The Undead, and Bad Dreams (openings)

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

The Undead: Zombies, Vampires and Ghosts

“We are Legion. Our numbers will darken the sky of every world. You cannot escape your doom.”

—Sovereign, Mass Effect (2007)

(artist: Untalented Inc)

Picking up from where “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis” left off…

“We are legion” was uttered by the Gerasene demon, which Jesus “miraculously” transferred into a herd of pigs before force-marching the poor animals into the ocean. Yet, the idea often connects to a legion of undead, whose hungry, upset polity threatens the living with a chorus of repressed, xenophilic voices speaking out against xenophobic oppression as middle-class: violent, very much non-peaceful protest mirroring Gil-Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1971) but also softer whispers; e.g., Trace Chapman’s “Talkin’ About a Revolution” (1988): “Poor people gonna rise up / And get their share.” Indeed, the undead are a radical response to trauma—of radicalization when treated like trash, period—and there exist entire struggles for which America is always the mother country siphoning resources into itself; i.e., in ways that reduce people to mere sex objects and recipients/givers of state force. This extends to workers facing proponents of state rhetoric that must be refuted, connecting this to that; i.e., texts ranging from Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein to Ahmed Saadawi’s 2014 Frankenstein in Baghdad, but connected as well to historical analysis; e.g., Bad Empanada’s “The Iraq War Was About Oil” (2024) highlighting that Zionism and oil monopolies are not mutually exclusive. To that, we’ll be exploring the monstrous history of such exploitation left behind as undead reminders of itself—from zombies, to vampires and ghosts.

Bear in mind, the number of ways the state oppresses, divides and conquers is without limit, affecting colonial territories like the Middle East, Africa and the Global South, from Rwanda to Vietnam to Cuba to Palestine and so many others. From snipers to bombs to death squads to eugenics programs, etc, nothing the colonizer does is fair and they fear everything around them enough to kill without question; they have to or profit cannot happen. Our guerilla-style resistance (asymmetrical warfare reclaiming the Aegis) needs to be cumulative as a means of developing something post-scarcity mid-resistance and decay. In short, we need to raise our voices—however loud and however soft—to speak out against the daily abuses of the colonized by the settler-colonial project as a fundamental element of Capitalism that will try and disguise itself. This includes lies and controlled opposition; e.g., Pride as something to recuperate by Rainbow Capitalism and something to reclaim by us.

(source tweet, anthnyxyz: June 1st, 2024)

Pride isn’t a holiday. It’s not something we do one month out of the year to serve profit; liberation is fought for year-round in spite of profit. Pride isn’t positive thinking divorced from socio-material concerns (thus reducing to controlled opposition), then; it’s a fight for socio-material liberation, challenging the white moderate’s argument for “peace” as an absence of perceived tension challenging capital, hence the status quo. For the sake of ourselves and our comrades all around the world, we cannot be silent because Imperialism (as we shall see) does not stay put; it consumes everything, making the world undead. Any intersectional, solidarized statement against oppression matters because it’s one more individual as part of a larger group that won’t divide to serve profit, thus gentrify and decay on loop. We’re all, in some shape or form, victims of Capitalism doing what Capitalism always does by design: profit while concealing the nature of said profit (exploitation, police violence and genocide) through dogmatic regulations of sex and force, preying on nature-as-monstrous-feminine. Like Omelas, to victimize one group and turn a blind eye is to doom all groups to such a fate, because the state will always incentivize class betrayal to avoid state predation as a matter of fact. This isn’t controversial so much as state proponents serving profit (thus genocide) merely discourage its open discussion. We must do better by setting aside our Judas silver to help those in need not just when it rears its ugly head, but for all time regardless if the membrane is weakened or not, whether Dracula’s castle appears nakedly on the horizon or not. The state is always eating behind illusions that—per Capitalist Realism—romanticize the harvest as grim, which we shall now explore the histories of in different undead forms.

Before we proceed, I do have some pieces on Palestine[1] as one genocide among several primary ones taking place right this very second to enrich the Imperial Core (the other being the Congo, but there are others, too). I likewise have future projects planned with Indigenous groups, people of color and other colonized groups if they wish to be included (re: “Looking for Models, Sex Positivity 5/13/2024“); for now, the history of settler-colonialism oscillating across imperial territories is something of a survey to a much wider problem: the bloody business of Capitalism harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine, extending to a broad cycle of gentrified lies that reliably decay into different forms.

As such, the oppressed become an army of undead, their counter history standing against state forces (the latter making hay as a matter of denying genocide, not simply during it); i.e., in acts of solidarity through our art as reclamatory and iconoclastic: as part of a pedagogy of the oppressed as undead (“those who suffer have no voice”). These apocrypha can be zombies, vampires, and ghosts, whose combined, nightmarish abuse (and voracious eroticism) shall be explored in the following two chapters (and their subchapters):

  • Bad Dreams; or, Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse parts one, two and three explore the giving and receiving of state trauma through undead bodies; i.e., various expects of military urbanism/state decay at home and settler colonialism abroad, as well as how to reclaim these devices and use them to freeze our enemies in place inside the state of exception (re: Athena’s Aegis).
  • They Hunger; or, Reintroducing Liminal Expression through Undead Feeding Vectors goes beyond zombies, using parts one and two to consider the feeding mechanisms of vampires, ghosts and their human counterparts to confront and express state trauma/decay with.

Bear in mind, we’ll only be able to scratch the surface of what American Liberalism, Capitalism, and establishment politics do on a daily basis: deny the ongoing execution of genocide, which they help enact the world over! We want to challenge that in ways that sing against state forces and their aims; re: our Song of Infinity as part of an older historical-material tradition: to sing against the storm of state operations killing people and nature by design (from Volume Two, part one):

As Bay shared with me, “Kiwis are bird rats”; i.e., Nature’s idea of Jewish revenge hunted by the likes of smug men like Karl Jobst or Christoph Waltz (the former sucks in real life, the latter sucks onstage): Their steady song of the Earth is our Song of Infinity to take up ironically with Gothic poetics against the colonizer posturing as “benevolent” (which includes Jewish ethnostates and their proponents simultaneously denying the Holocaust and reenacting it; i.e., the establishment “Good Jew” instead of those like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi as the mythical Jewish unicorn the state doesn’t want you to know about but cannot stop [because their power is a lie, an illusion]: a Socialist anti- Zionist Jew and journalist). Moderates, including token moderates (e.g., Obama) and their elitist, bought-and-paid-for yes men (The Humanist Reports’ “Politicians, Pundits, & Celebs Get a Brutal Reality Check at Elitist Circle Jerk,” 2024) try so hard to control the coverage and paint themselves as good, but they’re the biggest cunts of them all (re: MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 1963). Luckily there’s one thing that moderates (Jewish or otherwise) can never hide: which side they stood for—no, sung for—when the going got tough. We can’t afford to keep quiet or toe the line, because that’s what genocide is: dying in darkness alone, or ignoring those who do while kissing up to capital, to the elite. We’re together when we’re heard, warning predators off and organizing against them through intersectional solidarity (diversity is strength); i.e., kettling the cops, turning a kettling attempt on its heel (encirclement, but also a kayfabe pun); e.g., the American-Israeli ambilocal complex/academic establishment to sever ourselves from: “University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne protesters have encircled police using reinforced banners & signs” (source tweet: Escalate Network, 2024) is one, but also the students of Harvard (an establishment school if ever there was one):

(source tweet: Harvxrd Palestine Solidarity Committee)

Protests are always violent because the state always treats liberation with violence. To that, we must become a pandemic to the elite—united on every continent, a collective thorn in the side of empire-in-disguise. As such, I provide not just my book or this chapter, but my song as unbroken and unbowed, raising my fist with my friends all around the world (source).

As we inspect these histories, remember Weber’s maxim on the monopoly of violence (and in connection to it, Asprey’s paradox of terror and Crawford’s invention of terrorism vis-à-vis the Neo-Gothic mode): Any undead representation of worker interests automatically becomes seditious; the state legitimizes its own violence against the oppressed, delegitimizing any violence performed by those defending themselves from state control, the latter dressed up as “love[2] language” that treats the former as inhuman, alien, and fetishized; i.e., during us-versus-them Amazonomachia using the ghost of the counterfeit (the lie of state sovereignty) to further the process of abjection inside the state of exception.

Just as Capitalism sexualizes everything, its reversal (using Athena’s Aegis) sexualizes whilst looking beyond short-cited blindness. Or as my PhD writes,

Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios); a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other and vice versa. As such, my own contributions to the Gothic are very much about making it sexual again, but also sex-positive in ways that Radcliffe (and her own venerated castle’s praxial inertia) were not (source).

Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, this playfulness involves the confronting of trauma in different monstrous forms, including the undead as the traumatized eaters of sex in ways that express power and move it in different directions; i.e., through knowledge and the basis of oppositional synthesis: girl talk (anger/gossip), monsters and camp. So whereas demons are made, summoned or found insofar as power and knowledge are forbidden and exchanged, undead embody trauma while freezing and feeding as a means of uniting together against state trauma.

To that, the eyes are a common means of the undead doing so; i.e., a doorway to the soul as something less fixed and more open to performative debates that invite the potential for horror as serious and silly to varying degrees; e.g., Shelley’s Frankenstein summing it up well: “his teeth [were] of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set” (source); but as usual, they also go both ways, becoming a potent means of camp: laser-beam bedroom eyes—headlights to freeze one’s deer-like prey in!

In turn, this can be lampooned to death, but this paradoxically—like the vampire as suitably animate and inanimate—yields an odd kind of life unique to human communication and conditions. To quote Willem Dafoe (above):

The actor said of the Speed 2: Cruise Control performance:

A lot of people give me a hard time about that. They tease me about the size of my performance, that it was over the top. But I swear to God, I stand by that performance because there was no other way to do it. I’ve got a pretty flexible face, an expressive face.

And I don’t censor it, I let it do its thing. I don’t put on faces, but I know for a fact that my face can do some really extreme things. And so when you freeze it into a meme, yeah, you can get a lot of laughs out. That’s for sure (source: Bronwen Winter Phoenix’ “Willem Dafoe Stands by Performance in Speed 2,” 2024).

In short, the Gothic lives and dies by such campy potential unfettered, but there’s a lot of wacky devices at play to remember and not all of them work into a given performance!

Specifically keep the module thesis argument in mind, as I won’t have time to set it up and stress it neatly per monster type as undead (re: our modular thesis):

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it (and its trifectas, monopolies, etc) using the same threatening aesthetics of power and death, decay and rape.

(artist: Fritz Willis)

As such, bearing pain and feeding is anisotropic; trauma makes us decay/corrupt as monstrous-feminine or fascist (token or not), albeit in ways that cause us to develop undead feeding habits that are to some degree sex-positive or sex-coercive. It’s seldom clean, too, lurking in the odd grey area of the theatre stage and monster costume. Nor are these forces unique to neoliberal Capitalism, with past poets closer to death, rape and raw sexuality and taboo bodily functions (re: shit, cum, barf, birth, whatever) in ways we’re alienated from now (save in fetishized forms that serve profit): relegated to household spaces that close us off and expose us to patriarchal, Man-Box-style predation. Hauntology lets us brush up with the past as nostalgic in ways that never existed and push towards Communism as aborted by capital/the project of abjection (and other Gothic theories). Such fictional outrages postulate uneasy hypotheticals about what you would have done during a genocide “back then”: what you’re doing right now (doubly so given the flow of information in the past was more controlled than the Internet currently is)!

So far in the book, we’ve discussed Fischer’s maxim regarding Capitalist Realism at various points: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism.” Now I want to apply it to the historical-material expression of the zombie as a kind of myopic, “unimaginable bad dream”: the (eco)fascist nightmare of the zombie apocalypse (we’ll briefly touch on eco-fascism here, but return to it in Volume Three, Chapter Five). Faced with this nightmare, our goal is to humanize it in xenophilic language that enjoys the fantasy as something to critique (re: Sarkeesian)—i.e., to empathize with the wretched without ignoring their state-supplied undead brands (the spectral nature of the neither-living-nor dead as spreading like a virus, in linguo-material terms). Our emphasis (for the upcoming chapter) is bad dreams, so camping canon will focus on unironic state harm as something to overcome inside of itself; i.e., the liminal hauntology of war as a place to seek out trauma in theatrical forms that we must, ourselves, subvert within the home as broken, haunted, occupied by undead trauma as nostalgic. This can certainly be comedic in nature, but I find overtly comedic forms of zombie narratives to be somewhat empty in terms of their parody (re: Shaun of the Dead, 2004). In short, their eyes are blind, and we need something that not only can see the truth of things, but whose teeth have bite!

(artist: Bill Sienkiewicz; source: Jason Faulkner’s “What’s the Deal with the Original Resident Evil Cover Art?” 2019)

“When it comes to living, no one seems to care! When it comes to wanting out, those with power will be there!” The rise of the living dead is a call to violence in both directions (re: Matteson). Civil conflicts erase neat distinctions of inside/outside or correct/incorrect, hyphenating them mid-turmoil to constitute a dangerous, aggravated confusion: a residence unfriendly to those who feel foreign, thus unwelcome inside it. And yet, the productive idea of crisis is that, on an anisotropic viral level, undeath comments on the dogmatic sickness/decay of society as embodied with irony or without; i.e., the unheimlich (sick home) raised in defense of workers or the state plaguing them through various comorbidities leading to collective, compound, generational harm inside the liminal hauntology of war’s state of exception: the state is eating people closer to the nucleus more indiscriminately! And all the while various undead appear for or against the state; i.e., inside the castle grounds as a confusing site of psychosexual violence both canonical and campy using the same general aesthetic: trauma and feeding.

This includes zombies, vampires and ghost’s feeding mechanisms and vessels for psychosexual trauma. As we shall in the very next chapter, zombies often double ourselves or those we love inside a home that—per the Gothic tradition—is also doubled to say something troubling about itself that is normally buried; i.e., a bad dream that rises up out of Hell.

To this, we must become at home with trauma, exposing its walking corpse in places that are less devoid of undead things walking about than we care to admit; i.e., those scheduled to either give or receive violence in an undead sense, including ourselves! We can feel dead[3] for these reasons; or we can feel lobotomized during Capitalist Realism, conditioned only to consume in a world that does its best through the dead malls and brainless franchises of Zombie Capitalism to keep us asleep and hungry for food that keeps us braindead; i.e., infected with the virus of pro-state sentiment (which comes with an inability to imagine anything outside of the fever-like crisis): defending the nuclear family by abjecting its built-in decay. Our own psychosexual appetites (and penetrative-penetrated feeding methods, giving and receiving sexual force) must challenge those, but they often overlap like a bad dream.

(artist: Silk Angelo)

Bad Dreams, or Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

Fuck the fucker. I told him not to go downstairs.”

—C.J., Dawn of the Dead (2004)

This chapter concerns the bad-dream function of zombie apocalypses revealing and concealing state oppression. Per the Gothic, there is a class-cultural psychosexual element; i.e., the body as something to rape and rape with in relation to the home as sick. Live burial, Eve Sedgwick further contends in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, concerns libido as necrotic and tied to the ancestral home as voracious; i.e., the idea of live burial, wherein victims of state collapse become digested by the decaying home or some extension of it: castle-like bodies, knights and Amazons working as cops to supply the state with its necessary entropy and us-versus-them victims (of which it treats as “terrorists,” which it negotiates with using automatic violence). It’s all rather poetic and something for Communism to reclaim from capitalistic forms abusing the same poetics borrowed from the imaginary medieval past. So while the apocalypse is an uncovering of trauma through the things that are normally exploited, Gothic Communism is a psychosexual transfer of power towards workers, mid-revelation; i.e., standing against the state amongst those more oppressed through liberation with bodily pride (often as a literal billboard, below) as an act of genderqueer defiance! All peoples must be free, no exceptions! Genocide is wrong!

This famously contains the outlaw as masked, of course, but also anonymous in ways that remain after the face and body are exposed. It becomes a means of flashing those in/with power through our agency as something to see, show and conceal different things while, at times, literally putting out as a means of putting our code out there: show skin; watch Nazis (which white moderates functionally are) shit themselves; repeat. Simply put, we expose state defenders by pissing them off, and nothing pisses reactionaries and moderates off more than outspoken sex workers standing up for themselves and other oppressed groups. If you’re not pissing Nazis or Joe Biden off, then you’re not doing it right!

(exhibit 34c1a2a: Artist: Crow. Zombies and other undead concern messages of revenge for or against the state; e.g., Nazis cowardly[4] seeking revenge for capital by appearing logical, strong and merciless against its enemies, and workers bravely rising up to achieve a proletarian revenge by dismantling the state [and its Cartesian dogma]. All undead embody language as a kind of anisotropic virus, then, insofar as it can be used to infect people with different ideas—in duality to become as any monster does under such circumstances: doubled during oppositional praxis, mid-argument/confrontation.

[artist: Crow]

To that, Crow’s cryptonymy—the semi-degrading writing on his skin; e.g., “milk bag #1/#2” and “bimbo” as a self-appointed form of appreciate irony through the agency of calculated risk [where I lovingly “ravish” my good, sweet boy during consent-non-consent exactly the way he likes]—is like any zombie’s, capably showing and revealing his own apocalypse per the double operation of cryptonymy as speaking with others less fortunate making up the same collective voice; i.e., the showing of one’s skin and vulnerability mid-solidarity with other oppressed groups as a pedagogy that challenges state powers. This is an act of impeccable bravery against whose who are not brave, distracting and overwhelming the abuser as someone whose power can be divided by different groups all at once: “I’m here! Fuck with me!”)

(artist: Crow)

To that, Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything through Gothic poetics, the larger mode concerning the burial ground as the violently erotic home: the fearsome place of unchecked rape, of unironic predation in ways that have only worsened uniquely following the end of the French Revolution (re: Foucault). For the middle class, then, this becomes a dogmatic argument of shelter to defend from alien sex and force with abjecting degrees of extreme prejudice; for the alien/monstrous-feminine, such devices are turning inside-out, facing correct/incorrect as hyphenated to varying degrees of hyphenation during an apocalypse, a revelation, an uncovering of traumas that have developed through capital as growing into an increasingly alienizing and fetishizing force against nature coming home to roost.

Given its size, this chapter has been further divided into four main subchapters:

From the gun-laden annals of the zombie apocalypse inspired by the killing fields of Cambodia (and similar foreign displays of American brutality and exploitation) to Freddy Kreuger’s knives-and-nightmare torture of women to the war-torn battlefields of Bungie’s Myth series, we’ll examine some of these dreamlike scenarios, undead victims and zombie sex toys—including how iconoclasts have struggled to reclaim their widespread use from the state of exception; i.e., by examining personal, sexual trauma and incorporating proletarian “necrophilia”/xenophilia into the poetic equation during oppositional praxis challenging the middle class’ regular canonical function.

This function remains constant—feed and deliver trauma to regulate sex and force; i.e., defend the state during the liminal hauntology of war/apocalypse (the appearance of monsters), decaying with said state as its violence serves its usual purpose, but growing more visible due to weakening illusions: to execute unto labor-as-intersectionally-solidarized, said polity wrongfully framed as a hoard trying to decay and regenerate away from capital and its nuclear family model (and consequent trifectas, monopolies, capitalistic values). The state will harvest such things that appear in the friendly, functionally white middle-class neighborhood before pulling them once more out of sight again. In the interim, sex and force will crystalize in the usual heteronormative, settler-colonial ways, per the grim harvest; re (from Volume One):

When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn’t spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics’ endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains with counterterror (source).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

During an apocalypse, the nuclear family becomes brittle, threatened, hostile—replete with the usual dimorphic double standards during state-sanctioned rape and murder fantasies defending the elite through fascist-style moral panics, but also white-moderate exceptionalism (“boundaries for me, not for thee”) whose fear and dogma that reliably leads to witch hunts, to genocide when decay sets in at home regarding its endless raping overseas; e.g., the appearance of the monstrous-feminine as many things, but especially the damsel to rescue and the whore to exorcise through penetrative violence on the same often female bodies (re: Robert Neville); i.e., husbands or potential suitors slaying women, people of color and other formerly vulnerable spectres of Imperialism come fearsomely home to empire! Canonically the ghost of the counterfeit becomes something to abject—to capitalize on; re: necrophagy—the eating of old dead stories cryptonymically and cryptomimetically echoing spectres of decay per state abuse, its subterfuge breaking long enough to let said monsters appear and walk around for middle-class (usually white/token) American kids to banish again, Scooby-Doo-style (re: Radcliffe, The Monster Squad, etc): the pre-teen regulation of sex and force on various stages populated with various actors; i.e., “disempowerment” as a form of white suburban privilege to police marginalized groups with; e.g., mummies in pyramids ready to choke a bitch, and other threats of pimps from beyond the grave scaring whitey… white.

Joseph Crawford notes how the Victorians were afraid of everything vis-à-vis rebellion as something to abject (whitey scared of Hell as seeking revenge for colonial abuse—state shift), punching the ghost of the counterfeit. There’s really no end to the toxic sediment, the American graveyard built on transplanted British graveyards (a bit like Dracula’s transplanted grave sod from “Transylvania”). Is it fun? Sure! But nostalgia becomes yet-another-thing to police by white kids (and token elements, not shown below) who grow into functionally white cops that decay into fascist ones: an invasion of the body snatchers in costumes worn in good and bad faith (witches vs witch hunters, a concept we’ll explore at length, next volume)! They regress towards a fascist “former time,” a bad dream to project onto their deeper darker selves as giver and receive of force, which they profess in bad faith to conquer and overcome in service to profit at all moments: through revenge.

(artist: Art by Bones)

Survival (and by extension, “survival horror”) is a common theme of the Imperium invaded by its own atrocities as poetically humanized during mirror syndrome; i.e., the human condition (and by extension social-material conditions) a complicated process of rememory and reclamation as a lucid-dreaming maneuver that cannot be fully monopolized by state forces! This is a good thing! The bad dreams of an apocalypse, then, are generally a time to dance and play with monsters, but the quotes around “rape” and “murder” are generally optional insofar as the irony of psychosexual violence per ludo-Gothic BDSM is optional; i.e., as the violence and flow of power can travel towards or away from the state, mid-cryptonymy and decay!

Moreover, such doomsdays are classically evoked in the language of night-and-day—something to put down when the night falls and Hell’s dead routinely rise from the overcrowded grave (re: the manufacture trifecta) as a matter of postcolonial revenge, the whole lot of them thrown in together as searching for their lost humanity as a consequence of Capitalism. Some seek revenge in pursuit of power as fascist (e.g., Skeletor literally chasing the moon in the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie, seeking self-actualization as a deifying act); others look for retribution/comeuppance as a Communist exchange that often associates with nature-as-undead being yet another manner of preferential code—i.e., with its own unique history belonging to a shared struggle between workers and the state (Crow loves werewolves, exhibit 50a2) vis-à-vis the monstrous-feminine.

For instance, there’s the lunar cycles, whose undead nocturnal feeding becomes animalistically “feral”—a kind of lycanthropic madness tied to the moon-as-female (“lunacy”), pagan rites (the March hares, above), and a hunter’s symbol that often stresses size difference as a predator/prey dynamic tied to vulnerability at odd hours: in bed, sleeping or frozen in fear as lustful, wanting to be topped and bred, Snu-Snu-style:

(artist: Sandreiio)

As we’ve already explained, though, zombies often feed and receive/give trauma during the day when the world turns upside-down. Other undead generally do not—are attached to spaces of darkness (more on this in the feeding chapter) thrown wide; i.e., the eye of confusion, opened and staring state defenders down. There’s also the natural disaster side of things; i.e., an earthquake happens, or a toxic waste spill, or a pandemic otherwise serving as similar metaphors of denial and release: monsters (zombies or otherwise) conveniently appearing as scapegoats during capital’s usual instabilities swinging back and forth.

Whether it’s with an axe to the skull or a silver bullet to the heart, the state summons its own heroes of the middle-class. The latter then kill such beings to return things “to normal…” transforming them back into tame, harmless humans, subjects, slaves to their own psychosexual lust; i.e., as foisted onto them by a hostile middle-class branding them as criminals to consume during the process of abjection, namely making them criminals per criminogenic, dogmatic conditions that frame GNC behavior as “sodomy” (synonymized with disease, including the AIDS pandemic attached exclusively to homosexual men, at the time): “the love that dare not speak its name,” anal sex, tied to drug use and self-harm as a matter of coping with being relegated to homeless positions—to cruise, as it were. The closet’s a bitch, even after it’s become a tokenized privilege to escape from! As we’ll see, homosexual men historically have sold out to push that anguish onto others—to assimilate until they are put down/forced to convert (the euthanasia effect applies to anything monstrous-feminine, not just AFAB parties):

(exhibit 34c1a2a2a: During The Monster Squad‘s final battle, a gauntlet of movie monsters [and cops] are killed one-by-one. Society is ostensibly falling apart. Rudy, being the Monster Squad’s muscle and oldest of the boys, has already penetrated the Brides of Dracula with wooden stakes he made in shop class [a gross metaphor for losing one’s virginity to “scarlet women”]. With the werewolf, though, he remembers what the movies have taught him to do: shoot to kill, defend society [and police] from degenerate forces.

Wasting no time, Rudy pointedly borrows a fallen officer’s service revolver to load a single silver bullet into [the round made by stealing from one of their mother’s silverware collections, a sign of middle-class status]. As Rudy prepares his weapon, the wolf man is framed to the left during cross cuts; Rudy is his leather-clad executioner [aping an older “greaser” culture] standing to the right, a kind of mirror syndrome comparing and contrasting our man in white [straitjacket colors] and boy in black [the colors of the clergy and of death]. “Bang!” Rudy says, and fires. It works like a charm, dropping his enemy in one dramatic shot. Make no mistake, this is a violent, homophobic exchange, one mirroring police brutality in boys like Rudy conditioned to see gay men as monsters [a position not helped by closeted homosexuals being angry at the world, but also themselves]. The film was made in the 1980s and is never shy about its homophobic language, though it doesn’t explicitly connect the two [it doesn’t take Judith Butler to connect the dots, however].

Regardless, the wolf man’s killing remains a brutal, cryptonymic act of vigilante street justice, whereupon the guilty man—having transformed back into a human—outrageously thanks Rudy before dying. It’s internalized bigotry by the self-hating queer as laid low by conversion therapy, “ending the curse” in a very phallic, homosocial manner: a gunfight. Said fight simulates an ordering of force as giver and receiver per a heteronormative perverting of queerness by projecting straight insecurities onto something to scapegoat, to rape; i.e., the ostensibly straight man proves his outward “straightness” by raping an openly queer-coded man with an artificial penis: bullet dick. Per Foucault, it’s just another form of sodomy out-of-bedroom dressed up as justice in defense of the home as straight; sexuality becomes confused, psychosexually violent, hungry like the wolf [all that grunting and grimacing] and synonymous with unironic death; i.e., as a dogmatic means of carrying out capital punishment against GNC elements the state needs to keep its future cops in check and flush in war brides.

So often our killers are scared little boys motivated by sex attached to the nuclear model. Though brief, the scene is visibly traumatic for both characters, the fag denying his queer self-as-animal during suicide-by-cop and Rudy forced to execute such a person as a regressive, neocon rite of passage: becoming a straight man by killing a degenerate one as a means of fatal nostalgia, then and now. After he’s forced to look upon his work, Rudy realizes he’s just killed a human being [and a penitent one at that]. Still being a teenager, though, he responds to the ritual’s classic reward: owed sex. So Rudy hops to it, quickly distracting himself from what he’s done by assimilating at long last; i.e., returning his horny gaze onto the “loose” girl next door… who he’s been creeping on the whole movie. Such Hawthorne-grade hypocrisies are merely heteronormativity in action, folks!

To that, the straight perspective is normally the hero’s; i.e., as threatened by queer forces as trying to “turn” them. Per the pedagogy of the oppressed, obliterating these harmful myths becomes something to heal from police violence together. It’s tremendously important, then, to allow for positive queer inclusivity [versus burying your gays] that likewise speaks to the inverted complexity of queer life under state power and canonical Gothic poetics. In short, it’s very different to be queer and threatened by straight violence than the other way around; the latter is bad faith and murderous, whereas queer existence is generally made to question itself in ways that lead to calculated-risk-taking as a matter of discourse: being treated like animals as a rejection from normal society by virtue of being different from the way said society is structured around profit.

Shylock, for instance, is called a dog in Merchant of Venice precisely because he is alien in the eyes of the Christians who moralize their own behaviors as moral and generous. The reality is they use their own language to assign exceptions to themselves, mistreating the alien as foreign through double standards that not only punch down against him, but the stigma animals associated with him; i.e., bad dogs and wolves that refuse to behave. It’s a means of propping themselves up while alienating themselves from nature/the monstrous-feminine as something to capitalize on/exploit. Ultimately Shakespeare’s critique of an imaginary Venice speaks to English problems: abusing the language of nature and animals in order to maintain society as it presently exists under Capitalism when he wrote The Merchant of Venice. Development under Capitalism towards Communism invariably requires reversing the process of abjection to embrace our animal side as something normally alienated from us and fetishized by capital. We can recognize said side as alien and fetishized—indeed, can even play with that using ludo-Gothic BDSM—but we must humanize it as part of nature, not separate from it and “superior” to it as Cartesian thought does by design:

[source Tumblr post, Eldritch Bauble: June 3rd, 2024]

By extension, all of this has a genderqueer flavor insofar as the dialectic of the alien extends to anything “black” within the settler-colonial model that presently exists [which Shakespeare would have been on the cusp of when writing stories like The Merchant of Venice in 1598]—not just Jews, people of color or unruly women, but queer people at large surviving under capital as animalistic reclaimers of their wild sides; i.e., cruising amid stigma while returning to something forgotten as a means of survival amid enrichment, not exploitation when putting on the wolf mask: hunting for love and connection, not division and profit.

This, in turn, becomes a vital means of communicating through sex as something to spill tea with; i.e., among one’s friends as a process of surveying the territories through our social-sexual connections to gossip with; e.g., me—even when still inside the closet—gabbing with my girlfriends about who was dating who, and furthermore, our various techniques acting as a matter of pride but also learning through each other. Girls take pride in the head they give, but also the power said giving grants them over the cuties in their lives; this, in exchange, becomes instructional: suck dick, survive, but also thrive and have fun by cluing other people, AFAB or not, in on the means of doing so! Girls talk, and share as a means of survival and praxial enrichment through sex—to feel excited when one of our number meets someone cool [and starts to fuck]. This isn’t a trade secret, then, but a social-sexual means of Gothic-Communist development; i.e., by establishing shared trust in mutual action across communities that challenge heteronormative forces [versus tokenizing for them, as TERFs do].

For instance, when I starting experimenting more and sucking cock, my friend Lydia explained some handy tips for how to avoid the gag reflex with larger dicks. People who suck dick, when divorced from the necessity of having to make a “provider” cum, simply wind up enjoying it by virtue of it being something to partake in and have fun doing as skilled practitioners of as a matter of value, of skill; i.e., throat goats: “I wanna gag, I wanna choke, I want you to touch that dangly thing that’s swingin’ the back of my throat!” Get it, girl!

[artist: Othala M]

In other words, straight people—but especially men—don’t cruise the way that queer people historically would have done/do, and such examples of “sodomy” involve us fags seeking pleasure [including pain] as non-harmful, but often while adjacent to actual harm. ex changes us, as does death, and in the Gothic the two generally overlap [re: Zeuhl, Cuwu and Jadis radicalizing me with sex]. Faced with it, we find ourselves making curious sacrifices/absorbing new information that shows us what we’re made of—old pain, new daring. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, babes! Regardless of the monster type, but especially vampires and werewolves, the master/apprentice dynamic remains common in queer exchanges. Someone from an older generation is categorically attracted to someone from a new, younger generation across space and time—the latter drawn to the mastery and security of power the former offers, and the former seduced by the sweet essence and vitality that the other provides: the maiden and the whore, the lady and the tramp, the detective and the dark prince of love, etc.

Whatever the shape, such lords will value all cuties forced to fetishize/maximize their labor value’s monetary potential under a capitalistic scheme; i.e., valuing these survival mechanisms versus resenting them [as male Twitch streamers will do, for instance, but also SWERFs at large and even AFAB sex workers internalizing misogyny and using it to police themselves for the pimp]: for doing what capital forces the monstrous-feminine to endure by design. The trauma of settler-colonial domination is certainly there, mid-liminal-expression, but under sex-positive examples becomes something to subvert and ultimately avoid during calculated risk: a palliative Numinous, domming the sub safely regardless of gender or sexuality.

[artist: Super Phazed]

Of course, such things are hardly so black-and-white in reality, and “strength” as a matter of queer virtue shall reify as if-not-equal-then-certainly-idiosyncratic among both parties. However this happens, ’80s homophobia plagues queer culture more broadly as something to subvert using the same Gothic theatrics. As such, queerness is a community of misfit survivors drawn to each other as a mixing and matter of discourse melding desire/protection; i.e., we are all strong for each other as a social-activist means of monstrous-feminine expression in and out of the bedroom [and each other]: werewolves [and other lycans] serving as anthropocentric code thereof. These operate with all the usual animalistic preferences, carefully communicating trauma during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a complex means of merging privilege and oppression to synthesize catharsis.

[artists: Ms. Reefer and Ayla]

For example, Chryssi [aka Ms. Reefer] and Ayla have worked with me to give a shared voice to repressed struggles during calculated risk as a matter of exhibit. One is younger than the other but both are very femme and cute, but also feral and ravenous during sex in ways that feel adorable and hot insofar as size difference combine with an urgent desire to care and protect [to actually do so in ways the police historically do not] as each comes deliciously to the fore; e.g., by fucking like animals/to metal [werewolf or otherwise] while finding peace of mind during calculated risk expressing our collective outrage and struggle to find love and survive in ways straight folk generally do not—especially straight folk [and token fags] in decay defending the state: Nazi werewolves! In short, both cuties look out for each other and take care of their various needs during mutual exchange and consent as normally unspeakable, which I can assist in helping them speak by giving them a Gothic stage to speak their truth with: common ground to find with each other and our straight allies [wherever we find them]. The state haunts us? We haunt them back! It’s an honor to be able to fund, exhibit and illustrate my friends as such! Our similarities amid difference is a gift, our diversity a strength to survive state hunters as a matter of pride all year round [a war of attrition, as asymmetrical warfare always is].)

However one slices it, trauma, feeding and decay are both the result of settler colonialism and its history as an Aegis to show our enemies what for by rising up at all times, but especially when state illusions are weak. Any show of solidarity is a show of force in the eyes of the state, which they will do their damnedest to censor by having us cover up ourselves. We need to invoke the spirits of the dead—their awesome power through our own bodies and their labor value as reclaiming violence, terror and morphological expression from state forces. Simply put, it becomes a means of speaking out while confronting trauma, face-to-face, ass-to-ass on the mirror glass: where one’s power is stored, shown, wrestled with—where it negotiates with past histories making fresh ones on the surface of and within thresholds, through parody and pastiche, praxis and catharsis.

If you want to critique power, you must go where it is. Nothing is more powerful than workers in solidarity united in nude opposition (often literally) against the state: anti-Zionism, anti-fascism, and anti-Capitalism, etc, as written on the skin, but also simply the skin as something to share and flaunt while concealing ourselves through anti-predation measures; e.g., our identities behind invisible barriers, mid-cycle, struggling against hypermassive objects using our own massive elements abstracting said devices; i.e., our bodies and their labor value as GNC.

(exhibit 34c1a2a2: Artist: Crow. The dead become a matter of legend that always returns to a present that has deliberately forgotten them; i.e., the Imperial Core repressing state abuses at home and abroad in service to profit. These decay and return, over and over in ways that are hardly new. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” Marx announced, feeling doomed by the tragedy and farce of such gross repetitions. Similar to Marx, Nikolai Gogol writes in Dead Souls:

The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards (source). 

The way to avoid such ignominious destruction and betrayal by the state as dying and regenerating into new versions of “Rome” (as haunting our dead German and Russian, above), is to listen to the dead as now including Marx and Gogol; i.e., in ways we can possess and camp [taking what’s useful and critiquing the rest] to upend state illusions using what we got—our Aegis! “A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe,” Gogol asserts, very much of his time when he adds [effectively commenting on the monstrous-feminine]: “There are occasions when a woman, no matter how weak and impotent in character she may be in comparison with a man, will yet suddenly become not only harder than any man, but even harder than anything and everything in the world.” Zombies, in turn, inhabit us as mediums to harbor them—oracles to pass forgotten knowledge and trauma, mid-apocalypse; i.e., as a matter of pride, projecting abjected things back onto the colonizer to paralyze them with, thus give us a chance to regenerate into something altogether more humane and away from state designs. It’s a mirror game, a danger disco working good faith against bad, one where we chose what to wear and what to take off from moment to moment.)

(artist: Crow)

“What a horrible night to have a curse”; the way out is inside of itself as something centrist yarns treat like an Americanized Halloween: dawn signaling the routine ending of the dead’s dreadful climb above ground. Post-apocalypse, the nightmare has seemingly appeared and ended, after which regeneration is anisotropic. Radcliffean agents will defend the state while fearfully endorsing its bread-and-circus, purge-style violence and unironic demon lovers; we can consciously subvert all of this through our work and relationships—by entering the bad dream as a state of awareness (of “being woke,” as the saying originally goes); i.e., towards the violent exceptions the state makes, which we transform the nightmare space inside of itself. This happens by using monstrous language to humanize, thus liberate, ourselves with: illustrating mutual consent in Gothic-Communist ways.

I would argue this process must be conscious, active. For instance, Harmony and I—exchanging knowledge and essence to heal from our trauma—work consciously together and contribute towards rebellion as a sex-positive force healing from rape; i.e., while roleplaying undead “rape” (necrophilia) in quotes. It gets poetically messy amid the “carnage” and fluids: deep up in that soft, warm “danger” as touched by unspeakable trauma, the crypt-like tunnel saturated with “death” exploding in the usual medieval theatrics (e.g., the miracle of bleeding inanimate objects), but also hyphenating death and love, pleasure and pain, castles and bodies, rapture and rape, etc. It’s not about wishy-washy romance, but getting down to business! Medusa’s not gonna hug herself!

(exhibit 34c1a2b: Artist, top-left and bottom-right: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-left and top-right: Harmony Corrupted. The ravishing fantasy just as often uses dirty talk that doesn’t translate well to ordinary clothing or photos in bed. Even so, sexting and long-distance play allows for some degree of sharing amid simulation-as-context; i.e., the doll or the lover fucking from afar on a fetish as doll-like in relation to the monstrous-feminine body [mine or hers] as like a graveyard-like body or body-like graveyard [a zombie] as much as a castle; or rather the open-secret function of the Gothic castle becomes a theatrical space for rape play and literal live burial during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s castle-narrative: the Gothic chronotope’s hereditary rites and dynastic exchange apprised of sex-positive poetics and Communist language in ways classic authors would have had to fumble towards. As such, this isn’t Oedipus Rex or The Mysterious Mother. It’s not a tragedy befitting the usual mayhem per canonical forms. Rather, we’re friends helping each other and, in turn, the world—by using our own Aegises to turn state power back in on itself. Any revelation that exposes Omelas becomes further openings, thus opportunities, to widen and execute on top of each other in repetition. Like sex, it has to repeat in order for us to survive: loudly and visibly as a call to arms, to participate in an orgy of revolution [free zombie love].

