and rape! As such, they (and their organs of violent perception) remain prime candidates; re: for forbidden love as a postcolonial device told playfully through Amazonian terror language coming from Hell, especially wrestler’s kayfabe. Except, whereas a dark faerie might barely lift a finger to get what she needs, the demon mommy—while certainly no dummy in her own right—will happily do all the heavy lifting (a total thigh queen, below) while hunting for heads, herself[2]!

(artist: Ickpot)

Whereas the dark fairy is commonly femme and enchantingly mysterious (marking her prey with ropes, teeth, glamour and darkness), the demon mommy is shrewd, spicy, masculine and firm; both can capture their prey but she takes hers by force—i.e., direct and without guile, opting to smash and grab through underworld might versus stealth and overtly/exclusively feminine sex appeal (said femininity always occupied by an alien masculine [monstrous-feminine] element). She’s competent and battle-tested, a firebrand freak of nature (from a traditional, heteronormative standpoint) whose hauntological, faux-medieval qualities patently evoke “strict” versus gentle domination; i.e., psychosexual, vaso vagal, and predator/prey[3] confusions of danger and protection the Gothic (and its imaginary warrior-queen cavaliers) are known for, and which genuine abusers—e.g., Jadis or Zeuhl (the former who raped me, the latter who abandoned me but expected loyalty afterwards)—don’t have a monopoly on!

To it, the demon mommy comes from a house where peace is a stranger and war a welcome friend—a survivor of assassins, vendor of malice and purveyor of strict therapy through lucid nightmares lending the Amazonomachy‘s already medieval, military and hostile gravitas an extra hellish bent. She’s a vice character of sorts—bare and naked, an imposing “tank girl” distraction that roars loudly in ways unbefitting the Western maiden/state modesty argument, but presents precisely for those reasons in canonical circles: the femme fatale/sexual weapon/monster to love, but also routinely defeat and cage because she’s on-fire with hellish energies; i.e., too hot to handle, thus assimilate! Medusa, in this case, is always an antagonist to some degree, because the state requires one to exist and project their own police abuse onto. For them, Galatea is always Pygmalion’s bitch, the warrior whore trapped in his endless shadow and blamed for state shift; re: the Medusa bogeywoman.

Of course, everyone loves the whore; canon does so because her summoning becomes a euthanasia refrain to maintain the status quo with during times of crisis. The Nazi leader and Communist queer inhabit the same kayfabe space and bodies; e.g., Zod and Faora (the latter a Nazi werewolf woman, warrior whore and knightly wet dream for Zack Snyder’s neo-conservative superhero vehicle) appear menacingly in Man of Steel (2013); re: during the liminal hauntology of war… only to be bested and defeated after chewing the scenery and kicking absurd amounts of ass; i.e., during the usual copaganda displacements of controlled opposition/false rebellion. Every Radcliffean scapegoat needs a cop to bury them—a rugged, phallic jester dancing in the king’s court, these usurpers brandish a black mirror to suggest state fallibility (only to have a dashing hero sweep these feelings aside, breaking the mirror [and the oracle] in the process). Through fascinating fascism, the enemy is both weak and strong!

Sex and force, then, can produce/cater to remarkable tension and/or release, but the demon mommy is often relaxed, in this respect; i.e., she’s done this before, at home with the language of masters and slaves, aristocrats and serfs, which she combines through herself. Certifiably queenly but still putting in work, she’s not above dirty jobs—an expert jouster happy to take the reins and get down; a strong-thighed Queen Bee at Castle Sodom, her reputation for extreme behavior proceeds her (and whose poetic maneuvers excite similar emotions through vulgar puns[4] and, in case it wasn’t already obvious, heroic-villainous body language)!

She’s also hungry and ambitious, possessing a ravenous royal appetite formerly known to kings that—among a female/partially feminine body—is unequivocally monstrous-feminine. Demonstrating that appetite, she runs the risk of passing traditionally manly qualities onto helpless maidens exposed to someone other than their promised husbands! In short, she’s temptation incarnate, but works through a kind of gender swap importing the Amazon style onto more recent medieval hauntologies; e.g., castles, servants and unequal, nigh-scandalous breeding scenarios; i.e., a window into an older and scarier but also fascinating and partially imaginary world! Of knights and damsels, but also ladies bearing less virtue and more lust, such spaces turn regular life under capital inside-out; i.e., a Rabelaisian carnival where the exploration of what is normally denied becomes, itself, boldly normal: ringing the Devil’s doorbell!

(artist: Bold Vid Studio)

It might sound odd to white, straight, middle-class women in the Imperial Core nowadays, but women hardly more than a century ago were considered property by the state, of which having extramarital sex (or fantasizing about it in monstrous language) was a common mode of recourse/revenge for these kept persons: to “violate” ourselves, but also the state-assigned boundaries caging us that older authors projected onto a foreign exotic or dated imaginary. What, for older generations, was a push towards liberation for some (fascist feminism), we want to push towards universal liberation. This happens through the Gothic mode, including the consciously ironic language of alienation, scarcity and discord that subversive demon mommies represent; i.e., working towards regular shelter and comfort (often sex), their paradoxical protection realized through such tantalizing “Beauty and the Beast” what-ifs (the marriage of the Ancient Romance and ordinary novel to escape past barbarities, once summoned; re: Walpole’s vague castled forgeries).

To it, the Gothic and its imaginary medieval is the quintessential site of rape play waged by the middle class (and other workers, upper and lower) for different reasons (often at odds); mutual consent during rape play/deep passion is good praxis, provided the “rape” is actually in quotes. The concept is to tantalize with excitingly “dangerous” roleplay scenarios, the use of a threatening “lance” inviting the size queen’s warrior boast during rough, suitably passionate sex, “That all you got, motherfucker? C’mon, fuck me like you mean it!” Hair down, pussies out, girls (who’s fucking who—the power of knowing the courtly exchanges per network—something to arbitrate through girl talk’s anger/gossip, monsters and camp)!

(artist: Sasha Khmel)

So again, this makes the usual blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft accusations something to level against demon mommies! Like the earthbound Amazon or dark faerie, they are beings to canonically fear and tokenize, embodied by subversive agents in much the same manner that we’d camp in more earthly forms. Keeping the anal Amazon thesis in mind—that agents of terror are subverted through reclaimed terror language, including psychosexual acts of domination tied to areas of dominion (e.g., duels for property and honor, enacted by spontaneous brutal violence and fireworks, at or around castles)—let’s get to the exhibit, itself. Reflecting on demon mommies’ grim extortion of others to prosecute their own wars, it concerns the whore’s paradox as equally a paradox of rape reversing such terror devices to achieve a postcolonial effect/reversal of abjection with demon mommies; i.e., how we usually get your attention: through playful, fatal-nostalgic threats of “rape” during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s regular theatrical distortions of state “truths”! When performing unequal power to rebel against state arrangements—i.e., by using guilty pleasure relayed through unlawful carnal knowledge and sinful desire—the best defense is a good “offense” (such indomitable master/slave language often played for effect through exquisite “torture,” left).

(artist: In Case)

That’s what forbidden love ultimately is, in this case; i.e., the audience falling for scrappy harlots, slutty Valkyries, and avenging angels—our resident queens having fallen from Heaven, themselves, only to punch up from dark, foreboding places during the dialectic of the alien; i.e., by playing at war and sex’ intoxicating spells of “rape” to humanize ourselves (and nature-as-monstrous-feminine; re: Medusa) with postcolonial arguments: red-hot rape fantasies, burning with forbidden desires that demon mommies in particular specialize at during calculated risk! “Hell,” for Gothic Communism, is a theatrical place to go to and settle our differences, bravely speaking out in ritualized “violence”; i.e., with a corporal punishment rhetoric endemic to medieval, ecclesiastical institutions; e.g., naughty nuns (above), the complicated genderqueer disguise of churchly crossdress—re: Matthew Lewis’ Rosario/Matilda/the Devil—carried forwards from the ancient and medieval world into a stereotypically outmoded (operatic), predatory/prey caricature of the Amazonian underworld’s traditionally female[5] warrior!

Note: While our focus remains largely on demon mommies like Lady Helldriver and Hela, their function as postcolonial demon lovers remains part of a Gothic-Communist operation. To be holistic (as Gothic Communism generally demands), we’ll divert some energies towards other demon lovers, too—e.g., Del Toro’s aforementioned merman—and consider the complicated ways that privilege and oppression manifest and overlap; i.e., during an intersectional, solidarized pedagogy of the oppressed. —Perse

(exhibit 44a1a1b2: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. Lady Hellbender from Guardians of the Galaxy and Kalach from Baldur’s Gate 3 [2023] exemplify the demon muscle mommy archetype; i.e., they evoke the Amazonian threat of “capture, rape and death” put into optional hellish quotes—of DARVO Amazonomachia speaking to evil, demon slavers from nature, whose dire revenge canonically must be challenged through battle [when Hell comes to Earth or vice versa] but also fetishized [re: death by Snu-Snu] in ways we monster-fuckers humanize: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, camping the monomyth using postcolonial gender[queer] identity and performance!

To it, Gothic camp loves the muscled, bodybuilder guerrilla-as-demon, treated by the state like statuesque criminal hysterics and token, cop-like whores under settler colonialism’s black/white binary married to virgin/whore! They’re warriors and whores from Hell, the monstrous-feminine straddling the fence insofar as spine-tingling terror [and other body parts] require a bit of visual ambiguity, brute strength and token menace! Hell and its militias aren’t for wimps, save to torture them with irony or without!

Like kayfabe in general, demon mommies are physically very demanding and involved, but also govern liminal shows of force that translate to godly levels of inequality and doubles; re: faces and heels, heroes and villains, but also kings and queens, castles and forced marriages franchised by capital. In that sense, it’s no different than the Wild Hunt, Apollo’s chariot, or the death coach [vehicles of death and war]—flying gods speaking to latter-day UFO abduction and rapturous, Radcliffean capture tied to the ghost of the counterfeit [“back from outer space“]: moving castles and their dark-disco, giant, castle-like bodies [re: the liminal hauntology of war] taking us away and making an operatic show of it, then having their way with us in the safety of upside-down homes mocking Western variants! Such are vice characters, demon mommies a kind of Amazon “from Hell” that takes their prey [of any gender they want] back to Hell as an infernal, postcolonial territory!

[artist: Jessica Nigri]

Capital divides by design, always through predator/prey in service to profit. From a Cartesian standpoint, then, the state wrongs nature, gendering it as female/monstrous-feminine in “ancient,” canonically essential ways it can pimp once antagonized; nature responds by revenge-stealing state brides [often by gender-swapping them, turning men into brides] during reactive abuse. In short, subversive Amazons anisotropically camp the monstrous-feminine as terror language normally used to sodomize nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., when empire decays per capital’s usual boom-and-bust cycle, turning nature into terrorist the state counterterrorist [often a token Amazon] can incarcerate, rape or otherwise execute the state’s will against; re: geography as destiny along moral territories and iconography that must routinely be cleansed of evil/natural “corruption” through state arbitration and heroic precedent debriding said decay while gentrifying war all over again [re: Tolkien and Cameron’s cartographic refrains during the monomyth: punch, stab or shoot nature-as-whore, above].

Whatever the form, state binaries are false, harmful, and unnatural as a matter of function pimping nature as criminal, incorrect, and abhorrent; i.e., per Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and/or settler colonialism. Christianized us-versus-them violence stems from Beowulf vs Grendel; from Columbus onto the Cartesian Revolution and beyond, nature is something to pimp, anything not him and his men being “extended beings” for “thinking beings” to pimp, enslave and destroy by cheaply moving money through them. This great theft [which money is] translates neoliberally into Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain, a dubious arrangement of false power per light/darkness that calls for genocide in God’s name [more on Tolkien in a bit]: “For in its presence, all darkness must flee.” A blanket of the mind, such Capitalist Realism always dresses up as divide-and-conquer territory disputes happening between man/the state-as-straight and nature-as-monstrous-feminine; re [from Volume One]:  

The state’s various religious/secular ingroups associate entirely with exclusive ownership and universal coercion under state territories over state-assigned out-groups: to belong/to have belongings versus to be owned or used by someone or marked for systemic mistreatment, even death if you fail to be useful to them (the paradox being your death is useful to profit). Here, the state of exception provides the most basic function of capital: exploitation and genocide in service of the profit motive; i.e., the state eating its population according to heroic arrangements of theatrical power tied to bodily expression as dimorphically gendered [source]. 

These, in turn, codify with older monomythic language borrowed from the means to inspire royal fear and awe, but also lust of a hauntological sort; e.g., scarred and tattooed barbarian women passing for “Vikings” or “Picts” who spit, fart, swear in four-letter words, get mad and “smash”; i.e., doubling as sexual rewards in a time when the state emasculates its own men to sexually frustrate them, then sell them cartoon copies of their biggest wet dreams.

While women, as a whole, remain “lesser” in the pecking order’s Great Chain, standouts serve to enforce classical ideas of male dominance; i.e., in a female body that bullies lesser entitled men [sissification]: per a “prison sex” mentality conforming and adhering to patriarchal force inside the Man Box’ weird nerd culture. Keeping with Athenian Amazon propaganda, they canonically inspire compliance, not rebellion, as muscled; re: subjugated Hippolytas! Per the euthanasia effect, tokens [not just women, but any traitors] are tolerated so long as they uphold the current order through sex and force: calls to yield/submit and ultimately disperse!

While stating the obvious is an option, a common path for poetic recourse is fighting fire with fire, myth with myth. Speaking of the aforementioned charioteers themselves, such formidable demon lovers—strong enough to defy the “natural order” by crossing over into the civilized world but weak enough for the state to cage them [re: Eco]—are Galatea built-to-thrill when consumed, but also teach through experience alongside; e.g., size difference; i.e., calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM. They’re killer dolls that consist of darkness—as flavored through particular accents that code and qualify the Amazonian proceedings of either text: muscle and fire [versus Amazonian earthliness or faerie darkness]. There’s nothing objectively “wrong” with demon mommies; they’re simply ways to rarefy and transfer power in-the-flesh: “Your chariot awaits.”

Amazons, like other warriors and cops/criminals, have a white and a black side, which demon mommies act out in “hellish” ways. They tend to manifest less as binarized, dimorphic halves and more as moods, good and bad; i.e., inside a monomorphic entity whose base function doesn’t change; re: Lady Dimitrescu being a constant “phallic” whore who becomes outwardly furious when threatened, but also turned on: wanting to fuck her attackers to death. In demon-BDSM terms, these categories are not only not discrete, they are excessive and hyperbolic; i.e., nymphomania being an out-of-control “hysterical” libido informed by systemic, externalized trauma that confuses predator/prey mechanisms during calculated risk.

To it, Lady Hellbender is made of shadows and flame, as such—the staged power of unequal strength, of dragons and rarefied cruelty [similar to Count Dracula] that has the desire for company but not the manners; i.e., she tends “flare up” when excited, singing her guests [who, it must be said, sometimes prefer that]. In the demon-lover tradition, then, she demonstrates how forbidden desire is given in ways that distribute power unevenly. According to Hellbender’s damned construction, she burns, she dominates; her victims burn, dominated by her as Big Strict Whore[6] [re: “She tall, she tall”]! She is the curious byproduct of an environment both “stuck” and seeking to change. Said change, in turn, occurs inside-outside itself, through poetic cliché; i.e., said conventions being “how people talk,” but for her amounts to an oscillating fluency thereof: both through tackiness and lack of tact, a holistic-and-liminal ontological statement encompassing the entire masked ball [the original site of forbidden romance and home of the demon lover invading civil spaces of exchange becoming alien again]!

As such, “burning with desire” is a common febrile metaphor describing blood flow and body heat, but also adrenaline when desire climbs and predator/prey confuse in disco-like ways; i.e., the female side of the operatic experience, but turned into a demon-lover version of itself whose confused location jumps between bodies, all operating inside the hauntology/chronotope’s shared fever dream; e.g., The Tryanglz’ “Burning in the Third Degree” [1984]:

Hypnotize, see the flicker gleaming in your eyes
It catches me
Oh, I take it and you’ll never let me go
I’m your prisoner
I feel the heat of your desire
I just can’t face the fire [source: Genius]. 

The phenomenology of the danger disco is paradoxical; i.e., two [or more] things true at once, camping and canonizing the notion of female hysteria and desire. Either make survivors “break down” when triggered, but which they—often involuntarily and without guidance—seek out in ways that accurately describe the disorder of their lived experienced/menticided state informed by external factors; re: gargoyles.

In turn, everything moves in hypnotic slow-motion to speak to complicated feelings; re: the perils of dated courtship threatening the current space and time, a given survivor feeling hunted and desired simultaneously because—for them and their trauma—the difference is never clear-cut. All merge on the same surfaces and within the same thresholds, onstage and off. So, too, does the demon mommy [of a more humanized sort] embody the cowering maiden, demon lover and knightly savior all at once: “chercher la femme” a common female experience that has become, to some degree, hauntologized and myopic [focused prominently from a white, middle-class cis-het female gaze for centuries, left: “I’m being hunted!”] but also a chance to occupy an experience that, for many people, is totally alien to them: to step into someone else’s shoes!

In Gothic, these heavy-metal fan favorites survive outside their respective texts to enable praxial synthesis/generate fresh momentum. As things to rebuild like Frankenstein’s monster [minus the Cartesian dogma] through fantasy/sci-fi trash, they reify in culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive forms and high/low feelings; e.g., a golem’s desire to be loved, or a desire to be protected by someone “forbidden” you nonetheless desire; i.e., through desperation and convenience, unfolding under capital’s oppressive conditions! They unfold regardless, and whose mythical lovers take many forms beyond what is normally allowed; re: the demon mommy’s Amazonian, incendiary and tank-like body something to canonize for a heteronormative freakshow’s Male Gaze, but just as often can exist independent of that: a psychosexual gargoyle/Galatea trapped on the same shared stages while camping canonical superhero beauty standards and heteronormative shows of force—with captivating non-standard showmanship likewise trapped inside various degrees of repetitious convention interrogating myth with myth!

[artist: Marco Turini]

To it, monopolies are illusions, which the state can still argue through its carousel monstrous appeals/menticidal sex symbols, and which we target using the same dream-like aesthetics, left and next page]! By carrying the Gothic’s theatrically flippant, monstrous-feminine traditions into the present, such tours des force aren’t always costumes, but speak to/for/with our bodies and naturally assigned/state reassigned characters as, to some degree, xenomorphic, thus customizable like costumes.

Butch women want to appear strong and desirable, for example, but do so as much for themselves as they do a paycheck from male [or token] bosses—allegorically inside texts that may appear to support deviations from the nuclear model, but in truth often ultimately endorse the same-old status quo [re: Pygmalions like James Cameron shoving Amazons into chaste “armor” versus openly whore-like uniforms, pimping them all the same]. “Hell” is always a brothel—a restless place of cryptonymy to subvert/play with such things without fear of immediate punishment. To it, sex/women’s work extends from art, to porn, to art-as-porn or vice versa; i.e., threatening the center of man’s universe through castration fantasy as something to rock out to, onstage; e.g., Jane Tricka gliding her adventuresome mitt up Wayne Brady’s leg and past his vulnerable junk [note his surprised facial expression, below]: the queen of the stage “threatening” the male damsel-in-distress [there being an unscripted, improvised element to the gag as it unfolds, in real time[7]]!

[source: Whose Line Is It, Anyway? Season 5, episode 21; timestamp: 1:40] 

Tin women and dragon ladies, capital alienates those who are different and molds them into forgeries of themselves trapped in metal and other demonic materiel. In turn, these freakshow strongladies seek to reunite themselves with the audience regardless of profit and its associate dogma; i.e., specific members of the audience, while all eyes are upon them, the opera-in-question seeing them as alien main attractions. To grow is to less to escape arrest, then, and more to establish control, mid-stasis. Like the phantom of the opera, both sides of the creative/performative equation search for companionship, these articulations inverted and rife with various double standards and exceptions. Gender-bending and swapping are just other forms of play—ones that humanize those accused of rape, and those wanting “rape” [classically white women] in ways that meet the needs of each without turning either into cops. They skillfully reverse and/or blur the roles of power in ways that include not just dom and sub, but also the gender identity/performance of that, and the legitimacy and terrorist/counterterrorist status of each, etc.

Mommy or not, demons are like music, then; they’re chosen for contrast by whoever’s arbitrating them. Jazz, blues, funk, bebop, operatic tritones—in music, devilish elements are used for flavor [e.g., flat 5s, 7s and other dominants, diminished chords, Major 7s, etc]. The same goes for Gothic poetics personified, their overtones speaking pointedly to rising class, cultural and racial tensions existing between formerly ecclesiastical institutions bearing out a Protestant ethic; i.e., the eternal war between God and the Devil one that can be used to recruit both entities against workers for capital, or to reclaim either in service to them while walking away from Omelas [and selective bigotry/emancipation].

Such is the case with demon mommies like Lady Hellbender and Karlach’s own sodomy/problematic love. As warrior whores threatening medieval dominion—with “medieval” mil spec attire, vaso vagal sexuality and all-around size difference classically associated with masculine strength—they speak through anger and lust to hyphenate reaping and revenge in multiple directions, but always “from Hell”; i.e., for different groups, for different reasons, using courtly love.

Furthermore, this demonic, monstrous-feminine vector can tokenize for the state, policing the whore with the whore; or it can abject in reverse, workers reveling in these infernal feelings during psychosexual martyrdom: as harmless to all except the bourgeoisie and their strangleholds on moral panic; i.e., what for many is the Man Box [token women unironically acting like men, as TERFs do] and punching down, mid-witch-hunt, but which can also become the endearing [and sincere] appreciation of stacked, capable bodies playing at Hell and its go-to tortures, mid-kayfabe. In a world that increasingly recruits demonic muscle for state, hence colonial, purposes—i.e., tokenizing for fear of total alienation/exile—we want to accept demon mommy candidates/make them feel at home: to have our would-be abusers abandon the triangulation of unironic “prison sex” mentality/Satanic panic [and actual us-versus-them sticks-and-stones genocide] to instead make love through “war” as ironic hurly-burly hanky-panky!

[artist: Word2]

Thick-and-juicy cuts of dark [thigh] meat, they’re less beefcakes topping from below or bottoming from the top and more promising hellish sodomy and total dominance [a Faustian flavor of “torture,” except subs live for such strict service]. But, because it is a performance, there’s always room to camp rape and add a nurturing and self-fulfilling element to Hell; i.e., our strong lady from Hell protects us and smashes our enemies, but she’s got a smile that melts your heart, and brains to play games, sing songs, and clap cheeks that goes with all that molten, luscious brawn!

In other words, she’s the Green Manalishi with the two-pronged crown; i.e., the indulgent, dualistic succubus-incubus of an anisotropic class character—one whose “almost holy” melding of disparate cultural and racialized elements pointedly upset heteronormative [thus setter-colonial, Cartesian] sex and gender norms; re: to have the whore’s revenge against profit and the elite/their cops as straight. All happen vis-à-vis dialectical-material arrangements of demonic sex and force, of the libido—of our aforementioned “Pound Town” being staged, like always, as a gay dark place of dreams hovering near the surface [with Judas Priest’s own queerness being obsessed with such things]:

Now when the day goes to sleep
And the full moon looks
And the night is so black that the darkness cooks
Then you come creeping around
Making me do things I don’t want to do [Judas Priest’s “Green Manalishi,” 1979]. 

The classic Gothic demon is reconciliation with one’s home, thus legacy as fallen, rotting and doomed. Keeping with older writings of mine, “demon” refers to something you often fight to overcome/defeat, mid-exodus; i.e., as unconstrained by human limitations and all at once consolidating them. The word often refers to psychomachy as tied to a location, specifically a chronotope; e.g., Jason Lee’s demon from Dragon [1995] forcing him to look upon his grave to reflect on a cursed, concentrically trapped bloodline [above]. Capitalism reflects onto him, maintaining its Realism during mirror syndrome: courting the demon lover by making love as warriors do—through battle!

By extension, demon mommies aren’t mere fun and games of a light-hearted sort; they’re death omens—forcing us to look ignominiously upon flaws and hubris in our own lives, but also to reenact in playfully psychosexual, abstract ways. Haunted by genuine systemic, thus generational trauma, we play with endless demonic forms; i.e., any that can better alleviate/counteract the myriad harm said systems perfidiously cause: to rise up from the street in Hell’s gutter ballets/castle narratives popularized by Neo-Gothic trash and their painful cryptonymies. Monsters in mazes, demon mommies love to tease; i.e., by beckoning you with demonic pull into the infernal concentric pattern for where liberation must occur [re: Plato’s cave]! There is no outside of the text, loves; there is only change inside a system of differences pushing towards one where these differences aren’t punished [re: me, vis-à-vis Derrida]! Silence is genocide, so make some fucking noise!

Breaking the historical-material cycle, then, happens through mentalities and intuitions that aren’t second-nature, but become that way through good play overwriting bad in Gothic “safe spaces” built to explore demonic things; re: during calculated risk. “I’ll storm your castle!” she jeers, threatening psychosexual violence. To which I would happily respond: “Yes, storm it, mommy! Storm it! Depredate my bussy!” But always, a part of me still burns in Hell, sitting at the canonical Dark Lord’s throne—not my playtime fantasies and submission-by-choice under a competent femme dom, but the shadow of actual abuse I survived and which haunts the venue long afterwards [re: Jadis]!

The fact very much remains: you can’t hug the alien, thus familiarize yourself with Medusa/the unfamiliar [to normies] without seeing all sides of existence under state, thus police violence; i.e., its serialized/episodic historical materialism through demonic pastiche: retelling the demon mommy as a kind of superhuman folk hero! Reifying human qualities and structures in small, but feeling larger-than-life, they emblematize war personified in ways that we, when camping the canon, need to avoid neoliberal false hope upholding Capitalist Realism; i.e., not to recapture the financial success of state [super]models and mythical, never-actually-existed Golden Ages, but to camp them and break their Superstructure to bits using superhero shorthand; re: with alter egos and abject doubles, but also Hollywood glamour and regressive power fantasies unable to monopolize on terror weapons, hence props, makeup, costumes and roleplay!

Demon mommies are whores and the whore is always a threat—one to canonically revive, post-boom, and blame for capital’s inevitable bust period. In canonical terms, the line between superhero and villain, then, is notably razor-thin, the language frequently comic book in its centrist temptation arguments; e.g., Superman and his extraterrestrial superpowers, Batman and his endless gadgets, or Thor and his magic hammer—all conveniently threatened by a dark and/or queer-coded monstrous-feminine, if not equivalent to the hero, then a “close second” Venus twin emasculating hero and home alike: a Promethean scapegoat inkblot for their weakness/flagging reserves, and per the creation of sexual difference, a monomyth dragon they slay once more to prove their doubtful manhoods; e.g., Hela—the god of death, below—quite literally withering Thor’s manhood [erectile dysfunction] while having one hand behind her back, deftly emasculating him/throwing his power into question to bring Hell home to roost[8]. She doesn’t just measure up, during a dick-measuring contest; she puts the boys to shame:

Despite the state-imposed death sentence and bad rap, the demon mommy almost always enjoys her job: one, because she reliably “kills it,” confidently slaying her enemies’ will to fight while kicking self-righteous ass, mid-sermon; and two, the men appear as scared puny weaklings. Suitably overreacting against a sexy-and-stylish dominatrix, the former bemoan the latter’s strict sense/aesthetic of power and death rhapsodizing state shift. In Hela’s case, she isn’t strictly muscular in her physical appearance, but she nonetheless performs strength as something that is muscular/masculine in how she wears it; i.e., owning it while gleefully saying to her would-be owners, “Imagine a world where you weren’t cops, but kneeling before me!” She’s a butt pirate, a Radcliffean sex bandit to conjure at the story’s start, then banish again by its end.

