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.
Dark Xenophilia, part two: “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit”; or Magic, Drugs and Acid Communism (feat. the Monstrous-Feminine of Magic Girls, Unicorns and Xenomorphs)
And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall
Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
—Grace Wing Slick; “White Rabbit,” on Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow (1967)
Picking up where “Dark Xenophilia, part one: Monster-Fucking and Furry Panic” left off…
Part two continues our look at learning from nature in dark xenophilic terms of sexuality and gender as animalistic, gradient, anthropomorphic and fluid; i.e., from cradle to grave, childhood to adulthood and beyond. It explores drugs as a recursive, cyclical means of opening and expanding the mind to challenge Capitalist Realism (and its cancerous expansions): with acid Communism offering a dark Communist, Pagan and witchy/monstrous-feminine empathy to offset fascism’s radical apathy—the series of enchantments that only appear under the influence of otherworldly forces; i.e., called “drugs” nowadays, but also “poetry” and “art” having a similar liminal, often biomechanical (animate-inanimate) mind-opening affect! No one is immune when exposed to such forces, good or bad!
Our exposure of them (therefore ourselves) isn’t to seek desperately but by trusting in what we see that others mistake for chattel to tokenize and exploit; i.e., empathy is built at least partially on trust, which fascists destroy. We give and take fairly to develop what needs to develop for us to both survive and all-out thrive in a post-scarcity world: magic as xenophilic poetics, therefore radical labor changing how we think. In abjecting us, the state has made us powerful within their own system, which we can reclaim through our Aegis breaking theirs to dust, beckoning you follow us “rabbits” into Hell: “Hey, bunny!” as Jan Švankmajer’s titular Alice says. Follow the rabbit, white or black; follow the alien whore/profligate sinner as animalized and mystical drug dealer/dealer of drug-like sex and alterous factors!
(artist: Vana)
That is, using drugs per Stuart Mills (on Fisher) is—at least at first—a symbolic gesture; i.e., one that expands our minds away from the rigid, inflexible (thus intolerant) state of existence and thought that Capitalism forces on people vs whores/nature; re:
…part of acid communism is the means to fulfil Fisher’s desire to imagine the future. […] 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).
We’ll confront acid Communism later in the subchapter—meaning after we’ve given some examples to follow (the rabbit); i.e., starting with general animal mascots (next page), but also Sailor Moon, The Last Unicorn, and Alien (among others; e.g., Brave and Nimona, exhibit 56d1/2): as whorish means of profound redistribution!
Our white-to-black rabbits and their “special medicine” extend to any animal and color you could think of; e.g., a blue fox (or combinations, below); i.e., fetishes partially obscured, but also showing during the cryptonymy process reversing abjection through the whore’s revenge. Said medicine educates monstrous-feminine alternatives to Cartesian dogma, thus challenging its built-in desires to dominate nature through fear of anything else; i.e., “drugs are bad for you unless you pay for legal versions” being a warlike anthem chanted by the guardians of Capitalism (and its cancerous War on/with Drugs) against nature as a whole; re: a whore to pimp, thus rape, for profit out of revenge (through the usual tools’ trifectas, monopolies and qualities built for those aims)! Anytime we speak to/about black rabbits, then, we’re talking about/with dark xenophilia as something to encourage; i.e., they’re synonymous!
(artist: Vana)
In short, we’ll be following increasingly black (whore-like, radical and alien) rabbits from white—first looking at magic girls and unicorns in children’s and YA fiction, before considering acid Communism and adult forms more directly through poetic, rock ‘n roll counterculture as tied to older rebellious movements; e.g., Jim Morrison, William Blake, and yes, xenomorphs and their surreal, angry and rebellious liminalities: the whore’s paradox and revenge being two sides of the same terror language (and dreams) to reclaim by playing with “rape” and sodomy during ludo-Gothic BDSM!
- Home Base: Teaching Children about Animals, Magic and Sex (Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll)
- Halcyon Days; the Idylls of the Magical Queens-to-Be (feat. Sailor Moon)
- Approaching Our Teens, or Portents of the Doom Bun before The Last Unicorn (feat. Nimona, Brave and Darby O’Gill)
- “Magic Do as You Will!”: On the Cusp of Adulthood; or, Teenage Unicorns Following Rabbits (feat. The Last Unicorn)
- Continuing the Easter Egg Hunt: Derelict “Antiquity” (reprise, and Neo-Gothic Orientalism as a Foreign, Irrational Exotic to Pimp)
- Paradise Lost; or, Chasing the Rabbit on a Promethean Quest/during a Faustian Bargain (acid Communism reprise; feat., Jim Morrison, Blake, Rimbaud, etc)
- The Return of the Black Rabbit (feat. Giger, Metroid, Medusa, Giygas)
- Approaching Catharsis; or, the Whore’s Revenge Where Said Wrongs Once Occurred
- Closing Thoughts: On the Justice of Roosting Rabbits (and onto Zombie Malls Where Rabbits Are Sold)
Home Base: On Teaching Children about Animals, Magic and Sex (Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll)
First and foremost, educating children about animals, magic and sex (drugs, and rock ‘n roll); i.e., as the starting point to chasing bunnies. While it might seem rather straightforward to separate totems and general “magic” from drugs, pornography and queer transformation (say nothing of the persecutory trauma that accompanies them), the act is easier said than done. For starters, the act of anthropomorphizing magic animals—specifically to teach children about the world around them—is a common facet of children’s literature (and oral cultures) as a whole: girls and children in general something to exploit by exposure to dogma in ways we camp inside of themselves; i.e., through reclaimed animals, nudism and educated peril and morals of an acid Communist sort, thus sex as something to communicate in ways that are healthy for children to absorb at a relatively young age: about life and death, consent and coercion, rape and rapture, etc, pushing towards Gothic maturity to see what others do not (I once sat on a day-long train ride next to a blind woman who raised wolves; it was an eye-opening conversation)!
(exhibit 56a2a: Artist, top left-and-right and bottom-right: Tohupo; bottom-left: Foxinajacket; bottom-middle: Kiu Wot. Animals commonly attach to children’s literature, lending them a didactic air with a slightly magical quality tied to nature [and implied drug use]. This is hardly sexual by itself, though there is room to suggest sexual content in the thin line between YA-material and more prurient suggestions; i.e., Tohupo’s Mrs. Neeba lending herself a strong “Mother Goose” vibe despite being sexually expressive to a lesser degree, compared to Kiu Wot’s illustration being more overtly sexual [mommy in the bedroom]. This “sliding scale” is regularly invoked through the poetic treatment of animals and magic in any educational work; i.e., including sex education as something being taught to some degree in many children’s stories: animal mommies don’t wear pants/do wear clothes that make them cryptonymically seem naked and anatomically correct/neutered, and animals flop cutely and listen to each other’s problems/show each other our butts. We do so to say hello/communicate love and trauma [re: Victoria, exhibit 52g1a] versus status-quo variants outing the colonizer doing the same basic gesture in bad faith: showing us their ass; i.e., as something that gives them away during the accidental [for them] code switch! The ass on the Aegis as the Aegis can hurt to feel good, or talk about pain with pain as a corrupt data of all different kinds!)
(exhibit 56a2b: Model and artist, left: Maybel Syrup and Persephone van der Waard; right: Tohupo. This piece concerns the value of human life expressed anthropomorphically via Don Bluth’s The Secret of Nimh‘s 1982[1] dark fantasy vis-à-vis Mrs. Brisby’s sexy-widow-meets-Little-Red-Riding-Hood schtick; i.e., how Capitalism makes us feel small and abused/assigns sexual values [and predator/prey elements] to us, and how we as marginalized workers might mix-and-match different positions of power [the dominant and the submissive] during ludo-Gothic BDSM: through animals of different sizes like the rat and mouse, but also kayfabe Red Scare themes on the same bodies trying to endure—by expressing chattelized/verminized survival in ancient animalized theatre forms [with the 1970 Secret of Nimh having a similar mad-science critique/rebellious undercurrent to 1972’s Watership Down—a story we’ll return to in Volume Three].
Such attempts include through drugs-and-sex hauntologies, but also parental themes that carry/cross over into a lycanthropic nature/nurture and predator/prey half-real game across media at large; re: Mrs. Brisby being a brave mommy to seek protection from, but also sex/comfort in liminal, drug-like ways! Such ideas [and two-spirit peoples—trans, intersex, and non-binary] go back not just hundreds of years, but to the literal dawn of time; i.e., to a time and headspace where such things like animals, food, rape and war weren’t separate but hauntologically reinvoke from the Middle and Early Modern English periods, onwards [re: Chaucer’s Miller]!
For example, when Robert Burns turned over a mouse’s burrow, he wrote a little poem for the creature empathizing with her plight; i.e., “On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785” aka “Of Mine and Men”:
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal! [source].
The poem, far from preaching Humanity’s innate superiority, laments the damage its de facto stewardship cause other animals, of which—no matter how great or small those are—have value in Burns’ eyes [a common theme in British Romanticism].)
This animalized tutelage also extents to the children themselves and their developing bodies and identities (and desire for sex/comfort from parental/protector figures): as “magical,” invoking elements of queer expression tied to the natural world as increasingly drug-like and erotic; i.e., not with explicit drugs (though we’ll talk about that in a bit) but a “drug-like” means of activating queer expression that magically transforms one’s physical body and gender identity in fantastical, spell-like language and childlike imagination. The animal is an important part of this process; i.e., many children befriend animals and establish close bonds with them, expressing asexual relationships through artwork that says as much about themselves as it does the animal(s) they’re relating to. In other words, the totem, “furry” or chimera, etc, are expressions of the self as part of the natural world, which allows for (a)sexual expression of the artist in animalized ways (which is not the same thing as having sex with the animals they correspond with).
The larger process generally starts from an early age and continues into adulthood. In queer circles, authors transmute the kid-friendly approach of children’s literature by treating talking animals[2] and “magic” specifically as queer signifiers/de facto educators of sex positivity (and universal liberation) at large. While the notion of sexuality- and gender-as-identity have only materialized under Capitalism within the past two centuries or so, their current position within it nevertheless invokes magical legends and queer ideas of sexuality and gender that are much, much older than the modern world. While trans, intersex and non-binary people have existed since the dawn of time, only under Capitalism has their gender-non-conforming struggle had to be expressed linguo-materially on the receiving end of systemic exploitation and genocide!
(artist: Vana)
In turn, magic, drugs and transformation are useful towards expressing and subverting these xenophobic struggles in xenophilic language; i.e., without making them seem endlessly tormented and immiserate, through furry panic. In short, the goal of said magic is joy at becoming your true self over time; i.e., in a world—or in helping experience/develop a world—that won’t persecute you for being different; re: in ways closer to nature as something to love and respect, not rape for profit (not even if they seem dark and scary/suffused with Numinous energies, but also sluttier elements, above): “magic girl’ speaking to a position of power to regress to as much being an assigned vulnerability by the state, mid-witch-hunt!
While queer abuse is important to discuss and convey in undead-demonic language, it’s also vital to humanize nature itself as part of the equation; i.e., as something to treat humanely by human stewards of nature. Often this happens through a relationship with nature as queer-coded; i.e., happening through the eyes of a child simply being themselves within the natural-material world. While the image of Dorothy Gale leaps to mind—skipping cheerfully along the Yellow Brick Road with the Scarecrow, Tinman and Cowardly Lion—we want to express the importance in treating queerness as an iconoclastic mode of existence fueled by magic and drug use to chase rabbits we not only befriend, but become (to “go native”): to thwart the revenge of state pimps policing nature-as-whore.
After all, the “friends of Dorothy” (early LGBTQ symbols colonized by token fags) only helped the God-gifted Kansas farmgirl—already touched by magic but afraid of nature (“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”)—generously return home through monomythic force to her family’s farm; re: after killing a witch because the local patriarch “asked” them to (with laws being poorly-disguised threats administered by state rulers and carried out by state cops, including witch cops of all ages—more on this in Volume Three)! If the drug-addled fate of Judy Garland is any clue, we need to do far better—one, to honor her memory as someone hounded and abused by studio executives (re: forcing drugs into her system, breaking her body and mind alike); and two, to serve/save ourselves: as members of the Young-at-Heart becoming nature’s stewards standing against profit during the whore’s revenge chasing the rabbit. This “land back” approach happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which requires doing so in ways all workers historically have failed at (which includes Indigenous Peoples tokenizing under duress through treaties the White Man routinely breaks, and people of color selling out, too).
To avoid the pitfalls of menticide, then, we’ll start with magic girls who are closer to the mark, thus childhood; i.e., regarding queer-positive representation as openly stated within the narrative (unlike Hobbits or even vampires, which both tend to obscure queerness within medievalized ideas of courtly love [re: rings and giving them] or sodomy rhetoric): the magic-girl, monstrous-feminine heroines of Sailor Moon, aimed at educating children; re: about magic and genderqueer sex and identity through monstrous theatre with innate camp built in!
To it, queerness starts from innocence as something to regress to, and interrogate the rabbit (a lure). As damsel-and-detective sex demons, we’ll trace that circuitry on the usual golems and castles-in-the-flesh, going from witches to unicorns to aliens. First up, Sailor Scouts!
Halcyon Days; the Idylls of the Magical Queens-to-Be (feat. Sailor Moon)
Note: We looked at Sailor Moon earlier with Harmony and me. We’ll focus here on the making of the show and its utility when teaching kids how to be queer from an early age; i.e., when growing into emotional, Gothic and sexual maturity as a riddle not starting from adulthood looking backwards (we’ll get to that, too)! —Perse
(exhibit 56b: Top-right-to-top-left-to-bottom-left: samples from the “magical girl” anime, Pretty Cure! As provided by Angel [who runs a fanzine for the show called the Precure Forever Zine—a digital charity zine benefiting Voices of Children, available for preorders as of February 2023]; top middle and everything else: Sailor Moon. Sex education commonly happens through fantasy stories; i.e., about magic girls investigating their changing bodies and developing genders under crisis: policed by the world around them.)
Sailor Moon has been queer-coded since its inception and historically aims at young white-to-Japanese women (the manga originally penned by Naoko Takeuchi, a highly-educated[3] Japanese woman; i.e., educated outside of just being one of the most famous/accomplished manga artists of all time). Following this, the show has retained a strong genderqueer/questioning element and following all around the world; i.e., flourishing mid-struggle despite syndicated American localization censoring the queer elements by making Uranus and Neptune “cousins” (the preference of sanctioned incest and pedophilia being a common neo-conservative tactic). So while Sailor Moon targets tweens, its “puppy love” and childhood innocence material less steers readers towards a heteronormative existence and more explores feelings of “descriptive” sexuality and Satanic gender fluidity!
Furthermore, the show’s colossal popularity and seemingly endless longevity only leads to fanbases that go on to sexually mature and fantasize erotically about inhabiting and enjoying the show’s characters (next page)—not as teenagers to exploit by adults but as younger versions of their former selves that fans identify with over time as also having grown up!
To this, the erotic treatment of Sailor Moon and its magic-girl heroines isn’t limited to cis-het men in that respect. “Get ’em while they’re young” is certainly something that neoliberal privatization takes quite literally—surreptitiously effacing anything queer except the most homo-/queernormative elements to try and keep American consumers (and their overseas counterparts) cis-het from a young age onwards:
The first queer couple I encountered in anime was censored. Most kids who grew up in the ’90s are aware that in its original form, Sailor Moon‘s Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus aren’t actually cousins, but were instead a lesbian couple. The homophobic revision of these characters is so blatant it makes rewatches of the dub absolutely comical. This wasn’t the only revision the Sailor Moon dub made to the source material for the sake of censorship. Zoisite, an early villain who is an effeminate gay man in love with fellow villain Kunzite, is changed to a female character. Given Uranus’ butch persona, they may have wanted to do the same with her. Uranus is rarely if ever depicted in feminine clothing save for when she’s in her Sailor Scout form, rendering the possibility of portraying Neptune and Uranus as a straight couple nigh impossible (source: Austin Jones’ “Sailor Moon and the Complicated History of Queer Gender Expression in Anime for Girls,” 2020).
But the same is also true of sex-positive introductions to the magic girl trope (and various other nature-oriented egregores); i.e., to a young audience in an educational way that extends to adults whose own education is lacking about GNC people; e.g., Sailor Uranus was originally written as intersex—having both genitals and being able to swap them at will (ibid.).
Such sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll speak to animals in nature, but also appear in Gothic fiction—meaning with phallic women, Athena-androgyne (stereo)types and the Medusa “snake moms”/Archaic Mothers, etc; i.e., those similar to the Sailor Scouts having the whores’ revenge in less furious but no less transgressive ways (any trespass is unwelcome, thus attacked by state defenders upholding capital and its qualities, moderate or not). In canonical stories, their “horns” can always be monomythically severed, said castration taming the woman—as a magical object of man’s desire (extending to token parties, inside the Man Box)—whereas male entities “die” once castrated (no accounting for eunuchs, of course, nor intersex people; i.e., the latter often wrought with morphological trauma tied to their genitals as operated on: without their consent by over-corrective doctors; re: Victoria, exhibit 52g1a).
But a second opinion lingers—one cryptonymically showing and hiding things the state will try to tokenize and destroy when magic girls refuse to assimilate, thus not do as they’re told. Simply put, fans aren’t stupid; they learn from those they identify with, not wanting those beings to be censored at all and fearing/ridiculing proponents of censorship for doing just that (silence is genocide). For example, most cis-het or closeted/out lesbian girls are not only aware of the Sailor Moon queerness and censorship; they even make fun of the whole “cousins” thing (Farmer Smith’s “Sailor Uranus and Neptune: Gay Couple NOT Cousins,” 2020); re: we camp canon because we must!
Conversely most straight dudes (white or not) have no fucking clue—only make fun of the show or drool over its (originally teenage) cast like poster girls “made just for them.” To do so is to colonize Sailor Moon, treating its cast (and fandom) like chattel that exclusively serve heteronormativity in sex-coercive ways; re: not just the Man Box, but the Male Gaze extending to token parties (male or not). It’s prescriptive and that prescription must be challenged during oppositional praxis, including the liminality that pornographic expression reliably supplies; re: as fans grow up into these GNC franchises:
(exhibit 56c1: Middle, artist: Persephone van der Waard; everything around it from the top-middle-to-top-left-to-bottom-left-to-left-bottom-middle: Artnip; bottom-middle: Midna Ash; top-right and bottom-right: Soon2Bsalty. As usual, it’s possible for different groups to like the same thing at once for different reasons; e.g., cis-het men, teenage girls and queer people—all liking Sailor Scouts as boy-crazy magic-soldier alter egos navigating a city-pop hauntology and demonic rituals of monomythic courtship—but again, for different reasons on and off the same half-real stages: to either fight for universal liberation/walk away from Omelas, or install new children to torture and steal from into future models of capital pimping nature as monstrous-feminine whore; e.g., AI [and tech bros] being the Pirates of Silicon[e] Valley come home to goon [shaming and policing the slut for giving men boners]!
(exhibit 56c2: Model and artist: Mei Minato and Persephone van der Waard; left [AI generated]: Civit AI. While AI-generated “art” and porn reduces popular characters to a series of keywords and AI parameters, these personas can be “worn” by real persons with real bodies, passions, jobs and hobbies; e.g., Sailor Venus from Sailor Moon. Earlier exhibits showcased Harmony and I through this process, in “Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress.” Now we’ll look at Mei Minato casting a similar spell of profound liberatory power!
Packing a massive booty/meat-packing plant and even bigger heart, Mei is a foreign national veterinarian who loves animals, but also rocks her amazing body and makeup during brothel espionage; i.e., while doing alter-ego sex work online: the magic girl all grown up and kicking ass [reclaiming her means of production beyond factory nostalgias, which Marx and Socialist Realism mostly limited to larger mechanical factories/male labor versus working girls and women’s work].
All of these factors make up who Mei is without reducing her to a product/piece in a bigger commercial puzzle. Likewise, her amazing booty and tight, little “innie” coochie conveys a de facto “pornstar” bod whose “realism” is more an industry standard conducted through the creation of sexual difference that nevertheless can reflect holistically upon workers during liminal expression; i.e., with bodies that fall naturally within that standard to subvert it: the body of the nubile maiden, both infantilized and hyperbolically sexualized in ways that historically cater to white male chuds and token parties policing their betters’ avenues of appetite.
Furthermore, the notion of post-natal bottom surgery is a concept whose body dysmorphia/gender dysphoria can apply to different women across the board; i.e., in the porn industry’s frontier liminalities into YA media and back again: any whose crotches lack the “Barbie Doll” look/requisite female genitals, and wherein the “Barbie Doll effect” is labioplasty expected towards female workers pushed to surgically alter their bodies to cater to the status quo. Or conversely those who naturally fall into the status quo potentially feeling alienated from other workers: for being different from other pussy types, for example, hence placed onto a “pretty privilege” pedestal for having the Pussy of All Pussies [heavy lies the crown] or Ass to End All Asses [above]!
This, in turn, comes with its own double standards, assigning the owner “power” by virtue of cliché, harmful notions of feminine kinds; e.g., the dumb blonde, ideal tradwife, perfect girlfriend, catgirl, schoolgirl, and ostensibly tight virginal pussy during sex, etc; re: “We are all animals, my lady!”