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

To that, Harmony and I can play with each other as dolls to ravish as giver and receiver of “rape” in quotes, exchanging money and wisdom and kindness and love back and forth: my edging blue balls choked with passion, mercifully releasing a fresh load of cum that waters their tomb-like mound. Before that happens, I can delightfully slide in and out of their likeness, feeding insofar as “food” is deathly poetic, thrusting and staking their ripe, melon-like “corpse.” The entire time, we feed rapturously on each other in ways that benefit us both during low-stakes calculated risk, but also the proletariat through the crude-but-nuanced paradoxical nature of the Gothic; i.e., to challenge state education as a psychosexual erotic exchange/exhibit, whose complicated nudism and genuine affection camps “trauma” as we make and share it together in ways Capitalism discourages: by mixing business and pleasure, art and sex, friendship[5] and comraderie, Marxism and that sweet, sweet pusssssay!)

Such iconoclastic theatrics, unlike canonical media, can synthesize praxis in a sex-positive direction, leading to fresh possibilities that push towards an older future that never quite was: through the interrogation of trauma as something to feed erotically on inside the graveyard (which includes nudism as an asexual display of “threats” placed in quotes, but also removed from them). There will be unironic trauma, pain and rot; but successfully facing these horrors, we can demask the state as raping us, along with those predators hiding amongst us abusing monstrous poetics to fortify a complicit cryptonymy via coercive sex and force, its disordered thinking and various syndromes (too many to list, each a monster to express in ways we reclaim from canonical sicknesses and cold, systemic assignments of state force, punishment, torture, rape and murder). It becomes something to escape through the middle class keeping the gate: “Those will with power will be there!”

Through revolution’s subversive, horny methods, the human is undead in ways that become not just strong but indomitable/unkillable as we feed, thus grow stronger through our trauma-induced appetites and feeding habits dismantling state power in favor of anarchist forms. The state is the ultimate foe; per ludo-Gothic BDSM, we want to reverse the abjection process through feeding and trauma as something to perform, synthesizing catharsis. In turn, the paradox of Gothic poiesis and cryptomimesis allows for a fun duality by us as performers and teachers: spoiling ourselves rotten inside a proliferate necrobiome; e.g., “Yeah, baby! I’m a little zombie slut! Fuck my undead pussy with that big Destroyer cock of yours! Rock my world!” Hooray for bad Gothic puns and smoking-hot cuties defying police brutality!

(artist: Petra Juliet)

Please beware! There will be constant discussions of unironic genocide and rape in the pages ahead, as linked to monster poetics, which we must learn to subvert through the same performative spaces; i.e., with the descriptive sexuality of mutual consent during appreciative irony’s Gothic counterculture: our de facto (extracurricular) education as meant to challenge the state through how it feeds—through us as undead! All this is merely something to keep in mind as we enter the scary (and delightful) world of bad dreams!

Your Commy Mommy,

—Persephone

Onto “Bad Dreams, part zero: Return of the Living Dead“!


Footnotes

[1] One parallel example is my piece, “Judas Priest: Invincible Shield and Zionism” (2024). A more direct example, though, is my response to the Israeli crackdown after the October 7th Hamas attacks (committed bravely and desperately against their oppressors), “Justice for Palestine” (2023):

What’s going on in Palestine is wrong, but so is the larger geo-political argument trying to justify it—what is, quite simply, genocide for the same old reasons: bourgeois hegemony. The Imperial Core of the Global North sanctions, funds and incites genocide to enrich the elite, including the one occurring right now in Palestine at the hands of the state of Israel and its war criminals (Bad Empanada, “Israeli ETHNIC CLEANSING of Gaza Begins – 1 MILLION Expelled in Another Nakba,” 2023). This is entirely wrong on every conceivable register (and demonstrates how nation-states exist purely to serve the profit motive). Palestine is in the right, Israel is not; even when Hamas becomes indiscriminate in their killings of Israeli citizens, you must remember that said citizens are occupiers of stolen land taken through lies and by force—i.e., the ethnostate using its own women and children as human shields during an unlawful occupation that has been ongoing for over seventy years (with the United States’ financial backing and geopolitical support). […]

I, for one, will not stand idly by while the same old proponents of Imperialism make the same old tired arguments to serve the elite. These are people’s lives, ground into dust by the great machine of capital as having become an ever larger and more fearsome monster as time goes on. Even if those in the present fall into the state of exception, targeted for termination inside state-manufactured prisons by old ghouls like the American establishment (the mother territory) and her allies, we should not be silent as they siphon all life from the land and its peoples, places and ecosystems; the elite and their supporters need to be exposed for what they are: the Great Destroyers of our age, the ultimate threat to all life on the planet purely to enrich the smallest number of persons they can. In line with today being Friday the 13th, think of the elite (and nation-states) as the undying slasher that both never seems to die but is always in decay. Israel is fascist, and fascism is Capitalism in decay. American Liberalism and the neoliberal market demand eternal crisis that leads to decay that must be aided and supported. To that, the Israeli state is the 21st century version of the Nazi war machine (echoing Hilter’s beerhall putsch [and later his war into Poland and Russia appeased by Britain and America] as they shove into Gaza). War pimps and jailors speaking pretty words, the enablers of Israel are little more than murderers who come to you with smiles. They will destroy the Global South and then set their sights (and mercenaries) on the Global North (which is already a police state rife with fascism) as the Imperial Boomerang sails home. Fuck them (source).

Also consider “Bushnell’s Requiem: An Ode to a Martyr” (2024) and “Remember the Fallen: An Ode to Nex Benedict” (2024) as encapsulated in “Psychosexual Martyrdom” and “A Note About Canonical Essentialism.” Geography is not destiny or moral; we are not expendable in light of state aims. Furthermore, as my partner Bay says, “We should not live in a world that requires human sacrifice to make an important political statement on the value of human life.” Never let them forget that—that we are human and they, the state and its defenders, are the worst sort of ghouls draining nature to try and cheat death/consolidate power in vertical, pyramid-style arrangements!

[2] A note about necrophilia and sodomy as highly contentious terms: Whereas this volume explores xenophobia and xenophilia at length, it does so within the parent dichotomy of canon vs iconoclasm. Class struggle, then,  treats xenophilia as ironic in terms of meting out love and affection to stigmatized groups; i.e., those treated as undead by the state. However, “necrophilia” is historically a confusing term, more of a misnomer when used by the elite than any kind of accurate depiction of actual sex-positive behaviors. Technically fucking a “zombie” is necrophilia, but if the person isn’t actually braindead and has the ability to consent then it’s not historically what we be called necrophilia (outside of Gothic circles).

Figurative, tricky usage aside, my application of the word will either be to highlight its misnomic usage by state proponents, or to stress the simple fact that beings perceived as “dead” are being fucked in some shape or form: either by the state in a coercive sense or by the proletariat trying to recover their lost humanity while identifying as undead in xenophilic creations: “Fuck this zombie cunt,” being—true to form—an ontological paradox that must use a word that doesn’t quite fit; i.e., “technically, sort of, not really but the word stuck, so…” “Sodomy” falls under the same bailiwick, referring both to the xenophobic legends about queer people in Neo-Gothic discourse as criminals/outsiders, as well as the xenophilic reclamation of these same monster stories; i.e., the gay “feeder” of essence for or against state interests; e.g., the vampire or werewolf as a queer metaphor for homosexual men.

[3] The first thing Kain says in Alien is “I feel dead,” commenting on the Job-like stresses the company puts on its workers.

[4] State puppets aren’t brave, they’re complicit—are so horrible that no one in their right mind would want to support them or stay by their side; i.e., real divorced-dad energy as part of a grift, a hill to die on; e.g., Bad Empanada Live’s “Destiny & Loner Box’s Deadbeat Dad Journey to Israel” (2024). Let them, reminding those who look on our nude bodies that they aren’t for sale, nor destined to serve as zombie-like slaves to such men; they serve to rebel against them time and time again—as a circle that, coming round and round, pushes said abusers to the dustbin of history. Only cowards kill, enslave and/or rape women and children; only sad, pathetic hypocrites defend such butchery (killer virgins falling victim to the state promise of sex, essentially). Let them pay for it with our company among others reminding them what they have given up—their humanity and our trust!

[5] Harmony took the above photo for my birthday on June 1st. To that, I wasn’t able to have a cake on my birthday because my mother had to go out of state a couple days early. So Harmony (and some other cuties) gave me slices of their ample cake and pie, instead! So thick, tasty and moist, and needing to be glazed with lots of yummy frosting (rainbow jizz, taste the rainbow)!

Book Sample: Holistic Instruction; or, a Cruel Angel’s Thesis

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

“A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis”; or, the Broad-Strokes Nature of Holistic Instruction: Camping “Rape” as Food for Thought Regarding the Monster Modules

Per my thesis statement, Capitalism sexualizes everything in a heteronormative (vertically arranged, sexually dimorphic) scheme; canon achieves heteronormativity by essentializing biology, ecology and geography (economics, etc) in equal measure in order to achieve and maintain a Cartesian outcome: domination of the natural world (and workers) to serve profit. This happens through the routine gendering of Nature vs Society (vis-à-vis Raj Patel and Jason Moore) by Cartesian thinkers; i.e., in ways that men like Francis Bacon and René Descartes started, but continue to remain relevant under Capitalist Realism as a more recent affair that neither patriarch lived to see: a raping of nature as Promethean, meaning in this case “primed for abuse, ad nauseum.” Nature is Medusa; Medusa must obey and die (over and over).

In turn, said Realism yields neoliberal fantasies (often videogames) that present nature as good or evil in essential terms, and by extension, gendered ones that are biologically and ecologically divided along problematic moral categories whose territory is geared towards a settler-colonial outcome: the mapping and execution of conquest, thus genocide through us versus them, reliably framing “us” as human and “them” as inhuman through various black-and-white binaries that serve capital, thus empire (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, “A Note About Canonical Essentialism” (2024)

 

Picking up from where “Back to the Necropolis” left off…

Please note, I wrote the Monster Modules over a year-and-a-half ago. The raw theory is there, but the historical arguments aren’t aimed at specific recipients of state violence so much as I try to holistically consider all of them per intersectional solidarity as something to achieve together during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., built on older monstrous histories: learning to camp rape and find our power during liminal expression/Gothic counterculture as a sex-positive force. Think of my various staged critiques being aimed at the middle class as the gatekeepers of capital, decaying and tokenizing (non-white and gender-non-conforming traitors of class, race and culture) to attack the elite’s enemies by virtue of profit requiring enemies to exploit: nature as monstrous-feminine; e.g., Sigourney Weaver’s GNC, Tim-Curry-tinged 1983 shoot with Helmut Newton clearly having inspired their 1984 possession as the Gozer of New York: Zuul being Medusa-by-another-name.

(source: Kino Images)

As such, a lot of what follows paints in broad strokes regarding said history as it applies differently for various exploited groups; i.e., under the same predatory system relative to our Four Gs, Six Rs, Gothic mode of expression, etc; e.g., masks and revolutionary cryptonymy as something we can weaponize for ourselves:

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In short, these modules have a symposium style-flavor I want to preserve; I won’t be stressing particular theories like cryptonymy or terms like monstrous-feminine, as we’ve already talked about them extensively across multiple chapters and book volumes. Instead, I’ll be focusing on holistic expression per the monster classes as dualistic poetic devices. Any oppressions I express here, then, should apply intersectionally to white women, people of color, non-Christians, GNC people, disabled persons, etc, but it will apply to each differently! I want to focus on universal liberation vis-à-vis iconoclastic art, generally by considering sexuality and gender expression as canonically enslaved per the process of abjection; i.e., as attacking the ghost of the counterfeit through cryptomimesis, the narrative of the crypt and Cycle of Kings, etc, as forever serving profit. I’ll try and mention these and other past concepts at least once, and consider locations—e.g., castles, prisons, what-have-you—but the monsters remain the main focus, here (simply pick your poison and go to town, lovelies).

(artist: Les Edwards)

Likewise, my focus challenges Capitalist Realism by camping Marx with Gothic Communism as a genderqueer BDSM-meets-ludology hybrid in the Internet Age; i.e., as something to take advantage of for workers by workers. To that, Marxist analysis with Gothic poetics dates back to the man himself, but also contemporaries; e.g., Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) writing about the exploitation of serf numeration as a predatory necrometrics designed to enrich a predatory mid-level state official. There’s truly nothing new under the sun as far as that goes and the Internet is a powerful tool for finding whatever you need (until today I had no idea who Helmet Newton was, for example). So take whatever I supply here and close-read whatever you like—from Gogol’s vintage grift narrative to the anti-Semitic themes of the cover art for Uriah Heep’s Abominog (1982, above). Go nuts!

This isn’t hard to do; monsters are everywhere and always maintain a dualistic, dialectical-material potential. Yes, Capitalism sexualizes everything (my PhD thesis) per the dialectic of the alien (from Volume Two, part one), but said dialectic still manifests differently (and per various double standards) depending on who’s relating to whom, mid-struggle (from Volume One, “Healing from Rape”); i.e., as a given monster type through a given monster function; e.g., white women vs black men as zombies to humanize or dehumanize, or queer men as “vampires” feeding through sodomy on different prey groups to achieve complicated results: the whore, the demon, the rapist working as “dark predator” and prey in ways that code police violence as something to give and receive in canonical scenarios. As such, said violence becomes something to preemptively attack workers with, preventing their liberation by using dogmatic instruction meant to serve profit. As such, law and order canonize through state force and terror (often regarding sex) while invariably decaying as a result of itself (colonies always die; fascist ones die faster). Fear of that in the likeness of the cop and victim is a vital survival tool for us to weaponize against the state:

(source tweet, Katastrophe: December 14th, 2018)

Again, my instruction is multi-media, repetitive and holistic, not microscopic or myopically “total” (such completions are impossible, me and my friends’ work simply adding to all the others who came before). As long as you keep that in mind, you (and your constellations) should be able to apply what I write here to any disadvantaged group through any text/medium you want; i.e., not just the undead receiving/giving trauma and feeding psychosexually on it, nor demons shifting shapes and granting forbidden power and knowledge, nor the natural world as being to some degree undead and/or demonic, but newer ideas I’ve coined since writing these modules regarding the same profit motive: as something to critique among all media and labor under Capitalism. In short, I want you to be intertextual and extratextual in your applications, but also excessive, shameless, and unafraid to try new things again; i.e., “bein’ extra” provided it’s sex-positive per various concepts we’ve already discussed being continuously part of a larger theoretical structure to camp canon with in a practical sense.

For example, you should do your gold-star best to keep Sarkeesian’s adage in mind while synthesizing praxis: enjoy but do not blindly endorse canonical media, mid-consumption; i.e., as something to normally dissect for profit while shoving one’s head in the sand as a kind of self-important history (re: most speedrunner documentation, for instance, is settler-colonial—chasing immortality through world records tied to profit that ignore state atrocities all along the watchtower).

In other words, no matter how cool someone seems or touts themselves as, don’t act like this guy[1] (next page) without some degree of irony that critiques profit and its heroes. We’re here to kill our darlings (as a matter of critique), not worship them! Rags-to riches is bullshit, installed by the elite to force people not only to fight for scraps, but deify the entire opportunistic, manufactured process of scarcity and salvation; i.e., neoliberalism 101 per rigid inflexible minds incapable of fighting for anyone but themselves as part of a bourgeois Superstructure! Look around you. See that culture full of so-called gods of the sport, the Pantheon-grade colosseum and gladiators’ kayfabe? American or not, it’s “Rome” brought back to life in a 21st-century world, capital married to Cartesian thought raping Medusa on a global level; i.e., as a death sentence foisted onto workers and nature’s labor value converted into monetary forms tied to police violence: all the heteronormative divisions of settler-colonial sex and force wreaking harm, thus profit as something to count, name and repeat until the world ends. Until that happens, Medusa becomes a token slave, forced to mother her abusers while “threatening” them with kayfabe-style Snu-Snu: anti-predation for the oppressor and predation for the enemy (which is anything that doesn’t serve profit).

(artist: Yves Balak)

To this, sex positivity shouldn’t be a mystery monopolized by corporate guilds, a trade secret denied purposefully by dogmatic institutions in favor of crueler models of exchange (monetary value and labor/wage theft). Per revolutionary cryptonymy (e.g., “flashing”), though, we’ll still have to paradoxically guard ourselves while trying to teach people less knowledgeable than us; i.e., to be more involved, thus active and engaged with, the world around them in a pro-worker sense: to actually risk getting hurt while building towards something better (which is what sex-positive relationships ultimately boil down to). People who refuse to do that in any shape or form—who blame and attack anyone but themselves and Capitalism—are doomed to not only live alone in their self-centered universes (which is what videogames classically are), but cause harm wherever they go in pursuit of their so-called “legacies” while cementing themselves within capital prison-like realities (that isn’t a commentary about this exact person, below, but such clubbism and divisive sport mentalities are designed to foster us-versus-them animus favoring the usual predatory benefactors, weird canonical nerds, as naming everything after themselves, mid-rape):

So ends the tangent. Any like it will be made holistically in respect to a given chapter’s core themes and ideas, but also the book’s at large. And while I can’t stress every idea here in this opening due to time and word constraints, keep your eyes peeled nonetheless. They’ll surely pop up, and each-of-them grant special properties, extensions and intersections of all three monster types (which function modularly but often intersect) while developing Gothic Communism across all our lives; i.e., expressed by different members of the proletariat defending themselves and nature from state abuse/police violence while relating to each other in monstrous language that humanizes the alien: as something to reclaim through our own labor value/unequal power exchanges, including our guilty pleasures making us blush merely at the thought of saying them out loud!

Mind you, the embarrassment is ironic, canonical chagrin stemming from asking for something we’re expected to take by force; i.e., coercively under unequal socio-material arrangements prioritizing white cis-het men (and token groups) as the universal clientele per Cartesian thought having evolved into Man Box/”prison sex” forms. It’s these canonical behaviors/roleplay scenarios that iconoclasts play around with, mid-camp; e.g., during anal vs plane-Jane PIV sex as normally monopolized by capital. At first blush, they don’t look so different under Gothic scenarios:

(exhibit 34c1a2: Capital loves to have their cake and eat it, too; i.e., to threaten actual destruction if one deviates from “correct” forms of sexual activity while simultaneously abjecting and cashing in on “incorrect” ones: “black Bibles” to thrust in workers’ faces [often as cultural exports; e.g., Bible Black (2001), above]. These, in turn, are sold back to the middle class through a nuclear family model that is allowed to sin in the bedroom, provided it stays in the bedroom; i.e., it relegates to exploitative fantasies whose dogmatic elements punish the usual victims of state force outside the family home [often at school and society in general as invaded by dark prurient forces during moral panic]: as witches to prostitute to the fearful as fascinated with them, treating such prurience as throwaway pleasure blindly aping Hawthorne, not administering sex-positive lessons that actually challenge Puritan ideals [thus Capitalism under the Protestant work ethic]!

As usual, though, such spaces become places to camp—to try new things while just as easily [for many newlyweds and extramarital couples] trying sex at all for the first time. It’s normal to be nervous, the idea scary for most virgins because capital treats it as a tightrope to walk; i.e., as ignorantly as possible, leading to dangerous conflations conducive to scared brides submitting to their husbands’ knife-like dicks, thus patriarchal dominance. While the Gothic’s mutilative element has been commonplace since Radcliffe to Freud, subverting this unironically violent Amazonomachia generally requires a shy experimentation that frankly is cute to watch: “Can we… try anal?” Aw! Sure, babe!

To that, reversing abjection and humanizing the black[2], GNC whore [and sodomy as a non-rapacious activity] becomes yet another experiment to try before giggling about it together after an admittedly nice time: “That wasn’t so bad!” No, it generally isn’t, which can turn peoples’ worlds upside-down for the better insofar as they realize, post-anal, that “God” isn’t going to smite them; i.e., God’s not real, so what else isn’t? Apart from the snow-white bridal “reward,” what else can be reclaimed to liberate workers from capital, the middle class, menticide and the process of abjection?

Such dances with the ghost of the counterfeit not only open the mind, but help it heal. It’s not a slippery slope [though the argument is present, when used by bad actors] but a complicated act of self-discovery that, once ventured, helps past victims heal from rape as committed against workers by police forces; e.g., wives and women’s work; i.e., the home as something to police and expand into capital, at large, as nuclear. Each liberation is, to some degree then, unique. If yours includes anal or rape play [consent-non-consent] then that’s ultimately a good thing because you’ll know what works for you! As such, you become more emotionally and Gothically intelligent, which extends to class and culture war often enough.)

When camping canon, said exchanges should illustrate mutual consent (and one’s basic human rights at large) through ludo-Gothic BDSM and castle-narrative; i.e., as something to pass along into the future as already dead, waiting to wake up once more, then consciously haunt the living as already haunted passively by imperial abuse experienced at home and broad! To this, here’s a modular (cruel-angel’s) thesis statement to keep in mind per the Monster Modules’ subsequent essays and symposiums (indented for emphasis):

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it (and its trifectas, monopolies, etc) using the same threatening aesthetics of power and death, decay and rape.

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

These, in turn, remain cursed by mouth-fang and dick-knife hyphenations/doubles (tokenization) that, once shown mid-mise-en-abyme, can’t be unseen: the undead as the classic unthinking (and addicted, ravenous) slave to state dominion, the demon as the wily contractor to such inequalities, and the animal as forced to endure a cruel stewardship thereof; e.g., the black Nazi Jew, witch cop, TERF, etc, as hogging the graveyard as an odd, paradoxical site of psychosexual rapture, healing and release camping rape; i.e., as normally a dogmatic, xenophobic tool—of punishment, of us-versus-them, temptation, dangerous confusions and straight up kink—posturing as “necrophilic” camp that we must make campy in the same spaces: a pedagogy of the oppressed healing from rape, thus police abuse as all around us, the graves our cradles less to crawl out of and more to make love inside. To survive, you have to work fast in the crypt, telling good actors from bad while playing with trauma as a historical-material loop decaying inside of itself.

(source film: Cemetery Man, 1994)

Rape isn’t unique to Capitalism, then, but Capitalism exploits rape for profit, which always leaves a bloody footprint for us to double (think Danny escaping his rampaging father by walking backwards in his own footsteps during The Shining‘s [1981] hedge maze scene, except the camera man also had to do it[3]). In turn, its ubiquity is something to challenge through ludo-Gothic BDSM liberating worker minds during calculated risk: the moribund body and graveyard coalesced through a concentric cycle of exchange. Such complicated theatre (and prostitution) dates back to Rome and the ancient world (re: B.B. Wagner’s “The Graveyard Prostitutes of Rome and Beyond,” 2020), expanding into the Middle Ages, the Neo-Gothic (from the Graveyard Poets, Matthew Lewis, etc) onward to a cryptic hauntology beyond Great Britain; i.e., relishing in corpse sex theatre (and other unspeakables) under neoliberal Pax Americana‘s anxious inheritance foisted onto fresh workers to threaten them with (menticide): the ever-growing army of the elite’s undead!

In turn, harmful versions of said therapy mirror the abuse as “activity” and “area”; i.e., sex in funerary places historically overlapping as burial grounds and sites of masochistic rapture—as a nightly, “almost holy” meeting place for extramarital affairs (adjacent to taboo elements like rape, suicide, cannibalism, incest, nightmares/sleep sex, murder and so on) classically tempting young men of the cloth with the forbidden-yet-constantly-advertised forbidden pleasures of the flesh; e.g., the film adaptation for Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1986): sex is fun when you’re breaking the rules; it’s healthy when no one’s being harmed or forced/taken against their will (the empty threat of God smiting you for doing the nasty in His decaying house being a potently Numinous aphrodisiac).

Irony is always the deciding factor insofar as something is sex-positive or not. Furthermore, such curious privileges extend to anyone and everyone in the Internet Age—to partake and enjoy a “necrotic,” rape-fantasy ecstasy having been camped rather pornographically since Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Rocky Horror and present-day works: live burial (“burying the bishop”) a psychosexual means of feeling at home with one’s trauma as inescapable; i.e., a patriarchal system designed to benefit white cis-het Christian men that—however tokenized or gentrified it seems—will always decay in ways they can’t rely on to exclusively protect them, either (spectres of Marx seeking revenge through praxial success exposing the bourgeoisie for the murderers they and theirs are; re: a pedagogy of the oppressed, a voice of the rat/damned snitching on capital and the elite)!

Simply put, the exchanges are anisotropic, working as much to camp canonical forces (and move power towards workers) versus harming us with dogmatic sites of older psychosexual crimes—of gargoyles scaring the faithful, fearing “God” as much as overtly secular as not (capitalists famously walking the tightrope; e.g., Ronald Reagan’s Christofascism). However damaged we are from past abuse, camping this fact feels more and more homely and correct, in practice; i.e., once you go black, you can’t go back, babes (the dialectic of the alien a powerful means of catharsis and self-defense)! Camping canon is often “rapacious,” sexual; i.e., anger/gossip, monsters and camp (the basics of oppositional synthesis) with sex (and force) getting your attention in reliably Gothic ways: “Help! I’m an undead demon and I’m being ‘raped’ animal-style to Rocky Horror’s ‘Time Warp’!” Guess we should investigate, right?

(artist: Tago Van Tor)

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

In the Gothic, naughtiness is generally built on genuine trauma. To avoid war and rape as systemic harm leading to generational trauma/stolen generations, we must learn from the dead as something we embody through our Wisdom of the Ancients. Like a Gothic heroine in a castle, the liberatory ideal is exploration leading deeper inside—to heal from police atrocities, tokenistic exploitation, and compelled perversions occurring through feminism and genderqueer politics (and other minorities) in decay (e.g., TERFs, queer and Afronormativity, Zionism, etc) leading towards genocide, thus grim harvests.

“No body, no crime,” says the state, denying atrocities however much it needs to continue its dark feast. State cannibalism and disempowerment dismember what can ultimately be reassembled, though, strung together composite-style and speaking to its own murder and/or rape by the hands of others (e.g., Emily Portman’s “The Two Sisters” [2010] and similar murder ballads with changeling elements); or it can appear like a ghost, a simulacrum speaking to such lies as ultimately visible, mid-apocalypse. Cryptonymy is cryptonymy regardless of shape or size (a castle-like body or body-like castle denoting trauma as mirror-like; revolutionary or complicit, cryptonymy is about hiding in plain sight, then, generally as a means of good or bad habits synthesizing praxis in ways the state cannot manipulate or dissect (e.g., Child of God, 1972) as its fear and dogma normally do: useful criminal flesh[4] reduced afterwards to a useless unalive state, something to criminalize and scapegoat per criminogenic conditions, then incarcerate, judge and rape through law and order as usual: “all road men, gangsters, proper naughty boys and all that bollocks!” as Charlie Hunnam says, in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman (2019).

If the latter is a kind of intolerant, stalker-grade Count Dracula you do not want to be friends with, proletarian undeath and demonic poiesis reflect our being marked with trauma and yet still being able to function healthily with others to encourage universal tolerance but, per Karl Popper, exclude bigotry and harm; i.e., to not rape others as the state/capital do by design (regardless of venue). Whatever the monster type, there’s always a double for the state and vice versa projecting onto the same troubled surfaces and into the same thresholds—them, to blame others with and us to expose them as harming us.

To that, the state will always invoke self-defense as a matter of castle doctrine. They love plausible deniability and DARVO under settler-colonial conditions; i.e., playing the victim and the underdog rebel while treating us as terrorist, Nazi-Communist, what-have-you. Our monsters go against such systemic features, including high burdens of proof routinely and reliably defending the powerful as people extending from the state as centered around wealth and power always flowing up.

In a world of grand illusions, there’s no “seeing the light” as completely naked. Per cryptonymy, there’s always something hidden and something exposed that you must navigate by playing with proponents of good vs bad faith, play and education, BDSM, etc (which we’ll introduce here historically before unpacking fully in Volume Three: as something to make new histories with regarding the state as something to defend or dismantle). Intent matters less than socio-material outcomes, which those in bad faith cannot conceal (another topic for Volume Three); it’s always dualistic/dialectical-material, a historical-material trail of psychosexual rituals raised from the wreckage—of trauma as something to express, confront, negotiate with as a power we can reclaim. But it’s always a likeness of itself, an estate of unrest, a restless ghost (or some other egregore; e.g., Banquo’s zombie-like spectre, from Macbeth: “Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake / Thy gory locks at me!” source) of rape to camp; it has to be or it simply becomes invisible, thus conducive to profit through the perception of order as lawful, good, stable.

Per the Gothic, though, ghosts don’t stay dead; they get up and move around. It becomes something to invite in (or be invited into, that curiously polite quality of vampirism going both ways), then interrogate insofar as what ails them more or less ails us, too—Capitalism as a castled site of violent lies to survive and spatially thread, from mazes to labyrinths.

In turn, these become, per C.S. Lewis’s Problem of Pain, a dreadful, uncanny confrontation with a spirit of some small-to-mighty configuration; i.e., less a tiger in the room and more an echo that might be a tiger but just as much yields a general feeling of unheimlich. For or against the state, such likenesses are commonplace during cryptomimesis as a kind of puzzle to solve, a murder most foul (so-called “foul play” through intended gameplay in service to profit) testifying badly for itself across texts (the 1998 Ringu, above, coming from an older book). It becomes charged with corruption as data to expend like dark lightning from its sexually changed surfaces. Even so, entropy is the vector and the clue, the obfuscating reality of existence as meant to confuse us, but which we can weaponize against our confusers per the same historical-material effects during our revolutionary cryptonymy penetrating the spectral membrane: Schrodinger’s hot piece of vengeful ass!

(artist: Grobi-Grafik)

No matter how violent, antagonistic or intangible they seem, then, puzzles are solved by playing with them; history-towards-development is no exception. To that, the Gothic’s complicated, often-combative history of rape and its modular-to-intersecting preferences/poetics[5] are what we want to outline and explore here, but time is a factor. Sometimes we’ll focus on cryptonymy, others on hauntology or abjection, medieval poetics at large (e.g., a confusion of the senses, of boundaries during the dialectic of the alien) etc. Furthermore, from zombies to vampires, ghosts to composites, cyborgs to lycans, we’ll survey an example for each module taken from some of the most die-hard legends, just like I did in grad school; i.e., fluctuating between a looser symposium style and various essays that adhere to this larger module thesis argument amid smaller interesting-but-not-always-wholly-constant tangents and hot-cold Gothic extremes: a preferred alternative favoring the irrationally violent cluing the audience into a presence of decay state illusions have repeatedly tried to conceal since the Enlightenment—self-destruction, of state proponents punching themselves in the mirror-like face (re: “We have found the enemy and he is us.”).

(source: Broke Horror Fan)

As such, consider the above module thesis argument as a kebab skewer—a follow-through to achieve common ground, but also food for thought; i.e., something to go into your little brain baskets (and holes, mid-skewering of your meat) as you holistically try to weigh the historical function of monsters in the manner that I’ve carefully arranged here: as expressing and exchanging unequal power (“rape”) under duress during oppositional praxis while consuming and learning from/as the past, yourselves. It becomes vital forbidden knowledge we can reclaim when healing from rape by playing with “it” in quotes. This includes its odd sediment, doubles, hyphenations, etc; e.g., knife-dick play while looking for Mr. Right—our paradoxical salvation in a mock-up of our theatrical demise badly aping our deaths, our rapes, our confused pleasure-pain responses (versus Man Box types “finding religion” as just another grift/assimilation tactic, especially in kayfabe circles or executive positions; i.e., a redemption arc rehabilitating abusers; e.g., Hulk Hogan or George W. Bush) in search of a palliative Numinous, a Communist Numinous that engenders emotion/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness as a kind of second-nature dexterity towards being a better human and class/culture warrior on the side of the proletariat against the state and all its class traitors: dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit, giving Medusa a hug.

One more thing as far as that goes: Simplicity (abbreviation) is just a different means of abstracting trauma and power in ways useful to praxis; i.e., just an arrangement and interpretation of monsters at a given register that we can apply as needed. You already have complex and simple theory to combine with the Poetry Module; what follows is a historical inspection and hopefully future application towards fresh histories. Per the regulation of sex and force for or against the state and its Cartesian dialogic, monsters aren’t just threats (“Alright you primitive screwheads! Listen up!”); they’re poetic lenses that concern power as something to paradoxically shift away from state forces, mid-struggle. They are, like power more broadly, something to interrogate by going where they are through performance and play. This concerns war and rape, decay and feeding, transformation and fatal knowledge. All exchange per various human tissues as poetic material—from brains, to flesh, to blood, to cum, and others things we won’t touch on as much (e.g., shit).

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

(artist: Reiq)

Last but not least, this cruel angel’s thesis cannot reify alone; it takes friends to repeatedly perform these arguments—i.e., relative to state proponents trying to pit us again each other on the same stages, in the same undead, demonic and/or animalistic costumes constituting state force and decay (sickness) weighed against ours taking root to achieve the opposite function: liberation from rape through iconoclastic art as Gothic counterculture, including sexuality and gender identity through performative struggle (something we’ll adumbrate here and expand on much more in Volume Three). For us, Medusa is androgynous and monstrously humanized; both undead, demonic and/or animalistic, they are able to see, feed and exchange power and knowledge despite this seemingly blinding and otherwise crippling monstrous status (demons being more vocal than undead, but banished to hellish spheres).

(artist: Crow)

On our sexy mirror-like Aegis, then, Medusa smiles to deliver their best revenge against the state in various operatic forms. Often-musical, but always theatrical (from classical to industrial, heavy metal, punk to rap; to movies, videogames, novels and performance art), Medusa never settles down; they put “rape” in quotes, saying to their enemies harvesting them, “Can’t kill me, bitches! That all you got?” It’s that or state shift; i.e., when Mother Nature goes grim and actually fucks our brains out. So pick your poison—voyeurism or exhibitionism—until then, sweeties! Capitalism is doomed, regardless!

Onto “The Undead: Zombies, Vampires and Ghosts (module opening) and Bad Dreams; or, Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (chapter opening)“!


Footnotes

[1] From Papa Lobster’s “From Controversy to God: The Evolution of Tokido” (2024; timestamp: 8:57).

[2] Again, from a settler-colonial black-vs-white argument with pre-Enlightenment histories that predate settler-colonial racism; i.e., “black” as pure non-English, non-Christian stigma, thus incumbent less on skin color than the dialectic of the alien simply meaning “different” tied to older institutions where race argumentation wasn’t the primary focus.

[3] Garret Brown writes, “As Danny backs up step­ping in his own footprints to fool Jack, I had to back up ahead of him also in his footprints! To accomplish this I had to wear special boots with Danny-sized soles nailed to the bottom so I wouldn’t make the footprints any bigger!” (source: “The Steadicam and The Shining Revisited,” 2022).

[4] I’ve previously written about this excision of value regarding flesh; re: “Critical Review of Fred Botting’s ‘Future Horror (the Redundancy of Gothic)'” (2017):

Botting’s obituary perpetuates themes of meaningless substance, writing how ‘any anchoring substance is scraped away [as identity] slides precipitously across surfaces.” Mankind merely becomes the sum of so much superficial clay slapped on and removed with such astounding alacrity as to rob this interchangeable tissue of all meaning. Consider the surgery scene Botting initially evokes, where a British woman is being cosmetically operated on: “The skin is lifted and excess tissue scraped from under the cheeks [while a hose likewise suctions] gelatinous globules and bloody ooze pumped from the [woman’s] thighs.” Yet, this trope of meaningless flesh isn’t exclusive to our immediate age. I recall how the lifeless body of Matthew Lewis’ ill-fated prioress was beaten, trod upon and ill-used, in The Monk (1796), “till it became no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless and disgusting”;  or, consider Lester Ballard’s ignominious demise, in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Child of God (1973):

He was laid out on a slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open and the brains removed. His muscles were stripped from his bones. His heart was taken out. […] At the end of three months [Ballard] was scraped from the table into a plastic bag.

In both instances, the flesh of the authors’ victims is squeezed so tightly that it oozes between their white-knuckle fingers. However, Botting confidently asserts that, in modern times, “the terrors of the night are replaced by the terrors of the light”—as though this is an idea exclusive to that temporal region. Yet, Lewis or McCarthy both seem perfectly happy exploring those naked realities Bottling attributes exclusively to our own present.

In The Monk, Sister Agnes and Father Ambrosio exemplify this. The former describes the unveiled horror of a present moment, not some obscurity of the long-dead past, when she says, “…often have I at waking found my fingers ringed with the long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant.” Likewise, the latter, tortured by the Inquisition, tries to deny the existence of a God, but laments, “those truths, once [my] comfort, now presented themselves before [me] in the clearest light.” Manifest in said light, there is always some present horror for any writer to explore. These respective anxieties aren’t in the future. There’s no linear progression leading to a bright, over-exposed annihilation. Gothic fiction isn’t redundant because the past and future are in the present, and always have been. Thus, I can hardly agree with Botting when he writes, “the future produced in the void of the present [is] both horrifying and thrilling. But it is far from Gothic” (source).

Botting is a dumbass.

[5] E.g., vampires and demons both can feed, exchange power and transform, but each module historically emphasizes/stresses these individual poetic qualities more than others do, mid-intersection, and in specific unforgettable visualizations/monstrous shorthand.

Book Sample: Back to the Necropolis

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Update, 8/7/2024: Originally this piece was written for “Searching for Secrets.” On 6/14/2024, I moved the written material to the PDF manuscript of the Poetry Module (v1.2 onwards); today, I updated each promo page’s table of contents to reflect said change, too, meaning these transplanted posts are featured in the “Brace for Impact” table of contents.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Back to the Necropolis: Reflections on Mastery as Backwards; i.e., When Camping Myself as More and More Gay (feat. Black Nazis and Castlevania)!

“Oooooh! I love the look! Especially the monster fucking me! That’s hot!!”

—Drooling Red, to me regarding their drawing (2024)

Picking up from where “Into the Toy Chest, part two” left off…

We’re about to enter the second half of Volume Two, which—per my usual backwards approach—I wrote first and put last. Indeed, I wrote this second half of the volume before my PhD, revisiting it only after finalizing Volume Zero and Volume One, then writing another half to Volume Two that has since gone online before this half has! To that, we’re entering an old territory with fresh perspective: as someone who has mastered her genderqueer self and area of scholarship she trailblazed outside academia; i.e., to help liberate all sex workers through iconoclastic art! Though not entirely “necessary” towards understanding the Monster Modules, I’d nevertheless like to offer a quick roadmap for the hermeneutic waltz described (and an extended exhibit on black Nazis, TERF vampires, and Castlevania: Nocturne, 2023). It harbors various block quotes and collages, assembled this time as a particular lament configuration (minus Barker’s problematic elements, but haunted by them): a frame of reference when grappling and consuming my ideas, but also ruminating and hopefully improving on them in your own lives. “Truth” is less a thing universally acknowledged, then, and more the expression of rebellion as sex-positive in so many different campy, very-gay forms upending older histories with fresh nightmares: “Once more, but with rainbows!”

(artist: Drooling Red)

Mastery is a puzzle, insofar as calculated risk puts traditional notions of “empowerment” and “disempowerment” in quotes, thus on their heads; it becomes something to fuck with in ways that master monstrous language as a holistic theatrical mode. Except, one does not simply achieve mastery after a single day and night, deciding they like to fuck monsters. One becomes “rapaciously” masterful in ways that trap them in the middle, post-trauma, as something to recreate “trauma” in quotes; i.e., between ignorance and knowledge, but also knowing what to do with knowledge once you’ve got it. So many would-be intellectuals sell out, but keep the aesthetic minus its irony, mid-cryptonymy.

No one is immune from power as a structure in service to the elite, but it can be resisted in service to labor. However things reduce, division serves profit, and anything that serves profit, while predatory and unequal, can be critiqued per the elite’s usual trifectas, attempted monopolies (violence, terror and monsters), and qualities of capital (Cartesian, settler-colonial, heteronormative); i.e., as it sexualizes everything only to gentrify/tokenize and decay over and over and over while defending the state. Per Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, intersectional solidarity does not serve profit regardless of the variables at play (an inverse of the listed qualities, above). There’s several dialectical-material binaries, but loads of grey area. The only way to distinguish this from that between the constants and variables is to play with them in ways that distribute as a matter of privilege and oppression; i.e., what we’re born into: prisons, settler colonies, empire.