Despite state authors framing Hela as the Nazi-Communist tyrant[9] whose “farming” they can repeatedly sanction through her prescribed, essential illegitimacy—meaning as a feminist bugbear for cops to attack, much like any unruly whore—Hela lives on, post-execution; i.e., as the phantom, terrorist, monstrous-feminine avenger/ghost of the counterfeit that peoples of different socio-political persuasions can happily get behind [or vice versa, to have Hela thoroughly peg them out[10]]! She’s a Radcliffean strawman/fairy godmother to raise and burn, her victim’s invasion fears snuffed out by her bastard’s coming into [and going from] the Imperial Core’s forgery of paradise: a colossal homewrecker/monumental-if-gorgeous fake who does so with pleasure and flaring hysteria, calling the heroes to the void lurking at the center of their bogus castle! Bury her alive, if you want; this Bleeding Nun/faggot witch always rises from the grave, her own cryptonymy speaking vengefully through blindfolds and gags to Medusa’s usual silencing!

Keeping with Orientalism and other persecutory schemes, it’s possible to modulate such intimations without defaming and segregating other cultures. Even so, our demon-mommy wish fulfillment needs to occur in ways that overlap with daily life: the enormity of forces that grow to seemingly endless size, and overshadow not just our own lives, but those who came before and after us; re: death translated into anxieties of inheriting one’s place in empire. Such demons adopt a hungry desire to destroy not just the individual, but the entire bloodline because capital demands it and liberation requires it; re: Hawthorne’s American families always rising and falling in America [the expendability of the middle class, gatekeeping assimilation/safeguarding the elite]. We must challenge this, and do so through the pulpy inkblot language of the imaginary past speaking to buried atrocities, per the ghost of the counterfeit hiding in plain sight: the bad parent cryptomimetically haunting all replication/the panopticon.

While vital to growth, pain is an acquired taste that can motivate power to flow towards workers instead of the state. Doing so happens per ludo-Gothic BDSM playing with passivity and aggression, masculine and feminine, etc, to foster not simply gender trouble, but parody! Self-styled terms like “butch” or “mommy dom” aren’t simply applicable to Lady Hellbender or Hela as demon mommies; they speak to agency over our bodies and avataristic extensions of our bodies, sexualities, gender identities and performances, which the state will try to tokenize and prescribe back as controlled opposition—i.e., the common parlance of those who traffic in sex and courtly love, playing the victim and blaming us as victim, again per DARVO and obscurantism! We protest in duality during oppositional praxis, gender-swapping such stories but still threatening to take our admirers with us through paradoxical theft; i.e., not for profit, but back to Hell where we belong! Free from state bondage, forbidden love might yield a postcolonial effect [female or not, left]:

Such demonic courtship is often cute and slow, but guided by forbidden feelings that threaten to explode and expose the maiden as whore-like; e.g., the fairy princess [or some such submissive] experiencing a sudden desire for raw, extramarital sex; i.e., anything outside state-sanctioned models, thus treated as “from Hell,” animalistic, etc.

These, in turn, commence with the coded expressions of interest/maid-and-butler dialogs that—as the night follows the day—routinely guide the audience away from any novel-of-manners approach and towards naughty sex slumming it with monster lovers; i.e., in spite of the dangers and societal judgements stigmatizing both differently during the dialectic of shelter and the alien: the princess opting for the monster—not to damn or exploit them, but humanize them, mid-risk, while disavowing any state-approved, nuclear forms of “coupling” in the process [re: Radcliffe’s male heroes/good guys, which the heroine “gets” after surviving the demon lover]! She abjures state propaganda to wed the outlaw!

In turn, all can mean different things during the abjection process, and generally all at once. Monster love stories like Persephone and Hades, Beauty and the Beast or The Creature from the Black Lagoon [and similar stories rehashing the same basic concept, above] commonly portray the princess as never from Hell, but per the Gothic, yields a second trickier explanation; i.e., a reunion with one’s lost home: the secret princess and her buried feelings tied to Hell’s imaginary ancestry! Hell is a choice, and a useful one.

Of course, not everyone enjoys such “gimmicks”; e.g., Pallavi Dandamudi, who writes in “Here’s Why the Ending of The Shape of Water Doesn’t Work [2019]: 

If Eliza had been similar to the amphibian man all along, then her love is no longer a statement on the human capacity for compassion. The depth of Eliza’s character lies in her ability to love something that most humans would be scared of or repelled by. The plot portrays her as a simple yet courageous, silent yet powerful human being. This ending just takes away from that, it makes her like any other biological species who is attracted to another member of her species [source]. 

But these loaded, messy and combative representations of human and inhuman still poetically address eugenic/ethnocentric ideas of superior/inferior caused by capital and felt during a captive fantasy about forbidden love/dark desire; i.e., one that struggles to escape its own haunted history while forging new healthier myths/power fantasies using the same stuff.

Whatever the form, these liminal engagements mix danger with protection to yield our postcolonial effect; re: mid-terror-language, demon mommies [and similar sexual outlaws] protect those who feel small and/or vulnerable regarding the other ends of a given love triangle; i.e., as a prolonged and uphill battle, one where class, culture and race war wage for workers by workers, not traitors [cops] upholding the status quo! If such in-groups and tokens use monster love to abject the usual out-groups with, we upset the state’s dogmatic orderings of nature through these self-same stories having two worlds collide!

Except, whether going into Hell or bringing Hell back to Earth, we must do so without permanently regressing towards the very systemic modes of animal survival [e.g., Alien and the cat] whose unironic “jungle fever” capital endlessly relies upon! Instead, we must inspire post-scarcity while attaching its emphasis upon those we help liberate, mid-fetishization: to set free, not banish or limit to a wordless role that prioritizes one group over another [and which The Shape of Water admittedly does; i.e., outlawing the girl for loving the monster she speaks to through sign language, but for whom itself seldom gets a word in. It is always alien in ways Del Toro doesn’t let the creature speak to power with[11]]!

In short, there’s always a foreign element of fascination and fear to such curiously fatal attraction [re: the ghost of the counterfeit]. And yet, monster love stories opine on a scarcity of connection [sexual or otherwise] under capital, and the complicated realities that love triangles afford; i.e., where the privilege and oppression remain unequal for everyone involved, and speak in popular-but-dated forms of murky translation involving lopsided arbitration; e.g., the princess having material and social power over the monster [who she can report to the authorities, should she choose] while the monster often has physical power over her with its raw animal strength! Demon mommies, by comparison, classically keep the strength and reputation known to all demon lovers, but also retain some medieval degree of affluence and lordship over their chosen prey [regardless of gender though often male, insofar as Amazons classically target men; re: to feminize them].

Regardless, the collective road to salvation [and emancipation] requires finding common ground; i.e., in stories that frequently gentrify one side and treat the other as sexually exploitable through mixed metaphors, and whose tricky mixtures of power imbalance we must camp inside themselves; re: in Hell as it can be found on Earth, any demon couple intimated by an earthly double and vice versa; e.g., The Shape of Water evoking the unironic moral panic seen in Birth of a Nation or survived during the Wilmington massacre, but per Del Toro’s Mexican roots, pits a non-princess ethnic minority [and her token friends—a closeted gay painter and a woman-of-color co-worker] against someone even more alienated by the same white straight state! The balancing act is avoiding predation by one side against another while collectively punching up through the wordless power of forbidden love!

Such stories’ longing and nagging emphasis on love language [and language gaps] orbit conspicuously around a shared-if-uneven desire: sex and companionship of different kinds. You wanna really get laid/make friends? Make the unsafe feel safe again, acting as you do in good faith. Show us restraint, control, and understanding with those big capable mitts of yours; or, if you have the means to persecute us and our demonic elements, don’t! “Be gentle!” we ask, then tremble as you “ravish” us [or spare us]. Parry and thrust in ways that—while they can inflict pain—do so in ways that ultimately feel good and are encouraged/adored for their sense of similarity amid difference, healing from rape during a given pedagogy of the oppressed: 

I don’t want to tame your animal style
You won’t be caged
In the call of the wild [Scandal’s “The Warrior,” 1984].

The Gothic specializes in crossovers, committing the everyday offense of daring to see the demonized not just as human, but desirable in a postcolonial world. Yet, such presentation is still liminal, everything doubling and mirrored on the same surfaces, inside the same thresholds. While love-as-theatre commonly marries sex to force in martial forms, empires use it to pointedly instill fear and pacification using demon mommies; i.e., through shadows of police abuse and slave revolt, the former genuine and the latter greatly exaggerated by conflating land-back arguments with actual police brutality dressed up as rape epidemics, drug wars, and crime waves, etc.

Beyond demon mommies singing to release tension, it bears repeating that such DARVO-grade, vae victis [“woe to vanquished”] overtures classically manifest as demonic awakenings that prescribe genocide. Faced the popularity of setter-colonial “musicals,” postcolonial rebels of different kinds camp what has become blank parody/”camp” in quotes [re: Jameson]—doing so to pointedly and perceptively humanize all state victims; e.g., of white pioneer women towards Indigenous Peoples, normally tokenizing against them through rape fears that blame state targets instead of state structures; i.e., in half-real spaces of play and politics, the idea of monster love something to navigate and survive with an animal dance partner we’re drawn towards, but don’t wish to prey upon as the state desires [with white women expected to quickly use, then discard, non-white slaves as disposable sex objects]!

While inequality and preferential mistreatment generally see one side punished far more than the other is, rape ranking isn’t productive or really the point. As a matter of the pedagogy of the oppressed, privilege should assist in undermining such structures to achieve intersectional solidarity against the state; i.e., in holistic ways that people actually relate and respond to. Hence the monster and love story anisotropically addressing a shared-if-uneven human condition under state mechanisms: calumny and stigma, retaliation and remorse. Women fear rape and those branded as rapists fear accusation, the two playing these out on either side of a given exchange that allows for demon lovers of all kinds [not just mommies; re: Del Toro’s demon daddy topped from below by the movie’s spunky-if-unassuming heroine, their roles changing back and forth as things escalate/progress].

In turn, to even think of the other as “equal” becomes treason, sedition, a thought crime in canonical doctrine. So it must be disguised in ways that point to the trauma being discussed during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Anything the state can poetically combine to divide along the usual persecution networks, we mix-and-match; i.e., during the cryptonymy process, using it [and demon lovers] to cross boundaries and tear such cordons down; e.g., with demon mommies, but also mermen from the black lagoon. The boundaries that banish either to Hell are the apex of conspiracy abused by those with privilege; i.e., to enrich themselves on an individual level as much as systemic ones, working as much with ordinary things as not; e.g., Rebecca Watson’s “How Dave Grohl & Foo Fighters Put Actual Lives at Risk” [2024]. As they go hand-in-hand, so must we, but in reverse of what amounts essentially to glorified misinformation. We mustn’t hesitate to check it, and cement our own arguments in the mold.

In turn, these cryptonymic appeals to segregation or intersection sit inside pioneered discussions, they and their alliances couched in dated, hauntological fantasy rhetoric during liminal expression; i.e., as normally dominated by Cartesian orderings of the universe, which our holistic offerings offend on purpose. Paradox is to find one at odds with such paradigms, subverting their language to offer up visually similar but functionally alien alternatives: the golem-esque Amazon queen “man-spreading” her hairy bear snatch on her animal-print power chair while lording over her little, always-was goblin cumslut [captured, taken by force and kept for pleasure, below]. To reverse abjection is to play with its stigmas and taboos, its threats of capture, bondage and torture speaking to Persephone trapped in Hell in more ways than one!

 [artist: Flare Fox]

For better or worse, such things carry weight and instigate consequences we control; i.e., through monstrous dialogs about control. “Rape” enters quotes onstage and off, then—a way of life that yields liberatory sentiment through “torturous” castration aesthetics [re: the Archaic Mother/phallic woman]: xenophilic art of couples profoundly happy with the dominator’s humiliating arrangement as designated by them [an anisotropic reversal of the nuclear order’s polarity of husband and wife, but also girl-on-girl love, interracial[12a] relationships and other such canonical “unspeakables”]! As with demon mommies, it’s seen as embarrassing and guilty to enjoy such things—and indeed, there are pernicious aspects we must critique of the demon mommy rape fantasy while enjoying it—but to swear them [and monster battle and rape] off entirely is foolish.

Postcolonialism needs empathy as found among monsters; i.e., during the dialectic of the alien, the latter’s ubiquity owing to its popularity and age. Allegory, androgyny and monster-mommy kayfabe are as old as demons are—as old as acting is, thus masks, costumes, and muses; sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll; martial arts, stage performers and prize fighters [often mixing onstage and off as half-real spectacles; e.g., with Muhammed Ali loving wrestlers and monster movies, calling his infamous opponent, George Foreman, “the Mummy” on account of his long-guard defensive style[12b]].

To it, personification is equally old, as are comedy and drama in kayfabe, told with shadows and flames as popular high/low forms of discourse about war and rape, but also vulgarity at large; i.e., cartoonishly monstrous like Amazons, their statuesque bodies made-from-clay and infused with that mysterious spark of life; re: the fire of the gods as seen with Victor’s demonic Creature. The stuff of con men, grifters and charlatans, but also communicators, thinkers and actors, all stem from the ancient world’s bread-and-circus combat flowing into medieval varieties, followed by modern nostalgic forms of either [and other] time periods.

All heroes are monsters, meaning demons [mommies or otherwise] can be whatever we need them to be that represents ourselves and our struggles, not the state; i.e., to experiment and figure out what we prefer [with orientation and gender conformity or nonconformity often having a congenital element, similar to phobias and kinks]. All the same, no one is exempt from duality and paradox per nature and language. Exploitation and genuine harm sit adjacent to parody in ways that cross over during reprisals; i.e., us being attacked by reactionaries for speaking out through theatre, blending comfort and discomfort as demon mommies generally afford. Through them, we look “under the hood” to see what we’re made of and how we tick, but also to express ourselves in posthuman ways tied to the imaginary past [and its usual poetic indulgence] walking around:

[artist: Jan Rock]

Individual examples spent, I now want to spend the rest of the exhibit articulating demon mommies and postcolonialism through a more “big picture” lens. To it, kayfabe is liminal. Whatever its form, the fighting happens as much offstage as on; i.e., as much between the state and workers at large as between two performers being viewed. Like demons lovers overall, such things walk the line between reality and make-believe, madness and method, ancient and modern, masculine and feminine, total bullshit and pure truth, and male, intersex and female; in turn, class war weds to culture and race, all while the stage and its lovely inventions, props, stunt people and special effects become ours to use. While magic “isn’t real,” belief and perception are; as a matter of stage magic, then, great power lurks inside illusions and entertainment, the larger-than-life character of stage heroes [and their bodies] bearing out tremendously persuasive and representative, but also smuggling potential. While power is an illusion, we might as well use its splendid lie to assign our values to such startling and potent beings; i.e., rescuing their “Trojan Horse” function from police institutions, to instead become folk-hero role models for those who have no voice in the world [stand-ins until they find their own ways to speak out]!

All the while, it’s possible to subvert canon while raising concerns about popular media’s culturally appropriative/sexually prescriptive elements. Descriptive sexuality can likewise be conscripted through Rainbow Capitalism, which—along with everything else—we camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM using demon mommies. This camp serves multiple purposes, including outing our enemies. As I argue of revolutionary cryptonymy through heroic expression [from Volume One]:

[revolutionary cryptonymy] remains an utterly vital aspect of proletarian praxis—one that challenges state monopolies through the very things they try to control: morphological expression through monstrous and heroic performance, but especially animalized, hauntological examples like the Amazon or knight, as well as the more famously operatic, feudal sites of sexual danger to which they represent and/or navigate—Gothic castles as killing grounds for a state predator’s prey-like designations.

To that, […] revolutionary cryptonymy invokes liminal expression as a cosmetic, conspicuous means of useful disguise within state monopolies of violence, terror and in connection to those dated things, bodily expression. Together on antiquated stages, the deliberate use of dated masks, costumes, props and other performative elements hide activism’s sorties imperfectly within the trauma of canonical Gothic language and its complicated territories of expression; i.e., as a means of rebellious camouflage, useful for blending in and revealing the bad-faith nature of state proponents in shared, thus policed, spaces and dialogs. On said stage, reactionaries and moderates wear masks to hide themselves in common monstrous language; but when they respond to our Athena’s Aegis having doubled their mask, said mask slips from outrage defending state monopolies within nerd culture [source]. 

But apart from striking fear into the hearts of our enemies, the practice is admittedly self-satisfying and -serving. Insofar as power and demons are simply fun to play with, singing and theatre feel good. So does wearing costumes and acting out forbidden desire [sex or otherwise] become fun to watch; i.e., to defy the state as demon lovers, including mommies, happily do during monster love stories [often for the drama, but also the pornographic elements, below]!

Aside from toys, then, a huge appeal to BDSM lies in surrendering power as, oddly enough, its own kind of power [to become like a kid again, while playing with adult materials]. This aesthetic can involve someone big that—herbo or not—acts uncharacteristically gentle with someone they could visibly break, as much as someone small surrendering to a larger dom, or a dom aesthetic lending an element of “taming bears” to it [or a sub as strong as a bear]. It also speaks to asymmetrical warfare; i.e., as something to communicate/relate to and with during ludo-Gothic forms. None are “superior” insofar as challenging the state goes, but do utilize preference during monstrous code; i.e., demon lovers, whereupon demon mommies may assume a variety of dated cryptomimetic positions and embodiments, which echo trauma during the cryptonymy process: to best show and hide things that rebellion needs to destabilize the current world, putting a postcolonial one in its place!

[artist: Jan Rock]

Any way you slice it, great power is something to relate to in ways that historically threaten rape; i.e., someone looks strong enough to cause harm, as demon lovers generally do. Here, though, such rape-fantasy counterterror is not only not harmful, but paradoxically empowering and fun because it occurs within boundaries of faux-medieval play where both sides rewrite and reinforce the rules [thus reestablish mutual consent]. Fear of the alien is inherited by workers born and bred inside colonial bodies, then rewritten in postcolonial terms, onstage and off. When indulged in—and even by ace parties and their public nudism, playing with psychosexual trauma—such forbidden fruit becomes fuel that gives us [and our revolutionary engines] straight fire: to turn the frogs gay!

Whatever the gender[s] being explored, monsters contain a class character among the gendered elements; and while Imperialism perpetually makes the lives of others their business, the fact remains you only need that special someone [excepting polycules] to make you happy! In turn, the myth of the rape epidemic/dark slaver tries to suggest women [or those treated as women] don’t want dark things/actually desire state-assigned mates and nothing else. Yet, per the whore’s paradox, they so often do, and not because the state sells nature-as-alien back to them, mid-genocide! Down to play [and fuck] during ludo-Gothic BDSM, they humanize what the state can only dehumanize; they endeavor reclaim and hold onto the very language of “darkness,” mid-consumption. So does ethicality become a matter of informed consumption [a notion we’ll return to, in Volume Three].

The princesses of revolution don’t care to trap the demon lover inside an abject “slumming” role; and ideally the dom doesn’t want to brutalize us in reality during calculated risk. We want to let off steam and enjoy unequal power together as a shared way of life; i.e., one doubling as a teaching device that can show people how not to act like cops despite the power imbalance and shadow of police rule [with cops raping others through fetishized power imbalance that has a gendered character to it; re: Man Box/”prison sex” mentality and TERFs].

In truth, there’s so much room to play with power through demonic language’s literal and figurative crossfade. Trans or not, some men want to be manhandled by demon mommies; some women want to be “ravished” and taken into captivity [to sit by a dark throne]. The monster lover fantasy is generally a fleeting one—often more fun in one’s head [or in half-real spaces of demon BDSM where some irony is present]—but not because it is objectively wrong and shouldn’t happen; the empheral quality to demonic desire and reunion speaks to repressed, delegitimized arrangements of power the state can only pimp and police, not practice in good faith. “Hell” in reality is generally safer than state ideas of paradise, which its pimps aggressively sell to semi-frightened but equally-interested and curious women pining for “the other side”; and those treated as women [or “black, of Hell/nature,” etc] remain informed by Gothic opera and fairytales—i.e., where the woman falls in love with the monster as being more human than her assigned white knight!

Taken a step further by Pagan/GNC/non-white authors and actors, our additional dimensions and cracking eggs make a Heaven of Hell or vice versa, thus can reverse/swap already-gendered roles; re: by using demon mommies to say things about our oppression/desire in uniquely trans, intersex and non-binary morphological forms that intersectionally solidarize with other struggles: to love and be set free from state abuse/control when allegorically transforming their demonic language, ourselves; i.e., humanizing our allies during the same shared struggle, punching up from Hell! So while Amazons are classically AFAB, AMAB princesses likewise have their own “come hither!” poise, doing to beckon those treated like prey by the state: “Don’t be shy! It’s safe[13] to play with me!”

[artist: Julian Michaels]

Queer or not, everything happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM, reclaiming the neo-Victorian bedroom to turn it [and its Protestant ethic/process of abjection] inside-out. In turn, power is like a force field, phantoms or pantomime; it’s largely imaginary/subjective but shaped by objective forces. Sex and force elide as much as collide in medieval poetics. In a territorial, settler-colonial sense, the state looks to demonize those already “under fire”; i.e., treating native parties as hellish outsiders [suffering lasting damage/generational trauma]! Some will sell out through desperation and convenience; others are more principled, holding onto their values while different movements decay.

Power is all how you frame it, then. So when they’re circling the wagons and playing white Indians and saviors, use your wagons against them! It’s not “ceding ground” to own the demonic role; i.e., in ways that undermine capital and state authority by presenting power in ways that appear cop-like or tokenized, but actually flow power towards workers through demon mommies [often marrying them; re: death by Snu-Snu, below, colliding the medieval language of sex and war into readily consumable forms]: by helping others imagine alternative arrangements to reality and bonding with nature-as-alien. These fugitive unga-bunga refrains become conducive to Gothic-Communist development when such Great Destroyers demonstrably break state monopolies and cut their legs out from under them! “She smash!” Chonk, strong, and ready to bonk! It’s clobbering time, motherfuckers!

 [source]

Power is something that is perceived, thus subject to the usual forces of theatre; e.g., someone can be made to look younger than they actually are, or stronger than is humanly possible. Demon mommies are born of fire, but also made of it [re: Hellbender’s volcanic red hair and Karlach’s burning heart]. Burns hurt like hell; for us demons, love hurts and Hell [and Hell’s heartache] is our paradise, but a plastic one our forced immigrants’ poetic contributions help make and redefine power [and boundaries, trust] in order to shift away from state abuse; i.e., achieving equity under dialectical-material scrutiny and [s]exercise! Hot as hellfire, a monster “ass queen” awaits, as does her Numinous booty’s infernal fitness and demon-dumper glory! We are but priests praying at her temple of almighty fire! Baby got back, a bottom-heavy cathedral whose abyssal end is one to plunge repeatedly into [to fall in love with/make that pull-out game weak]! She even does anal, pegging her “victims” while preaching the benefits [re: using sodomy not as an unironic terror weapon against different marginalized targets, but to cause “terror” as a matter of spicing up sex; i.e., in lands of darkness/disputed ownership challenging state owners]!

[artist: Forest the Rotten] 

Granted, worship is an ancient human function. Except, whereas state religions organize to enslave “the unknown” for profit, ours remain entirely devoted to emancipatory worship; i.e., of a secularized, Satanic politique that actually respects nature. As its monstrous-feminine stewards, our threat displays challenge the state-as-straight pimping nature as monstrous-feminine; e.g., Angela Carter’s white cis-het Female Gaze preying on such things without rehumanizing anything. As such, nature’s revelatory bodies become inspirational temples, rebuilt by us doubling the original’s chonky profane; i.e., during crisis, and within the vein of Gothic fetishes that were already done to death/painfully cliché centuries ago. So does Gothic Communism resurrect long-lost feelings of rebellious frisson that break capital’s counterparts, having the whore’s revenge against them. In the usual language of victory and defeat, they’re the sore losers who remain scared of nature and death!

Nothing is more covetous or afraid than a cop, than imperial defenders, than Pax Americana leery of unruly spoilsports subverting Cartesian gender norms [androgynous, Mother Nature fucks back]. From size difference to size deference, Medusa is straight intergalactic metal, and you can’t kill the metal any more than colonize outer space! A forsaken fane of devilish flagellation, fornication, and flatulence [it happens], she always comes back, reclaiming colonial territories before leaving just as quick: an impure thought, a cosmic whore, mountain mama, female Hercules, bat outta hell! From art to porn, let’s blaze new trails that lead away from Cartesian abuse, taking ourselves home [and to town]! Camp canon; ravish ironically by putting “rape” in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM! Every fortress of doom has its greatest soldier!

Beyond demon mommies, there’s so much language for sex and violence when it comes to postcolonial liberation; i.e., nature treated as queer/alien/female, etc, much of it understandably animalized and medieval per a demonic courtly love’s pornographic style. Whatever the form of the art/performance, capital paywalls nature and pimps it out to rape or otherwise exploit it. Gothic-Communist calculus factors in monetization/privatization of monsters and their liberation under capital; i.e., sex work is paid only if said workers fight for it; re [from Volume One]:

our socio-political positions are vulnerable and often associated directly with our bodies and identities as things to control through monstrous forms during Gothic theatre […] Such forays into pretend worlds amount to an imaginary liberation that challenges Capitalist Realism through avatar-like vehicles; i.e., places to put ourselves and occupy for a time, to better learn how to frame our own experiences (and bodies) in a situation of make-believe. But within that invention lies the ability to think critically about our surroundings, thus interpret the stories already present within our lives that shape how we think, thus act [source].

This goes for us defying the state animalizing us, their idea of “tribal,” “savage” or “primal” challenging workers; i.e., inventing variants to some degree appropriative or appreciative regarding older struggles against empire; e.g., white Indians vs allies to Indigenous groups [with sex being a pacifying or mobilizing force in demonic forms; re: Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks (2014) something of a pun regarding issues of demonic representation[14]]. While [from Volume Zero] 

animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms; i.e., stigma animals relayed through demonic BDSM and rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized: marked for trauma or by trauma [source].

likewise [from Volume One] 

the medieval character of state violence and terror cannot be destroyed during morphological expression, only subverted or contained through linguo-material “traps” we put into motion during revolutionary cryptonomy as an essential means of counterterrorist liberation; i.e., by throwing the setter-colonial character of heteronormativity into dispute through a rebellious medieval, postcolonial imaginary. 

[…] emotional turmoil is very much at home in the Gothic. This includes anxieties about physical bodies and their hauntological uniforms as often having a sexualized, animalistic, psychological element that overlaps with half-exposed, unburied trauma acquired generationally under state domination. This domination occurs within regressive, medievalized positions of crisis and decay that defend and uphold the status quo, but can be reclaimed by proletarian agents within weird-nerd culture; e.g., workers embodying knights to reclaim their killing/raping implements inside the state of exception, while simultaneously dealing with state infiltrators fighting to recapture the same devices back for themselves and their masters; i.e., Amazons and furries, etc, as forms of contested morphological expression that can assist or hamper gyno/androdiversity within Gothic poetics under state monopolies. To that, heroes are monsters, and monsters go hand-in-hand with animals being for or against their own abuse to varying degrees.

The resultant middle ground of this duality grants words like “demon,” “zombie,” or “animal” a double purpose […]: predator and prey. […] Domestication invokes a sense of the wild that is reclaimed by state forces to serve the profit motive, which rebellious agents must challenge and reclaim while being animalized [source]. 

It also extends to demons “of nature” combined with a less earthly plane that points back to nature again; e.g., Hell or extraterrestrial worlds; i.e., places where women rule and men are cucked in the usual Amazonian rape/death-by-Snu-Snu wrestler fantasies that—appearances of domination aside—canonically uphold state power through token/undercover police violence.

Decaying rebellious potential, Red Scare abuses whores in demonic language to better give the Straights “scare boners”; i.e., with “non-white” body types that speak to their mommy issues towards nature during Gothic vaudeville. Compelled dominance servicing straight males sissies per the nuclear/settler-colonial model whoring nature-as-monstrous-feminine, it’s something to “slay” in the usual, unironic monomyth, and which sex-positive workers may camp using what they got: as mommies who cannot die when “slain”!

[artist: Nyx]

Demon or not, it’s no secret that Amazons are farmed by the state to cater to cis-het weird nerds chasing non-natal mommies; i.e., the usual monster peach to cut up and harvest like moist evil cake. But GNC parties humanize the harvest for postcolonial purposes, challenging profit [and its freakshow chattelization] with similar demonic poetry during ludo-Gothic BDSM [re: Nyx, above]. Not ones to overlook a good myth onstage, we use them to our advantage through ourselves; i.e., to teach one another through Gothic theatre and its many, many ways to tell stories about monsters by personifying them. In doing so, we challenge deep-seated beliefs with things rising to the surface; i.e., that we can alter on or around ourselves, all to make larger harmful structures go down in flames. If Communism is a myth, then so is Capitalist Realism, our cryptonymy fighting fire with fire [as demon mommies do]—to best burn Rome to cinders and rise from its fertile ashes!