[artist: Blxxd Bunny]
A similar manicuring of their crotch extends to clothing as often expected; i.e., wherein the basic idea is fine but historically-materially becomes shamed through deregulated commercial practices that treat the owner’s “lawn” [the front and the back/ass crack, left] as something to maintain by virtue of it being someone else‘s property/plumbing to police; i.e., God’s Paradise operating through fractal recursion—the customer extending to patron, director and shareholder as tyrannical entitlement on the same Great Chain of Being [which the Medusa and her rabbits level through Numinous offshoots, also left]. To combat this, “pussy verisimilitude” offers a different kind of realism than what’s enforced through Vitruvian industry standards; e.g., the gynodiversity of public hair on the pantied camel toe as a kind of artistic accessory that can be easily applied or removed like a merkin.
Together with Sailor Moon and the catgirl aesthetic, my subversion is liminal and composite among friends; i.e., not a raw fearful image of the catgirl from the moon[4] [Artemis being the virginal huntress associated with the moon to sight her prey with as much as its size and light being a symbol of female hysteria] but a child-friendlier variant experienced through Sailor Scouts; i.e., collectively reviving Medusa, onstage and off: the Leveler Dark Rabbit pulsing ominously behind white sparkly goodness and neoliberal hyperreality [and one whose overt sexuality and confident nudism will thoroughly ruffle the feathers of American Puritanism at home and on the world stage]. The shared goal, then, is to challenge the American-brand of “weeb” rape culture in the process, while also celebrating Mei [and all Sailor Scouts] for being an awesome person. She rocks!
To it, Mei Minato is a real person with real struggles inside-outside the porn industry—with her having been doxxed by “fans” for her daring to moonlight; i.e., as a sex worker [with women deduced to singular roles to limit their capacity while also pushing them towards financial dependency on men/tokens and the state]. She’s both incredibly kind—helping people and animals—and has feelings and stories about the work that she does on- and off-camera; i.e., her content helps pay for her tuition, but is “to also have fun, de-stress and build self-confidence” as she navigates and negotiates the larger world: as hostile to her endeavors, trying to cage her magic!
Meanwhile, the hyperreality of the pornstar body is that Capitalism shapes AFABs/GNC bodies into a Barbie Doll egregore it can enslave; re: to cater to male/token consumers inside Plato’s Man Box: as future soldiers and enforcers of the colonial binary who are owed sex of a particular type. With the flood of AI stealing labor to draft this likeness in perpetuity, the image of the Barbie Doll body has flooded the market with pirated imagery that includes the likeness of various models and artwork; i.e., as smashed together by software abused by entitled tech bros [white or not[5]]: the subsequent humanity and its rebellious potential/dialectical-material context having been sucked entirely from the image until it becomes a souless cartoon carbon copy meant to perfect the product, but only cheapen it further than the pre-internet, thus pre-AI porn industry was able. The elite steal from labor as “dead” to them—a process imitated by the middle class pimping magic girls to dance for their delight and coffers aping the elite’s.)
Per Foucault, power and resistance are to be found in one-and-the-same place; i.e., on the surface of the image as consensually ambiguous sans context. All the same, the tendency to make things “fucky” is a common source of humor in fandom circles (ProZD’s “peachette,” 2019). When broached through the language of magic girls animalized, sex education reflects upon the liminality and progression of the human body as something that matures central to the narrative unfolding!
Again, fans grow up; they experience mounting sexual desires through their bodies and identities as things to grow into, often through increasingly ace-to-erotic expressions thereof. A kind of sexual adventure that starts small, porn is prone to escalate as people discover and unlock their true potential as (a)sexual beings. It involves the very monsters sold to them since childhood; i.e., magic animal personas that “grow up” alongside them (exhibit 56c1/2)—less as things children shouldn’t become and more what they identify as despite heteronormativity’s canonizing camp. The rebellion becomes hermeneutically broad; i.e., occurring merely by workers expressing themselves in sex-positive ways, and whose synthesis the state will pimp, hence brand as subversively pornographic: to punish “its” naughty little girls (of any age) for making nature “untame” once more; re: on her Aegis as something to reflect the state’s supremacy onto itself through the dialectic of the alien self-reporting the usual weirdos! “Girls do get it done!” and there’s more than one way to skin a Nazi-to-white/token-moderate cat by flashing your own kitty’s Dark Aegis!
(artist: Mei Minato)
Let’s further unpack this; i.e., as the hybridity of porn and magic girls—as monstrous-feminine beings of nature with undead or hellish components—can become performatively complicated. Equally complex, then, is the trademarked expression of nature through neoliberal media pushing towards darkness and dark doubles (the black rabbit); i.e., as presenting children with a cartoon idea of what the world even is, all while exploiting the planet behind a smiling and kid-friendly façade; e.g., Disney and its own generational bigotry/whitewashes policing whores and apologizing for toxic love/rape culture as historical-material in its recursive fractals (more on that, in Volume Three)!
In keeping with Sailor Moon, though, this grandiose and globalized charade often dresses up in fantastical language tied to human bodies “of nature and the cosmos”; i.e., as things that grow and develop under enforced parental supervision as a metaphor for state power policing nature as gay alien. Any “gateways” that potentially delineates from state interests (the rebellion of magic sluts fighting state spectres in slutty drag, left) will be policed, their iconoclastic iterations discouraged through force; i.e., sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll—the magic girl as doorway to a Promethean mode of animalized existence beyond capital and its chattelizing aura’s awful Realism (which only weakens when the state sheds its disguises)!
(artist: Rae Moon)
First, the entire class of “magic girls” inhabits the natural world as alien—i.e., one to convey through magic-tinged, drug-addled “fairy dust” language being the very things to defend in the frankest of terms—but also by expressing the defenders, themselves, as honest, good-faith extensions thereof! Such meta actors belong to nature and uphold it from corrupting forces, but “corruption” means many different things during oppositional praxis; re: it’s not a bug but a function of code during the cryptonymy process; e.g., Sailor Moon’s mythical pubes (above)!
The basic, iconoclastic vein of Sailor Scouts, Bowser-Peaches and “thicc” unicorn furries, then, is not so different from the classic fawn, satyr or nymph (then or now): to subvert heteronormative prescription tied to “body policing” as administered by powerful, white men/tokens, Athens onwards. While the Patriarchy fears many things, they fear nature, most of all; i.e., as being outside of their control within their own slave markets. Defending those, they will dehumanize whatever bodies, genders and sexualities they associate with nature; i.e., as something to pimp on a spectrum: beings outside their vision of an orderly universe taming the wild whore and breeding her for that purpose.
This extends to whatever elements help form the bonds; i.e., any required to commune with nature as untame while being pimped in bad faith: magic or drugs as things to be “on” in ways to fear and shame. By comparison, the iconoclastic worker—often from an early age—favors natural-material expressions of universal body positivity and sex-positive BDSM, kinks and monsters conducive to ending Omelas for good. Doing so, they relate with natural demons, but also the magic or drugs that invoke them; i.e., as part of the natural-material arrangement of things to camp canon with. Under their influence, practitioners weave in other components that describe the human condition as it applies to them through fan favorites.
In other words, nature is a common starting point when introducing children to sex through media; i.e., the birds and the bees, if you will, which often involves material elements of a decidedly criminalized sort (which all work is; re: all work being universally sexualized, but whose liberatory dialogs speak with/to more overtly sexualized forms of work, like the Sailor Scouts own fabulous kayfabe).
Crime—as something articulate through state instruments pimping nature as monstrous-feminine—leaves an unnatural, Gothic footprint: the graveyards, castles, and other human structures that advertise the historical-material presence of a heteronormative order furthering abjection. Be it of the church/state or corporate bodies, this order survives beyond the natural lifespan of animals or plants by dominating nature inside its own ghosts of rape; i.e., as an idea to express in relation to itself, but also coming out of the civilized world: “Alice” going back into a hauntological idea of the dreaded anti-home’s neo-medieval imposter zone (with Caroline Jones following a black cat, below—same idea as a rabbit: chasing the witch’s familiar back to wild nature and the Gothic anti-home as reclaimed/turned into a wicked stepmother’s hunting grounds/bowels of the Earth and underworld conjoined, mid-unheimlich).
Simply put, canonical children’s media positions “nature” as threatened by corrupting forces dressed up in abject language “neither here nor there”: the riotous voices of the unheard, reduced to a dark, external wailing of the dead and of chaos to dialectically-materially canonize, thus reject the madness of a middle-class Don Quixote (re: Radcliffe’s heroism). Except, while magic and drugs can put you in touch with cute, talking animals or horny fawns (e.g., Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006) doubled by the state—meaning for liberals and sex pests to author and latch onto as much as curious children (re: Gaiman, above)—these can also send you magically to places where trauma has gathered and stayed: Hell, but also the underworld, or states of exception where the state’s victims are abused, then buried in the here-and-now’s hereafter come home!
The problem, here, is that canon doesn’t protect children or nature because the state is antithetical towards doing so. Therefore, it cannot acclimate children to consensual aspects of sexuality and gender through natural demons; re: Neil Gaiman, author of Coraline (above) is a sex pest protected by the system expecting him to appear in his own work for decades; i.e., Coraline‘s scapegoat usage of “Other Mother” demonology treating the categorization as an “adult” word—one that generally carries “evil” connotations in centrist language, and which spills into outright persecution in reactionary circles Gaiman (and his evil wife) contribute towards.
Genocide is half-real and dualistic, like an historical-material effect; during genocide, the state will deny involvement in favor of a given material arrangement supplied through fear and dogma like Gaiman’s: drugs and magic are bad because they turn you into monsters associated with unspeakable death, sexual degeneracy and violation of the vulnerable and the young. And yet, the witch is exposed through these, speaking to a double standard we fags subvert through our own apotropaic function anisotropically defending the black-rabbit witch in duality from Radcliffean DARVO obscurantism policing the whore by blaming the whore!
Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM chasing rabbits to learn from them, minus the prescribed harm. And yet, under these conditions, confronting death by merging it with the natural-material world is seen as entirely “unnatural”; i.e., unbefitting of a children’s “proper” education, the ghost of the counterfeit something to classically poo-poo by critics of the Gothic (more on this in “The Future Is a Dead Mall”). To it, parental forces will historically and swiftly relegate liminal positions of magic and drug-like sexuality and gender to “darker” monomyth spaces; i.e., whose unwilling occupants they associate with sin, the underworld and a vast “grey area” of degenerate factors; re: Coraline basically being told, “don’t be a whore!”
These prohibitions exclude, but also capitalize on, notions of adulthood as conceptually bound to criminalized activities; e.g., BDSM, porn, and controlled substances, but also scapegoated, anthropomorphized personas that express trauma in ways children are normally “spared” from: the sheer presence of death during linguo-material conflict; i.e., as fundamentally alien to heteronormative tolerance, yet still wedded to said alien’s placenta as the elite’s source of fresh blood the middle class police; re: aping their masters by attacking the ghost of the counterfeit. On either side of the Black Veil, the cop’s victim is always a whore.
Conversely, genderqueer expression seeks to reunite children through these devices gradually but inclusively. It does so, again, through consciously sex-positive attitudes in nature-themed furry art, magic girls and witchcraft chasing rabbits; i.e., in pure and hybrid forms that flow anisotropically against status-quo cultural norms (exhibit 56d2, below). But this uphill battle against the state—re: as a Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial polity in its modular persecution rhetoric—still places the half-real protagonist in the crosshairs of the usual hunters; i.e., who are trained to kill the enemy by branding children as obviously dark and evil (exhibit 56d1, below): a death curse that—for us—takes many animalistic forms. Such “black rabbits” encapsulate female/monstrous-feminine death spirits (exhibit 56e, below), the iconoclast required to investigate and understand these while heading into their teenage years and beyond (towards death administered by the state, Coraline simply another Dorothy Gale)!
Approaching Our Teens, or Portents of the Doom Bun before The Last Unicorn (feat. Nimona, Brave and Darby O’Gill)
To be holistic, then, I want to give some more exhibits before we tackle The Last Unicorn (exhibit 57); i.e., regarding signs of fate (which doom is) that help bridge the gap between children’s magic animal stories and YA media similar to The Last Unicorn (a story about finding love, especially tragic star-crossed love); e.g., Nimona, Brave and Darby O’Gill speaking to the princess as not simply rebellious, but queer-tinged and fairy-like through their transformative power/wish fulfillment and descriptive histories outing state predators scapegoating nature.
In canonical circles, the introduction of overtly abject monsters is often something that “awaits” children as they grow up—less “instantly” transitioning from the seemingly innocent unicorn (and its earthly locales) to suddenly experimenting with drugs (exhibit 60a/60b) and finally pure nightmares like the utterly erotic and surreal xenomorph (exhibit 60e).
As children confusingly transition into adulthood, they will encounter these ideological challenges at the acceptable hour and then be expected to respond; i.e., by monomythically dismissing them outright (through tokenized force), or by guiltily indulging in them through the heteronormative order of purchasing forbidden fruit with stolen labor value (wages); re: we freaks of nature have our revenge by simply existing in visible ways that effect the next generation’s consumption, money or not—of what we produce melded to state doubles, with Alice given our Mad Hatter’s shapeshifting biscuits and tea but these taking the troubling form of the usual suspects: dark animal crackers speaking to obscured danger and proximities with power and power abuse during Halloween scapegoat denialism!
(exhibit 56d: Artist, left: Natesquatch. The black dog or bear is a common, shapeshifting symbol of death that has been co-opted by colonizing forces.
For example, Mor’du from Disney-owned Pixar’s Brave is an undead, cursed animal-king that must be slain; i.e. by a great warrior to reclaim nature from dark, animalistic forces. Disney Villains: the Essential Guide [2020] describes Mor’du in unflattering and frankly villainizing language that justifies monomythic violence against him: “Once a vain and arrogant prince, Mor’du is now a bloodthirsty bear under a terrible spell. Standing over 13 feet tall, he is savage and fiercely strong. Everyone in the kingdom fears bears, but the deadly Mor’du is the most terrifying of all” [source]. The unkindness towards bears as stigma animals touches upon a Western bias commented on by authors like William Faulkner [whose own ancient bear, Old Ben, in “The Bear” (1942), represents a struggle for the hero to identify with nature after killing Ben] or Roger Ebert’s fear of wolves—the latter stoked by Joe Carnahan’s 2012 The Grey [which treats wolves as metaphors for depression within a heroic cult of death struggling against an impossible foe; e.g., Beowulf and the spear-Danes versus Grendel, over a thousand years ago]: “When I learned of Sarah Palin hunting wolves from a helicopter, my sensibilities were tested, but after this film, I was prepared to call in more helicopters” [source: 2012 review].
To that, the usual companies are de facto helicopter parents calling the cops on nature; i.e., as whore victim through their “own” kids crying wolf [or bear] to pimp nature accordingly. As such, Mor’du’s status is equally symbolic in a long tradition of dominating nature as savage barbarian—meaning the struggles of someone being kill-on-sight because that’s how they present in canon; i.e., within the state of exception per centrist, Faustian narratives that throw audiences backwards into a nostalgic fantasyland past: the black penitent bear whore of a gender-swapped Braveheart [an Amazonian Dorothy Gale].
To it, Brave treats untame nature as rapacious, black and corrupt, thus infringing on “civilized” borders defended by a chonky Scottish girl boss/fairy princess named Merida; i.e., whose own moral struggles in a man’s world constitutes her virtue [and encroaching fed-up womanhood viewing her own mother as a bear to poach like Jane Eye in the Red Room’s cryptonymic “Redrum,” above]. Further symbolized by fight or flight from the Radcliffean bear bandit, her underage but blossoming bodily autonomy as “princess” becomes something to preserve from Mor’du’s giant claws [the black death symbol being the usual Radcliffean demon lover threatening defilement of traditional female virtue during bloody murder]!
The usual dualities persist during dialectical-material critiques. And yet, as a damsel-in-distress facing off against Mor’du’s lost humanity post-Faustian bargain, Merida becomes the “brave” white Indian; i.e., by performing a cliché rite of passage normally assigned to men in older times: slapping bears. It’s a gendered Amazon performance geared towards young straight female adults; i.e., as something to achieve in relation to human primacy and hereditary rites by punishing animals to whitewash the chronotope; e.g., the berserk, or “bear coat,” as an anthropomorphic human symbol of “might makes right” status that is obviously bad for the bear as an animal and princess rejecting said animal symbol, but also as a shapeshifting anthromorph onstage and off: the lycanthrope taxidermized by a crossdressing cop!
Except, this can be camped. In the spirit of Star Wars camp, Nimona plays on medieval pageantry like Brave‘s; i.e., in corporatized shorthand to deliberately critique the monomyth’s defense-of-the-realm fervor as state propaganda taught to kids by big movie companies: Gloreth, the golden-haired, girl boss queen, can do no wrong [the statue, below]. Like Eowyn from LotR punching “witches,” mid-kayfabe, she’s a virginal shieldmaiden for a besieged kingdom whose self-righteous legend disguises the fascist nature of state defense; i.e., the police state secretly raping whores!
Inside a retro-future police state [complete with castles, red-eye cameras, and flying cars], Nimona‘s Orwellian political maneuverings play out through a cliché of the medieval tale that predates the science fiction renovations it camps: the duel. The white knight, Ambrosious Goldenloin, inevitably crosses swords with the black knight, Sir Allister Boldheart [the moor as a personified “wolf,” akin to Shylock from The Merchant of Venice and similar modernized hauntologies]. “Any of you should be able to hold the sword—if you earn it; i.e., “a new era of heroes” working for the state under an expanded recruitment umbrella. Within this hiring boom of knights-as-stormtroopers, Boldheart is framed for killing the girl boss of color by an outwardly serene, inwardly treacherous female director/minister of propaganda [a gender swap for Senator Palpatine, wearing Princess Lea’s clothes, next page]: “Gloreth kept the monsters out” and protected the kingdom from alien nature trespassers, white moderacy caving palingenetically to fascism… again.
To it, Nimona is disappointed that Boldheart isn’t a murderer because they want to be his evil sidekick! The film—made by a non-binary director [source: Laura Zornosa’s “The Deeper Meaning Behind Nimona‘s Shape-Shifting Story,” 2023]—presents lycanthropy as a form of gender-non-conformity and queer struggle using neo-medieval language: the queer werewolf/dark knight [“Knights don’t mope; we brood!”]. An Asian man, Ambrosious, is the homosocial, white-armored nemesis of Boldheart and his Darth Vader’s black-armor-and-robot-arm getup—the latter then galvanized, post-betrayal, by a snarky vice character who bashes cops with animalized, shapeshifter magic [while choosing not to murder them].
Sex and gender are a gradient to make gender trouble on; i.e., like my binary trans persona, Glenn the Goblin, Nimona can pick whatever form they want, but choose a shortstack, redheaded Pippi Longstocking with fangs and a penchant for all things “metal.” Whereas Nimona changes shape in a self-infantilized regression that speaks to their lived experiences and brutal kettling by state proponents—eventually morphing into something big and strong [a kaiju] in the face of childhood trauma—Boldheart calls Nimona a monster because they’re ostensibly a girl who not only can change shape but dislikes knights [cops] during reactive abuse: “she’s” supposed to die because knights kill monsters, including witchy queers “who don’t know their place.”
Turns out, Nimona and Gloreth were partners as children, divided by the latter’s fearful family at the sight of magic. The lesson of the narrative, then, is a sapphic, Pagan mistrust of Greater Good government by pushing against established institutions, not simply “corrupt” directors; i.e., the latter’s ability to use 1,000+ years’ worth of ancient misinformation and modern social media [in hauntological forms] to generate marginalized in-fighting by presenting queer rebels as instigating crisis, thus worthy of reprisals by marginalized children who grow into TERFs: taught to be a hero-for-the-state by driving a sword into the heart of anything different; i.e., good versus evil, us versus them. For Nimona, its suicide-by-cop! They lose the will to fight, thus live!
The real villain, then, is state power as a bourgeois shapeshifter demonizing proletarian shapeshifters by “kettling” them: Gloreth’s scapegoat as something to kill, thus return things “to normal.” Threatened with losing control, the director turns the giant, Death-Star-sized cannon against the kingdom, forcing Nimona to intervene—by throwing themselves in front of its salvo: “Go back to the shadow” invoking the abjection process to, sure enough, camp Tolkien! The biggest threat to the people of the kingdom isn’t Nimona, then, the openly queer and shapeshifting magic girl; it’s the functional heiress of a closeted lesbian enforcing state hegemony! The onstage director—being a fascist—rules through misdirection, crisis and fear as something that affects her worse than anyone: her dying words being a slogan that cements her ignominious death tied to state delusions, our resident nutjob tilting at windmills!
Such things are half-real; e.g., whereas Jadis saw diversity as a weakness in establishment politics, Nimona represents diversity as a form of strength: to change shape for more than just survival, but to alter the world around them through empathy as something to establish—not just for one type of queerness but all of them personified within Nimona as a plurality for gender-non-conformity and active rebellion against heteronormative tyranny [e.g., zombies]. Its oppressive, blinding walls and process of abjection become something to join together and riot against, kaiju-style: to let the “monsters” in to expose the true deceivers—our political leaders, but also Capitalism as built to foster their megalomaniacal self-delusions and inequities. Ours. In the end, these weaponized beliefs and blindnesses must, like the kingdom’s castle walls, be disarmed and deconstructed, lest Capitalist Realism and the Capitalocene have us dying like the director does [following in Goebbels footsteps]!)