Foucault wrote on prisons all his life, a man of academia as a matter of privilege that won him with the ability to help or abuse those around him (re: pedophilia). He chose both, making him a state puppet in the end; i.e., poisoning the well by arguing for pedophilia through words and actions. Similar to Simone Beauvoir or Jean-Paul Sartre, the guy raped people, specifically children (often non-white, per his sex tourism: Bad Empanada Live’s “Michel Foucault Was a Pedophile – The Evidence Is Clear,” 2022). As this volume shall demonstrate, his ideas challenging empire are still useful, but they must be taken with a grain of salt—of critique that extends the right of challenging empire to all parties, not just Foucault having his cake and eating it, too (a real French imperialist playing the rebel; i.e., “boundaries for me, not for thee”)! This “salt” can be supplied by figures with systemic power regaining their humanity in ways Foucault never got the chance to (he died of AIDS in 1984).

For instance, Dennis Challeen—a judge, himself—wrote in the poem “Prisoners” (2012) of such power as a judge might be able to oversee; i.e., from the outside looking in, as someone with power over others generally does:

We want them to have self worth,
So we destroy their self worth

To be responsible,
So we take away all responsibility

To be a part of our community,
So we isolate them from the community

To be positive and constructive,
So we degrade them and make them useless

To be non-violent,
So we put them where there is violence all around

To be kind and loving people,
So we subject them to hatred and cruelty

To quit being tough guys,
So we put them where the tough guy is respected

To quit hanging around losers,
So we put all the losers under one roof

To quit exploiting us,
So we put them where they exploit each other.

We want them to take control of their own lives
Own their own problems and quit being parasites,
So we make them totally dependent on us (source).

Justice isn’t monopolized by those with privilege, though, and point-in-fact requires those with less privilege (thus power) to assert and affirm a pedagogy of the oppressed that speaks truth to power as a matter of resistance, not status-quo consolidation; i.e., that has decayed over time (with older writers like Shelley or Hawthorne being far more critical of power through their privilege than many more recent thinkers, like Foucault).

Simply put, power aggregates; we, in turn, must aggregate—as comrades, masters, students, et al—not with the elite as Faustian backstabbers (e.g., Lando Calrissian and Darth Vader) but against the elite and their prison-like profit motive, their us-versus-them, their monstrous-feminine, their Aegis as a darling to kill and reclaim while not throwing the baby out with the bathwater (re: Foucault’s ideas, not his reputation). Reclaimed by us, their loss of humanity is our dignity and power to regain by learning from history in all its half-real, imaginary forms:

I am the ruler of these nether worlds
The underground, whoa yes
On every wall and place my fearsome name is heard
Just look around, whoa yes (Van Halen’s “Atomic Punk,” 1978).

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

I am a white girl with many strange and wonderful friends, falling for all manner of dark, delightful cuties. Let it never be said I compromised my arguments while doing so! Poor in money though I am, I am rich both in spirit and the love I share for workers and nature; i.e., as things to rescue from the state by fucking with monsters as a Promethean, Numinous means of mastering the seemingly abominable (emblems of rape and death fantasies) to dominate our tyrants (the bourgeoisie): making monsters that speak to our trauma and free us from it by humanizing us through the alien as a condition we all find ourselves on different sides of while interrogating sex and force; i.e., seeking pleasure (and pleasurable pain) while avoiding harm as a matter of triangulation—the sell-out playing the victim. I only became gayer as time went on; i.e., my past took on a life of its own: not to betray my cause but remain polyamorously faithful towards it!

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

Though they cannot be fully divorced from it, monsters aren’t completely emblematic of subjugation by state forces. Iconoclastic subversion is the means of turning the tables on our overlords. They normally drink our blood as something to harvest under capital as a well-oiled machine, at this point. We must reverse—as Daniel Day-Lewis would put it—the drinking of the milkshake, sucking their power through the same socio-material implements (the straw) according to how such things came into their possession: through Gothic poetics!

Power cannot be created or destroyed, in this respect; it can only be transferred from workers or the state through oppositional praxis, which pastiche remediates to varying degrees of irony during liminal expression’s conflicting surfaces and thresholds. As always, resistance and exploitation exist in the same space, canon and camp operating in the same shadow zone where Nazis and Communists coincide; i.e., as fodder for Pax Americana kayfabe copaganda, including videogames and their painfully neoliberal and fun adaptations weaponizing marginalization.

Such tokenization is fractally recursive in service to the state, with modular elements that complicate liberation. To that, we’re talking about decay in lieu of me having written three books since I wrote Volume Two, part two, over a year ago at this point. We won’t have time to go over all the possibilities, here, but I do have a fairly niche example we’ll exhibit cursorily over the next fourteen pages (and one the Undead Module shall expand upon extensively in the following chapters); i.e., one that encapsulates marginalized intersectional tokenism: normative* Afrocentrism-as-undead through a hauntological black queer Nazi—Castlevania: Nocturne (2023)!

*As in Afronormativity punching down against other marginalized groups while playing the universal victim through a decayed fascist form of pan-Africanism. The practice was originally a liberatory device and can still be used in that fashion provided it avoids an exclusionary segregational function; i.e., works towards intersectional solidarity instead of isolationism (which is just another ghetto to fence/nation to sanction and embargo by imperial forces). Except historically Afrocentrism is just that—centralized predominantly around the struggles of a singular group of black ethnicities and cultures that didn’t primarily integrate with other non-white groups/struggles beyond the African continent and its descendants; e.g., Native Americans, Māori or Aboriginal groups, etc; i.e., decaying into a person-of-color middle-class gatekeeping mechanism on par with white indentured servants originally accepting the yolk, per Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980). We’ll unpack these considerations after the close-reading of Castlevania: Nocturne, and give a brief holistic examination of fascist tokenization in other Japanese neoliberal works: Capcom’s problematic Amazons in their Street Fighter franchise!

(exhibit 34b3b3a3: Castlevania: Nocturne falls victim to the usual pitfalls of neoliberal hero escapism, but there remain lots of Gothic fetishes and clichés to consider for actual revolutionary purposes. Even so, these have to be rescued from the usual kill-the-Medusa dreck [fun dreck, but dreck nonetheless]: the Countess.

For one, the show’s Great Destroyer—a “black Egyptian” spin [as Castlevania loves to do] on the Elizabeth Báthory legend—ties vampirism to a pre-Western regression; i.e., a 21st century hauntology demonizing Communism as state shift per Capitalist Realism: a vengeful Medusa as daughter-of-Ra, an equation of hysterical “terror” conjured up again. In other words, it’s Joseph Crawford’s invention of terrorism through French state decay vis-à-vis Napoleon letting British and American forces hold onto power in their own territories and power centers: through a counterfeit, girl-boss death god used to keep the elite in power now much as Radcliffe did [versus Matthew Lewis’ queer camp] when the actual French Revolution was underway! In other words, bread and circus.

Fast-forward two centuries, and the so-called Devourer of Light [a black hole exemplified by the Apep-style eclipse eating Ra] is fascist DARVO on the state side of things; i.e., with a Japanese neoliberal [videogame] Shintoism ultimately defending the light, the sun, through a Western cop [our very own Richter Belmont] punching Nazis and Communists conflated per centrist dogma on the show’s signature Medusa. This includes their rhetoric, aesthetic, costumes, masks, etc, as canonical monstrous-feminine she-wolves and fags [e.g., Orlock] as expendable bad bitches, their lieutenants, bosses and gods all wrapped up in the same anisotropic scheme for the state. Or as our resident queen’s token black Mephistopheles, Doltra, delightfully says, “They’re revolutionaries, father. We’re here to crush them.” She’s literally a black Nazi, thus Afrocentrist by virtue of psychosexual, biomechanical decay—a gargoyle, an undead puppet to shock the masses with.

Corporations love to milk and tokenize Nazis through these kinds of paradoxical compromises. Just like Amazon did with Obi Wan in 2022, Netflix is fetishizing the Nazi as vampiric in 2023. It doesn’t get any more cliché than that, except it’s heavily tokenized in ways that didn’t quite exist two centuries ago! Again, it’s Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks [1952] injected into a corporatized Gothic imaginary [with each monstrous-feminine having a calm state and an agitated, “hysterical” state; i.e., the latter increasingly more slutty and pissed-off than the former] relying on Afrocentrism to sell to a target marginalized demographic running interference for the writers playing the white moderate: “Okay, you can play the Nazi!” This is not progress unless irony is present; there is none in Obi Wan and very little in Nocturne as we shall see.

Whatever their race, Nazis lend themselves well to camp, but corporate schlock generally has about as much irony as Darth Vader* originally did [except here it’s Bubblegum Nazi Punk; e.g., Obi Wan‘s Reva Sevander, above]. That being said, moderacy is, itself, a form of false rebellion serving profit [which is what the blood and black-and-red aesthetic signifies through a Marxist reading of the text]. Whether gay, female and/or black, such things reliably decay under the allure of capitalist trinkets fighting Red Scare with cartoon Nazi scapegoats; i.e., Faustian bargains, preying on others the way white women historically have done in the Gothic mode since Radcliffe: as guilty as the false priest, seeking the token’s fix as psychosexual “liberation.” It’s predatory but one that occurs differently depending on whose preying [a holy conflation synonymizing “pray” with “prey” in such poetic schemes].

*Also a black Nazi; i.e., voiced by James Earl Jones and later echoed in Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon, per The Mandalorian (2019) as a decayed, Sith-like form of Samuel L. Jackson’s Mace Windu.

Mind you, there’s a billion-and-one monster girls, and they either serve profit or they don’t as a liminal, paradoxical expression: a slutty Halloween costume to fight over during oppositional praxis. When it’s that time of year and she—knocking ‘rap rap rap—rap!’ on your chamber door like The Terminator [with Brad Fidel riffing on Beethoven’s famous coda of fate a-knockin’ in the 5th Symphony’s opening section, 1808]: the vampire as the predatory visitor coming out of the imaginary past to tempt us with destruction as something—per Capitalist Realism—to express as Nazi-Communist monster-girl kayfabe.

Again, this canonically serves profit, thus the state while furthering the process of abjection through the ghost of the counterfeit as something to fear and attack during the Shadow of Pygmalion’s Cycle of Kings and their royal decay as tomb-like, populated with whores useful to Cartesian edicts. Such reversals [and their context of mutual consent] exist inside spheres of monstrous rape play with Radcliffean demon lovers abusing Lewis’ ironic Matilda [originally profaning the Madonna to castrate the rapacious Ambrosio]. They’re hardly cut-and-dry from an immediate visual standpoint; i.e., exploitation versus empowerment-as-sex-positive walk a tremendously fine line, indeed!

[artist: Lera PI]

White women, for example, classically feel trapped between virgin and whore, ashamed as they look to use their power as a taste of blood normally restricted to men in the same positions; i.e., triangulating against and feeding on the vulnerable until they are euthanized, closeted, beheaded, etc, under a fascist feeding scheme; i.e., the undead feeding mechanism servicing the state, whereupon Capitalism in decay is the state regressively cannibalizing itself to survive; i.e., any undead and their famously abject foods; e.g., blood, brains, or flesh as complicated psychosexual statements with anisotropic functions. Per Jameson, the privilege of the middle class invokes the dialectic of shelter to defend “itself” [the elite] from, as I argue, the alien dead—the non-middle-class undead—in effect raping said dead and abjecting their legitimate suddenly-visible grievances; i.e., slave revolts; e.g., The Birth of a Nation except tokenism pointedly weaponizes black culture against itself through a tokenized middle class punching down; re: Jordan Peele’s Us.

As we shall explore more, deeper in the volume, Zombie-Vampire Capitalism pointedly turns women into cops, then back into housewives, and black slaves into black cops then back into black slaves, etc. The mouth of the state is always hungry but it becomes horrifyingly visible during a zombie apocalypse: when fearsome, animalistic, nocturnal feeders—normally relegated to the dead of night or the pits of Hell—suddenly appear at daytime on Earth, feeding psychosexually in broad daylight as a means of genocide a) exposed as a regular state function disinterred, mid-apocalypse [meaning “to uncover”] and b) something to resist through the same poetic means of feeding as a proletarian counterterrorist role; i.e., the return of the living dead seeking revenge for the elite’s usual giving and receiving of state violence.

[artist: Zdzisław Beksiński]

White or not, the middle class are the gatekeepers of capital and its nuclear-familial design, and allow for various marginalized concessions of “representation” that eventually disappear when fascist power is formally attained; i.e., the state finally entering a “rabid” state only to be put down by another state not yet in decay to the same extent; e.g., America vs Nazi Germany [this problem becomes a matter of suicide per the Mother Country dying as America is, which we shall explore in the Undead Module proper]. At home and abroad, American Liberalism [and the middle class] always decay fascistically into darker versions of itself that self-defend until total collapse trying to decay into fresh forms of the same-old inequality under Imperialism—i.e., America’s true purpose [Cartesian exploitation] projected onto Nazi Germany as the “only” Nazis in town, despite America being the breeding ground for fascism having inspired others since the late 1800s: as the global economic superpower!
China’s recent developments are changing this hegemony and the chickens are already coming home to roost; i.e., token, corporatized arbitration of Imperialism-in-crisis in ways America cannot stop, no matter how many female and non-white girl bosses they turn into unironic Amazons, vampires, Medusa, etc! “Home” as a fatal portrait will decay until it eats itself, specifically the next-in-line [above]. Our rights are stripped down and eaten by the state [often retrojected/hyphenated as a ruinous hungry vampire-castle or castle-vampire] until our right to exist becomes anathema, zombie-like. Then the state dies. Until then, the state is always “in danger” as something to abject onto labor threatening the nuclear families of the middle class; rinse and repeat.

Like, as if, bitches! Angela Carter famously argued, “Any free woman in an unfree society will always be a monster”; i.e., TERFs; e.g., Amazons, which are already tokenized and have a fascist element as such, but compound through black/non-white girl bosses and GNC/BDSM elements. Except such women transform into token-style witch cops precisely by virtue of turning heel to serve the usual pimps, aka fighting for scraps. Token assimilators do so as the state’s Amazonian war bosses, their subjugated Hippolyta and Medusa playing out through different forms of tokenized “rebellion”; e.g., Wonder Woman and her Nazi counterpart stooges’ white-Indian rhetoric performing the same bad, half-real theatre on the same planetary fields of domination: Indigenous lands mapped out, invaded, and raped in-text and out.

Starting with Radcliffe, British and American feminism has decayed to become increasingly complicit in this global predation. However they need to, then, each assimilator shall ape the whore that society “needs” to be behead once she invariably breaks bad; e.g., Dany Targaryen from Game of Thrones [2011] “coached by Hilter” per the actress watching actual videos of the old dictator to obey the show’s writers telling her to play the female version thereof [source: Desiree Murphy’s “Emilia Clarke Says She Watched Videos of Hitler to Prepare for Game of Thrones Finale,” 2019]! Dany goes rogue; the usual dudes put her down to further a centrist, Star-Wars-style scheme: patriarchal, Pygmalion-grade dominance in a capitalist system dressed up as “medieval,” billionaire-Marxist, centrist; i.e., good guys and bad, good cops and bad. Except, ACAB. It’s all Pax Americana apologia; i.e., lionizing profit in ways that, at times, feel incredibly forced [which is what the Force from Star Wars canonically is: centrist dogma weaponizing the monomyth against labor by putting “rebellion” in quotes]. From girl boss to black Nazi to white knight, whatever forms of class betrayal that emerge are still betrayal—is Capitalism, through and through as Afrocentrist, white and cis supremacist, and homonormative to varying degrees of concession with profit as heteronormative, Cartesian, settler-colonial!

Like all Nazis tend to be, such exchanges and alliances are admittedly fascinating to watch. But systemic abuse does get old, the same-old paradigm exhausting if irony isn’t present. The bitch is simply drugged, then bashed through the usual morality plays designed to keep rebellion in check; i.e., by white/tokenized moderates and mutilative sex as a fatal lure: through toys. To subvert them, we must take their ludic/performative context and alter it beyond canon’s usual weaponizing of such things; i.e., camping demon BDSM and unironic rape fantasies made to canonically justify violence against the monstrous-feminine, thus serve profit! Profit equals rape. We must camp rape to end profit and achieve post-scarcity through intersectional solidarity.

Except, the state loves to weaponize the home against whatever perceived barbarians are “at the gate”; i.e., “think of the women and children” as settler-colonial agents presented as “native.” This extends to such figures conjured up, Radcliffe-style, and ceremoniously raped before tossing them back into the proverbial bin. Per Irigary, the mother is always something to rape; per Creed, she refuses to be a victim; per me, such predation within the profit motive is something we must challenge and subvert inside of itself—by playing with it from one series of toys to the next! From feminism to Afrocentrism to the 1980s, nostalgia decays, finding an oft-modular jouissance [for or against the state] inside itself; e.g., Vaporwave, but also the stripper disco girls of Castlevania and The Darkest Dungeon. As Nina says in “80s Girl” [2018]: Don’t let the past hold you back!” Take these things and make them functionally proletarian again; i.e., defending Medusa as someone to hug who, yes, has rape trauma, thus fantasies of an oft-hauntological sort [Gothic roleplay always sits between the present and the imaginary past as violent]:

[artist, top-left: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-middle: PawznCupz; source tweet, right: Cottontail, March 30th: “Got to voice plant mommy~ check it out!”] 

What can I say? Per Sarkeesian’s adage, I can enjoy what I critique; e.g., the black “Egypt” of the Japanese neoliberal imagination; i.e., a site of regular abject psychosexual power fantasies. On the GBA and DS, I’ve played with such portable, hand-held cultural exports—of monster rape and play—since I was a little girl well into adulthood; as a professional, though, I’ve pointedly critiqued Castlevania‘s monster moms before [Persephone van der Waard’s “Sex in Castlevania, season 3,” 2020] and have lovingly reified them as a sex-positive mode of being. Simply put, I love me a good, Sontag-grade BDSM/rape-murder fantasy—monster girls [above] but also a strict-class Archaic Mother who, for once, actually feels strong! And I mean really strong. Think Jadis, minus the actual abuse, or Lewis’ Bleeding Nun but ostensibly able to avenge herself in ways Carmilla wasn’t, in the original Netflix series. Sign me up, babes!

Unlike sex-positive forces, regressive proponents—meaning conservatives, reactionaries and moderates—will use Amazonomachia to project their darker sides and deep unspeakable desires onto an “other” place they can attack and claim exclusive victimhood as a false flag operation; i.e., that lets them rape unironically with impunity while using DARVO tactics to accuse labor of being the ones causing harm! In quotes or not, “danger” and excitement are an effective means of shocking the system when system shock is already unfolding [again]: calculated risk that has imaginary elements with a historical flavor as dogmatic-to-iconoclastic. It’s often problematic for this reason; e.g., the Castlevania Belmonts’ utter love for whipping the whore with their hand-me-down slaver’s tool [which is precisely what a whip is, but also an anti-Semitic torture device used, through salting the leather, to inflict pain against unholy forces, mid-witch-hunt].

 

Yet, all are things to reclaim inside of themselves, finding liberation alongside lost/stolen generations and their systemic harm. Like Ann Rice’s vampire, Doltra becomes something to interview by virtue of critiquing her show-stealing masochism. The production’s admittedly rather literal black penitent, she’s the little pink neon sign pointing to herself and shouting “Nazi!” in whorish squeals, mid-mutilation: “I’m a bad girl, daddy! Whip me!” It’s “WAP” with no irony at all, the black knight stripped bare and whipped like any classic slave. Doltra is the victim of bad play having learned to love harmful pain and unequal power arrangements; i.e., the Shakespearean Moor as something to not only stare at but punish as reprobate. In short, she’s a fatal sycophant zombie self-flagellating but also serving as literal food for the master if need be [which the show offers as a dated critique of older systems of repression through its critique of the Catholic faith’s blood sacrifice—the lamb sent to Abraham—and by extension, transubstantiation]! The difference between a lobotomized corpse and a drug addict is scant, insofar as such feeding predicates on predation of the servant serving the master forcing undeath upon them; Doltra was probably groomed early on to view the Countess as a god—i.e., of the “might makes right” sort, the skeleton queen!

False or not, revolution gets messy fast. As such, Doltra is the token slave, the stylish and shameless house n*gro whoring herself out; i.e., as the Nazi-grade monster mom’s dutiful lapdog assimilating for a white predatory mistress: profaning the Western household to ultimately uphold it through false rebellion, disguised as a second wave feminist bogeywomen scaring the Man. Frankly such role reversals are par for the course in neoliberal tokenism; i.e., making Nazis blacker than they would have been allowed by the German [or American] state in decay while a given extermination carries on, all the while. She’s a Hugo-Boss style paper doll: the fashion model method weaponizing the help to punch down against the poors. At best, she’s a black capitalist, but her job is literally the enforcer for someone even worse; i.e., the usual fash MO: kiss up and punch down, but always, always look stylish!

[source: Alucarddaily]

Unlike nation-states, corporations don’t care about dogmatic presentation as true to the state; they care about exploitation as something that invariably corrupts, which they can milk while throwing various states under the bus if need be. Profit is always the victim. As such, capitalists will do whatever they can to profit as efficiently as possible [visually compromising ideologies useful to capital while still, somehow, propping them up, CIA-style] but especially DARVO and obscurantism through bad-faith centrist yarns framing capital as the victim dressed up in false rebellion as fascist and moderate. In turn, tokenism happens, but this He-Man-grade cronyism, per Doltra and the Countess, is still entirely Rainbow Capitalist [the character is fun in a pure vice-character sense, but she’s smug precisely because her belief in the Countess is blind zealotry the audience not only roots for, but expects].

Earlier we also mentioned moderacy—i.e., something to challenge inside of itself. Such a glutton-for-punishment like Doltra’s obedience-in-decay is countered by perhaps the show’s nicest surprise: Annette and Edouard. To be completely honest, I don’t know a lot about either persona, save that Annette was originally white [a move similar to the 2017 show making Isaac black]. Some people predictably hate this for reasons of “historical accuracy” [uh huh]. Fascists gonna hate, but personally I see this as a theatrical route to fresh voices to enjoy and critique: Castlevania isn’t sacred; it’s a trashy, campy place to profane sacred things. The show uses it to talk about revolution in ways that give it a multi-racial flavor [which others appreciate, as well; e.g., La’Ron Readus’ “Why Annette is Black,” 2023]. Cool, but let’s interrogate that!

I have enough experience reading Nella Larsen, R. Charles Johnson, Michelle Cliff, Jean Rhys, Toni Morrison or Zora Neale Hurston, etc, to recognize the value in such perspective; re: the pedagogy of the oppressed as non-white, but in-development. Still, corporations are generally heavy-handed; Castlevania: Nocturne feels a bit “punch the plantation owner” as written in ways that lean closer to Django Unchanged [2012] versus MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” or Fanon’s aforementioned Black Skin, White Masks: going after an overt cartoon of such realities versus criticizing white moderacy [and Afrocentrism] as the historical-material enemy of progress in Americanized lands and legends. The show just doesn’t have the incentive to say those things, because those things challenge profit. Still, I liked the class differences between Annette and Edouard, and Edouard’s role as a queer person-of-color trapped in a demon’s body while singing operatically from beyond the grave to literally challenge the earliest iterations of fascism: on the plantations, much as slaves always did—through singing as a kind of rebellious code. Except he’s actually an opera singer born free and helping those not born free escape through music as a revolutionary front [“the creatures of the night; what sweet music they make!”]. Neat!

However, while I appreciated Annette’s refusal to stoop to such self-defeating tactics as Doltra did, the show still isn’t as radical as it comes across through its non-white faces; i.e., making black-and-white arguments that—while they refreshingly critique the French Revolution as overlooking black slaves—aren’t always very nuanced unto themselves; i.e., its own Afrocentrism stating “evil is evil” or “the sun will outshine the darkness” while not really thinking about struggles outside their own plantations. To that, Indigenous groups aren’t really being mentioned or included as “black” if they aren’t tied to the current genocide being committed by the French. This being said, Orlock does briefly mention a Mohawk boy he loved, once, in the American colonies. Indeed, the word “colony” is something he stresses, albeit in ways that ultimately mistrust the fascist Countess without extending that critique to the white American gentry as ultimately complicit in settler-colonialism. The show picks and chooses quite liberally who to bash. Except, that’s the problem. You gotta bash all the fash, lovelies, and before they inevitably decay!

[artist: François-Auguste Biard]

In short, Nocturne offers the usual problems of divide and conquer being relegated to voodoo and Caribbean slaves being the only dissenting non-white voice Netflix offers; i.e., as a moderate force upending the “natural order” of masters and slaves, of so-called Divine Right while not really speaking to anyone but the French as imperialist. I get the basic idea, but a little dualistic integrity and holism would have helped critique capital as a current problem without reducing black culture to a singular monolith that excludes Indigenous peoples at large; i.e., while vital, challenging the master/slave dialogic is a bit antiquated, as capital fosters so many different kinds of class betrayal in centrist stories. Afrocentrism, in this case, projects onto island slave revolts [e.g., the Haitian Revolution] exacted against French forces to appeal to an African American audience monopolizing victimhood by projecting themselves onto Caribbean slaves speaking Creole. Similar to Bram Stoker’s gentrified anti-Semitism as a bigoted Irishman whitewashing British atrocities, eventually Afrocentrism becomes just another form of gatekeeper rhetoric that leaves far too much out; i.e., reducing “black” to American citizens and recuperating rebellion as “black and queer,” but leaving anything Indigenous out [e.g., Māori as “black” within the settler colonial argument despite having relatively fair skin[1]]: outside of an African survey that focuses on a lack of unity back then to serve profit now. These are old tactics that sadly work all too well.

Even so, watching everyone at war with each other mid-revolution was fun. The French Church, the queer-coded Arab beefcake topped by Orlock, the French [white] middle class—there’s so many Gothic tropes on display in Nocturne as mixing with class-cultural considerations; i.e., fitting into the kinds of half-real discourse that was actually occurring centuries ago, except it’s being relaid through a modernized, corporate retelling: the videogame adaptation as racially inclusive to a moderate, Afrocentrist degree! “Look. We have black Nazis and black cops! How diverse, right?” Like Macbeth minus the irony, it crams them into borrowed robes[2] to serve the state; e.g., Doltra’s hoof-shaped, thigh-high stripper boots.

More to the point, such middle-class, gatekeeper fictions further the process of abjection as racially expanded by presenting the ghost of the counterfeit as “threat”; i.e., something to burn in a purifying ritual in defense of the West looking backward, shrouded in Capitalist Realism: “Once she conquers Europe, you will guide her to America.” Won’t someone please think of the poor settler-colony? The Countess/Sekhmet is literally canonized, here, as the ghost of fascism seeking revenge against moderates [the West] and slaves alike; i.e., the indiscriminate lioness as redhaired, an Archaic Mother set up to take the fall when all’s said and done: a ringleading devil-worshipper Melmoth, coming home to roost, mid-Amazonomachia. Like the usual Nazi tricks, it puts “rebellion” and “Jewish revenge” in quotes. Doltra, by extension, is merely a stepping stone to whitewash America displaced as 18th-century “France”: by diverse cops, but cops nonetheless keeping the peace against Red Scare through extinction/extermination rhetoric, mid-DARVO, marking the Medusa [and the black Amazon] for death.

Any settler colony needs cops and victims; i.e., the creation of an imaginary enemy/menace, raison d’être, call-to-arms/casus beli and so on. The most privileged within capital’s cycle of abuse and hauntological argument are generally the most scared, angry and violent on and offstage, acting tough and afraid at the same time, abusing oppressor/oppressed rhetoric for purposes of capital, especially settler-colonialism; i.e., Joseph Crawford’s invention of terrorism; e.g., Zionists[2a] [Thought Slime’s “Zionists Are Crybabies,” 2024]. This does not preclude tokenism; it demands it, on both sides of the argument [from the oppressor perspective, of course]: black cops, black Nazis [“black” meaning anything non-white, per the settler-colonial binary].

Or in the words of Malcolm X in 1963, 

The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political “football game” that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.

Politically the American Negro is nothing but a football and the white liberals control this mentally dead ball through tricks of tokenism: false promises of integration and civil rights [source: Digital History]. 

This plays out onstage, many decades after his and MLK’s death, among many other members of the Civil Rights Movement who were also killed, tokenized or otherwise subjugated as black capitalists decaying into persons the likes of which embody Doltra in real life; e.g., Candice Owens or Barack Obama. Those who can be turned attack their own kind more viciously in service to white moderacy as the world order then and now. But criticism to that order burns now as it did in 1963 when Malcolm X was still alive: “A liberal is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now” [source tweet: Eyeball Slicer, November 23rd, 2023].

Sekhmet’s double is the furious Wandering Jew and Nazi ghost, a great Eater of the Dead and the Light, insofar as the state is dying and must be saved by punching the Nazi: our black hole sun, eating the light as an argument for patriarchal domination’s revival. It’s a bait-and-switch gimmick, our false Egyptian standing in for Communism, mid-Red-Scare, conflated with fascism as an American phenomenon projected onto non-Western places as ghosts of Caesar and Marx. It all becomes something to banish alongside any crisis and decay as merely a predatory means to restore the state during the liminal hauntology of war [the castle, in this case, is Sekhmet threatening to cannibalize the state per a rebellious-yet-fascist transfer of power dressed up as a faux-Egyptian Archaic Mother]. It works as Castlevania always has; i.e., American-style obscurantism, through the kayfabe monomyth, post-WW2, in neoliberal markets doing Goldilocks Imperialism during Capitalism Realism: by defending the usual empires [and their cartographic refrains] from a Nazi strawman/straw dog—a queen bitch, in Nocturne‘s case. The only solution is force and it must be righteously administered by the good guys against the bad until the end of time.

Afrocentrist or TERF, the state defends itself, including when regressing to false preachers dealing with the bourgeoisie disguised as “the devil-as-monstrous-feminine.” All their paradoxes, kayfabe, contradictions, and temporary alliances/strange bedfellows—their language of the past, their queerness and non-white, turncoat aristocrat representation—serve the state [the Star Wars problem]: to buck the unironic Whore of Babylon. It’s dogmatic, thus needs to be camped in ways that weaponize the language of hellish rebellion for workers. It must camp what has become blind as one staring into an eclipse, into the eye of confusion existing as the flavor-of-the-month; i.e., a lunatic daughter of Ra to worship as yet-another-boss-style sacrifice for the monomyth to present to our heroes as “big sacrifice”: raping the Nazi whore as “extremely fuckable” in ways we can harness to achieve systemic catharsis and redistribution. We’ll unpack all of this stuff in the Monster Modules proper. So keep it handy!)

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

This concludes the assimilation exhibit, but we still have a few more quotes and focal points to stress before the Necropolis returns for us to play around inside.

First, the harvest that any fascist/moderate (and their concentric veneers) invoke, ipso facto, occurs as a tolling refrain: “The harvest is here! Pity those with a place at the table!” To that, Netflix shamelessly cashing in on the Castlevania monster girl might seem to suggest a monopoly on such psychosexual poetics, doomed to police us during the liminal hauntology of war stuck on repeat; i.e., to produce tokenized, succubus-style, monstrous-feminine traitors alongside the lily-white, modest ones; re (from Volume One):

Such a castle’s nightmarish presence denotes potential mayhem tied to one’s habitat; i.e., through the liminal hauntology of war colonizing nature and those tied to nature. When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn’t spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics’ endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains with counterterror (source).

As such, the presence of unironic rape, possession and imprisonment in Gothic castles is generally accepted. Except, this isn’t exclusively tied to profit and Capitalism as something to defend (re: Radcliffe) through childish regressions into escapist dark-fantasy castles. I relied on unironic interpretations in the past, but eventually learned to include irony in my own castle-narrative and scholarship. Provided a given relationship/performance challenges the socio-material factors that normally lead to such abuse, though, there’s nothing wrong with sexiness and rape play as a sexual-to-asexual Gothic commentary on psychosexual harm and predation.

To varying degrees, then, all workers possess the means to subvert canonical monsters during rape play as consent-non-consent forms of calculated risk bending the optics; i.e., in what we make and leave behind, over and over (e.g., my Castlevania monster girl drawing revisited today as of writing this, above, originally from 2019): the operatic “danger disco’s” hauntological “torture” dungeon, but also its sexy monstrous-feminine as a collective, shared statement of our daily struggles reclaimed from state tyrannies doubling our monstrous selves! Per the usual mise-en-abyme as concentric, we’re always in the middle of someone, somewhere and/or something that inspires us through castle-narrative to move towards a decaying likeness of what they’re ostensibly turning into (frozen in time): half-real beings pointing towards a better world dancing with the imaginary past as a future event unfolding always in the present space-and-time! Disco decays. When it does, we feel “raped,” thus strong as desirable for our scars, our exploitation as something that, like all monsters, can be reclaimed during a pedagogy of the oppressed resisting police violence! It’s crude and violent, as the Gothic always is. The slave is generally a zombie to fuck.

(artist: Ottomarr)

Except, such praxial synthesis and catharsis is less a crystal ball and more something historical-material, insofar as history is predicated on material conditions having a social element that—per Marx—shape and maintain each other but cannot be monopolized by us or the state. It’s a wrestling match that demands intersectional solidarity to weaken the prison inside itself; i.e., putting the elite “on the hip” not as an event but a counter structure that takes their power away in the vital moment: “Call your dogs! They can feast on your corpses!”

We succ, something always given and received during any poetic exchange of essence, of power and vitality (what do you think sex is? See: above): siphoned towards us with a little help from each other towards a common cause reversing abjection, thus profit as a structure. So whenever Medusa’s feeling pissed off, instead of getting hung up on the usual moral ambiguities, sexy bodies/clothes, Amazonomachia kayfabe, or blind camp (e.g., the Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride, 1973), ask yourselves why that might be; i.e., why the usual monomyth needs black Nazis and a Whore of Babylon’s cataclysmic Big Revenge for the white knights/good cops to unite against for the state’s continuation: rape apologia is state/capitalist apologia.

To that, feelings of total annihilation and domination don’t come from nothing! They’re informed by socio-material conditions for or against the state as occupying the same theatrical spaces of rape; i.e., something to canonize or camp! Everything decays under capital. Napoleon, like the Nazis over a century after his defeat, decayed rebellion and its slogans, to serve capital by becoming the elite’s scapegoat to consolidate power right where it was. Marx hinted at this with “The Eighteenth Brumaire” (1852); whether Nocturne will or not remains to be seen, but I doubt it. It’s set up like a videogame, with Medusa as the boss, not Napoleon or the bourgeoisie; i.e., it’s a disco with monsters, but decaying in ways useful to the elite now.

As the undead, the demonic, the animalistic, we oppressed live for that shit, encapsulating its give-and-take as forbidden, begging to yield up fresh regeneration and revival away from state decay and genocide:

Now you are mine
In my control
One taste of your life
And I own your soul! (Judas Priest’s “Love Bites[3],” 1984).

State continuation, by comparison, yields the usual horrors, which requires escape through paradox as something to invite and enjoy once taught; i.e., the likes of which a vampire has been done to death but never really gets old—to be powerful when feeling weak, weakened by our usual predators while appearing fearsome and alluring to them! They’ll want “their share” (all of it), which we’ll have to deny when returning from and to the grave as the scene of the crime; i.e., while playing the part as something we can camp to degrees that would make Matthew Lewis or Tim Curry blush with pride and ghoulish delight!

As such, put “rape” in quotes, lovelies! Avoid singular or exclusionary interpretations whose centrisms and normativities (e.g., Afro, hetero) remove those quotes to serve profit, as the fascist (regardless of skin color) always does when capital (and everything inside of it) decays! Moderates and pearly castles are merely waiting to darken and devour workers and nature, starting with the monstrous-feminine but eventually eating everything else, too. Capitalism is unstable by design; when it enters a fascist state of decay, it only disintegrates faster than it would otherwise. Moderates know all of this and choose to lie about it; Nazis embrace the idea through fatal heroism and the cult of death. Good cop, bad cop.

We’ll return to these models and pieces repeatedly in this volume, but also all of these monstrous poetic modules as proletarian in function; i.e., gleaned as a historical-material device that we can improve upon not once, but over and over as feeding time appears and approaches—the vampire, but also their spectral crypt a place to take you in, bury you alive, and feed on your old self as something to reinvent out of old, dead things: necrophagy as a transfer of power where you feed on old dying things/funerary rituals releasing their power in psychosexual ways that aid workers! Nutritious corpses well-fed on a Gothic maturity’s Song of Infinity are useful to this reversal through the same mouths feeding on a better poetic wisdom—of the Ancients!

Remember that decay is anisotropic, thus can be for/towards state power or against/away from it (“away from Omelas”). In short, we want to decay (then regenerate) away from fascism and capital defending itself, not towards the same exploitations it whitewashes with non-white agents; e.g., as liberatory circles like Afrocentrism have historically done per tokenization, which expresses in problematic media like Castlevania: Nocturne; i.e., as pointing to older betrayals unfolding again, black Capitalism being black liberation in decay towards profit and division (divide and conquer). Oppressed groups historically sell out, regardless of their exact skin colors; in turn, a complicated, psychomachic resistance occupies the same haunted veneer as a theatrical device: a mask.

Like monsters, masks aren’t monopolized by any one group. For workers, praxial success onstage and off requires revolutionary cryptonymy making these kinds of performative and theoretical distinctions relative to “black” as inclusive beyond African bodies (American or otherwise); i.e., while recognizing the coded roles of cosmetic non-white physical elements (e.g., black skin) and various elements of non-white identity that allow for communicative nuance in terms of oppressed groups speaking out. I certainly don’t use the label “black Nazi” lightly or in bad faith; I’d like to unpack that a bit.

The larger issue of communication remains representation among divided groups that, per various islander/Polynesian communities and Indigenous groups overall, do sometimes choose to identify as black even when not physically or descended from Africa. Indeed, the “black” aspect isn’t tied to one group and its oppression alone, but operates per non-white entities needing to unite against capital together. Otherwise, it’s just Obama syndrome; i.e., “We have a black president” or a Native American representative, or whichever token you want to think of. These will divide, decay and eat themselves, mid-crisis, because tokenization leads to brutal in-fighting as much as with other groups: “prison sex” mentality (more on this in Volume Three).

Moreover, claims of fascism against liberatory movements is a common one by bad-faith parties (re: “black Nazis” versus Nazis and Communists sharing the same theatrical shadow space in American kayfabe); e.g., Ian Kochinski calling Professor Flowers a “black Nazi[3a]” in bad faith, all to discredit her arguments while distracting from the fact that he’s a sex pest and white supremacist pedophile LARPing as a white “progressive” (e.g., Essence of Thought’s “That Time Vaush’s Career Should Have Died” [2023]. We’ll critique Kochinski much more in Volume Three, trust me).

Similar to feminism and biological sex, skin color shouldn’t be the sole focus of oppressed validation because it always essentializes per fascist rhetoric. It’s fine to say “I have black skin and am oppressed” but tools of oppression will turn a certain dark shade into the only signifier of oppression, excluding others per divide and conquer as a kind of “reverse shadism”; i.e., you’re not black enough, which classically identifies by sight. Ultimately rebellion has to allow for nuanced oppressed identity expression while taking a unified, intersectionally solidarized stance against state power in all its forms, tokens included. We identify by action, as comrades, mid-duality and with a fair degree of flexibility in our terms (forced narrow definitions are generally a cloak for oppressors to hide their abuses behind, and to attack from; e.g., a special definition for genocide instead of a generalized one: John the Duncan’s “Does ‘Intent’ Matter in Genocide,” 2024).