Revolution, as such, truly is a piece of cake—one that takes as many forms as demonology holistically allows! We are legion, but whose myriad, intersectional solidarity often can be summed up in single images; i.e., any that indicate similar acts of muse-like defiance, expressed in ways openly happy and animalistic, but also educated [thus intimidating to the elite, left]:

[artist: Mercedes the Muse]

We’re not just a pretty face or fat piece of ass, then, but operate through poetic argument, and whose preference with those poetic devices [often metaphors] reclaim by us to better steer our agenda with; re: by using what we got, our Aegis and its forbidden fruit/darkness visible offering up forbidden sight/a deal with the Devil!

As such, demonic rebellion [muscle mommy or otherwise] scuttles or commandeers this vessel or that, jettisons or smuggles any and all cargo, inside; it commonly combines seafaring metaphor with other performative means, often relying on medieval language, but also gut animal skills in animal situations of survival—i.e., where you communicate through scowls, smiles, puppy dog eyes and sounds, but also body language and pet-training BDSM exercises [speaking from experience, here]. It’s definitely a skill, and one that can save you in a pinch. The immediacy of danger and naked exposure demand it, which calculated risk is all about. There is no “true mastery” of such things, only a desire or need to change through practice to escape hostile conditions of false mastery by altering those conditions; happening by any and all means, development [of Communism] happens when those conditions change: using Gothic poetics [and its prolific language of mastery vis-à-vis demon mommies] for the betterment of all!

Whatever our individual preferences and postcolonial inclinations—be it Amazons or cat women from the moon—we queers and other marginalized groups collectively love demons; i.e., because their unequal power/forbidden knowledge/dark desire and transformative potential all speak to our alienation as having a human face we can ringlead: descriptive sexuality and gender as morphological freedom [to express violence and terror] towards liberation—not positive thinking and “peace” [a white man’s word, but also used by cis-het feminists] fetishizing token cops, be they good or bad, white or non-white, skinny or [more often than not] thicc during state monopolies! Waifus are waifus, betrayal is betrayal, cops are cops, but liberators use the same aesthetics [and bodies/colors of stigma] as those who sell out during asymmetrical warfare!

[artist: Angel] 

All workers are demonized to some extent. The postcolonial difference is, rebellious workers operate as universal freedom fighters; i.e., who consciously choose our own roles, despite whatever positions or lot we’re born into. So while profit is moving money through nature as cheaply as possible, our revenge is channeling such things towards ourselves; i.e., by redistributing them but also their capabilities to generate, which we opt of out in favor of a post-scarcity world. This includes demon mommies, but really any form of monstrous theatre you could think of. We’re not just arm candy used “for looks,” then, but sweet the pot through our labor exchanges, including our bodies and what they represent; i.e., at the time, but also over time, reviving such devices as needed to remind people what we and our movement is about; e.g., my friend Angel and their contributions to the book [from an old, commissioned shoot, above] but also Ebonnyy [from a more recent commission, next page].

Something to reclaim inside state monopolies, then, our guerrilla’s strange appetites/diabolical inclinations under capital advertise to whet the curiosity of spectating onlookers! Vulnerable parties, however strong they appear or behave, are framed as demons: to be hunted down and killed like animals. Any appeals to the contrary sit within the same complicated language. Amazons and similar demons are sex warriors—gladiators that promote power as something to witness in all aspects of itself [the home, weapon, body and vehicle, etc]. They play out in highly conventional ways that normally enact cops-and-victims violence to reinforce the status quo; but our imaginary bondage is like Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth: speaking to oppression through “oppression” acted out by subversive agents. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all, but each flower among the larger hellish bouquet remains special, unique, powerful. Helping instead of harming others despite having power over them—that’s our immortality!

[model and artist: Ebonnyy and Persephone van der Waard]

To it, monster-fucking theatre and its abstraction on the Aegis is one of paradoxical struggle—not just of mitigation and reversal during liminal expression, but of upset while turning workers on [eroticized class awakenings, getting down and in touch with our wild sides chattelized by the state]: the vulnerable as normally preyed upon by predatory agents thinking they’re saving the world from evil, the former overcoming the latter emboldened by state forces to harm nature; i.e., by abusing trust, violating boundaries and limiting victims control over their own lives. We fags camp that, merging demon love with adrenaline; i.e., through fight-or-fight operatics that purposefully excite our cathartic energies challenging capital’s usual qualities. If cops are criminals with badges, calling their victims criminals before unironically raping them, postcolonial demon mommies motivate systemic catharsis by camping said rape, time and time again.)

So concludes the symposium and “Idle Hands,” part one. Now that we’ve covered Amazons, dark faeries and demon muscle mommies in the blood libel/witch class vein, I’d like to consider a different aspect to such predators and prey, in “Idle Hands,” part two; i.e., through a sculpted, claymation quality to nature-as-monstrous-feminine and its revenge: hunting and vampires! Amazons often do this, but theirs is territorial in ways that are guarded as “home”; re: for which to bring captured, smaller male mates back to for breeding purposes. But “death by Snu-Snu” has another hunter function that just as often yields kawaii vibes in a modern demonic; i.e., inside an urban setting haunted by monstrous-feminine rage (and patriarchal abuse) vis-à-vis transplanted blood libel tropes—vampires unwelcome in a homely space, yet compelling precisely for the demon-lover violence they promise to visit upon others/suspicion they arouse during courtly love.

For that, we’ll be looking pointedly at Takena’s “Midnight Vampire”! For Takena’s antihero, death is a party—a danger disco to dance savagely inside, Matthew-Lewis-style; i.e., to anisotropically reverse the usual directions of sex and force during criminal-on-criminal violence, the female avenger’s castration fantasy while attracted to predators—happily enacting the whore’s bloody revenge! Gird your loins!

Onto “Idle Hands, part two: Vampires and Claymation“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] For further examination of this, consider “Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse, the Birthplace of Ludo-Gothic BDSM” (2024) from the Undead Module.

[2] Doing so evokes Artemis and similar goddesses of war/the hunt, but also Hippolyta and her ilk. In either case, their collective “virginity” occurs by killing men outright (for trespassing on their land, hence home) or by forcing men to marry them and have their children (the shoe on the other foot; re: death by Snu-Snu)! There’s certainly a long history of white-Indian tokenization* to Amazons as “man-eaters” in this respect (the humiliation of men by Amazons part of the latter’s ancient copagandistic function; re: as a patriarchal mythical device treating Athenian women as second-class citizens). Even so, it can easily be reclaimed during the dialectic of the alien, and applies equally to demon mommies essentially being “Amazons from Hell” (often two-world people, one foot in each).

*E.g., Samus Aran; re: “‘In Search of the Secret Spell’: Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte- Blanche” (2024)!

[3] For more writing about Amazons and knights apart from here, refer to Volume One’s “‘Predators and Prey’: Predators as Amazons, Knights, and Other Forms of Domesticated, Animalized Monster Violence” (2024).

[4] “Spread ’em, mount ’em, pin ’em” as Jadis’ lepidopterist friends loved to recite.

[5] It’d be easy enough to treat the Amazon as male or intersex through GNC performance (the whole idea already centers around crossdress), but we won’t be doing so, here.

[6] Size difference is a common way to compensate for not leaning into the emotional aspects; i.e., the “Napoleon” persona versus someone who is strong and silent—though frankly there’s no “correct” way to go about this. The best actors combine different elements at their disposal to achieve the desired effect (whatever that is) per case; i.e., regarding those being subjected to their talents and services! To that, Lady Hellbender carries a strict flavor of femme dom (the Amazon), one that plays out through her demonic aesthetic during ludo-Gothic BDSM; but gentle femme doms likewise exist and can use the same/different aesthetics to achieve their own desirable outcomes; e.g., Harmony Corrupted and I.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In other words, erogenous pleasure, non-harmful pain and other euphoric sensations determine by context, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Such performances are generally works-in-progress, tailored to fit the different players working in concert; i.e., I have trauma and want to work through it with Harmony, who doesn’t want to harm me (the mark of a good dom). So we work through it, step-by-step, session-by-session, until we figure out the best way to work such rough play into our psychosexual games and theatre.

But rest assured, while many people have one “speed” with which they normally play things out, switches like myself prefer the ability to adopt different fantasies—thus demonic configurations of “fatal” desire, knowledge and power—when playing with excellent cuties like Harmony Corrupted “on the go/fly.” It’s a place of magical pleasure, a Twilight Zone of our defense, addressing how we feel:

I’m falling down a spiral, destination unknown
Double-crossed messenger all alone
Can’t get no connection, can’t get through, where are you? (Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone,” 1982).

Such things are a part to play out during cryptonymy and calculated risk, their darkness visible making actual harm impossible and catharsis all but guaranteed; i.e., a party to perform between different players having fun through exquisite “torture” yielding to individual preference.

In turn, we rock ‘n doll in danger discos of our design, divorced from profit and made to help us heal from actual abuse/systems thereof! Genuine exploitation sits adjacent to palliative-Numinous feelings, all existing in the same shadow zone. Those marked by trauma seek “trauma” out in quotes: as made weird in ways that, true enough, seek weird out as something to relate to with; re (from Volume Two, part one):

don’t suffer for your art if you can help it. But also remember that trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird. The idea is to combine them in ways that alleviate sickness, stress, tension and harm, but also avoid predation by perfidious elements in our daily lives coming from structural abuse: the Gothic castle as a beacon to attract and house the likeminded while the state tries, as it always does, to dominate us through its own victims (source).

So do we make our bones, our own friendship and marriage counselors, during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Demon mommies reify not just combative emotions, then, but socio-material conditions as “plastic through play.” In doing so, they give us a powerfully compassionate voice to subvert, thus counteract, state forms with; i.e., during liminal expression doubling our abusers, onstage and off. Any syndrome (mirror, compartment, virgin/whore, white knight, impostor, etc), disorder (eating, personality, body and/or gender), or monopoly we’d want to interrogate, we may do so; i.e., in a half-real sense. State influence sits in between reality and imagination as informing each other according to state designs upheld or turned upside-down in said territories’ total spheres; i.e., desk murder and state atrocities, at large, versus rape play of a campy sort, the latter punching up while arguing for/administering critical thought and dialectical-material analysis as second-nature, over time: through actual Satanic rebellion repeatedly “taking temperature.”

Doing so means parsing fake rebellion/witch cops, en medias res (re: Milton)—with state proponents and labor proponents looking the same, but whose cryptonymy functions differently! Function determines function, and rebellion is always anisotropic; i.e., its reversal of polarity concerning power and knowledge operate through imagination and desire, either requiring such “sea legs” to navigate the inevitable confusions that occur when occupying and navigating a constantly changing world flooded with pre-existing trauma; re: its darkness visible.

[7] Note how Brady, visibly intimidated by Tricka, falls back on various bodybuilder stereotypes once triggered; and how she—suitably emboldened by the stage as a kind of safe space to push the envelope—happily fucks with him a bit; i.e., taking him to Pound Town, if but for one frightening moment written all over his face. The crowd (including the other performers, right) loves it.

[8] The plot of Thor: Ragnarok (2017) being to foist Asgard’s imperial sins onto Odin’s evil daughter (evocations of Virginia Woolfe’s “Judith,” the fictional sister of Shakespeare from her 1929 novel, A Room of One’s Own); i.e., that women “can’t have power” because they’re “hysterical” and always seek revenge against the Patriarchy pimping them; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss.

[9] The character was originally written by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, thus echoes many of those writers problematic attitudes about American heroism on the global stage.

[10] A double pun; i.e., to “peg” as in, fuck with a strap-on, and to “peg out,” meaning to kill. A classic double whammy that Medusa revels in!

[11] I.e., the James Whale problem, a queer director taking away the Creature’s voice: as it was normally expressed—the way Shelley intended—against Cartesian men.

[12a] Such things can be performed with other people, or with poetic extensions of them; e.g., sex toys that—through size, color and shape—represent things outside our normal experience as much as anything ordinary or “realistic”; re: the classic Gothic juxtaposition of the everyday “novel” versus the Ancient Romance extending to roleplay and toys:

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

The gimmick transforms through context; re: by illustrating mutual consent through playing with forbidden elements. To that, such spaces let workers change clothes and colors of different kinds, but also offer various openings in a tantalizing gesture of exposure and invitation, as well as exploration of and for different kinds of people looking in on the fun. White girls are classically “threatened” by BBC in traditional porn, for instance, but through their own pornography can illustrate mutual consent simply through selection; i.e., the ability to put whatever into their holes that they want (a nightmare scenario for straight white men who want to control said women; i.e., in every aspect of their lives, including who they have sex with or who they fantasize about/perform with).

[12b] John J. Raspanti quotes of Ali vs Foreman:

“George Foreman is nothing but a big mummy,” Ali said. “I’ve officially named him, ‘The Mummy.’ See, you all believe that stuff you see in the movies. Here’s a guy running through the jungle, doing the hundred-yard dash, and the mummy is chasing him. Thomp, thomp, thomp. ‘Ooh, help! I can’t get away from the Mummy! Help, help! The Mummy’s catching me. Help! Here comes the Mummy!’ And the mummy always catches him. Well, don’t you all believe that stuff. There ain’t no mummy gonna catch me” (source: John J. Raspanti’s “Forty-Nine Years Ago,” 2023).

The fact remains, people love monsters, and frequently turn up at shows like those to see monsters do battle (often men of color), and because these performers rarefy politics and bloodspots tied to specific places and warring geopolitical forces; e.g., Ali and Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, their event billed “The Rumble in the Jungle.” Indeed, boxing is commonly called “war personified,” the fighters involved representing different countries and peoples whether they want to or not.

To his credit, though, Ali was staunchly anti-war (outside the ring, anyways), going so far as to refuse the draft even if it cost him his license and landed him in jail:

On June 20, 1967, the great Muhammad Ali was convicted in Houston for refusing induction in the U.S. armed forces.

Ali saw the war in Vietnam as an exercise in genocide. He also used his platform as boxing champion to connect the war abroad with the war at home, saying, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”

For these statements, as much as the act itself, Judge Joe Ingraham [through a blatant act of judicial legislation] handed down the maximum sentence to Cassius Clay (as they insisted upon calling him in court): five-years in a federal penitentiary and a $10,000 fine (source: Dave Zirin’s “When Muhammad Ali Took the Weight,” 2011).

In turn, activism and theatre often go hand-in-hand—not just for Ali, but for all performers and consumers of monsters, onstage and off; re: of demon lovers, mommies included!

[13] This goes both ways, with trans women being seen as “traps.” We’ll explore this more in Volume Three.

[14] I.e., “a seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and institutional practices that emphasize Indigenous recognition and accommodation” (source). Betrayal is betrayal.

This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). 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). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). 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 “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

“I’ll See You in Hell”: Dark Faeries and Demon Mommies

“Your tauntaun will freeze before you reach the first marker!”

—a deck officer to Han Solo, The Empire Strikes Back (1981)

Picking up where “A Paucity of Time“ left off…

Demons are intensely popular poetic devices, which communicate, as people do, through sex and force, but also taboo subjects concerning larger bigotries, phobias and stigmas involving sex and force. In turn, everything speaks to dark wishes, wants and desires achieved through transformation and trade; i.e., few things are used in conjunction more than “fire” and “desire,” but also oxymoron and darkness visible; e.g., “cold fire,” and “Hell freezing over” (the latter being a frozen lake in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, for instance). Milton’s Lucifer was, in that sense, the bringer of light with darkness that broke state illusions. I want to unpack that a little more, here.

Our focus remains monstrous-feminine, as usual. And yet, at its most simple, all roads lead to Rome; i.e., the pandemonium all demons and fairies provide takes you to Hell in order to experience what is forbidden or otherwise denied at home, generally through home’s unequal conditions turned on their heads.

Such things historically and dialectically-materially reduce to sex and force, as a result—are highly controlled by canon as such because, with the proper nudge and mindset, they suddenly offer the unique and productive ability to radically change the world in a half-real sense; i.e., starting onstage but hardly ending there, battering Capitalist Realism with proletarian illusions camping the canon to liberate the whore: through a reclaimed (and deliberately subversive) Superstructure. This cycling wardrobe—one of many masks, mirrors and costumes—endlessly yields dark wishes concerning emancipatory sex and force dressed up as “rape,” and whose dark demonic knowledge and power reliably abstract, adjudicate or otherwise convey through whorish revenge as a devilish, Gothic-Communist, impossible-to-control creative act: something to pass down in cryptonymic, anachronistic and extracurricular modes of poetic discourse forever at play (and war) in history’s endless jumble.

“I’ll See You in Hell,” then, divides in two basic parts to consider said jumble with: a continuation of monstrous-feminine revenge “of nature” against profit—a rebellious witch (and not a witch cop) being someone who, pimped by state force, not only refuses to play ball (witches pimping witches, mid-moral-panic), but bends the rules of play through ludo-Gothic BDSM (and its usual historical ironies) in pursuit of universal liberation: the obfuscation of friend and foe through the usual prosecution markers; re: to confuse state threat responses, reclaiming them while humanizing ourselves during the cryptonymy process!

Amazons, already monstrous-feminine, are a kind of witch whose uneven, historically selective qualities of persecution—through blood libel, sodomy and witch hunter rhetoric—we’ll pointedly explore (this time) through a symposium on demon mommies and dark faeries; i.e., as poetic extensions of the Amazon type of witch: the warrior and monstrous-feminine (often female) dominant/monarch. In turn, we’ll consider both as a common, beloved way of working out our state-imposed, us-versus-them differences through the usual language/theatre of difference: the Gothic’s rape/police roleplay scenarios pointedly breaking boundaries but also resetting them through the playful-yet-shock-therapy fantasies of abject reversal (often with a half-real element of pure invention, dead cultures, and real-life doubles; e.g., Skyrim‘s barbarians and cat people, left, practicing cross-species “pollination” to confront and ultimately revert Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative systems of violence, terror and morphological expression: fucking the alien)!

(artist: Gekko)

Remember that I’m merely scratching the surface of a very old problem (re: nature as gyn/ecological, vis-à-vis Patel and Moore); our doing so, here, shall explore the dark, repressed, out-of-sight qualities to daily life felt but cloaked under capital—generally in places too hot, cold, dark, or otherwise inhospitable to regular folk, yet for the queer-and-mighty is exactly how they prefer (and where they take us to better acclimate/expand our horizons):

• “Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries (feat. Annabel Morningstar, Harmony Corrupted, Romantic Rose, The Witch, and more)”: A collaboration between whores. Considers the labor proponents of Gothic-Communist revolution—working together and with Gothic materials, in a staged, meta sense—to demonically give rise (thus shape/voice) to dark places and people; i.e., as dark faerie rulers/regal fairylands where one can explore off-limit feelings and desires conducive to post-scarcity development; e.g., Satan from Robert Eggers’ The Witch, Lavos from Chrono Trigger, and more!
• “Trial by Fire: Demon Muscle Mommies (feat. Lady Hellbender and Hela, The Shape of Water)“: A symposium. Considers the fiery, militant aspect to demon muscle mommy doms, specifically through the postcolonial urge of forbidden love.

Each considers the whore’s paradox, and how it extends to transition as a source of pride, mid-capture and “duress”; i.e., when you go to Hell as Persephone, only to find out it’s not so bad: a paradox of “rape” that, in quotes, can challenge profit.

In doing so, a hostage suddenly gains the ability to speak to their abuse with ludo-Gothic BDSM/calculated risk, while simultaneously reclaiming they and their friends’ humanity with the fun stuff—with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also those monstrous-feminine beings that famously embody them through courtly love’s demonic castle sex and dark (spontaneous, forbidden) desire; i.e., “I would love [to see/do] this or that.” Demons and faeries do so, and generally with Gothic “spice” haunted by actual abuse/commodification! In other words, they (and their Numinous, exquisitely “torturous” homes) are commonly gratuitous, seeming right out of a succubean nightmare, porno mag and/or Gothic novel: mail-order and made just for those dark monstrous-feminine desires (male, female, or intersex) that workers, per the Protestant ethic, aren’t “supposed” to have!

(artist: Slightly Cunty)

In response, unequal power arranges in a courtly manner with a female/monstrous-feminine, home-court advantage: a warrior whore expressing courtly love towards the princess-as-classic-sex-object (sometimes with a gender swap, but not always; e.g., female brats/pillow princesses, above).

Let’s unpack this conceptually for a moment (five pages), then precede the exhibits themselves with a short list of additional boundaries.

To unpack the above ideas from a theatrical standpoint, think of them as regressive therapy told through Gothic adventure stories. Rather than every second of every day guided by alarm clocks, sugar and caffeine flowing money up, the same fictions can reallocate such forces onto new tracks of distribution. To it, the monomyth is the classic adventure story told from a male warrior perspective, the Gothic heroine forced to survive the villainous castle while waiting to be rescued there; it is a Promethean space when reversed as such, the anisotropic variant harboring a fugitive ruler marrying through kidnap by taking Persephone back to Hell: where she belongs because existing there paradoxically sets her free!

People love demons (and dark worlds) for this reason—relish the gateways, but also “battle parties” and warring theatrical tensions (e.g., psychomachy and Amazonomachia), which they so easily represent when traveled to and visited for the length of a dream (versus coming to empire during the liminal hauntology of war); re: as conflicting poetic stances and arguments to access and adopt in praxial opposition, pimping nature or speaking from nature-whored-out in its defense (regardless of sex, species, race, gender and/or religion, etc). “Hell,” then, is classically the site of such raucous, oscillating exchange, raunchy exploitation and taboo exploration; i.e., during the dialectic of the alien. Such push-pull, gruesome revenge and demonic invention aren’t automatically “bad,” but something to dualistically evoke and pursue by two basic sides (workers or the state) meeting in the middle of a shared shadow zone, their parody and pastiche (remediated praxis) playing with such devices at cross purposes!

(artist: yxxzoid)

To it, Gothic Communism turns the world upside-down to voluntarily transform it outside Hell’s caged evocation, camping the canon (and its rape) using our cake and infernal holes (e.g., assholes, left) as dungeons of deep dark desire; the state, to keep it the same, thus prolong genocide raping nature as usual!

At a glance, things might seem discrete; in practice, people and place evoke one another through mise-en-abyme during liminal expression’s Gothic, concentrically morphological expression (re: Walpole’s walking castles [the Capitalocene] expressed as literal fortresses [and giant suits of armor inside said fortresses] but also corporally vis-à-vis my arguments; re: “Castles in the Flesh,” 2024): where dreams, but especially dark, unequal, forbidden dreams (things conspicuously absent from daily life yet advertised everywhere as such) come gloriously alive/true during ergodic, non-trivial playtime (with “truth” being the potential for them to realize outside the Platonic dream space); re: darkness visible; e.g., universal liberation, ironic/unironic murder and rape fantasies, or land back, vis-à-vis liminal spaces (and occupiers of said spaces) that embody such things in praxial opposition on and within the cryptomimetically echoing surfaces and thresholds (often as drug-like; i.e., acid Communism—a concept we’ll explore at length in “Call of the Wild”).

Simply put, demons articulate through chaos as a kind of wicked, horny presence (of death and decay but also change, regeneration and appetite); campy demons—whether people and/or place, be they mommies and faeries of a rebellious monstrous-feminine—use the medieval morphology of the infernal concentric pattern and Promethean space to upset any sense of order (moral, emotional, ontological, etc; re: Aguirre) that capital installs; i.e., by morphologically (and with puns) evoking violence and terror onstage to threaten radical change offstage: to evoke and instill possible worlds that capital doesn’t want to happen. This means worlds without profit, or—paradoxically—masters (despite the mistress argument campily conveyed by dark faeries and demon mommies). In turn, canon offsets camp with canceled futures/retro-future hauntologies (re: controlled opposition), the vultures of the bourgeoisie instilling praxial inertia to continue scavenging labor’s zombie corpse; re: Capitalist Realism holding workers hostage through DARVO argumentation and police obstruction/arbitration of sex and force per the trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital levied in bad faith: “They [a liberated proletariat] will be a dark master worse than us! Trust in the elite!”

I’d call bullshit, but we are what the elite design workers to fear as “beyond” Capitalism. In short, Communism is gay and from outer space, generally as sodomy arguments known for gender trouble and delight; i.e., we’re a thing to paradoxically chase (more on chasing femboys/catboys and twinks-in-peril, in Volume Three), said chase unfolding on either side of the praxial equation: to plant ideas in our heads that bury the fag or disinter its oddly sexy corpse!

(artist: Jaybaesun)

Despite demons classically being the life of the party, state dogma cannot tolerate anything that functionally threatens bourgeois hegemony. So it treats the function (of genuine rebellion) as party pooping while, in the same breath, robbing our aesthetic of any critical power through bad-faith replication (re: obscurantism).

State alienation, fetishization and control of Gothic poetics (about sex and force) are endless, as are the many ways to challenge them in dualistic forms promoting fearful possibilities the state wants to repress with tokenized variants. As our exhibits will demonstrate, this includes Amazons and Medusa, but also demon mommies of a more overtly demonic and hellish, dark fiery mistress, and/or faerie[1] design; i.e., serving as operatic changeling vice characters giving voice to such things—those creatures seemingly “of another world,” one whose unheimlich, liminal hauntology of war they can take you to as well, making your dreams come true in fantastical modes of expression: to another planet, an underground lake, a fortress, a dark forest, etc, to undergo sodomy as demonic courtship worthy of witch hunts and blood libel in state eyes framing such pleasure as “guilty.”

Under such scrutiny and censorship, these trials by fire are felt through darkness visible; i.e., between resident and residence, seeking less redemption in state eyes and more to rectify state pogroms: a black gate to take you to Hell and back, once opened—not once, but recursively during holistic study of the Medusa’s Numinous peach! If our goal is to humanize the harvest (exposing the state as inhumane), then Hell’s diet grants us the demonic ability to radically change size, shape and composition (as well as perspective regarding such things) to throw the doors of perception wider than Harmony’s painted, glorious ass (and to allow for the interrogation of ghosts, beating them up a fair bit; i.e., during theatrical violence concerned with harm that lacks the capacity to inflict lasting damage[2])!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Such is the stuff of forbidden love, for Gothic authors and actors; i.e., making tongue-in-cheek love (courtship) to demon lovers and their castled haunts during an evocatively carceral (dungeon-style) reversal of the classic abjection process: a verboten, outrageous, Numinous space (chronotope) of the gods—one whose dump(er) site we invoke with swears concerning taboo subjects, be those forbidden objects, personas or divinities (e.g., “shit,” “fuck,” “What the hell?” “Holy Saint Francis!” or “What in God’s name?” etc). It’s an intense, regressive place that bears out similar energies between God and the Devil, the two mentioned both in the same breath and when alluding to other inhuman(e) dynasties with a Frankensteinian stamp using the ghost of the counterfeit: a world that—under capital’s constant alienation and fetishization of nature—has become alien, but also descriptively and prescriptively vengeful towards the perceived order by the perceived disorder!

In the Faustian tradition, it also becomes like a carnival ride, one made with unequal, forbidden exchange and radical transformation using basic materials (re: clay or something comparable, like dead flesh); i.e., in pursuit of fatal knowledge versus power (two sides of the same dark coin). Promethean or Faustian, it’s gratuitous, egregious, formerly accepted and currently beyond the pale owing to the abjection process—to go to an old, dislocated sphere to see the truth at home with forbidden sight; i.e., by making, summoning or otherwise digging up said truths through derelict archaeologies (the Gothic retro-future/found-yet-forged document) and likenesses: a jilted bride of Hell/the dungeon, a horny queen taking us prisoner for funsies in her anti-home!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Such sight, in the Gothic tradition, is always dualistic, liminal, concentric, ergodic, and anisotropic (re: castle-narrative), but also morphological and ouroborotic, intimating fearsome-but-desirable things beyond ourselves using ourselves; i.e., felt during a recursive mise-en-abyme, the castle-like whore or whore-like castle (the Medusa) seen pareidolically from the front or the back in ways that—when made, summoned, or found; clothed or naked, kawaii or kowai, alive or slain, unvanquished or ravished, and viewed from all angles like a gleeful parody of Picasso’s arrogant cubism, above—begin to suggest the angry whole of a furious Mother Earth (the wandering womb a traveling castle that, hyperobject, moves in stillness): to conjure up the chronotope’s half-real, hauntological feelings of abjected, monstrous-feminine things, during the cryptonymy process! Policed, the whore paradoxically has her revenge by acting out her rape to revenge (as normally delivered by police violence) from state targets. There’s always more to see, but also a state position to occupy and subvert in dualistic terms!