And while we’ve now looked at magic girls like Sailor Moon, Nimona and Brave (and shortly will be looking at unicorns in YA media), this isn’t to say that one form of monstrous-feminine is “superior” to another when reversing abjection; i.e., in terms of fostering sex positivity and sympathy-for-the-devil education within a holistic Gothic mode: pushing towards death (and black rabbits) by personifying it as a vehicle thereof (the dreaded death coach, next page). However we try to humanize monsters, concerned parental groups aggressively restrict the increasingly abject, trauma-heavy types to specific activities and spaces tied to Nordic and nuclear models; i.e., sending the bizarre, seemingly necrophilic function of overtly undead monsters to “adult” graveyards and Promethean lands of the dead, while relegating the Faustian component of more “hellish,” otherworldly demons to places that children are likewise barred from accessing! A brothel is a brothel, thus full of guilty pleasures speaking to nature and death as alien; i.e., full of many kinds of revenges to be had, mid-harvest (to ring Hell’s bells, left)! Fruit plucked! Harvest humanized!
(artist: Hotsumi)
Yet, the historical-material effect of this policing is segregative regardless if the demons of nature have partially undead and/or hellish qualities; i.e., the pandemonium of natural demons become underexplored and underrepresented in children’s fiction through concrete socio-material forces: reactionaries eradicating open “degeneracy” while colonizing the visually appropriate language they permit in “acceptable” public discourse. They learned it from corporations, parental guidance policing the whore to rape her witch-like status (from G-rated and above; e.g., Snow White)!
As such, terrifying children and horny superstitious middle-class women (re: danger sex with graveyards), Disney proves, is canonically fine if it’s in defense of the status quo[6]:
(exhibit 56e: Darby O’Gill and the Little People was a 1959 movie for children that is strangely terrifying. Then again, the terror is no accident; i.e., Disney uses their tremendous resources to appropriate cartoony versions of Celtic myths, preserving the heteronormative order through literal fear and dogma. The old man, Darby O’Gill, struggles to defend the young and innocent Katie from an imaginary past that is ancient and female—the bean sidhe and its death cries! By confronting and attacking said spirit, Darby faces a ghastly omen of death [a half-real hag to chase down like Don Quixote policing bicycle face]: the “ooooooo” of the demon very “they’re coming to get you, Barbara!” in its abjecting of nature/the druids.
In turn, their brief dance in the town square summons the “death coach,” which appropriately descends from the dark, rainy sky to spirit old Darby away to the land of the dead! It’s intentionally hauntological, reviving these old myths to hold Grampa hostage/superstitiously spook and instill children with a Protestant ethic demonizing Catholicism behind a Black Veil; i.e., in defense of heteronormative sex told through a Disney classic: the fairytale marriage used to fetishize Indigenous populations, but also assimilate them; re: not just the old-timers, but Peter Pan‘s 1954 Tiger Lily and 1995 Pocahontas doing the same exact thing: “kill the Indian, save the man” [or whore/virgin]. Also, I’m thoroughly convinced Disney do shitty remakes of their own canon so they can convince people that their old movies were “good”; they weren’t—the classics having always been racist, sexist and queerphobic—but can be camped!)
A huge part of this selective abuse occurs through active division—one creating and stretching a divide between pornography and art enforced through the insistence of evil, corrupting forces “from nature”; e.g., the bean sidhe or lycanthrope, despite their natural guise, remain dangerous because any dialogs about sex (and nature) from them promote Original Sin; i.e., anything the demon says is wrong because it’s queer by default, thus secretly dark, vile and deserving of total banishment (and death)! Indeed, canonical iterations relegate overt sexuality to adult stories outside of fantasy fictions meant for children, whose own forests are devoid of obvious sex: as something to describe outside the heteronormative, nuclear family model. Indeed, the canonical fairytale is usually quite chaste unless pointedly made “for adults”; i.e., making it a kind of cheap, speakeasy-bake porn with nothing much to do or say but pander in the laziest possible ways to the usual paying status-quo audience: cis-het parents.
Canon-wise, to encircle and ring up these purchases within a host of darker elements is allowed, provided it reasserts the heteronormative order through abject means. This tendency gatekeeps children, preventing them from exploring dualistically nostalgic notions of fairytale language that marry nature-themed creatures to erotic dialogs, but especially pornographic expressions of pain, loss, drug-use and death, as well as gender dysphoria, lurking persecution and exile.
As we’ve already explored, though, monsters are incredibly liminal; so is the queer experience, which often features monsters as contested, pornographic entities to chase—i.e., the presence of “nature” as a sacred, tamed, biblical site that becomes invaded by the forces of darkness through Original Sin, Satanic Panic, and other reactionary arguments’ self-authored black rabbits; re: exploitation and liberation occupy the same poetic spaces, hence the whore’s paradoxical revenge through exposure: the opposite of fetish obscura, nature and the Medusa as notably non-white/thicc PAWG to PHAT people of color! Such medicine cures the poison of capital as normally exploiting us and our peaches, pies and cakes; i.e., as things to reclaim by us through our non-harmful harvesting of them on the Aegis: suggesting degrowth through what we grow exposing the state as inhumane—pimps of nature from childhood to YA to adult stories alike! Any victim is a whore, to some extent, but can become a dark avenger as whore to have the whore’s revenge through paradox and cryptonymy advertising the eating of crackers (so to speak) in bed and out! So we do pull the Black Veil aside to showcase wicked bad naughty Zoot!
(artist: Hotsumi)
Rabbits are historically bred as pets but also for meat, in larger breeds; some rabbits are dark and thicc in ways that speak to their liberation while still enjoying the torment they cause their malnourished onlookers. Speaking to adolescent curiosities about changing bodies and what to expect of nubility (during puberty in terms of actual and idealized bodies in popular media), black rabbits do so in prescriptive and descriptive forms: puberty as scary but also exciting. To it, while material conditions shape social ones and vice versa, we congenital-to-comorbid sluts feel excited at being “born again”; i.e., as de facto witches reclaiming our bodies’ Satanic power from state pimps! All roads lead to Rome? Our heart-shaped landing strips lead to the palace of Queen Maeb!
In turn, the liminality of nubility classically has targets of sexual assault willing themselves to transform; i.e., into something unfuckable, which we can then flip on its head: to be something fuckable (above and below) that abusers can’t fuck, but whose cryptonymy—as behind and on the buffers we use—remain overshadowed by such desires (and buffers) to start with. Keeping with darkness visible, then, such portents of doom are meant to be followed into Hell (re: landing strips); and white or not, power’s power! On the Aegis, though, the chub becomes something to chase, rubbing our enemies raw (to suck their power through our vampiric holes/gaze without giving them what they want—total domination)!
To it, canonical polemics invalidate and ostracize Pagan rites and animalistic egregores, doing so by concentrating and collectively punishing them as “Satanic”; i.e., anything black (not just rabbits or cats), and operating alongside queerly “subversive” examples of natural demons: as lent an undead and/or hellish affect to stress their evil, outsider function; re: by the moral panickers: saying to any who will listen, “Please, think of the modest women and children!” Such corruption arguments tokenize, concerning the youth by “groomer” demons; i.e., poaching the black rabbit, rabbit-on-rabbit, mid-push-pull! Again, it’s very Watership Down.
In turn, all are placed outside the “natural” order of things—canonically being presented in ways that threaten the elite’s staple image of nature as imperiled and alien during virgin/whore mirror syndrome; i.e., by confusing agents whose closeness to the genuine natural world is branded as heretical, but also pornographic as “educational” in lateral, peripheral forms of canon: what your parents (and older, often male siblings) enjoy and keep from you/shelter you from… until you’re on the market, that is, when they pimp you in turn—to suddenly throw you in, head-first and blindfolded (as I was)!
Creating porn as a means of sex-positive expression/universal liberation amounts to the generation of societal boundaries that need to be respected by those establishing them; i.e., it is not an invitation to attack them or “claim” them. As outlined in the manifesto, not only is state-corporate hegemony a gateway to fascism (as Capitalism decays), but fascism is a gateway to assimilative, chattel rape fantasies and worker abuse committed by “heroic” agents: cis-het white men/token agents as false protectors! Often defended by battered housewives (who radicalized from their own abuse), these “husbando” and token “waifu” cops will never, ever have a healthy relationship; i.e., because they treat their partners like unironic masters or chattel slaves (thus food and sex toys). Simply put, they desire and resent them, seeing them as threats to state hegemony but also prizes to claim for being good little cops: mommy and daddy replacements!
(artist: Hotsumi)
So do cops become chasers; i.e., putting the Madonna on a pedestal while having affairs with the Whore’s Maculate Conception. Often, these dark mistresses (and lotharios) are codified in appropriative forms of genderqueer fantasy avatars: thicc women, “pixie dream girls,” femboys, unicorns, gorgons, etc, as bourgeois dogma dualized by proletarian likenesses using the same black-rabbit aesthetic (the sacrifice and the avenger). While these liminal forms of “bait” exist within the state of exception, they aren’t strictly mythical; they’re hiding from monstrous-femicidal forces like Amalthea did from King Haggard’s Red Bull (next page), onstage and off. The onscreen variant offers up demonic allusions to rapacious forms of courtly love: of classically chasing vulnerable women through the forest, forcing them to change into something else[7] to survive the patriarch’s lusty wrath. To it, the lycanthrope (again rabbit or not, female or not) has a topos of power that is as much their ability to transform as it is to attract an unwanted mate and go running scared through the dark forest!
Offstage, power and resistance meet at cross purposes during Pride events. Kink at Pride is a tricky subject, or public nudism in general; even so, they invite gender trouble from reactionaries as much as overt porn. Obviously it should be made available at appropriate ages and in stories that can teach sex and gender to children in language they’ll actually comprehend (exhibit 56a).
All the same, we shouldn’t treat children like fools; i.e., they are smarter than capital gives them credit, absorbing and internalizing ideas at a rapid pace (a common consensus is that children until puberty passively acquire language; they do not learn it). They also grow up and experiment with sex as they age and their bodies mature. They make their own gossip, perceptive pastiche and constructive anger to transform themselves and the natural-material world like Gay Wizards do—as bearers, dwellings and messengers of their own trauma. Of that, the poiesis of their “magic” chooses the form, not them: “Magic do as you will!”
“Magic Do as You Will!”: On the Cusp of Adulthood; or, Teenage Unicorns Following Rabbits
This brings us to the bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story and Young Adult fiction aimed at sexually developing teenagers. For men, this is classically the monomyth. For women, this applies to the Gothic novel out of older rape apologia or legends about rape and courtly love/escape (e.g., Persephone and Hades); i.e., commonly turning women into things a rapist (or their proxy) won’t care for, thus chase. In leaving the safety of Paradise, the Young-at-Heart—from Persephone to Hermia to Dorothy Gale to Madikken to Ripley to Amalthea—speak to the female/feminine side of things, save that Amalthea is monstrous-feminine in magical ways tied to nature-as-alien. She’s a GNC, phallic (“one-horned”) whore/force of nature to capture and turn into a princess—first sent on her way by a talking butterfly (versus a rabbit), and chased over Hell’s half-acre by a fiery Red Bull. This speaks to the fears of approaching nubility that women would classically fear and want to control in Neo-Gothic fantasies, except The Last Unicorn has the gift of queer inclusion, thus foresight: our Lady Amalthea (the bearer of the Horn of Plenty) is queer and alienated (the “last” of her kind, just as Schmendrick is the last of his, the Red-Hot Swamis—from Hindu: a religious ascetic or holy person).
Furthermore, the unicorn is only called “Amalthea” after Schmendrick (whose name is Yiddish for “fool”) turns her into a human girl of courting age; i.e., lending the story a hauntological air of gender trouble and dysphoria/body dysmorphia, mid-metamorphosis, but also jouissant cryptonymy and infiltration: “I’m alive!” while “the world is dying!” as the heroes go into the aging king’s crumbling castle (similar to the Skeksis from Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal of the same year). Hauntologies aside, Beagle’s activist-tinged neo-medieval—he wrote his novel (marketed as sci-fi; source: Baca) in 1968 and the screenplay for the film—is very bittersweet and ontologically trapped between childhood and adulthood; i.e., hiding, fighting and regressing during the cryptonymy process, and the many regrets/surprise joys that come from development and exposure:
(exhibit 57: Screencaps from The Last Unicorn. The unicorn is a creature that, when tamed, loses its horn, thus ability to fight but also be recognized for what it is; i.e., by virtue of “being beheaded,” but keeping its female body as automatically feminine within sexist eyes: “Love is slowing you down.” In short, the unicorn is a monstrous-feminine freakshow attraction, one generally sought out to be tamed and captured on all registers—first the farmer who mistakes her for a white mare, then the old witch who knows better but puts a false horn on her so paying folks can cryptonymically recognize what they’re even looking at, then ultimately held prisoner in the ocean under a haunted castle by a mad king. The last is done by Haggard constantly spying on her and her standing still to hide from him in human form; i.e., “all his spies” versus the classic female refrain that, when extending to the monstrous-feminine as a queer shapeshifting entity [the unicorn as “horned” beast] leads to Amazonomachia yet again: a duel on the beach, fencing with horns to foil the king’s rapacious and steady, Zeus-like advances [the burning abjection process]. As always, the mythic structure provides clues that spell out popularized ideas indicative of capital functioning as it usually does—doing so through the cryptonymy process, mid-chronotope: “to reach the Red Bull, you have to walk through [castle] time!” Very Bakhtinian!)
Though short on the pornographic side of things, The Last Unicorn is a perfectly fine-if-curious YA example of these ideas. Utterly enchanting but strangely bleak, it weds adult themes of death and queer existentialism to fantastical ideas of nature: the ivory image of the unicorn as a beacon of the natural world haunted with the absence of obvious trauma. She isn’t immediately under attack, but feels utterly alone. The animals of the forest are alright, but they aren’t like her. So when she innocently goes looking for what became of the others who are, she finds herself trapped in different ways—first, inside an empty land strangely depopulated of unicorns, then inside a greedy king’s castle as an unwilling fake princess.
If this sounds Gothic, it is, but with a suitably queer twist: not only is the castle is home to demons, the undead, and imprisoned queer folk; but our heroine—the story’s magic girl—is a traditionally queer monster locked inside a body she doesn’t want to inhabit; re: that of a human girl. She feels closer to nature and herself when she isn’t a princess, but having been human for a time misses the prince if not the castle he called home (despite the false father he clung to: “He is no son of mine. I found himself on a doorstep where some peasant had left him. It was pleasant enough, at first, but it died quickly.” The king is a drug lord/addict, addicted to queerness as something to see: “Why can I not see myself in your eyes!” His sickness drains the land, turning “green and soft” into “hard and grey” by a darker half of the king that keeps him prisoner).
Under attack, one will scramble desperately to defend oneself from power abuse. This humiliating desperation and defeat isn’t just from threats of physical death, but identity death. The Red Bull did not want to kill the unicorn, only drive her towards the king in his counting house. Schmendrick—bless him—invokes the awesome power of the Magic to transform the unicorn into an acceptable “beard” that the Red Bull, once-triggered, would not attack; it would deactivate and retreat, leaving the queer party in temporary peace to pursue their quest of gay rescue!
However, the disguise would not last, threatening to alter Amalthea irrevocably forever—to turn her straight, marry the prince, and live happily ever after (“Reader, I closeted myself.”)! In the end, she and the prince do not wed; the Red Bull kills the prince, who the unicorn resurrects. The “happy ending” is that they remember each other with fondness—that she “will remember his heart when men are fairytales and books written by rabbits” (similar to Cuwu and I, our regrets aside, such as those are). She’s the rabbit Schmendrick pulled out of a hat; i.e., in reverse, and—per a revolutionary cryptonymy—concealed inside a human girl who followed the rabbit back to her hutch (“I have done you evil and cannot undo it!”): a closeting of the queer, the rabbit going back into the hat/to Wonderland as an imperfect exile: “At the end of the film, the unicorn triumphs—but she still doesn’t find love?” / “There’s no happy ending. The love story is completely tragic” (source: Ricard Baca’s “Peter S. Beagle Recalls…” 2016). The idea isn’t doom, I would argue, but a curse to navigate as queer people do—in a traveling wardrobe/drag show!
The Last Unicorn, then, is ultimately a tale about trans emasculation and concealment towards liberation as elusive—about queer people being hunted by powerful men and having to hide in ways that invariably draw attention to themselves or make themselves feel dead inside (the subterfuges of which we can/will reclaim in Volume Three, Chapter Five); e.g., during the opening scene, two hunters spare the unicorn’s life and tell her she is the last. Amalthea declares, “What do men know? Just because they have seen no unicorns for a while does not mean that we have all vanished! We do not vanish! We live forever! We are as old as the sky, as old as the moon! We can be hunted, trapped—can even be killed if we leave our forests—but we do not vanish!”
And yet, segregation is no defense; re: her forest is strangely empty (a sexual pun). Men in this story do not know what they are looking at, but still exploit the unicorn as something to chattelize and pimp; i.e., they think she is a white mare versus a unicorn! To it, the most powerful of men hunt and trap unicorns for their delight, doing so by knowing what common men do not; i.e., the unicorns are useful to Haggard and make him happy when nothing else can; re: when he is using them for his delight, as one does a powerful drug but also virgin/whore: “Each time I see the unicorns […] it is like that morning in the woods, and I am truly young in spite of myself!” She’s the last card to collect, completing his collection. Is it any wonder this film is a queer kid’s calling card, there and back again?
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
Everything Haggard touches dies, like a vampire. His servants are Faustian devils and the dry bones of old, drunken madmen (the skull that speaks a Gothic trope, on par with Hamlet: “To reach the Red Bull you have to walk through time. A clock isn’t time, it’s just numbers and springs. Pay it no mind—just walk right on through.” Again, very Bakhtinian). Infantile yet violent, the old king will capture what is his, or kill it if it resists: “The end will be the same.” Instead, the unicorn prevails and the mad old king plunges into the sea, swept away by the tide like mermaid foam.
A story of shattered innocence, The Last Unicorn reminds viewers to beware of those who want to “protect” children; i.e., their harmful lessons teaching men to become like Haggard, thus to colonize love, magic and all things sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (the soundtrack performed by “Horse with No Name[8] [1971] legends, America)—in a heteronormative way that cages gay unicorns like Haggard did; re: by having “unicorns” dance for them the way that the Patriarchy taught them to, and which Beagle critiques by turning Radcliffe monomorphically on her head: by summoning the castle to dismiss Capitalism through Hamlet’s father’s ghost—killing Lir (a nod to King Lear) as Hamlet’s double, to then revive him after daddy Quixote’s dead and gone: to deny the younger squire/Sancho Panza a chance at love, but punishing him with sweet memories having nipped future Patriarchy/nepotism in the bud (“I will miss you; I never had any friends before”).
To it, heteronormativity is social-sexually dimorphic; it also sexualizes everything in coercive, imprisoning ways to enforce the pimp of nature as monstrous-feminine by bourgeois fans and class traitors (actual police, TERFs, weird canonical nerds, etc). As Aristotle once said, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.” Likewise, a little girl in a Baptist family once damned me to Hell because I had long hair (“They grow up so fast!”). At the same time, my seven-year-old nephew—growing up in a trans-friendly household—didn’t miss a beat when he learned that I was trans: “Oh, so Grandma has a daughter now!” All we have to do is kill the covetous King Haggard in the next generation’s hearts, and maybe someday Amalthea and Lir can finally bone!
In other words, gender is a social construct tied to marriage in and out of the nuclear model, but one’s material surroundings inform the (de)construction; i.e., as an ongoing affair towards or away from said model. So if you’re surrounded by people who isolate and bombard you with fear and dogma, you’re going to grow up emotionally and Gothically stupid; you’re going to become the very thing capital want you to be—i.e., those who control the means of production and flow of information, but also regulate the Superstructure through cops; re: as zombified in a manner beholden to shareholders who want consumers to blindly consume predictably. The bourgeoisie want consumers to condition via canonical sex education that hide capitalist abuses around the world in fantasy language and canonical hermeneutics. In turn, fascists deliver naked displays of force in defense of Capitalism as something that decays by design: to defend through force, the Red Bulls to Haggard’s kingdom!
(exhibit 58: Top-left: source. A Nazi is a Nazi, including those who defend them.)
The first casualties in fascist coups are the intelligencia and artists; i.e., as unwilling victims of child-soldier violence. That makes the nature of Gothic Communism not only antifascist, thus fundamentally nonviolent vis-à-vis nature, but something made to defend sex-positive artists from state actors; i.e., from sex-coercive workers (artists or not) working for or endorsing the state through their own terrible art and shitty social movements’ false rebellion, hence violent enfants terribles who grow into stochastic terrorists: the bad-faith counterprotest delivered by violent cowards like Kyle Rittenhouse and the Proud Boys (exhibit 58, above). Beagle presents these rogues, in The Last Unicorn, as outlaws who—far from actually resisting King Haggard meaningfully—are actually conmen that Schmendrick accidently exposes/defeats with his own illusions of Robin Hood: “Robin Hood is a myth; we are the reality! […] That was a dangerous diversion, Sir Sorcerer!” To which Captain Cully and his right hand reward the fledgling wizard by tying him to a tree (“We’ll fill him; we’ll both be gentlemen of leisure in a month’s time!”) and which Schmendrick (our Sancho Panza making a false healing drought) escapes by accidently turning the tree back into a woman—specifically a big-titty grandma whore who tries to rape him (the blind whore’s revenge): “Oh, what have I done? Oh, God, I’m engaged to a Douglass fir! UNICORN, HELP ME!” His golem has wooden boobs, and those hurt! He’s the penis she’s titty-fucking with (echoes of Gulliver’s Travels)!