For example, I don’t think it’s “bi-erasure” to use “pan” instead of “bi” when talking conversationally about academic topics and/or monsters. Indeed, there’s an incredibly small difference between two or more genders versus regardless of gender when put to practice.

All the same, if someone wants to use whichever feels more accurate or true to them, then that’s valid! It’s effectively the same idea with “black” vs “non-white,” insofar as either should ultimately resist the state as a white force within the settler-colonial project that is America, capital, and Capitalist Realism (and all that entails). Of course, I do my best to remember that certain friends identify as non-white, but also a) am still learning and b) working within theories that recognize settler colonialism as black-and-white, because of its binarized design; i.e., there’s white thinking beings and then there’s everything else as black/non-white extended beings to be harvested (re: the monstrous-feminine). Tokenism tries to forget that by splitting hairs, but in reality they’re merely drawing straws to choose the Judas and scapegoat. All are victims, in the end (no honor among thieves, which is what capitalists are).

Similar problems emerge with Zionism i.e., Jewish people should be the first to speak out against their own oppression, but anti-Zionist Jews also get called “anti-Semitic” by state proponents; e.g., Holocaust survivors being censored and discredited by Zionists of all walks, colors, ages, classes, etc. In the end, the struggle reduces to the state and capital versus labor against capital and capital’s defenders (token or not). The idea is to acknowledge our similarities amid difference while healing from rape as power abuse committed by state forces; i.e., a pedagogy of the oppressed where we’re all raped differently by state power via police agents.

Again, this rape varies per its execution, but the singular aim is to disperse, disempower and discredit proletarian synthesis/catharsis. I wasn’t sexually raped, for instance, but I was emotionally tortured for years. Even writing that makes me feel weak and imposturous. Like, what am I? Just a posh white bitch, I suppose. I know better than that, but these conflicts of identity still emerge when fascists muddy the waters while attacking state enemies, and not all fascists are white people. Just as often, token fascists and moderates use terror to instill fear and doubt among the colonized, including through marginalized in-fighting. They have to or empire as we know it would be impossible; but conversely, we can return the favor while liberating ourselves, and nothing terrifies the elite (and their servants) more than intersectional solidarity serving a black function in a postcolonial model moving towards post-scarcity—on our raft of Medusa!

(artist: Théodore Géricault)

No comparisons are perfect; doubles invite troubling comparisons, often through sex as something—however far-fetched—to buy, hook, line and sinker. Through rebellion, it becomes a fresh start, a subversive means of regeneration into something that replaces capital inside itself. Development is a constant cliffhanger treading towards new boundaries to form, uphold, rewire, oscillating as the Gothic does: on the Aegis. Afrocentrism is not exempt from this, any more than feminism or queer politics are.

To this, black Nazis become a sobering reality seen in neoliberal fictions, which we must critique and challenge at all times. Doltra’s fun to watch, sure, but problematic nonetheless, and this extends to our daily lives outside Castlevania as informed by its dramatic aesthetics. To that, some oppressed groups may identify as black or not, but a black function still expresses a universal non-white class-cultural character against capital as functionally white; e.g., if an individual or section of peoples from the Aboriginal societies of Australia identify socially and politically as black—i.e., as a struggle against settler-colonial powers, even when their skin appears physically white—versus someone Māori potentially identifying as “non-white” politically for much the same reasons.

Regardless of exactly how such groups choose to identify against the state, it will always be some degree of non-white, regardless if it’s cosmetically or linguo-materially “black” or not; e.g., red (skin or politics), brown, Eastern/non-Christian (Orientalism) or anything else. Just as there’s no limit to capital sexually exploiting and dividing/fetishizing everything to serve profit, there’s no monopoly on rebellion as something that often overlaps various factors thereof, mid-liminal expression during ludo-Gothic BDSM to challenge profit. Each speaks individually per their unique identities belonging collectively to a shared non-white struggle; i.e., where identifying as “black” is a linguo-material device that has cosmetic socio-political elements. This isn’t about ranking rape per a singular special word, but expressing it in all its forms as part of a shared undertaking. And per Gothic discourse, class and culture do affect the conversation/poetics in various dualistic ways we don’t want to reduce to a singular marginalized group, ethnic or not.

(artist: NGArt7)

Simply put, duality must be considered and played with because monsters are dualistic regarding society as sick in ways that aren’t a congenital disease, but a socio-ideological one; i.e., white and black having different meanings depending on the context and use through monstrous language; e.g., black people are classically depicted as orcs, zombies, or some such element inside the state of exception, including as Nazis during camp as having performative irony or not. The takeaway remains constant, though: having a shared postcolonial function (which canonically operates as black- vs-white in ways that treat anything non-white as “black”) that doesn’t tokenize for the state; e.g., blaxploitation as something to camp with various amounts (or dearths) of irony—Black Dynamite (2009) hilariously riffing on Shaft (1973) while often leaning problematically into the same bigoted tropes. It’s always a tightrope.

In regards to non-white tokenism (Nazis or otherwise), I’m ultimately talking about normative Afrocentrism and pan-Africanism in decay by virtue of its rising false-revolutionary character as half-real; i.e, not relegated to a given type of media or its target audience (usually an American or British one), but extending to all peoples under capital between fiction and non-fiction across the Gothic mode: the world as something for the elite to carve up on all registers, across all media refrains (re: Tolkien, Cameron). It’s less black skin, white masks as an exclusively theatrical appearance and more a fabrication of exclusive false rebellion using black aesthetics in a literal sense: black skin in black Nazi uniforms decaying “socialism” as obscurantist tokenized DARVO. It sells out for a slice of the oppressed group acting the oppressor against other marginalized elements while internalizing bigotry/whiteness with a cosmetically black cop/”rebel” façade. Eventually the mask drops and the white function takes over to brutalize the oppressed policing themselves.

Dress it up however you want, then, but class and race betrayal are class and race betrayal, ipso facto. Flow of power determines function; we’re talking about Afronormativity per Afrocentrism being used as a tokenized rotting mask pushing power towards the state, but it applies to any in-community policing by tokenized agents that—while they have legitimate grievances—choose to kiss up to state power and punch laterally against their own kind/comrades (or down, depending on their privilege); i.e., I experience as much discrimination by cis-to-GNC AFAB sex workers exuding trans misogyny[3b] as I do white cis-het men; but also from black actors calling me a “white theorist” as a means of discrediting my work as functionally non-white. I won’t condone or defend that, but instead will out and express it as a form of decay that needs to be acknowledged and discussed in response to my work as a group effort, thus group to protect from class and race traitors/useful idiots serving capital:

Revolution is a group effort, one where my friends are people to protect from tokenized agents; i.e., like this individual, who until this moment seemed friendly enough—effusive towards my work, even—but after reading this piece suddenly started to ignore my boundaries while attacking my friends. Call me “honky” if you want, but go after my friends? Unacceptable!

(source: MegaGFilms’ “UNACCEPTABLE,” 2013)

Whatever can be said about my work or my snow-white skin/privilege, my function is non-white. I’m really not the enemy here, capital and the state are, but also their various defenders; whatever the form—from the Native Americans[3c] to pan-Africanism—tokenism (re: Fanon) and decay towards capital (which is what fascism is) remains a historically self-defeating practice. Doltra dies at the end of Castlevania: Nocturne, and until then she is utterly alone, made into the Countless’ dutiful lapdog: if you scratch a token Nazi… a Nazi still bleeds!

(artist: MthS)

Regardless if a given group’s claim towards emancipation is valid, excluding others and muddying the waters for no other reason than to attack radical liberation is folly. Subjugation is segregation and segregation is no defense from the engines of capital against its usual targets; the only way forward is intersectional solidarity towards universal liberation from capital and its fascist defenders (white skin or not; e.g. Richard Dreyfuss interviewed by Bill Maher talking about incest[3d], two white men definitely in decay). The dead become something to eat insofar as we can decay away from capital and regenerate towards a higher form of life hinted at through the imaginary dead as one less decayed in a fascist sense. But our forms of cannibalism and vampirism—however vital, will always be haunted by active fascist elements threatening to lobotomize and consume us (and our friends) for the state. Reclamation occurs in spite of that, using the same theatrical devices:

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

In the spirit of passing into new territories within old ones, then, I’d like my readers to briefly reconsider this flowing of power and knowledge through its coursing within me into these bloody pages. Regard how my thesis sentence from Volume Zero—”Capitalism sexualizes everything”—became something to synthesize through ludo-Gothic BDSM as later developed and explored; i.e., as a concept that I introduced when discussing Metroidvania in the thesis volume, but having invited readers through later volumes to consider well beyond videogame analysis or performance moving into the half-real space of all Gothic poetics: the critique of power wherever it (and state dogma) are found.

Per the sexual dimorphism operating normally within capital, “strength” and “battle” divide along an enforced sexual/gender binary (canonical biological essentialism); i.e., as “strong” in ways that serve profit as something to perform in ways that until quite recently did not exist (within the past several-thousand years): nation-states. Now they’re everywhere, as are their war and rape canonized through the paradox of strong and weak (a fascist binary) but also clothed and nude as a monstrous-feminine fighter of the usual sort; i.e., the Amazonomachy‘s virgin/whore as sexy and tough in ways that serve profit during capital’s ups-and-downs, its decay. She operates as a hauntological gladiator remediating in various sexy spectacles that marry raw strength to feminine displays of vulnerability and eye candy for paying male customers first and foremost (e.g., Rainbow Mika’s infamous butt slap, above—Capcom are shameless in their pandering to the status quo, but also do make a good Amazon).

Whatever the form, sex and force serve profit under capital. Apart from “chasers” of a GNC sort (more on them in Volume Three), though, gamer culture is sexist, unable to make GNC distinctions at all. As such, they tend to see the monstrous-feminine predominantly as female; i.e., its strength something to “buff” or “nerf” vis-à-vis gratuitously sexual displays “for men.” From literal toys to staged, show-style fights, all sell the female demon lover as fash-coded, regardless of skin color while defaulting to white; re: fatal nostalgia weaponizing the white female protector through island-fortress mentality that can tokenize to non-white forms (re: Doltra)! It’s territorial inside a neoliberal market selling protection as “Amazonian.” We’ve discussed the token fascist as black and female, then, so I may as well be holistic and look at white mean girls (we’ve done that tons throughout this series, but I digress).

Let’s stick with Capcom and the Street Fighter franchise. As the ancient heel demonstrates, theatre junkies love a presence of decay in heroic figures (which store cultural values and taboos). In modern kayfabe, this accounts for fascist elements in post-fascist wrestling language as a complicated dogwhistle; i.e., the black knight or dark Amazon, which applies black as “corrupt” in a fascist aesthetic in ways that historically don’t rely on skin color more so than cultural markers of “other” that have ethnic elements (e.g., Jews, Moors) among progressively Eastern or non-British national flavors (e.g., the manufactured, abject prurience of the French or backstabbing “nature” of Italians) but rather express through Gothic poetics as “black” across toy-like media: foreign, taboo or decayed in a non-racialized degree; i.e., regarding white as “default.” There’s still a racial element, it’s simply not stressed as much as the white figure’s “corruption” is, her forced militarization.

(artist: Arman Akopian)

For example, Cammy White—a white poster girl for dated-thus-decayed British Imperialism (the skull insignia echoing Germanized variants of military symbols: the German Reichsadler and death’s head unit, but also lightning bolts/seig “sun/victory” runes) as weaponized by a Japanese heel, M. Bison, playing Melmoth’s double—accounts for a continual fascist presence in Britain under Pax Americana through Japanese neoliberal (videogame) kayfabe; i.e., a sexy female assassin, already suffering female double standards, curiously sports SAS attire (the telltale beret and military greens) attached to an retro ’80s calisthenics leotard/gym bod while working for Shadaloo… as an evil global organization of super villains (the Jewish conspiracy conflated with Nazis, but also historically complicated by Zionism): a white non-American femme fatale haunting and hunting the videogame stage in ways that, along with Doltra in Castlevania, become the Nazi to camp; i.e., to enjoy for its sexiness and “bad girl” flavor but critique for its fascist potential.

(source: Manush Monitor)

In this case, Cammy’s literally the brainwashed puppet, bad British cop and sex symbol/sex slave made into a toy in more ways than one; e.g., the killer sex doll; i.e., “for the boys,” but also TERFs who claim such Amazonian theatrics for themselves alone. In short, tokenism (and its escapist, dogmatic tendencies) might complicate under recent globalization and post-WW2 markets, but all such nation pastiche—and their anthemic music as something to universally capitalize on; e.g., 331 Rock’s “Super Street Fighter II Meets Metal – Cammy” (2024)—serve profit and state hegemony onstage and off.

White or black, we want to remember something vital about tokenization per the Nazi as monstrous-feminine. Capital recruits from marginalized spheres when it’s in decay but once fascist secures formal power will put people who menstruate/give birth into the kitchen; i.e., keep ’em barefoot and pregnant. Such brides will always be put on a pedestal and the whore will always be chased as the bad bitch who is fun to fuck, but must—like the Fox and the Hound—maintain the nation-state kayfabe to keep up appearances. It’s a joy division (refer to Volume Zero for more examples of the euthanasia effect):

(artist: Wolf Skull Jack)

No matter how carefully they walk the tightrope/wear the thong for the boys while kicking ass, then, subjugated Amazons decay and fascism is bad for everyone but the elite; i.e., regardless of how well the intended audience (white cis-het men, tokenizing outwards) seems to be “eating good”: on waifus/war brides denoting a capitalization on, and sickness towards nature-as-monstrous-feminine (which again, has non-white components that can tokenize like Doltra does). Nature-as-monstrous-feminine is always expendable first; re: the euthanasia effect.

(artist, top: Fireband-3D; middle: Edayan; bottom: Fireband-3D)

This ties into the profit motive as not only Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative, but something that reflects in the usual warrior performers who—per all of these things—serve the profit motive by treating nature as monstrous-feminine on any register and in any format: rape and kill Medusa, torturing her secrets out of her to consolidate power around the usual patriarchal nuclei buoyed by capital on top of older imperiums. Canonically the motive always reduces to a pyramid point scaled by standard (white)/tokenized people harvesting nature as monstrous-feminine; e.g., Chun Li as the self-proclaimed “strongest woman in the world”; i.e., both anti-thetical to state forces and thetical to the state as needing to prey on the very things it abjects: through the ghost of the counterfeit as something for the middle class to attack, conquer and harvest in any and all forms, but especially the monomyth during neoliberal refrains (videogames) inside the Imperial Core fighting back and forth, centrist-style: no moral actions, only moral teams; i.e., neoliberal, Anglo-American exceptionalism.

All of this is traditionally dressed up in sexist ways (re: “Borrowed Robes“) that, per capital, serve profit as heteronormative, settler-colonial and Cartesian as a neoliberal spectre we must interrogate, mid-play. Fans of canon, though, generally treat such heroic clashes as escapist, bread-and-circus entertainment; they won’t want to critique their strong-and-sexy heroes as built to service their needs tied forever to profit expanding to compromise said needs. In short, there’s always a monetary value to these exchanges, whose predatory transactional costs abuse labor as always flowing up; i.e., in ways that disseminate capitalistic dogma and its harmful values and historical-material effects back down onto entitled Man Box consumers and their victims (more on this in Volume Three).

(source: Sabitsu’s “ED (Shirtless) vs CHUN-LI (Alternative) – Street Fighter 6,” 2024)

Quick refresh: Along with all the double standards, “Amazon” theatrically equals “monster love” as something that canonically synonymizes sex and rape, but also struggle and submission: courtly love, the dragon and the knight (the Medusa and the Hippolyta) wherein monstrous-feminine is always sex object and alien fetish. Metroidvania apply this to the operatic castle space as one to move through, generally set to music: castle-narrative; fighting games focus on the combat area and chaotic dance of one-on-one combat; etc. Whatever the form, actual non-harmful love’s sex and emancipation exist in the same danger space on the same surfaces and in between thresholds.

This is where ludo-Gothic BDSM as a means of subversive monstrous-feminine argument (sex and force) begins to really translate not just to Metroidvania like Castlevania, but to any kind of Gothic poetics at war on and offstage as musical, dance-like, safe; e.g., Street Fighter, above (Ed as the Nazi avatar in decay and Chun Li as the female token good cop); i.e., only becoming a revolutionary means of critical thought when the egregore—any egregore—offers up an abstract, accessible, fun (combat sports) critical lens/ontological statement that approaches and combats something tied to various historical-material symptoms of profit: the unironic monomyth’s Shadow of Pygmalion, Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern and narrative of the crypt.

In short, it’s the dialectic of the alien made in our favor by camping anything and everything in ways that kick ass while sporting a big ass. We put “predation” in quotes, but acknowledge the pain and harm of a system chasing said ass as something to harvest for profit-as-usual: our Aegis a shield that bounces damage back at our would-be-destroyers (while helping us relieve stress/get our jollies during our “death/rape,” no less)! Hypnotic illusions don’t tear people apart, but Pavlovian conditioning can when someone thinks they’re Akuma: “Your body assumed it’s proper form when my fists tore it apart!” To be honest, I think people like that are compensating for their lack of humanity (and impotency) in the bedroom! Unironic fighters for the state excel as making war, not love!

(artist: Auxtasy)

Capitalism sexualizes everything and American militarism loves sexy military recruiters; i.e., poster girls. But sex and pain (especially monstrous examples) are excellent teachers for or against the state. To that, proponents of either will catch more flies with honey than shit, the former which allows for an open, honest enjoyment of an Amazonian statuesque alongside non-standard beauty norms. They’re not mutually exclusive, but liberation and profit are.

Rule of thumb, then: whatever a monster’s shape (size difference) or modular class (undead, demonic, animalistic), if it challenges the profit motive, it’s probably sex-positive; i.e., doesn’t instruct through unironic sexual coercion and rape, but through good BDSM is often haunted by patriarchal state abuse (re: Man Box, which we’ll pointedly interrogate in Volume Three); e.g., the disordered thinking of narcissistic women abusing their own children and servants: trauma begets trauma. We can subvert that, using our scars as a strength it was never intended for by state forces preying on us. The idea is to fight fire with fire, recruiting through sex as a flamethrower-style can opener for the closed-up brain. The rebellious power of monsters is enormous, off the charts. But it must be harnessed and used as such, not recuperated by state forces only to decay again; i.e., sloppy seconds.

In either case, instructors are often massive, dark and threatening but tied to pleasure and non-harmful pain, etc, as non-white in a Cartesian sense: the pedagogy of rebellion, of the furious dead, demons, nature, et al, externalizing matters of vice and virtue as things to corporally liberate from state forces, from profit; i.e., whenever state decay lets us work our magic in response to their bullshit as fully exposed for all to see. All booties—regardless of sex, size, gender, race or religion, etc—shall be free.

(artist: Ddaniii45)

In the interim, strength as a means of sexuality and gender expression-as-performance and gender identity are staged in a half-real sense: everywhere we are, among each other and how we relate and interact as friends and comrades waging class and culture war through our art, our bodies, our funding of such things; e.g., my friend Jackie paying me to draw them as “a badass bitch,” and for me doing my best to represent them while adhering to my project’s core values to achieve creative success, mid-praxis: sex-positivity, descriptive sexuality, informed consumption, and cultural appreciation, etc, illustrating mutual consent as a labor exchange and psychosexual dialog invigilated with pride:

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

The Gothic is crude as often as not, not-so-subtle and yet prone to subtlety through dualistic exchanges playing with doubles. Praxis remediates through pastiche like a bad echo, thus oscillates across the surface of such things. This includes fugitive, hunted bodies of all kinds threatened by alienation and predation, prejudice and persecution both things to enact and elude through the usual opposing cryptonymies.

If you’ve read my books thus far, you’ll know that Castlevania or not, there’s a nigh-endless number of waifu and wheyfu in the world, on the market—of Amazons and mommy doms, Medusa and succubae, etc, to “battle” with in various schools (of Terror and Horror) and crossovers. Regardless of their fame, the reliable casualty of such hurly-burly in service to workers is so many dead darlings: so many monsters to humanize as proletarian while preserving the sexy aesthetic of monstrous battle clapping those “dummy thicc” ass cheeks; i.e., as stewards of nature to shield from capital’s ravenous decaying maw/fascist feeding mechanisms (which the Undead Module will expensively unpack). Per Edward Said’s pleasures of exile, home must become foreign to you, must become hostile/alien as a means of sex-positive transformation!

Beauty standards are always arbitrary but arbitrated under different conditions for different reasons. Profit standardizes beauty as “rebellious” to serve profit through the Amazon as cop-like, thus prone to decay. As such, sex workers are born under duress, reclaiming their bodies, labor and performances from exploitative models (the monomyth) while being exploited. This isn’t “optional,” but required insofar as subversion is done unto canon, capital as foisting itself onto labor as something to alienate, fetishize, pimping it out to receive its regular beatings from good cops attacking bad cops to defend capital as both decaying and regenerating over time, but also seeking revenge; i.e., when capital decays and blames the monstrous-feminine as usual: the Destroyer as weak and strong in ways that serve profit—the dark mistress, the whore, the boss/dragon lady’s forbidden fruit, cut up and served on a plate.

(artist: Brendan Corris)

Mind you, this isn’t just marginalized groups. White women tokenize, too (albeit from a liminal staging point), praying on others through their ability to gatekeep fantasies of exploitation to suit themselves; and white men are the standard oppressor decaying from white knight to black, the loyalty of the American middle class playing their own form of slavery unto the elite, being their white Indian as undercover cop: the colonial servant, formerly indentured. Anything that can decay assimilates in this fashion unless other options exist as made available to potential class traitors by rebellious, sex-positive workers.

These tricks occur in the same spaces, stages, cryptonymies, mimesis. Per the undead, the Gothic announces the arrival (and fear) of decay as a historical-material current within capital-in-decay that can be challenged; i.e., through what we feed on/with using what we got, our Aegis as anisotropic in terms of processing trauma, mid-poiesis, challenging moderacy and fascism: either keeping the peace through different rates of decay and abuse, instability and power. Decay needn’t exclusively promote genocide, but may likewise grant an offering of untried change into something new emerging from an old dead thing: a chance to seed the Earth with fresh life fertilized by a dark “rotting” peach. The spirit of revenge is there, only the best kind laid bare—not survival, but success!

(artist: Mei Minato)

To this, ludo-Gothic BDSM yields a dualistic, anisotropic function that reverses the process of abjection by dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., doing so through the Four Gs, Six Rs, Gothic mode of expression, Gothic-Communist Hermeneutic Quadfecta and iconoclastic doubles of oppositional praxis. Dialectical-material scrutiny is vital, then, to synthesizing good praxis and systemic catharsis; praxial synthesis and catharsis occur on all registers/poetics when the dialectic of the alien (something I coined when revisited Volume Two and getting it ready for publication) is approached with the specific and conscious intent of challenging profit and all the decaying operations involved in its continuation: fascism/centrism in games, art, novels, media, onstage and off—everywhere.

As such, I would extend my PhD’s thesis-volume arguments to Volume One’s synthesizing of praxis in simplified forms that cultivate good social-sexual habits; i.e., raising the emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness needed to apply ludo-Gothic BDSM to monsters’ liberatory devices only when holistically examined over time, and with other people offering oppressed perspectives contributing to a continual pedagogy of the oppressed: through the dialectic of the alien reversing the usual canonical function of monsters, hence the flow of power towards workers to hug and humanize Medusa as perpetually harvested by the state during neoliberal Cartesian dogma.

Just as their old theories updated under new conditions, my analysis took ideas that emerged after my PhD to say things that I would expound upon after crystalizing Volume One. In short, my theories—already unique and robust—began to mature and comment on themselves in practice; i.e., as something to express in continuum leading me to say things that I couldn’t say without having said something previous, and something before that. Except, Gothic Communism is communal, reverse abjection something that requires a holistic perspective assembled amongst an informed and active polity united against the state.

This required me to introduce these concepts to future people who influenced my work as forever-in-progress (from Volume Two, part one):

Monsters, then, become something to express the human condition with insofar as all of these things are in flux. I wanted to express all of this through my personal experiences having built gradually upon my entire body of work—my initial radicalization and further pushing towards the Left by virtue of myself: a) as a closeted trans woman who fell in love with a non-binary person, a BDSM predator and narcissist, and a borderline Marxist-Leninist; and b) a steady progression towards my current position as an an-Com ludo-Gothicist by virtue of my work being shaped further by falling in love again, this time with a Indigenous GNC an- Com. Our views are shaped by those we meet and fall in love with in sequence and upon reflection, who we see as human by virtue of common ground and interests amid differences—a pedagogy of the oppressed relaid in Gothic poetics as recursive, concentric, anisotropic, and ergodic (endlessly tiered and self-contained, determined by flow and non-trivial effort); it’s about tearing down harmful boundaries and installing healthy ones through different points of view like teaching, medicine and the medieval, but also selective absorption, a confusion of the senses and magical assembly to add to our Song of Infinity (all specialized poetic devices the medieval prep section will explore further). In our hands, ludo-Gothic BDSM is a potent means of establishing and negotiating boundaries—to perform and play with power (and trauma) where it exists, in the shadow zone.

Friends are made through communicating boundaries and being open with those we connect with while living in situations that require us to use code to portray our human condition but also oppression and rebellion. In short, we identify as monsters who love and see each other as human in spite of those who, one way or another, side with the colonizer group; e.g., overt statements like “Stay in your lane!” or shows of solidarity with the oppressor class when the oppressed class is speaking out against systemic issues.

This is often difficult to express and yields ease of access through abstraction—metaphors. If someone says “black lives matter” and someone says “white lives matter” in response, you have an argument that can be reconfigured into a poetic form; e.g., cats; i.e., “black cats matter” vs “white cats matter” when the underlying dialectical-material reality is black is functionally alien/oppressed (them) within capital and white is functionally human/privileged (us) by virtue of being the colonizer position during the dialectic of the alien as something to invoke through the Gothic mode. Issues of class intersect with culture, which require us seeing these things in ways that simplify it without reducing it to one or the other but both engaging back and forth. It becomes something of a dance, whose normal perception of “cat” desperately needs to be confused (echoing Monty Python’s absurdist 1969 skit, “Confuse-A-Cat,” as able to take itself seriously enough, in the proper hands, to reverse the usual flow of power as directed away from the state for once).

In terms of cats or lives or anything else, these all constitute arguments through different devices that try to raise awareness about not just the raw mechanics of oppression, but cognitive dissonance as a matter of experience. They reduce to oppressed vs oppressor regardless if you use the underlying signified or its myriad signifiers, of which cats are but one example. Us versus them. Beware those who fight against liberation by telling you to stay in your lane directly or ipso facto, by virtue of action speaking for them as dogmatic. Negotiation, then, is as much reminding people where power lies and how to use it mid-argument (source).

The agglutinate and cumulative nature of such holistic expression has led me to expand on Volume Two, writing the Poetry module as something whose ideas about ludo-Gothic BDSM and ergodic motion (castle-narrative) I would master as an expression of myself relaid as much through art and friendship as scholarship:

I am visited by ghosts of my rapturous design, the empress of my fate, the queen of a universe shared with seraphs the likes of which I can hardly describe; “no coward soul is mine” (ibid.).

I didn’t know exactly what to do with it—not at first, but eventually I started to dial it in, figuring out what mastery can be used for regarding proletarian concerns:

Under Capitalism, childhood and innocence are lost at birth, replaced with harmful copycats. But fret not! Duality distinguishes “corruption” as defined through context, and a baddie is different than a bad cop; even if both are wearing the same witch costume, their function is determined by where their rhetoric/antics on and offstage send power a-flowing: towards workers or the state (which is why iconoclasts can camp Nazis and still be rebels in disguise, and why TERFs are still Nazis despite appearing as witches). The same goes for their lairs, their castles as slapped together and used to express largely systemic issues; i.e., on the classic site of queer angst (the stage) given voice among a pedagogy of the oppressed that can be used by all marginalized groups. I call it “Metroidvania,” but that is just one name among many for the Gothic castle as something to reclaim with ludo-Gothic BDSM—with revolutionary cryptonymy and castle-narrative (ergodic motion) during the liminal hauntology of war as something to survive. Cops are the enemy in that instance, as are their hungry fortresses; our bodies become ours reclaimed from them within these prisons’ danger discos. Or as Grendel’s mother basically said: “I’m not trapped in here with you, you’re trapped in here with me!”

(artist: Ariel Zucker-Brull)

The same goes for me and anyone who thinks they know more than me about Metroidvania! I am peerless in that respect, both a) the master of the field in a field where no experts exist (as of coining my work, anyways—British academia was allergic to portmanteaus and cross-media disciplines), and b) a holistic instructor who takes this knowledge and applies it through ludo-Gothic BDSM (my brainchild, my academic concept) to synthesize good Communist praxis outside academia, for the workers of the world to do in kind; i.e., in ergodic motion (my master’s thesis) as a pedagogic metaphor that both describes and aids the teaching process: to all workers (nature and the environment) sexualized, fetishized and alienated by capital (my PhD argument) and the profit motive’s harmful canon, its fatal nostalgia, its pocket experts hired in expert testimony for the state/the prosecution.

So forget Luke Skywalker boldly declaring to the Emperor, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me!” Bitch, please—I’m the Medusa (and “Jedi” are Sith waiting to happen) and I’ve worked too hard for too long and survived too much to just lay down and take any more of it! The Earth is my home; Hell is my home as something I design, and I will fight to defend it and my friends from the usual fear and dogma, cops and sell-out academics, et al. […] Protests are always violent because the state always treats liberation with violence. To that, we must become a pandemic to the elite—united on every continent, a collective thorn in the side of empire-in-disguise. As such, I provide not just my book or this chapter, but my song as unbroken and unbowed, raising my fist with my friends all around the world (sung despite my fear mechanisms telling me not to, for fear of angering Jadis’ shadow haunting me)! (ibid.).

(model and artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In short, “mastery” as I developed it became something to imbricate/enmesh with my living scholarship as one of reassembly and rememory time and time again: “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns” (from Volume Zero) segued into “The shape doesn’t matter provided the function (and flow of power) is consistent” (from this volume); i.e., as synthesized amongst my friends, lovers, muses, fellow sex workers and I challenging the profit motive together as one, across many life times: our Song of Infinity having—like the zombie, the vampire, the demon—many shapes to assume and power to play with! The state will always try to monopolize our pedagogy to serve their aims; i.e., to recuperate what we use to release stress and confront trauma in palliative-Numinous forms:

(model and artist: Mikki Storm and Persephone van der Waard)

“And in strange aeons, even death may die.” My friends and I continuously place “death” in quotes, our collective ludo-Gothic BDSM a parallel, slutty “could-be” history challenging bigotry as a Cartesian, heteronormative, settler-colonial effect; i.e., one we challenge through Athena’s Aegis as reclaimed by Medusa as us, our sexy Amazonian witchcraft (and all its undead, demons and animal forms) camping the canon in ways the state thoroughly abhors: making the straightforward harvesting of us by the state and its proponent agents/sell-outs something to tie into knots. It’s a part of the experience and not one to simply slice through as Alexander the Great did, but find paradoxical liberation in knots (Amazonian or otherwise):

(artist: Evul)

Through a thoroughly chaotic, non-linear mise-en-abyme, Gothic Communism camps canon, making empathy where apathy has existed for so long. This happens by using our dark forces, our Satanic wizardry to self-define away from capital as something to camp inside of itself. To that, we camp the twin trees, fashioning a Hell on Earth to suit our designs (from “Concerning Monsters”):

This historical-material arrangement is profoundly ubiquitous, requiring workers to reclaim monsters (undead, demons and totems) away from the usual state monopolies of violence, terror and hellish morphological expression; i.e., during our own pedagogy of the oppressed—our anger and gossip, monsters and camp—having evolved into itself: a dialectical-material process whose oscillating interrogations (and myriad interpretations) of trauma took centuries while monsters were already evolving into state implements and canonical, singular interpretations thereof. Iconoclastic monsters, then, become flexible and productive critical lenses that raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness as something to “turn into”; or, as Volume One argues:

Contrary to Pygmalions and canonical weird-nerd culture, monsters aren’t just commodities; they’re symbolic embodiments of speculative thinking tied to larger issues. You don’t simply buy and consume them (commodifying struggle) but use them as a means, if not to put yourself directly in the shoes of those being oppressed, then to think about things differently than you might normally. It’s an opportunity to empathize with the oppressed and contribute to their pedagogy in ways that, to be frank, make you less stupid, nasty and cruel (source).

Monsters are often seen as “not real” or “impossible,” relegated to the lands of make-believe and pure fantasy. Except this isn’t true. In Gothic Communism, they constitute a powerful, diverse, and modular means of interrogating the world around us as full of dangerous Cartesian illusions meant to control workers by locking Capitalism (and its genocidal ordering of nature and human language) firmly in place. Good monsters become impossible, as do the possible futures they arguably represent. Instead of saying “in a perfect world,” then, we should say “a possible world”; i.e., in a better possible world, nudity (and other modes of GNC sexual and gender expression) can be exposed and enjoyed post-scarcity and not be seen and treated as inhumanely monstrous (a threat; e.g., bare bodies being a threat to the pimp’s profit margins). Rather, the monstrous language remains as a voice for the oppressed to flourish with;

All this being said, this is an older part of the book, and one for the sake of time (and my sanity) I won’t be updating quite as extensively. Some changes are already in place vis-à-vis Volume Two, part one—and I will be expanding on things and signposting to make sure what I have already feels more attached to my published material, including talking about ludo-Gothic BDSM in relation to these older histories—but there will no brand-new monster essays from scratch if I can help it (no promises)! As such, I won’t be going over this area of the book with quite as fine-tooth a comb, but will add exhibits, epigrams, definitions, visual aids and the like. The same, if not more so, goes for Volume Three (which has seen some changes since I wrote the majority of it back in early 2023) because I want to preserve its grain-of-sand quality that the rest of this book series has built around like a pearl. To that, you already have complex theory and simple theory to work with (re: Volume Zero and One), as well as my aforementioned synthesis of those combined aspects with Gothic poetics (re: Volume Two, part one) to achieve new useful conclusions building on my foundation. And yet, just as I argued with the ghosts of others to raise my cathedral, you will have to learn to debate with spirits yourself to raise your own, mid-segue.

As such, for Volumes Two, part two and all of Volume Three, you will be debating with my spectres; i.e., the oldest sections of my castle, but some of the most raw and earnest regarding sex-positivity as a liberatory Gothic poetic device whose essence remains intact, regardless if the language had yet to fully form. Per my usual backwards approach, I’ve actually done this before (from Volume One):

If you’ve read the symposium from Volume Zero (and the end of the manifesto), you’ll have an idea of what to expect, moving forward; I didn’t want to change things too much despite having written this second symposium well before my thesis. Like the thesis volume’s symposium, it represents a point when I was still figuring things out, and I think it serves as a good thought experiment insofar as it will represent a middle stage in your own thinking that will match up with [the Monster Modules. Their older partially-formed historical qualities] might speak to you better as you interpret and grapple with these ideas yourselves. And if you want increasingly more complete forms of theory that spell things out as much as possible, there is always the manifesto and thesis (ibid.).

Keep all of this in mind as we proceed into the Undead Module. We will meet again, our darkness visible a choking force that drives you, mid-penetration, towards post-scarcity’s unknown pleasures! Medusa’s fat undead pussy “feeding” as a war-like, indiscreetly poetic-yet-still-rebellious psychosexuality (re: our specialized Gothic poetic devices-made-flesh)!

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

Onto the Undead Module and “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis“!


Footnotes

[1] A kind of “reverse shadism,” omitting and ultimately policing these oppressed groups for not having dark enough skin despite both groups experiencing oppression by the colonizer.

[2] For a good illustration of this per the Male Gaze/profit motive in games, refer to “Borrowed Robes: The Role of “Chosen” Clothing — Part 1: Female Videogame Characters” (2020): “This two-part series examines the historical lack of choice regarding character appearance in videogames—namely clothes.”

[2a] Fascists are historically given free reign, in this respect; i.e., double standards for the mad dog; e.g., the Zionist project a Nazi-grade Jewish state endorsed and enabled by the US like all fascists are. As such, the same outrageous double standards apply to any fash token that can theoretically exist, funneled through the same geopolitical considerations, copaganda and Military Industrial Complex. Onstage and off, canonical kayfabe weaponizes Nazis against Communism for capital.

In other words, while Communism must historically endure flag flags that lead to occupation and genocide—entire countries being invaded and overthrown in defense of capitalist hegemony—any fash can bite the hand that feeds provided it ultimately is brought to heel; e.g., the Gulf of Tokin incident that led to the US invasion of Vietnam versus the 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty (GDF’s “How Israel Cucked the United States,” 2024) that America’s political elite/machinery stayed quiet about in service to the usual atrocities serving vertical power as enslaving so-called “great men” to itself—”slave to the power of death,” as Iron Maiden would describe it, “Powerslave” (1984) displacing as the British love to do, unto an imaginary site of colonial abuse: “Ancient Egypt” (“I’m a god, why can’t I live on?”).

Regarding the Liberty’s abuse at the hands of the Israeli state, the only people in power who griped out loud were those who felt fascism’s sting against themselves projected onto an image of American domination, not America’s usual victims; i.e., “boundaries for me, not for thee”; e.g., Thomas G. Abernathy (then-U.S. Representative, on the floor of the House of Representatives, 29 June 1967) near-singular critique at the time of the incident (and still failing rather spectacularly to say the quiet part out loud; i.e., merely acting the hawk feeling bruised for American soldiers):

The Liberty ship incident – and indeed it was more than an incident – has been treated entirely too lightly by this Government. To say the lease, too little has been said about it. This useless, unnecessary and inexcusable attack took the lives of 34 American boys, wounded 175 others, and left many others in a state of horrified shock, to say nothing of what it did to a flag-flying vessel of the U.S. Navy. How could this be treated so lightly in this the greatest Capitol in all the world?

I have heard Members of this House, and many, many others, say that if this had been done by others, the leaders of our Government would have moved in with sternness and appropriate action demands or even retaliatory action. These men at all times are entitled to the strong backing of every citizen of this land or every race and every creed. They are entitled to and should have the strong arm, as well as the strong voice of their Government and their people behind them. And who has spoken out in their behalf from this land since some of their number were so suddenly shot down and others so severely wounded on the Liberty ship?

What complaint have we registered? What has Washington said? To tell you the truth, this great Capitol as well as this great Government – if it can still be called great – was and is as quiet as a tomb regarding this event?” (source: Honorary Liberty Veterans’ ” Quotes by Contemporary Experts on the USS Liberty”).

As such, state power defends state power in all forms, including undead aspects conditioned to give state force to state targets. To that, fascists exist because they are useful to capital, thus can get away with murder when Communists are killed merely for existing. Fascists become bold and insufferable, but in service to the American state/capitalist war machine as the ultimate destroyer they begrudgingly answer to.

The pearly castles are the worst, then; i.e., white moderacy and American exceptionalism acting affronted when they get hurt, not the state’s usual victims: nature-as-monstrous-feminine. Yet they enable the fash anyways because the white knight needs the black to function; they are central to the same illusion, which immediately and instantly falls apart unless they cooperate towards profit by attacking labor as undead.