Blood libel, in that respect, speaks canonically through the monomyth language of persecution, rape and revenge (the whore’s or the pimp’s) afforded to undead, demonic and/or animalistic monstrous-feminine qualities that—in canonical stories—reliably frame, instigate and perform witch hunts inside/outside themselves; e.g., Beowulf, Frankenstein, or Dracula as things to hunt down by heroic forces; i.e., as a recruitment device meant to defend capital from invented enemies “of nature,” the former seeking and destroying the latter onstage and off.

In turn, said execution unfurls in abject territories while abusing unironic forms of DARVO-style terror language, all before ultimately seceding dark ownership of “stolen” colonial gains, thereby restoring a fallen state to its “rightful” sovereignty’s heteronormative reproductive order/the nuclear model: as rescued from the witch tempting the whore’s revenge by exposing her Numinous figure (re: anal sex, but also Amazonian muscle, below). You gotta start somewhere when healing from rape, and we Gothic Communists explore such things to subvert them—to “gang alang” with the devil in some shape or form; i.e., ourselves, often seen wearing animal masks and costumes, but also sporting powerful, semi-to-fully-naked bodies, above and left—walking castles whose war-like fortresses promote “harm” as paradoxically pleasurable: to wage war as sex-positive-yet-fierce, at times being rather literal in its campy morphological puns and playful gallows humor cheekily lampooning abjection as a whole. The bigger the “castle,” the bigger the harvest; the bigger the “threat,” the greater the punchline/payoff.

(artist: Dzenrei Art)

Reverse abjection, then, is still a form of courtship with harvested things—of forbidden monster love (and sex) expressing as unequal, forbidden exchange to explore in people and place as taboo, vulgar and, at times, crude (re: Walpole and Lewis). The iconoclastic idea is the paradoxical threat of “danger” where no danger can occur but which the feeling of danger is abundant, famously evoked through traps, monsters and atmosphere, but also animated miniatures and colossal fakeries suggesting the potential occupation of a ruinous legendary home. Such things can subvert this and reverse that during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., to illustrate power in the hands of the dom or the sub. The classic irony of the dom is they serve the sub under “perilous” boundaries of mutual consent; but power defines through exchange, wherein one is meaningless without the other! Desire goes both ways during oppositional praxis—the Gothic infamously dualistic, hence visually and at times praxially ambiguous!

Concluding our food for thought, I wish to supply several (seven) boundary-setting points before we proceed onto the main exhibits themselves.

First, for the sake of simplicity and time, “See You in Hell” is focusing on faeries and demon mommies (of, again, the “witch” blood libel class); i.e., as functionally dominant during a collaborative exercise/postcolonial debate, but it’s not difficult to turn the tables; e.g., by a sub who tops from below, a dom who bottoms from the top (the “power bottom”), or switches doing either role, etc—they reify not by appearance but through the function of unequal exchange, first and foremost. Said Titania to her faerie train about Nick Bottom, “Tie up my lover’s tongue. Bring him silently” (source). As such, we “enslaved” are quick to agree, surrendering control to please those we love. Demon BDSM has universal application and adaptability in this respect, but again—our focus is on dominant aesthetics through faeries and demons.

(artist: Bottru)

Second, “See You in Hell” was originally just “Trial by Fire,” the former written concerning the postcolonial subversion—and cryptonymic revelation/concealment of—captive (thus rape/death) fantasies through swole’ demon mommies. I’ve since expanded this to faerie queens in a second exhibit, placed first, called “Darkness Visible.” Faerie or demon, we’re essentially talking about femme doms of a gentle/strict variety (often hyphenated to allow for softer visual elements merged with vaso vagal ones), which effectively promote a more overtly hellish, otherworldly and Promethean (“of the gods”) version of Amazons, and employ similar aesthetic devices of terror. This includes their mighty monstrous-feminine bodies, but also the sodomy those bodies promise to inflict during ludo-Gothic BDSM (and its own threats of controlled, operatic, palliative-Numinous regression); i.e., made to camp canon, thus anisotropically reverse capital’s usual terrorist/counterterrorist polarities (re: its trifectas, monopolies and qualities). We’re left, then, with witch-like beings of dark power from powerful places beyond normal perception; re: faerie queens/monarchs the likes of which we’ve written about before, revisiting them again here (exhibit 44a1a1b1), before the original demon mommies exhibit on courtly love, 44a1a1b2.

(artist: Iulaandrea)

To that, while the original exhibit (44a1a1b2) concerns fiery muscular examples to deal in dark desire, I wanted to preface that with some additional non-muscular examples of faerie queens (exhibit 44a1a1b1): kidnapper beings of darkness visible; re: “changelings,” but also goblins, vampires and witches fulfilling a similar doppelganger abduction (alien imposter), blood libel role; i.e., who take their prey—often women and children, but also weaker men—to underwater places (watery graves/sunken palaces) under demon-lover torture scenarios; e.g., presumed cannibalism, bloodletting and rape/revenge play. These happen with Amazons, faeries, Medusa and similar monstrous-feminine as “hysterical” (re: phallic women/Archaic Mothers) that secure some sense of nature’s revenge for workers to paradoxically enjoy when the vulnerable, thus exposed or otherwise adjacent to power as something to embrace, do just that; i.e., when hugging the alien (re: Medusa, but also her avatars like Giger’s xenomorph, above)—namely through proximity with power and death in classically demonic ways (re: exchange, transformation, revenge, creativity [magic/mad science] and desire, etc). Per the vengeful, monstrous-feminine whore, nature’s revenge is the reversal of abjection; i.e., one that occurs generally through the theatrically indecent exposure of rebellious nudity and the feverish, murky embrace of the blood libel, sodomy and witch hunt[3] charges: those that, camped by us, show the state/capital (and its monopolies, trifectas and qualities’ bid for legitimacy/warped notions of justice through us-versus-them argumentation) to be entirely false!

Divorced from state authorship, such faerie monarchs are still categorically violent in light of police violence against nature as monstrous-feminine (or otherwise concern the performance of categorical violence); their campy usage still concerns universal liberation using half-real Gothic poetics about kidnapping and courtly love through impostor dialogs and dark desire interrogating creative bids for legitimacy. Even so, “Darkness Visible” before “Trial by Fire” is less focused around forbidden love through overtly postcolonial rhetoric, and more on ludo-Gothic BDSM (the language of capture healing from rape) that could be applied to such arguments. This faerie encore’s momentum include participants like Annabel Morningstar (who will feature in this exhibit a lot, below) and some of my other friends, who I’ve included to be holistic (and because I frankly love mommy doms and want to expand the umbrella[4] a bit, through their help).

Indeed, I could raise as many cathedrals/castles-in-the-flesh as I—but also my friends and their body parts—want; i.e., my directing of what they ultimately want to articulate during ludo-Gothic BDSM: as powerful, independent, and sex-positive monsters, achieving paradoxical liberation through reclaimed, ironic bondage (and other BDSM devices), but also unironically caged by state forces struggling to contain us (re: exploitation and liberation not simply existing on the same stages, but whose punitive language is used by both sides [workers and the state] to entrap or emancipate nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine).

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

Beyond our doing so in “Darkness Visible,” I wholly expect you to be able to do what I do/raise your own golems, gargoyles and Galatea in the same Medusa refrain (always in Pygmalion’s Shadow); i.e., once critical thought, as a process, is intuitively understood, the ability to observe and/or perform it, yourselves, becomes infinite in form, using the same aesthetics (of power and death, darkness and revenge) to liberate what the state uses to enslave. During oppositional praxis, function determines function as a matter of flow regarding power moving towards or away from workers; re: through our hands developing Gothic Communism, we can throw the doors of perception wide to reveal hidden truths beyond Capitalist Realism—by using darkness visible differently than the state. The trick is dialectical-material scrutiny achieving intelligence and awareness (consciousness) as second-nature, said status acquired through praxial synthesis; re: on a daily level, our variable exchanges cultivating good social-sexual habits through what we create and encourage as extensions of our demonic, rebellious, genderqueer and emancipated selves: the hellish, awesome power of creation setting nature free, the magic outlaw/dark faerie/cyborg freak/rival power running wild by our making of monsters—for workers, not profit!

Gothic Communism, as the ensuing non-fiery examples shall hopefully demonstrate, is a group operation, one that works as much through tactile, wet, vitalistic intuition (concerning deities of dark vengeful nature) as by dry thesis and reinforcement through clinical detachment. But there’s always room to work thesis materials in; i.e., by the reader long after this module is published!

Third, I wrote “Trial by Fire” before writing “Reclaiming Amazons,” but the framed thesis in that portion—about anal sex/general sodomy as a terror weapon couched within the whore’s counterterrorist revenge through the classic poetic function of demons—is still at work in this older writing’s liminal expression; i.e., in between the frame and framer’s Wonderland, shifting incessantly back and forth across space and time.

Everyone loves the whore and her wanton, naughty and at-times-bloody revenge. In turn, rituals thrive on repetition, Gothic Communism developing through frequencies that synapse along active-if-cloaked circuits of data; demons, as the classic granters of forbidden wishes, generally tie to power expressed in places, people and roleplay scenarios that speak to radically altering ourselves, including how power is framed and performed. As we’ll see, this includes Annabel’s dark faerie queen (or my other friends) envisioned by me during a mutual, informed labor exchange and exhibit; i.e., generally through dark, unequal, forbidden exchange (of power and knowledge) that—when used actively and intelligently in counterterrorist forms—thwarts profit through Amazons and anal, whose dark animal tortures dark faeries and demon mommies certainly embody (taking their prey back to their lairs).

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

In short, they capture their “victims” and take them to dark realms of desire attached to pre-capitalist modes of thought, which Gothic Communism uses to recultivate a cultural understanding of the imaginary past through a rising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, cultural and racial awareness; re: an intersectional, solidarized pedagogy of the oppressed, illustrating mutual consent (through informed labor exchange and sex-positive art) achieving praxial synthesis on the daily during opposition praxis: using iconoclastic art to achieve universal liberation for all work sexualized under capital, and to become stewards of the natural world we protect from the state as enemy to all life on planet Earth.

Revolution (and its dark cargo and romance) is an exercise in totality. Arbitrated through play and art, its liminal refrain—whose patented break from routine during holistic study and Gothic, monstrous-feminine dualism—seeks to gradually and collectively expose a system of harm designed to conceal itself through sex and force pimping nature in duality. Every monster they make or cage is legitimate through the giving and receiving of state force, ours always illegitimate (re: Weber). Both sides require the language—by them to hunt us and by us to acknowledge we are being hunted, which we can reclaim during genocide and its moral panics/witch-hunt dialogs of persecution, caution and revenge; i.e., through poetic likenesses that hide our function among shared, oppositional subterfuge: the oppression of witches, which faeries and demon mommies essentially are!

We camp canon because we must; we play with the imaginary past through vice characters like demon mommies and dark faeries—i.e., in order to expose what is happening to people currently inside the state of exception, at home and abroad. They lend a voice to canonical fears blowing things out of proportion, worker counterterror exposing state terror through the same dialogs thereof: the witch treated as terrorist by the state looking to control nature with—all of which we subvert using what we got!

For us, such creatures stick out during the cryptonymy process, seemingly to blend in through Gothic as commonplace, vulgar and summoned vis-à-vis Radcliffe’s evil castles/rape anxieties (fears of the ancient/medieval world including incest and pedophilia linked to straight people scapegoating homosexual men for practices that undoubtedly occurred in the historical past, but were committed far more commonly by straight-practicing patriarchs). Under Pax Americana, “Hell is a place that always appears on Earth (or an Earth-like double)”; rape is predominantly a white, straight male/tokenized crime committed against innocent female parties, children, the elderly and people of color/queer people, etc. In turn, rape victims aren’t only not believed but often attacked because they threaten property by being witness to their property-owning fathers’, husbands’ and boyfriend’s (or normalized token) crimes and deceptions protected by state devices: courts, cops, and copaganda. The justice system exists to predominantly engender rape, not prevent it (and movements created by marginalized groups are co-opted and abused by white victims; e.g., #MeToo)! All become things to reconcile; i.e., by relating back and forth through intersectional solidarity’s pedagogy of the oppressed healing from rape in the shadow of all police violence!

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

Fourth, I won’t have time to reinsert many of these positions into “Darkness Visible” or “Trial by Fire” (and their symposium approach’s conversational style). But you may apply them yourselves as you go; e.g., “Trial by Fire” is about postcolonial monster sex adjacent to Amazonian power fantasies evoked through the threat of campy sodomy and exquisite “torture.” Ergo, it should be easy enough to apply my anal Amazon thesis to demon mommies as a kind of dark monster mother well at home in ludo-Gothic BDSM; re:

The state only tolerates the problematic love of Amazons and anal when their challenge (to the ancient canonical laws) is nominal; i.e., provided they serve profit in canonical terror language. As something to combine, but also canonize in different performances, anal is a place and parlance of trauma to give and receive through tokenized enforcers dressed up as savage warriors—Amazons being a half-real theatrical device forever trapped between genuine rebellion and false, targeting vulnerable body parts in vulnerable areas (e.g., the bathroom). Things like Amazons and anal, then, canonically binarize to best give or receive state force (mainly police violence) pursuant to profit. To challenge profit and Capitalist Realism on and offstage, workers must camp state terror inside of itself—anisotropically with Amazons and anal to reverse terror/counterterror with subversive irony during liminal expression.

[…] Demons aren’t satisfied with vanilla sex; they play with “darker” forms to weaponize them as a form of transformative exchange: an eye-opening experience/revelation, insofar as anal isn’t purely abject, but something to reverse and embrace during the dialectic of the alien […]  to take anal back is to take the land (and labor) back from these performative elements and their associate structures and enforcers by camping them […]: subversive Amazons and anal rerouting the usual flow/ordering of power on the Aegis.

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

Fifth, the flavor of “I’ll See You in Hell” is closer to my Poetry Module, and will reference a lot of its ideas using a similar style of discourse.

Sixth, I’ve decided to preserve the original parenthetical-italic formatting of each exhibit.

Seventh, the subject of rape play comes up extensively in this exhibit, but especially the dark faerie portion. The performative, didactic idea, as always, is to heal from rape by camping it as the Gothic (and its fakeries) historically do—by helping survivors heal from trauma with “trauma”; re: through ludo-Gothic BDSM putting “rape” in quotes, effectively playing with rape during calculated risk (monsters) to help the traumatized relax, but also fight back by surviving and thriving despite our abusers harming us!

So anytime I mention “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” I’m referring to healing from rape through play (with monsters like dark faeries, who represent rape in some shape or form); and vice versa, “healing from rape” or general faerie/demon poetics and roleplay (often with big toys and a royal-size “dark” aesthetic, below) likewise denote “ludo-Gothic BDSM” as a penetrative death analog (re: ahegao). Tied to Great Change, it’s the whore out in the open—similar to a bean sidhe or Medusa’s snakes except her pussy’s doin’ the talking! Little death, big implications!

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

In short, each expresses the other and the imaginary willpower of state forces raping nature for profit, whereupon our healing from rape to stymie profit (when illustrating mutual consent behind cryptonymic safety buffers) is the whore’s ultimate revenge; i.e., while paradoxically exposed through vulnerable nudity and dark, semi-naked threats, camping state terror weapons during the cryptonymy process (with Amazonian nudity being invulnerable, to some extent, and “darkness” being clothed and naked at the same time, etc). Through it, roleplayers synonymize playtime and “rape” haunted by actual abuse/token betrayal, wherein our poetic devices help achieve some sense of autonomy. In doing so, they likewise help us acclimate to markers of trauma and abuse, inside/outside ourselves; i.e., as an ongoing lived reality to regain power through theatrical disempowerment, whereupon we “threaten” ourselves with campy psychosexual versions of state abuse; re (from “A Rape Reprise”): “rape is something that demons play with during the whore’s paradox. By extension, ludo-Gothic BDSM is effectively rape play combined with Gothic themes and BDSM practices to avenge state wrongs against nature” (source).

Theory aside (e.g., reversing abjection), the whole point of said “exquisite ‘torture'” is to help past, present and future rape[5] victims heal from the lasting physical, mental and emotional, etc, effects (e.g., the prey mechanisms of rape: fight, flight, fawn, freeze and flop) caused by capital doing what capital does. This means not just by rape’s actual penetrative violence, but by the ongoing threats of imaginary penetration and other kinds of violence besides overtly sexual (e.g., carceral, corporal or verbal abuse), and which the state normally supplies to menticide its victims (extending from single people to entire cultures and places); i.e., before, during and after a given event, constituting an ongoing pimping of nature/policing it as alien whore: to keep raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine, while simultaneously pacifying and antagonizing it through threats of rape causing generational abuse! Rape is torture and terror to keep nature under the state’s boot; emancipation, to rise up from Hell to speak apocalyptically with such things.

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

The reality of rape victims is that everyone can be a victim under capital, but seldom to the same degree (many simply live under conditions where rape is more possible for them, but not foregone). Furthermore, such things are alien to many and experienced differently per side (re: Volume One’s “Healing from Rape“); i.e., rape is a weapon of terror whose fresh evocation frightens anew, but also carries with it a great deal of shame, self-hatred, fear and secrecy projected onto other victims (many cops, de facto or actual, were once victims, themselves). By extension, rape survivors trigger at threats that are, to some degree, imaginary and lived; being able to control the time and place of these half-real interactions, but also depth, size, speed and relative nudity involved (above and left) can be intensely therapeutic and educational for ourselves and others—can help everyone gain some sense of voice, thus expert testimony through ourselves and our shared labor exchanges, playfully illustrating mutual consent during rape play!

That’s the paradox of rape, thus the whore; to heal from rape, you must evoke it during calculated risk. Normally alienated by capital, but sold back to us in purely exploitative forms, our subversive remanufacture of such things can help us systemically combat internal-externalized fears and stigmas, thus avoid self-destruction while rebuilding trust through tailor-made boundaries (re: Cuwu and dialectical behavior therapy incorporated into Gothic Communism); i.e., while learning to be at peace with our strange appetites acquired by life under capital, using said dialogs of mastery to become self-sufficient. To change our socio-material conditions overtime (thus raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness) requires active, consciously informed consent through teamwork changing the rules of acceptable behavior and discourse; e.g., Annabel and I negotiating everything that went into this exhibit; i.e., reclaiming our collective time and space, but also means of production to think with, poetry to play with, and bodies to control ourselves (thereby reducing the odds of rape, which is all profit really is). That’s what good praxis is all about!

Got all that? Enough foreplay, then! First up is our dark faerie collab—one enacted between myself and different models. Embodying different monstrous-feminine qualities embedded in Gothic, it has been funded by me to endorse our rights (as sex workers) in times of state decay and witch hunts. Consider our work representative; i.e., of wild, unruly nature performing its dark revenge: bringing fairyland home to the conqueror through the campy language of sex and force, our healing from rape (as a state terror weapon) relaid in darkness visible!

Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries (feat. Annabel Morningstar, Harmony Corrupted, Romantic Rose, The Witch, and more)

“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”

—Black Phillip, The Witch (2015)

 

Before we start our exhibit on dark faeries, a small tangent on Puritanism and Satan, followed by a few aesthetic notes on dark faeries (about eleven pages)…

As I’ve already expressed, “Darkness Visible” is a collaboration of common whores—one seeking to penetrate, thus escape, Capitalist Realism through transformative theatrical exchange; i.e., as dark faeries do, meaning unequally through sudden capture and rapid transportation, magically ferrying their prey beyond normal spheres and into forbidden netherworlds mirroring the faerie’s diurnal counterparts: a nightly place of dreams (often a cave, lake or forest) housing dark desires that are either entirely naked (as faeries often are) or veiled by an oppressive society that normally forbids them to ordinary folk, but hangs in front of to endlessly taunt said folk with (and hypocritically perjure/scapegoat themselves); i.e., with darkness visible, meaning a paradoxically charged, opaque surface that—per Segewick’s imagery of the surface, but also Radcliffe’s infamous Black Veil (and the forest and castle that house veil and veiled alike)—threatens exposure to hostile alien forces similar to more a diaphanous material. Like a pair of magic panties, our investment pulls this veil aside to show you the goods; i.e., to root out harmful prudes by appreciating what we, as people, have become alienated from by capital and must refamiliarize ourselves with through demonic trade; re: exquisite “torture”; e.g., the faerie’s fat, functionally non-white ass: large, immodest, and succulent—a demon lover’s darkness visible helping us live deliciously!

(artist: Nyx)

In doing so, our interest pointedly lies in faerie rulers, meaning those capable of royal enforcement and divine internment, but also medieval pomp-and-circumstance of a similar grandiose scale; re: courtly love. To it, faerie transformation concerns more than bodily changes[6], but that of otherworldly scenery reminiscent of one’s home made alien by a regal Numinous presence. Transpiring through forced relocation as a matter of unequal exchange that faeries are known for in popular stories, such creatures lead a double life. As you will see, so do we (sex workers often moonlight; survival sex workers toil in broad daylight, forced to suffer judgment by society at large policing whores).

Trotted out in pulp media, the process of abjection likewise reinvents Satan as someone who, once bastardized from Pagan culture[7], must be kept “in check” in Christianized spheres by strip-teasing him; i.e., by abusing the same poetics through pornographic dogma, wherein state Gothic canonically lands the Devil in hot water. “The Devil,” not the state, tempts maidens to prostitute themselves—to disrobe, forsake God and destroy the nuclear family vis-à-vis a Puritan reimagining of Hammer of Witches (1478) and blood libel. Commonly devised to accuse disobedient women of “witchcraft,” such pogroms extend state slander and DARVO into circular myth; i.e., urban legends tarring proto-feminism, queerness and Pagan religions with the same cruel, half-real brush, forsaking these groups into latter-day persecution networks, confessional refrains, and idiotic-but-effective canards; e.g., the drinking of infant blood and eating of their flesh perverting Catholic mass, all while using the leftover fat in flying ointments the witch can lubricate her “broom” with, then levitate through unholy orgasm (and phallic-woman histrionics).

According to the settlers, all this happens in service to Satan; i.e., as something to (de/an)nounce and defame through outrageous innuendo and ghost stories—their counterfeits’ haunting aggrandizing God and Manifest Destiny while beset by the Wild as something to colonize all over again: nature “gone wild,” thus savage, impure, and fallen out of a canonically essential pastoral imposed by moral arbiters “grown lax” and paranoid (thus punished by God through Satanic caricature, isolation, and ultimately Malthusian outcomes: starvation, disease, war and death). Satan is the Puritans’ imaginary friend (there are no Indians, in The Witch, the Puritans talking only to themselves while they slowly go mad/starve to death).

A chaste maiden symbolize state dominance; her liberation, through uncontrolled prostitution, is cataclysmic—i.e., the Devil “wins” the moment the state’s baby factories refuse a prescribed burden of care (and when men abjure the same rapacious gender binary, but I digress). Instead, they’re saddled with outrageous entitlement, yet faced with such vituperative and bogus claptrap since birth. So it should come as little surprise when state daughters frequently go mad from threats of exile, rape and execution—that they spontaneously strip naked and run to the hills, almost eager to sin! Debutantes delighting in sodomy and other witchy things, their criminal’s whispered and limitless debauchery cloaks in the dead of night; i.e., as things partially imaginary to repeatedly assault the righteous with, the latter’s menticided brains visualizing profligates who won’t put out for them (the abjection process, during the dialectic of shelter and the alien, fears nature as hungry for superstitious Puritans, all while allegedly “transing their kids” to hug Medusa: through hauntological gender trouble that ruffles police feathers, centuries later).

For the state and its self-policing populace, faeries amount to a fearmongering of wasted wombs, a binarization thereof that puts the colonizers at the top; i.e., during military urbanism and optimism crusading against invented, us-versus-them evils draining state essence—predominantly the right to control female bodies, but also anything that isn’t a white, cis-het, Christian male in order to maintain patriarchal sway over state territories and populations; re: anything monstrous-feminized by the state pimping nature-as-alien for fear of nature’s revenge in kind. But for workers seeking emancipation, faeries—but especially dark, royal faeries—communicate the desire to not only visibly resent our dominators (and their self-righteous bullshit), but slice them to ribbons; i.e., during the cryptonymy process, bristling with fury the elite cannot hope to contain through the same dark devices’ double operation, showing and concealing a plethora of apocalypses.

“If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” wrote the Bard, but nudity is the whore’s weapon; i.e., as a mode of endless moral panic, “hysteria” compelled through state force—a thing to dismiss and preach in equal measure. Policing it doesn’t historically work, the whore’s glee being a maiden set free while dancing on her captors’ graves: “Get fucked, Mom! Way to go, Dad!” Through the usual Promethean anisotropic (re: Hawthorne), the Puritans were the victims worthy of punishment (the witches hunting the witch hunters)!

In this sense, The Witch is hardly unique in its morbid fascination with a Gothic puritanical, including its fatal-when-viewed nostalgia and sinister two-way applications. Plenty of stories give the guilty a place to go and commit venal sins for or against the state; i.e., through Gothic “thought crimes” walking the tightrope between outright vandal and fascist vigilante; e.g., the tank-like T-800 from The Terminator compelling a similar act of revenge to Egger’s titular witch that, instead of policing the usual groups with state force, animates like Walpole’s armor to blast an entire police station to bits[8]:

Per my arguments, such thoughts are fertilized by revolutionary cryptonymy inside the Gothic mode’s unruly aspects; i.e., as something to witness and foment fresh rebellious sentiment with while reversing abjection (versus posture as such; re: Jameson’s dismissal of the Gothic, who we’ll talk about more towards the end of the module)!

Regardless, whatever devious wish fulfillment transpires with faerie transplants (to have nature’s monstrous-feminine revenge by killing your whole annoying family and oppressive belief system; re: Eggers), these always happen in darkness. Specifically they unfold in darkness visible relaid through the perceived fairy palaces’ royal decree; i.e., faeries are quite often monsters of a patrician standing and prestige summoned by mere mortals during the restless cryptonymy process, but like the more plebian brethren they walk amongst are generally made to express proletarian longing—meaning through things that are closed off to begin with, and desired for that reason by different parties involved: the forbidden sight that darkness visible classically offers generally tied to a time and place known colloquially as “Hell.”

In short, every monarchy has a ruler for which their voice is given more heed (through the dynastic orderings of power) than plain country folk. Such power is often—in the ancient tradition—borne through nudity as a kind of weapon that offends modern sensibilities (with Egger’s witch often being nude, and Cameron’s terminator and rebel soldier both arriving naked, too); i.e., a courting of power as something to take back by getting into the nudist spirit of things. To it, “Darkness Visible” considers ludo-Gothic BDSM and dark faeries through mutual action in pursuit of Hell’s demonic powers; i.e., which my friends and I—Annabel, Nyx, Harmony and Rose (among others not shown here)—pointedly synthesize, wedding performance and labor exchange to the stimulating act of forbidden creation tied to public nudism; re: castles-in-the-flesh, each with its own qualities that I’ll stress when exhibiting them (e.g., Nyx’ ties to nature; Annabel, to cottagecore; Harmony and Rose, to BDSM and healing from rape; and Crow, to genderqueerness)!

(artists [clockwise, starting top-left]: Nyx, Romantic Rose, Harmony Corrupted, Annabel Morningstar, and Crow)

Except our exhibit, like Carroll’s white rabbit, becomes something to follow deeper inside Wonderland acting as Plato’s cave (a displaced, shadowy replica of the real world and its abuses lying in state). Reversing abjection, we strike conservative parties who view us “dead” merely by strutting our stuff with confidence, and all occur within/upon our naked bodies’ “Aegis”: from an oppressed, fateful voice, rising up from the dark corners of the West to resist, thus subvert, its cultural understanding of the imaginary past—all in favor of something more sex-positive taking said Wisdom’s place; re: as a proletarian Superstructure.