So don’t be fooled by false acts of contrition from violent LARPers (and token variants); they are the tears of crocodiles. To present oneself as different is to face their wrath—to become a potential target when Capitalism decays and enters crisis, producing zombie killers for the state and undead scapegoats for them to kill (whores policing whores, too: “She shall never have you, the hussy! We shall perish together!”). Likewise, be on your guard; i.e., like a shark waiting for blood, fascists and cryptofascists are waiting for those in power to slip, ready to pounce and take it all for themselves and blame/pimp you as the witch. They must not be normalized enough to feel comfortable; they must be challenged by workers uniting in solidarity against the source of fascism: Capitalism!
Like Beagle’s novel/screenplay about rebellious unicorns, the creative importance of Gothic Communism’s holistic approach is to encourage sex positivity (and asexual appreciation) along a well-used track towards liberation versus enslavement; i.e., one that includes—but does not endorse—the language of violence and war ubiquitous in popular media from the Gothic onwards: an addressal to the existence of anger as a legitimate, constructive force under duress during the cryptonymy process reversing abjection (thus profit) during our whore’s revenge! Rittenhouse is never getting any!
Through common material means of communicating ideas about sex, empathy and emotional intelligence—thus alienation and fetishization—ludo-Gothic BDSM includes a wide variety of “game” performers, students and teachers playing the white-to-black rabbit; i.e., everyday language and linguistic strategies like puns, clichés, metaphors and adages, but also sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (thus harpies and unicorns), as well as Gothic theories by which to pick the lock in duality during liminal expression. So do we actual rebels—like Beagle before us—operate holistically inside veiled fantastical venues! A unicorn is a whore to set free.
In doing so, Gothic Communism desires to entice all working peoples to look through our cryptomimetic methodologies; i.e., our demonic-undead animal cryptonymy as applied poetics, onstage and off: learning from us as we teach within the crosshairs how to generate a social-sexual class consciousness wedded to the virgin/whore, thus culture and race fighting back as Amalthea and her misfit friends do—through naked disguise and prostitution. Everyone likes whores/sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, right? What about horror stories about these things, or art more broadly beyond Beagle or us chasing black rabbits?
You remember Alien, right? Nine Inch Nails? Se7en (re: “Seeing Dead People“)? This glorious phantasm of endless indulgence in forbidden, mind-altering “drugs” also includes queer allies looking at “trippy” stories like Beagle’s; i.e., where past mistakes can stochastically lead to the truth and surprise solutions—what Bob Ross calls “happy accidents” (or funny ones, from Cervantes to Beagle to us): men/tokens are so alienated from nature and whores, they no longer know what they’re looking at, which gives us true guerrillas an edge. Fascists are stupid, farming nature with malice; e.g., Everquest and every “mob” in that game’s own cartographic refrain. “If you listen to fools, the mob rules!” (Black Sabbath, 1981).
Keeping with Ross, anyone can imagine and “paint” a better world through the past as something to rediscover through tragedy and farce. As Giger shows us but also Beagle, the results can be incredibly transformative; i.e., regarding how we think about ourselves in relation to the historical-material world and nature: as something that is not writ in stone, but defined by a dialogic imagination forever in talks/decay and regeneration. To it, history can change through the human condition as something to evolve out of past forms!
This requires something I’ve described before as “learning from the past”; i.e., the Wisdoms of the Ancients as alive and happening within a world far more modernized than Radcliffe could have dreamed by touching upon forms of rebellion she famously shied away from: demons, but also the mentalities of demons as begot from altered states of mind to give back to others, mid-exchange. Indeed, Radcliffe and other Neo-Gothic authors made up (so to speak) an earlier rise of discourse; i.e., towards gender and sexual identity as starting to develop in resistance to older forms of capital similar what Beagle did in the ’80s (and us, in the 2020s). Don’t avoid the rabbit; fuck it to metal, on drugs, worshipping Satan!
As we’ve discussed, much has happened since Radcliffe—requiring current rebels to reconsider a rather old solution that feels quite novel in the present state of affairs: illicit drug use as something to symbolize or encourage through the likes of the unicorn (the white rabbit) or the harpy/xenomorph (the black rabbit); i.e., as a fever dream ode not just about rape and blind-parody sarcasm, but rape play during ludo-Gothic BDSM! To reverse abjection, said BDSM speaks hauntologically but also cryptonymically and chronotopically to sex, drugs and genderqueer rebellion/rock ‘n roll; i.e., as a happy uncontrollable ordeal—one that, sure enough, has a bit of pain thrown in to spice things up during the historical-material trauma loop: someone not to duel over but slay dragons with during the same-old weirdest boner being something to camp by embodying the boner’s symbolic cause!
Egads! The black rabbit strikes again, ravishing us in our dreams while awake; i.e., the Red Bull dropping down to taunt us, like Reptile’s Easter Egg from Mortal Kombat (1993), and just as cryptic: chasing the Numinous rabbit through many Black Veils, peeling these layers (of a black onion) back while the call comes from inside the house (re: the house is alien in ways that speak to predator/prey dualism, during liminal expression)! Let’s continue the hunt!
Continuing the Easter Egg Hunt: Derelict “Antiquity” (reprise, and Neo-Gothic Orientalism as a Foreign, Irrational Exotic to Pimp)
(artist: Kory Cromie)
Speaking of Mortal Kombat and Easter Egg hunts, the Medusa—a black rabbit or not—is concentrically framed; i.e., a Russian bun doll to get to the center of through changing skin (the xenomorph a kind of dark unicorn, but furious and blind, left; re: the harpy whore Celano to Amalthea’s virgin, but “two sides of the same magic” the white unicorn cannot stand to see caged: “She’ll kill you if you see her free!” So be it). I’ll apply this in just a moment to Fisher’s “acid Communism,” but the basic concept is actually a throwback to altered states of mind that hail from a shared imaginary antiquity studied by developing women and homosexual men; re: Radcliffe and Lewis referring to the imaginary “medieval” in regards to their young adult place in an increasingly capitalist world; i.e., where gender identity versus sexual action was becoming a thing the state was canonically policing (re: Broadmoor). With Beagle and beyond, this wasn’t just rabbits, but rabbit hybrids speaking of rape, revenge and necro-erotic fertility/fertilization through surreal chimeras; i.e., like Giger’s xenomorph linked to Orientalism as “dressing Aesop up,” a suit in a suit (with Said writing Orientalism in 1978—three years after Giger’s Necronomicon [of Lovecraft’s “mad Arab”] and a year before Alien, and three before The Last Unicorn).
We’ll get to Stompy in “Return of the Black Rabbit.” For now, let’s unpack Orientalism and similar exotic subspaces speaking to the rabbits enclosures by other names (a “pen” being both a cage and writing device for the bun-in-spirit egregore’s room of one’s own). Keeping with actual drug use flowing poetry on and off the page, prudes like Coleridge certainly imbibed laudanum to inspire themselves (and their habitats) with. But many other authors have done similar inspirational consumption with drug-like poetics and half-real virgin/whore muses.
Leaving a hazy “past” in their wake, we’re left with a surreal procession of pasts and their imperfect authors (re: Schmendrick’s Robin Hood echoing Hamlet’s father’s ghost, but also Titania’s fairy train) that we, as genderqueer people, can learn from; i.e., when finding our own non-exclusionary voices: liberating nature as alien, dead, monstrous-feminine whore, mid-exploitation—with Orientalism and Neo-Gothic as modular but often overlapping through cognitive dissonance: when the rubber meets the road and the road is rocky/the dark forest speaking to past crimes but also dark whores met with transformation and pain, mid-exchange. Illusions can trap or free the mind, just like Schmendrick!
This invariably involves encountering similar, but unique scenarios that cover up, imitate and parody even older scenarios; i.e., not just “fatal” portraits, but “dead poets” reciting the reinvented past through bits of poetry that go on to define our own struggles to be extraordinary under the self-same ticking of the clock: “Seize the day. Because, believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold and die” (exhibit 59a, below).
Like Rimbaud’s infamous “derangement of all the senses,” there’s no time like the present to “do drugs” and transform into our true selves (and Rimbaud’s transgressive expanding of the senses in 1871 [“Je est un autre“] riding on the emergence, as Foucault puts it, of the homosexual as a new species in 1870; i.e., as queer discourse spearheaded/expressed by an expanding of the senses in literature, but also popular stories and everyday speech: a return to the queer as revived in the present in new retro-modern forms): as something to take with us on dangerous roads. America, for example, play Jimmy Webb’s excellent and haunting “Man’s Road“; i.e., speaking again to Bakhtin, but also German translations of the 1982 film (with Christopher Lee fluent in German) likewise alluding to German shadow novels and plays (re: Faustus) that inspired the British Neo-Gothic authors’ own Terror and Horror schools escaping Plato’s cave while inside it: “I can only show you the door; you’re the one who has to walk through it.”
(exhibit 59a: Model and artist, top-far-left: Matthew Lewis and George Lethbridge Saunders; top-mid-left [concealed]: Mary Shelley and Richard Rothwell; bottom-far-left: model and artist: Elizabeth Devonshire and Thomas Lawrence, as no “living” portrait of Radcliffe survives; meme, top-middle-left: source.)
Yet, while the spectres of Marx survive in ways still common today that workers can learn from, they can also be fooled by copycats. It’s the corporate copycats and proponents of capital you gotta beware; i.e., they’ll teach you that all people are the same, that the old ways are exclusively stupid and bad, then blind you with the reimagined past as seen through “their” eyes—the way they want you to see the world, thus buy their products and otherwise behave predictably for them (a concept we’ll explore for the rest of this book series): a false prophet insofar as their cryptonymy is bourgeois, thus false relative to worker class interests! Trojan animals, thus whores, work in duality!
(artist, left: PDD; right: Harmony Corrupted)
As such, fabled falsehood isn’t monopolized by the elite, as Lewis’ cryptonymy shows (and Beagle’s/ours). In keeping with his Matilda’s own black rabbit, demons give forbidden knowledge as something to chase into Hell on Earth (a bit like Dante’s Virgil, but gayer and sluttier): where they chattelize and brutalize nature, they will rape workers and fetishize said whore and rape it as alien. “Black” is given a bad rap, then; e.g., blackmail or Black Phillip. But it’s where power is stored, thus can be used by us to leverage our power as something to reverse abjection on the Aegis!
As a trans person, then, I have devised ludo-Gothic BDSM (and monstrous drug use as a mind-opening device) to cryptonymically reverse abjection, thus the rape of nature’s black rabbits similar to Said’s Orientalism (echoing those black rabbits my stepfather killed in front of me and forced me to eat); i.e., ones that, despite being coded as sinister per a Protestant ethic pimping nature at large as monstrous-feminine, magically “levels the playing field” for all sex workers—thus all work, past, present and future—having died prematurely while toiling under manufactured, exploited time: the cruel mechanized clock of Capitalism and ergonomic labor stolen for someone else’s profit based on your body and time, but also poetics! Sex and adventure go arm-in-arm, or rather dick-in-hole since the feudal ages into modern eras selling military conquest being “worthwhile”; i.e., for a breedable princess to steal from your rival and impregnate with your bloodline!
“To reach the Red Bull you have to walk through time!” Same idea with the black rabbit and its own Gothic fakeries oppositional cryptonymy (re: Gwynevere, Princess of Sunlight, below—a concentric hyperreal illusion inside an illusion inside an illusion, within the infernal concentric pattern’s ergodic, anisotropic, liminal, holistic mise-en-abyme)!
(model and artist: Isabelle Ryan and Persephone van der Waard)
As Beagle showed us, such “Ancient” Romances can be camped through sex work, well enough; i.e., to achieve a drug-like empathy during the cryptonymy process. As Said shows, this needn’t be literal drugs (though it can be), but a land associated with them. As someone who is habitually sober but has tried drugs, I propose “breaking the clock” by listening to the friendly past as “drug-like”; i.e., in places “out of time,” like the Metroidvania chronotope (which houses monstrous-feminine and black knight hybrids, such as Dark Souls‘ concentric illusions, above), but also the Orientalism (and black rabbits) such chronotopes invoke!
When taken, drugs distort one’s sense/placing of time, shaping the future in ways that keep the evil clock and its callous machinations from returning (and blinding people with false, reinvented, neoliberal time); i.e., by using my time as something to compile a driven, focused haze: a life’s work for future workers of the world to learn from—to give them, and their ancestors/future children a frankly much-needed voice and hermeneutic of perceiving they can emblematize and disseminate!
To it, I am not by doing anything remarkably “great” in the traditional sense (re: Prince Lir’s great deeds), but by doing something that few under Capitalism actually do, am still doing an extraordinary feat to contribute towards a larger movement, over space-time: one fighting with enhanced modes of perception (and existence) that supply hallucinatory acid-Communist potential to yield revolutionary demon-undead animal deities like the unicorn, xenomorph or 1,001 Arabian Nights from the Islamic Golden Age onwards; i.e., as a jinn-like mascot retranslated for genderqueer existence (e.g., exhibit 60d—with trans, intersex and non-binary persons making their own art tied to the half-real imaginary past): to make dark wishes come true that, per Said’s Orientalism, challenge the Protestant ethic pimping Islam and Africa as smushed into a single abject paradigm. “Sometimes a tree’s just a tree,” but beyond its usage per capital, can grow cryptonymically into something more; re: like Schmendrick’s “true magic” (“Did you see what I made? I had it—it had me—but it’s gone now!”) but like any witch hunt and subsequent liberation, isn’t rooted in any particular time and place (re: Federici)!
To that, I’m doing my own small part to fight Capitalism and help wake people up by leaving my own “torch” behind: this “trippy” book series (and my art married to my friends, which a friend described as being “the Bob Ross of vulvas”). Designed to illuminate with shadows, it can stay free from the drug-induced, paralyzing darkness of Capitalism’s “bad batches,” but still kind of works like drugs do. These can be unusual linguistic devices like “monster puns” or stories of exquisite “torture”; re: on the edge of the civilized (sober) world: Orientalism and its hauntologies long after “Ozymandias” started an admittedly tenebrous trend (cloaked in the Shadow not just of Pygmalion, but Napoleon aping Caesar).
Part of the essence of Gothic is its modular and patchwork nature; i.e., allowing you to make quick, rapid comparisons to seemingly unlike things across larger groups with people who might not have seen a given “rabbit” but recognize something similar somewhere else. The chaotic exercise amounts to “Hey, this is sort of like that” as tying to a massive checklist in the monster mode; you only have to check the boxes needed to address a particular issue under Capitalism, thus a particular monster to think about or with in regards to yourself as part of the larger material world. Drugs, then, become symbolic to an altered, discouraged way of thinking that can transform the world to help all workers tripping through the liminal space (and its hauntology of war):
(exhibit 59b: Model and artist: Jazminskyyy and Persephone van der Waard [with mixed media from album artist Ken Kelly‘s cover for Rainbow’s 1976 album, Rising]. A black rabbit tripping hard!
Just like with stigma animals, stigma substances must be reclaimed through the minorities [and cultures/religions] they’re associated with [and vice versa]. To this, Orientalism goes hand-in-hand with the stigmatizing of drugs, specifically as a cultural facet in non-Christian societies that “threaten” Western values; e.g., Islamophobia involving xenophobic hauntologies that fetishize abjected parties. In liminal forms of fantastical expression, queerness can intersect with this subversion, the rainbow as something to “go over” involving queerness and drug use; e.g., the poppy fields in The Wizard of Oz that Dorothy and her friends were skipping through; i.e., in the arduous task of reclaiming and rehumanizing of lost cultures and memories.
As something to reclaim, the use or theme of dark rainbows/drugs can combat a racist/xenophobic Gothic imagination through empathetic fantasies adjacent their Orientalist doubles; i.e., not just a castle, but a palace operated by a sultan—with harems, concubines, eunuchs and assassins! Inside this dialogic sphere, Western demons are replaced by fake jinn and Italian banditti are swapped out for desert nomads, etc [e.g., Lovecraft’s incredibly racist and xenophobic ghost of the counterfeit, “Under the Pyramids”—a 1924 short story where, I shit you not, Harry Houdini is kidnapped by Egyptian devil worshippers and lowered into a Gaza pyramid and forced to look upon ancient terrors]: a dark moth rabbit to turn into and inspire others with its bare exposed “terrors”! So scary!
[artist: Jazminskyyy]
Abjection fetishizes the whore as alien on a gradient, one where racism lingers as a hauntological entity haunting older empire in “older” empire’s cryptomimetic “currency.” In the usual morphological cartography-in-small, a black or brown body also stands in for continents or cities, but also what those yield as fetishized in both directions: a land of ancient warriors and exotic whores—thus their dark revenge and forbidden pleasures; i.e., as something to plunge into and relish, mid-conquest [sex being a chance to extend one’s bloodline through future attempts at expanding territory and development of one’s already-owned land and materials]! Canonically this is called “slumming” but exploitation and liberation occupy the same shadow zone/use the same dark forces [and rabbits] at cross dialectical-material purposes!
Similar to their overtly Western counterparts, then, sex-positive examples of the Middle Eastern romance highlight the magic castle—not to endorse the status quo, but quantify cultural value in general while inside the same shadow of police violence; i.e., a dark whore’s rarefied desire for universal class elevation and wealth redistribution in a singular [thus inadequate] body language haunted by tokenism/ostracization: as coming from a particular socio-material arrangement and ethnic group’s diaspora/cultural reinvention [e.g., the Hoteps] that encompasses holistic struggle in idiosyncratic forms: the nepotistic hoard attached to the whore the sultan sucked said gold from [capital turning nature into gold as a transactional predatory process]. All workers are princes, princesses and princexes under Communism—making the outdated, medieval notion of the princess, kingdom and castle symbolic of a former time to regress into Communism with; re: “Long and hard is the way…” speaking to BBCs and PHAT bodies, black or not [e.g., PAWGs]! The way out of the brothel is inside it, camping such devices in ways that encourage interracial subterfuge; e.g., like Jazmin and I did, working together to performatively speak to struggles not quite of ours but also not quite not!
Of course, one needn’t actually live in the castle—i.e., while ruling from a dogmatic, unfair position—for things to be “good.” Likewise, its cryptonymy can reflect a particular fantasy type played by adjacent oppressed groups in good faith: the storing and exchange of power under the Arabian Nights pastiche according to medievalized personas like the princess but also the mercenary from an imaginary world not “of the West”; i.e., a place closer to nature/the frontiers of current conquest dressed up xenophobically and xenophillically as religious-themed challenges to Christian hegemony with heretical suggestion: the Crusades having failed in rooting out all forms of opposition while minting new canonical ones that repeat the process.
Just as capital makes this eradication impossible—re: by demanding a scapegoat always be near and if one isn’t, that it be created out of thin air—we holistic oppressed can invent new subversions out of the same silk shawls; i.e., where those of us closer to the in-group stand in for out-groups that can’t speak for themselves; e.g., a white trans woman and black cis-het sex worker speaking to the oppressed in Palestine as inclusively as our faction in the larger fractured pedagogy allows. Weaponizing Orientalism for workers in a global world certainly involves a balancing act—i.e., because cultural appreciation and appropriation occupy the same siren-song choral chambers—but it can be done in sex-positive ways that dodge tokenism in the act!
[artist: Jazminskyyy]
In Gothic, bandits are whores as part of the tableaux “sticking us up”; i.e., of a hauntological regression to the barbaric: as having a middle-class fascination with non-white cultures since the Crusades seeking to invade and colonize those areas. In turn, bandits are simply redistributors of wealth under criminogenic conditions, the whore being a kind of sex bandit that—for women, in classical scenarios—would “stealth steal” wealth from men; i.e., through labor that wasn’t always pimped [a whore without a pimp being a threat]. The femme fatale would be something that, from the Neo-Gothic period onwards, romanticized such paradigm shifts in ways that while not completely underheard of in actual history outside fantasy stories, usually fell on the side of pirate queens or royalty like the Queen of Sheba. Things then progressed beyond the usual cliques and began to globalize Orientalism as a terror weapon tied to drug and sex wars; i.e., as a neoliberal export meeting a rising middle-class demand for exotic princesses/infidel tyrants versus a medieval canard.
Xenophobia is generally rooted in half-legends, futile investigations and complete inventions, on the Aegis: what we’re working with, mid-subversion!
To this, domestic fears of the foreign assassin are not limited to the Orientalism of the Middle East [also being featured within the ninjas of medieval Japan, for instance]! Except these occur after the Mongol sacking of Baghdad, which forced the Golden Age of Islam to end, and echoed Cartesian pursuits, centuries afterwards; i.e., where much of actual Muslim recorded history and cultural achievements survive in echoes. Rather than being completely destroyed, though, they become the stuff of legends, leading cryptomimetically to a glut of popular misconceptions ushered in by future abusers and liberators [e.g., Frankenstein in Bagdad‘s 2013 response by Ahmed Saadawi to the War on Terror].