It’s both “You leave Jack Burton alone!” from Big Trouble in Little China and “He who controls the spice controls the universe!” from Dune (the 1984 adaptation). Like House Atreides from the latter franchise, American proponents think they’re the light—the heliocentric, all-important center of the universe—and everything else is darkness as something to fear and kill, but also lament the coming of: anti-Semitism (“rats,” witches, water vampirism) and Orientalism (the Fremen, messiah propaganda, jinn), of which the Harkonnen are the purveyors of the same fash rhetoric whitewashing the Atreides’ doom as the unthinkable collapse of America and of Capitalism. Except Capitalist Realism loves to threaten destruction to maintain the peace: through revenge (re: the Star Wars problem predating Lucas or Herbert with The Birth of a Nation and older Orientalist narratives).

To that, Frank Herbert was another Pygmalion with white people disease. Americans love self-absorbed importance, whatever form they take under whatever markets (e.g., laissez-faire, Bretton Woods, neoliberalism) and displacements of dogma, of sectarianism, of faith: white savior, white Indian, white Arab, white Amazon, white knight, white cop, white master. This includes black knights, cops, and castles having decayed to a fascist undead form: the paradox of black-as-white, versus black as resisting state force and hegemony (thus profit).

Anything that challenges this centrist, good-vs-evil cycle is alien, insofar as the West is conditioned through its people/tokens to think they are the hero, the savior, the one who can never be wrong in any way. As such, they are most prone to decay. They are parasites, impostors, exempt from the very trifectas and monopolies they enforce for the state; i.e., more cognitive dissonance/estrangement and disordered thinking resulting in more syndromes, delusions, blindness, madness. They project this onto the Harkonnen Gigeresque, the infantile Freudian recuperating the xenomorphic Nazi-Communist BDSM to punch, mid-duel, while playing the victim, the Indigenous and rightful heir.

The white and black princes are two sides of the same imperial coin–all controlled to serve the state as self-serving and invested, but dependent on things they cannot fully control: bread and circus, monsters, shows during war-as-a-business; e.g., feminism in decay through the Bene Gesserit as a cult of warrior-nun witches solving material disputes for princes, kings, dukes, houses, emperors; i.e., yet-another-coven of monstrous-feminine to blame for the usual harvesting of nature, with Paul eventually drinking the blue Kool-Aid to seek petty revenge against the entire universe while simultaneously “being realistic”: Jewish conspiracy grooming the warlock, the One (the monomythic protagonist, minus The Matrix‘s irony and feeling sorry for the fall of the Great House Atreides) as a patriarchal tool when all’s said and done, a non-Miltonian Satanic, a fanatic colonizing the desert of the real: “I am Paul Maud’dib Atreides, Duke of Arrakis!”

This is fascism, pointedly weaponizing a myth of a white superhuman to reclaim the colony! They weaponize nature to do so, no matter the cost (“desert power” a stand-in for American foreign policy and domination)–all to put a new emperor on the throne. It’s a chronotope, the planetary desert realm the same site of hereditary rites and dynastic primacy through propaganda battles proving strength, thus correctness: “Your father was a weak man!” Re: Hard times make strong soldiers. It’s fascist dogma, might-makes-right, transferring power through the incestuous refrain, the plot to Henry IV (1600): the duel for the girl, the dream of white sovereignty with a legion of obedient harem dogs. “Lead them to Paradise!” It’s white-savior Islamophobia poisoning the well, while insisting there are no sides. Wrong. There are workers vs the state (and its cops)!

As such, our princely mirror syndrome announces the white side seeing itself as a fascist counterpart on the same glass-like persona: “We’re Harkonnens!” This and the prophecy’s white hubris deifying said savior—they’re all part of the same hawkish, genocidal warpath defending Capitalism; i.e., from counterterror and fear with state terror and fear acting the rebel, the guerrilla weaponizing natives (the myth of the invincible barbarian) and nuclear weapons against Communism through fascism as the mad dog to eventually put down. It’s business-as-usual, adapting to survive amid decay as something to deny and stall: “May the wings of Liberty never lose a feather!”

[3a] There are different accounts of the debate; e.g., Professor Flower’s own: “On My Debate with Vaush” (2022), whereupon Flowers was heavily criticized by members of her own community for speaking on these topics at all (which has its own sexist/tokenized considerations).

[3b] From Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2022.”

[3c] Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014):

More specifically, I argue that the expression of Indigenous anticolonial nationalism that emerged during this period forced colonial power to modify itself from a structure that was once primarily reinforced by policies, techniques, and ideologies explicitly oriented around the genocidal exclusion/assimilation double, to one that is now reproduced through a seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and institutional practices that emphasize our recognition and accommodation. Regardless of this modification, however, the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state has remained colonial to its foundation.

Karl Marx, Settler-Colonialism, and Indigenous Dispossession in Post–White Paper Canada

What do I mean by a colonial—or more precisely, settler-colonial relationship? A settler-colonial relationship is one characterized by a particular form of domination; that is, it is a relationship where power—in this case, interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power—has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority. In this respect, Canada is no different from most other settler-colonial powers: in the Canadian context, colonial domination continues to be structurally committed to maintain—through force, fraud, and more recently, so-called “negotiations”— ongoing state access to the land and resources that contradictorily provide the material and spiritual sustenance of Indigenous societies on the one hand, and the foundation of colonial state-formation, settlement, and capitalist development on the other. As Patrick Wolfe states, “Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive [of settler-colonialism] is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” (source).

In other words, settler-colonialism has had to routinely and progressively adapt against rebellious voices to assimilate them; i.e., adopt new assimilation policies that allow for an expanded breadth of tokenization, thus decay as something to continue facilitating oppression through oppressed groups that likewise decay accordingly.

[3d] Jacob Stolworthy writes,

“Making matters even more strange was the fact that Maher seemed unperturbed by this, and that it took place while the pair were discussing incest.

Maher asked Dreyfuss who he thought about when he “masturbated” growing up, and the actor replied: “I never thought about my mother – and I never thought that if I had thought of my mother I would be thinking incestuous.”

When Maher asked him if he thought it would have been “incestuous” to think about his sister, the actor said: “In the early years, I thought about very little else.”

He later asked Maher: “Did you have a sister?” adding: “Did you ever give her what we called a movie actor kiss?” Maher replied: “No! Oh God, please – I love my sister, but…”

Dreyfuss then asked: “Did she ever ask you?” to which Maher said he didn’t get on with his sister when he was younger (source: “Bill Maher Viewers Left Baffled after Chaotic Richard Dreyfuss Interview, 2023).

[3] The song uses the same Death-knocks rhythm that Fidel’s Terminator did, either example being a harmful demon lover asking to be let in! I.e., the one who knocks, the danger!

Book Sample: “Into the Toy Chest, part two”

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Update, 8/7/2024: Originally this piece was written for “Searching for Secrets.” On 6/14/2024, I moved the written material to the PDF manuscript of the Poetry Module (v1.2 onwards); today, I updated each promo page’s table of contents to reflect said change, too, meaning these transplanted posts are featured in the “Brace for Impact” table of contents.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Into the Toy Chest, part two: My Experiences

Eventually, she picks up a drifter and takes him to bed. It is good, “so good that sometimes she would shake her head-no, no-because it was so good she might not be able to stand it, she would burst.” When sex is finished, she demands that he leave. Calm at first, she issues her demands with increasing hysteria. The apartment is her domain, her “castle,” the most coherent image of “self” that she has preserved. She must preside over this-at least this inner space. But the drifter will not withdraw. And when Theresa berates him, he beats her to death. The “reality” of the demon lover’s literal violence triumphs, after all.

Two hundred years ago Ann Radcliffe introduced Gothic conventions into the mainstream of English fiction. For the first time the process of feminine sexual initiation found respectable, secular expression. Yet the terms of this expression were ultimately limiting. It is important to recognize and acknowledge the heritage of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic tradition; it is even more important now to move on and invent other, less mutilating conventions for the rendering of feminine sexual desire  (source).

—Cynthia Wolff, “The Radcliffean Gothic Model” (1979)

Picking up from where “Into the Toy Chest, part one” left off…

Part one covered the nuts and bolts of Gothic history as toy-like through its parasocial exchanges; part two shall observe them when reflecting on my interpersonal exchanges: my exes, but also my working relationships with friends (with benefits) and life partners.

To that, sex should be fun, should give both sides a performative means of finding catharsis while camping “rape” as canonically synonymous with sex under capital:

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

We all want some form of intimacy while surviving capital as something we can transform through ourselves and what we leave behind; ludo-Gothic BDSM goes well beyond Radcliffe or Wolff and considers the sex-positive potential of rape fantasies involving people who have survived trauma differently and yet—as I describe it in Volume One—have to heal from rape as a structure they relate to differently per Gothic texts. As I wrote (of Cuwu and I) in “Healing from Rape”:

As its most basic level, rape is a violation of basic human, animal and environmental rights enacted through Cartesian power abuse; this postscript concerns the complicated process that healing from rape entails—i.e., its corrupting presence through codified trauma, wherein the surviving of police abuse becomes something to relate to others through Gothic stories that constitute radical empathy as a thing forever out-of-joint: the attempt to empathize with alien experiences to gain new perspective. Such empathy needn’t concern both parties equally and its Gothic dialogs concern intense, poetic liminalities still bearing an intense potential for disguise that is haunted by the shadow of police forces. Even so, the postscript aims to showcase such a dialog and its phenomenological complexities; i.e., one held between two or more people relating through their interpretation of various texts they are either intimately familiar with or at the very least recognize the tell-tale arrangements of power and performance through traumatic markers: heroes and monsters as a liminal proposition to find catharsis inside the oscillation of (source).

Again, that quote was written concerning Cuwu and I through a kind of DBT I eventually called ludo-Gothic BDSM. It’s the backbone of my book as it presently exists, making Cuwu one of its most important-if-silent-contributors.

Except intersectional solidarity means learning from our past as a present document forever being rewritten through new rape fantasies; i.e., in interpersonal exchanges that extend the privilege as a basic human right all peoples may exercise in defiance to the state and its victim-turned-cop sell-outs policing the larger Gothic mode’s demon BDSM. We’re putting “rape” in quotes by defying canonical Gothic iterations of the rape fantasy that have been academically recognized as problematic since the xenomorph chowed down on Veronica Cartwright. It’s a rape fantasy—one that we could hear quite clearly despite the movie’s immortal tagline: “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream!”

Even now, I can hear Lambert’s blood-curdling death scream and think of nothing else; I get goosebumps, frisson, aka the “skin orgasm.” I think of my own loss of power—of being raped (through a denial of power) mid-Gothic poetics, by Jadis, by my father and stepfather before them—and recognize the classic cathartic role of the operatic rape castle. It isn’t to foster rape and division, but to hug Medusa by reenacting our own deaths in rapturous, martyr-like outbursts of passion. The trick is to do so in ways that unite workers through calculated risk; i.e., against capital and its TERF-grade sell-outs weaponizing the theatre of rape against workers for the elite!

Just as Scott was tormenting poor Cartwright to haunt us with, you will do well to remember that Janice Raymond—a second wave feminist—decayed the proceedings in a fascist direction; i.e., by releasing The Transsexual Empire (1979) as a TERF screed, projecting all the usual white female bigotries onto an imaginary other tied to settler colonialism going on much as it always has: abjecting the ghost of the counterfeit to keep white women/tokenized groups gatekeeping and girl bossing an infinitely diverse and rebel-ready workforce.

We’ll get to that later in the volume. For now, just remember that ludo-Gothic BDSM is a sex-positive device; i.e., fostering empathy through us playing together inside the frame as caged, but also fenced between the past-future of what has happened and what will happen that can be different while preserving the aesthetic: as a usual means of identifying and expressing trauma. Again, if you want to critique power then you must go where it is, hence face potential impostors among you and yourselves feeling imposturous:

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a2a2a: Artist: Harmony Corrupted. Harmony is a good friend of mine—one I have played with in ways that teach both of us as we currently consider unequal power exchange as a theatrical means of worker liberation; i.e., by shaping how we think about rape by expressing it as calculated risk linked to real-world abuse. This butts up against the Destroyer persona through the virgin/whore dynamic, but also the Amazon/dark mommy dom as something that lends itself well to a non-destructive, DBT-style “death” theatre/rape fantasy. Devised while cognizant of state abuse and manipulation, it was made between myself and people like Harmony as someone I count myself very lucky to be friends with: a mommy dom who won’t triangulate or dump her baggage onto you, but for whom the two of you can work out your kinks [so to speak] together! Love ya, babe!)

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

The basic concept is hardly new—has been around for centuries: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? […] And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Shylock’s soliloquy is vital in narratives of feeling alien as a raped existence, insofar as those who have been abused seek out calculated risk as a means of living with trauma as stuck inside us; i.e., something that triggers from external reminders we then internalize, creating new gargoyle-esque suggestions of trauma, on and on. The way forward (away from fascist regressions) is psychosexual healing as a theatrical proposition that challenges menticide and state-sanctioned waves of terror and force; i.e., chasing the palliative Numinous during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a psychosexual means of relating to each other through a shared past, one where we cross paths with our former selves in other such witness stories pertaining to each of us differently.

And yet, it’s a fallacy to think that modernity has been on this linear progression towards the truth (what Western dickwads call “progress”). Rather, we can learn from those in the past who weren’t subject to Capitalist Realism as it exists today (a cycle of gentrification, decay and inheritance/death anxieties, pursuant to rape, captive and murder fantasies). Radcliffe wasn’t the only female author of the Neo-Gothic period; Shelley was there, too, and Dacre amongst others. And while it’s easy to point at Radcliffe and beat her corpse with a stick (as Volume Zero does), she was a master of theatrical devices that assist our ludo-Gothic BDSM: the demon lover, of course, but also the Black Veil. In short, if you’re going to talk about “rape” through Gothic exercises of cryptonymy that help workers rebel onstage and off, Radcliffe has far more to teach you about rape theatre than Shelley might seem to.

All the same, Shelley can teach us things that translate neatly to postcolonial BDSM and critiques of Radcliffe. In short, they’re both full of surprises when camped as ghosts of themselves, which possess the likes of Harmony and I when we play with the imaginary past as toy-like—not to consolidate state power by policing ourselves, but by learning the lingo to act out our paradoxical means of escape. The state will hunt us down, boasting “Not even death can save you from me!” as they do. Imagine their surprise, then, when “death” sets us free, but also drains them of their power in the process! We’ll have topped them from the bottom, but also taken the Destroyer persona back; i.e., to hug and humanize Medusa with as a pro-labor agent: humanizing the harvest as a hammer and sickle, a spectre of Marx versus a TERF one interpreting the xenomorph as a fascist does: the black/monstrous-feminine rapist of white women as the universal victim policing others through their victims and ours as forever at war—a witch hunt, but also an exterminatory bug hunt. It’s goofy but intense—a broadside the likes of a certain Star Trek revival joyously crying out, “Fire everything!”

Fucking oath, son! Time and time again, class and culture war summon up our ghostly ships; i.e., waylaid by us and taken from our colonizers to haunt their current counterfeits with: commandeered by spectres of a thoroughly genderqueer and postcolonial Marxist phantasm.

In short, Harmony and I have lived what—for straight folks—is something they can only touch upon in Gothic stories and roleplays: sex, reunion, and psychosexual healing amid bodies as toy-like. For cis women, the threat of exposure and constant rapacious danger is sadly relatable as a straight woman would experience such things; for queer bodies, this can be something to play with on the same stage as camped to Hell and back, expressing ourselves mid-exploitation on the only venue we’re historically given.

For the rest of the chapter, I will continue this examination with other friends and partners—past but also present, sleeping and awake as a thoroughly liminal proposition. Sleep is the cousin of death—death’s counterfeit waiting to replace one with the other—but also “death” in quotes as a profoundly awake sensation that makes one feel sleepy (“a sleepy potion,” Lewis called it, no doubt ribbing Shakespeare’s apothecary a bit). In medieval language, it evokes hunger and greed relative to trauma as passed down like a curse, a dragon sickness; in turn, the penis becomes something to live with (as I, a trans woman, do)—saddled with it and the mind of its own it seems to have—waking up based on past memories of past abusers who didn’t always harm me: “Love and pain become one in the same in the eyes of a wounded child!”

Let’s start with an ex: Cuwu, I choose you!

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a2a2b: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. “You’re so good! Oh, fuck!” Cuwu told me as I stuffed their tight little puppy pussy [bottom-right]. They were my dominator and protector and I was their service top; I adored them and being praised by them, and we played many times. All of us sit next to disaster as something to summon—at night, a thing to erect and put our erections inside. Sometimes we’re alone and thinking of such dragons [“getting the horn,” as the Brits call it]; sometimes our “dragon” wakes up and we fuck the cutie with it, all while they have a dragon sleeping inside them as well; and sometimes the dragon inside them wakes up. Medusa isn’t always nice. In spatio-temporal terms, this called a chronotope, which for the Gothic concerns hereditary rites and dynastic primacy as something to move through and inside: a liminal space and its various surfaces and artifacts imbued with the presence of “antique” legendary power and death from one castle-like body and body-like castle to the next.

An aesthetic is, in British terms, a particular kind of philosophy/argumentation—the visual reifying and exploration of such emblems, their phantasmagorical somnambulism a sleepwalking act to move through; re: castle-narrative. It extends between texts during mise-en-abyme insofar as a person is an extension of a castle and vice versa. The sickness is greed as something wrought from Western Imperialism, feudalism, Cartesian thought, Capitalism, neoliberalism, et al; i.e., as a kind of black pearl, a hellish onion to peel and explore, one layer of the grave-like soil at a time—not once, but over and over!

True to form, much of it is felt on the surface as charged, dark, and tense; but you have to go digging to get to the bottom of things—to “bottom out” inside Medusa’s moribund “tomb” [to hit her cervix, which she kind of enjoys, sometimes]. Power is a quest, then, insofar as “empowerment” and “disempowerment” are placed in quotes, mid-Mandelbrot. It becomes a paradox, something to heal from while being attracted to weird, to trauma, to abuse as a dice role: the Numinous as both a Faustian bargain and Promethean Quest that needs irony to function in a sex-positive sense. That irony isn’t always present, but can be installed during future calculus having learned from older venturings into a calculated risk and its fatal nostalgia:

[artist, left: Cuwu; models and artist: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard]

For example, I was hurt bad in Jadis’ “dungeon” as both the person, the pussy and the place conflicting between conflations of all three; so, I rebounded and escaped into Cuwu as hopefully something better to experience. They caught me on the wing. And as they did, they explained how they had their own trauma, their own DBT-style psychomachy that played out on the surface of that dragon-like visage. Dragons aren’t just artifacts of power but shapeshifters; i.e., masks that are worn as a face is worn by someone abused: potentially an abuser but not always. A narcissist has many masks, the paradox being they are broken into soft or hard divisions that shift across their likeness as walking around: a folie-a-deux and chez folie internalized and plain for all to see.

Would it surprise you to know that I still love parts of Cuwu and Jadis, but also freely admit that whatever I do love is haunted by the ghost of whatever counterfeit I could fashion? All I have are photographs of fatal portraits of either dragon, but neither can come alive ever again to harm me; I am free of them, trapped inside these complicated feelings of safety as I pursue fresh loves and new adventures.

Dragons embody disordered thinking as something to display through corruption of data as the data. You’re never sure quite who you’re dealing with, because what you’re dealing with is chaos as both tangible and something that resists interrogation: the unspeakable, the unattainable. But unlike a Scooby Doo villain, you can’t just take off a villain’s mask; they have to come out to play and sometimes retreat behind the good side of themselves and vice versa. Sadly Cuwu was always performing, always in survival mode [so was Jadis]: their sexuality a kind of “mirror dance” they always wanted me to watch—to keep them safe and protect me, but also as an attack. Per the liar’s paradox, their sentence was not true.

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard] 

Per the Gothic Romance, I met a little dragon inside the slutty maiden, either side of them roiling on the same person [what plural personalities call a “system”]. There we were, having sex for the second-to-last-time, very much in a place we probably shouldn’t have been but did so anyways [long story]. Cuwu, as the good dragon at that moment, carried me on their wings to safety and laid me down gently enough.

Like Zeuhl, I didn’t realize this was the end of the good times, but then and there, I simply enjoyed my mommy protector one more time [the above collage was just us fooling around without me cumming in them—we had done that earlier after getting in from the road and taking a nap: my creampie of them during a quickie we did not record, simply wanting to enjoy one another… and they hypnotizing me with their eyes, telling me vocally to “cum in mommy’s pussy” which I did most obediently]. They loved me and I loved them, the look in their eyes—every turn and toss of their pretty head, every outstretched finger and curve they flaunted just for me [and something I’m allowed to share with all of you, provided I keep their name out of it]. As their upper half gasped and opened, so did their lower half. Eager to swallow me, all of them stretched and took me in. Little did I know, it was a mercy that they let me go:

Quite a ride, eh? One worthy of a song perhaps you’ve heard before in some shape or form, maybe a videogame like Guilty Gear X‘s “Icarus” [2015] or some other rock opera incumbent on big feelings, desires, shames as both secret and out in the open: 

She knew it all
It’s a fleeting dream
No one can reach the horizon
She knew it all
It’s a fleeting dream
No hands can touch the sun
If you can not
stop this pathetic time
Oh bring back, bring back
All I need is proof
that I lived

[…]  

[Bridge]
Dusk of night descends upon me
Oh please, don’t look
I won’t be there for you no more

[Chorus]
Take me, take me outside of these walls
It’s not mercy that I’m begging
Oh, please
Take me, take me to the end of the world
Longing for the sunshine
Even if my wings may melt away [source: Genius]

[artist: Cuwu]

Total accuracy isn’t the point, but “danger disco” abstractions that yield volatile tremendous feelings that hit upon our daily struggles dueling and looking for love as forbidden to us under capital [I’d never heard “Icarus” before today (though it sounds a lot like X or Concerto-Moon-meets-Queen) but it fits my experiences like a glove—a perfect stranger]. Cuwu, like Jadis, had a victimized side and a Destroyer side, but also a Destroyer playing the victim and vice versa. In turn, trauma is generational; buried, lost and found again, it lives within us, traveling across bodies as places to deliver calamity as a sign of pain being a healing or harmful arrangement. Medieval poetics are useful insofar as interrogating and performing such abuse is concerned. You want to interrogate power—to eventually negotiate with your own as reclaimed from state forces—you must go where it is! But never take a dragon [whatever its shape and size, claws and mouths] out of your calculations! Its beauty can be unstable, prone to madness and decay—especially its combustible, volcanic ass!

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard] 

Above is our last time together [in person]. The paradox of immortality is that nothing lasts forever but the intensity of fleeting things outshine the seemingly infinite cosmos, the celestial firmament hanging overhead, the constellation in the sky something of an odd burial ground for those legendary souls we want to enshrine in a place always overhead. The stars are arbitrary for a fixature to fix meaning to as from our own lives informed by so many others. In turn, women knit scarves during war to soothe their own souls, sending messages that fuse the two, like a quilt, an odd patchwork of so many lovely and terrible things.

[model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

To that, Cuwu, once more I lay flowers on the grave of our love/friendship. You were my dragon—a little ho with a mouth like a clown demon [Pennywise leaps to mind] and a body like a fairy reaching over from fairyland to take part of me [a bite out of me] and leave something behind [you left your panties here as a keepsake. I still have them]. Good and bad, I’ve remembered all of you here in this book series. I hope you are well, Little Dragon, and that if you look upon these images yourself that they find you happy and well, too! Thank you for the memories, my Spyro, my Smaug the Stupendous, my little heartbreaker! Shine on, you crazy diamond! Shine on!)

Jadis love-bombed me, and Cuwu played with the pieces. Per a grander love-bombing tradition, capital makes us feel both like complete shit and a million bucks, enforcing us to face that feeling in the language as lived; i.e., as a (usually) figurative room to maneuver inside and parody escape strategies with using unprecedented BDSM potential: “I’ve never seen that—never seen someone drag their garbage down to the street and then bang the hell out of it with a stick. No, I’ve never seen that.”

Except, give us weirdos what we like as, to some degree abject, and we become—pardon the expression—as happy as pigs in shit. The idea isn’t to become what capital wants us to be, but reclaim our own lost power through a Gothic maturity that isn’t above crude puns/psychosexual metaphors[1] tied to abject bodily functions (and sites where these functions take place): to feel like shit as a poetic device, but also a means of showing off our vulnerability to confront feelings of self-consciousness, of embarrassment (“Don’t stare/watch me!” versus “Go ahead, sicko!”) at being caught with one’s pants down[2] in a routine place of dismemberment for female/monstrous-feminine parties in Gothic media (the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection in action):

(artist: Cuwu)

As such, GNC people like Cuwu and I are drawn to “trauma” as straight people are, albeit from a different vantage point: something to recognize and find similar souls to bond with and heal together—in denuded psychosexual forms of medieval expression showcasing power and bareness towards it as something to revel in and learn from; i.e., a gallant, charging catharsis supercharged by the power of metal as something to fuck to and completely slay our would-be attackers by finding cuties who, as doms, won’t hurt us at all: “Ah-cha!’ Oh, no! I’m so exposed! I hope something doesn’t happennn…” There’s generally some decorum on both sides, but I’m generally a huge slut when faced with Numinous “rape”:

(exhibit 34b3b2a2c: Model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl. Internalized bigotry is variable between type of oppressed group. Trans women are often ashamed of their penises; e.g., I was made to fear and dislike my because of my father and step father [and other cis-het men who hurt my mother and me] but also Zeuhl and Jadis, who eventually abused once I became sexually active. Cuwu had to teach me to find self-acceptance and love by playing with them as a genderqueer person who could teach me to love myself amid theatrical devices that accounted for a) my alienation under capital, and b) my new sense of identity inside that liminal position: from different perspectives, lighting and gendered outfits, etc. Exploitation and liberation exist in the same place, the same shadow zone!

[model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard] 

In short, I graduated from my sex doll to a doll-like cutie who took the feared side of me into themselves to show me that it wasn’t dangerous; i.e., that I was human, as was my hard dick, as were things associated with it—not so scary at all, but in fact, kind of funny-looking but fun to play with during puppy play and BDSM as I liked to enact it [subbing for/topping mommy doms]! In short, we were both toy-like and playing with each other’s equipment to learn something near about ourselves under capital. They steered me and listened to the cute, noisy sounds I made in bed/wiggly motions I made when I lost control; I returned the favor when playing with them. I learned to trust gifts again, learning as much as I could. That’s what my relationship to Cuwu ultimately was and continues to be!

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

This obviously took time, effort and care—not just for me as a late bloomer [as I didn’t start dating until I was 29] but anatomically as well; i.e., as the genitals and eyes are classically vulnerable areas of the body tied to human identity as policed by capital. Normally I wouldn’t show my penis or Cuwu’s eyes, above, but I needed to in order make a larger point: sight and sexuality are experienced through gendered exchanges that can uphold the status quo or reject it in a serialized lesson. For me, I went from the doll that couldn’t see me, to a pair of eyes that could; i.e., a person who smiled happily whenever I fucked them with my hard girl cock. I got over Jadis and Zeuhl’s shaming of me as a trans nympho and started to see myself differently thanks to the traditional monster language that Cuwu and I played around with in bed; i.e., that which I would transplant unto relationships when continuing to grow and develop myself as queer. It’s different, therefore interesting in ways that invite questions but also a willingness to try something new. The most common question I get from AFAB people about my doll is: “How does it feel?”; i.e., “Does it feel like a real vagina?” being a question that also applies to any synthetic device; e.g., dildoes, sheaths, dolls, suits, and so on, as things to be ]. Playing with conventions in toy-like artifacts—of trauma and fear but also are how we learn as a species, insofar as the Gothic is primarily phenomological: understood through experience.)

(artist: Crow)

Let’s continue exploring this raw, explosive trend of self-discover and self-definition not just with Cuwu, but Crow as a current partner of mine living in my complicated headspace; i.e., interviewing the same hysterical, “avatar of Medusa” not just as female, but monstrous-feminine. We already know how the Archaic Mother’s affect travels across a variety of popular media forms[3] tied to big feelings and emotional turbulence; the same goes across corporal surfaces meant to help those dimorphically sexualized under capital: to face their alienation, internalized bigotry and self-hatred. This occurs in something they can pilot and humanize upon an Aegis-like double—not just Harmony’s pale, cis-gendered body haunted by the wandering womb and cosmic male rapist; the bailiwick includes other (often pale, thanks to settler colonialism) GNC bodies rarefied into external abstractions speaking to conflict/trauma as living inside-outside the body as castle-like; e.g., me and my body as something to fear for its male qualities (with the trans woman generally feeling afraid or ashamed of their penis), but also the equally snowy marshmallow chonk of my handsome good boy, Crow, and his female qualities coached by external factors (history is predicated on socio-material conditions, which shape thought as a Gothic poetic device).

Similar to Cuwu and I, then, Crow and I are expressing the monstrous-feminine as queer in ways that have always existed in the flesh, but could not be tolerated, inhabited or breathed within society until quite recently. Our queerness is built on older ghosts who live on through us as uniquely queer in the Internet Age; i.e., something that—per female bodies under a Western Male Gaze—would be expected to disrobe for inspection by male suitors and female servants/overseers, but can be appreciated for their own relegated beauty disrobed to say with pride, “I exist, muthafuckas!”

Indeed, Crow does, and he must be seen to be believed—a real feast for the eyes, the apple of mine eye:

(exhibit 34b3b2: Artist: Crow. Per Segewick, a female body is not only constantly surveilled in Gothic fictions, but naked even when clothed; per me, nudity becomes armor to shield ourselves with confidence as a revolutionary cryptonymy—of flashing through the buffer of the camera lens/phone screen as seeing what bigots can’t own or attack, and which appreciators of the cutie’s courage can admire him from afar with pride: “that’s my good boy!”)

In other words, GNC identities (and their bodies) would have been relegated to a cultural nadir/unspeakable place the Gothic made room for in the shadow of Capitalism: an ontological inversion (thus campy endorsement) of the silly and stupid queer panic of the early 1800s; i.e., “the love that dare not speak its name!” With male agents, this would have been sodomy as criminal, insofar as men were seen as people and women couldn’t legally own property in England until 1833; but they could write novels about castles that gave them (and homosexual men) voices that, until then, couldn’t find a place. That is, queerness manifested through struggle as commodified by straight folk and lived by queer folk in theatre and orthographic sites that gentrify, decay and regenerate over time. The mistress of letters was always a virgin and a whore—doubly so if she indulged in something as fanciful and “terrorist” as Gothic fiction! It became a so-called double shame—both something to indulge in, but also sell-out to the establishment as a white woman of privilege: Ann Radcliffe blazing a trail that adhered to capital as kept parties so often do.

Or, as I write in Volume Zero:

Austen’s Isabella and Catherine [from Northanger Abbey] are written to sound kinda basic as a critique of Radcliffe’s exact readership, including how they ward off boredom as middle-class ladies do: devouring the so-called “horrid” as a viral and proliferate commodity to ravenously tear through, not as “terrorist” literature in any active revolutionary sense! If Austen could do this to Radcliffe (in an admittedly limited, novel-of-manners approach, to be clear), then so can we critique the same champions of the Gothic fictions (today’s and yesterdays’) drawing a line of compromise in the sand while profiting off it: A soft-spoken stance of genuine rebuke is better than staying silent and making money through the same Gothic poetics: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”; or, the wacky novels of 18th century sell-outs.

To this, Radcliffe—a seasoned pro, at this point—chose to stay utterly silent for decades; then, at the time of her death, she further distanced herself from the French Revolution and Lewis while handing the next generation her recipe to terror and horror as she saw them in her own “terrorist literature”:

As Nick Groom writes (again, from the Oxford World’s Classics of The Italian):

As to risibility, a notorious letter condemning ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ accused [Radcliffe] of provoking a fashion:

To make terror the order of the day, by confining the heroes and heroines in old gloomy castles, full of spectres, apparitions, ghosts, and dead men’s bones […] If a curtain is withdrawn, there is a bleeding body behind it; if a chest is open, it contains a skeleton; if a noise is heard, somebody is receiving a deadly blow; and if a candle goes out, its place is sure to be supplied by a flash of lightning.

Groom notes how the letter in question explicitly attacks Radcliffe’s “system of terror” for being monotonous, ignorant, and “contaminated” by “Monk” Lewis’ horror writings—to which Radcliffe herself would never write another novel, but whose 1826 posthumous appearance with “On the Supernatural in Poetry” distances herself from the French Revolution (and its terrors), radicalism and Lewis (source).

The problem with female bodies is they are often seen as homogenous in conjunction with successful” (from a fiscal standpoint) female authors preaching to the heteronormative choir by abjecting us as the ghost of the counterfeit. It would force all monstrous-feminine to be sexy cis waifus (with Harmony someone to prize and own) and queer bodies like Crow’s to put back into the closet while also fetishizing and alienating them:

(exhibit 34b3b3a: Artist: Crow. Shot by Crow as he and I played. This time, I was the dominant, and “transformed” to “dominate” [quotes for irony relative to historical harm] my play partner. Each of us conveyed the lycan aesthetic akin to John Webster’s treatment of it: a cryptonym for trauma expressed through talismans, but also bodies’ psychosexual “madness.” There is the rabies metaphor, of course, but also the humors descriptor of sanguine linked to the body’s literal size as commodified by Cartesian thought: “big = non-white” per settler-colonial dogma, regardless of skin color. Cuwu’s not the only GNC ho with a monster PAWG dumper!

In turn, social-sexual taboos regarding sexual diseases [due to lack of medicine] but also good old-fashioned dogma and stigmas regarding patrilineal descent, come into play regarding such bodies as fertile fields to till by the agrarian nature of colonialists doubling as state poachers: hounding Medusa not only force-coded as monstrous-feminine, but prized for her food-like assets; e.g., her pudding or cake [with sugar being a medieval status symbol until it eventually became factory-produced slave gruel]; i.e., the Hammer of Witches [1478] swung against non-Christian AFAB persons who refused to have sex with Christian men, and simultaneously levied against non-white/GNC persons by AFAB reactionaries/subjugates. This tracks with Foucault’s observation of sexuality prior to the 18th century largely being composed of action, not identity expressed in public discourse. Except in the Internet Age, gender studies has become something to put to practice during ludo-Gothic BDSM: how workers play together in ways that reinvent the distributions of power when confronting trauma and negotiating its theatre on shared stages.

[artist: Crow]

To this, not only would a female body like Crow’s would be expected by heteronormative forces to be collared and rut dutifully as the automatic submissive; any hint of aggression becomes, per the euthanasia effect, hints of rabies among a feral monstrous-feminine who must be put down/to heel. The glasses, then, become a mask, not unlike Clark Kent’s—hiding something far stronger than relics of Pax Americana: a trans boy who knows what he likes and wants, seeing his body as a toy to have other cuties play with and enjoy.)

Let’s further reflect on these complicated, GNC, toy-like feelings and ideas for some important takeaways surrounding rape play (another thirteen pages).

As we proceed into Volume Two’s Monster Modules, we’re going to be looking at older fictions between the 18th and 21st centuries; i.e., according to theories that have expanded and evolved since the 1970s. Except, instead of cis-centric terms like “man” and “woman,” their ironic, genderqueer implementation radically separates from biology to stir up gender trouble vis-à-vis Judith Butler, but also enjoy the roles of power exchange formally reserved for a heteronormative dimorphic, then and now (vis-à-vis me). In other words, a person of a given “normative Gothic” (hetero or otherwise) was/is/will not be separate from their body’s biology. AFAB bodies historically would have and continue to be denied the ability to top during sex, save in a subby manner submitting to cisgendered male forces (or a monstrous-feminine corruptor/rapist, as time went on); and conversely, AMAB persons would have been and continue to be expected to dominate regardless of their social-sexual position (status and the literal position of their bodies during sex). All tie to profit and harvesting of nature as something to abject, of course; and society decaying and gentrifying responds as it always does during moral panic: with a witch hunt by cops of a standard-to-tokenized caliber.

The ludo-Gothic point here is how the playful, toy-like elements extend from gender roles to gender swaps/fluidity insofar as topping is literally whose putting in the majority of the work during sex/asexual play versus “dom” and “sub”; i.e., as a theatre of power that can brush up against harmful historical forms behind the counterfeit, but also dated mechanisms of Gothic play that become woefully antiquated as counterfeit: out of an imaginary history stemming from the earliest days of commodified Gothic fiction into liberatory forms that move past what Wolff touched on in 1979; re:

Two hundred years ago Ann Radcliffe introduced Gothic conventions into the mainstream of English fiction. For the first time the process of feminine sexual initiation found respectable, secular expression. Yet the terms of this expression were ultimately limiting. It is important to recognize and acknowledge the heritage of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic tradition; it is even more important now to move on and invent other, less mutilating conventions for the rendering of feminine sexual desire (source).

Like Carter, Moers, or even Creed, though, Wolff’s adumbrations barely hint at a queer potential the likes of which myself and Crow personify in our day-to-day playing—as something to enjoy among ourselves, but also help us survive as a hunted party that is both unwelcome in the Gothic and that which has made the Gothic our home far more precociously than these (white) second wave feminists did/do. But, per the double operation of cryptonymy—i.e., as something to reverse in either direction anisotropically (for the state or for workers)—things as ordinary as a naked cutie’s beautiful body become something to hide in plain sight: to flash during naughty sessions where we can be ourselves, seeking catharsis as something to synthesize with our own praxis camping canon. We do it because we must, but also because it’s exciting and fun; it feels good relative to queer experience as a painful one normally forced to hide itself.

Simply put, systemic change cannot happen without sex-positive experiences that humanize things normally viewed and treated as dogmatic; i.e., internally and externally regarding queer existence at large. The Gothic is vital to that revelation, but we’re always left with the feeling that we’re somehow up to no good—except, the paradox is, we learn to love it, discovering how much fun it can be to step into a new identity that describes us far better than heteronormative assignment ever did! With it, we can flash our “badge” to like-minded cuties who look normal on the outside but know the passcodes expressed as much in literal body language as Gothic conventions doubling as such. Generally they elide, but the basic show-and-tell remains a lightning-quick recognition of those we trust as “like us”; i.e., weird attracts weird, nerd likes nerd, especially when marked by trauma. Prey recognizes prey to bond with new “trauma” (e.g., the werewolf, or the knife-like cock of such a monster as cosmetic-only, thus safe to insert): as a healing force that supplies catharsis by avoiding predators that—like toys—come in all shapes, sizes, and colors.

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

Of course, the attraction is liminal, meaning you have to learn to recognize, subject and vet the toy-like people coming to play with you as equally toy-like. Jadis, we shall continue to see, broke me because they had already been broken and became a dominant-class abuser themselves; Cuwu, a submissive-class; and both cases attracted to me as prey they could get something out of. And while the play sessions were harmful, I still learned from them: to seek out people who won’t prey on you despite recognizing you as prey. In sex-positive scenarios, the draw to trauma during the playing with bodies like toys becomes restorative and educational for both sides: relieving stress and reinforcing good habits as things to master and pass along in the flesh; i.e., during liminal expression and ludo-Gothic BDSM’s collars, gifts, and toys as things to treat with respect—to play rough if both sides want, but ultimately to play nice as a cathartic, educational device.

The more friends you make, the more trust you accrue, the more you learn, the better everything becomes—the sex, the friendship, all of it. You become family as something to find, and the friends of your friends become your friends and yours theirs, on and on. As far as sex goes, a single night of hot, sticky passion becomes “Can you put it back in?” Not under threat of force (“You’re gonna be Hauser’s babe!”), but a cultural, sex-positive empathy that becomes second-nature through good praxis, hence ludo-Gothic BDSM. There’s plenty of “pizza” (food or sex, shelter, etc) to go around provided praxial synthesis is attained: a continual balancing act—of give and take—with a sex-positive, liberatory character generally characterized as “theft” by the bourgeoisie (and their proponents, accidental or otherwise). We don’t want to shoot the individual thief, but “eat the rich” in ways that avoid total bedlam (e.g., Les Miserables, 1862) while still pushing for radical change at a socio-material level using Gothic poetics. Acquiring such nuance helps avoid the “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to aptly-titled family annihilators: the End of History as the end of scarcity (thus rape and war) as we know it.