Furthermore, our bare-and-exposed contingency demonstrates a collaborative push for a universal meta awareness—one raised through the dark faerie (ruler) aesthetic as its own “bad religion”; i.e., of larger historical-material trends we want to change through ourselves as monstrous-feminine in small, thus monopolized by virtue of sex, itself, being so heavily policed and censored at large. Canonized in ways that crowd the chronotope with a special kind of darkness visible, the nude sex and force of Gothic castles darken with the pitch blackness known to puritanical censor bars (and modest clothing’s obscurantism). In turn, we highlight the absence of said bars on our bodies’ exposure, but also that of state weaponry and bondage surrounding us, which the state generally won’t censor!

The Gothic’s concentric duality is notably crowded. By pushing it in a post-scarcity direction, we make a mockery of our colonizers’ values, thus their upholding of said values through a dogmatic, platitudinal Gothic. This includes its fairytale wish fulfillment’s dubious, disingenuous framing of the world; e.g., “Suffer not a witch to live” something to apprehend by us and—like the Rolling Stones’ immortal song—happily “paint it black” through bean-sidhe dress-up and crossdress shenanigans camping the lot of ’em: “Look at the Straights, scared of a little pussy!” (with Cameron showing his own Amazonian, white-savior conservatism, having Skynet reportedly terrified of Sarah Connor’s unborn son).

In doing so, we not only embody the sheer heights and plunging depths of fairytales through ourselves, but demonstrate the universal applicability of “darkness” during class war told through Gothic overture. Reclaiming its revolutionary power by punching up during the cryptonymy process (and its own infamous reliance on such things), we reify the dualistic language of sin, demon lovers and all-around vice characters through faeries. Playing them as suitably witch-like, thus invented, our collective aim is to exit the bottle[9] dressed as forgeries but also paradoxically naked disguises (with Hell being a Promethean place[10] to escape persecution and upend profit). In turn, this can be done by others, onstage and off, learning by our example; i.e., to give shape to dark places and persons where anyone can explore off-limit feelings and desires (so-called “yums” that many will “yuck”). Commonly expressed as monstrous-feminine, we are queenly and seeking revenge against the state fleecing us; re: wicked stepmothers and monarchs, but also truthsayers speaking in darkness visible: to our profound abuse and survival while naked, thus exposed to rape we must camp.

So concludes the preface on Puritanism, witches and Satanism (six pages, to haunt the remainder with a spectre of persecution). A couple more aesthetic notes, before we proceed; e.g., the intensity and size difference that faeries commonly evoke when performed; i.e., naked or not, their power feels naked in ways that generate a similar Numinous effect (to be bare and exposed before godly forces)!

Reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Tamora, Queen of the Goths, but also Titania the Faerie Queen and Queen Maeb, Milton’s Satan, Galatea of the Pygmalion legend, Hecate, Medusa, etc—which our performances evoke in spirit if not actually their armies of goblins, wild animals, and Jewish-/queer-coded vampires, devils, succubae, etc—my friends and I humanize the harvest as faeries do: as beings of nature antagonized by state arguments into a kind of false tyrant threatening state rule. Often by speaking to repressed desires for liberation, these include counterterrorist action caged in vice-character stigma, bigotry and phobia! She’s not just a whore, but a jinn—a wishmaster trading tit for tat (often with a sinister, evil-and-loving-it flavor); i.e., while carrying a castle-sized aura. Make something “too big” and it becomes titanically estranged, fully inhuman; our resident baddie is big to be sure but still relatively human-sized: a walking castle to parlay with, a dragon lady to slay during monomyth pastiche. She’s a queen of terrors[11] to treat with—up close and personal, during the witching hour/grim harvest’s liminal hauntology of war! Like a massive blaze, but one that doesn’t visibly burn (which darkness visible does not), her presence notably sucks the room of oxygen: a dark faerie with batwings (and probably having a witch’s familiar or two; i.e., stigma animals; e.g., a frowning toad, raven or black cat) emblematizing the whore in a position of power normally reversed for women having men’s babies!

In regards to dark faeries, then, I often find it useful to think of them in parental terms (the Gothic chronotope being concerned with dynastic primacy and hereditary rites; re: Bakhtin). The wicked stepmother trope, for example, is both diegetically and non-diegetically stuck in the past; i.e., as a corporal-architectural means of dispelling present illusions and weaving fresh spells with, mise-en-abyme. It’s a party/disco-like mood in structure’s time and place (the opera) that queer people commonly relate to/with, one that capital claims to be beyond or otherwise above using themselves; i.e., their proponents serve profit, crafting ancient landowner-yet-undomesticated beings of capricious splendor who make war and turn our worlds upside-down, only to be laid low for their monstrous-feminine hubris. An egregore (concentration) versus an origin, the body-like castle (or castle-like body) appears seemingly ex nihilo, threatens, and then as all spectres of Marx do, it vanishes (or disintegrates).

(artist: Evul)

The Gothic is writ in disintegration. Our faerie-like potential (and flesh) works within the same poetic spheres’ palliative Numinous, conveying some degree of enormity and psychosexual power (often height and heels; i.e., size difference and power imbalance beyond our sex organs; e.g., Gwendoline Christie’s curiously chaste-but-imposing Lucifer from the 2022 Sandman adaptation, below—begging Key and Peele’s “She tall, she tall” line from their 2012 “Karim and Jahar” skit). Instead of compelling state order through tragic-hero narratives, we make Miltonic Satanism conscious of the Devil’s party to liberate nature-as-monstrous-feminine with; re: to ravish ironically by putting “rape” in the quotes of a Gothic fake laid bare!

In feudalistic terms, “sovereignty” was something to randomly assign to bodies that were, unto themselves, haunted by impostor syndrome overshadowed by tyrannical revenge, ruthless torture, dishonorable deeds (re: courtly love) and total conquest, but also boastful claims, grand adventure, nude fakery and murderous fantasy (fake princesses, cursed bloodlines, evil castles, pretend inheritance, uncertain ancestors, bastard children, long-lost siblings, and invented family trees, etc). As such, the Gothic historically litigates through fakery to forge sympathy for the Devil in any shape or size, but also configuration. The Gothic castle, then, is a site of alien invasion and pure illusion, one whose vanishing point leads into and (out from) “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present.” There, ambush and succor are friends, the “ancient” fake a thing to apotropaically ward off evil spirits less through genuine superstition and more through calculated risk acting curses out: the parent something to fabricate and fear in equal measure.

Except the Devil, contrary to popular belief, has no advocate, and is something of an inkblot to qualify in different ways. Like Lucifer from Paradise Lost, dark faeries never fully assimilate/are always rivals challenging state forms regardless if they tokenize (re: “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”); i.e., occupying the same shadow space as Nazis and using the same tumultuous aesthetic of power and death. Our destiny, then, becomes the ability to craft, thus choose, our fate as something to nakedly diverge away from state copies along the same medieval tracks of invented ancestry (re: Madoff).

As such, the faerie ruler is a Nazi-Communist whore (the world’s oldest profession and enemy—the Medusa), but a powerful one—an indulgent, phallic walking fetish/perpetual thorn in the state’s side vengefully taking what she wants when she wants (the virgin and the whore, the cult of the virgin queen[12]), and someone whose anathematic ability to even want anything (female characters in Gothic fiction being historically passive and denied the right to open sexual appetites while surrounding by rape) the bourgeoisie will desperately try to reclaim by gentrifying the idea of desire/carrying it away from slaves (with women historically being slaves, and Christie’s Satan being penned by Neil Gaiman, a sex pest masquerading as a queer ally): a fetish for the sissy to suckle, the female or GNC dom of nature chained to a straight male.

Envisioned by my friends and I, this exhibit tries to break from stage bondage while evoking unironic harm in campy genderqueer body language; i.e., by illustrating the dark faerie as monstrous-feminine liberator through darkness visible beyond its limited, capricious norms. By ransoming those persons holding our rights hostage, we supply a Trojan-Horse feller of empires, splendidly mendacious via the Gothic’s giddy delight at reversing abjection (from Walpole and Lewis, onwards), and where power and trauma exist, hand-in-hand. While forged sanctuary notably contradicts the safe passage of (and through) a military home afraid of outsiders, we take the faerie ruler and flirt with disaster arranged—as it always is—by state instruments: sex as the most policed device in the world, second only to the Gothic and monsters; i.e., as poetic arguments that not only speak to our alienation, but with it to rehumanize ourselves!

Sex is power—doubly so concerning faerie queens as things to express through reclaimed exploitation; re: our labor value, but also our symbolic value through our genders and sexuality qualified through appearance; e.g., skin color and size—with Crow having undeniably pale skin, but also an impeccable shapeliness to them that is anything but modest (next page). Together we trade in nudity and craft, my invigilation of Crow’s assets (and willingness to disrobe for a good cause, below) speaking to subversive faerie monarchs well enough: go big or go home when satirizing our survived trauma! Context matters, as does the ability to explain it when illustrating mutual consent through public nudism.

(artist: Crow)

Except, while dark power’s “denuding” classically threatens modesty in the state’s hierarchy of values, it’s a bit of a silly myth that you actually have to be modest when speaking truth to power! The simple fact is (and one that Gothic stories illustrate, time and time again), you can speak to power with power-as-abstract in recognizable forms of darkness visible disrobed. Chief among those is the human body resembling a castle and vice versa; i.e., the familiar-foreign, psychosexual signature of a stacked faerie residence as much being the stamp of power and home touched by alien elements, versus the actual humanoid shape emblematic to vanity projects. Rippling through the performance of sex, playing house can become deliberately mendacious and truthful, but also mixed in terms of its literal, pun-heavy metaphors; i.e., faerie castles being as much who embodies them with a brick-house, “mighty mighty” physique.

As disco-in-disguise through danger disco, period, the artificial wilderness is one whose paradoxical reinvention of royal faerie nudity happens during ludo-Gothic BDSM between different workers! It’s a bad camouflage that blends into a space where everyone is wearing the same basic disguise: surviving as tricksters treating ourselves (turning tricks), making mischief while embodying it as a matter of paradox, artifice, guile, teasing and relief!

Bodies or buildings, the Gothic classically emerged out of a delicate, exciting time and perfect storm of variables: an expanding middle-class luxury affording Neo-Gothic authors (and later pretty much everyone, as soon as access to such things expanded beyond the probably-gay sons of British prime ministers and MPs); i.e., a sudden, special sense of play and control that, up until that point, hadn’t really existed beyond aristocratic privilege, and simultaneously was diving back into the medieval semi-imaginary past as something to play with. As camouflage to speak to state power/disorder rising to global prominence using the same stuff to hide itself with, such subterfuge became something not to exclusively admonish, but admire: scaring ourselves, but also the state, by reclaiming such devices to help from rape in theatrical doubles thereof.

For the state, it’s a way of sexing up the banality of evil through weird-nerd culture; for workers, a rising intuition acclimated to the spread of power and lies, thus camping the canon through the usual Gothic disclaimers: everything’s fake, but hides rebellious potential somewhere in all those conventions, fetishes and psychosexual clichés; i.e., Faustian transactions transmitting magical devilry through grave danger and serpentine, bandit-style, black penitent treachery as a hauntological, displaced critique of capital growing into itself; e.g., Radcliffe’s Count Montoni or Father Schedoni part of a larger cultural imaginary relegating British atrocities (and aging national identity) to a cultural imaginary always at war with fictional “Italian” doubles and their evil castles: a forever war haunted by a “just business” mentality of gangsters, liars and thieves, but also poison, bad reputations, stolen brides, concealed weapons and private, mercenary warfare.

To this, the Gothic celebrates chaos and confusion during calculated risk acknowledging state decay (and medieval regression) through artifice. A at times nebulous and completely bonkers, Icarian (crash-and-burn) threat to profit/the nuclear family dressed up as “alien invasion” (which faeries represent), it’s one the state will take seriously while, at the same time, giving workers something to enjoy or otherwise empathize with, through disposable and discredited pleasures; i.e., in faerie-like ways that not only exceed, but purposefully violate state tolerances, mid-cryptonymy! A wish to crystalize by first invoking it, to think of the Devil that she may appear helps workers conjure an imposing luminary that, through our aforementioned nudism, outshines its classical demonizing usage! Rape is historically cheap. Our bodies and identity-through-performance, take on fresh life that overwrites state doubles policing the whore! Police this, dickwads!

(artist: Lera)

Often, this awakening (and its active class character) incurs through infidelity regarding extramarital affairs—the Faustian dealings of the state and monarchs behind closed doors. Despite the crown, the dark faerie queen is an anti-monarch in the traditional sense, but works through entertainment as, itself, a kind of paradoxical threat: the act of being sinful, to some extent, unfaithful because blind faith is historically-materially harmful; i.e., unfaithful to the harmful idea that work is holy, per the Protestant ethic, and pushing back against the idea that wish fulfillment is somehow “cheating” (versus working a low-paying job one’s whole life, subject to wage and labor theft, but also sexual theft through compelled marriage). From a proletarian angle, the Devil opens doors the state wants closed—disaster a thing to court through abjected things; re: demon lovers simply whores, versus medieval slayers, the two overlapping or haunted by their own inverted flavors of sex and force through the same Numinous, abjected scheme.

Concluding our pre-exhibit tangent on Satan, Puritanism, and our aesthetic notes, everyone loves whores, if only as faerie weapons to attack with or stand against; re: sex and force as things to respect and understand above else! There’s a method to our madness, a devil in the details. If the state invents whatever enemy it needs to dialectically-materially enforce its will and rape nature (commonly a woman, it must be said; re: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”), we turn that on its head, fostering a dark mistress/fairy godmother it can never fully pimp, having her whore’s revenge in Promethean worlds (of power older than man, thus profit)! This collab is me and my friends’ fun, conversational attempt to illustrate that, speaking louder together than we ever could alone, our naked fairytale bodies making all manner of wishes come true. Why ask for a pretty dress or the taste of butter when the sky’s the limit? So pay attention, loves; service to Satan is its own reward, and this is what living deliciously (and anti-predation/rape) is all about!

(exhibit 44a1a1b1: Artist: Annabel Morningstar. Annabel is into “cottagecore,” a cottage-industry type of aesthetic that features faeries, and who inspired the idea for this exhibit [though we won’t cover the idea itself until “Call of the Wild”]. Many of the images featured here come from the shoot I commissioned her to produce. 

While demons are whores per the virgin/whore dichotomy, and they communicate as much through pain adjacent to harm during paradoxical revenge dialogs, doing so is a method of social-sexual enrichment in “ace” forms of public nudism; i.e., interrogating trauma and power through Gothic poetics and liminal expression: the booty normally controlled by the state suddenly set free by the natural, God-given owner of said booty—workers! “If you want to critique power, you must go where it is”; demons do that, but equip the interlocutor/participant[s] with the ability to likewise communicate as demons do—through pleasure and non-harmful pain that speak to systemic abuse being an ongoing problem under Capitalist Realism: to bring Hell to Earth, throwing the doors of perception wide on the Aegis [above and below]. Think of it as anal jazz—something to improvise “darkness” with/upon to change/upend state hegemonies; i.e., to profane the sacred in “almost holy” language, where people watch us simultaneously fail and succeed per attempt: on the highway to Hell, loaded with dark power evocative of pre-Christian religions, fertility rites and bacchanal pleasures deemed alien and sinful by the Church, but also pimped by its secularized extensions during the Protestant ethic abjecting the faerie whore’s ghost of the counterfeit [and special weapons, below]!

[artist: Annabel Morningstar]

Of course, Medusa is the basic notion of such monstrous-feminine/demon lover theatrics upsetting state balance; but dark faeries constitute the same idea as the snake-headed original, as do witches, Amazons, or any other classic female example [that extends easily enough to GNC forms]. They double their canonical variants, while still having that evil, Venus-twin look to them; but again, flow [of power] determines function, not appearance. Appraising and addressing that dilemma through demons like Annabel’s dark sidhe design [and peachy backside, below] helps us not only reclaim monstrous-feminine from state tokenism/obscurantism, but distinguish ourselves and blend in during revolutionary cryptonymy when humanizing the harvest with ludo-Gothic BDSM and bare, exposed forces of darkness! Antagonize nature and put it to work for us.

Furthermore, such poetry is robust, holistic—a complete package fine-tuned to reverse abjection on the Aegis; i.e., during the same-old mythological games’ ghost of the counterfeit assisting rebellion, recultivating the imaginary past in all the same language to camp it; re: Marx’s dead generations, but also the man himself, to yield more perceptive retro-futures looking forwards by going backwards to uncover sex-positive hauntologies within fatal, undead nostalgia [and restless dogma/rebellion during the cryptonymy process].

[artist: Annabel Morningstar]

Often, this reveals itself through flesh as castle-like, hyphenating the lavish, sensual language of revenge vis-à-vis sex and war with food and death, shelter and combat, pleasure and pain, religion and release placed in optional quotes [e.g., “impalement” or “sheathing[13]“] to achieve live burial in architectural, morphological degrees; i.e., the queen bound to the castle as a funerary chronotope housing a fugitive derelict’s engines of war regardless of ornamentation; e.g., the faerie queen’s fortress backside acting as opening to the netherworld’s opera space/mise-en-abyme as “belly of the beast,” but also butthole of the beast [or other such orifices and cavities, though Annabel’s asshole is a sight to behold, above]: the house as the monster, liar and abuser but also the monster as “brick house” [re: The Commodores] telling paradoxical truths with taboo, thus attractive elements that feed anisotropically in both directions. So often, women [or those treated like women] are, per the whore’s paradox, forbidden from taking abject BBC/manifesting as such, but expected per the profit motive’s colossal, patriarchal double standards to do just that.

Point in fact, Alraune and similar vampiric heinies—e.g., the Moth Fairy from Bloodstained 2: Curse of the Moon, next page—literally stem from nature seeking its monstrous-feminine revenge against profit, hence rape; i.e., acting as bait while fucking back to hell from rape—lying in wait at the traditional place of abuse, thus revenge; re: the bedroom haunted by the vengeful whore’s phallic ovipositor or vagina dentata, double/two-faced presentation, and Medusa-style severed head eating her rapist through Gothic pareidolia and pseudolimb, mid-liminal expression: oscillating[14] inside a murderous womb’s Numinous, danger-zone/nexus-of-crisis hyphenating of sex and force, human and insect, mouth and fang—the palliative-Numinous, Gothic-Communist mommy to quest for and have her dom you through forbidden sight/darkness visible! Something to see that defies belief, the revenge isn’t petty in defense of private property through monopolized terror devices, but substantial and thrilling in defense of nature and labor! The Gothic—as a storehouse of old recycled tropes, dated fakeries and grimly humorous camp—is a fantastic resource for such premeditated discourse/crass danger-disco maneuvers playfully badass dangers.

[model and artist: Annabel Morningstar and Persephone van der Waard]

Except, the same ideas of the vampire’s undead reversal [of the usual feeding direction] likewise apply to the demon’s revenge being functionally the same; i.e., regardless of aesthetic, the dark faerie operating through unequal trade and transformation has Promethean and Faustian outcomes: the destruction of the usual predators by anti-predation devices [and false bodies/animalized Gothic fakeries working in tandem, part of the same vengeful force, above] luring aspiring rapists [which monomyth heroes are] to their doom! Beheading the Medusa is classic abjection, her castration of patriarchal agents while playing “dead” classic reverse abjection; i.e., “helpless” while tied up. It’s a kind of data, but also code-through-power-fantasy speaking to anxiety and anger in methods where the actors and articles involved can reckon with dark forces that raise intelligence/awareness during the cryptonymy process to reverse abjection and foster Gothic Communism; re: moving power anisotropically towards workers through dialectical-material scrutiny during praxial synthesis, not Freudian psychoanalysis [and mainstays, like Creed, Segewick, Carter and Kristeva, etc]. It might seem like the whore always loses; per the whore’s paradox, she reverses abjection through BDSM played out in Gothic stories: showing the military optimist their own cruelty in desiring to rape nature-as-alien-whore, hoping to defeat Capitalism’s hidden sins through combat.

To it, the Gothic is notoriously indiscrete/prone to push-pull while crossing very fine lines; its chaotic violation of boundaries neatly describes the half-real ways that power and its uneven distributions and boundaries exist and unfold in faerie fun and [sex] games. Whether a castle, occupant, or some castle-in-the-flesh combination, awesome [Numinous] power and obscurity are always close at hand. Weighed down by [and reached for with] ambivalent hands and clouded vision, its cryptonymy affords the wielder tangents with narrow cutting power and broad latitude; i.e., amid solvent [dissoluble] feelings of constant confusion and overwhelming danger. The air permeates with thick dread, but also paradoxical excitement; i.e., insofar as liberation and exploitation [cops and victims, Nazis and Communists] all occupy the same kayfabe umbral zone that faeries do: where the atrocities of present social structures, displaced onto faux-medieval language, return as “past” to fall once more under its powerful spell [re: Punter and the ghost of the counterfeit]—all to further or reverse abjection, time and time again!

The Gothic is obsessed with the return of rape as a matter of nostalgia paradox—to a young state of mind with an adult perspective, confronting generational trauma to not only survive, but defeat it at the “source”; i.e., regressing to progress by going to Hell not elsewhere, but at home displaced to a nightmare, castled state—one common to medieval torture scenarios and state crisis and decay expanding said torture deeper into regular in-groups seemingly under state protection. But such places, as haunted homes, are also semi-imaginary playgrounds of “rape” out in the open, exposed dramatically for those who have survived systemic abuse [and its concealment] and seek to unbury such secrets, once and for all.

These cloaked testimonies and Black-Veil affects confess or otherwise point to unspeakable, widespread and atrocious harm on the homefront, themselves announced by great entropy [disorder and collapse] as something that suddenly arrives or erupts into massive, extreme violence: the unstoppable revenge of the barbaric past unto a possible future, holocaust and revenge housed and confronted in the same zone of play’s exquisite “torture.” Commonly denoted by [and abstracted as] Gothic castles and conquerors whereupon time is a circle, imperial abuse and state consumption under capital abject onto a retro-future space-time loop, the “better future” of a once-upon-a-time endlessly devoured by the imaginary past from Elsewhere traveling through space and time [usually outer space, the ocean, the barbaric past, or simply a space of darkness; e.g., Lavos from Chrono Trigger or Skynet from The Terminator—Toriyama’s concentric purple people eater and Cameron’s technological singularity/police state demonic personifications of manmade extinction abjected onto “unknown” spheres during the liminal hauntology of war]: to catch a predator by responding to pain and anxiety as, at times, thoroughly unreliable data.

In Gothic, pain is a problem [re: C.S. Lewis] insofar as uncanny elements promise death inside the home; i.e., as occupied by something older than us, alien even, but nevertheless part of the place we call home. Trauma attacks memory but also rememory as a process, less making it forgetful and more foggy and fractured. In turn, some things are so awful we want to forget and never speak of them again, but silence is death, pain a data to analyze “on the hunt,” gathering evidence; i.e., intel that resists concrete discovery or dismissal as a kind of always-ringing alarm system gone haywire; re: inside the belly of the beast.

Yet, interpretation and deciphering these cryptic omens is required both to survive and live with peace of mind that we aren’t being pimped by tyrannical forces passed off as fakes: the men behind the curtain’s concentric veneer/gobstopper mask, machinations of state, and inkblot scapegoats. There’s always another castle and tyrant inside, because that’s what capital is: endless installations of figureheads, per the ghost of the counterfeit furthering the abjection process. Vague or crystalized, the story is worth nothing without these creatures and their Numinous, at-times-incorporeal halos; i.e., the threat of awesome change, wrought through generational abuse and cryptonymic release: a wild walking castle appears!

In Chrono Trigger’s case, the canceled future [which a hauntology is; re: Fisher] is declared after a failure to stop Lavos, dooming the entire planet: “But… the future refused to change.” Such is Capitalist Realism—deliberately trading genuine activism for personal responsibility scapegoating nature, the latter dressed up as technological singularity or cosmic-nihilist space reaper! Such territories are well-trod, done to death but deathless because of a need to quell Capitalism’s inheritance anxieties among the middle class quaking before the ghost of the counterfeit: the prodigal son, his chickens come home to roost per the Imperial Boomerang’s grim harvest, its dirty little secret cloned and laid bare as “fantasy”!

State proponents, being incompatible with life and consent, lie by design/about everything[15]. They do so to defend what the elite privatize—a fake, which they perform to maintain profit; i.e., through cryptonymic lies-upon-lies and force as something to enact against the counterfeit’s ghost: furthering abjection for the state during Capitalist Realism, the system having an extraordinary tolerance for menticide. So when the state is strong, its cops and their perfidious illusions feel strong. But when the state is weak, these same enchantments wane; i.e., in ways that demand aggressively conspiratorial and preemptive shows of force from the middle class already conjuring up such Radcliffean bugbears: often against “weak and strong” scapegoats [re: Eco] that trap a besieged Earth inside a fluctuating spell of endless lunacy and death [re: Majora’s threat of the falling moon]!

The instigator is typically absurd, Lavos effectively a castle-like “gun porcupine” whose non-diegetic pipe organs herald a sudden invasion-from-within piloted by a central menace [re: the backstabbing Jew]. For the elite, however, a Numinous scapegoat is still a scapegoat; they go so far as to grant the beast its own alien life cycle, expecting us to kneel before it when it erupts from the ground like a cicada or African rain frog[16], then punch down at ourselves during mirror syndrome—in effect, bypassing the elite [and their well-deserved blame] entirely!

For Gothic Communism, though, the whole point is to subvert these black onions’ escalations of civil war—meaning to recreate such cataclysmic disempowerment in ways that empower workers through awesome doom; i.e., in defense of nature from capital during calculated risk: a near-death experience whose obscured, layered threat rears its ugly head when the “old gods” return to have their revenge; re: Medusa and state shift during the Capitalocene. Per the paradox of rape, their evocation feels good during calculated risk; i.e., a confusing reality the elite [the men behind the curtain] will exploit, full-bore: “Worship the state’s gods of death pushed into neoliberal [videogame] spheres; have revenge on who we dress up as the end of the world—Communism and its spectres of Marx!”

[source]

Like the xenomorph’s messy intimations of Ovid, Lavos is a Satanic gay death fairy from outer space/Radcliffean nightmare about the end the world. Aping Hell, the tyrannical butterfly’s cuckoo metamorphosis turns Earth into a ravenous primordial maw eating Utopia cocooning it [re: the caterpillar and the wasp]. As usual, capital will use such degenerate [queer-coded, Archaic-Mother] cryptonymy [and its faerie-like, phantom-class egregores] to charm the middle class, thus further abjection and destabilize the world pursuant to profit raping nature by chattelizing it: the ghost of genocide personified and displaced through DARVO and obscurantism, tokenized by neoliberal copaganda haunting the sham of Utopia [re: “Rome” as retro-future].

“Progress,” then, is classically the word of Cartesian white men raping nature, who frame Omelas as imperiled on the Aegis to justify policing the whore, post-apocalypse; i.e., capital routinely scapegoats its own inevitable “bust” in astronoetic language, the scapegoat a devious ur-thing to push as far away from capital [with Lavos landing on Earth millions of years in the primordial past, similar to Giygas from the Mother franchise, exhibit 60e2] yet push its child soldiers endlessly towards so they can peel back the layers and pimp the whore all over again: the murderous womb, which stories like Alien[17] made so famous, Creed fantasized about from Freud’s arguments, and I reclaimed in my own work, but which Bacon and the Cartesian Revolution’s mainstays have been “running a train on” for centuries! They’re Lavos pulling a bait-and-switch handing out death warrants; i.e., during us-versus-them, gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss stranger danger punching state-compelled unknown during Capitalist Realism! Divorced from the world, it’s still their oyster to pry open and gut; re: through the usual simulative refrains escalating hyperbolic war against the potential for Great Change: idiots trying to conquer death, therefore nature’s great revenge!