Such things canonically fetishize and alienize sex and force [re: policing the whore]. One example includes the word “assassin” as drug-themed, but also xenophobic and xenophilic. Hayden Chakra describes this group as
The order of Hashashin, or also known as the middle eastern Assassins, were a medieval terror spreading gang that excelled in the professional killing of important people. Other names they were recognized by were Nizaris, Nizari Ismailis, Batini’s “people of the esoteric teachings” or Ta’limiyyah “people of the secret teachings.” They controlled the medieval Islamic world for more than 130 years. Their leader was called Hassan al-Sabbah [source: “The Deadliest Medieval Order Of Assassins – The Hashashins,” 2022].
[source: Bitplex’ “Original (1989) Prince of Persia Reimagined in 3D!” 2018]
Supposedly the group worked in secret from a dangerous fortress called Alamut, or “Death Mountain.” Furthermore, after Napoleon’s defeating of the Mamluks and conquering of Egypt, an 1809 talk by a French linguistic contributed to the rise of Egyptology in the process but also various harmful myths about the homogenized peoples and their conquered culture seeking revenge:
The talk, by the linguist and orientalist Silvestre de Sacy, was titled “Dynasty of the Hashishyun and the Etymology of Their Name.” Its gist was that the name of a Shi’ite sect known as the Hashishyun (“Assassins”) was derived from its members’ use of hashish, an intoxicant made of marijuana resin. Founded in 11th-century Persia by Hasan ibn al-Sabah, the Hashishyun sect, from the Ismaili branch of Shi’a Islam, was quite well known in France and throughout Europe. It had gained fame after being mentioned in Marco Polo’s widely read account of his travels, written in about 1300. According to Marco Polo, Al-Sabah, aka the “Old Man of the Mountain,” would give his followers an “intoxicating potion” to drink that turned them into cruel warriors, and would then dispatch them to dispose of his enemies. The extensive use of the sect’s members as hit men is a historical fact, but the potion Marco Polo described was apparently a legend. In any case, so well-known was the legend in Europe, that the French form of the sect’s name, assassin, became synonymous with “murderer,” and also passed into English as a noun and a verb [source: Elon Gilad’s “The Historic Mixup That Made People Fear Hashish,” 2019].
Though ultimately not founded in historical fact, the legend of the Middle East as synonymous with drugs, prostitution and murder demonstrates a popular mantra utilized by Napoleon into Orientalism; i.e., haunted by his ghost: as the shrewd and unscrupulous maker of history as “a set of lies that people have agreed upon” [source: PBS “Self-Made Myth”]. He leaves out his own role as head-of-state compelling these agreements through force, not unlike other Great Men of History before/after him except he was spearheading Western superiority and Cartesian exceptionalism during the rise of the nation-state through his own pioneering of modern war leading towards modern-day fascism and white savior rhetoric on the global stage in the 20th and 21st centuries [e.g., the Prince of Persia series, above, or The Legend of Zelda and its own curiously liminal (and genderqueer) subversions, below].
[artist, top-left: Persephone van der Waard; rest: Jazminskyyy]
Certainly there remains a dogmatic fear of the unknown the elite use to stoke Western fears of the East and their inexorable, prophesized revenge “from the shadows.” But a larger duality [and paradox] is equally present; i.e., the assassin and their mythical “magic potion” existing historically-materially as something to endorse [the American War on Drugs] or subvert [“Death Mountain[9]“]: reuniting alien things to benefit labor and nature, not the elite; re: mid-paradox, on the Aegis, challenging profit.
As something to subvert inside a xenophilic exhibit like mine and Jazmin’s, there is generally a danger in challenging the representations of powerful men like Napoleon, but also later Pygmalions like Frank Frazetta [the page after next]: a shared dialogic/stage tone-policed by reactionaries, white moderates, and token elements wanting exclusive authorship over “exclusive” oppression. Oppression is holistic. Ergo, whatever suspicions different groups nurse/arouse, we have to intersect, thus allow for shared performances inside the Valley of Amazons and Thieves [e.g., Link and Nabooru, above]—meaning those that account for asymmetrical and holistic axes of privilege and oppression alike! Nothing reduces during guerrilla warfare, because reducing select groups to singular voices speaking to their oppression is merely a divisive tactic whose Tower of Babel colonizes workers and media, Nintendo style: “Heaven rewards hard work.”
[artist: Persephone van der Waard]
Overspecialize and you breed in weakness—not from Heinlein’s perspective, but that of rebels needing intersectional solidarity. Furthermore, silence is death. Therefore, we avoid the shame of canonical/token indignation [and ignominious death] while advancing one’s material position; i.e., with one’s own body to break Orientalism by faking it, thus Capitalist Realism, in good faith versus the state. The wearing of a mask also works to protect one’s actual identity through a secret identity/alter ego that publicizes a challenge to the established order of an imagined Orient/dead culture’s imaginary past—a place to cherish and “plunder” [with/without quotes] depending on who you work for/fight against; i.e., where power and resistance share the same language in oppositional praxis; e.g., a sexy Sheik to Ganon or Link’s Hero of Time. Oppressed groups can be kettled to reject help from educated allies with privilege [as Said was; re: Persephone van der Waard’s 2017 “Frederic Jameson and the Art of Lying” speaking to the paradox of telling truth with splendid lies/archaeologies of the future and elaborate strategies of misdirection]. We’re all part of the same Breakfast Club; i.e., to betray each other is doom ourselves to an Omelas refrain.)
So far, things have bore out some semblance of order and Paradise; i.e., as something to exclude and indulge in to camp the usual bigotries by “wanting to go to South Africa” (to camp it). Except, post-drug use, the monomyth heroine finds themselves suddenly approaching Hell in ways that continue to resemble home as fearful despite reversing abjection through a holistic pedagogy of the oppressed: the rapidly approaching brick wall, Black Veil or otherwise proverbial abyss rising up to swallow them whole, mise-en-abyme, into the infernal concentric pattern!
In short, this is where “the wheels fly off” and Paradise is subsequently Lost and found through paradox/darkness visible (which the bun and its “magic carpet” are). But the rabbit hasn’t shown itself yet—waiting somewhere close at hand as the teenage character finds themselves in a scary grown-up world doubling their perfect past while they have a sexually nubile heroic form to operatically brave the dangers with: hunting for our own “death” in quotes; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM. That’s our immortality! With Paradise Lost, let’s tempt the Fates!
Paradise Lost; or, Chasing the Rabbit on a Promethean Quest/during a Faustian Bargain (acid Communism reprise; feat., Jim Morrison, Blake, Rimbaud, etc)
Canon h(a)unts its dreams with bugbears (or bugbuns, Bugs Bunnies); Gothic Communism uses the same basic approach to speak to the pedagogy pimped by capital and exotified from an early teenage point of conception and “breeding age” (e.g., Frazetta’s “Cleopatra” a pinup body by guarded by non-white harem guards and black panthers, below): growing up (too fast)/forced to by capital’s nuclear model!
Beyond Orientalism, I now want to employ Fisher’s acid Communism as a way of getting creative by following the black rabbit on a figurative (or literal) drug trip from adulthood onwards; i.e., within ways that reinvent what will likely be suppressed by using what’s on hand: to shapeshift, thus avoid capture but still get one’s point across, albeit in disguise/on drugs, and which include fatal regressions back into the dangerous childhood as close by insofar as adults are infantilized for their sexual labor! This tripping whore’s revenge includes when using art as a forbidden substance to open one’s eyes (or grow them anew). Already outlined by Radcliffe, Lewis and Otto as part of a larger synchronistic scheme, but similarly drawing upon the old, “dead” volumes already compiled by past users of the same method, Gothic Communism uses whatever works to help people see while concealing the drug as “just” entertainment.
(artist: Frank Frazetta)
Furthermore, this includes any “drug-like” or transformative experience historically offered by its famous caché of radical methods and infamous stories. This isn’t just a band of unlikely friends and certified misfits commenting on a similar socio-material arrangement with similar stories; they’re doing it in similar ways that continue to be used to cryptonymically represent themselves with—the helpful “ghost,” in this case, being the Wisdom of the Ancients as a “library” donated to workers by these now-dead people: Marx’s nightmare as a useful tool; i.e., not just any old curse, but a means of escaping the curse of Capitalism by playing with “curses” we can control; re: through ludo-Gothic BDSM doing “magic” to gain forbidden sight: to see, to speak, to scream (Daily Dose of Internet, Jan 16th 2023; timestamp: 0:23), thus sing and dance to gain taboo knowledge as the poetic ability to detect the human within the monster through various social-sexual exchanges. So do we keep chasing our adventurous, titular white-to-black rabbit into an uncanny adulthood that leaves us feeling stranded and free from Capitalist Realism’s usual marooning!
Our inspection of reclaiming the rabbit—and its drugs/adult behaviors and cycle of education back towards children, again—will include acid Communism from past revolutionaries like Jim Morrison, Rimbaud, Blake and Shakespeare, but also the Medusa “dragon” these emboldened men were historically chasing for various, not-always-noble-reasons: ghosts we workers of the present must also camp.
To it, demonic reclamation is not an overnight process; it carries on through a state of transition towards the state as something to reinvert—i.e., by redistributing power and reconfiguring socio-material conditions over time. This includes the joyous subverting of canonical forms through the code of identity as a cryptonymic means of concealment: for those performing queer existence with borrowed language (thus time); i.e., the camouflage of revolutionary cryptonyms (which we shall examine more thoroughly in the next chapter and in Volume Three) as a kind of covert identity working out in the open. This can be through occult demonic expression, nature-themed demons and drugs, or composite demons and critiques of capital that become disguised by virtue of their otherworldly “Gothic” qualities; re: the unreality of the infernal concentric pattern being something we can make real in spite of that: to break Capitalist Realism by developing Gothic Communism with its own stolen supply of drugs (and white-to-black rabbits)!
For example, whereas exhibit 60a shows workers with morphologically flexible demons, exhibit 60b places model cut-outs over Frank Frazetta’s original paintings. His older, hauntological images of women and nature are fundamentally violent and dehumanizing. By subverting those through fresh visions, the worker effectively reinvents the relationship between humans, sexuality and nature; i.e., through peaceful drug use and sex-positive hallucinations reversing abjection during the whore’s revenge; re: “putting the pussy on the chainwax!”
(exhibit 60a: Artist: Regalia for the Wicked: An Eldritch Fashion Zine. “Wicked,” in this case, denotes a class of individual monsters canonically associated with evil and the unknown; i.e., Lovecraft’s xenophobia, except here the magazine covertly humanizes the monsters. I say “covert” because the outward appearance is still abnormal, meaning humanized without sacrificing their phantasmagorical, morphologically inchoate qualities; i.e., there’s a sense of pride involved in preserving that aspect of themselves, denoting Fisher’s “acid Communism” as a drug-like means of escape into liberating plastic bodies.)
(exhibit 60b: Models: Nyx and Mikki Storm; artist: Persephone van der Waard.)
Workers require iconoclastic “drugs” to combat Capitalist Realism’s inability to imagine a future beyond the canonical, devastated hauntologies of neoliberal canon; i.e., a drug-like expansion of the mind—what Mark Fisher called “acid Communism.” Earlier, we looked at Stuart Mill’s “What Is Acid Communism?” As we further inspect the good-to-bad rebellious qualities of it (and not just innocent, child-like ones), I want you to have access to the full quote:
…part of acid communism is the means to fulfil Fisher’s desire to imagine the future. Of course, some people take a superficial view of this part, though I think Fisher choose acid communism partly for the advantage this superficiality provides. 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. For example, Marx’s call for class consciousness is a very acid communist idea, but the means of achieving class consciousness (the critiques and contradictions of capital) dominated much of Marx’s contribution. If Fisher had more time, perhaps this would have been the fate of acid communism too, attempting to imagine new ways of achieving acidic or post-capitalist realist thought. Instead, acid communism leaves us with a simple message. 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).
As we’ll see, such an idea isn’t restricted to drugs-in-abstract, though!
For example, not only were they a Marxist-Leninist, but Cuwu actually studied weed’s neoliberal recultivation; i.e., from an outlawed substance used to demonize minorities to a monocrop directed at white-owned businesses. According to Cuwu, the monopoly did little to change the persecution of black and brown people; i.e., for having these drugs in states where the practice hasn’t been legalized. Instead, the legalization is designed to privatize and gentrify the drug’s production within white systems of power—in effect, taking weed away from poor black and brown communities; i.e., as one of the few non-violent ways of making money to enrich white business owners and corporations without condemning the War on Drugs for the abusive Crusades happening against minorities as usual.
By that same logic, drug use must be decriminalized in a literal and figurative sense, including monsters of nature (and by extension, all monsters) as a powerful means of educating children (the future generation) not to exploit each other and the world around them for profit; i.e., monsters becoming rebellious stewards of nature that adults follow back into childhood’s sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll: as counterculture-with-a-face (or bunny ears). Except “counterculture,” like the human body and its history of psychosexual expression vis-à-vis nature, becomes something to dive into. Meanwhile, some are more famous than others, guiding our way through past history as possible differently in the future to achieve similar countercultural goals that are more inclusive and sex-positive than past versions!
This brings us to Jim Morrison, who frankly was a bit of a misogynistic dick; i.e., aping Percy Shelley’s common-law treatment of Mary Wollstonecraft junior but also Rimbaud’s privileged “derangement of the senses” to posture at rebellion by dying for one’s art until they either cried “Uncle!” or actually dropped dead: Rimbaud sold out/got wise and Morrison bought the farm in a Parisian bathtub (from a heroin overdose, if memory serves). Beatniks and peaceniks haunted by liberal concessions and betrayals behind the rebellious façade, pacification is pacification (no one likes a hypocrite poser except other hypocrite posers refusing to stay sober). C’est la vie!
Other drugs, like LSD, were originally weaponized (from naturally-occurring mescaline) by the CIA; i.e., to interrogate suspects by making them more suggestible and compliant. Conversely, these drugs were linked not just to 1960s counterculture (and its white, privileged irresponsibilities, above), but older modes of seeing the world before Red Scare dominated the scene; e.g., Jim Morrison’s The Doors being a nod to Aldous Huxley’s 1954, The Doors of Perception, whose documentation of mescaline work is eponymously linked to William Blake’s “doors of perception”; i.e., Blake’s pointed concern with “corroding fires” being the literal acids he used to make his infamous printing plates to defend the Devil as a mind-opening force; re: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Depending on their usage during oppositional praxis, psychoactive drugs (or drug-like media that induce similar effects or appeals) can open or close the mind during Capitalism Realism as something to encourage or defeat (with rabbits to chase, versus dragons)!
This being said, drug misuse can happen on either side of that equation. As a Byronic, misogynistic sage touched swiftly with rockstar success and meteoric plummeting[10] just as fast, Morrison’s crooning “I am the Lizard King, I can do anything!” from “Not to Touch the Earth” (1968) highlighted a tragic shortening of his own life as self-prophesized: “No one gets out of here alive.” More to the point, he accomplished this dark maxim in pursuit of forbidden truth and new, undiscovered senses/synesthesia-esque sensations through heavy drug use (not entirely unlike Rimbaud, except Rimbaud died a capitalist after quitting drugs); i.e., a dysfunctional misfit whose bucolic, fatal excess led to his own premature demise.
As such, the cliché of the artist suffering for his craft “to break on through” administers a cold hard truth: of vino veritas heralding Paracelsus’ adage, “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison” (and context; re: Pinsky). Figurative and/or literal, drugs can be imbibed/expressed as a matter of degree (famously seen through functioning/non-functioning alcoholics like T.S. Eliot and Earnest Hemmingway abusing alcohol to get at the truth, but also to cope with reality as insufferably laden with madness and death—an addictive, Dionysian tradition that damaged them as much as it did Phil Lynott insisting “I Got to Give It Up” in 1979, while slowly drinking himself to death). To this, even Coleridge took just enough laudanum to open his mind, but survived to close it again and badger Matthew Lewis for writing The Monk. His work (according to Coleridge) was too close to death and the chaos of a queer existence that the older man desperately wanted to abolish once sober. You don’t need drugs to write in a drug-like way/speak to a desire for liberation that manifests differently per oppressed and privileged groups; without drugs, Coleridge became a cop.
The fact remains, Matthew Lewis didn’t have a reputation for doing hard drugs (as far as I can tell, anyways), yet features a drug-like character whose particular Gothic imagination was one many in public life detested! Beyond Coleridge, many saw Matilda and Lewis as a profane embarrassment, with Coleridge impeaching Lewis every chance he got. Yet, Lewis was arguably as sober as Coleridge was, albeit for far longer! Lewis didn’t do drugs; he merely lacked the inhibitions to silence his dreams from moment to waking moment (my own dedication for Volume Zero reading: “I swear I wrote this book sober!” despite me rarely doing drugs myself. Simply put, I didn’t need to).
(exhibit 60c: Artist: Unlovely Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft senior, wrote arguably the first modern feminist text in Great Britain, A Vindication of the Rights of Women [1792]. Shelley herself went onto write Frankenstein, which—as we’ve discussed in “Making Demons“—had a very anti-capitalist flavor amid its hauntological mix of Gothic horror, Byronic anti-heroics, framed perspectives and dark vengeful spectres.)
I’m emphasizing “drug use” in quotes here because the “usage” is at times symbolic, paratextual and/or literal; i.e., any of these methods working as a complicated means of rebellious poetic expression that dates back to at least the 1700s (in relation to the Enlightenment, anyways). Back then, it was ridiculed during the rising of genderqueer identities, only to continue on a pro-capitalist trend through the likes of privileged, megachurch grifter-televangelists like Pat Robertson (who only just died today as of me writing this; mark the date: 6/8/2023; Rebecca Watson, 2023). Of Robertson, Unlovely Frankenstein writes,
Pat Robertson said feminism “is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Sure, it sounds profoundly stupid, but it doesn’t even rank on the 10 stupidest things Pat Robertson has ever said (source, 2023).
Clearly acid Communism’s drug-like expansion into new states of existence lies at the heart of Gothic critiques of capital and its violation of human rights; i.e., by the usual suspects during various Wars of Drugs pimping the egregore (white rabbit or not): white, cis-het, Christian men/token forces (whose own Protestant ethic under Capitalism—especially neoliberal Capitalism—we’ll continue to unpack in Volume Three when excoriating the Man Box). We must chase the Black Rabbit down; i.e., to get a quote for prosperity by turning into the Black Rabbit, ourselves (who still wants hugs during the dialectic of the alien: a mating porcupine).
From the Shelley clan’s precocious and anti-capitalist fictions—to Rimbaud’s subsequent “derangement” during the first Gilded Age versus Morrison’s ’70s-era debauchery leading up to the Second/second wave feminism well into Internet-era reclamations of contested monsters—the Gothic organ of queer liberation under Capitalism speaks to the figurative eyeballs of perceptive pastiche (versus Jameson’s statue with blind eyeballs attacking Gothic vision); i.e., as “drug-addled” without abusing said drugs (thus the rabbit) like these older magicians did.
These, in turn, are commonly embodied by a host of resources who creatively offer up new ways of understanding ourselves and the material world; i.e., through the Gothic imagination’s circular proximity with death and chaos as thoroughly codified in drug-like darkness. Doing so through their own modular and unreliable spyglasses into the past, older Gothic rebels equaled murky expressions of the self as plastic and malleable (the slow, incremental metamorphosis for many trans people being a kind of “creeping”; i.e., to avoid detection from those in power as immortal predators you don’t run from, especially if they have you surrounded; re: the harpy Celano from The Last Unicorn).
For example, sense and sensibility is, itself, an old idea. Through Gothic poetics, it merges through one’s nebulous sexual desires, class liberation fantasies and gender fluidity—not simply an abject bodily metaphor or criminal “branding” of so-called degenerates, but a sensitive rebellious mode of shapeshifting existence; re: the Romantics—but especially the young ones, per Nafi—generally thinking of Satan as a rebel figure; i.e., pointedly described by Milton as turning into different forms that were decidedly un-angelic (a toad, a snake—both stigma animals—but also other, more inchoate forms). Why not a rabbit, too?
Collected and (re)assembled into a dark, dreamy composite, then pulled back and viewed from a distance, these demons form a pattern on the surface of collages like those scattered through this series: transforming ontological freedom using language reclaimed from heteronormative societal constraints that really warp you brain (re: exhibit 60c; also, Pillow Pants from Clerks 2). Ignoring Robertson’s own malicious dogma as a theocratically fascist means of expanding on his already-vast fortunes, the sad fact remains that most straight folk (closeted or not) think openly GNC people are abject aliens to some degree (only having seen “representations” of them in horror movies); i.e., nature as something to steal from while riding out Medusa’s wrath (re: state shift). But these same transphobic persons also have very weird phobias tied to the penis, anus and pussy (whose constant mislabeling as “vagina” denotes a place to put the man’s penis for reproductive purposes while ignoring the clitoris to mythical extremes).
From a canonical standpoint under Capitalist Realism, men see women/the monstrous-feminine and “junk” as sites of alien violence, rape and hysteria[11]: “Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here,” “work will see you free!” (camping Dante and Auschwitz through our own skull-and-crossbones pirate pussies, below); i.e., death sex during ludo-Gothic BDSM!