(artist: Jim Davis)

To that, you have to stick with it, and correctly. It’s not a gun to restore to prime working order (e.g., Awesome Restorations’ “COLT Python .357 MAGNUM Gun Lighter Restoration,” 2023), but a hammering of such “swords” (a nod to Romeo + Juliet, there) into ploughshares to achieve a utopian state of post-scarcity existence through Gothic poetics, aka Gothic Communism; i.e., a subversion of the usual “wrath of God” scenarios during Revelations to remind people that Medusa is the ultimate force of the planet, and one who will absolutely choke a bitch if capital keeps fucking around. Fuck around, find out: Capitalism doesn’t rule the planet, Mother Nature does, and will have the last laugh as she crushes Zeus’ puny head between her chonky thighs (skull-crusher and brain-squishing ASMR, Bob-Ross-style: “Beat the devil out of him!”).

To avoid that (and the usual predation of “wolves” on “lambs”), you gotta put the pussy on the chainwax—not unironically like oiling the Tinman (though lube is important during sex, purely because cuties are not sex machines you maintain like property), but with historical-material irony per dialectical-material arguments/cryptonymic disguises; i.e., changing skin/shape to fight back by presenting as we are; e.g., wolves in sheeps’ clothing and vice versa:

(artist: Bay)

This therian-grade dialog is meant to speak conditionally to the state and its proponents abusing all life, including humans as animals; i.e., conditional love versus a Pavlovian love forced upon people through dogma as bad BDSM. In animalistic terms, this requires scouting a territory for toys to play with; i.e., in ways that humans do to protect themselves and nature from the state!

To that, we’re digging up bones to play with the ghost of the counterfeit and reverse the process of abjection; i.e., by changing how the middle class (capital’s gatekeepers, gaslighters and girl bosses) feels about state shift as something we can bring in a non-fascist/non-cataclysmic direction, mid-apocalypse/-revelation. People learn through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll; but if the state cannibalizes during moral panic as historically linked to its cyclical crises and decay as built-in, we must “give a dog a bone” through humor, wit, and irony as part of the counterterror repertoire: using what we got to show those at home as acclimated to the Imperial Core’s legal defining and enforcement of crime (with genocide being pushed to the margins but haunting the resident, the suburb).

Some people need bigger “bones[4]“/wakeup calls than others do; i.e., size queens, but also status-quo dummies who never “bone” losing their minds when faced with state collapse and state shift as something our Aegis must nevertheless speak to them: “This is Walter!” Better to see what frightens you and lose your shit in a controlled environment than to lose total control out in the wilderness where people can get hurt (the line between the two not being discrete of course; i.e., the exiter of Plato’s cave becoming an outsider insiders will kill to defend the state’s shadow plays):

The paradox of taming Medusa is not to disempower, but quell her revenge to suit ours as agents thereof. Furthermore, there are many kinds of mommies, and it’s not only possible but vital to be multiple at the same time! So Collete Tatou, the purple-haired “strict” cutie[5] from Ratatouille (2007)—the “pirate,” she styled herself—was only half wrong/right. We must be mommy when cooking in the kitchen; i.e., as something to take back as a collective of pirates making privatization and middle-class expectations (e.g., Parisian food snobs paying for high-skilled labor they can literally eat) as thing of the past. Bribe the “grow-air,” babes; she’ll keep you fed (and not just with food, you feel me?):

(exhibit 34b3b3a2: Source, top: Rule 34; bottom: Degenerate Art Gallery. As Volume Two, part one argues, “BDSM or otherwise, people work through preference and experimentation to issue public statements that are, to some degree, coded” [source]. Monsters are code; we deal in/fuck with monsters as thing to cook up like food-as-code, thus encryption, revolutionary cryptonymy something to eat. Having control over them [versus AI art, left], we gain control over our bodies, art and labor as things to take back from capital’s usual thievery—in what we produce as ours, not something to steal. For example, Ratatouille‘s full of shit like that: “Cook’s don’t steal,” “anyone can cook,” piracy in the kitchen relative to “stupid old men,” nepotism [“some garbage boy who got lucky”] and BDSM through workplace attractions that, in the end, change even the most old die-hard critics’ minds through so-call “peasant dishes”; i.e., progression away from gentrification as a matter of public opinion, the latter swayed through the usual venues/gradients of exchange blending food/sex and power/resistance, mid-poiesis. “Bon sang! Elle donne une belle coupe!“; translation: “She’s a good fuck!” In literal terms, though: “She gives a beautiful strike!” Big dumpers and tight little pussies generally do, opening our eyes to a better world if used correctly [for workers].

In turn, “food” [and other such pun-like pareidolia] always comes to those who love to cook—delicious people and tasty ideas that, for those constantly cooking up new schemes, find themselves surrounded by unicorn pussy [Gusteau, our chubby mentor, slayed some pussy to sire his estranged kid, giving him the keys to the proverbial castle]. As always, remember we camp because we must; when “making it gay,” yourselves, always ask, “what’s the context?” then act accordingly.)

Whatever monstrous-feminine we’re dealing with, all should fall on the side of nature and labor as exemplified by workers working together to achieve universal human recognition (what Lacan would call the mirror test, and where sex workers generally find themselves when culturing rebellion to suit their needs, demands, arguments, etc). Like Arthur’s coconuts from Holy Grail (1975), we find them in strange places—not to sell them, but make goofy artistic statements (aping “hoofbeats”) per neo-medieval theatre as something to perform; i.e., by good-faith actors in front of a casting mirror. People come and go, in that respect, but can still contribute towards something better through reflections that last: we are people with rights, regardless of whatever rationalizing the state (and its unironically scientific, Cartesian essentializing of thinking vs emergent beings might try to put forward. It becomes a circuitous and recursive rememory of things that sees beyond the oral or written tradition from singular perspectives, and speaks to the state’s collective memory death—its own abuse and decay—as something to endure and surpass: ideas that come to us, but also undead, demonic and animalistic egregores that arrive into our world based on what we build together (our aforementioned “having pull” applying to monstrous cuties in all shapes and sizes, from all walks of life: a Gothic push-pull we learn to manipulate in order to help keep us alive).

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

By extension, there’s plenty of everything to go around if we all learn to trust and love each other in opposition to the state and its myopic illusions sexualizing labor through war-and-rape-as-a-business. So lay it all on the table, control for risk, be honest, and see what happens when you put your best monster self forward. Doing so works by virtue of people liking what they see, thinking you might be fun to play with; i.e., not because you fooled them (so-called “pickup artistry” is for cons and creeps), but because you worked hard to change what you didn’t like and still own your flaws and scars. And even if it doesn’t “work out,” an adventure is still an adventure to a life having one more thing worth telling: “Your path is clear. Make it a journey!” The best parts of those you love will live on according to how you remember them. With Cuwu, Zeuhl and Jadis, I am nothing but consistent in that regard. The same goes for Crow and Bay—Harmony and my other muses, comrades, FWBs—as people who are always with me in some shape or form. We freaks look out for each other!

To that, toys are useful for articulating trauma, but also healing from it and getting one’s frustrations out on an invulnerable subject-object drawn to pain as pleasurable; i.e., from “Show me on the doll where they touched you” to “put your cock in this doll” to “fuck me like you mean it!” History is trauma as something to play with according to misfit toys. Jadis was a bully who broke theirs; Cuwu, a dragon who captivated theirs; Zeuhl, who used and discarded theirs, burning them akin to a Picasso’s past—of the woman (or monstrous-feminine) involved.

True to form, none were ever in full control (as power can cause people to fracture along hard to soft lines), but surrendered their power in different ways. The common thread was play insofar as we played with each other to alleviate symptoms and exert or alleviate control over ourselves. Jadis was the military-style thug “relinquishing” control in the bedroom (classic fetish gear being one step removed from mil spec); Zeuhl was the neurotic control freak treating me like a unicorn, blanket, and sex machine; and Cuwu was the former dancer with an action-figure’s figure, their paper-doll approach to clothes, accessories, makeup and hairstyles a gender-fluid aesthetic merged with their doll-like tendency to disassociate (apart from the drugs).

(artist: Cuwu)

In short, each was how my abusers related to others through things that were normally strictly regulated for them by capital as patriarchal, settler-colonial and criminogenic; i.e., gentrified to serve profit, and it showed in their affect as cosmetic: Zeuhl as hopelessly discrete, Jadis as commanding and blunt, and Cuwu’s eyes turned glassy when each of them were facing their own trauma in “quotes”; i.e., a flashback in material form, a pretty toy-like effigy to play with that they could control when surrendering power for a moment: me. They couldn’t be in control at all times and neither could I in a man’s world, but I was something that each could control differently.

For Jadis, she was abused by her narcissistic mother and incorporated narcissistic tendencies, herself; for Zeuhl, they were the regressing enby who abandoned their expertise the moment things got hot; and Cuwu suffered as people forced to identify as women so often do: as a sex object without agency. The power for each came in ways they could control through me to get what they wanted, except something was always passed between us as aliens. This includes knowledge through the hermeneutic of experiencing ludo-Gothic BDSM, first-hand—of socio-material things that yield fresh revelations: Cuwu’s kindness, and their copy of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017), Zeuhl’s recommendation of A History of Sexuality, Volume One (1980) and Gender Trouble (1993), and Jadis showing me Tool and NIN music videos. Similar to my Galatean lineage’s actual bloodline (re: my great-grandmother, grandmother and mother’s infernal influence on my little trans brain), adult me found uses for all of these non-familial palimpsests in my Song of Infinity riffing on older garbage; while my exes were using me without my consent (the beautiful thing with Fair Use is it not requiring permission, except in the case of private nude images, which I always get prior to use), I pulled a “Monk” Lewis to weaponize their bullshit against the state! Get fucked, nerds!

Attracting trouble isn’t a curse if you can camp it. Indeed, my newfound pull (after turning 29, which was eight years older than Lewis when he wrote The Monk) wasn’t as bad as I thought it was—constantly meeting devils-in-disguise who lured me in with sex and harmed me, making me feel like a glutton for punishment (“my type,” you could call it). Indeed, all changed my life and my work for the better inside the Gothic as an endless framed narrative/mise-en-abyme; i.e., as something I gradually parsed out.

It might seem mechanical and rawly conditioned, doomed, and/or hand-me-down, but there was always an organic element, a chance for a fresh start with friends we play with to create and learn new sex-positive things. For me, that meant a chance to learn what each liked, but also little lessons that came from playing under different conditions; e.g., sex on the floor as hard or carpeted, thus bruising skin close to the bone or chafing the skin raw. All went into this book as beyond the sum of its parts, but nevertheless reliant on such educational experiences to reify the instruction for others to partake of, themselves: find your own coconuts to play with, as I repeatedly do. As long as it’s sex-positive, and provided we as a culture can recognize the difference through camp as widespread (camping the twin trees: the Base and Superstructure), then that’s all that matters!

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

For once, my inability to turn my brain off came in handy, as did my attraction to the monstrous-feminine. Zeuhl was my androgyne, Jadis my bruiser herbo, and Cuwu my little transmasc mommy dom. And each had a trademark physical trait, fictional counterpart and emotional signature to account for that: a steel-trap pussy, tits for days, and an ass that never, ever quit—each respectively belonging to a debatably autistic alien with a flat affect (I only mention autism because they insisted they weren’t neurodivergent—keep telling yourself that, hon), a surly orc queen, and a hungry and vain dragoness seeking to control a scene to avoid getting hurt in the future.

In short, they’d each been hurt before and would never stop controlling others by playing the Amazon, the femme fatale, the monstrous-feminine: something to dress up and control through abject theatre that subverts the lack of agency (re: Laura Ng[6]) each experienced at some point (or felt like they did, in Zeuhl’s case); i.e., through cosmetics as a weapon unto itself, mid-theatre. It becomes a coerced position of enforced negotiation, that under the right conditions, is sex-positive, but nevertheless works within a dialog of incessant scrutiny under sex work—of the female body as endlessly policed, owned, controlled by patriarchal forces playing Pygmalion. “A free woman in an unfree society will always be a monster.” Even with queer people, this applies insofar as they’re forced into a Pavlovian box. They become robotic, cold, automatic—a sum of different parts valued by men, thus capital, including its token agents. I’m a woman, too, but AMAB, and no less coerced by state dogma through my GNC exes (all female).

Except, in the case of my exes, it was bad play because sooner or later the game needs to stop, or at least pause to reflect, or it becomes an unironic way of life, always reacting to abusive factors that make it hard to get close enough to trust anyone, even if there was some degree of proximity or ostensible intimacy between sleepers, spies, and conflicting agents. Love decays, as does activism when used in service to the profit motive. It did for Cuwu, Zeuhl and Jadis, insofar as their different bad habits all led to the harming of me by virtue of each selling out.

This betrayal was unique to each as having different flaws. Cuwu had borderline personality disorder and embraced a chaotic lifestyle (with the help of several bad actors) that forsook all they had preached. Unlike them, Zeuhl got a cushy job and used me until their first, best option (the one they’d been chasing for ten years) came into their life (obscure hint: initially cock-blocked by a volcano). So did Jadis, oddly enough (no volcano, in their case). In short, both waited were they secure enough to toss me aside, and then did so (and while Zeuhl was more ashamed of it, they still did it in a ruthless, premeditated and placating manner before trying to pin everything on me when I got sick of their bullshit, years later).

The point, here, is that none of my exes used their trauma to think with in sex-positive ways, but glide from point A to point B on autopilot: toying with their food as something to abuse, mid-play. Sex is one of those things that works well on instinct, but it’s better when it’s actively engaged with because trust is incumbent on good communication, not blind cruising. They were all sex experts, insofar as Zeuhl had sexual health training (and an extensive GNC education, especially with twinks), Jadis was an active masochist with years of acquired know-how (and a sadistic mean streak), and Cuwu likewise knew the ins and outs of such things as relayed between a younger generation’s acclimation to internet culture, but also the machinery of the state as something to impersonate, like chameleons.

(artist: Jan-H Sculpts)

Within that culture’s mise-en-abyme/framed narrative, the Amazon (and similar monstrous-feminine) survive as tools used by different people pinned between the state and its usual disparate, harmful conditions. They become something that, like all toys, you can recognize in people, and play with; i.e., mid-historical-materialism, while capital constantly corrupts, rewrites, and transforms over time—in short when it decays and regenerates. This travels from Ancient Athens, to Marston’s Wonder Woman putting “Athens” in quotes, to whatever it becomes when we manifest these articles ourselves; i.e., working to find social-sexual freedom amid oscillating threatres of opposition, deception, games-in-games rendering us or others the dupe, but also having the power to liberate us amid low-to-high stakes.

Within those stakes, monstrous-feminine players are more skilled by virtue of necessity—overcoming systemic adversity through treachery and cunning but also nuance and grace; i.e., a system of exchange on par with giving rings, in The Merchant of Venice, which extends to other kinds of games that serve a similar purpose; e.g., Luc Besson’s 2019 excellent rehash of La Femme Nikita, the svelte sexpot beating the boys at their own game in ways they aren’t accustomed to playing themselves, by virtue of them being men: blunt instruments to her scalpel’s acting and play as a means of surviving men, first and foremost.

Classically this is always a Pygmalion fantasy that plays out in a half-real sense; i.e., male directors creating Amazonian fantasies that always seem to cater to their sexual fantasies under an abuse of power between them as director and the actresses they marry (and divorce); e.g., James Cameron, but also Luc Besson having dated Maïwenn Le Besco when she was 15 and he 32 (they met when she was 12). In short, Hollywood and European cinema is haunted by pedophilia, but still allows for monstrous-feminine liberation in a space occupied by exploitation, first and foremost. Per Gothic Communism, we can unshackle Galatea from Pygmalion.

In other words, we simply don’t need to serve these weirdos to tell these kinds of stories (even if said stories are well-made, as The Terminator and La Femme Nikita undeniably are)! This is work saying because women abused by their male (and much older) rapists go on to develop rape-apologetic tendencies; e.g., Le Besco

Maïwenn confirmed earlier this year that she did in fact pull Plenel’s hair and spit in his face at a Paris restaurant; Plenel filed a police report March 7 alleging the incident took place in late February. The writer/director/actress, née Maïwenn Le Besco, told French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche (via Screen Daily) that the encounter with Plenel stemmed from her feeling “morally violated” that Mediapart published rape allegations against her ex-husband, director Luc Besson, without notifying her. […]

Mediapart editor-in-chief Plenel called out Maïwenn’s presumed lack of support for the #MeToo movement in May 2023.

“She’s outspokenly anti-#MeToo and she made a gesture to please her world, and that’s why she bragged about it on TV,” Plenel told Variety. “We could see a sort of pride that echoed that world.”

Plenel said at the time, “We published what [Maïwenn] told police as part of the investigation into Besson. When she talked to the police, she discussed complicated aspects of her relationship with Luc Besson, notably during their separation. But once we published our piece, we never received any protest of any kind. That was about five years [ago] — that would mean that for all this time, Maiwenn wanted to take her revenge” (source: Samantha Bergeson’s “Maïwenn Assaulted Journalist after Feeling ‘Morally Violated’ by Allegations Against Ex-Husband Luc Besson,” 2023).

but also Roman Polanski’s victim, Samantha Geimer, apologizing 45 years after the rape took place:

“Let me be very clear: What happened with Polanski was never a big problem for me,” Geimer told Seigner in a translated version of the interview obtained Monday by The Times. “I didn’t even know it was illegal, that someone could be arrested for it. I was fine, I’m still fine. The fact that we’ve made this [a big deal] weighs on me terribly. To have to constantly repeat that it wasn’t a big deal, it’s a terrible burden” (source: Nardine Saad’s “Roman Polanski and the Woman He Pleaded Guilty to Raping Pose together 45 Years Later,” 2023).

Like, dude, you were 13! It’s rape regardless of what you think! You were a child and he drugged and sodomized you! You can speak for yourself if you absolutely want to, but you don’t get to speak for other people!

Except, just as Geimer and Le Besco do this in real life, their infinitely faster and deadlier idealized forms like Nikita whitewash Hollywood, male directors/actors and capital through the profit motive and all its problematic aspects. It becomes yet-another-patriarch to defend by daddy’s good girl: “Give me a child until she is seven, and I will show you the woman.” It’s a gender swap on Aristotle’s already-creepy maxim towards young boys; i.e., brainwashing. Not exactly the bedrock we want to base Gothic Communism on, eh?

Of course, we can rescue Amazons from their history of subjugation, but this happens onstage, mid-exploitation, as a performance that ties them to some sense of ourselves belonging to the monstrous-feminine as a complicated polity of freak bitches. Amazons and Amazonomachia are always—to some degree—sex objects struggling like Galatea does: to find their own agency in the world; i.e., through what they make and leave behind as haunted by their trauma as potentially going to decay in favor their abusers and the system tied to them.

Such baggage is impossible to completely untangle ourselves from. My escape was my own case of brothel espionage, between three cuties I knew extremely well and not at all, but which I was drawn towards due to my own half-and-half psychosexual responses[7] and tastes: the Amazon mommy dom serving me as the sub (which is how being a sub works) under good conditions, and burying me alive under bad (the graveyard symbolism a, at times, literal skull-and-crossbones warning for those with unchecked libidos inside a given abusive structure closing into trap them—me chasing the dragon, so to speak, as humans generally do: as creatures of impulse, driven by stim-like tendencies that aren’t always conscious but need to be in order to prevent harm).

It’s a common mistake to humanize one’s abuser(s) through theatrical tropes bleeding into real life. Except that’s not what I’m doing. My exes treated me poorly as individuals, but I don’t ultimately blame them in place of systemic harm (not even Zeuhl, who tried to spin their shitty behavior as teaching me a valuable lesson. Valuable or not, you’re still backstabbing a cunt, my dude); I blame capital’s monopolies and trifectas driving people to such extremes at all, looking for protection—namely shelter and power—under criminogenic conditions while at times abusing others through social-sexual dysfunction. And in my own way, I eventually bested them all by becoming the woman I am today as having mastered my craft, mid-survival: a mistress of my own destiny able to spot what I dislike (assholes) and what I like (female warriors, androgynes, princexes, etc) as a potential lesson, but also a fresh chance at something fun once more—slightly different but familiar and capable.

(artist: Blissful Art)

Take it from me, babes: there’s so many Amazons in the world, so many monstrous-feminine to enjoy! So I’ve gradually learned to look for the monstrous-feminine in ways that won’t harm me, that make me feel welcome in a world of light that feels more and more alien to me; to me, Hell feels like home the more time I spend with the people of Hell, all of us uniting against the state and its subjugated Hippolytas. It’s a tricky balance, one you can only learn not just by swimming with sharks, but playing with them constantly. Always playing, always building, always learning all at once! If you can get through a heartbreak emotionally intact, you’ll get the hang of being vulnerable and actively guarding yourself at the same time. It’s an art, not a science—one guided at times by instinct, raw emotion, and psychosexual energies, but also good habits that must become second-nature to best challenge state forces on a systemic level: history as toy-like in ways that yield emergent forms of Gothic poetics, thus actual liberation.

(artist: Crow)

This includes theory as something to revisit through our friends showing themselves off, the classics being the proverbial tip of the iceberg in terms of the scope and extent of Gothic-Communist development. Just as past Gothicists’ imperfect, semi-blind observations were based on older things brought forward and reinvented, we need to bring all of them forward as campy versions of themselves; i.e., to rival Shelley’s already skillful rivaling of Prometheus and Matthew Lewis’ own doctrine of palimpsests. Our bad echo is the ancient female monster of the ancient world described by Creed, except we’ve updated it with a monstrous-feminine, non-white, genderqueer dialog that has only recently emerged within Western spheres. But this always starts with history as something derelict; i.e., an “ancient” thing reassembled and pulled forwards from backwards, over and over across the mandala sands, to shift the cultural understanding of the imaginary past during class and culture warfare in a sex-positive, liberatory scheme. The ostensible quaintness of Radcliffe, Walpole or Lewis’ old-fashioned toys belies a chaotic and organic function to what we’re trying to reclaim and cultivate during our own camp: Medusa as an awesome poetic device whose “ancient” forms can evolve and change into fresh toy-like futures (of new emancipatory hauntologies), step-by-step, in present spheres mid-penetration.

Keep that in mind about Medusa as we proceed into the Monster Modules. It will apply to the monstrous-feminine as undead, demonic, and/or anthropomorphic; i.e., as something to phenomenologically rarefy in toy-like ways and relate to ontologically on an emotional level: through play and, at times, literal toys as sexualized, alien, fetish. Trauma under capital results from workers and nature exploited sexually by the state for profit; monsters aren’t just critical lenses, then, but sex toys that speak to psychosexual trauma as something to process and learn from through ludo-Gothic BDSM—i.e., its psychosexual gender expression that mirrors our dialectical-material reality as socio-sexual: a demon or piece thereof offering up fatal knowledge, mid-crisis, but also as we shall see next, decaying like a literal and figurative corpse (things known to fall apart under scrutiny and—pardon the crude joke—during sex). During liberation, there’s not much aesthetic difference. Form follows function insofar as function is determined by play guiding power in different directions during oppositional praxis’ interminable, ouroborotic  castle-narrative for or against the state.

To that, this chapter ends, and we’ll be diving into the Necropolis once again! Onto “Back to the Necropolis“!


Footnotes

[1] Not my brothers’ butt sex jokes, then, but something that externalizes abject things to converse adventuresomely with the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., pirates e.g., The Pirates of Dark Water (1991).

[2] This idea of disempowerment doesn’t just haunt bathrooms, nor the home as the place of women’s work, but the office space as a man’s woman where secretaries are both in demand and treated as unwelcome outsiders (a fantasy Harmony’s bondage shoot, a few pages back, helps articulate, face and critique through play).

[3]  Not just literal sex toys, but the Gothic mode of expression’s sexually charged and trauma-laden metal and rock ‘n roll, violent videogames, Gothic novels, horror movies, etc.

[4] “Look at the size of this thing. You think this came out of a chicken or something?”

[5] “Let me make this simple: Do what I say… OR I WILL KILL YOU!” Ostensibly a strict mommy dom, Tatou was something of a big softie when push came to kiss (to that, the movie has a somewhat dubious understanding of what consent is: through old French noirs).

[6] Re: “‘The Most Powerful Weapon You Have’: Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita“:

As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source).

[7] In a way, my exes knew me better than myself, because I wasn’t always actively thinking about my own psychosexual drives. I had to learn by getting “mated” in “chess.” Defeat is a powerful teacher. But I don’t want to hand it to them, though: I learned from their mistakes; re (from Volume Two, part one:

I suffered at their hands and benefitted from their actions because I slowly learned how to stand on my own two feet; i.e., to take what they (and my other exes) did to me and transform it into a message of Gothic healing and hope, of calculated risk doomsaying about state shift to promote Gothic Communism. I couldn’t have done that, on some level, without capital abusing me, but also my exes (that’s nothing to be proud of, on their ends, however) [source].

In other words, games under capital are driven by a desire to win and survive, but also commodify these devices in an unfair system furthered by the product as instruction. Under capital, life isn’t fair, but life could be if we developed a better system by changing the rules; i.e., through emergent gameplay during our magic circles, ludic contracts, Gothic BDSM, et al.

Book Sample: “‘Into the Toy Chest’ Opening and ‘Rape Play'”

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Update, 8/7/2024: Originally this piece was written for “Searching for Secrets.” On 6/14/2024, I moved the written material to the PDF manuscript of the Poetry Module (v1.2 onwards); today, I updated each promo page’s table of contents to reflect said change, too, meaning these transplanted posts are featured in the “Brace for Impact” table of contents.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Note: This subchapter discusses rape as something to critique through Gothic media. It contains no images of actual sexual abuse, but does include problematic Gothic media as something to critic in our usual approach (from the book/series disclaimer):

While explicitly criminal sexual acts, taboos and obscenities are discussed herein, no explicit illustrations thereof are shown, nor anything criminal; i.e., no snuff porn, child porn or revenge porn. It does examine things generally thought of as porn that are unironically violent. Examples of uncensored, erotic artwork and sex work are present, albeit inside exhibits that critique the obscene potential (from a legal standpoint) of their sexual content: “ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse” (source: Justice.gov). For instance, there is an illustrated example of uncensored semen—a “breeding kink” exhibit with zombie unicorns and werewolves (exhibit 87a)—that I’ve included to illustrate a particular point, but its purposes are ultimately educational in nature.

The point of this book isn’t to be obscene for its own sake, but to educate the broader public (including teenagers*) about sex-positive artwork and labor historically treated as obscene by the state. For the material herein to be legally considered obscene it would have to simultaneously qualify in three distinct ways (aka the “Miller” test):

    • appeal to prurient interests (i.e., an erotic, lascivious, abnormal, unhealthy, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion)
    • attempt to depict or describe sexual conduct in a patently offensive way (i.e., ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse)
    • lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

Taken as a whole, this book discusses debatably prurient material in an academic manner, depicting and describing sexual conduct in a non-offensive way for the express purpose of education vis-à-vis literary-artistic-political enrichment.

Into the Toy Chest: Gothic History as Toy-like Amongst Ourselves (Opening)

BDSM in popular media [canon] isn’t made to educate, but to shock naïve people looking for a thrill. It’s about as accurate as sex is during porn, tending to romanticize the therapeutic psychosexual elements divorced from performative context; i.e., merely showing them as they appear at first glance: recreations of traditional disempowerment, whose paralysis and vulnerable exposure hauntingly evoke real scenes of abuse; e.g., hair pulling and physical attacks, kidnappings with bindings and gags, rapes, drownings and murders—often by knife [canon synonymizes sex with violation, including abject reproduction: the murderous cock and womb of the father and mother but also their hideous “brood”]. The neophyte’s idea of what BDSM is often tries to mimic the trust-building exercise without understanding why it exists in a sex-positive [often trashy/pulpy] sense and why someone might try to perform it to achieve psychosexual catharsis that is often embroiled within self-destructive pathologies [the “call of the void”] seeking unironic harm; the novice counterfeit also tends to look like the expert performance at first glance. The difference lies not in the aesthetics but the skill level and intent, which can be hard to detect. Nevertheless, the fact remains that BDSM, when sex-positive, is built around community and trust as something to establish over time. It’s rehearsed over and over in a highly controlled environment [informed boundaries/consent, safewords] to prevent harm, hence the motto: “Hurt, not harm.”

Yet, there’s also the paradox of professional sex work, which capitalizes off hard kinks to turn a buck. There’s frankly nothing wrong with this, provided there’s a communal understanding encouraged by the paratext (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, Volume Zero (2023)

[artist: Cara Day]

Picking up from where “Herbos to Himbos, part two” left off…

In my usual style, this chapter was written backwards, making “Into the Toy Chest” the first-written, placed-last element thereof—one that considers playing with the toy-like past in two parts: among the parasocial nuts-and-bolts, and among friends as co-contributors to an ongoing poetic statement for or against the state. In turn, it considers the Gothic as toy-like insofar as it’s gleaned and understood through rape play (aka consent-non-consent) as executed between these two poles.

  • “Into the Toy Chest, part zero: A Note about Rape/Rape Play” (included in this post): Outlines rape and the Destroyer persona as something to camp during rape play per our definition of it previously introduced during “Psychosexual Martyrdom” (2024).
  • “Into the Toy Chest, part one: the Nuts and Bolts of Rape Play” (included in this post): Covers the nuts and bolts of Gothic history as toy-like through its parasocial, rape-play exchanges.
  • Into the Toy Chest, part two: My Experiences“: Observes the nuts and bolts of rape fantasies when reflecting on my interpersonal exchanges.

Into the Toy Chest, part zero: A Note about Rape/Rape Play; or, Facing the Great Destroyer

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

—Persephone van der Waard, “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022”

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

To prepare you, I want to extrapolate rape as I experienced it; i.e., as we shall use it as by previously citing “Psychosexual Martyrdom.” I want to expand on that quote a little; it’s a tough read, but it should prove vital in the grim chapters ahead: power is an illusion, but it is tied to forces that can drive you mad through echoes of your own doom assisted by social and material inequality weaponized by state forces!

Note: Originally posted on my old blog, I went onto include “Psychosexual Martyrdom” in this volume (which is available, as all of my books are, on my website). —Perse

Here is the sample, written after the murders of Nex Benedict and Aaron Bushell, which I had written about previously:

“Psychosexual” means “of sexuality and the mind,” generally trauma; I further liken it to conflict—i.e., conflicting mind and sex, or “battle sex” through rape fantasy, theatre and play. So while Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything in service to profit and all monsters are psychosexual to some degree, the chaos of iconoclastic monsters ultimately challenge the profit motive and its heteronormative, binarized theatrical language/performative roles (of sex and gender) as a delivery mechanism for orderly state abuse (canon vs camp); i.e., by anisotropically reversing Gothic poetic’s flow of power (often through deception, concealment and revelation—cryptonymy) to humanize workers in spite of Cartesian hegemony (and its grim harvests) and Capitalist Realism; e.g., terrorists and counterterrorists, but also heroes and villains (from my thesis volume): “All heroes are monsters, thus liminal expressions that are sexualized and gendered” (source). Challenging state monopolies by reversing the dialectical-material function of said labels (and their oft-pornographic poetics) is exactly what we must do in order to succeed. Monsters as (often queer) code, a messy shadow zone full of darkness visible. It’s where the magic (and the sex) happen.

All the while, surrender and segregation are no defense because the state requires criminals to exist inside harmful, highly unequal distributions of power (“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will” —Frederick Douglass). Instead, we must short-circuit the exchange of violence by humanizing ourselves as ordinarily being the givers and receivers of state harm made into something whose sex positivity—the giving and receiving of pleasure and pleasurable pain; i.e., sadists and masochists during sex-positive demon BDSM—of which the establishment cannot challenge: “The givers and receivers of a state-sanctioned conflict reveal both to be human, one losing its ability to receive punishment and the other to give it. Both must happen simultaneously and en masse for settler-colonialism to stop” (“Bushnell’s Requiem“). The state mustn’t colonize us through fascism, thus decaying into fractured forms of itself (and Capitalism) through medieval regressive defenses of capital; it must be developed before then, from moment to living moment, as gleaned from monstrous hauntology into something that stalls genocide altogether. Though violence and force are required to challenge the state, liberation comes not from sheer feat of arms, but rather from subversive and transgressive reclamation of monstrous symbols: a pedagogy of the oppressed that makes us human while presenting us as monsters abused by the state. It’s a tricky balance, mainly because violence as something to perform and receive are not the same thing despite often appearing identical; i.e., martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it (“rape” meaning [for our purposes] “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,” generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) [again, my emphasis]: finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).

Again, it’s tricky because mid-development, we will be criminalized regardless of what we do; but if criminals become human, then the state’s power crumbles, not ours. The paradox stems from the manner in which those cast as monsters are designed to threaten the state at all times—either by making demands that go outside their scope of influence, but also because our mere existence must threaten the state and its actors; i.e, because the state demands the arrangement as useful to them. To survive this clear-and-obvious clusterfuck, we must become precious, saintly and unkillable as monsters are, but also loved.

(artist: Lera PI)

I confess, this is not easy reading and sadly is only a taste of things to come. But, the rest of the chapter shall give you a means not only of healing from rape, but subverting its unironic Destroyer through rape-like theatre that puts “rape” in quotes. Sometimes this is less gentle than you might think, but often it occupies that “black Egyptian” hauntological sweet spot; i.e., trapped between reality and madness, danger and disco as liminal in another respect: exploitation and liberation felt in the same theatrical space, fucking to metal and combining operatic pleasure and non-harmful pain to evoke harm but not execute it!

Instead, “rape” becomes an aesthetic with a dark motherly persona emblematic of rape as something to heal from through bad echoes of itself. Thanks to capital, these can never be historically-materially divorced from actual injury and death, but per psychosexual theatre always sits adjacent to harm as something to learn from during calculated risk; i.e., as dark, stylish, and raw. This isn’t the case in the photo below—with UrEvilMommy and her partner always using condoms (from a shoot already featured in Volume Zero)—but therein lies the rub: little clues that tease such performances as “on the fence,” straddling that Goldilocks zone that hurts so good; i.e., like a witch’s broom mounted, mid-flight! “Fuck me like you mean it, you bastard! Like an animal! Give me your power to make Hell on Earth something sex-positive for now until the sun burns out!” It’s a taunt, even at times a bit of a goofy one; e.g., Arnold Schwarzenegger’s supremely hilarious Predator (1987) bit: “Come on… Come on! Do it! Do it! Come on. Come on! Kill me! I’m here! Kill me! I’m here! Kill me! Come on! Kill me! I’m here! Come on! Do it now! Kill me!” (source). He’s a bad sub, but it’s still a submissive gesture!

This is a cryptomimetic byproduct, one teased at centuries ago by Marx. As he put it,

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language (source: “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” 1852).

Now camp Marx. Put that pussy on the chainwax! It’s not a means of pacification—to make us laugh, cry and/or cum to hold us back—but a means of waking up our dormant empathy as a kind of “darkness visible”; i.e., a sleeper that, once collectively awake, breaks Capitalist Realism once and for all!

(artist: UrEvilMommy)

Into the Toy Chest, part one: the Nuts and Bolts of Rape Play

The reader identifies (broadly and loosely) with the predicament as a totality: the ritualized conflict that takes place among the major figures of a Gothic fiction (within the significant boundaries of that “enclosed space”) represents in externalized form the conflict any single woman might experience. The reader will project her feelings into several characters, each one of whom will carry some element of her divided “self.” A woman pictures herself as trapped between the demands of two sorts of men—a “chaste” lover and a “demon” lover—each of whom is really a reflection of one portion of her own longing. Her rite of passage takes the form of (1) proclaiming her right to preside as mistress over the Gothic structure and (2) deciding which man (which form of “love”) may penetrate its recesses! (source).

—Cynthia Wolff, “The Radcliffean Gothic Model” (1979)

(artist: Robert A. Multari)

Part one considers the nuts and bolts of rape play through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., and rape/death fantasies rescued from Radcliffe’s skilled-and-yet-unskilled status (from my thesis volume); e.g., the knife dick:

“Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the décor and costumes and blasphemous rites” (re: “Fascinating Fascism“). Needless to say that nearly two centuries later, Sontag’s opinion of BDSM is limited to a harmful canonical version of Sadomasochism that frankly is way off the mark in terms of what sex positivity’s entire gamut entails: “Sadomasochism has always [emphasis, me] been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love” (ibid.). She completely ignores the matter of degree and negotiation, and the fact that sex isn’t even automatically included in BDSM:

So what about the intersection of kink and sex? When is this appropriate and what are the guidelines?

It’s a tricky topic. I remember telling a friend who is pretty vanilla but curious how kink scenes are distinct activities. She said, “So, wait, there’s no sex?” And I remember struggling to answer this. For me, most kink scenes are separate from sexual encounters, even if sex may follow a scene. This is very partner dependent, but for me, a kink scene requires aftercare before there is sex. And so far this was almost always the case for me – negotiation, scene, aftercare, possibility of sex [source: Victor’s “Intersection of Kink and Sex,” 2019].

In other words, if Sontag was “vanilla,” then Radcliffe was barely even ice cream [whose naughty operatic fantasies are unironically violent and sit on the ledge of threatened morality—what Ash, in Alien, would call “delusions,” exhibit 51a]. But their combined inexperience paradoxically stems from dark fantasies invented from the open secret of sex abuse turned into urban legends (source).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

As we dive into the history side of monsters as psychosexual poetic devices, then, I want you to recall my description of Harmony Corrupted:

the proverbial flipside [“horror”] annihilating the viewer through the self-same castled-buttocks, hefty flesh and raunchy feast for the senses: fatal food belying wild hunger behind the veil of lost innocence, paradise lost (the poisoned apple), the feral lycanthrope’s mask-like visage and costumed body alluding to a secret self, an animal side ritualistically evoked not by a literal magic potion, but the power of sex-positive ritual and psychosexual sexual healing. […] she looks good, mid-“death,” but whose surface crackles with untold power and colossal weight, thrown around with the scope and scale of vacant planets. A very freaky girl, in other words, she confronts what she fears as something to reclaim: her own body and gender as something to play with through Gothic mechanisms of power exchange and forbidden knowledge (source).

To this, Harmony’s brand vibes with mine. She becomes something to dress or undress by virtue of mutual consent; i.e., as something established and executed between us and invigilated by me after the fact by someone who wanted to be invigilated and routinely gave me feedback, mid-invigilation. It was less a tornado or force of nature (as women are so often compared to) spiriting me away to a magic other world, and more something close by and spritely—like a slutty fairy with a record shop, but cutely nerdy and quietly wacky like Senan Byrne’s “Helium Balloons” skit (2016) taking me somewhere over the rainbow but somehow down to earth:

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In short, Harmony participated and played with me, the result being something weird, toy-like and fun: Gothic Slutty Barbie™ minus Mattel’s corporate tampering! It’s a bit kooky and comes with all the usual hanky-panky shenanigans, but also funny and sweet, meaning relatable/delightful BTS stories springing forth (next page); i.e., while that cute little tongue pops out of that ostensibly “dead” mouth, its owner choked by invisible hands round her throat (fetishes and clichés equate to “necrophilia” placed into quotes—the corpse bride/mommy dom in corpse paint). The desire to say “it ain’t easy being green” while simultaneously saying “bright green!” to BDSM rape play is one hell of a tightrope, but a fun one if you know what you’re doing and have a good playmate. You feel that tension and want to rip each other’s clothes off and get all up in there. Into her “toy chest,” indeed!