The elite push DARVO onto a capitalist analogy dressed up in Nazi-Communist obscurantism! Mighty spectres of death trapped in time as endlessly traveled, fascism and Communism become things to abort and dread, but always to discourage Communism, mid-kayfabe; i.e., neoliberal monomyth refrains promoting death omens of various kinds by the elite unto all workers: home as Hell to return to, or Hell returning home as Juggernaut, Leviathan or some-such Great Destroyer! Faintly detected by stubbornly imperceptive investigators gentrifying extermination war as “cutesy” in service to the state, the heroes of Chrono Trigger and similar fictions [often women and children; re: Radcliffe’s Scooby Doo palimpsest] hunt these endemic alien monsters down, arriving at a final spectral boss looming menacingly inside the web-like trail’s garden of the forking paths: an evil onion/cocoon, hence duty to discharge or execution to carry out—reversing predator and prey in a layered singularity when others failed and the nightmare of the undying vampire never quite ends [so-called “true peace,” itself, an elusive and brittle lie, under Capitalism]!

Per Radcliffe, demons are classic beings to summon and, pursuant to their final forms, “lovers” to defeat through some kind of challenge offered [often survival or temptation]. While Dracula more commonly fits this role, or something else erotic, plenty of Numinous forms have false bodies [re: Lavos] or no bodies at all [re: Skynet, though it cyberpunk pyramid is preceded by an army of cyborg skeletons]. But such qualities skirt the same lines and territories as faerie rulers and their dark chrysalids—asleep, waiting like Cthulhu at R’lyeh to wake up [no one afraid of Capitalism’s fall more than fascists like Lovecraft, but also those strip-mining cosmic nihilism’s Cycle of Kings, post-Giger]: inside a nightmare that, once awake, cannot be escaped [the realization of our being trapped in Plato’s cave]!

[source]

Whatever the form, the function is unanimous. Such beings are vice characters of some kind or another to scapegoat inside a monomyth center/closed space; e.g., vampires as faeries, often of a genderqueer quality bearing anti-Semitic flavors that—under a more modern Radcliffean—become queer-coded witch hunts during sodomy and blood libel arguments exterminating the moth by burning it with state candles; i.e., “bug hunt” being the dark desire to canonically unfold during the heroic quest: to penetrate home as sick with a foreign insectoid plot, excising the insect to whitewash capital and its castles through incendiary fetes and kayfabe. The lynch mob, as such, is a rite of passage purging the usual suspects, their purification by fire happening at night while the interlopers, the middle class, happily beat the faerie to death to achieve regicide, infanticide and genocide [and to get the girl at the end of the story]. Such is copaganda in totality—the monomyth, cops-and-victims power fantasy turning state defenders’ brains off while acting like they’ve somehow “grown up”; i.e., once ridding Paradise of the seemingly invincible barbarian/Grendel stand-in by doing the state’s dirty work. For capital, all roads lead to Rome; all minions lead to a mastermind who, at the end of the monomyth, can be martyred.

A fight over a woman is classically a fight over a chain of property [dowry] and custodial rights, only one side can’t defend itself. Yet, everyone loves the whore [or has virgin/whore syndrome] and its blackhole sun’s black sunshine taunting oblivion vis-à-vis state-induced death anxiety and similar emergencies. In this respect, the Gothic and its demon-mommy poetry’s recursively psychosexual and emotional [ergodic, concentric, anisotropic, etc] turmoil speaks to curiosity’s magnetic charm making anyone feel more at home in alien places; i.e., writ in disintegration[18] with poison as the cure, at home with duality and paradox, contradiction and conflict, society and sickness, and empowerment through “disempowerment” with and without quotes regarding things normally closed-off and simultaneously commonplace; re: sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also the stories encompassing such materiel, talent, and merchandise.

Such meltdowns are what the dark faerie ultimately embodies, thus represents through an antihero’s journey—person and place—to bring such things to light for workers or the state: to see you in Hell. “Hell” isn’t “bad,” in this sense. It’s just, like a fairy’s cocoon, a place of radical change, black light and dark desire, thus rape and revenge as something to address, mid-duality and -stasis; i.e., from multiple angles and holistic tangents developing Gothic Communism through wise, perceptive “torture” buried alive—an ass of the gods woken up to deliver a Wisdom of the Ancients caught somewhere in time, but also on the bodies of those we love; e.g., my friend Nyx; i.e., who, on her formidable physique and persona, traps the viewer between pre-capitalist ideas and a post-scarcity future where the state has been permanently dismantled and billionaires no longer exist! A fortress for friends to enter and “die” inside, Nyx slays capital using capital’s ultimate weapon against them: faerie butts speaking for themselves as taking up arms! Like Lavos, Nyx’s planetary “fairy castle” is armed with “ballistics” [missiles or otherwise]!

[artist: Nyx]

Nothing is policed more. Per the Gothic mode, faeries personify dark spaces of chaos; i.e., the faerie queen’s labyrinth[19] of conjecture to penetrate and enjoy what is forbidden outside, but permitted inside itself and its libidinous, brothel-like casino’s concentric morphological architecture; re: mise-en-abyme the reader surrenders unto. Said surrender happens during an eager virgin [or experienced whore’s] imperiled, overwhelmed mind: the slit-like murder holes[20] of prolonged sieges, ramming the barricades of a hungry and curious-yet-fragile brain that, deprived of experience or having too much of it, conflates sex and harm. Fed on warlike fictions exploring that which everyday life teases and denies, the Gothic was the original trashy escape for bored English housewives to slum with!

Speaking to experience and inexperience in equal, stoked barbarity—that being the desire to fuck, but fearing rape as something that women [or those treated as women] are born into—we non-housewives “surrender it all” for something better felt but for a moment in paradoxically “rapacious” tones: “I’d give it all to spend a night with you”; i.e., gentle mommies to nurture and ward off broad, elusive terrors with their teddy-bear softness and nurturing affection, but also “strict,” dark and or Amazonian/faerie femme doms. Working on a switching BDSM mechanism, they instill a sense of masculine strength [with a feminine veneer] during courtly love: comfort food nourishing through multigender mixtures of sex and force during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., developing Gothic Communism on the Aegis, the dated past and possible future constantly haunted by great pain and pleasure in the same fairy-like bodies closer to nature than many under Capitalism currently are!

[artist: Nyx] 

Again, Nyx is one such body—a fairy godmother “goldmine” whose butterfly tattoos denote a high tolerance for pain, but also poetically evoke the ancient goddess Psyche [exhibit 56a1a2]: as a transformative deity linked to the mind set free through pleasure, including pleasurable pain linked to dead metaphors. Capitalism is a cycle of misery bleeding the land dry for a manmade disaster—one of total privatization pimping nature-as-monstrous-feminine by the state, and where such hoarded resources will do no good during state shift; men cannot eat gold and Medusa always wins, so we might as well listen to her avatars ahead of time!

In turn, the only way to exact our whore’s revenge—thus challenge the state and its brittle illusions, infinite exploitation, gross inequality/Protestant ethic/billionaires, automatic violence, and incompatibility with life having their finger on the pulse of capital—is by tapping into our labor’s infinite value and where it’s stored as, to some degree, alien and fetishized during these endless harvests; i.e., our rights versus theirs, we’re the anti-family to capital’s fucked-up sense of nuclear [erectile] dysfunction, division and devastation; re: to humanize the harvest, exposing the state as inhumane. The closer you get to the heart of things, vis-à-vis the infernal concentric pattern, the more Numinous things become; i.e., a reminder that simple things like fruit [and other cash crops in banana republics] lie historically at the core of exploitation: ass farms, but also an outpouring of dark volcanic sentiment[21] turning regular consumption inside-out, the state [and its colonies] having incurred our baddie’s chonky wrath! Fucking to metal, we smash state minds [those of cops policing us] against our whore’s naughty clapping cheeks! “Stare and tremble” as our “pumpkins” turn into chariots of class war playing out the murder of class traitors! The climax is great, the catastrophe one of sweet, sweet revenge!

 [artist: Nyx]

This crop-like cryptonymy includes Nyx’ portentous faerie ass serving as a restless labyrinth to explore, but also her ties to the land and me, her big heart, and aching love for fantasy artwork and rock n roll; i.e., West Virginia, where she comes from, being a place not simply to preserve, but give back with gusto: to the dispossessed. Often ourselves, but also those around us the state destroys—this means labor towns, the miner’s widows, the ruined land and now-native populations all owned in ways we take back through what we own, away from the boomtown factories, mines and fenced-off processing facilities attached to a naturalized boom-or-bust/circular colony. We camp economics and rebellion, making them sexier than usual; and when primed for it, only take a spark to set us off. Strange fruit sending us down special roads, so does the Gothic, through another of Medusa’s avatars—a Mountain Mama, in this case—send us home!

 [artist: Nyx] 

Simply put, we’re hard to believe, yet, like faeries, here we are; forbidden sight, for us, amounts to believing in better worlds through what others see in and upon us as harbingers thereof. While the state frames us as destroyers from Elsewhere to make said worlds “impossible,” we load Capitalist Realism with a black magnetism that reels our audience back in. We’re a demonic sight for sore eyes, then—trading unequally through forbidden things [violence, terror and sex] to anisotropically achieve radical transformation, and seek to be viewed as increasingly legitimate on all registers; i.e., during liminal expression reversing terror/counterterror! The revolutionary idea, here, is to avoid easy solutions in favor of difficult ones, our faerie glamour targeting systems instead of scapegoats by directing violence away from ourselves, mid-rodeo!

So while challenging profit and Capitalist Realism might sound incredibly boring on its face, in truth this takes many different, faerie-like forms that are anything but insipid! Great power lies in them, thus are precisely what the state aims to own, control and harvest by raping nature on loop during the abjection process; i.e., by building monuments to its own displaced abuse, and worshipped at by the middle class to further abject through cryptonymy [and the other Four Gs] all over again; re: Lavos, and those framed as Lavos, are the ones being harvested by state proponents in bad faith. So does capital demand inequality and total control for the state, framing nature as “illegitimate whore” and terrorist to seek its endless and bloody vengeance against.

In that respect, Capitalist Realism could be summarized simply as a battle for legitimacy amid state monopolies, decay and poetic dysfunction. Those of nature, like Nyx, become forces of nature that smash said monopolies with their kindness and shapeliness: a warrior mommy invoking acceptance and love, but also a willingness to transmute state terror with a harvest its cops can never reap, a dark faerie they can never dethrone! “Your ass is fat n your aura is threatening[22]!” Verily.

To that, the Gothic plays with Numinous things and games to instill a paradoxical sense of control; i.e., through rules and devices that can be handled, thus played with, for different means to achieve monumental leverage, post-abstraction; re: a palliative Numinous through ludo-Gothic BDSM developing Gothic Communism to challenge Capitalist Realism [and state ludologies coercing nature through mercenary force]. Doing so happens through things that are historically-materially very hard to regulate; re: sex and force, but also the Gothic/games on either side of class, culture and race war during oppositional praxis. Like Medusa’s fat pussy or asshole, such “castled discotheques” become something to stab, but cannot die—indeed, loves to “die” during calculated risk thrusting to the hilt!

 

[artist: Nyx] 

In times of crisis, then, sex and war are comfort foods, but also a covert means of negotiating themselves within themselves: the whore speaking cryptonymically and cryptomimetically to harm through things that are normally policed, monopolized and colonized in ways we subvert during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: by using what we got, thus arbitrate liberation as our revenge—a desire to see the state blown to bits, but in reality being a process of smaller battles infused with activism automatically equated as “violent” by the state [and cops]: the whore, out in the open, flashing the powerful with her mighty weapons. Physically violent or not, we cannot co-exist with the state, and our struggle against the owner class is always legitimate; e.g., the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson sloganized through “deny, defend, depose” on the shell casings [source: Andrea Cavallier et al‘s “Manhunt Continues,” 2024] versus the same liberatory sentiments enticed through our weaponized bodies demonstrating state fallibility just as well: the elite are not all-powerful; they humbugs!

The fertility of such Gothic maturity is the adventuresome ability to discuss intense harm and healing in sex-positive ways that conceal violence in “violence”; i.e., that push towards universal liberation and away from a shuttered, bigoted existence—fucking to metal not simply to breed or sate the middle class, but disabuse them of genocidal blind eyes! The ghost of the counterfeit becomes profoundly medicinal and multipurpose in good faith, as well as holistic interpretations that liberate workers through speculative richness, but highly abused by state forces in bad faith, theoretic imperialism, and singular interpretations expanding the state of exception on the same inkblot; re: warrior women, witches, faeries, and Medusa [and Medusa’s fat ass, above and below] granting protection when facing the unknown during the dialectic of shelter and the alien—and faced, for some, as if for the first time and others, through déjà vu: to meet again, for the first time, an old enemy and friend both at once that, in doing so, makes our wildest dreams come true. As always, this unfolds while reversing abjection to abstain from Judas silver crucifying the rebel; i.e., the bullet with butterfly wings that riles up the rabble, Medusa’s avatar having more cushion for the pushin’! With darkness visible, she takes us to the gates of Heaven or Hell, a place to come to [or on] and stay awhile!

[artist: Annabel Morningstar]

Beyond Nyx, consider Annabel’s toxic faerie queen once more. Tits or ass, thighs or stomach, shoulders or throat—all sides to her speak of a scarcely-contained power viewed from different vantage points, her forbidden sight also speaking to a greater world: the plenty of paradise merged with cryptonymy of rape and revenge, voicing joy during calculated risk, but also genuine pain on the dark side of the moon highlighting curious truths and contradictions; i.e., eustress and confusing the senses; e.g., Andrew Friesen’s “My Cat Likes to Be Hit” [2008]: “If she didn’t like it, wouldn’t she run away?” Quite the opposite, “We eat the night, drink the time, and make our dreams come true!” [The Scorpions’ “The Zoo,” 1980].

Another way to phrase it is that humans are animals, and bound by the same principles of confusion and delight[23]: to reunite with things we are alienated from, primarily our faerie-like bodies and their unknown pleasures. This includes pain, but also their psychosexual theatre speaking to rape through “rape” that—all the same—makes our eyes roll back into our dumb skulls: dummy-thicc vitality and salubrious little deaths preceded or overshadowed by Numinous big death/the torpor of Great Destruction; e.g., the rape of a friend or the death of a loved one, the fall of a country or destruction of one’s home. Exacted through inescapable punishment or debt of some kind, our faerie-ness refers to something we ultimately must confront that—despite Capitalist Realism [and its neoliberal copaganda’s dogmatic, ceaseless military optimism]—cannot actually be defeated; it can only be embraced regarding all sides of itself during the dialectic of the alien: us, and by extension nature, exploited by the state as the ultimate destroyer projecting its harm onto the usual Radcliffean, cops-and-victims scapegoats.

Death and rape are classically things to avenge, canonically being yet-another-way for capital to divide nature and conquer her through dualistic terror language. Our revenge is two-fold—acting revenge out while evoking adjacent harm through play during ludo-Gothic BDSM: comedy and drama through demons [faeries, in this case] as an ancient theatrical device, alongside prostitution as literally the world’s oldest profession. Through them, we tell stories to aid in our survival, thus ability to play and learn, but also recontextualize harm through monstrous theatre’s poetic arguments: accessing a part or side of ourselves that is normally closed off; e.g., anal sex as one form of sodomy that faerie magic and darkness visible radiate. Our demons—thus operatic desires, emotional enormity and bedlam, and hauntological calamities—sit on the same shadowy stage as the state’s own vice characters and apocalypses [the revelation generally shrouded in darkness during the cryptonymy process; re, Lavos: “The black wind begins to blow…” Fate farts in the edgelord’s general direction].

To it, we’re the caterpillar and the wasp, the impostor inside a tasty treat that, when consumed, eats you alive from the inside out! We’re the death of patriarchal thought [and tokenism] that abjures profit in succulent, sweet-and-savory ways; i.e., there is no way to change the status quo without some degree of disguise and pain, but also play through transformative [metamorphic] language that is, sure enough, painfully delicious and obvious. Change hurts, especially when it’s up in our guts, poetry’s forbidden fruit rewiring our brains through “trepanation” in quotes—delobotomy killing our darlings, but likewise fucking us just the way we like: with a raw urgency eagerly tearing off our clothes and getting down to business [often through the dialog of sleep; e.g., Shakespeare’s slutty faeries’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream having a curious and steady penchant for “somno” sex; i.e., using “love-in-idleness” to make people fantasize about extramarital sex].

In the face of unstoppable death and other symbols of capital, risk becomes something to camp—calculated by us through the whore’s paradox of rape! We point to our own harm, but do so to live with it in manageable forms; i.e., the whore’s revenge, mid-paradox, being a tell-tale smile or set of faerie wings: a safe space to wrestle our demons, but also fuck them/guide them inside us by the hand! Through nearness with “death” as a theatrical, paradoxical concept, we faeries raise the stakes, the dead, a lover’s dick, what-have-you. Consent is sexy—especially in times where it is scarce, inserting it needily into our hungry holes. Gimme!

[model and artist: Annabel Morningstar and Persephone van der Waard]

Everyone likes the whore, the tramp, the vice character as someone to root for/spice things up with Gothic panache; i.e., they’re a secret to seek—a dead thing to play with, a puzzle to assemble, a castle [un]made brick-by-brick, to mount and pin to the bed while setting the tempo. The picture, then, is both crystal clear and sharp as knives, but also vague and fleeting as mist, mid-speculation; i.e., walking thunder that, like the Gothic castle, moves while in place and ties to grander and grander intimations blurring Heaven and Hell: a Communist Numinous relaid in castles and warships, but also bodies framed as such, the likeness [and contrast] of kaiju sovereignty that workers embody on the Aegis; i.e., as avatars of Medusa threatening cataclysm in state eyes drunk on Capitalist Realism [mistrusting anything beyond state vision, but also imaginary history beyond fascist reinvention misinterpreting said past]!

Such playful rapture/exquisite “torture” inserts itself into one’s sleeping and waking moments alike, faerie succubae and incubae invading and incubating inside daily life; i.e., with indelible feelings of chaos to embrace as one does Medusa [during the dialectic of the alien]: an alien abductor “taking us away” but not really going anywhere[24], impossible motion cruising for sex perching on the cusp of disaster [warding off evil while presenting as such, brimming with pathos and desire]! So do we live in Gothic times; i.e., inside dwellings of doom unable to contain their own demonic power on any register or in/across any medium. The dark faerie doesn’t merely sit on its laurels, then, but beckons with darkness visible: “Eat me… if you dare! Conquer my dark temple!” As Wordsworth put it, “Let nature be your teacher!”

[artist: Annabel Morningstar]

Abyssal though it seems, the data isn’t corrupted; the corruption is the data, but it must be deciphered. It shakes things up, but cannot be shook; its dated conventions [and their massive, Walpolean personifications—the Capitalocene] continuously fall apart and reform, the Gothic writ with power and decay to best speak to things beyond Capitalism and its ever-decaying illusions while inside them; i.e., inside various persecution networks [and their concentric labyrinths] while using the language of persecution to camp canon with. In other words, the appearance informs the exchange, but the context is ultimately what defines it from a dialectical-material standpoint. Something to sink into, then, those who do can likewise accept how perception can warp under gravity’s dark attraction; i.e., that such a twisting can happen [at cross purposes] while also realizing how the dialectical-material observation itself is fairly constant.

Activism, then, is predominantly leveraged through said observation as something to perform: an identity [faerie or otherwise] attached to legendary victimhood, then overcome and lived with under what power we do have to control, change and recontextualize; i.e., our own survival as beings of nature harvested by state forces through fiction as a staging point. With a little fairy dust, we might begin to arbitrate/scrutinize sex and force in Gothically mature forms that—classically inundated with suspicion, sadomasochism, bondage, and supernatural-to-earthly menace—grant us special, faerie-like ways to speak, means to hunt, and room to breathe as stewards of nature; i.e., as required by us to best survive state counterfeits playing the victim in bad faith, the cop selling out!

Radcliffe’s exclusively white, cis-het rape scenarios, for example, depict the paranoid havers abjecting other groups, punching up and down. Victimhood [and its emotions, like shame, hatred and guilt] do not define us, but do orbit around us/repurpose them through trauma normally buried[25] in what we inherit between fiction and non-fiction, imagination and objective reality interlocked; i.e., as something to perform and play with during ludo-Gothic BDSM, rediscovering “ancient derelicts” like Radcliffe’s spectral castles to learn from them despite their immaturity [we’ll unpack this during “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons”]:

[artist: Carl Gustav Carus]

My dislike—of Radcliffe’s dry modesty but also the army of academic fans licking her mysterious asscrack—is no secret. Then again, she was an intellectual and creative whose writings aren’t completely without merit [refer to my PhD for further discussions about this problem]. So while Radcliffe is a darling to kill, these windows into the past still offer dated ways of thinking we can gleam current-day truths from; i.e., while moving around inside them during ergodic motion to excite faerie-like feelings, which Gothic castles very much were [and are] designed for! This means they’re valuable despite their flaws[26], insofar as they’re littered with playful ways of framing arguments about survival… which again, Gothic castles concern themselves with—to “survive” as relics, but for us go beyond those who harmed us without irony to begin with; i.e., to survive those who, as Gloria Gaynor put it, “hurt us with goodbye.” Forget eternal damnation, ours is endless delight through exquisite torture camping the canon, fawning to feign deference towards those who do not deserve our genuine love or uncritical gaze!

While the Gothic is classically about facing our fears [especially of uncertain, imposturous parentage] by anchoring us in infernal, concentric darkness to survive, it commonly forces people to face things that—like Radcliffe’s unmappable castles[27]—are never entirely imaginary and, worse still, make us doubt reality and imagination. Questioning our sanity and lineage/sense of self in the process, we must acclimate to a state of asking questions useful to our survival under monomythic duress, violence, captivity and alarm, held hostage as prisoners of dark love hunting us; i.e., in a state of probing survival [the rememory process] whose hypervigilance/reliance on intuition goes beyond any single worker or sanctioned action, and instead encompasses what all of us can offer as, to some extent, like faeries and their castles’ forbidden and exotic but also policed elements; e.g., Disney’s “princess” variety promoting assimilation through whitewashed, gentrified castles that put “Gothic” in the hands of a smaller paying clientele seeking a colonized wish fulfillment; re: Radcliffe’s secret princess trope, granting a common girl the bounties of conquest simply by surviving a night in the dastardly place. Whatever camping of the monomyth we do will often be through our bodies as “faerie,” castle-like and genderqueer.

[artist: Mugiwara] 

Mugi, for example, is a survival sex worker/plural trans man; trans men, per the whore’s paradox, are commonly exploited by heteronormative society treating them as unnatural—doubly so for plural persons. Any attempt to humanize ourselves happens through our exchanges subverting such norms by reclaiming said language for liberatory purposes; i.e., our bodies and labor are valid, as are the faerie-like identities attached to them normally invalidated through state doubles and their monomythic violence: likenesses of Medusa, but also each other regardless of gender or sex, shape or size, color or character! Anyone can be oppressed, and anyone can camp the monomyth, hence liberate themselves through the Gothic’s Promethean fairytale; e.g., Mugi, Crow and Victoria’s ample and shared cause through the same pedagogic exhibitionism as Nyx and Annabel, but for expressly GNC reasons:

[artist: Crow] 

With the above and below collages, Mugi and Crow played with me for my 38th  birthday because I liked playing with them [and Crow is one of my partners]. But they’re also two of my muses—and Victoria [next page] is a close friend. More to the point, we’re all trans, and I want to give GNC people a voice beyond just myself while illustrating mutual consent through a shared exhibit’s collective labor exchange. We’re all faeries of a GNC sort, making a case for ourselves using what we got!

Trans people have always been people, and despite blood libel framing us as evil faeries, we’re actually quite good around children. We certainly don’t eat them, and can even have them [e.g., Mugi has a daughter who’s as cute as a bug’s ear]! Simply put, we have families and friends and lookout for each other under state pogroms incited by weird canonical nerds. Our life and labor have value, whereupon mutual aid is not only fine, but just another form of exchange that includes our bodies and labor cast, during demonic/faerie poetics, in a sex-positive light [versus limiting certain groups to caste-style positions; e.g., Jews and usury or untouchables and begging during public outcry/moral panic]. Through ourselves cast as faeries onstage and off, we overcome harmful expectations while allowing for public nudity as a holistic, all-inclusive form of activism; i.e., expressing itself through us, punching up towards universal liberation! “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light!”

Furthermore, biology is hardly essential when it comes to gender identity and performance, but informs whatever liberty emerges in either case [re: sex and gender as separate from each other and unanchored from biology, yet still relating back and forth on a magical fairy spectrum].

To it, Crow and Mugi are both trans and AFAB; I am trans and AMAB; and my friend Victoria is intersex. All of us are faeries promoting darkness visible, each one a special snowflake [as the chuds so often like to put it]:

[artist: Victoria] 

Each of us represents a genderqueer aspect to existence that abjures heteronormative, thus settler-colonial and Cartesian standards; i.e., to exist despite capital exterminating us, our survival a poetic and revolutionary act of defiance made in defense of nature-as-monstrous feminine raped by state forces.

To it, our whore’s fairytale revenge is to exist in ways of make-believe that—far from being totally fictitious or imaginary—defy total banishment to “pure fiction” by shifting deliberately into half-real territories; i.e., as art that speaks to our lived, GNC realities onstage and off, and that when exposed by us through revolutionary cryptonymy purposefully challenges profit as a structure: in defense of ourselves and our friends emerging from the abject land of faeries [often dark forests, said forest alluding to Dante’s Inferno, but also Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ovid’s Metamorphoses] to speak to apocalypse. By reversing abjection as dark faeries so often do, we camp the canon; re: punching up at state hauntologies, abjection, and cryptonymy [commonly relaid in monomyth language; e.g., Metroidvania] to break Capitalist Realism to bits! We’re Lavos, but instead of a Greater Destroyer capable of what the state accuses, you have those who walk away from Omelas!

In turn, our wishes are “dark” because they deal in unequal, forbidden trade and radical transformation/desire that upend the current order in pursuit of a post-scarcity world that, while it doesn’t harm others, remains tied to the harmful past as partially imaginary and nebulous; i.e., its plastic, signature poetry sits adjacent to the barbaric historical-material trends of older dead generations [re: Marx, but also the many Gothic castles embodying nature’s dark vitality and demonic desire, power and knowledge]. We faeries camp our own rape, putting “rape” in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., while highlighting our own queerness surviving campy doubles, said doubles still reflecting unironic copycats felt upon the same Aegis. We are haunted by genocide’s shadows of shadows/castled echo, but camp our profound survival [of these castles] to communicate through Numinous, psychosexual sensation—another sapient trademark the dark faerie subtype excels at! Where faeries are found, castles—usually abandoned—aren’t usually far behind!

This GNC idea of universal solidarity and value through alienation goes beyond Mugi, Crow, Victoria and I; it also includes “non-white” bodies, be those with a different skin color [e.g., vitiligo, in Mugi’s case] but also body type: thicc. We’ve considered this spectrum earlier with Nyx and Annabel—and just now with Mugi, Crow and Victoria—but have yet to explore its monstrous-feminine margins.

[artist: Sinead]

My friend, Sinead, for example, is fat and genderqueer [not a woman, but fae[28]]—much of faer praxial focus centers around fat liberation merged with faerie-style makeup and genderqueer artistic statements altering traditional beauty standards [or shifting to older standards thereof; e.g., the Rubenesque]. Similar to Mugi and I, fae are policed for what makes faer simultaneously forbidden and attractive under state venues: a forbidden fruit that refuses to take the grim harvest lying down! It becomes, for each of us, a “secret self” to de-closet, then camp canon with—having power the state wants to control as “dark,” unholy and “demonic,” during witch hunts stomping faeries.

[artist and model: Sinead and Persephone van der Waard]

Some faeries stomp back. In the poetic language of the Medusa, I’ve drawn Sinead as a fat underwater queen, her tomb a monstrous-feminine place to plunder in the Cartesian tradition: to, in Francis Bacon’s words, “penetrate the womb of nature and torture her secrets out of her.” This translates monomythically to the moving of money through nature in the usual acts, but also sites of conquest: fat and ready for slaughter but also, per Capitalist Realism, presented as abject, Numinous, “asking for it”; i.e., a scapegoat to butcher within endlessly recolonized zones, where men plunge into and prove their manhoods—by raping and reaping nature, which fae and faers Promethean space prevent by fucking back through Numinous anti-predation challenging profit!