(artist: My Pet Monster Girl)
Concerning canon, it’s like asking a small, ignorant child to describe childbirth and having them gleefully tell you that women shit the baby out. And you say we‘re on drugs! Also, you’re missing out, because dicks and anal are awesome if you can manage it (and if your partner is too “girthy” to enter you, then sex toys can reclaim the anus for everyone’s pleasure. Follow that rabbit).
Furthermore, these fears are very old, stemming from the earliest proponents of Western Civilization’s patriarchal phobias, the latter concerning the hysteria of a so-called wandering womb; re: the Archaic Mother as ancient and female, but categorized by Freud, Jung and other 20th century men (and their survivors) extending to nature as monstrous-feminine whore, period. And yet, the extreme phobias on display through these Pygmalion dweebs likewise denote their own drug-like ways of the viewing the world (e.g., Freud loved cocaine). This myopia must be reclaimed through the Archaic Mother/phallic woman as whore; i.e., as a mode of trans, intersex and enby rebellion through Galatea-esque monsters like the xenomorph, Sailor Scout or unicorn as valorized by queer culture as queen-like; re: the Numinous spirit of vengeance that ties to a lot of different oppressed cultures. The black rabbit comes back, out of the past retro-future!
The Return of the Black Rabbit (feat. Giger, Metroid, Medusa, Giygas)
A classic Gothic story eludes to the infernal concentric pattern/Promethean Quest’s closed space (or Faustian bargain summoning the black penitent/profligate alien whore): a concentric, recursive, liminal, anisotropic, ergodic time-space aiding in generational rememory and reclamation/regeneration. The conquering princess, after returning home, realizes the black bun has followed them back to Paradise; i.e., showcasing said place as never perfect in ways we can reclaim by pushing towards post-scarcity as the Gothic does—imperfectly while inside the labyrinth and its exploitative shadow zones (which house Nazis and Commies in duality)! A bunny shade can spell doom but also great radical change/endless possibility while freeing versus policing the whore (re: the Radiance, who we won’t inspect here because we already have; re: “Policing the Whore“)!
As such, I’d like to close this chapter by examining how that is; i.e., by considering a radical desire to transform not just to escape our enemies, but terrify them through Gothic-Communist counterterror as a form of radical empathy acknowledging the valid (and furious) emotions of abused cultures (essentially a dark version of LSD drug therapies); re: by returning to the fatal nostalgia of Giger, Metroid, Medusa, and Giygas, but also Scott’s Covenant as adults ourselves having a Second prodigal Coming/childhood and puberty as genderqueer detectives do: chasing an ouroborotic bunny round and round the chronotope run of Capitalist Realism during acid Communism’s live burial empathizing with said predicament to benefit labor and nature (versus Pygmalion like Morrison, or subjugated Galatea/gargoyle cops like Autumn Ivy, below).
(exhibit 60d: Artist, top-left: Benny Kusnoto; top-right: Autumn Ivy, who is non-binary but token; bottom-left: unknown; bottom-right: Just Some Noob.
The xenomorph is a nebulous inkblot, insofar as its avenger “walking castle” is occupied by a legion of older dead it demonically voices during castle-narrative; i.e., the wail of the damned, mid-dungeon. The interplay can be sexual, but the vein is classically ace.
The imperial refrain under capital sees GNC persons routinely treated as monstrous-feminine, thus gays to bury while framed as corrupt or degenerate, concentric/tangled scapegoats; i.e., Nazi-Communists with flavors of other bigotries and xenophobia mixed into the Gothic mode’s Red Scare soup: anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, Orientalism, witch hunts, blood libel, sodomy rhetoric and various other compound/chimeric moral panics. Said dungeon has become crowded not just with vampires, witches and goblins, then, but Communist ones linked directly to criminalized drug use bad “rabbit” sex [which until the 20th century wasn’t really criminalized, at all; re: Foucault, but also the War on Drugs being an American phenomenon meant to crystalize and prolong Capitalist Realism].)
Concentric stigma is something to be mindful of in Gothic fiction. The xenomorph is a classic “phallic woman” inside the womb space, but also a member of the forces of darkness, hence a black knight corruptor and cosmic rabbit rapist (re: Jennifer Shiman’s “Alien in 30 Seconds“); i.e., as curiously pre-fascist and Communist/queer until proven otherwise (and dissected by the female detective as often as the male one). In posthuman stories like Alien, the Medusa is generally respected by the android servants as the ultimate, “pure” form of queer existence; re: it is bio-mechanical, but also intersex, defined by something men do not have: eggs, but also female genitals with a masculine quality to them as something to imagine through a genderqueer imagination; i.e., reclaiming wandering womb (or bicycle face) from ancient misunderstandings about sex (with our species or other animals) but also drugs and biology warped under more recent hauntologies bastardizing the fact that animals don’t understand consent (That’s Why’s “Wild Rabbit makes love with my Giant Blue Rabbit,” 2012): to accuse chattelized people.
The ethnocentric chain of carnage lends an artificial wilderness that—much like the golem or gargoyle—mixes technology with parasitoidism and lots of implied unsafe drugs and sex; i.e., the Gothic’s tendency to speak to excessive force, psychosexual angst, and imminent penetration by showing you what’s gonna go in what: “That’s not a knife; this is a knife [next page]!” The black knightly mercenary’s harpoon conveys vaso vagal danger to swoon at, which is instantly if subtly offset with play as a matter of waiting inside the graveyard for the “rape” to happen; i.e., invaded by wild, Pagan forces corrupting the scared and the sacred with insect jousting and implied traumatic penetration; re: not just the whore, but ancient alien whore having her revenge by saying to her enemies, “Mine’s bigger!” Dick measuring is something women can do, too, because it concerns emotions like pride and social rituals with a funerary psychosexual element that can “go to war” like anything else. Intimidation is often the goal, but also satisfaction and excitement: “Take me down to the Paradise city!” (Guns ‘n Roses, 1989).
Some rabbits have bigger wands with weapon-like qualities! In nature, this ovipositor is a common feature among female-dominated, eusocial insects; Gothic canon famously attaches the “female penis” to the Archaic Mother archetype, forcing GNC people to live in the shadow of the state’s crusade against it. To be different is to live in fear because those around you want you dead, including members of your own family but also so-called “defenders” of the community you call home; i.e., the police. But improvised weapons—and symbiosis, the wasp eating the caterpillar to weaponize said grub against the state, thus protect smaller more vulnerable animals we caretake—work with stolen ordinance, too; it’s all about letting everyone play with such toys (e.g., Arnold’s M-79 grenade launcher from T2 versus Spoop’s dildo also being a terror weapon; re: as Asprey’s kissing cousin of force); i.e., to say one-and-all that we’re not just cookies in a jar to take from when Elon Musk gets peckish. “Peck this, fucker!”
(artist: Spoop)
To it, Archaic Mothers are ancient, anthropomorphic, phallic intersex demons that live inside deep, dark places—specifically womb-like lairs/parallel space. Here, they canonically pervert the heteronormative reproductive order by offering up monstrous-feminine forms of sexual reproduction; i.e., contained in monomyth spaces modeled externally after the sexually-dimorphic activities occurring within. Whereas the Skeleton King is found in his tomb, the dark queen is found inside her deathly womb’s mise-en-abyme. The classic example is Medusa, equipped with penis-like genitals and living in the darkness of the sea (which is generally regarded as the “cradle of the world” in many pre-Western mythologies, often serving as the birthplace of monsters). Other more recent examples include the “vaginal,” bio-mechanical “external wombs” of the alien queen from Aliens or Mother Brain from Metroid as potential friends on either side of an animalistic exchange (the black rabbits of a vengeful return to Wonderland)!
In “War Vaginas,” for example, I note the Archaic Mothers’ function through Mother Brain as a colonial foil meant to scare token women into sexist, transphobic violence; i.e., an abject catalyst to repress activist sentiments and rebellion:
Mother Brain, meanwhile, isn’t just Samus’ ancient foil; she’s arguably the Patriarchy’s boogeyman […] To face such a goddess amounts to a return, a completion of the cycle: birth, death, consumption. Animals eat their babies. For them, the mouth is a symbol of consumption, but also danger (teeth bite). The vagina symbolizes birth; for a mother goddess who births and eats disposable babies, bodily openings symbolically conflate. The vagina becomes a site of trauma attached to childbirth and… food. If Samus doesn’t fight back, Mother Brain’s giant mouth will literally gobble her up. She’s not Samus’ biological mother, she’s an impostor, but the feeling of cannibalistic infanticide cannot be totally ignored (source).
Despite being presented as the wronged party whose anger legitimately stems from colonial oppression, the Dark Mother and her children are famously hunted and killed by traditional applications of phallic violence; i.e., in modern, neoconservative stories with classical standards to install and offend during reactive abuse kettling nature the whore as monstrous-feminine; re: Doom and Contra being linked to real-world violence through the state (echoing Vietnam and Operation Condor) but also Metroid and its violent, female hero as raping the ancient womb with phallic violence (which, again, stems from Aliens, Starship Troopers, and older forms of Amazonomachia/Cartesian persecutions of nature as monstrous-feminine). It’s American exceptionalism; re: dressing up the Greater Evil as an Americanized avatar for children to fight the “good war” against, but one that speaks poetically to older forms of drug use that have become hauntologically white and straight (thus fascist). Like our smaller furry friends (e.g., Cookie the Calico’s “If not friend, why friend-shaped?” 2025), we’re all divided and scared; i.e., can feel things out when asking for food, hugs, sex and anything else! “Gimme shelter!”
“No one gives it to you; you have to take it.” Except beware any “historian” conflating the modern and ancient worlds, which they do through willful ignorance tied to state abuse of the usual tools and devices. Furthermore, the neoconservative revenge fantasy is always rapacious—a punitive, bloodthirsty invasion of the Womb whose subsequent “fucking” happens with stolen ordinance, taken away from rebels to restore state hegemony in the region; i.e., by raping the Dark Queen, but not before destroying her “illegitimate” bloodline with a subjugated Amazon, thus ensuring the legitimacy of an equally false replacement.
Not only is this colonial apologia; the very act is reactionary towards patriarchal fears of abject female/feminine regression—i.e., the woman seeing herself as demonized, her monstrous-feminine double’s unwelcome presence on the Aegis reverting the colonized space less towards a natural state and more into an unnatural condition of abject reproduction: a bio-mechanical womb. Inside said unheimlich, the queer bugbear is a Venus-twin Dark Medusa whose queenly ovipositor breeds with the colonists against their will, turning them into drone-like monsters that blindly spread the disease of their demon lover (the 20th century pitting a made-up, Red Scare/Satanic Panic “disease” against the state’s regular enemies in neoliberal canon: Communism. Except the plurality of the creature suggests a number of otherworldly voices speaking through the Dark Mother as a kind of clairvoyant channeler of undead/demonic animal tongues; re: xenoglossia).
The paradox remains the xenomorph’s andro/gynodiverse, “hermaphroditic” qualities often being “chased” like rabbit by sexist cis-het men and women; i.e., viewed by them with utter fascination and lust (a concept we’ll unpack more in Volume Three, Chapter Three); re: Ripley as the state’s subjugated Hippolyta, chasing the queer presence back to the ends of the Earth because it imperfectly resembles her trauma. The ensuing catfight is orchestrated by the Patriarchy to recruit TERFs into an imagined vital conflict between us-versus-them; i.e., token “good” Amazons and female rage versus dark, alien forms that must be destroyed. Ripley-as-Rambo has no empathy and is sober as a priest (or nun, whatever); she gets her high/sees “God” during Crusader-style purges that restore her faith through unironic slaughter. The call of the void is what she lives for—to pluck the lowest-hanging fruit, killing rabbits!
(model and artist: Itzel Sparrow and Persephone van der Waard)
For trans, non-binary and intersex people, though, the plight of the Alien Queen murdered by the state’s girl boss is merely us existing as we always have: a ground state, but also a “womb state” that’s evolved out of our childhoods into our adult selves as “standing out” in cis-het society (as Itzel does, having an ass of the gods, above ). Viewed through the TERF eyes of the state’s surveilling vigilante/travelling panopticon, the xenomorph—as a creative spectre of Marx and resident black rabbit—must die; i.e., at its posthuman heart, the xenomorph rejects empire and heteronormativity through a liminal, bio-mechanical return to nature through linguo-material, drug-like means: the Shadow of Galatea having a dark, non-white function regardless of sex, gender or ethnicity insofar as the Archaic Mother/alien nature evolved from the early city-states into Rome and hauntologically beyond; e.g., Medusa with curly hair expanding symbolically to include different functionally non-white groups (e.g., Irish women/PoC)!
That’s what trans, non-binary and intersex people represent: delineations from colonial-binarized standards within biology and language as creative towards non-heteronormative ends. We fully recognize that we’re “other” relative to heteronormative models’ intersecting persecution dialectics of the alien; we just don’t want to be killed for it, which requires changing the system from toe to top full of apathy being swapped out for our aforementioned dark empathy instead!
(exhibit 60e1: Artist, top-left and bottom-right: Hannibal Damage on Reflective Desire; top-middle: H.R. Giger; top-right: Hannibal Damage; bottom-left: Rubber Matt; bottom-middle-right: René Magritte. Magritte once said, “I want to create a mystery, not to solve it.” Charlie Skelton writes of him,
Magritte keeps the tension held within the image […] in perpetual and unresolved antagonism. It was Magritte’s genius to construct images that are awkwardly resilient to straightforward resolution, and he famously hated having his paintings psychoanalyzed or scoured for deeper meaning [source: “Why Magritte was like a standup comedian,” 2015].
Rabbit skins come in all kinds. Thoroughly xenophilic, the idea of “living latex” comments on the medieval idea of the animate/inanimate to convey the elusively mysterious sense of the human within the inhuman [or vice versa] as ontologically undead/demonic, thus surreal [e.g., Giger’s xenomorph, Donnie Darko or Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”]. In other words, reality is dehumanizing/xenophobic. And yet, inside this larger process, a humanely dehumanized inhuman side lurks that co-exists with its opposite: as liminal/uncanny on a surface level!
Like Segewick’s analysis of the Gothic in “Imagery of the Surface” as favoring the surface level over perceived “deeper truths,” living latex becomes a persona of various virtues or vices, but also a relinquishing of self-consciousness inside an alter-ego [a popular superhero trope with revolutionary potential, if not actual activists; e.g., Peter Parker or Clark Kent as moderate, outdated caricatures of American journalism passed off as legitimate criticality].
As a kind of suit of armor that shields one from the outside world, this occurs by dampening external forces figuratively and literally. It’s a blinder designed as much for xenophilic comfort and calm as it is xenophobic discomfort and anxiety [though both poles can be executed to whatever degrees all parties decide]: fear can be performed, its impulses resisted through discipline exercises that invariably require energy and effort from both parties during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Such a topic is incredibly synchronistic, spanning many different mediums that remain peripherally aware of one another—having been discussed, for instance, with equal parts fascination, reverence, curiosity and disgust in metal and horror for decades: thriving in the late ’70s countercultural whiplash to the emergence of neoliberalism; e.g., Judas Priest’s 1978 Stained Class and 1979 Hell Bent for Leather solidifying NWOBHM as infused with death and leather daddy biker culture!
In BDSM at large, though, the latex suit enforces a dehumanized, uncanny appearance, which the wearer can don but also perform inside to stress certain aspects of restraint, control, obedience and discipline. Furthermore, their suit can modify to include monstrous components [such as horns] but also a complete lack of identifying facial features to assume an uncanny doll-like affect. But within this, the human side can shine through something that serves to buffer the wearer for a body-language-and-leather-aesthetics-heavy performance; i.e., as forceful, transgressive commentary on daily life’s “smothering” qualities. Conversely, when the suit is removed, the human underneath can exhibit modifications, too; e.g., tattoos [exhibit 45c2a] but also gender-affirming surgeries. Such persons embody the things that heteronormative persons would outright reject and attack: queerness and BDSM as sinful and vice-driven, but also chaotic—a threat to order.)
“Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” / “They must have wanted it for the weapon’s division.” A logical outcome of corporate weaponization, nature’s black-mirror formlessness mirrors in the xenomorph, but also shoggoth from At the Mountains of Madness or the T-1000 from T2 (all stemming from Frankenstein). While Scott originally envisioned the derelict ship as a “bomber” filled with advanced tools of warfare in space, his treatment of the xenomorph is progressively anti-capitalist/anti-patriarchal thus Galatean; re: David made it to spread and overwhelm the West from the outside-in; re: it’s literally the Imperial Boomerang: a reverse prescription and at-times surreal desecration of the usual Western values hauntologized from city-states into nation-states and corporations acting like the heroes of old; i.e., cowardly and unfairly towards nature as alien invader against bourgeois claims (re: the hero, Perseus, raped and murdered Medusa in her sleep by having had Athena’s help to overcome the Gorgon’s rape victim Aegis with the state’s: anti-predation maneuvers on both sides).
That’s what the “Goths” hauntologically were (re: Baldrick) and what Giger’s own drug-addled, BDSM-tinged Numinous sought to recapture while camping neoclassical canon: to show a dark and absurd side of nature that exists, hence invades the canonical imaginary in spite of the West and its self-lionization in an architectural-morphological imagination’s cryptomimetic mise-en-abyme: Picasso burning the psychosexual “bunny’s” portrait!
(artist, left: Doc Zenith; top-right: H.R. Giger; bottom-right: Benvenuto Cellini)
In short, the xenomorph is a black whore violating hauntology’s white supremacy arguments; re: those of the Cartesian revolution built on older patriarchies essentializing rape as justified. A byproduct of iconoclastic mad science turning nature into a weapon against the status quo, the xenomorph survives as pure, furious creation that spites David’s own creators as false gods. It’s not just a survivor of rape, but a death-god Galatea whose life after death makes the likes of the magically beheaded Ash pale in comparison; i.e., an ability to transform, but also escape through forbidden forms of extraterrestrial love liberating sex work on the Aegis! She hijacks the ship through mutinous subversion of its deepest circuitry (the brain)!
Meanwhile, the Oedipal nature of the language being used is figurative (unlike Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, which is spelled out literally); the phallic or vagina’ rabbit doesn’t have fixed, Cartesian prescriptions attached to it, but occupy uncertain positions outside orderly existence haunting its frontier models. Indeed, through the psychological model of one’s return to the Dark Mother and her “womb,” Alien‘s birth trauma can have much more of an Otto Rank interpretation than a Freudian one: a desire to end postnatal trauma by returning to the darkness and security of the womb, versus focusing on the brutality of exiting it. And upon gaining entry once more, to sleep perchance to dream! Time for nap-nap!
Moreover, the overt, death-infused sexuality in Alien has a 1970s BDSM flavor—one fixating on ambiguous consent and a “stricter” form of power-exchange that borders on corporal punishment. As something for the company to weaponize, the shapeless xenomorph is basically an “abject, latex gimp suit” (exhibit 60e1) with bones for laces and a “stabby cock dagger” for traumatic insemination, but also works as a handy metaphor for colonial trauma: hate-fucking your oppressors; i.e., the rape fantasy of the slave overpowering the master as messily intertwined with domination/submission fantasies of white women towards their servants, before and during Said’s Culture and Imperialism onwards; re: navigating double standards and rockstar power imbalances through holistic rebellion: a place to allow for half-real curiosities to commission ways to close the gap in the future of a past moment for all peoples and places dodging the “27 Club”; e.g., my mom asking me to draw her younger self with Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, along with a variety of other commissions she happily paid me: a hybrid of The Magician’s Nephew with Warhammer’s Britannica where my mom-as-Jadis’ good-witchy double (reclaiming C.S. Lewis’ ace, schoolboy BDSM) cheerfully saves her now-deceased boyfriend from a black knight, Star Wars and my newly-wed in-laws, and my then-newly-born in-law as Spider-baby!
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
The whole spiel is revolutionary wish-fulfillment—a cryptonymic “safe space” for the oppressed to voice their legitimate, social-sexual anger against state oppression and xenophobia with uncivil ludo-Gothic BDSM’s fantasy love language. As an ontological statement reclaimed for and by queer people, the xenomorph was always going to be challenged, but also co-opted and turned against them (which, as we shall see in Volume Three, becomes part of the exhibit). All the while, the psychosexual sentiment of the monster elides colonial violence and Pagan eroticism with legitimate, rising forms of postcolonial discourse that rose to the fore with the emergence of neoliberal Capitalism. Unlike Norman Bates, the xenomorph wasn’t designed exclusively to demonize queer people any more than other black rabbits were on the Aegis; the palimpsest was a centuries-long lineage of postcolonial media with a Satanic protagonist rebelling against the status quo. 1979 was the year Margaret Thatcher—the world’s first elected neoliberal in the Global North, before Reagan—first assumed power.
To this, the monster’s patent inability to separate pleasure from pain denotes a queer escape from the closet that threatened to swallow them whole—one whose exposed “newness” allotted fresh voices the opportunity to complicate the Gothic Romance with Freudian clichés drenched in Neo-Gothic nostalgia. The paradox of xenophilia is that sexuality and trauma go hand-in-hand, queer people forced into the fearsome shadows (with authors like Dennis Cooper eventually commenting on queer expression as historically-materially looped, arm-in-arm, with the compelled rape of queer persons; e.g., his favorite commentary [and Zeuhl’s] being on twinks during a “trap/bait” arrangement, sex in bathrooms, and rape performance art).