More to the point, entry into someone’s “forbidden zone” is established through trust and boundary-building exercises that play (and lay) on the poetic devices Volume Two, part one outlined:

Our views are shaped by those we meet and fall in love with in sequence and upon reflection, who we see as human by virtue of common ground and interests amid differences—a pedagogy of the oppressed relaid in Gothic poetics as recursive, concentric, anisotropic, and ergodic (endlessly tiered and self-contained, determined by flow and non-trivial effort); it’s about tearing down harmful boundaries and installing healthy ones through different points of view like teaching, medicine and the medieval, but also selective absorption, a confusion of the senses and magical assembly to add to our Song of Infinity (all specialized poetic devices the medieval prep section will explore further). In our hands, ludo-Gothic BDSM is a potent means of establishing and negotiating boundaries—to perform and play with power (and trauma) where it exists, in the shadow zone.

Friends are made through communicating boundaries and being open with those we connect with while living in situations that require us to use code to portray our human condition but also oppression and rebellion. In short, we identify as monsters who love and see each other as human in spite of those who, one way or another, side with the colonizer group (source).

Harmony is literally the poster girl for this idea—the wellspring for which our ideas flowed through me invigilating her as we related to each other, mid-poiesis! I want to include her because she’s valuable, friendly and fun—is a wonderful friend, student, playmate, and comrade! I feel very safe working with her and value our friendship beyond words; i.e., as something to pass along to the next generation: to learn from us in oral, written, and visual forms they can digest and create fresh recipes with. Pay attention, kids; this is how it’s done!

It’s a work-in-process, one made in real time that allows for all the fun weirdness that intimacy equates to. For example, Harmony posed awhile back for this cover shot (which eventually became the cover of Volume Two, part one). She was wearing black lipstick that, in a later sex tape she made for me with her SO, actually wasn’t “smear proof” as advertised! It kept getting all over his big fat cock during oral. So Harmony had to use a burgundy red called “Bauhaus,” instead… which caused the algorithm to send her “#bauhausisracist.” We had a laugh about that, both of us enjoying killing our darlings mid-discourse, per our overlapping Gothic voyeurism and exhibitionism; i.e., as an opportunity to expose harmful bad actors playing the rebel (an ” apocalypse” in zombie terms). This, in turn, reminded me of my past spent in Manchester, England, and Zeuhl (speaking of bad actors) showing me “Bella Lugosi’s Dead” (1982). I said, “I’m more of a postpunk girl,” to which Harmony replied, “Yeah same here! Post punk, EBM and ethereal is my stuff!” We exchanged some music, back and forth, but she also said she’d make me a playlist.

Then, we had a play session and it was very relaxing and fun—like sex in a graveyard, but from the comfort and warmth of our own homes! It’s ultimately not a privilege, but a basic human right! It’s all there in our cryptomimetic gloomth, our castle-narrative funneling along the Gothic chronotope as a meta dialog between cuties: delicious, sexy echopraxis! “Put your mysterium tremendum in my uncanny valley!” It disintegrates, reassembling amid vitality as decaying into fresh life! Just look at those cute little boobies, that tight little pussy waiting to be stuffed (the context of mutual consent being as much Harmony taking the images for me, but also me selecting them and her approving my selections in real time):

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In other words, women classically are made to fear themselves projected onto abject counterparts, but also to campily interrogate or embody that in different toy-like ways: torturous mutilation, death and rape fantasies to play with differently than cis-het boys (or TERFs) would. The latter approach the memento mori as thrashed on like training dummies during overtly phallic emulations of war and mortal combat; i.e., Man Box, when irony is truant; e.g., Kentucky Ballistics’ “Medieval Weapons vs The Modern Warrior” (next page, 2024). Women are expected to rely on men for projection, but must likewise grit and bear it when white knights turn out to be black (whose decay is expected by the narrative as a historical-material one—ACAB extending to canonical knights and castles).

However vengeful, women are expected grant softer and more literally sexual analogs for “rape” in quotes (or not): poison, resentment, and treachery as the universal recipient for penetration, not guns and bullets given back in kind. They can do other things, but these become Amazonian as a form of monstrous-feminine, which the state will try to monopolize as toy-like under the elite’s thrall: Golding’s conch, except it shoots bullets to keep the peace.

To subvert that, we must toy with all of the above as something to take away from TERFs as bad actors, players, educators during Demon BDSM (and all token agents). Expressed through our bodies and roleplay (re: Harmony and I, having fun) as monstrous-feminine, there is often a neo-medieval flavor that recovers from trauma acted out versus contributing to it in classically male forms (to steer us clear of state harm and bad education, in other words): knives, bullets and clubs (stab, shoot, punch); i.e., melee and projectile violence that kills someone’s enemies, meaning the state’s by proxy. Every execution needs a cop, thus a victim; but dated, second wave forms like Dead Calm often (as stated, earlier) deliberately pit the resident white cutie against a demon lover (white or black) like Radcliffe’s sort, over two centuries backward. It’s regressive, but also exclusionary as a kind of decay reserved for “special women”; i.e., for good girls (married to white men, or at least white-functioning men): childishly fighting over the same gun as a police tool in settler-colonial territories (the rapist, in Zane’s case, scrapping with the British naval officer’s wife. She can throw down, doing so as the secret warrior princess [with auburn, curly hair] who doubtless has her own bigotries effaced by making the rapist white).

These are broad claims. I’d like to spend the rest of part one articulating the nuts-and bolts of this poetic, toy-like violence—in essence, to give room to critique the unironic forms of its theatrical iterations, extending pervasively into the Gothic and sex work, including guns and cars tied to heroic action (echoes of Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes and my monomythic critiques at large). Then, we’ll move into part two: my life as a poetic, iconoclastic, interpersonal response to all of these parasocial things! It’s gonna go quick, and we’ll cover a lot of ground over a very short period—just enough to get my points across…

First and foremost, let’s consider sex and force as dimorphized in toy-like ways (with history being such toys coming to life). Because of the heteronormative, false-dimorphic nature of capital, such toy-like violence divides into male violence as something to give and receive in service to the profit motive; i.e., attacking nature-as-monstrous-feminine, extending the dialectic of the alien into violent, Cartesian displays whose shows of force are lethal and regressive: whack, stab, and shoot Medusa! Rape her zombie cunt; i.e., own your enemy through deadly psychosexual force, aka “extreme prejudice.” It’s everywhere, so we must learn to laugh at (thus critique) such things through play that extends to how others do so as well, but differently as a matter of dialectical-material praxis: opposing force!

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a2a: Artist: Kentucky Ballistics. The Gothic explores psychosexual violence as something to play with in non-harmful forms, except the duality of language implements BDSM as something that can always be good or bad relative to state dogma; i.e., as something to enforce [or otherwise encourage] through terror and force, meaning police violence as de facto and stochastic—as much meted out by vigilantes as by official agents within the same half-real theatre. For sexist men [from Volume Two, part one]:

humans aren’t cruel by nature; they’re taught to be cruel to serve profit during settler colonialism at home and abroad. Accustomed to the Man Box, boys grow into young men, then adults who maintain a cruel streak fueled by us versus them; they fall prey to guilty pleasure, wishful thinking and the pleasure principle as Pavlovian. They’re always chasing that fix and cannot conceive of anything outside of it: a murderous flow state whose headspace is conducive to violence against the enemy as alien. In turn, the enemy is “out there,” so that is where men go—to war and for marriage (military exogamy and war brides); i.e., war booty to drag back to the ancestral home as restored from a mysterious decay through far-off bloodshed [source].

In short, capital is criminogenic relative to nuclear-familial dogma leading to domestic abuse that synonymizes sex and force to harmful extremes during theatrical rites of passage: lethal force carried out with actual killing tools [or improvised ones] breaking one’s “toys” [a big problem when people are treated like toys, but also bodies to count[1]] as us-versus-them analogs; i.e., so-called “male violence” per an unironic “Male Gothic” speaking to the implements of psychosexual medieval theatre used by heteronormative [or token] agents serving profit by hammering anything that sticks out [above]: sexual violence as punitive play/retribution.

[source: The Slow Mo Guys’ “75mph Bird to the Face with Adam Savage,” 2024]  

It’s a silly thing to do, of course, and often a very funny one ipso facto. On a domestic level, this historically-materially turns to lethal force by the male/tokenized side against the female/monstrous-feminine side as indicative of the larger structural exploitation built into itself; i.e., harvesting nature as monstrous-feminine, code for “rape and kill.” The “problem” is always there, always something to turn into “merch” given the right tool as being worshipped for doing so. This dimorphism ties to capital and its usual heteronormative tropes/false binaries expanded wider and wider in an ever-growing market roping workers into the Battle of the Sexes. As Snake Eater [2004] shows us, this kind of gun customization and worship [which extends to cars and bodies] wasn’t available at a public level in the 1960s; it also shows Snake [the future Big Boss] nerding out over the future of the world in his hands… all while ignoring the female Russian spy seducing him as much with the gun as her own “ballistics” [very phallic]. Communism one, Solid Snake zero! To quote the man himself:

“The feeding ramp is polished to a mirror sheen. The slide’s been reinforced. And the interlock with the frame is tightened for added precision. The sight system is original, too. The thumb safety is extended to make it easier on the finger. A long-type trigger with non-slip grooves. A ring hammer… The base of the trigger guard’s been filed down for a higher grip. And not only that, nearly every part of this gun has been expertly crafted and customized. Where’d you get something like this?” [source].

There’s a lot going on—a kind of story-within-a-story whose espionage and counter-espionage will become especially relevant in part two. We’re all monsters and heroes on the same stage, wearing the same masks, driving the same heroic vehicles, sporting all manner of weapons and strange powers. But for all this pornographic liminality and potential for rebellion in service to workers, sex work is guarded in the classic sense: by harem soldiers; i.e., the submissive wifely girl by the battle-hardened warrior nuns pledging service to the state [re: The Monk]! Just as you can’t just peel off your clothes and simply say you’re safe, you can’t just hand a bitch a gun and be like, “Go shoot the enemy!” Context matters, as does instruction as anisotropic through Gothic poetics; i.e., as forever at work vis-à-vis class warriors and traitors sending power in one of two directions:

 

[artist, top-right: Gala Ann; top-left: Nonneim; bottom: Blur Squid] 

American culture is Pax Americana, aka “peace through strength,” which not only builds on top of genocide, but aims to turn the world into a car lot and gun shop expressed through people-like avatars of such things[2]. It’s not whether these things are needed, but that they dogmatically turn into porn that operates along the usual nuclear model to the detriment of all workers and nature, mid-harvest. Through Capitalist Realism, guns and cars become an essential way of life; i.e., killing the planet by virtue of war and rape as a business, one where gun/car culture represents privatization as Marx envisioned it: factories [which Henry Ford defended and upheld per his own fascist ties]. To quote the man himself:

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realizations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital (source: “Private Property and Communism,” 1844).

Per my arguments, this usage translates historically-materially into rape minus quotes. For our own sake, then, we must challenge that with our own camp, our own ludo-Gothic BDSM. As my short essay “Making Marx Gay” [2024] demonstrates, this means camping Marx as well! Anything they put into the world becomes something they cannot exclusively own; i.e., we can camp it.)

Sex and force are two sides of the Imperium; i.e., ubiquitously sponsored and disseminated by state proponents in mock-up, “faraway” displacements making settler colonialism seem “ancient” (the ghost of the counterfeit), ready to abject time and time again. As such, the female/tokenized side of the settler-colonial project’s binarized thinking is terror as called by Asprey, “the kissing cousin of force.” Under canonical essentialism, force executes terror as a flipside the state tries to monopolize against its enemies; i.e., both being given and received to harvest nature as alien/monstrous-feminine.

(artist: Hanage Missile)

In this praxial vacuum, consent is the first casualty thereof, sex and force meted out by those with no reverses for nuance or kindness, save towards a singular pet perhaps (usually an animal or a bride); e.g., Samus saving the animals while blowing up Zebes, eventually decaying into a shadow she will abject to whitewash empire while decaying herself (re: the euthanasia effect).

Faced with heteronormative vanguards, those essentialized as “women” according to their biology are forced to sell these products as canonically essential from a likewise geographical and morphological degree; i.e., sexualized by capital like women are at all points/perspectives, becoming an extension of them as eroticized inside the same police dialogic: of enslavement and profit, gun and car porn sitting on the image of the surface as something to seek revenge with—through tokenized police violence during the usual decay of punk, feminist and genderqueer culture.

Metroidvania or not, videogames—like their older palimpsests—are rife with this spirit of decay. It sits inside them and travels across all manner of performative interpretations (e.g., cosplayers, speedrunners, critics, etc). As such, they decay and become the fascist knife dick to rape nature (and those of nature) with; i.e., the Cartesian lie of “thinking beings” vs “extended beings.” The former are actually lobotomized to kill the usual colonized parties as darkness, outside, incorrect, etc: little mouths eating for the big mouth of the state, siphoning power always and forever towards the state nucleus and its Skeksis-grade oligarchy in half-real forms.

For example, just look at these two ghouls, Mark Hamill sucking the state’s dick; they’re both pieces of shit—bad actors merging fantasy and reality as bouncing back and forth through backroom deals; i.e., through the useful myth of Gothic ancestry—but the register of their hypocrisy converges between two men on two different stages: of war as something to—per Lucas—whitewash as “faraway” during billionaire Marxism (which really is just Capitalism, thus not Marxist). Yet, relegated to the alien halls of American power, the nature of this shared politic remains “theatrical” for both men. Good or bad, power is simply a relationship between actors serving workers or the state. These two assclowns are serving the state, thus the profit motive, as genocidal by design:

(source: Becca Wood’s “Mark Hamill asks President Joe Biden if he can call him ‘Joe’-bi-Wan Kenobi,” 2024)

Regarding the tokenized side of such betrayals, Amazons appear as knights do, but the function of the armor is usually inverted, stripped down to the skin as something to drape across a car’s hood, ornament-style. Moreover, the same underlying syndromes still exist—e.g., virgin/whore, mirror and compartment, etc—meaning that somewhere, some girl isn’t just being reduced to a militant sex object, but a dutiful wallflower actually getting shot by some family annihilator treating his wife and children exclusively as his: his car to ride and crash—to punish when they’ve “been bad” (running away to have extramarital sex).

Under this patriarchal installment, the man is generally the giver of violence towards disobedient property as—per neoliberal Capitalism—made inside a given area and haunted by a ghost of the counterfeit that must be routinely abjected at home as alien. This haunting extends to guns, cars, and the toy-like force tied to them and their manufacture as indebted to the usual trifectas and monopolies; i.e., regardless of where on the male/female dichotomy one lands. It’s toy-like, but harmful, so we must play with it as a Shakespearean might: on the stage as half-real! Unlike Hamill and Biden, who are accustomed to power and privilege, we’ll have to work and act all the harder to make our message heard!

(artist: Steven Stahlberg)

Capital is ultimately a Cartesian (settler-colonial, heteronormative) delivery system that biologically essentializes dimorphized sex and violence. The problem with American gun/car culture—and Gothic hyphenations of these (and other morphological forms of male violence; e.g., knives and car sex, above)—is they aren’t just treated with respect, but worshiped as canonically mutilative: the white woman escaping into unironic rape fantasies that lionize American and its usual Man Box benefactors; i.e., those emblematic of the profit motive as abject and romanticized per the Western, noir or Metroidvania, etc (Joe Biden, with his stupid aviators, thinks he’s a cowboy-style badass; i.e., the emperor has no clothes). Blame Radcliffe for that one, white women pacifying Imperialism while paradoxically exposing it. Nevertheless, the Gothic canonically offers up a measure of one’s manhood, meaning “knife dick” toys to play with that define women (specifically white cis-het women and various token examples) by how they are tortured by men. In turn, they shape and maintain how the women triangulate for these men when ranking rape vis-à-vis various minorities they gatekeep.

Skewered, class traitors attack potential dissidents through cultural appropriation: victimization as a witch-cop veil for TERF-style assaults dressed up as “survival.” Radicalization towards the state is effectively random, but with odds bettered by dogma (socio-material conditions loading the dice), it’s a gamble the state with happily take time and time again; i.e., to roll on repeat in service to profit. It’s all a game to them, a harmful one.

Guns and other weapons remain central, insofar as they are the expected result of any such rhetoric; car culture gets the vigilante to and fro (and at times weaponizes to run down protestors and bystanders alike), and it all bleeds together like a bad Saturday morning cartoon: the heroine, her car and her weapon, her outfit all on-brand as “fash.” Except no matter how much respect you give them, fascism serves only one purpose: to kill for the state defending itself mid-decay (which cars generally deliver to sites of such Holocaust-by-bullet violence; i.e., as something that must be built to provide: garages, parking lots, highways, etc). They aren’t simply expensive toys, then, but killing devices made to threaten others with: a vampiric mad dog.

By extension, those who wield (or receive) them become arbiters of state force much like a medieval knight would on their armored steed; those on the wrong side of the law become desperados, terrorists, outlaws, etc, including sex workers regularly policed by medievalized regression (which is what fascism is). White or black, the state’s proponents are something to be feared, including by white women (the classic Gothic readership) enforcing this fortress-grade xenophobia through their own compelled dysfunction. Emblematic of the nuclear model’s “teenage rebellion,” they grow threatened by imaginary scapegoats projected onto real-world groups; i.e., harmful stereotypes tied to profit; e.g., the lie of trans women merely being “men in women’s dresses,” and “all black men raping white women,” etc—mostly myths built around reactive violence, but lucrative ones popularized during moral panic as capital decays (versus targeting fascism and the elite, which we must do).

On the other hand, the state will routinely target a person forced to identify around their female biology as monstrous-feminine: a thing to protect in bad faith, but also to slay through the male/token body doubling the state’s carried weapons—their executioner and victim. It’s so very easy for the cartoon Communist to become fascist in centrist yarns: mad Medusa insane with psychosexual fury as something to sexualize in defense of capital. She becomes as toy-like as a gun, a car-like machine girl who can be scapegoated by capital, but also deputized by its decaying agencies: to assist in a return to greatness. Such give and take is always made to further consolidate state power as never really surrendering anything.

(artist: Sykosan)

Forms follow function, then, insofar as power normally flows towards the state as arbitrated by state control over Gothic poetics. People are not machines, but can be made machine-like; i.e., through bio-power-style insect politics relative to the gun/car culture around them as dogmatizing guns, cars, and girls (all expensive commodities) during us versus them. Cars and guns create far more problems than they solve, and women threatened by perceived dangers help the elite stay in power (versus asymmetrical warfare weaponizing stolen ordinance for a postcolonial aim): by redirecting privileged worker anger towards those with less privilege coded as “threats” in dogmatic bad faith.

State power decays towards fascism, but genocide under “peaceful” conditions is equally present-if-mendacious pareidolia; i.e., a menticidal, gut-punch lie to tell whenever the white castle darkens: “There is no genocide!” To that, there seriously needs to be a lot less guns, cars, and weaponized bodies in the world (the warship, left, haunted by the ghost ship in a fourth-dimension sense); i.e., being worshiped on altars due to the Military Industrial Complex and copaganda selling war toys to kids that mirror the killing doubles kids are expected to grow into: waves of terror and force.

Instead, there needs to be more people being treated as human while playing with toy-like iterations of these things; i.e., what’s known in Biblical language as “hammering swords into ploughshares,” and generally associated with the end of the world. Per Capitalist Realism, America laying down its arms—thereby converting them permanently into tools of peace—is entirely unthinkable to capital because guns/cars and female/monstrous-feminine enslavement (and the Protestant work ethic attached to them in the nuclear family model on all registers) is holy insofar as capitalistic hegemony is sacred. In short, it’s the same-old fragile, trigger-happy dogma.

(artist: The Art of Vero)

As such, women become turned into cargo—”built,” that is, like a nice car/gun (or some such weapon) would be—but also operating as a model usually does under patriarchal influence; i.e., to swap in and out insofar as a given woman (especially a non-white woman, let alone a GNC monstrous-feminine) will historically-materially codify along the lines of such entities’ power installments. Per the canonical Gothic, this means without any agency save what they’re reduced to within material culture indicating nature’s subjugation to serve profit; i.e., guns and cars, but also the girls tied to them as the measure of a man’s success by virtue of implied conquest: their “parts” owned and assembled by him as capital reduces to through its daily operations, moving money and materials through nature in war-like, rapacious ways.

As such, women (especially Indigenous women/women of color) become the beautiful shadow—the ghost-like unicorn tied to efficient profit that, per enshittification, exploits and infantilizes them as a ripe harvest to divvy up and exploit, but not before presenting in public spaces like Halloween candy fetishizing the ghost of the counterfeit. Such beauties are classically naked-and-clothed all at once, viewed from the front and the back as something to “hit,” and mistreat through impostor accounts leaking the original material; i.e., as fruit from another planet, the Global South. All remain as something to carve up but whose carving haunts the criminalized romance such bodies are forced to align with; i.e., guns, drugs, sex and fast cars/women tied to the usual siphoning of resources from colonized lands at home and abroad. Capital loses control over wild things, precisely so it can seize control again and move money through nature. It’s a con.

Volume One examined Nya Blu in this respect:

[artist, right: Nya Blu]

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

The same idea applies to Nya as “comparable”; i.e., to other models being mistreated by capital as toying with their rights: something to weaponize, labor-wise, against the colonized group on various registers and at different locations. All maintain some aspect of this colonial character even in domestic spheres.

(artist: Lexi Love)

To that, Lexi Love is yet-another-resurrection of the whore side of the virgin/whore binary—stupid hot and dummy thicc, but a dark Madonna who’s ultimately “off limits” save in cheap, replicate copies: photos, videos, and other merch-style offshoots of the original. All constitute a parasocial, predatory means of rarefying nature as something to conquer by men—to “come and get” like pigs to the trough (a comment on the men bred on Lexi’s likeness, not the lady herself as a person); i.e., nature as food (re: Volume One), cultivated and feasted on, over and over through the favor of the gods pimping out nature not just as female, but monstrous-feminine; e.g., the lady of the lake, Aphrodite, Medusa, etc.

Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. I would extend this to nature deifying under capital (and its predecessors); i.e., into something men can chase and claim through force, not consent. Said forces decay inside an arrangement that worsens by virtue of optics; the exploitation is universal, moderate or not. So while fatness is something altogether healthy (and desirable) under natural circumstances, capital treats it merely as something to milk and abuse for profit. The so-called “temple” becomes haunted by the historical-material abuse of a people that—if not Lexi, herself—nevertheless look like Lexi. She becomes unfairly privileged in a system where relatively few people get to enjoy such “success”: a princess, a sex symbol, an icon. She might seem mute, then, but there’s power in her silent smile and shapely body the elite can never monopolize:

(artist: Lexi Love)

Both ladies are industry pros, to be sure, which the state ultimately treats as expensive merchandise of a non-white variety to flaunt and exploit like a mountain of cocaine. Pushed into the streets of American cities, they featured within sites of imperial consumption deep inside the settler colony’s mother territories: to be feasted on by sex-starved white people slumming through harmful “jungle-fever fantasies,” then discarded by virtue of their raunchiest material being all over Google at the touch of a key (out of respect for Lexi and Nya, those images are not shown here; these images are from fan accounts that, as far as I can tell, are legit). In terms of spices, materiel, and “booty” as delivered through force, these girls are queenly pursuits (the ass that launched 1,000 ships) haunted by drug wars treating their flesh as the ultimate high:

 

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a2a1: Artist, top: Lexi Love; bottom: Nya Blu. It’s possible to appreciate these women as sexy and exotic while also acknowledging their human status as exploited. They might technically be clothed; their bodies still swell against all manner of skimpy-but-tight garments. The women aren’t inevitably stripped of just these, either, but of market value by various persons flooding said market with something to drive people wild with: stolen labor per a larger settler-colonial addiction that mistreats the models [who are probably well-paid, but whose image or likeness becomes branded or owned by the companies who hire them]. Such leaks are tremendously unfair to Lexi and Nya, who are framed as either “teenage” [note the braces] or “dark maternal jungle bunny”; i.e., as yet-another-form-of-nature-being-harvested-as-monstrous-feminine: a castle-like body to besiege, bought-and-paid for per a settler-colonial scheme whose shelf life is radioactive. Yet the show must go on, reducing them—however lovely they might appear—to sex objects inside a highly racist industry[3a] exploiting them for their labor [and non-white bodies] chased by white cis-het men as the universal clientele.

 Volume One likened this cycle as a liminal hauntology inside capital; i.e., raping Medusa per the castle as dislocated, viewed on the horizon:

Such a castle’s nightmarish presence denotes potential mayhem tied to one’s habitat; i.e., through the liminal hauntology of war colonizing nature and those tied to nature. When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn’t spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics’ endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains with counterterror [source].

[artist: Nya Blu]

So whatever power women like Nya or Lexi have—and duplicates of them who survive in the same predatory business, including others of a less-than-celebrity status—it collectively lives in the shadows of a wider exploitation hinted at by the long shadows these ladies cast. They embody the harvest as something to reclaim inside of its American hauntologies—on the surface of the skin, behind phone screens, as statuesque castle-like bodies in a traveling mise-en-abyme. They are legend, but in ways that potentially yield Richard Matteson’s fearsome undead made into a liberatory device: Medusa, thick and full, threatening to break free, getting down to business.)

All the while, white women look at them in horror and disgust, but also confused empathy as someone who is policed differently relative to the same shared characteristics: “woman is other” something we must extend to all oppressed groups treated as monstrous-feminine, not just thicc white or black cis-het women! The same critical lens we applied to Peele works here, then: Anytime someone tries to make you cum as a clever distraction from state criticism—especially while serving the profit motive—they’re enacting state apologia. We need to think through sex/rape play in ways that prevent genocide for all peoples, including sex workers exploiting others through themselves as selling out

Note: This isn’t a comment on Soon2BSalty! She’s awesome and my working experience with her was perfectly fine [and made a nice piece of art]! Go support her work! —Perse

(artist: Soon2BSalty)

Per my work as done with all my friends’ help[3], we’re exploring the opposite side of Capitalist Realism’s harmful, myopic/panoptic refrains well beyond Ellen Moers’ dated “Female Gothic”; i.e., to re-envision Matthew Lewis’ “Male Gothic” as a toy-like monstrous-feminine whose 21st century camp provides ironic rape play. Such irony expands “sodomy” and witchcraft to all forms of queerness/monstrous-feminine under attack by bloodthirsty straight dudes and token agents; i.e., serving profit as a settler-colonial structure pimping nature out: what TERFs call “men in dresses” regarding trans women and “foolish girls duped by a global conspiracy” regarding trans men (with enbies and ace people facing their own discrimination). So while people generally like a dash of splatter with their theatrically rough sex (e.g., Romeo and Juliet‘s graveyard duel: “Tempt not a dangerous man!”), we want to expand the view of the oppressed beyond white cis-het women/tokenized sex workers; i.e., as historically triangulating against/policing other oppressed peoples to receive the state’s equality of convenience, post-betrayal.

As such, we’ll conclude part one of the subchapter with a few more points on the nuts and bolts of interpersonal Gothic poetics; following that, part two will consider the toy-like pedagogy of Gothic poetics per my own experiences with various cuties—my exes, but also my current partners as real people, not parasocial exchanges.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

We all have the power to work together for or against the state. Revolutionary cryptonymy dabbles in power as something to—like the state—temporarily surrender before taking it back. And to be completely honest, losing control/sharing power is fun under sex-positive scenarios. Except the Destroyer can’t be sex-positive unless it demonstrably challenges the cycling of profit, thus the state’s unironic war and rape of nature-as-monstrous-feminine. This arbitrates as a matter of Gothic counterculture, civil rights and social justice decided by workers, not the state (and its pulverized, accommodated intellectuals).

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

As an iconoclastic device, then, ludo-Gothic BDSM plays with rape through ace-leaning nudism and unequal power exchange between artists and muses, doms and subs. All work together to a) comment on systemic harm through calculated risk, and b) to cooperate through our crossed wires’ survival mechanisms warped by trauma—in short, so we can function as people and have (relatively) healthy relationships, sexual or otherwise: we’re not toys for you to abuse or use to abuse others with like you might your favorite gun, car or sex object. This applies to me and Harmony Corrupted as FWBs as we negotiated, but also my friendship with Blxxd Bunny as a predominantly ace sex worker I can proudly feature time and time again! On top of that, I can invigilate/write about both cuties separately and/or together (over the next few pages) despite them having never met!

Some cuties cast big shadows. Like Harmony Corrupted, Bunny corrupts icons simply by existing in ways ironic to capitalistic dogma (which is inflexible, rigid, unable to change). Each cutie amounts, in praxial-poetic terms, to size difference challenging history as a giant composite thing their own contributions threaten with a dialectical-material opposite; i.e., in the same historical-material loop of pilfering stuff for different ends; re: “And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service.”

Except doubles serve workers or the state. Camp Marx, remember? Debate his ghost to weaponize such spirits to our cause as an ever-evolving one! During a given counterfeit’s decay, its gigantic dogma remains; e.g., Lady Justice. We can double that, take power back for ourselves; i.e., from Ozymandias, who loses power mid-entropy and takes it in again, but for a moment does not have it securely in his grip (the Shadow of Pygmalion).

Even so, the flow and spread of power can seem hideously uneven—like a black hole’s sucking in planets and spitting out single atoms from Hawking’s radiation—but the state only appears so powerful. The paradox of hyperreality is decay invades itself during Capitalist Realism, giving us room to work, thus the ability to install our own doubles to reclaim the desert of empire behind their decaying maps and galleries. The icons are always in motion, framed in different ways to achieve different ends:

(source: Bryan Rolli’s “Rush to Release Photo Outtakes from Moving Pictures Shoot,” 2021)

Fret not, lovelies, what Rush called Moving Pictures is hardly a new concept. Indeed, ambiguously gay men like Walpole and Lewis recognized through aesthetics regarding power (and aliens) as forever alive; i.e., by virtue of us haunted by the unstable, volatile past swimming all around us—to frame but also assemble like a giant or castle (or a giant, Voltron-style bunny mech) to thump capital’s ass with. It becomes a war whose mise-en-abyme is concentric, embroiled in chaos but able to move and challenge things that seem “immovable” (from Volume Zero):

The mise-en-abyme [“place in abyss”] is classically portrayed as heraldry—the coat of arms, as per Bakhtin’s “dynastic primacy and hereditary rites” of the Gothic chronotope—emblazoned on the knights’ shields, banners and killing implements belonging to the same “walking castles”: castle-narrative becomes something not just to walk around inside one castle, but between castles, outside of castles, inside the giant knight as a castle-in-a-castle; straight castles and gay castles, etc (source).

Any body-like castle or castle-like body we can do, too—our own Trojan Bunnies: “Stare and tremble!” But these can be arranged inside of an exhibit of pastiche, of praxis remediating for workers next to older examples that copied themselves to serve capital: it showcases the constant reassembly during oppositional synthesis.

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a2a1b1: Left side: source, top-left; bottom. Right side: artist, bottom-left: Frank Frazetta; bottom-right: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Bonaparte Before the Sphinx”; middle-left and top-right: Blxxd Bunny. Model and artist, middle-right: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard. Power is a splendid lie, but also a reassembly of old assemblies mostly hidden until now [the right side of this collage-of-collages being concealed until later in this volume]. Make it a deck full of trap cards tailor-made/jury-rigged to fuck with capital’s own statues; it’s not like they can monopolize any of this!)

Per the infernal concentric pattern, we dance in the ruins, learning to recognize not just the signs, but how they dialectically-materially clash, reform/redouble, and fit together. In turn, people are drawn to our decay and revival as a giant, sex-positive force that escapes the illusion inside of itself: our castle-narrative, our ludo-Gothic BDSM an opposing force denigrating capital and celebrating liberation by virtue of power as something no structure can hold onto forever! Indeed, capital cannot, because it decays by design; and while moderates try to conceal the decay of fascism, they only have their own radioactivity eat them from the inside, out. Like the caterpillar and the wasp, eventually the green statue becomes like a chrysalis; i.e., something to nefandously emerge from differently that hungrily changes the function of power and capital into Communism leaving exploitation behind: our butterfly (or wasp) having eaten theirs—mid-poiesis, mid-refrain—to change the flow of power along all the usual tracks: the Archaic Mother and her huge, throbbing ovipositor making for some strange, hungry babies (with Starry Eyes, below, being [in true paradoxical fashion] being two things at once: a lovely Gothic commentary on psychosexual transformation [of the Sapphic sort] and damning indictment of the Hollywood class system). We’re left with things that—however seemingly “killed and dead” they might seem—don’t stay dead, indeed cannot die no matter how much abuse capital throws at them! Once deconstructed, Medusa can simply reconstruct, endlessly reborn! “That all you got?” You can’t kill the metal, bitches! Medusa cannot die (neither can the state, which always threatens to return, but either can be atrophied to irrelevance)!

(source: Cult Projections’ “Q&A with Alexandra Essoe, Star of Starry Eyes,” 2015)

When this happens, it’s no longer the state taking resources for itself. The material and social conditions shift in ways that redistribute and rearrange the Base and Superstructure, mid-resistance: into a camped, horizontal, chaotically flexible iteration of itself. It’s a double, in other words, a Venus twin with an opposite function to capital’s monopolies and trifectas, achieving post-scarcity through pre-capitalist nostalgia, but also the Four Gs, Six Rs, mode of expression, Gothic-Communist Hermeneutic Quadfecta, three doubles of oppositional praxis (from Volume Zero) and basics of oppositional synthesis/the oppositional synthetic groupings (from Volume One); i.e., as something to practically reduce to anger/gossip, monsters and camp as a matter of good habits that bounce all along this manifesto tree as something to camp the twin trees of capital with: using our creative successes to outlast our short lives! What we do in life echoes in eternity!

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a2a1b2: Artist, top-left and bottom-right: Blxxd Bunny; bottom-left and top-right: Harmony Corrupted. Like a “pharaoh’s pyramid,” effigies of Medusa are wrought in disintegration, becoming Russian-doll golems that assemble and disassemble in the abyssal refrain. But decay totally rules! In the desert of the real, we don’t have to pull an Anakin and complain, “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth!” We can have our cake and eat it, too—our bodies serving as giants-in-small, smooth pillars of rock ‘n roll, effigies to Medusa that illustrate mutual consent by engaging poetically with the past to produce Communism in the present; i.e., as something we can add to from moment to moment. Simply put, our bodies are built for war—class and culture war through sex work liberating ourselves through iconoclastic art, side by side! It’s a booty phalanx, hard and soft, united as one against the state monopolizing us. Nothing will terrify them more than our own advertised might: intersectional solidarity through sex and force made sex-positive, not imperial! It becomes second-nature, strikes all by itself; i.e., as language evolving and building on itself as part of something larger trapped-in-small, encased in sweet amber.)

That’s just the tip, loves. We’ll broach all of that during Volume Three (and provide copies of the manifesto tree for you to reference). Until then, just remember that power is a paradox largely concerned with perception; to that, icons and canon are ridiculously fragile, and can be changed easily enough by an intersectionally organized collective. During special moments of routine crisis we can install cracks in their perceived “invincibility.” We can break them. Nothing is permanent; there’s always the opportunity to change, but especially when capital decays. Capital is always decaying and said decay increases the more they try to take (which they do by design). They will not last, and in the vital moment as a series of steps, we can unify to replace their gargoyles with our own, camping their ghosts with ours: from Caesar to Marx, we camp them all.

Put in simpler (and shorter) language: Ace people rock, and Bunny’s the fucking bomb, y’all! And while they currently don’t do custom content, the material that we produced together is some of my all-time favorites. So, similar to all of the cuties I work with, please go show Bunny some love! They work hard to deliver a killer product each and every time, but do so as an excellent comrade worthy of your patronage and respect! Their smile (and booty) are infectious, irresistible:

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

In short, we’re comrades in a shared struggle, one whose Gothic-Communist spiral intertwines with Gothic canon during oppositional praxis; i.e., a double helix that complicates along a sex-to-ace gradient during Gothic poetics at large (from Volume Zero):

(exhibit 1a1a1c3: D&D “homebrew” is a way of escaping the palimpsestuous racial profiling of Tolkien’s High Fantastical gentrification enacted by Wizards of the Coast trying to enforce the racial [thus class and gender] binary—e.g., “mind flayers” always being lawful evil, or Drow always being chaotic evil/”pure evil” inside the state of exception [exhibit 41b] to fill the gap made by the humanized [yet still fetishized] “good” orcs [exhibit 37e]: the exceptional “not bad for an orc” pariah. Tolkien made orcs to be beaten and bitten by swords with fancy-sounding names illustrating the function as simultaneously dressed up and denuded [from The Hobbit]:

He took out his sword again, and again it flashed in the dark by itself. It burned with a rage that made it gleam if goblins were about; now it was bright as blue flame for delight in the killing of the great lord of the cave. It made no trouble whatever of cutting through the goblin-chains and setting all the prisoners free as quickly as possible. This sword’s name was Glamdring the Foe-hammer, if you remember. The goblins just called it Beater, and hated it worse than Biter if possible. Orcrist, too, had been saved; for Gandalf had brought it along as well […]

At this point Gandalf fell behind, and Thorin with him. They turned a sharp corner. “About turn!” he shouted. “Draw your sword Thorin!”

There was nothing else to be done; and the goblins did not like it. They came scurrying round the corner in full cry, and found Goblin-cleaver and Foe-hammer shining cold and bright right in their astonished eyes. The ones in front dropped their torches and gave one yell before they were killed. The ones behind yelled still more, and leaped back knocking over those that were running after them. “Biter and Beater!” they shrieked; and soon they were all in confusion…” [source]. 

This function can be reversed, but must occur within the mode of expression; e.g., sexy orc roleplay in Skyrim mods, exhibit 84b; i.e., inside material conditions to avoid praxial invisibility. You have to be able to give it shape inside camp and communicate it to others afterward.)

To this, oppositional praxis during Gothic Communism is less like the discrete, nine-squared D&D Alignment Chart (above) and more like a Venn Diagram of the same components doubled and super-imposed over each other. Hence, why revolutionary acronyms like ACAB (“All Cops Are Bad”) are handy but also why you still have to distinguish between who’s genuine/good-faith and who isn’t/bad-faith during oppositional praxis; i.e., through dialectical-material scrutiny as performed by gay space wizards through whatever “poison” you pick and serve up (source).

As part of the helix, there exist a lot of tightropes to walk. For starters, sex workers love to look good regardless of sexual pleasure (though the two often overlap). Released from the bondage of the mind, the rape castle’s unironic function disappears but the aesthetics of captivity, rape and murder remain; i.e., something to fuck to, fool around with and feel the high of proximity to power without actual danger being a risk. We can heal together while respecting each other in ways others from our own separate histories did not, but who still taught us a thing or two to “better the instruction” in an ironically sex-positive sense. In turn, we can take that and use it when working with new cuties who aren’t total dickwads!

For instance, when Jadis marked me for trauma, I lived to produce my greatest work (from Volume Two, part one):

The greatest irony of Jadis harming me [something we’ll go into more detail about during the undead module] is they accidentally gifted me with the appreciation of calculated risk. Scoured with invisible knives, I don’t view my scars as a “weakness” at all; I relish the feeling of proximity to the ghost of total power—of knowing that motherfucker took me to the edge but didn’t take everything from me: I escaped them and lived to do my greatest work in spite of their treachery! (source).

Sometimes this was in clothes, at my desk. But as you have seen, sometimes it requires going mask-off, but also clothes-off with (and balls-deep inside) my friends; i.e., to show you my trauma as something I can express in ways that feel and impart healthy psychosexual lessons.