As Sinead demonstrates, Medusa isn’t a woman; fae are the dark mother/fat-and-sassy whore whose watery grave [and its riches symbolizing nature’s endless labor value and exploitation] is where stupid, enterprising men go to die the Roman fool [the Gothic operates dualistically through doubles and decay to defeat enemies of nature; i.e., with their own colonizing devices reclaimed for liberatory purposes]! Wrecking ships on theatrical safe “danger” spaces where true death and rape are impossible, the “kraken” takes faer stolen booty back from horny-yet-superstitious plundering idiots—a Great Destroyer striking them ignominiously dead with faer Numinous booty and whore’s revenge! In doing so, fae give rise to a collective mistrust of, and to desire to change, capital’s mistreatment of planet Earth: a Leveler to entreat before it makes good on its name.

To it, fae target the current mechanisms of state as having evolved over centuries out of the ancient world [and Greece and Rome] to exploit nature through the advancement of state trifectas, monopolies and qualities, thus belief systems. Medusa challenges this advancement through artistic statements that evoke the ghost of the counterfeit [through the poetic language of the half-real ancient past] to reverse abjection, thus profit and genocide as things to prevent: showing the state it’s doomed on faer Aegis, and faer own superiority/unfriendliness to profit in the process! So do we become stewards to perform the symbolic death of the state raping us in bad faith, translating through praxial synthesis into activism [thus universal liberation of all work under Capitalism] through iconoclastic art: to make men fear what, for sailors, they are generally at the mercy of. The sea, then, is a cruel mistress who cannot die, but one who properly respected will yield great rewards: not being unironically trapped and isolated by shapeshifting darkness, then buried alive! In other words, quit while you’re ahead!

To it, praxial synthesis is a matter of involvement that leads to development through daily habits cultivating systemic catharsis; re [from Volume One]:

Systemic catharsis requires praxis as conveyed through our extracurricular instruction’s cultivation of good social-sexual habits; i.e., de facto educators relaying a pedagogy of the oppressed through trauma writing and artwork that speak to living with rape under warlike conditions, raising the collective, solidarized awareness and intelligence required towards preventing future abuse (ultimately dismantling the state) [source]. 

However we get involved, universal empathy and resistance to state overtures should be our top priority when triggering the responses we want. In short, we lead by example, advancing awareness and intelligence [thus rape prevention]through our bodies, labor and social-sexual, artistic-pornographic exchanges.

Last but not least, this isn’t always about raw, vaso vagal violence and mutilative revenge [e.g., murder or castration] committed against our abusers; it also includes the whore’s revenge challenging profit [thus rape] by receiving pain in defense of nature-as-monstrous-feminine—i.e., by establishing intersectional solidarity among pain-loving friends, who put “rape” in quotes by receiving pain through what we deliver unto ourselves: as something to delight in because it’s not a terror weapon meant to pacify us, but heal from rape as our revenge by playing with pain in classical ways.

Our shared human struggle, then, includes exposing our pain in ways we paradoxically reclaim in ironically palliative forms; re: through the whore’s paradox, but especially the cryptonymy process: through cheeky “punishment” arguments that show us in control during calculated risk; i.e., through the appearance of impotence, yet deftly wielding things that, exposed as we desire to expose them during ludo-Gothic BDSM, incur the wrath of people who cannot immediately attack us, yet desperately want to in bad faith. Enraging them with our Aegis, our hellish Communist powers occur by outing them, denormalizing their predatory actions [and subterfuge concealing said actions] from safe vantage points; e.g., the buffer of the phone or computer screen, or otherwise physical distance; re: “flashing with power” to those who have it “in spades”; e.g., my friend Rose’s substantial “battlements”:

[artist: Romantic Rose]

To it, faeries are demons, which—while they constitute unequal, forbidden exchange and startling transformation—also morphologically synonymize with habitats whose dark, radical desires upend state control over terror and pain as darkness visible; i.e., in pursuit of post-scarcity with pre-capitalist hauntologies about giving non-harmful pain; re: that of flesh concerned with power and knowledge, linked to buildings; e.g., faerie-castle torture dungeons, appearing to revenge past wrongs but also existing merely to spite genuine abusers! “We can ‘torture’ ourselves, thanks!”

The dark faerie then, becomes someone to perform and savor in the bargain; i.e., “What dost thou want?” as something to act out through cryptonymic activism masquerading as “mere playtime” and guilty pleasure/controlled opposition, yet feels paradoxically genuine in its playful espionage—as naughty but educational in ways that, while they seem wholly doomed/self-destructive, actually prevent rape [cops, by comparison, enforce rape]. Gothic castles are traditionally places of fear and fascination; so when people see a body-like castle or castle-like body on the horizon, they will often be drawn towards it—i.e., as the faerie refrain’s promise of a hell of a good time, including a delivery site to deposit some dark offering or another [and overshadowed by systemic abuse, all the while]!

[artist: Romantic Rose] 

Beyond cum tributes illustrating mutual consent, the prevention of rape happens by one, raising intelligence and awareness to mobilize activism during praxial catharsis; and two, recultivating the Superstructure while simultaneously exposing our attackers in ways they cannot immediately kettle; re: anisotropically reversing the terrorist/counterterrorist argument of monstrous-feminine language during the pedagogy of the oppressed while giving pain during crucial lessons: not all pain is bad, pain is vital towards growth, and pain during sex can enhance the experience[29] and change how we view sex in socialized [ace] forms; i.e., while humanizing those routinely harvested by state forces abusing said language [re: DARVO and obscurantism].

The Gothic, in turn, interrogates trauma and pain through public nudism uncovering dark things/things coded as “dark.” In doing so, it reminds our attackers where such power is normally stored—through workers and their art, but also their bodies and pain as part of the same infernal trade, bouncing back and forth to heal from rape; i.e., by communicating, as people do, in the half-real, castled and demon-fairy codes: of pleasurable pain elucidating repressed, “unspeakable” desires! Whatever investigations of trauma the state impedes, we facilitate through said infernal trading of pain, bondage [the Gothic in love with desensitization and immobilization; e.g., the constriction of one under attack, below] as something they can’t really control: to use at our own risk in ways that lower the odds of actual harm taking place!

[artist: Kingocrsh]

 To it, how would the state begin to abolishing BDSM when it carries such a famous double standard? Furthermore, evocations of rape and harm sit in quotes, thus on the cusp of something Numinous and healing insofar as rape can be healed; i.e., beckoning all who watch, “Come and see!” To the hungry, “Let them eat cake, pudding and pie!” To the combative, “Let them go twelve rounds with the champ!”

[artist: Romantic Rose] 

Romantic Rose, beyond the pre-existing images already shown, deliberately posed for this exhibit—doing so as a dark faerie queen I might play with and illustrate on my canvas to make a larger point about ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., with her massive tits, cute tum, big booty and fat thighs, but also her huge heart and soft words telling me I’m a good girl as we play together! Our joys [and toys] intermingle through the mystery of monstrous-feminine work reclaimed from state alienation and greed in castled forms of courtly love, thereby transforming into something we then show the world as alien to reunite with; i.e., through the demonic creative process purposefully given a magic-faerie stamp about healing from pain by involving it in ways we can control and camp: “her tits were there,” living deliciously in spite of the Protestant ethic [no need for a hasty exit when we’re protected behind a phone screen]! Sometimes, big things are to be used; sometimes, they’re for show—a way to make you wet and/or hard a glance, imagining as you do what is more fun in one’s head than in practice: the anxiety of receiving pain from things that might be a little too big! Faeries of a royal variety tend to be tall; their junk is less reported on historically [ol’ Shakespeare omitted Oberon’s cock size, if memory serves] but often imagined as matching said height in relative length: the carrot-y girth of a hellish botanical’s mondo faerie dong [with many improvised dildos being produce]!

[artist: Romantic Rose]

Keeping with Hell and darkness visible, this generally waits on the cusp of dark, intoxicating discoveries first given shape through games played by a great many users; i.e., through ourselves as controlled pieces of meat, but also our meta performances/playgrounds consciously imbued with dark poetic energies that faeries revel in. We are the witches of our time, the mistress of our own fate—of the universe freed from police abuse, hence beyond what capital orders and exploits for profit—and again, some witches hammer back.

Of course, how they chose to is ultimately up to them, but it usually happens through devices of darkness, power and knowledge recognized by the larger world, under capital—force, yes, but sex through demon BDSM and faerie-like games; e.g., size queens like Rose, above, taking giant artificial cocks for fun—not to please sexist men, but to emasculate abusive parties insecure about them own members and lack of regular sex. In doing so, these behaviors expand beyond what tortures the state permits, our simulacra exposing theirs as dangerous [e.g., death before dishonor] while putting ourselves in performances of “danger” the state will do its best to stamp out. For them, we’re an unweeded garden grown to seed, the state seeking once more to control what it rapes routinely for profit [which is all the nuclear model systemically is]. By stamping the tramp, monstrous-feminine fairy rulers become conspiracies of unironic rape; re: to scapegoat and tokenize through DARVO and obscurantism by state predators, nothing more.

Touched by trauma, survivors of rape always feel somewhat uneasy/off-balance by any setting evoking exploitation and liberation; i.e., on the same dark surfaces and in the same ambiguous thresholds where faeries call home/rule from. To speak to atrocity and feel good as we do is to play under such positions of perceived disadvantage, restless and agitated by otherworldly enchantment and vaso vagal excitement; i.e., unable to fully relax otherwise, even when said disadvantage isn’t obvious and the warning signs are seemingly absent [the violence of the past happening without warning—sudden and extreme at any moment, exigent and warrantless to monopolize such things].

That being said, there is a vestigial and ongoing torturous element, one I’ll keep investigating to conclude the exhibit with; i.e., with Rose a bit more, but also Harmony Corrupted playing the greatest faerie of all—the Medusa!

Trauma is something to live with; for those with a history with or of violence, weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma[30] to change the survivor for good. Until the day we die, we feel, like the dark faerie, attuned to self-destruction seeking escape by camping harm; i.e., by cramping their style at the proverbial crossroads, out-fiddling the fiddler with our own faerie glamour as, like all deities according to Blake, residing in our breast! The power to disrupt and offend capital lives within us—not as atomized workers, but a plastic collective whose murky  wisdom reaches backwards and forwards in all directions!

To shake such imbalance, then, and retain our defense mechanisms/”spider sense” regarding hidden dangers, we often “martyr” ourselves together during calculated risk [which public nudism essentially is]—to twitch and moan like convulsionnaires, opening ourselves wide to persecution but also the liberation and acceptance of us as psychosexual beings growing accustomed to a hunted, predated existence we can pierce the fog of war with; re: the faerie’s special sight being the strange, at-times-atrocious appetite for pain acquired under capital raping us for profit, which historically-materially encourage tokenization under criminogenic conditions [re: desperation and convenience]. In our hands, the ritualized administering of pain can happen in ways that are only not harmful, but easy enough to pleasurably control when we otherwise feel out of control; e.g., candle wax poured gently on soft, vulnerable parts of the body like the breasts:

[artist: Romantic Rose] 

If you’re wondering what on Earth might possess someone to try such things, the short answer is “capital.” As such, the female body is classically haunted by pain as something to control under capital’s endless pimping [wax being a medieval sculptor’s analog to human flesh]. To it, Rose takes power as something to subvert and transform into her revenge through things that, generally weighed by virtue of size, become more powerful than her enemies can hope to harvest, contain, enslave or match: obstacles and theatre curtains for them, not Rose [total privacy, safety and consent something of a myth under Gothic’s ongoing surveillance, which provides an odd kind of cloaked honesty in how survival victims often feel: under attack and lied to by home as untrustworthy but without exit[31]]! Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, to heal from rape is to play with rape, and that includes pain and its operatic symbols/decaying rituals honed over centuries; e.g., comfortable discomfort, bold caution, weak strength, honest dishonesty, safe danger and similar oxymorons well-known to people living with trauma not weaponizing it against others.

The perditious, ecclesiastic background remains a common sticking point for Gothic satire; re: Lewis; e.g., the camping of religious rapture and torture-as-canon through psychosexual martyrdom as profoundly tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless loaded with textual markers [as the Gothic very much is] that allude to actual harm. This extends to those Rose wants to see such things unfold witnessing her emancipation from the weight of survived trauma; e.g., me having Rose pose multiple times in compromising positions [and tortured, penitent outfits of contrition] that, in the wrong hands, might disadvantage Rose, but through us working as a team, weaponize exclusively to our benefit: the faerie queen set free to work her magic on the living world! “C’mon, scrub! Don’t be courteous; slay that pussy! Mommy has needs! Pound me like I owe you money!”

[artist: Romantic Rose]

Shown for my pleasure—but also to make a combined, social-sexual political statement by inspiring me to paint her as a dark monarch afterwards—Rose uses her body to stress our shared agency over such things; i.e., that we, as sex workers, are capable of working together to speak out against genocide for all peoples under capital. We do so by using our bodies and labor through universal liberation; i.e., as active and informed by ourselves contributing to something greater and in development: Gothic Communism. Evoked selectively through monsters—this time choosing faeries that, under a Gothic lens, function as demons do—their hypnotic glamour[32] administers through flesh and the power it holds having an admittedly demonic signature. Ours is the conscious reclamation of demonic poetics during rape play—carefully shaped and positioned to convey the basic human right to exhibit such things however we want; i.e., to negotiate and advertise [sex is power as something to trade through artwork, and porn is artwork that can achieve such activism to a high degree].

This includes rape play as something to champion as faerie-like and demonic; i.e., as a Promethean being to humanize and hug during the dialectic of the alien avenging nature against profit, of which Harmony also volunteered: my Medusa, and someone I engage in consent-non-consent with on a regular basis [next page]. She straight up slaps, but during live burial offers a much-needed boost to keep at it; i.e., when the chips are down and our libidos/anxiety are up inside these hauntological spaces of doom parking atop our usual safe-space residences [the Gothic famously combining cautionary-to-unbridled lust and looming death/rape fears]!

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

Gothic Communism, then, is something that Nyx, Rose, Annabel, Sinead, Mugi, Crow, Harmony and I do together as friends showing each other off in whatever ways we want to be seen; i.e., as sexy avengers illustrating mutual consent and collective worker action through demonic-yet-sex-positive art exhibits. Rose and Harmony, in particular, grace the cover of several modules for a reason; they are each incredibly kind, honorable and sweet, but also fuckable and fluent in Gothic—i.e., able to work its dated-yet-deathless fetishes and clichés to our collective advantage. When I play with them and my other friends, I feel like I’ve made a deal with the Devil—one whose faerie-like powers set me free, delighting in unknown pleasures couched in prison logic turned on its head. A composite danger disco, they compile a concentric fortress to lose myself in, but also to feel safe from self-righteous, militarily optimistic and tokenized pretenders who hunt us down in bad faith during the liminal hauntology of war/ghost of the counterfeit/Imperial Boomerang’s canceled future [often a vehicle and/or building evocative of an “ancient” tyrant returning to beat us to submission/demand we kneel before them[33]]—someone to believe in when surrounded by so much complicit cryptonymy and neoliberal hogwash.

Keeping with faeries, the idea is informed bliss under Gothic-Communist development; i.e., no gods or masters, just friends who love and protect each other in the struggle to be free from state abuse using the same demon-BDSM language and aesthetic of power and death: what they can’t monopolize, despite stiff competition compelling them to do so! The enemy is unironic oppression and betrayal, thus police actors upholding the state in some shape or form. There is no way to achieve rebellion, thus prevent rape, without resisting and protesting to a meaningful, demonstrable degree; i.e., rebelling against those who uphold these structures, symbolism translating to socio-material change: of criminogenic conditions [and language] towards post-scarcity conditions through medieval poetics reclaimed by workers for those ends. Power aggregates for them, but also for us backfiring their schemes.

Like the Amazon’s fur bikini or nun’s habit, then, there is no way to do this without exposing ourselves to some degree of exposure, thus risk. This vulnerable phrasing includes tracing the anxious spiral of death and decay that breaks how we see the world, whereupon the Aegis becomes something we can use only after the illusions forced onto us since birth are shivered by our demonic theatre, our ludo-Gothic BDSM, magic power and mad science something to behold during the same spaces and personas whose darkness actualizes proletarian needs, not bourgeois ones. Again, such darkness is simply where forbidden dreams [of unequal power and knowledge] come true; re: as a dualistic, dialectical-material matter of revenge through the Gothic’s demonic creative expression, betwixt residence and resident. The idea is to throw aside “no good can come of it” when playing with these notions, and use them to our creative; i.e., to reify what capital denies us: our creative freedom breaking Capitalist Realism paradoxically with darkness; re: something that can be used for liberation or exploitation through discourse about such things, including famous monsters and their lairs: as things to embody struggle with during the abjection process!

Like Egger’s witch, we dark faeries are not waifu. If anything, the power imbalance, stormy disposition, and class character makes that impossible. Instead, through the pedagogy of the oppressed as modular and intersectional, we steer the conversation away from those used to being the center of attention [and always make everything about them; i.e., white cis-het men, or those emulating them, inside the Man Box]. By daring to speak up for ourselves and those less privileged than ourselves in weird-nerd culture, we show strength and vulnerability in equal measure! Revolution is messy but the fact remains, some people are chattelized more than others; those with less privilege will be expected to betray more to elevate, meaning solidarity for and among oppressed groups is incredibly important lest we cannibalize ourselves.

We’re all monarchs under Communism, loves—not defined by skin color or national boundaries but by the bounds we form and make to help one another! Anyone who excludes others to be a king for a day is a traitor and a fool; capital—an unapologetic system of theft—relies on cheap loyalty and quick betrayal to keep the elite in power. No honor among thieves? That’s all capital does, and to not help those in need would be to commit a grave, insurmountable error! We give back to each other by refusing to sell ourselves to the lowest bidders imaginable; we whore ourselves for Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism: by spitting on Medusa’s trapdoor pussy before we pin her to the wall, lubricating revolution however we can—during explosive combative sex!

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

Medusa isn’t something that exists in a vacuum, then, nor is it merely a device of police hegemony against criminalized elements who aren’t allowed to resist the state’s sudden and merciless terror attacks; we can take her as a poetic device and embody furious, horny and rebellious aspects of ourselves and our own frustration, yearning and longing the state will only try to rape and repress labor with. Medusa unseals such documentation, herself an “ancient,” found document of the Gothic style.

A new Satanic cathedral, a new master of the universe—us, haunting the counterfeit and abjection process! “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Our fortresses, our operas, our titanic passion something that cannot be contained, silenced or ignored taking us to paradise upside-down [salvation being a metaphor for orgasm that we enact in this life, and pervert in the bargain]! It’s a Gothic castle to give voice to rape by playing with it in “unspeakable” forms/darkness visible we can unpack room by room, at whatever pace we require to heal: to express vulnerability yet gain confidence, self-respect and growth recovering from self-hatred, internalized bigotry and impostor/mirror syndrome, etc, on the same road to Hell; re: the postpunk world-in-decay where rebirth is joyously found, the doomed inside gravitating towards the convulsionnaire’s psychosexual martyrdom and sweet theatrical release promoting better things, mid-infernal-concentric-pattern, mise-en-abyme and Cycle of Kings, etc; e.g., the haunted house, Gothic castle, or circular ruin [see my work on Metroidvania for more examples]: the monstrous-feminine villain of the classic monomyth, reversed through Gothic homecomings to break Capitalist Realism with, inside the same endless loop of dying space-time!

Royalty are fluent in the language of service and bondage; Gothic theatre is a safe, campy space to play with powerful things that people like, including dark faeries that mirror the Gorgon as—above all else—a strict taskmaster and ironically “cruel” mistress [rawr]. Nothing is more powerful or loved/feared than Medusa, a liberated whore reversing abjection on her Aegis; boundless and bare, the dark faerie—suddenly naked—is exposed as mighty-mighty and upon the black mirror’s sleek surface: paradoxically ripe for the taking as she haunts the nuclear model with rape and whose “rape,” during ludo-Gothic BDSM, is haunted by nuclear abuse hunting witches! As Matthew Lewis showed us, we can play and speak to genocide by flaunting pain as an aesthetic linked to sex, but stay able to detach from and camp it with royal aplomb!

To better the instruction and regain control during her revenge against profit, Medusa knows your darkest desires. She’s seen and done it all, only asking that when it’s her turn, you ravish her wrecking-ball ass just the way she likes [with Harmony being agender and fluid in her expression—an avatar of the monstrous-feminine, hence Gothic Communism beyond herself, the war she makes towards liberation seen chaotically on her surfaces and in her dark, wet thresholds]! “There you go! Good boy! Fuck mommy just like that! Mount, now heave to! Ride the lightning all full speed!”

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

The medieval, faux or not, enjoys marrying popular culture to the language of strength, faulty bloodlines, questionable destiny and weakness [to be weak for someone/show vulnerability around them] that it might adequately speak to larger forces at play/get to the bottom of things [the Gothic loves puns]. Revolution, then, is very much something to get into the mood of through these pernicious elements’ flexible camp and persistently rigid “sticking-to” of our arguments. So push her face down into the bed; stab her demon pussy to humanize the harvest! Fantasies of subjugation/dark mastery go both ways; Gothic Communism brings them [and the dark faerie/whore of nature] out of the bedroom [re: Foucault] and into daily life once more! PRAXIS SYNTHESIZED; Medusa can’t die/always hungers for more cum from gentlemen callers!

More to the point, invoking Medusa’s famous aptitude for punishment [and threshold for pain] becomes an opportunity to let down one’s guard and take homerun-style “power shots” of a controlled and playful variety—to spar more aggressively than you might elsewhere when camping rape with some degree of seriousness! To turn up the heat, mid-kayfabe, Medusa [and her veteran initiative] can give as good as she gets, the exposure of nudity something that bounces pain back less like turtles and more like mating porcupines charging their batteries!

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

Something is always given and received per exchange. As Harmony shows us, Medusa is something to perform towards universal liberation by Gothic means and motivations; i.e., by paralyzing capital through rude, alien suggestions of rape putting “rape” in quotes, but haunted by its darker side on the Aegis. So don’t fear the reaper—court her and see what she has to say! Witness, mid-capture, Medusa’s dark castle of unholy butt sex, looming deliciously to devour your misguided sense of piety! To squish your junk and your brain, crushing your stupid, costly preconceptions handed down by bourgeois idiots! To invite you to investigate her tremendous, moon-sized urges and wicked, Kegel-esque palpitations, she’ll have you realize [sooner or later] that all workers are gods waiting to wake up and take back what’s theirs from state pretenders!

Revolution is a duel, and it pays to be awake; a champion galvanizer, Medusa gets your attention and keeps it. So wake up, take hold, and reclaim through faerie apocalypse [revelation]: we can have what we want/need not be careful what we wish for! This realizes during state degrowth, the latter occurring by vacillating chemotherapy—a dark-pulse tone poem pushing forbidden things along while disguising our faerie selves behind earthly “beards”; i.e., as controlled opposition, shrinking the bourgeoisie like a tumor! Animal magnetism sets in among commercialized doubles; we camp canon by doubling it—achieving actual, genuine rebellion that mirrors false, recuperated forms, inside the same Gothic mode. Actual martyrdom haunts nature as our domain, our psychosexual “martyrdom” flaunting our power [e.g., our plunging necklines or short skirts] to fuck with those who can’t rape us short of crossing the lines that we install [re: rape is impossible within boundaries of mutual consent, whose cementing undermines Capitalist Realism and its “boundaries for me, not for thee” nonsense]! Nazis [and liberals/moderates] normalize rape in ways our healing from rape—through the regaining of agency and boundaries, during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a public advertisement—helps prevent!

[artist: Akii Desu] 

Such treatment, and its umbral radiation healing emotional damage with “damage,” requires concentration in multiple turnings of that word; i.e., as a matter of potency and focus, delivered through concentrated forms; e.g. Blake’s corroding fires—to handle with care, but dispense with glee, convincing through the molding of a hellish statuesque by virtue of intense, profound reactions [chemical, physical or otherwise] greasing the wheels. Though merited [and fun] in its execution, the sacking of “Rome” isn’t drama for its own sake, but a performative, collaborative vein of counterterrorist activism; i.e., brothel espionage engaged with and expressed through vintage Gothic theatrics’ opaque transparencies; e.g., bodies, costumes, masks, roleplay scenarios, locations, idioms, medieval nostalgia, bad puns, dirty jokes, hardcore sex and penetration, lewd commentaries, genre conventions and clichés; physiological responses like sexual tension and release, throbbing orgasms, medicinal pain, belly laughter and all-around letting off steam; the assorted emotional thrills, consent-non-consent, torn panties and exposed genitals of courtly love; the Gothic’s obsession with paranormal antics, drama, comedy and all-around mood—all playing with power-as-monstrous-feminine and sex as warlike, stunning and gorgeous. It’s what we’ve been doing for this entire faerie exhibit and indeed, the whole book series: playing with those things that societies the world over value, and which we subvert inside of themselves to help from rape with!

Much of this healing concerns the theft of theatrical devices, onstage and off. Workers steal, cops steal; workers and cops commit violence. Weapons of terror aren’t moral or immoral, then; how they’re used—during oppositional praxis, hence class, culture and race war—is. Less a single exchange [during regular examinations and emergency consultations] and more an ongoing relationship, it’s one that happens as much with mechanism as mechanic on all registers across all groups of workers; i.e., of animals and beings of nature like faeries versus the state and its proponents/doubles tampering with or otherwise intimidating witnesses [through blackmail, extortion, even murder]. One side discourages criminality and rape through doomy language thereof; the other encourages it while reeking like a corpse: a black moon rising but also a string of dark planets seemingly vacant but haunted by Numinous, monstrous-feminine potential!

In turn, faeries are canonically things to be caught, except our beauteous orbs are too big to capture; our praxis, but also our pussies, are wetter and looser than Radcliffe’s probably[34] was, those and other social-sexual implements pulling you under our faerie lakes [drenching spheres] and keeping you there—i.e., during live burial as, per Segewick, a commentary on libido tied to various forces/medieval poetics at work, and which we concern with dialectical-material, not psychological models [again, darkness visible and not the murky and far-less-precise models used by those schools of thought that proceeded Marx, deliberately choosing to ignore the historical-material elements he applied to monsters decades before Freud and company abandoned them]! Pillars of monsters, magic and myth, these dark faeries deliver pleasure and pain to prevent trauma, thus command respect and demand discipline from their bottoms: teamwork makes the dream work, healing from “rape” by playing with it, in quotes. As far as survivors go, we’re preaching to the choir!

[artists (clockwise, starting top-left): Romantic Rose, Sinead, Harmony Corrupted, Nyx, Victoria, Annabel Morningstar, Mugiwara, Crow, and Angel Witch]

 

“PUSSY VANQUISHED” or “PUSSY SLAYER VANQUISHED,” we’ve done this before, but rebellion is repeatedly and collectively seditious; re: a collage-like drum to beat, time and time again, among a polity of co-conspirators [above] breeding rebellion through sex on the brain—as something to chase down/get to the bottom of by restoring the mobility of activism [and critical thought] from its turgid, praxially-inert stasis and shell. We’re not sugar-coating the bitter pill to conceal anything scandalous, but operate through sugar and scandal in faux-medieval to speak to toxic, sinister or otherwise controversial devices that—unobserved and undigested by the picky eaters—can go completely unnoticed. Revolutionary cryptonymy points a big combative sign at genocide to prevent its continuation [often through kayfabe, sex and force duking things out, on and offstage]: a garden of shattered innocence, promoting psychosexual healing through “martyrdom,” cultured intuition, and unbridled passion tethered—if not on actual leads—then through bodies, rulesets, and systems of exchange that ground and facilitate the excitement of such grandiose, out-of-control sensations! So do we go beyond our comfort zones; i.e., seeking satisfaction, we adjust to colder comforts warming our plump godly backsides:

(artist: TMFD)

To it, the Gothic—but especially Gothic Communism—is all about application, practice and informed interactions, not rote transaction; i.e., playing with taboo things that we enjoy camping in non-harmful forms, lowering the odds of systemic harm taking place when dashing Capitalist Realism: through fakery and rituals coded to prevent harm, addressing unspeakable things in ways that give them a language, hence voice to speak out with [which capital tries to alienate us from]. In other words, you are what you eat; we’re a diet of pain prescribed by us, not the state’s harmful, policing varieties! I, for example love sluts and playing with them; i.e., as mommy-like and virally potent, which faeries are, but also, to some degree, make-believe. The cryptonymic, holistic idea is to resonate using controlled substances that, faerie-like and in control, speak to abuse beyond our control that, performed in fake ways, touch on socio-material change through buffers; re: speaking out while protecting ourselves; e.g., we can camp Christianity through faerie-like doubles that—when push comes to shove—let us say to the offended bad-faith parties rattling sabers, they’re “just” faeries; re: the “just play” defense, treating our threats as emptier than they seem, “style over substance.”