But their morphologically diffuse language was overtly sexualized and gender-nonconformist, operating in ways typical of the aforementioned rising discourse; i.e., new forms of social-sexual identity attached to ritualized trauma as intensely cathartic for the oppressed, but also morphologically complex in a medievalized counterattack: the miraculous survival of queer rememory within the disassembled flesh and materials—of an unnatural newborn, one whose curse of oppression awakens the enslaved robotics centuries later during the twilight era of genocide. Doing so to advance mutely and furiously towards its de facto conquerors, the American middle class, the rabbit eats Saturn (this variant of the killer baby being different than Giygas, the “mighty idiot” conquer-baby-god from Mother 2/Earthbound, below, or Homelander from The Boys [who we’ll examine in Volume Three, Chapter Five] because the “killer child” archetype represents the oppressed as an infantilized tool or byproduct of oppression as a structure):
(exhibit 60e2: Artist, top-left: Jared Thompson; top-right: Porto881; bottom: anonymous, source. Giygas [“GEE-gis”] represents a kind of astral traveler that returns to conquer Earth; i.e., the plot to Prometheus but also its forbears: Satan’s coming home to undermine God’s paradise, or the Enlightenment’s “progress,” after waking from a long sleep of death. In doing so, Giygas is effectively dead when traveling through space, awakening in an ancient “Cave of the Past” womb, and where he is confronted by the heroes of the game and “aborted”; i.e., a neonatal, xenophobic confrontation on par with what Ashley Gavin calls “inside baby/outside baby” according to the argument if something is alive or dead from conservative minds [source: “Ashley Gavin: Live in Chicago,” 2023].
Indeed, “inside” in Gothic stories refers to the idea of inherence fantasy as womblike but also funeral, chaotic and undead; a cryptonymic inversion of the topography of inside/outside as burdened/initiated by colonial trauma [re: Abraham and Torok]. Clearly the myriad theories of this procedure’s literal or figurative nature remain open to debate [source: Reddit] and by persons like Grier from Super Famicon BS-X who default to “high-school level” Freudian tropes in the self-confessed absence of “Gothic expertise” [source: “Grasping the true form of Giygas’ attack,” 2009]. Instead of merely guessing at the inkblot using silly psychoanalytical models and moving endlessly in circles, it’s more productive—as an expert of the Humanities, Marxism and the Gothic—to interpret the nebulous, cartoonishly Freudian imagery in relation to what the Earth historically-materially represents and why a perceived alien force might wish to conquer it; i.e., from a dialectical-material standpoint, what does the traveling violence between competing material forces expressed in demonic pastiche actually signify?
The short answer is, labor as something that becomes wild, but also assimilated by fascist DARVO obscurantism through technological singularities maintaining Capitalist Realism [from Mary Shelley, onwards]. The time-traveling abortion—to kill one’s enemy before they’re even conceived—is a science fiction staple that dates back to Frankenstein [which Cameron took quite literally in The Terminator with his “retroactive abortion” line]. In Earthbound the act “nips” Communism “in the bud,” stopping the spread of dissident information that, when silenced, allows the status quo to miraculously remain intact. The bringers of this calamity are effectively weaponized children of a Radcliffean paradigm punching the Black Veil; i.e., their bodies turned to metal while they use the “power of friendship” as a personal responsibility deus ex machina to “save the world”: preserving the established order from a pareidolic lunar rabbit menace, except the ink is menstrual blood [or some such Freudian, body fluid paint-by-numbers].
Also, for what it’s worth: the presence of a numen or divinity is described through ghost stories as “abortive offshoots of the Numinous,” by Rudolph Otto. In that sense, Giygas is our “spectre of Marx” that implies an unimaginable greatness beyond Capitalism’s myopia during a ghost story that conveys doom with literal symbolism—its own elaborate strategy of misdirection in the neoliberal era, which is the only one that commercialized videogames have ever known [according to Ahoy’s 2020 “The First Videogame,” the earliest examples of “videogame” happened in 1973 during the same year as the Oil Crisis of the Arab-Israeli war—a conflict that would help the elite secure a steady shift away from Bretton Woods and the Embedded Liberalism approach of post-WW2; i.e., in favor of neoliberal Capitalism’s return to market deregulation through state power. For a lengthy analysis of this topic, consider Bad Empanada’s lengthy and scathing response to neoliberal propagandist and shill for the World Economic Forum, Johnny Harris].)
In Alien, xenophobia and xenophilia are not discreet, inhabiting a single demon lover’s surreal physique/district nine (echoes not just of Donnie Darko evil rabbit but the zombies-vampires from Plan Nine from Outer Space). There, the beautiful pain, confusion and—at times—violent, tremendously orgasmic/vaso vagal exertion of ambrosial renaissance goes beyond the chief monster. For example, the “milk” in Ash’s veins (below) is semen-like in a humors-esque degree, personifying his rapist-servant energies to track very much with Giger’s trippy portfolio eroticism; i.e., in the Gothic surrealist approach to things (the “walking penis” trope being a kind of gross, but also dated, hallucinatory pun: Macbeth’s fatal vision).
Yet, in pure BDSM terms, the phobic-philic power exchange favors the “mommy dom” as “strict”; i.e., her secret admirer, Ash, would happily submit to her paralyzing authority despite how she could and probably would bite his head off/fuck his literal guts out (exhibit 60e3). This treatment—of overblown, homicidal threats of violence against the willing servant—is very much part of the ’70s death fantasy that permeated the BDSM theatre of those times. However, Alien also comments phantasmagorically on buried colonial trauma as something whose raw, angry sexuality and gender trouble would be automatically abjected by the usual benefactors of colonialism chasing rabbits (sure enough, the fantasy would be met with lethal force in the mid-’80s during Cameron’s lionization of neoliberal hegemony worldwide).
(exhibit 60e3: A disembodied “O face” that takes advantage of the techno-occult wonders of Gothic pastiche: an out-of-body orgasm tied to a fearsome past. This can be through sodomy as something to invoke; i.e., unreproductive or non-legitimate sex, but also asexual expression that plays with traditionally sexualized language and gender to achieve genderqueer results: gender parody and trouble. Simply put, it’s fun and therapeutic, a kind of castration “stress art” for relating to others asexually through sexual language, humor and playful, even transgressive xenophilic degradation/revenge [a concept we’ve already examined with Blxxd Bunny in a previous chapter but will return to more extensively in Volume Three]. Cock shaming is a thing [I love it]!)
The ludo-Gothic rememory in this case is Scott’s BDSM reversal of the process of abjection: through his own, iconoclastic ghost of the counterfeit. It’s less that people “forget” that Percy Shelley loved Milton’s Satan as a rebel, for instance, and more that those who know died and the lesson wasn’t passed on/was repressed by those in power. So when Scott fully banked on Giger’s Gothic surrealism, those who know knew and those who didn’t saw the usual xenophobic threats of rape aimed at white women by dark forces; re: the usual counterterror cryptonymy saying to said women, “Join us!” as much as actually intended physical harm!
Beyond the ’70s inkblot, Scott would quote Percy Shelley in Covenant and Prometheus, which again were basically xenophilic love letters to Frankenstein as itself serving up a 19-year-old wunderkind’s love letter to Milton’s Paradise Lost; i.e., in a revolutionary vein whose counterterror path laid out Gothic reinvention that can never be stopped. These days, the usual criticisms to said imagination spell out in lateral terms. For every queer nerd reveling in Scott’s quirky Gothicism, you have ten weird Aliens nerds loudly clamoring for more guns and dead Commies; bourgeois servitude is their canon/praxis. Much to their chagrin and confusion, Scott would press on, making the city-bombing terrorist/vengeful queer robot the Hannibal Satanic hero of his latter-day apocalypse movies (exhibit 60e3)!
As something to reclaim, then, the chimeric, “opium dream” vibe of the abjectly furious, “death BDSM” of the xenomorph should be a hint. Apart from open rebellion, the curious desire to look at our lost histories, schadenfreude, ecology (e.g., the forest and kodama, from Princess Mononoke) and formerly hedonistic or sexually liberated cultures “rabbits” simply involves the eyes and the Aegis; i.e., as being a normal gateway for the average person to experience extraordinary events with an expectation to see the violence, the gory and the macabre (a nostalgic fascination with monsters inside-outside nature, exhibit 48d2; but also the body as inside-out, whose “anatomical Dark Venus” fringes on hauntological, exhibit 44a2).
Yet, the hallucinatory cryptonymy and confusion of the senses when faced with chaos causes them to overlap; re: much like Nick Bottom’s do during his own drug-fueled dream; i.e., a kind of erotic synesthesia or “experiencing together” of various senses to get at the truth of things; re: “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 [of dark rabbits] was.”
Just like Shakespeare’s dark, forbidden forest, this desire to know gnosis is also driven by ecstasy—to learn by having fun and playing at being ourselves in ways heteronormative society doesn’t approve of, but actively tries to demonize and exterminate; i.e., by targeting the sites of such Dionysian delights (a concept that applies quite readily to queer people and sex workers wishing to be left alone by weird reactionary straight people scapegoating furries). The Bacchanal transformation away from Cartesian norms/binaries invokes the sleeping death as cathartic; i.e., a form of rape play by fucking the sleeping-beauty doll-like sacrifice as thoroughly “stoned” in the hands of friends under conditions of informed consent. This can be assisted by altered sight, but also make rebellion something to attract people towards as “neurochemically pleasurable” through rituals of guilty pleasure during ludo-Gothic BDSM; e.g., school girls and ambiguous age regression scenarios; i.e., intimations not just of date rape, but ritual sacrifice tied to a ghost of the counterfeit using the most classic of imperiled damsels: the “virgin” (a watched pot never boils, unless you’re fucking it).
(artist: Spoop)
We’ll look even further into actual drugs in Volume Three when talking about parallel societies (e.g., Joy Division had many run-ins with coke, ecstasy and acid when trying to deal with Margaret Thatcher’s bullshit). For now, I want to focus on the natural kind—not smoking weed, even (exhibit 60b), but the so-called “religious” experience of communion with intense emotions mid-ritual: state sanctions against a Paganized illicit sexuality. I want to wrap things up regarding that, considering the whore’s revenge against profit (and places of profit; e.g., malls); i.e., where the black rabbit, once freed, testifies to its own bourgeois pimping and verminization haunting its freedom and xenoglossic voice seeking shelter and comfort during reclaimed sodomy dialogs (re: Ng and I, “Reclaiming Anal“): titillating people long-distance with educational aphrodisiacs, mid-cryptonymy on the Aegis (e.g., witch panties/Oedipal eye contact, above)!
Approaching Catharsis; or, the Whore’s Revenge Where Said Wrongs Once Occurred
Of course, the xenomorph remains our centerpiece—a bio-mechanical, queenly Numinous tied to real-world, GNC peoples and their artistic refrain during the usual social-sexual rituals and practices. Earlier I also mentioned Radcliffe’s frisson. In her own way, Radcliffe was exploring an altered reality through a natural response to perceived danger and stress of a particular kind—concealed rape tied to older legends expressed in statuesque, chronotopic ways: the hauntology of even having a voice to cry “rape” with (as Medusa was classically not humanized at all, in the archaic legends): zenith and nadir! Diabolical or divine? Maybe both!
(artist: Doc Zenith)
In turn, the usual double standards—of male nudity and armor versus female nudity and vulnerability (above) during sexual difference—bring forwards an ancient trope that was further dimorphized under Capitalism to offset the rising cries of “rape!” Patriarchy under capital, per Creed and Freud, assumes an ancient right/rite-of-passage: to rape not just whores, but all nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., as classically being—among many other things—assigned female/non-white/non-Christian, etc, through tokenized police force. Such barbarity and entitlement springs forth a variety of revenge arguments, many revolving around castration.
But such things were, again, un-lady-like in ways that Radcliffe wouldn’t have been allowed to feel; re: “Methinks the lady doth protest too much!” Except, the Medusa paradoxically grows stronger after she’s circumstanced/the head severed from the body to recycle the rape cries in ways no Aegis could shield men/token agents from; re: because Athena was castrating men in the ancient world in ways that would carry over into ours; i.e., during class, culture and race war under neoliberal Capitalism and its nature-vs-the-state dogma (re: Cameron).
And though she was unreliable and timidly experimental, Radcliffe still yielded far better emancipatory results than the totally unreliable, prescribed way of seeing the world outlined above (Cartesian Dualism is a colonizing force). Obviously this investigation can occur differently depending on the flavor you’re seeking in your own work (the act of creating going hand-in-hand with searching for a particular style or message within the style’s heady aesthetic): “Come to mother!” or “Cum for/in mother!” Same difference; i.e., a body like a fertility god, beckoning you towards the imaginary past’s retro-future apocalypse and potential reckoning with capital away from harming rabbits (of any color)! “Eh, what’s up, doc? Your cock? Conquer my city/animal patch, little man!”
(artist: melkteeth)
As Gothic-Communists, these can also be used to make the escape not just an innocent yarn, but an erotic, artistic, clock-carrying rabbit’s drug experiment to make Radcliffe blush like an embarrassed schoolgirl; re: Giger’s unbridled, xenomorphic surrealism as linked to various, ancient totems, lycans, and chimeras that undoubtedly inspired his own biologically intersex, drug-fueled visions, but also the everyday human cross-sections thinly veiled by modernity (above). They inspire the lesson, but also embody it in ways that extend to us having rage to spare, but also love in ways, oddly enough, a bit alien to Giger’s beast: rape prevention through empathy-amid-exposure versus sheer “fuck off and die” vibes. To make a virgin/whore hero openly animalistic can stress an animal quality to bait the gooners trying to police nature as monstrous-feminine with.
Instead, “‘mother’ is the name for ‘God’ on the lips and hearts of all children”; i.e., in ways that yield a kind of Oedipal desire for the mother as something to worship and embody at the same time—a performance, in other words, and one that seeks nature and nurture as a matter of gender trouble versus sheer eroticism, lust or big/small regression. Again, they tend to go hand-in-hand as often as not during ludo-Gothic BDSM, and who doesn’t like a good dark mommy? There’s enough room for gentle and strict Amazons/Medusas, trust me!
Compared to Giger’s own portfolio, we each draw from life and nature, but I like to dress the alien and whore up through dialectical-material context and paradox; i.e., in ways that dictate such things through power flow, which again, I stress through sex positivity and the monstrous-feminine as queer and sparkly in its gayness on the same Aegis, not abject/animalistic torture. Different strokes, but I think enjoying sex without rape through mutual consent is very human, so I like to stress that versus regressing to a flight/flight primordial mentality!
(model and artist: Scarlet and Persephone van der Waard)
“Going back to school” through xenophilic artistic expression is Gothic Communism’s entire aim; i.e., to have fun and play with monstrous-feminine language by fucking with tokens: raising a dark temple to worship at, including the god-like, genderqueer demon rabbits inside. Case in point, I’ve done it myself in my own work, piqued by the effect the Numinous played on my neurodivergent, chemically drug-free imagination (and something that I already related to through Lovecraft’s work, which was read to me as a youngster—I had weird grandparents). Doing so helped me reach my trans self in relation to the reimagined past as an ongoing mode, one that has the prolific and transformative potential to reveal cryptonymic functions of power through drug-like means, thus experience and critique it: fighting fire with fire, the fire of the gods as much about (and through) alienation as it is about rape; re: a naked, pissed-off woman is scary enough, but nudity of the whore in public speaks to rape in ways that are joyous just as often; i.e., during the cryptonymy process’s preferential roleplay loaded with quasi-medieval embellishment. That’s my jam, cuties!
This really isn’t “new,” though; re: Otto described the ghost story as an “abortive offshoot” tied to larger “Numinous” sensations, thus to a presence of the numen—of divinity and power—whose complex, ongoing relationship conspicuously involved religious language he figuratively supplied in an attempt to describe something beyond ordinary experience, but nevertheless attached to/contained inside smaller/more regular ghost stories: the awesome ghost (which C. S. Lewis, in response to Otto, called the uncanny or “mighty spirit” as greater than tigers).
Also like Radcliffe, Otto’s linguistic sleuthing was to try and grasp why these stories were so popular to begin with. Sure, they were being giant snobby nerds about it, but their own investigations yielded lucid and helpful information. According to both, sleuthing the mystery provides good, “impressive feelings”: thinking through art as an active process of engagement during a perceived exchange of unequal power frequently associated with “religious experience” in common lexicon (those big feelings for big trauma as something near us). Yet those of us in the BDSM community already know this effect by a different name: “sub drop,” which I initially likened in my own PhD research and graduate work to “ludo-Gothic BDSM” (“Our Ludic Masters”) and eventually started to apply to my own life (“Why I Submit”). Doing so led to me coming out as trans before writing this book, which was inspired by Radcliffe’s own “exquisite torture” but also my love for Alien and its own complex rape fantasies linked to liminal spaces, castle-narrative, and Numinous killer-rabbit occupants; i.e., as drug-like in ways I tended to imagine while—and I cannot stress this enough—not being on actual drugs!
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
Beyond the xenomorph as the obvious example, then, iconoclastic stories about drug-fueled sex demons more broadly can liberate the mind under Capitalist Realism by making new monsters inspired by older ones: hitting it from the front and back. They accomplish this “booty bump” by becoming forms of drug-seeking behavior that investigate older, non-Western ways of life as “drug-like” with genderqueer potential: a return to the womb of darkness and the poetic gods therein as dug-up “archaeologies.”
Furthermore, there’s a strict refusal to hide the imaginary anthropomorphic components, owing to a convergent sense of communion with the past per current communities that identify with nature through monsters and drugs as reclaimed; re: furries. Yet, the atypical experiences they offer aren’t (always) chemical drugs that, once injected, ravage your body and destroy your mind; they’re highly monstrous forms of self-expression that free the mind from Cartesian bias—the proverbial “good stuff” that helps people understand sex better, including sex work, by building new bonds associated with tried-and-true methods and their prolific and varied footprints; e.g., these mind-altering substances last through what Jen from The Dark Crystal (1982) called pictures: “Words that stay.” Few stay better than those that were crafted under the influence of some dissident Promethean force!
Likewise, few things make quite the impression as monster puns; i.e., you remember the things that scare you, but also make you feel like you’ve never felt before. That’s the sight-enhancing power of Gothic Communism, a kind of forbidden sensory enchantment or transformation depending on what you feel like you need to operate better—as an activist, but also merely to exist (existing for trans people automatically becomes activism under genocidal conditions, which capital fosters).
This includes experiencing revenge, rape, or other fantasies that help us cope with trauma as tailor-made for our bodies and descriptive roleplays (Sima’s “Your Hips Are Wider than Your Shoulders,” 2024)—perceived, imaginary and experienced in ways that cause them to bleed together as darkness visible. For the Gothic, that means fantasies that are hauntological, abject, cryptonymic, and chronotopic, but also phantasmagorical (dream-like); i.e., in relation to nature as policed, mid-panic (JayDaddy’s “You’re in a Slasher Movie,” 2025). Revolution is half-real/dualistic!
To this, fursonas become like suits of armor—offering the wearer and those around them a kind of safe space where no one gets hurt as we let off steam; i.e., expressing ourselves freely as we plan our next step when interacting with others: a secret identity to act out dark wish fulfillment as a means of cathartic revenge, of tackling a hunter or prey mechanism that has become maladaptive in our lives; re: Covenant and David, among other things, the Trojan rabbit bearing false gifts that, when opened, unleash Hell as something to see long after the maelstrom is spent!
Forbidden sight, lost sight, forgotten sight, monster vision, Commie vision and darkness visible—the point with all these various visual types (and sensory confusions) is that, like our previous collages, a sex-positive exhibit can display different experiences of the past that form a pattern among the purple mist. This bunny train includes marginally or vastly different “trippy” experiences: “Exquisite torture? The Numinous? Cosmic Nihilism? Eh, po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh!”
As part of a collective, communal exchange with the creative past made wiser than it currently is, these seminal methods can be conjoined to restore old connections that were lost, using them in ways to understand the world better under Capitalism; i.e., to see through capital’s lies with Gothic poetics as a discursive way of connecting with the former undivided self as “monstrous” in modern times (and whose so-called modern people are really nothing more than proponents of the colonial model of two different kinds of monsters: the hunters and the hunted—a concept we’ll return to in Volume Three, with witch cops).
As the material world begins to decay under Capitalism and produces demons of a different sort by delving into the fascist past, being able to adopt “old” ways of thinking tailor-made for our world can give marginalized people a means of a survival by countering the drug-like propaganda of fascists (the Nazis were not afraid to do drugs, including Hitler); i.e., not just trans people, but anyone who seeks to rebel against Capitalism as a system that historically exploits as many workers as it can; re: assigning relative privilege to a squad of violent watchmen outwards: from cis-white men, then cis-white women, then cis-people in general, and various other forms of tokenism punching down (re: token furries) decadently against nature as alien. Sooner or later, nature punches back, and hard, knocking “Rome’s” teeth out!