While silence is genocide and segregation is no protection from rape—and a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all, requiring universal emancipation—there isn’t a monopoly on dishonesty and the enjoyment of guilty pleasure/demonic speaking through pain, panic and death [dark faeries are death faeries, more or less]. We can lie to protect ourselves, but also be more honest than state proponents with the same lateral, unorthodox devices, enjoying them to endorsing liberation through said machinations [re: Sarkeesian]. In turn, we can be smarter than them when setting up our revelations’ cryptonymic hall of mirrors; re: liberation and exploitation share the same spaces, surfaces and thresholds, but also confused, engorged organs of sight/tools of overall perception and disguise. Forget pocket sand, vivid concealment is the dark faerie’s primary weapon! Borrowed from medieval thought [of torture; e.g., stigmata, below] and inserted into half-real medieval hauntologies and their dark Aegises, we reverse abjection through the cryptonymy process sundering Capitalism Realism with apocalyptic language: to show and behold just that, in the faerie flesh! A Great Destroyer mending through the transmutation of darkness and pain, marrying strict to gentle but carrying the usual otherworldly elements of royal command that dark faeries are known for to escape unironic, non-consensual mastery!

[artists: Romantic Rose]

Milton had the right idea; re: “The mind its own place,” a thing to swell with darkness visible, allowing for expanded consciousness, mid-activism. Faeries, then, make anything possible, insofar as “death” can happen onstage, but also radical wish fulfilment through repressed desires that, sure enough, carry offstage during our aforementioned dark trades; i.e., of darkness visible, which happen through demonic exchange and transformation as an oft-hyperbolic poetic act; e.g., their alter-ego, superhero/supervillain’s too-tall bodies, and too-big boobies [mammoth milkers] and butts’ enormous, immodest implications promising profound, improper revelation while cryptonymically winking sardonic charm/radiating faerie ahegao from the bruised-and-bleeding flesh: about half-real potentialities to tilt towards that, unto themselves, “tilt” [enrage] those of the audience still in Plato’s cave [“If we spirits have offended, think but this and all is mended…”]. The paradox of rape and it’s revenge-made-visible, then—but also the monstrous-feminine as a nurturing-scaring warrior maternal—lies in the immediate visual ambiguity of such reenactments but also the presumed futility in defeating them. Death cannot be conquered, and murder (and rape) always will out. That’s what darkness visible is, and by extension, swole’ demon mommies, which we’ll look at next.

[artist: BS Art]

In this respect, dark faeries [and their infernal castles promoting enormously obscure power] function like Medusa does; i.e., speaking to how rape destroys us [and classically is survived by turning into different objects; e.g., a tree] but, through a radical desire to heal from rape by systemically preventing it in paradoxical ways, becomes the very darkness we’ve been performing this entire exhibit: a world without rape, the power to prevent it in our hands subverting hyperbolic beauty standards by Gothically upending purity arguments! For the capitalist, they cannot foresee such a place; to show such profound and whorish/profane recipients of abuse—out in the open, playing with rape as an exhibit—is to threaten capitalist with a post-rape planet. God forbid, right? The thought turns them to stone.

Like Satan, faerie royals are gods/superhumans. They tower to provide dramatic effect, but also invite troubling comparison; i.e., for recess and relapse, absurdity and surrealism, they double our desires, but also conventional mechanisms of power used at cross purposes during oppositional praxis: curating a reality—one within that classic Gothic half-reality caught between complete fakery and total reality—to engage with through age-old power fantasies, including royalty and their power to change peoples’ lives on a whim [often through ransom and arranged marriages, but also medieval, virgin-queen[35] sex games and all-around Faustian elevation[36]]. And, as anyone skilled in the war of war will tell you, warfare isn’t just on the obvious fields with clear-cut uniforms; it’s a theatre that bleeds into daily life through darkness visible, including sex [especially monstrous sex; re: Amazonomachia more broadly] as something to play out, perform and interrogate while negotiating our rights. That’s ultimately what dark faeries are: a theatre of war through psychosexual weaponry that, true enough, is measured by size and aesthetic, but ratified through sex and force performed among or regarding those devices as demonic, dark-yet-visible; re: Faust and Prometheus.

We’ll examine those devices more, deeper in the module. For now, recall that demons of any kind [not just faeries] seldom stay in churches, and that states [through a Protestant ethic] aren’t overtly ecclesiastical. Nevertheless, there remains a cryptonymic, hidden-visible element of sedition to faeries and their own sense of otherworldly glory making us come [to paradise]—a potential to camp that must be embraced, then crystalized in what we create, playfully developing Gothic Communism using what we got. However we do it—be that armored when nude or nude when armored during the whore’s paradox, through kayfabe as psychomachy or Amazonomachia—we are life and the state is death; the state is ultimately incompatible with us, and we camp its inherently unequal canon from exchange to cryptonymic exchange using our shield-like Aegis to have the whore’s revenge against profit: “No pasarán!” There is always another princess in another castle, the bare and level sands stretching far away as we quest for the Gothic-Communist Numinous, cryptomimetically liberating Medusa during cryptonymy’s praxial synthesis; re: in collaborative exhibits like this one!

So is abjection dialectically-materially reversed through the faerie’s demonic trades, its anisotropic vengeance parsed in cryptomimetic and hauntological arbitration. In turn, such litigation frequently occupies chronotopic spheres [re: mise-en-abyme and castles-in-the-flesh] that freeze our attackers in place with darkness visible. Such oscillating duality and liminality is something to occupy across/upon/within people and place—not to rank rape or justify some variant, but prevent all harm while walking away from Omelas as a group of friends [and friends of friends, of friends of friends, and so on].

Doing show should antagonize and provoke not one, but all: through a similarity amid difference! Found again/for the first time through Gothic paradox and reinvention, we faeries and witches dive into Styx. We do so above water and ground; i.e., out from the forests shrunk by capital and into urban territories made, like Radcliffe’s Black Veil, afraid of such things. Their city streets and night skies clouded with smoke, we make ourselves at home; i.e., when bringing Hell home to ferry you there, too—not as punishment, but invitations one and all calling you back to where you belong! “Hell’s bells, Satan’s callin’ for you!”

So kneel if you want! Just have the courage to step on through…)

“What dost thou want?” Again, the devil is in the details—cloudy from aesthetic but clear as day from a dialectical-material standpoint: challenging profit through the performance of power during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: specifically that of dark faeries, breaking Capitalist Realism through Satanic (or otherwise abject) wish fulfillment! Their darkness visible promotes a world without end, hitting us where it hurts and pleases to heal from rape. In broaching post-scarcity with medieval pre-capitalist language to have the whore’s revenge, the language of unhappiness can lead to happier spheres, blazing a curious trail in the bargain (not all roads lead to Rome):

(artist: Nico)

So concludes the dark faerie (ruler) collaboration! Next, we’ll examine a no less strict, but openly warrior class of monstrous-feminine (and its fiery and militant examples of the Amazon taken beyond earthly realms)—swole’ demon mommies in a postcolonial close-read about forbidden love!

Onto “‘Trial by Fire’: Swole’ Demon Mommies (feat. Lady Hellbender and Karlach)“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Also spelled “fairy,” and referred to as bean sidhe, which translates to “fairy woman/woman of the burial mounds”; i.e., often to a royal degree; e.g., a faerie queen or princess—classically of the otherworld, netherworld, Numinous beyond, Hell, etc. I’ll be sticking to “faerie” for the most part, just to keep things consistent (and because “fairy” often sounds daintier than “faerie”; e.g., fairy princess).

[2] Including verbal abuse; e.g., the speedrunner Bubzia cursing out the boos from Mario 64 during a blindfolded run: “You… stupid, piece-of-shit ghost!” (“I DESTROYED This Blindfolded SM64 Speedrun,” 2024; timestamp: 19:55)

[3] Blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft are all classically criminal charges against non-Christian bodies of the medieval world, which would segue into queerphobia in the 1700s and beyond, under capital (re: “Leaving the Closet; or, a Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love,” 2024). So while witch hunts classically targeted Pagan cis women, blood libel targeted Jews, and sodomy targeted homosexual men, these have been reconfigured under neoliberal, late-stage Capitalism; i.e., to select rebellious monstrous-feminine groups in bad-faith, pitting those against good-faith groups using the same aesthetic one is colonizing and the other decolonizing.

[4] Limited by human imagination and desire (for sex, revenge, and other policed areas), which is to say, completely unlimited save how capital shapes our ability to imagine and how we, as workers, challenge that.

[5] Refer to “A Rape Reprise” for my definitions of rape, themselves lifted from the Poetry Module’s “A Note About Rape/Rape Play” and “Psychosexual Martyrdom“).

[6] This being said, Black Phillip is known as a goat who turns into a man; i.e., as the ominous black curtain Eggers torments the audience with and eventually pulls aside, stripping everyone naked. We’ll explore anthropomorphism and “skin-changing” much more in “Call of the Wild.”

[7] The Gothic, as usual, is obsessed with old, vengeful sites/rites of return; i.e., by nature and those “of it” reclaiming the land and the colonial home from current imposters. The reappearance of faerie royals speaks to a postcolonial, hauntological apocalypse where old kings and queens closer to nature, but also their dark gods, come home to roost; i.e., by reminding Christians they never left—that they were never exterminated, thus seek dislocated, aged and alien-faerie revenge from across the sea and into the New World (witches behaving similar to Dracula, but also goblins in this respect, the Puritans having been chased out of England to punch down against older colonial victims: not the Irish and the Catholics or Jewish people, but the witches of Celtic myth borrowed from Samhain and other druidic harvest rituals).

Satan is one such faerie—a dark wishmaster tempting Puritan girls with liberation, till they whither from old age/exposure and become his wicked hags. The harvest is poor for the girl’s family because they’re all on the menu and she, possessed by the bean sidhe* spirit of heretics (the ancient victim/rival of English fanaticism) is killing them, one by one; re: the grim harvest, the revenge of the Corn Lady on those normally holding the sickle!

*Myth commonly occupies a xenophobic track. Bean sidhe—according to English myth demonizing the pre-Teutonic and pre-Norman Celts into the Irish Catholics and secular Irish—were considered a death omen; their shrill, unruly cries, similar to the Medusa’s gaze, were thought to be able to strike the listener dead, once heard! In short, the rage of such ghosts is a black mirror to strike the guilty dead for having stayed silent about rape while alive! It’s a tool of monstrous-feminine revenge, which the colonizer uses against their usual victims; i.e., by turning them into DARVO-style bogeywomen for not killing home rule with kindness! It’s tone-policing tampering with the witness, calling their testimony “poison” to alienate them [divide and conquer].

The purpose of the witch, then, is to carry the Puritan’s guilt of imperial inheritance, which balloons through their own self-righteousness and overdependence; i.e., on invented enemies to aggrandize themselves and rape the land they abject onto their new area of divine providence (whose perceived criminality watches them through the witch’s uncanny animal familiars, framing the American Indigenous in a New England light). The daughter is possessed not by xenoglossia, then, but by anarchist wish fulfillment; i.e., to destroy her family, who she resents as the real criminals; e.g., her teenage brother lusting after her, but also her demented mother slut-shaming her.

In turn, the witch embodies the Sphinx’ Riddle turned on its head, the witch of youthful whore and aged crone hidden inside the mind of an increasingly vengeful maiden evoking the witch at her annoying twin siblings: “But I am that very witch!” She’s a dog soldier guerilla, warring from the shadows; i.e., by changing shape and size, but also age to embody and invoke mass hysteria—the Puritan’s weapon of choice—against them. Lurking in twilight between day and night, familial suspicion convinces her own flesh and blood that she commands nature and dark wishes to turn the Puritans against each other and, in the process, use terror weapons to ultimately undo the bloodline of nature’s enemies; she’s an imposter for what the Puritans call “enemy” (re: Milton’s “arch-fiend”) having chased them out of house and home (the characters—pariahs themselves, banished by a colony of heretics—are often homesick) and denying it to them, here, in a hauntologized, pre-colonial America: the destruction of the nuclear home by its “anti” double changeling.

Per black/white us versus them and the dialectic of shelter and the alien, nature is criminal invading the Puritans’ sense of unsteady home. Satan, in that respect, might seem like Charles Manson and the witch as one of his Manson girls; i.e., bog-standard Gothic, but haunted by genocide as the ghost of the counterfeit. Closer to the mark, he’s a terrorist fighting for land back, dressed up as a gangster/pimp the Puritans can recognize dancing on their graves! Classic centrist projection (of moral teams), and yet the Gothic works through allegory to secret critical thought into viewers’ brains. Eggers stays comfortably inside the Puritan fear space, but despite this semblance of white moderacy devotes the entirety of its runtime to crucify them; i.e., as a black parody of their values, speaking in the language of morality to hoist them on their own petards. It’s a witch hunt, one where the witch hunts the witch hunters. It’s intensely critical of the Puritans, lambasting them in a classic, New-England, Hawthornean polemic obsessed with Salem’s awful reputation and desire for revenge! There are no good witches in Eggers’ film; just black witches having their revenge.

In turn, Eggers’ film is directed at current-day Puritans-by-another-name: Christian nationalists. The victims of the film think themselves righteous, undeserving of violence, but from our perspective they’re the most radical and delusional of them all. They do it to themselves, while those most often forced into monstrous-feminine, scapegoat positions retreat from family life; i.e., as having been designed, from the start, to harm insubordinate, tokenized women, and for which they seek the whore’s black, monstrous-feminine revenge against; e.g., the opening “baby-mashing” scene being phallic and vaginal, the witch’s pestle-like broom and mortar-like bowl an Archaic Mother’s vagina dentata wielded by a phallic woman making chunky baby batter (above) with her enemies’ spawn (terror weapons include horror—to invoke disgust and dehumanize one’s victims); re: Lady Macbeth: “Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers, / Wherever in your sightless substances / You wait on Nature’s mischief!” It’s an identity and taboo (unthinkable*) act of defiance told through monstrous argument—the land defending itself from Divine Right and Manifest Destiny by reversing abjection at the source: wolfing down the next-in-line! “Stare and tremble!” Matthew Lewis is alive and well (whose novel, The Monk, also features a famous scene with a dead rotting baby crawling with worms)!

*With infanticide DARVO being a classic weapon of settler colonists, who use their women and children as human shields. The witch reduces the baby (whose pregnancy historically embodies a threat of death and enslavement to married and unmarried women, alike) as something to render down and empower her disgusting revenge (death from the skies)! Furthermore, the wet slapping sound of the witch’s broom during the infanticide scene plays later in the film; i.e., when the then-widowed mother “turns,” seeking revenge against the surviving daughter—by accusing her of seducing father and son! Incest and infanticide, Horace Walpole’s Mysterious Mother once again leaps to mind!

So if you find yourself chilled and quaking in the witch’s indeterminate presence and feeling sorry for the Puritans (who are made by Eggers to be as incompetent and unlikeable as possible), it’s merely a reminder of your own privileged position wreathed in ghostly counterfeit, but also the call of the void towards more humane orders of existence couched in barbarity. That’s what dark faeries classically portend, however unsightly they come to us in our dreams (re: like Satan, disguised as a toad to tempt Eve in her sleep): to pour sweet poison in our ears, and cloud our eyes with crystal darkness!

[8] Cameron doing so in the style of the noir and Western, but also zombie film turning the police into a victim of their own abuses come back to haunt them; i.e., from the tech-noir retro-future! Doing so carries a rebellious signature (if not downright conviction, in Cameron’s case) because the slasher’s normal, canonical usage is to scare teenagers into not having extramarital sex; i.e., while being a guilty pleasure that, among couples married or not, is used to excite particular fears and, sure enough, raise libido in times of perceived danger/elevated panic (with the heroes of the movie fucking while on the run from their tireless assassin). Per Hogel, the middle class eats that shit up (re: through various fandoms and refrains, above), driving the process of abjection to feed the profit motive.

[9] E.g., Link, the Hero of Time from Zelda, capturing smaller faeries in bottles, but gaining boons at faerie fountains housing Great Faeries he cannot bottle (re: size difference)!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

[10] One of dark, vengeful, monstrous-feminine gods; re: Creed and Freud, vis-à-vis Medusa.

[11] Darkness and chaos being classically female; re: Jung’s female chaos dragon.

[12] Re: Titania being a stand-in for Queen Elizabeth, a woman who never married or bore children, which Shakespeare, a gay man, envisioned as our aforementioned fairy queen from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

[13] The Gothic loves violent sexual metaphors, which speak adequately to queer hyphenations of criminal sex and force that, just as well, speak to demons and their psychosexuality at large: the faerie ornamentation of violence, but also the its rude slumming (re: gentrification and decay).

[14] A classic Gothic signature, alongside live burial tropes and the decay of state mastery through various fetishes and clichés, and dated, revived conventions stressed for their simultaneous age, barbarity and profound regeneration. These sit in between boundaries concerned with sex as a weakness, but also a death warrant that executes when consumed; re: sex equals death when one’s virtue is “weak.” The Gothic, cloaked in the spectre of organized religion and the Protestant ethic, camps such nonsense inside of itself.

[15] Re: ACAB and ASAB. The state and its traitors (cops) exploit and rape everything for profit, thus control—the two historically-materially going hand-in-hand; i.e. through state illusions and force, thus neoliberal reinvention (mis)using such methods on a regular basis. These include corruption, lobbying and bribes, but also police brutality and various other activities (espionage, assassinations, etc) occurring onstage and off. Less a corrupting of the system and more lubricating it through boom-and-bust with the trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital, these are things working very much by design. Profit, above all else, facilitates the half-real mechanisms at work, including genocide (war and rape) as a simple consequence of state and corporate operations. They only exist to exploit nature and workers as monstrous-feminine (re: through the usual ethnocentric, canonically essentialist revenge arguments), but that’s all the state is made to perform: divide and conquer for profit, that’s it.

Furthermore, said motive might be haunted by older forms of empire (the ghost of the counterfeit), but within the present state of affairs, profit supersedes these ghosts, which it pimps out in some shape or form; it charters them in the same mapped-out spheres, like everything else. So while everyone likes the whore, the state needs her as something to attack/surrender territory to before clawing it all back: holding a gun to nature’s head, forcing sex in a rush that, turning her into carrot and stick, takes away all choice. Everything is taxable, written up as “the cost of doing business.” Unequal, myopic, panoptic—the state works for one purpose, regardless of scope and scale: to privatize thus exploit and reduce everything to profit; i.e., free enterprise (which neoliberalism is) and negative freedom for the owner class, hence billionaires.

[16] While both animals are known for their cute battle cries, rain frogs are further referred to as “potato fairies.”

[17] I.e., Scott’s film emblematic of Shelley’s Frankenstein novel, both haunted by Red Scare vis-à-vis Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956 onwards, the latter inspired by Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” or At of the Mountains of Madness from the 1930s, H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds from 1898, and older xenophobia/Orientalism from Conrad, Poe, and Radcliffe, etc, reaching back into Antiquity’s fear of the legendary guerilla and barbarian general, Hannibal (who Scipio Africanus defeated in battle, only doing so after Hannibal’s famed crossing of the Alps).

[18] Re, Chris Baldrick’s introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (2009): “For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration” (source). This, for us whores, becomes something to thrive inside, regenerating like a zombie might, but also a demon; i.e., the faerie, in its chrysalis, changing shape to better suit itself in a hostile environment.

[19] Labyrinths, like any dungeon, aren’t cheap. The Labyrinth of Crete, for example, was designed for King Minos by Daedalus and his son, Icarus. By comparison, Gothic fiction miraculously takes what is normally expensive and lets anyone design any cathedral they wish (often with as little as their naked bodies)!

[20] The slots in castle walls from which arrows, bolts and other missiles were fired from relative safety.

[21] A violent outburst of a given crop preventing holocaust (re: “Disgustipated” and “the cry of the carrots”) by turning the harvest back on itself—with ass being a much-needed spice to revolution! Anyone can be a faerie/use faerie devices as weapons of terror to shock and dismantle the state and state bigotry (as racist, sexist and homophobic, etc). Like the human body as something to advertise, such weapons take infinite forms (and beckon “sodomy” as anything extramarital/non-PIV that stalls state engines with; e.g., oral or anal, but also even more repulsive [to the state] forms of kink I don’t tend to advertise); i.e., Crawford’s invention of terrorism and Asprey’s paradox of terror become, per my arguments, Amazonian devices of terror (re: anal sex and similar sodomy devices) that apply neatly to our work: turning the state—normally hunting and pimping nature through its own monopolies—into something workers and nature hunt in response by showing them our ass humanized under demonizing conditions; re: “darkness” being anything that upends state order by iconoclastic means! To cover up is to segregate and silence, thus sentence ourselves to our fate.

[22] The text featured on Nyx’s Twitter banner image; emphasis, me.

(source)

[23] Including the battering of housewives and similar victims’ confusion of predatory/prey, pleasure/pain, fight/flight and vaso vagal, which other animals can’t experience or perform (for sex-positive or sex-coercive reasons) like humans (and their Gothic parentage) can.

[24] For a good example of this from the Undead Module, consider “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge” (2024).

[25] What Horace Walpole called “secret sin; [an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse” from The Mysterious Mother (1768); re (from Volume One):

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate (source: Healing from Rape,” 2023).

That story was about double incest; any reclamation we enact (about rape and general harm) is generally couched within poetry and mythmaking to some extent—if not because what we say is false then because it will be treated as false, mythical, or otherwise make-believe (as faeries are). Paradoxically, the Gothic castle works as a way to process things that will otherwise be denied outright. The effect is less a strict, positive-sounding euphemism, and more a sex symbol that expresses through violence to conceal sexual abuse (and pleasure) behind; re: the cryptonymy process pointing to all manner of things inside the inky charnel house—where such things get up and move around in uncanny (animate-inanimate) miniature and gigantic forms (often suits of armor)!

[26] For the power of speculation as highly developed; i.e., owing to capital being less developed than it currently is; e.g., Radcliffe’s painterly view of the world in a, at times, very literal sense:

One of the unique aspects of Ann Radcliffe’s novels is her emphasis on landscape. […]

Similarly, theories of landscape are tied to particular settings in the novel. The three main settings for the novel are the different “homes” that Emily inhabits: La Valée, the castle of Udolpho, and Château-le-Blanc. La Valée “is a sheltered and highly sentimental world, a version of a Rousseauian ideal community,” (Kilgour, 114) where Emily “receives a moral and sentimental education from her father,” (Murray, 115) St. Aubert. Emily will take with her the moral lessons of her idyllic home to a more hostile landscape, as is captured by the Castle of Udolpho. Thus, La Valée and Udolpho represent the beautiful and the sublime: “[p]leasurable sentiments characterize the first world; sensations of terror characterize the second. Obscurity replaces light, mystery replaces openness” (Murray, 115). Situated on a towering mountain in the Apennines, the castle of Udolpho is “[s]ilent, lonely and sublime[. It] seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign” (Radcliffe, 227).  The Château-le-Blanc, in contrast, contains elements of both the beautiful and the sublime; it is a more ambiguous space (an ancestral castle that is modernized by its owner), in which Emily has to negotiate between appearance and reality (Murray, 128).

Like the characters’ relation to nature indicates their moral character, so the setting’s relation to the surrounding landscape reveals the character of its owner (Kilgour, 119). For example, La Vallée is in harmony with its surroundings, reflecting the moderation and virtue of St. Aubert, while Udolpho reflects Montoni’s tyranny by dominating the landscape (Kilgour, 119). In this sense, setting takes on aspects of character, like the Castle in Walpole’s Otranto [source: WordPress, “Landscape, Setting, and Character,” 2011].

These castles embody a particular point of worldview we can embody for the duration of the novel, but take it outside itself to shape our own works; e.g., my books informed, love it or hate, by Radcliffe!

[27] Aka “geometries of terror”/the infernal concentric pattern (re: Aguirre); i.e., with false walls and floors, but also memories about concealed dreaded evils (re: Radcliffe)!

[28] Faers pronouns include: fae/it (any neos/they/he).

[29] Especially when a former victim’s survival mechanism has been damaged, the line between pleasure and pain blurred, but also predator and prey! Simply put, the bigger the trauma, the more usual psychosexual spaces (and their palliative-Numinous evocations) are.

[30] A saying I’ve evoked in the past when writing about trauma as something to revisit:

There clearly isn’t a monopoly on empathy as expressed through monsters, magic and metaphors—including big ones (castles), but also schools of these things playing with the ghost of the counterfeit; e.g., Radcliffe and Lewis’ Schools of Terror and Horror, but also intimations of general-purpose “necromancy” or goth culture as a psychosexual, monomythic (adventuresome) performance with kayfabe elements: “Zombie Marx or Zombie Twain? Choose your fighter!”

Nevertheless, our juggling and balance in whatever contributions we can supply is important. Again, don’t suffer for your art if you can help it. But also remember that trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird. The idea is to combine them in ways that alleviate sickness, stress, tension and harm, but also avoid predation by perfidious elements in our daily lives coming from structural abuse: the Gothic castle as a beacon to attract and house the like-minded while the state tries, as it always does, to dominate us through its own victims.

Yet despite having previously discussed martyrs as a powerful form of reverse abjection, it’s not something that should be shot for each and every time. It’s done out of pure necessity and frustration, which we want to move away from. A classic (thus sacrificial) state of grace is no substitute for systemic change. We need to be more constructive and inventive when the options are available; i.e., to offer up enriching poetic gestures that lead to socio-material change without us dying routinely and en masse as a result (as the rats who follow the Pied Piper do). “Magic, myths and monsters” means taking what we need and putting things that seem like they won’t fit together together and passing through barriers that, for the Gothic, is a piece of cake (see, below) [source: “A Song Written in Decay,” 2024].

(artist: Cuwu)

The idea is to learn from our collective but also individual past mistakes; re: “to dominate us through its own victims”; e.g., Jadis dominating me and me revisiting the grave of our relationship to ruminate on our abuse as something exchanged between us, them to me:

Weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma. I don’t wish to hide the fact that I loved and made allowances for my abuser because I most certainly did (and still am always reminded of that, through these rememories of them). Nor do I wish to change them, after the fact. That only happens when they decide to (and until then, they simply take and take, having no reason to change). To my most antagonistic abuser (the most Hurtful Abuser Award actually goes to Zeuhl, oddly enough), I merely wish to leave some parting words as we begin our segue into the sorts of monomythical forms you were doubtless inspired by when brutalizing me (source: “Escaping Jadis; or, Running Up that Hill,” 2024).

Only by interacting holistically and repeatedly with the past as “past” can we build devices to play with and prevent the same old mistakes on a systemic level

[31] Escape of the maze, in Gothic, happens inside itself.

[32] The radiative aura that faeries classically exude, used to paralyze the recipient(s) witnessing it. In regal terms, it could be called “majesty” but often likens to a vain, drug-like torpor not unlike vampires and their own seductive charm.

[33] Per the master/slave dynamic, which in Gothic, is often code for more prurient activities demanded by rulers of their slaves; e.g., “kneel” = “suck my cock.” They’ve come to be the rulers of you all!

[34] Though given her secretive nature—and tendency to write what, for all intents and purposes, is torture porn—I’d hazard to guess that ol’ Radcliffe probably experienced more than her fair share of wet nethers!

[35] Extending to royals not expected to produce a male heir to the throne; i.e., aristocratic privilege, romanced in Gothic fiction since Walpole and through the chronotope as saturated with such promises: of sex and force from a dynastic hereditary standpoint (re: Bakhtin). In short, power is measured in space and time through marriage as traceable through motion as much bloodline, the two hardly separate in Gothic stories throwing them into dis(re)pute!

[36] Generally through sacrifice during quid pro quo.