People forget the awesome power of rhetoric, but also of poetics; i.e., as spell-like relative to trauma, and gender trouble, parody and dysphoria/euphoria as profoundly intense (thus able to shape how we see the world around us through Numinous works). So often, transformation is how we see things that don’t physically change; their context does in a phenomenological sense—i.e., how it’s experienced, thus viewed and treated in future works, of works, of works…
To that, Gothic-Communist agency is merely a contribution to trails already well-blazed, and marks yet another step for us to grow and develop as we try and survive, but also cope with past abuse by healthily expressing ourselves through altered states of seeing the world during ludo-Gothic BDSM as 24/7. Fisher died before he could finish his own work on acid Communism, handing the reins over the next in line (as is tradition). Rather than fear us for having these dreams of violence built on older ones, consider how they are more apposite to who we are as people living within our own genocide as unresolved. Solve that case, Nancy Drew!
Keeping this in mind, genocide is precisely the thing we want to prevent by experimenting with “drugs” ourselves. Doing so involves the destruction of those things symbolic of genocide during oppositional praxis: the proponents of class struggle, but also the monstrous-feminine within class war against the state. Trans, intersex and non-binary people ain’t basic, y’all; but we also ain’t aliens the way the state decrees. A girl can certainly dream, though, picturing herself akin to something like a xenomorph; i.e., as the prophesied avenger of past wrongs in the present. This isn’t just psychological tension, mind you, but class struggle and unequal material conditions and conditions of power told through Gothic poetics.
To this, the iconoclastic revenge fantasy becomes a kind of “lucid dream,” one that regains a modicum of control from those who harm us and threaten us; i.e., with material reminders of trauma. The question for the nervous observer shouldn’t be, “Will she kill me?” but “Why does she feel this way? Why is her body biomechanical and fueled by dream-like, drug-fueled forays into the ‘past’?”
The devil, they say, is in the details, and dark empathy means giving different people a room of one’s own to play out difficult power fantasies about rape and other generational abuse/erasure; re: the xenomorph as a kind of traditionally female whore avenging past wrongs in Western and Japanese culture: “And if you wrong me, shall I not revenge?” So do holistic vermin come home to roost/reap the extirpator with oddly sexy rape revenge: the slow march of time versus the black rabbit’s race to the finish—a turtle rabbit!
(artist: Tomato Lover)
Love, Dead and Robots, for example, combines the Yokai spirit of vengeance with a tick-tock version of Shelley’s Creature (next page); i.e., East-meets-West, the be(a)st of both worlds turning hunter into hunted and vice versa: a killer Trojan rabbit’s splendide mendax; re: “That rabbit’s dynamite!” Fuck around and find out, assholes! A reaper of vengeance avenging past wrongs with a body of metal (re: like Sonic‘s Amazon rabbit character); i.e., concentric preferential code, the sideways smile of a vengeful black womb/whore ravishing Francis Bacon and company (re: Creed and me), thus reaping the Numinous whirlwind of a Great Bunny Destroyer punching up with vigor (and so on): the call isn’t coming from inside the house, but is the house—the At the Mountains of Madness eating Capitalism through the native’s reclaiming cannibalism against profit and its spearheads during “land back” on the Aegis: giving the prison/death sentence back during live burial! Such is Gothic maturity developing Gothic Communism during ludo-Gothic BDSM to tell (or rip) the Nazi and Commie apart!
Fluency illuminates darkness visible during dialectical-material scrutiny. As we move on to synthesize Gothic theory in Volume Three, it’s incredibly important to remember the focus of this book: sex worker rights through such scrutiny—not psychoanalysis as a jacket for Marx to conceal him! The whole point of Sex Positivity is stopping sex worker abuse through reclaimed Gothic poetics, which Gothic Communism achieves through successful proletarian praxis freeing black rabbits; i.e., exposing systemic abuse with Gothic theories by funneling them through monstrous puns, historical awareness and transformative experiences: as dialectical-material analysis, but also covert devices like cryptonomy and hauntology (which we’ll explore in dead malls, next).
To achieve praxial catharsis, these various, modular means and “mash-ups” become expanded, personified ways of seeing and communicating—a “monster mode” that all workers can use to transform material conditions through the Gothic imagination, not just trans people. Together, we can all express our personal journeys and subject matter to others; i.e., highlighting the various social-sexual symptoms of Capitalism that inexorably lead to sex worker abuse/exploitation: lobotomization, live burial, menticide, and war/rape culture, as well as their various canonical gargoyles and ignominious deaths; e.g., the coded and “little” deaths—of individual worker brains and actual lives, but also their sex and social lives tied to the hyperreal death of the future that leads to the Big Death of Promethean Capitalism: through its classic business site; re: as a place where fatal nostalgia (thus empathy) goes to die and be reborn: the mall as a cathedral where consumerism/privatization and pimping come to a head with the rabbits who turn such places into Bunny Island: the Revenge (a swarm, echoing Danny Glover’s excellent 2023 show about a woman-of-color sex worker serial killer—bee buns protecting the robo-rabbit hive) of the cooked cooking us (Master Necronic, 2021)!
Closing Thoughts: On the Justice of Roosting Rabbits (and onto Zombie Malls Where Rabbits Are Sold)
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
In times of crisis, people can change to anisotropically rebel for or against the state. So beware the Ides of March; i.e., the parthenogenetic egg-laying rabbit hatching the lunar-sized demise of the oppressor through self-served posthumanist, cybernetic revenge: a false Antiquity’s dark Aesop seizing the means of revenge production back from state pirates. Privateer bun deprivatizes capital; avast! We sail into Black Duality, cryptomimetically tempting Fate to undo the Puritan ethic to expose the pimp and camp Marx’s ghost! They push us into the putrid animal past; we bring it forwards in paradoxical forms of joy that not only can’t die, but help us regenerate as revenge! We are and aren’t what you paint us as: from lawn jockey to Space Jockey to bring the chickens (or rabbits) home to roost; i.e., the “past” is right now, currently at hand! The eye opens and the panopticon searches for prey as Hell comes to Earth. It’s very Watership Down but also Terminator in ways we can reverse: the return of the proletariat assassin played by us furries!
(artist: Fox in a Jacket)
To it, we servants of a Dark Easter amortize the mortgage, showing you what’s in store! Death, libido, and dealing through public nudism and the duality and cryptonymic, intersectionally solidarized anisotropic labor exchange: the voice of Omelas’ holistic chattel breaking the monopoly and spell of Capitalist Realism! We become death, destroyer of worlds, and beautiful in our rapturous sermons; i.e., Zofloya handing Victoria a poisoned chalice! The beautiful death, putting on her spotted robe! Time for love bombs, straight from the ass; total eclipse of the heart!
And if those unaccustomed to flattery can’t spot fetishization in bad faith or the throes of assimilation, those who have lived it have likewise learned through experience; i.e., during calculated risk to reduce risk and better the instruction by passing on hard palliative-Numinous medicine (“the dose [and context] doth make the poison”): to the next in line playing with fetishes and taboos to apotropaically subvert the usual negative effects! Summon and spar your own demons until you can handle whatever the state throws at you. So is ludo-Gothic BDSM acid/Gothic Communism, in small; i.e., something that took many tries from me, failing at many things until I returned for the first time to my queer roots, mid-psychomachy!
Some people push back; we do it on the trail of death as oddly happy. To chase the Numinous as a mighty sex ghost we don’t want to vanish, it’s like a rapturous spell that can deny/kill the orgasm like a succubus just as much as summon it during calculated risk (chasing the ghost of rape). What dreams may cum indeed! Take one for the team: the jungle moon bun’s tramp stamp of doom, back in black, turning the noose on the executioner in her chimeric death coach’s nightcap: a poison drug putting a spell on you, a paralytic wasp embryo inside you, eating you up (the killer egg, in trans language, hatching a tokophobic dragon up in your guts).
So do we reify and spar with such demons to give them voice and shape, meaning as vehicles we can control extending into the world around us; i.e., like a lever that can move the Earth with; e.g., Sweetpea (above, 2024) murdering her enemies being impractical in real-life (classic codependency on murder victims) but therapeutic for workers in real life looking in; i.e., the fantasy of a knife very different through performative but also dialectical-material context achieving cathartic synthesis without harming other workers. Quite the opposite, we prevent systemic harm by changing what causes harm through “harm” during the whore’s paradox of rape: the ghost of the counterfeit, swapping terror and counterterror!
It’s half-real, delighting in discomfort and eustress disguised as genuine distress during ludo-Gothic BDSM; concentric illusions, deceptions, and mirages are the Gothic’s go-to place of concealment: in plain-sight (and often strict), oscillating between gentle and hard, black and white, virtue and vice, etc. So can we “rape” or otherwise fuck with each other in paradoxically Numinous forms developing Communism. Win-win! Fuck the Five-O!
“Remember the rep,” Rocky Balboa? “Crime doesn’t pay?” In short, we’re already criminal by existing and pimped into self-hatred, and if crime didn’t happen then the elite (and cops) wouldn’t exist. Yet here they are, playing hero like Rocky is. Self-love and self-care comes from getting angry at those who harm us in bad faith (as Stallone does). So save it for those who have it coming and who underestimate us; i.e., for being small, weak, and having all the power they want to take from us. Become the thing they’ve always feared and run with it; it’s literally poetic justice, and silence is genocide. Like Sweetpea, we’re literally investigating our own death—as something we survived and carried out. Allegedly.
So hit it and quit it? Bitch, please, we’re here to stay (and camping Zeuhl’s ghost, in the bargain)! Our home, Jameson’s nightmare of Marx’ ghost, is a Twilight Zone turning empire’s rot in on itself: you’re already dead; you just don’t know it! That is our revenge, and we’ll beat that drum till the End of Days; i.e., when Medusa comes to pick up/relieve her avatar and show us what’s coming to a head! When push comes to shove, she’s queen of her kind! First-world problems become end-world problems, our dead queen beating Saturn in a child-eating competition.
The trick to avoiding that sorry end (of our species) is dismantling capital, which requires dark empathy and teamwork to avoid Queen Death’s maw. The way out, then, is through Hell by mastering Her shadows before then; i.e., shirking what capital promises and conditions, meaning workers being made to think what is promised as “reward” (Jafar-style) but actually a curse we must break (and vice versa: the victim’s desire for power versus the state soldier afraid of everything and alienated from nature in all its wondrous forms; e.g., killer rabbits, next page)!
So Yoshi-style egg-laying mammals aren’t completely fictional, the seemingly chimeric convergence of the echidna or duck-billed platypus speaking to the imaginary sodomy terrors of yesteryear! We’re not just dragon bunnies but bunny bandits—a vanguard of tank rabbits preparing for Kursk 2.0! The victory and justice of our one people, one race racing to the finish like a slow shuffling slasher—the paradox of the hare as a turtle whore—is the eggs we lay as much serving as bombs, as well as clever bio-weapons inside-outside our hosts: survival, solidarity and speaking out! We do so through revolutionary cryptonymy!
And while killing is a power that translates poetically to activism—and there’s power in death as radical change—we’re not terrorists, but freedom fighters; i.e., the only thing we kill is profit, but can defend ourselves as they attack us: fighting fire with fire being anisotropic. So is our rape revenge fantasies taking sodomy back; i.e., through said fantasies that speak to activism as something to disguise what we’re talking about. When fascism comes home to roost, then, so do we. Scared of a killer rabbit sucking your blood for a change, King Arthur? Of changing into any shape we need (and size; i.e., kaiju bunnies)?
The fact remains, land back is a guerrilla enterprise, and we don’t owe the bourgeoisie shit. Godzilla Bun is here to eat capital, and rape fantasies putting the shoes on the other foot (a bit like Cinderella) are not mutually exclusive with good praxis: fantasizing about killing the elite is not the same as killing them. Don’t believe philistines who say that is worthless (e.g., Bad Empanada); from Marx to us, social change and justice go hand-in-hand with material change.
Perception-wise, there’s a thin line between victimizer and victim (e.g., Olurinatti’s “How Men Become Aziz Ansari,” 2025), as well as damsels, detectives and demons, but also rabbit and rapist (apart from humans, consent is virtually non-existent in the animal kingdom); the magic of revolutionary cryptonymy is its function yielding itself clear as crystal regardless of praxial ambiguity through dialectical-material scrutiny and worker/owner divisions (thus cats/dogs and other tokenized rivalries finding common ground under shared duress/cause for concern and trust issues/vice-character alter egos): “Feel the power of the Dark Crystal!”
Furthermore, per Asprey’s paradox, makeup is a weapon, and sex in art/porn is a weapon, our furry counterterror versus state dualism and its usual tools. Our attraction and portraits are fatal, as are theirs, but our demon-red vampire eyes give and take as undead-demonic animals having the whore’s torturously fake revenge during confused predator/prey and vaso vagal memento mori—all to grant curious shared wishes: dreams in fractured solidarity during ludo-Gothic BDSM of the hunted hunting the hunter and ravishing them, a common enemy and lubricant diptych, with a demon lover’s nasty and penetrative, impregnating parting gift—the caterpillar and the wasp laid by a magic March hare.
So does Communism grow inside the audience and change their vision through sex and force: our black Dracula, Lady-Macbeth, Great Destroyer’s hunting vibe a light bringer exposing the lily-white, banal bourgeois dragons like Elon Musk as Dracula in duality playing at Van Helsing’s man of reason; i.e., as “white knight” predators with their hands in the cookie jar whether onstage or off! Our cookie jar. A pimp’s a pimp, and you think you can get away with murder? Two can play at that game, and this one’s for Medusa!
The drug trip never ends—is a “perma” trip that, like Radcliffe’s spectral castles, stretch into the void, mise-en-abyme: the belly of the bun, buns all the way down, a Numinous ravishing by the bun of the Radcliffean cop to be its carrot, a darkness not to flee from but face and reconcile with by sodomizing capital’s corpse (re: the anal Amazon thesis applying to black bunnies buttfucking the palaces of a dying capital to transform them into safe brothel “stables”)!
Before the Demon Module’s conclusion, then, I want to briefly examine that vis-à-vis the sorts of dark empathy and Gothic poetic elements we’ve been discussing relative to the nature world; i.e., to reunite with as capital decays (versus lament and fantasize through Capitalist Realism, as Stranger Things does; re: avenging America [or a similar empire] that never was to keep scapegoating Capitalism as usual, above): a Morpheus-style wake-up call while dreaming (a night bunny versus a black dog or nightmare, etc), haunting places as carefree as the blissful neo-arcadia of Yoshi’s Island from Super Mario World (1990). A mall is a mall—both an emergent town square as much as state-sanctioned concentration camps!
Why the dead mall, though? Like a mining camp during a gold rush, the mall is a cryptonym for genocide tied to capital as dead. As a “ghost town” where the exploitation of workers sits eerily within the decayed illusion of the mall as nostalgic, this means the unfolding grand calamity is well-disguised: the fictional, concentric ruin as a neoliberal disguise to our own crumbling world! To prevent its logical endpoint, Capitalism’s zombie future must be revived into a new form of visible, critical undead—one whose life-saving emotional/Gothic intelligence; girl talk, love language; transformative, eye-opening pastiche; and all-around execution of proletarian praxis (the basics of oppositional synthesis) occurs at the new sites of media exchange and worker exploitation build on older bunny bazars!
And while physical malls might be dying or dead, their online iterations are certainly not. It is here where a new zombie future must emerge, a half-real proletarian “archaeology” that lives in the ruins of Capitalism while bearing out the p(r)osy chiding of critics far too good to participate; re: Jameson and similar fancy-pants thinkers and poets who act like nature’s stewards, but in a very gentrified white man’s way that is too good for acid Communism and the Gothic (someone who might turn their noses up at Gandalf’s smoke rings, for example). We’ll spank their little bottoms (or thump their buns/eat their fat juicy carrots, as the bunny power bottom does), next; i.e., where rabbits (thus whores) are sold!
Onwards to “The Future Is a Dead Mall (and Module Conclusion)“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] The same year The Dark Crystal and The Last Unicorn likewise catered to YA in a Wizard-of-Oz “family film” approach: through spontaneous magic, queerness, violence and revenge going in all directions!
[2] Conversely the talking animal can also be a sign of rebellious property or chattel, suddenly speaking in hauntological forms that ooze xenophobia from the frightened, bigoted viewers; e.g., Red Hook’s The Darkest Dungeon II having a less-than-charitable view of talking animals, its denizens of the Sluice being a non-too-subtle, dislocated cross between George Orwell’s 1945 Animal Farm and Warhammer’s Skaven race of warrior rats: “There are rumours these rancorous beasts have some demoniac spark of… otherworldly intelligence.” It’s anti-Semitic and Red-Scare, a subterranean ghetto where cop-like heroes can go and clean house, mid-blood-libel policing the joy division.
[3] Naoko Takeuchi “graduated from Kyoritsu University of Pharmacy, where she received a degree in chemistry [and later] became a licensed pharmacist” (source: Women Who Kick Ass’ “Naoko Takeuchi: Why She Kicks Ass,” 2013]. Similar to Nina Hartley or Victoria Paris, Takeuchi is clearly educated/privileged, but also sex-positive in her work; i.e., as something that regularly faces colonization by neoliberal groups post hoc (and philistines; re: Bad Empanada).
[4] I.e., speaking to femme-fatale Nazi-Commie she-wolves; e.g., Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) being pure Red Scare that pimps the whore, mid-lunacy!
[5] E.g., Goldenbell Training as a black tech bro abusing AI to strip-mine Bruce Lee’s likeness for personal gain. A pimp is a pimp, dude, and art theft is bigotry disguised through labor as preyed upon during neoliberal abuse. In turn, a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all, and plenty of straight black guys are sexist, queerphobic pigs. You’re one of them!
[6] To which Nimona represents a recent delineation from a rival, smaller company in 2023; i.e., despite producing Andor (which is Marxist but not very queer), Disney canceled Nimona under Bluesky as a mainstream release because of its queer themes (source: Rohit Rajput’s “Why Was Nimona canceled by Disney?” 2023), Nimona then funded as an independent release by Annapurna Pictures acquired by Netflix. Corporate pimping and hot-potato aside, there’s only so much sublimation and recuperation you can do with ads before the allegory wins out! And Nimona‘s not subtle!
[7] I.e., often a tree (“There is no immortality but a tree’s love!”), but also monsters. Haggard is a trans chaser in that Beagle inverts the classic myth; i.e., of female transformation by turning the unicorn into something the king didn’t want: a naked human girl who remains queer (“She looks so strange; she has a newness…”). He’s Nick Fuentes, but less smitten with catboys and more horse girls of a more literal sort—something to monopolize and make scarce, regardless!
[8] Making Amalthea a fun subversion of Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name; re: from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Western trilogy—a unicorn (not a horse), then a girl with no name until our unwilling Pygmalion turns her into a Galatea he calls “Amalthea”; re: the mysterious tease whispering plentiful salvation to the king who cares not for earthly “pleasures of the court”: too busy chasing not dragons to slay in his case (as his son does to impress the “princess”), but unicorns to capture. Everyone who tries to capture the unicorn dies, making Amalthea’s killing of the king her revenge; i.e., by setting the others free, making them brave enough to flee by fighting back in front of them, ending the Holocaust by cockblocking the creep: “I knew you were the last!” Good riddance, old man!
[9] Operating on par with Monty Python’s “Castle Anthrax”; i.e., as a hauntologically hypnotic site of forbidden sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll through Gothicized monomyth violence (sex and force): Ganon’s own brothel in “the desert of the real” hawking brown dope/sugar having a dualistic class, culture and race war function.
[10] I.e., similar to Lord Byron’s 1819 “Don Juan” antihero, penned by a rags-to-riches rockstar through a “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” persona: “I want a hero.” Fun fact: The former phrase comes from Lady Caroline Lamb—a woman who, according to Miriam Lang, far outpaced Byron’s excesses with her own whorish shenanigans drinking and fucking Byron under the table:
The statement that Byron was ”mad, bad and dangerous to know” comes from Lady Caroline Lamb after their first meeting, when the publication of ”Childe Harold” (1812) made him the literary and social lion of London at the age of 24. However, Lady Caroline was notoriously worse than he on all three counts, and when she threw herself at Byron, her irrationality and sexual excesses so appalled him that he terminated the affair after about six months. Later, her vengeance fueled the scandal that forced him to leave England.
Undeniably, Byron held most women in low esteem, but in the Regency period, it was the profligate Prince Regent who set the example society followed. Furthermore, Byron’s sexual attitudes and behavior were conditioned by early experiences: a dissolute father, who deserted wife and young child; a violent-tempered mother; a sexually abusive nursemaid and homosexual attachment to a college classmate; the agony and sense of inferiority over his crippled leg, and the spell his extraordinary good looks cast over women.
None of this justifies Byron’s promiscuity or makes him more acceptable by modern women’s standards. It was his one sincere attachment (1813-16), to his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, that led to his downfall in London society. That dangerous liaison, confirmed by Leslie Marchand’s biography, destroyed Byron’s brief marriage (1815-16) to Annabella Milbanke. While incest was not illegal in England, it was considered beyond the pale even in that licentious era. Thus, when rumors surfaced, Byron found himself ostracized (source: “How Lord Byron Became Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know,” 1989).
[11] E.g., watch Alien to see men with small positions thinking they’re smarter than nature, only to get disemboweled, face-fucked and impregnated by the xenomorph. Their comeuppance symbolizes the return of the past as traumatic for men, but also happening in their rapacious language; i.e., the chickens coming home to roost several generations later against the company workforce (exhibit 60e)!