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Indeed, I very much had to, as Jadis—always one to take, take, take by force[4] (“You have heart! I’ll take that too!”)—took my Gothic wardrobe during our separation (the snazzy clothing purchased with her dead father’s fortune to manipulate me with). I eventually had to get my own collar again, purchased by me and chosen by my own “owner,” Bay, as one of many future friends to play with while wearing it:

(exhibit 34b3b2a2b1: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. Like rings as gifts to give and take away, collars wield great potency as emblematic of “rape” worn around our necks. Jadis took my old collar [left] with them; Bay picked my new collar [right]. The former was a master at hurting others through gifts; the latter, at healing others despite their own trauma. In short, Bay didn’t become a stone-cold cunt like Jadis did; i.e., the latter aping a bad likeness of her godawful mother as something to elicit pity and fear from me, but also compelled submission and confessions. Like, fuck that noise! I’m a little puppy-raven who wants a good owner, meaning someone who treats me—in the Gothic-Communist manner—as an equal, not a slave. But per my own trauma and open nature, I had to learn that one the hard way—i.e., by people who knew a great deal about harming and deceiving others in order to control them, but fuck-all about being open and honest in sex-positive ways. We gotta camp Nietzsche, too, then; i.e., gazing into abysses to fight sex-coercive monsters by becoming sex-positive monsters: “I’m totally gazing into your ‘abyss’ right meow!” / “That’s right, baby! Now come on inside! Mommy’s waiting!”)

Regarding the Gothic past as half-real, but also something to toy with in new imaginary forms performed in our everyday lives, I need to warn/encourage you: lived trauma can bleed into shared trauma as a site for new predation; or said “predation” can be put in quotes by someone who also knows what it’s like to suffer who doesn’t want to harm others to help themselves feel better! This coin-toss outcome is essentially pure chance on a shared aesthetic, meaning you gotta look past the image to spot the flags [red or green] hidden through subtext. You gotta know yourself, which you can’t fully without taking some risks with others. The best toys can hurt you in the wrong hands; in the right hands, you can feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven (or hell; re: Milton’s “the mind is its own place”).

While love, monsters and sex all rule, you can really get your heart broke all the same. In short, you gotta “risk it for the biscuit,” but don’t let down your guard; dream big, but don’t lose sight of you humanity or your playmate’s! Once you have confidence and some experiences under your belt, meeting cuties will get easier, as will falling in (and out of love): unicorns thicker than a bowl of oatmeal—colorful, exotic, tasty and all around you if you have eyes that see. Like weirdness, confidence can attract. Consent is sexy! Monsters are sexy! So go for those who are actually bold enough to bare themselves in public (as sex workers generally must do); i.e., a sight for sore eyes standing out from all the usual eyesores (systemic inequality and discrimination), making a stand to speak with their body and gender as part of who they are. Doing so encourages Galatean sorority through tailored “plumage”: to look related less through traditional hereditary-heraldic variables and more through a found family. Birds of a feather flock (and fuck) together!

(source: FilmsByJosh’s “Black Tape Project,” 2024)

Unlike birds, people are socially and sexually flexible—can change their external appearance through art as a subjective, human experience. People, then, are like tattoos: personalized, expressive, wrought through pain as endemic to the healing process; healing hurts. But some people have tattoos and other bold (sometimes crude, graphic) qualities that announce their trauma and recovery on their sleeves; i.e., as part of who they are that exits out into world in good faith. Like a Gothic portrait, the idea with these signals is to vibe in ways that guard and express, yielding good psychosexual habits and campy paradoxes (e.g., cute little bats, adorable princes of darkness), not unironic medieval violence and bigotries (a troubling comparison whose dark reflection becomes a doubt or worst fear to oscillate in front of, but also remind us who we’re not by virtue of excising it).

As such, bad faith is always possible with masks. This means the double operation of cryptonymy should always be considered, insofar as a proverbial open book is still a “book,” meaning the cover contains something that isn’t the same on the inside as the out, or can pass itself off as something it’s not. In short, there can be a predatory or adversarial character to a survivor who has just as much potential to be cruel versus kind. Superficiality aside, there is a preferential component that remains subjective (skin-deep and in the eye of the beholder); i.e., the body as a canvas according to its parts as preferred; e.g., boobs are ok, in my opinion, but the booty is where it’s at! Or you can try combinations: thicc, bendy and expressive. Like Harmony and I, it becomes something that’s out, proud, and seen in public despite scornful eyes; i.e., beauty as a target to click and devastate, versus appreciating for its courage, its taut, bombshell moxie.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

To that, I’m a sucker for mommy doms because I’ve learned it through trial and error (which is what dating initially is unless you have a book like this to refer to). As such, I’ve discovered that I love Amazons, mommy doms and knightly girls: a girl-crazy trans woman chasing after different dark mommies, and who loves the complexity of getting topped from below—to be nurtured by someone I can really pound and call funny names[5], and who enjoys receiving tributes while mechanically disadvantaged but privileged within a liminal position; i.e., one whose negotiated mutual consent makes them equally powerful to myself in a shared space where power is largely a ludo-Gothic illusion. Compliments are paid—not in pounds of flesh, but appreciation through sex-positive “peril” as forbidden, but nutritious and enriched by Gothic maturity as a Communist quality evolved past the dated barbarism of Capitalism; i.e., versus canonical forms of cake-like or peachy food that rot the brain through harmful, sex-coercive lessons: things that encourage Man Box antics from dudes (or token women like Jadis) and a lack of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness.

Does this all sound like crazy talk from the madwoman in the attic? Poppycock! Remember that power is a paradox—one to play and perform with as a potent means of interrogating and negotiating power and resistance in the same shadow zone’s complicated sphere. I’ve written about this a lot, and want to give you an extended quote I feel is germane. Skip ahead a few pages (“Am I a joke to you?”) if you’ve already read it.

As Volume Zero writes:

The idea is to liberate ourselves with fairly negotiated, thus cathartic, dungeon fantasies that camp canon through counterterrorist theatre to whatever degree feels correct to us [emphasis, me]; e.g., me in a haunted castle, wandering through the dark, menacing halls while wearing a sexy dress (and nothing under it, my bare body molested by the breeze and the fabric): a hopelessly vulnerable Gothic heroine feeling pretty and desired, hungrily and desperately interrogating the musical, cobwebbed gloomth while scarcely having anything between me and certain “doom.” As usual, the Gothic paradox allows for intense, oxymoronic dualities to coexist at the same time in the same space (e.g., “sad cum” or “gloomth” or similar and confused degrees of “verklempt” during the castle’s psychosexual, emotional “storm”). Simply put, I want to feel naked and exposed, thus paradoxically most alive in ways that I have negotiated through the contract between me and the media I’m working with (wherein the Metroidvania castle, as far as I’m concerned, is the perfect dom); i.e., while being “hunted” and covered in rebellious “kick me” symbols and clothing that advertises my true self260 as naked, colorful and dark, as if to tease the viewer in the shadows to try something (and also showing my ass to my academic dominators: “I fart in your general direction!”). As the kids say, that’s a mood.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Why stick out? you ask? One, because we must in order to survive. Two, because our deals with the devil simply acknowledge our true selves, which the state wants us to reject […]. But also, it feels good to be Athena’s Aegis; i.e., challenging heteronormative power in ways that demonstrate how fragile said illusion (and its gatekeepers) are. State bullies are entitled nerds completely used to getting everything they want, who desire what I will never give them (a form of agency I’ve worked hard for); and completely afraid of nearly everything and will freak out at fairly silly things they have no business getting so worked up about: at people like me, burning down their imaginary churches and those churches’ ideas of compelled order about Capitalism and its gobstopper illusions (those highly unnatural and imprisoning systems of thought that are slowly killing us as a species). Frankly the idea of me being terrifying seems absurd, but as a burning proponent of rebellion constitutes something that still, on some level, represents an incendiary threat that many advertise as the “end times”: Communism… but Gothic and gay! To which I cheerfully put up the goat horns and say in response, “Hail, Satan!” It’s like saying “Ni!” to old ladies.

Our performative and internalized devilry becomes something to join—a communion or pact whose assimilation classically amounts to a devilish bargain; yet Gothic Communism is a group effort, one whose sex-positive class/culture warrior is among a fellowship or pandemonium of equally sex-positive ne’er-do-wells instead of one or more class/race traitors for the elite and their age-old Faustian bargains. We reach towards you, croon “Join us!” and become something to run away with; i.e., corrupting the minds of the youth (women and children) by calling out seductively to them, offering forbidden knowledge/fruit as a chance to go wild/go native by coming out of the closet in opposition to state forces (who will chase us, only to be turned away at the door—”no fascists allowed!”): the truth of things in its totality and not just a white person’s perspective as an outsider to genuine atrocities; e.g., a Lovecraft novella, an overplayed Iron Maiden or Slayer song or the problematic castle of a Radcliffean novel (though these can all be enjoyed mid-rebellion).

As Robert Asprey notes, terror and native wit/creativity are the historical tools of the counterterrorist, often being all they immediately have at their disposal; under Capitalism in the Internet Age, labor becomes a huge bargaining chip that Gothic Communism marries to terror during class war as a theatrical, operatic proposition (solidarity and labor action expressed as much through improvised Gothic poetics [improv] as improvised weapons): a means of bringing the oppressed and alienated closer to together in an informed, Satanic act of outer-space empathy and love in the face of state forces. The spotlight isn’t something to hog or monopolize strictly by white nerds but expand and share in a drive towards post-scarcity (through a horizontally-arranged system that isn’t rigged in favor of those who control it because no one person or select group will be in control, in that sense; that’s what anarchism ultimately is).

Doing so becomes second-nature, a way of existing that doesn’t require drugs or sex (though they can certainly be involved if one wants them to); it requires community and love in opposition to capital’s usual bad-faith actors, fear and dogma […]

In turn, these principles manifest efficiently in music, art and culture not as “lesser forms of media” but as an open, quick and honest way that people express themselves regarding the truth of things (which the usual benefactors of Capitalism will cover up by acting like the Enlightenment and Pax Americana is either somehow good for everyone, or neutered forms of futurism that can be envisioned by white men who speak for everyone else; e.g., Asimov or Jameson). It’s hard, at first, to “put on the glasses.” Eventually you don’t need them at all—communicating effortlessly with others who see the way you do because it’s become a part of your culture, the Superstructure. That becomes a powerful bond—in part because it’s saturated through an entire polity versus simply being restricted to a single-dose product.

As such, terror through labor action is my weapon, but specifically counterterror by pointing out rather nakedly the stupid things the state fears […] The paradox continues insofar as I learned what, how and why through a harmful, abusive emulation of rape fantasy while living with Jadis, which I then turned into cathartic forms having at least partially learned (by accident) the method from my humiliation endured inside an academic setting. […]

Entirely by accident, then, I discovered through bad play (enacted against me by a bad actor/player) that good play amounts to Gothic poetics as a potent means of regaining control through reclaimed implements of terror (the manacle, castle, rapist, slur or baton, etc) but also being that which terrifies the state and its proponents to no end: a refusal to conform or obey (which forces the state’s hand, relying on the veneer of not being the tyrants they’ve spent decades projecting onto Nazis, nominal Communists, and other theatrical scapegoats). Haunted by the ghosts of my youth, I could dance with them and make versions of themselves that could never harm me. I would be in control in ways I never felt before, feeling a presence of “danger” that triggered my prey mechanisms just enough to make the exercise therapeutic; i.e., while showing myself off as a trust-building exercise behind a buffer that stood between me and the world. The whole performance/thought experiment nursed my wounds and made me feel safe without pushing me into the arms of future abusers; instead, I could transform myself and my environment using my education as a negotiation device, the theatre and its effect enhanced by years of academic and lived experience. Suddenly my years of costly and time-extensive Gothic education felt profoundly useful—not just to me, but something I could give back to the workers of the world; i.e., those who had already given me much to think about in relation to their own work as part of a movement I could join through Gothic poetics:

(artist: ikerellatab)

Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios); a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other and vice versa. As such, my own contributions to the Gothic are very much about making it sexual again, but also sex-positive in ways that Radcliffe (and her own venerated castle’s praxial inertia) were not; i.e., tearing her (and her Faustian contracts, castles and various harmful BDSM scenarios) “a new college-debt-sized asshole” while, in the same breath, addressing my deeply personal, trans woman’s fears of my own penis (e.g., Zeuhl) but also trying anal and other things in a monstrous context (e.g., Cuwu’s choking and rape play and Jadis’ “put your mysterium tremendum in my uncanny valley!”). In short, my playing with new things—activities, roleplays and identity scenarios—had transformative potential relative to my sexuality and gender as highly idiosyncratic.

We’re all idiosyncratic in ways Capitalism wants you to forget, so try anal, “chains and torture,” and the Numinous as something to reassemble yourself in some shape or form during liminal expression; the paradox of being free while still “in chains” is a sex-positive kind of theater that is incredibly intense, but harmless (and it’s more fun as a group activity—we are a social species). As the conveyor of these complicated fantasies, my book is a castle with castles inside of itself—built for the reader to wander around inside while asking questions about: to play with, making mistakes that will undoubtedly hurt, but not harm them, and which they can take and apply to their own social-sex lives. We can use this to camp not just Radcliffe as the end-all-be-all of the castled stage, but also Tolkien’s former interrogations of power presented in poetic language (source).

As we shall see, the same liberatory praxis applies to any canonical darling to kill for development’s sake while playing with history mid-poiesis, inside our own BDSM “torture” dungeons. We want to rule in Hell, not serve in Heaven, lovelies.

As such, the chief goal of Gothic Communism isn’t just to tear down old the harmful legacies of old dead people (through that is important); there’s a Cartesian element to Gothic canon that we need to consciously attack, liberating as we do sex work (and nature-as-alien) through our own misfit toys. This is a poetic device, which Volume Two is mostly concerned with; as Volume Two, part one argues:

In short, we want to hug the alien, therefore contribute to a pedagogy of the oppressed by synthesizing praxis, invoking the dialectic of the alien to confront and interrogate trauma (and power) as something to perform and play with; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as a potent means of embodying likenesses among differences, its dark theatricalities ushering intersectional solidarity in by humanizing monsters as de facto (extracurricular) teaching devices: to be more creative and poetic as a means of attaining praxial catharsis, collectively illustrating mutual consent thereby raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness, mid-struggle. Catharsis amounts to reversing the flow of power away from the state (and its powerful illusions) through our daily interrogations (source).

Except this applies differently per oppressed group in a shared pedagogy’s similarities amid difference; e.g., cis women experience oppression differently than trans people do, but nevertheless are still regulated by state forces that trigger them in rape-fantasy realms meant to help them spread their broken wings and soar (not without some element of grandeur and camp: “I’m a peacock! You gotta let me fly!”).

(exhibit 34b3b2a2b2: Artist: Harmony Corrupted. “Rape” becomes something to put into quotes versus the profit motive as something that commonly presents nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., a womb-like castle to invade and, per Francis Bacon, torture nature’s secrets out of in service to capital as it now exists. This speaks to the lives of women [and other marginalized groups] who—faced with state force—are given two choices: tokenize or fight! They play with the Dark-Souls boss gag through their own social-sex lives as campy and instructional: “PUSSY SLAIN.” It becomes fun, putting “murder” and “rape” in quotes, but letting someone feel monstrous and sexy at the same time; i.e., as a sex-positive challenge to TERFs, SWERFs, fascists, et al. Class war and Gothic counterculture are fun partly because those accustomed to sexual violence and gender essentialization can find people they trust a) not to harm them, and b) let them be their own weird selves inside a room of one’s own. Fucking is fun as an oft-ahegao means of doing so! Not just once, but again and again [“Can you put it back in?” Harmony likes to shyly ask her partner]. Rooms need paint, after all!)

For instance, Harmony—when fenced inside a Walpolean “rape castle”—is a cis-het woman, thus has cis-het female trauma. She might feel the impostor relative to her womb, booty or breasts, etc, as female-coded. However, the same ideas extend to the monstrous-feminine (and its various torture dungeons) as a thoroughly GNC proposition (with other intersecting marginalized components); e.g., as Harmony and I collectively demonstrate during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a group effort that goes beyond us, and which I shall now unpack before jumping into Volume Two, part two’s Monster Modules. In short, we’re the monsters, playing with “rape” as a kind of fantasy theatre trapped both inside itself and as part of a larger concentric meta text; e.g., from Northanger Abbey (1817) to Scream (1996) to Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin (2022).

Let’s unpack all of that next, in part two! Onto Into the Toy Chest, part two—My Experiences!


Footnotes

[1] In war, especially American wars, “victory” is arbitrated by kill count; the same idea is perpetrated by weird canonical nerds stuck in the Man Box regarding sexual conquests: a “body count,” which generally only “counts” if it’s PIV sex. In truth, numbers are far less important than the quality and character of a given relationship, not the sex; i.e., my in-person body count is eight—where I achieved PIV sex, but furthermore where the majority of those [six] were people I was friends with, and which the sex was a chance to learn more about them versus the end-all, be-all of our relations.

[2] From guns to cars to explosives—e.g., crash dummies, the dwarvish satchel charges from Myth, to MythBusters (2003)—all simulate war, rape and death through calculated risk; i.e., as something to have an element of control over through a mixture of analog bodies and implements of actual harm. It’s a game, a form of redirection that ultimately feels playful and cathartic; i.e., the closer you approach sex-positive forms, which capital will try to fake in service to profit, not workers or nature.

Indeed, it’s often zany in Loony-Toons-style ways classically befitting of young boys; e.g., my little brother hijacking one of the jets in Battlefield 2 (2005) and flying so high that the physics grew “dangerously confused,” causing the plane to spiral out of control and spin impossibly fast (with my brother ejecting to leave the confused co-pilot sitting alone in the whirling and disintegrating plane); or, when he hacked the game’s physics in Daggerfall (1995), effectively turning his character first into a rocket car (zipping along the ground similar to Doomguy’s own lack of friction) and then an airplane/missile that launched off the imperial castle steps, flying forward at impossible speeds to smash gloriously into the ground like a meteor.

It’s akin to playtesting life through abrupt and obscene simulations that, like a videogame, verge on the absurd, the warlike, the outrageously violent. But, as myself playing Myth on an old (new, at the time) iMac, or my brother playing Need for Speed 2 (1997) on the PSOne and trying to “tip buses” (think cows, but with vehicles) in a particular level, it turns complete accidents and horrendous, abject failures by any other name/on any other day into an Evel-Knievel-type spectacle: something to sell tickets to and rate 10/10 for the thrill of it; i.e., on stolen land, but also into illusions of digital replicas of said stolen land during Capitalist Realism. The profit motive generates such entropy as chasing after efficient profit that translates back into real life out of various simulations that decay into the real world connected to the hyperreal simulation: rubbernecking with a death race feel that verges on parody speaking to the reality of car violence; e.g., Carmageddon (above, 1997) merging popular heavy metal—Fear Factory’s Demanufacture (1995)—with out-of-control car racing similar to Mortal Kombat the movie (1995) did with pit fighting/manufactured counterculture (e.g., KMFDM’s 1997 “Megalomaniac“) or Road Rash (1996) did Soundgarden’s Bad Motor Finger (1991). It’s like a caricature, a sick joke, a bad portrait with a time signature and hauntological idiosyncrasy gliding along the same Gothic mode. At times, it can feel a bit manufactured, especially from a white, middle-class perspective acting rebellious even when there’s no systemic oppression taking place (which is what fascism historically is: white oppressors playing the victim); i.e., a controlled form of opposition that’s even a bit silly and random (as silly and random as my brother naming one of his bases in the original DOS version of X-Com: UFO Defense [1994] “trans fat,” after glancing at the black-and-white Nutritional Facts label on the back of the Cheetos bag he was eating from: “Trans Fat was invaded by aliens! No!”). Can you tell the difference?

(source: Fandom)

[3a] Which extends to camping superhero stories with varying degrees of success regarding assimilative double standards; e.g., Key and Peele’s “This Superhero Squad Has a Discrimination Problem,” 2020). It’s easy to swat low-hanging fruit but still compromise on harder moral stances; e.g., Jordan Peele disappointingly taking Israel’s side in support of Joe Biden’s role in American’s age-old genocidal antics: “Peele put his name to the letter which praised Biden for his ‘unshakable moral conviction, leadership, and support for the Jewish people,’ and urged the U.S. government ‘to not rest until all hostages are released'” (source: Shannon Power’s “Jordan Peele Faces Backlash,” 2023); i.e., Afrocentrism-meets-plain-old-American-exceptionalism-and-centrist-dogma! Gross. More to the point, anytime someone tries to make you laugh as a clever distraction from state criticism, they’re enacting state apologia. We need to think through laughter in ways that prevent genocide for all peoples, not just black Americans, Peele!

[3] If you want to be included, refer to Persephone van der Waard’s “Looking for Models, Sex Positivity 5/13/2024.”

[4] They were a bully and took pleasure in stealing from others.

[5] To be silly in bed, but also elsewhere; i.e., like Bob Wily to Dr. Leo Marvin on Good Morning, America, in What About Bob? (1991): “You can call me boob“; e.g., me telling Bay, ” I love you, my pepperoni pizza with double cheese and stuffed crust.” To which Bay lets me “eat their pizza,” anytime.

Book Sample: “From Herbos to Himbos, part two”

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Update, 8/7/2024: Originally this piece was written for “Searching for Secrets.” On 6/14/2024, I moved the written material to the PDF manuscript of the Poetry Module (v1.2 onwards); today, I updated each promo page’s table of contents to reflect said change, too, meaning these transplanted posts are featured in the “Brace for Impact” table of contents.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

“Death by Snu-Snu!”: From Herbos to Himbos, part two (feat. Ayla, Weaponlord and Savage Land Rogue; Autumn Ivy and Claire Max)

“My pardons if I disturbed you. You caught me chastising my wife.”

“Seemed to me she was doing the chastising.”

—Jaime Lannister and a bandit, A Storm of Swords (2000)

(artist: Erik Von Lehmann)

Picking up from where “Splendide Mendax/Herbos and Himbos, part one” left off…

Part two of “From Herbos to Himbos” explores feminism and punk in decay through the subjugation of Amazons, but also where they call home under capital; i.e., a playground and stage to perform on by real-life actors.

Before we consider Ayla and Savage Land Rogue, though, we need to consider what drives their dualistic echopraxis. True to form, a monopoly of morphological expression doesn’t exist anymore than those of violence or terror do; i.e., from Jedi to Amazons to Conan-style “meat wizards” (the latter combining orgasmic, shonen-style energy blasts with American nuclear bombs), all become a nostalgic form of research through consumption and performance: chasing Numinous echoes in personified forms—to escape bondage and heal from it with “it.” The same applies to any cavegirl we could think of (and for which diametrically applies to cavemen, too, albeit through the usual double standards; e.g., Fred Flintstone having a “dad bod” vs his shapely Stepford Wife, Wilma).

By extension, and per an American Gothic lens exposing all the usual decaying radioactive elements to Pax Americana, Wonder Woman is something of a wunderwaffe and wunderkind mutant; i.e., a bomb-like super soldier defaulted to by capital at large, but still used in times of desperation and plenty alike. She’s as American as apple pie—cheap, disposable, built on the graves of dead Indians’ stolen land, a beauty-pageant-turned-cop, oscillating between the two. But while bombs and bombshells alike are propaganda weapons, they don’t historically convince colonized lands to ever give up; indeed, they historically become weaponized against capital by Indigenous forces destroying the occupying army from within!

Everything dies, especially police lies and power structures, but the decay goes from pleasantries to clothes to the flesh itself as necrotic. The pearly castles and their “protectors” are the worst, utterly rank with the stink of death. As we saw with Wonder Woman, feminism—like canon’s cops, castles, and wizards (re: Lo Pan)—historically decays into fascist, naked-but-bellicose forms that serve profit (mirror syndrome); i.e., inside a centrist cycle of good cop, bad cop kayfabe playing not just white knight (syndrome), but white Indian suffering from virgin/whore syndrome (and other such heroic dysfunction tied to profit): so-called “strongwomen” who refuse to be trad wives, yet still serve profit as sex symbols of empty rebellion. Their taut, war-like bodies posture strength amid societal collapse while their clothes disintegrate for the status quo as much as themselves: a bikini with a half-life, much like America’s legacy! It becomes something to pass around the blame (forcing workers to join in by virtue of the usual trifectas and monopolies). In turn, the elite take all of the power and none of the blame, and male/token Pygmalions from Radcliffe to R. L. Stine pat themselves on the back; i.e., as self-made doomsayers capitalizing on American cruelty and greed through the ghost of the counterfeit while not challenging the profit motive and its dogma in any meaningful sense. They further the process of abjection, cashing in on it as the white middle class is historically incentivized to always do by the elite: keep people scared but consuming their own bullshit and corpses (of them and their past-to-future victims) as toy-like.

(artist: Tim Jacobus)

Decayed or not, Amazons are toys. Per the duality of language and the double operation of cryptonymy as anisotropic, such playthings serve workers or the state during liminal expression. In psychosexual terms, it can be a snapshot (a quickie) or a grueling ordeal (a marathon), but the trauma is always present, needing to be played with. Furthermore, such decay does so not just on the surface of a given hero (or their clothes), but across the entire site of post-apocalyptic violence she/they/him (accounting for GNC AFAB) and their consumers regress into as capital decays (what I call “fash brain,” or a power fantasy where fash-minded [usually white] people go to whitewash marginalized struggles while also playing the exclusive victim and the hero: “Help, help! I’m being repressed!”). As Volume Two, part one discussed, heroes—like villains and monsters—aren’t discrete in this respect, and their bodies as much as their milieu/tableaux serve to store and engage with cultural values and taboos in equal theatrical measure. The idea obviously applies to herbos and himbos, but for the sake of time (and authorial preference) let’s specifically interrogate it with herbos a bit more, shall we?

(artist: Reiq)

“I am strong, strong, strong!” a fash will always shout before showing off their waistcoat of blood diamonds—their trim torso fed on the sorrow and misery of those they colonize. Whatever the venue, the skull-like imperator insignia will never be far off, nor the banality of evil (acting ownership and exploitation as their “God-given right”; i.e., no matter how hard workers work for the elite—including cops, studios, or anything else [e.g., Yong Yea’s “Microsoft & Xbox Baffle Internet after Shutting down Hi-Fi Rush Dev & Three Other Bethesda Studios,” 2024]—said elite will always claw back as much profit for themselves and then have the middle class blame the usual “suspects”: labor and marginalized groups) as just another neoliberal scheme populated by flesh merchants of all sorts (sorry, Reiq, but if the shoe fits…). State proponents are class dormant—are simply a corpse that doesn’t know it is dead, a public hazard weaponized by capital to repeat, rape, reap ad nauseam. The elite are chicken hawks, space aliens, cradle robbers, grave diggers all rolled into one; we shouldn’t trust them as far as we can throw their old, shriveled bodies!

Apart from convincing people they don’t exist, though, the elite lie through their forces as “skinny-fat,” skinny-dipping into the blood of the marginalized like Elizabeth Bathory did all those poor virgins; i.e., to cheat death, a relationship to nature that can only exist while preying on it to “enrich” the colonial addict in a drug-like way. “White people disease,” “boomer syndrome,” “the white Indian,” or whatever other pathological label you care to give it, Capitalism is radioactive, menticidal—a disease, self-cannibalizing and self-lobotomizing the usual groups to administer and receive state violence (consider this prep for the Undead Module). Corpses never get tired, but they aren’t monopolized by the state, either. So like a giant Caesar, they might seem invincible; but we can strip and sap them of their necromantic potency and swap it with ours. The more they fuck (stake) our rotten bodies, the more we “life tap” their asses, topping from the grave-like bottom! Per the Gothic, this has a postcolonial character but also a posthuman one; i.e., as adumbrated by the likes of Richard Matteson critiquing Victor Frankenstein’s double, Robert Neville; i.e., in a decaying Pax Americana defending itself against the undead as Commie zombie-vampires vs fash nerds playing the state’s judge, jury and executioner. But of course, this goes both ways. So aftercare, lovelies. Aftercare!

“Sure seems to be a lot of death, destruction and exploitation going around, eh?” Decay isn’t always as obvious as a rotting corpse, though; a police state will do just as well, and outwardly presents as comely and forceful. The Amazon, as a historical-material loop, is just another excuse for a) capitalists to undress and display militant/disobedient monstrous-feminine in a peep-show-style, compromising position (for easier access: the peach and both holes denuded, but also paywalled by capitalist veils and quasi-chastity butt plugs, below) during the “conquer the ‘conqueror'” fantasy foisted onto the marginalized barbarian; and b) for punks-in-decay to defect over to capital (or having never left, as America demonstrates); e.g., Lady Liberty turns green with class envy but also straight-up decay as she rots, is left to rot, is raped in all manner of voyeuristic displays turned into the biggest DARVO joke of all: the Fourth of July. It becomes an open secret to string up and tout imperial “invincibility” until the structure finally gives out under its own bloated corpse weight. Death by Snu-Snu, indeed!

(artist: Shane Ballard)

In turn, people respond to themselves in ghostly, often-giant (above) statuesque likeness as “dressed in power” in decay as part of the canonical, moribund image—the uniform-style clothes and muscles/curves, of course, but also positions of status and prestige (re: the Statue of Liberty) that, through the usual dialogs of gatekeeping and carried keys, save themselves from unironic predation as affairs of state in small. It becomes an abstracted game of teamwork, of psychosexual knowledge exchanged in both directions, a pedagogy of the oppressed and oppressor onstage simultaneously in four dimensions (the Gothic chronotope). Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, heroic roleplay becomes a theatrical means of talking about taboo subject matter with a) personas that tend not to be questioned (as heroes seldom are, especially “pretty” ones), and b) in an ostensibly asexual way (combat theatre) that doesn’t preclude sexuality or nudism. Point-in-fact, various stressors build up in ways that demand release; i.e., being “pent up” as a psychosexual “blue balls/clit” known to many people, ace or not. People want their psychosexual climax, conquest, and fireworks show—what System of a Down calls “Violent Pornography” (2001):

Everybody, everybody, everybody livin’ now
Everybody, everybody, everybody fucks [sucks, cries, dies …]

It’s a violent pornography
Chokin’ chicks and sodomy
The kinda shit you get on your TV (source: Genius)

Except, it’s not just a means of unironic exploitation, but a critical voice that puts “rape” in quotes through the usual showmanship turned on its gay little head. Again, we can reclaim such things, but our deathly “disco-in-disguise” (which reverses capital’s hiding of its own decay behind herbo veneers) must occur in the same graveyard of Pygmalion and Galatea’s assorted likenesses; i.e., inside the same the valley of swole, über-thicc dolls!

To that, a bare sword or sword-like body is all at once a sharpened metal bar and a two-sided proposition; i.e., the canonical sheathing in state prey versus a rebellious symbol of power and station unthinkable to those accustomed to total power on all registers: resistance, rebellion, self-determination and self-definition beyond canonical edicts. On either side of this Satanic equation, superheroes are meant to exude power as something to witness but also transfer and ritualize as a psychosexual educational device. It arbitrates as a performance, a plaything to toy with, a symbol that can assume any shape that one might pull out of a hat, in which—per the usual paradoxes and monopolies—becomes “sword-like” as a threat to state hegemons: a form of legitimacy by nature of its threat as terrifying to the elite in ways they can’t control; i.e., where terrorism is both the state and the rebel’s every action a weapon of terror (and vice versa) that challenges the usual flowing of power towards the state. Simply put, it fucks with the bourgeoisies’ fix. Everyone likes the Jester! They’re cool, kooky and probably an animal in the sack!

(artist: Santi-Ikari)

The state has countermeasures, their ability to transform going beyond shape; but the perception of value still weighs against an enemy (to workers) that is eternal, out of time and place: a fascist lord as the hauntological evocation of something that strives to conceal itself, but sticks out like a sore thumb (which moderacy is designed to conceal, like perfume on a corpse). In turn, we can recruit old symbols (crowns, scepters, weapons, bodies, weapon-like bodies, etc) to forge and argue through power’s usual paradoxes; i.e., as someone who has something to offer that tends to have value in societies from time immemorial: sex and force as coded in ways that can be rewritten, but also rewrite other things, reversing abjection through the counterfeit by evoking its vengeful ghost. On and on.

(artist: George Sellas)

This historically is spoiled by craven Judases and sell-outs aping their colonizers (re: Fanon), but also xenophobic scapegoats and superstitions that pit pro-terror against a population to control it through self-policing maneuvers of a stochastic sort; i.e., a gladiatorial, Conan-style refrain returning to a more savage time that never quite existed; e.g., Savage Land Rogue (next page, 1993), but also Weaponlord (above) and Overwatch 2’s (2021) Mad Max rip-off, Odessa Stone (the last of which we’ll talk about in Volume Three). All this variety aside, such prehistorical regressions only becomes a form of revolutionary wish fulfillment if the hero is both a wish fulfilled and granter of them in ways that challenge the paradigm; i.e., like a jinn to rub on her “lamp” and beckon orgasmic pleasure as potent, poetic, and at times, primal, but not fascist.

Fascists love to return to not only a time when things were “great,” but also when “true warriors” fought against mythological enemies: zombies, but also dinosaurs as older reptilian tyrants (as megafauna, some dinosaurs would have probably been warm-blooded, but still wouldn’t have been mammals); e.g., the Tyrannosaurus Rex a “tyrant lizard” evoked by the likes of a white cavegirl duking it out with a black, alien: the fascist “lizard person” (the quoted phrase being code for Jewish conspiracies/vampirism[12]) riding a black tyranno. It’s the usual white Indian narrative, forcing the Amazon to be both beauty and beast for white nerds, but still something with sex-positive potential:

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a1b2: Artist, left: Jim Lee recolor by spidey0318; top-middle: Claw0208; bottom-middle: Akira Toriyama; top-right: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right: Hinomaru. Such borderline erotica are “wasteland fantasies” that, like the zombie apocalypse, anticipate colonial collapse into a savage place where white people [and those from token nations; i.e., Japan] must survive. Such power trips not only reduce women to Amazonian sex objects who are more wild [and sexually aggressive] than trad wives are allowed to be, but also are made and sold by family men capitalizing on such inventions; e.g., Toriyama, who left a note to his two children while making Chrono Trigger back in the ’90s: “Heeey! Sasuke! Kikka! Pop’s working on games like this! Hey are you guys watching? Isn’t this great?!” [source tweet: Rebecca Stone, March 7th, 2024]. It’s literally “the World’s Greatest Dad” award, self-administered by Toriyama blowing his own horn [a father being a hero figure his children will be less inclined to critique].

A similar code was left behind by a Super Metroid developer during the Draygon fight, Yasuhiko Fujii:

Before the fight with Draygon, the boss of Maridia, there’s a group of Evir enemies that do a little “dance.” Their movements actually trace out the letters of a phrase in English, “Keiko Love!” Keiko was the name of a girl I was dating at the time. I was busy with work all the time and couldn’t see her much, so at night while everyone at the office sleeping, I stole a moment and snuck that code in! [source: shmuplations].

These Amazonian survivor stories aren’t so different from Metroidvania and survival horror at large [re: Mazes and Labyrinths]. They are fun, as are their makers’ BTS shenanigans. Even so, their regressive power fantasies a) have fascist overtones to them, and b) are commonly sold to middle-class children who feel out-of-control thanks to a world that is made unstable to serve profit, per Capitalist Realism. Plenty to enjoy and critique, here!)

As Ayla and Savage Land Rogue demonstrate, Amazon habitats are far older than videogames, but have evolved into them out of older Pax Americana fantasies exported elsewhere (from America to Japan and back again); i.e., a revival of the “white jungle” populated with “big game”: a vacation-type resort for the usual anxious pearl-clutchers looking for Jane and Tarzan; i.e., to punch down at towards the dogmatic threat of a Black Planet: to ease their own inheritance anxieties and fear of a non-white revenge for empire as inherently genocidal, tokenizing colonial subjects like the Amazon to police its own group, mid-Holocaust.

As I write in Volume Zero, the poetic tradition of the Amazon is long and complicated, but also at war with itself in multiple ways:

A kind of Galatea traditionally sculpted by Pygmalion and his imitators, Amazons and their complicated pastiche embody social-sexual conflict during oppositional praxis, hence come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are canonically war dogs of a binarized character. Most notably is the noble Athena versus the dark Medusa from the female legends of Antiquity [also, Queen Hippolyta]: the doubling of the hunter persona, a white and black wolf. Such war-boss, queen bitches canonically offer good behavior and bad behavior as our proverbial “teeth in the night” meant to serve as man’s best friend in centrist theatre [and whose true rebellion goes against the elite’s profit motive].

However, the lineage stretches backwards and forwards hauntologically through post-Renaissance revivals. For one, there’s the pre-fascist, Neo-Gothic “phallic women-in-black” such as Victoria de Loredani, and the Victorian “madwoman in the attic,” Bertha Mason; the post-Victorian, hatpin-stabbing suffragettes of the early 20th century [e.g., Leoti Baker]; the comic book/action hero treatment starting with William Marston’s bondage-themed Wonder Woman in the 1940s [or Rosie the Riveter] followed by the feral, bikini-wearing sexpots of the 1960s and 1970s [Coffy], as well Ripley and similar “female Rambos” of the 1980s [a neoliberal response to the “final girl” trope of the slasher genre]; various catsuit regressions— sexy spies, detectives, doctors, and BDSM-tinged femme fatales—in the ’90s, 2000s and 2010s; then, an increasingly queer presence regarding the rise of trans, intersex, non-binary and other forms of queer discourse online. If the 20th century constitutes the continuation of first wave, second wave and third wave feminism, then fourth wave feminism’s rise has seen a regression towards the older forms using the same language in oppositional praxis: regressive Amazonomachia and post-fascist gender trouble [the “gender critical” movement] veering backward at fascist and pre-fascist palimpsests versus subversive Amazonomachia and transgressive gender parody. It’s less a question of stolen valor and more of older groups fighting for the equality of convenience by pitting their versions of the “Amazon-as-waifu” [a promised war bride, whose more muscular variants are called “wheyfus” for supposedly being “gym maidens” that consume whey but also can dominate the chaser sissy as a result] against genderqueer variants; i.e., a “mirror match,” in fighting game parlance (source).

(artist: Matt Groening)

This “waifu paradox” is the Amazon as war bride, trapped between dominant and submissive, and where we and TERFs must each go to perform. The difference is dialectical-material function. They police what is acceptable; i.e., how far we can go. Amazon is a fetish, doll, inanimate object to occupy and play with as one might a simulacrum, an imitation, a likeness of the past as fearsome: a “knight,” which is essentially what an Amazon is, but tied to an imaginary queendom tamed by patriarchal forces, their bondage. Like a doll, it becomes something to play with; like armor/the Destroyer, something to fill in and wear/dance with, often through “combat”: play-fighting relaid through prompts, cues, and stage instructions. Think of rape play as a joke, of which the Amazon excels at; i.e., “death by Snu-Snu” (above) as something that is both silly and serious, but also anisotropic; e.g., anal sex being the victim’s “death” that woman are forced to grit their teeth and bear for men, but for which men dread as perceived retribution: when faced with someone monstrous-feminine who is clearly stronger than them, but also sexy in ways that make them want to hug and submit to Medusa. In turn, this becomes a centrist game of compromise whose cosplays can please men, but also frighten them to varying degrees of canon and camp (COD: “crushed pelvises” denoting PIV sex, not pegging as Futurama‘s [1999] own latent homophobia); i.e., in sex-positive ways that challenge profit. This is less of a balancing act, by itself, and more a choosing of one’s battles, mid-balance, to speak as a death god that is, under capitalist schemes, still shacked to men and the profit motive—if not literally then figuratively to those who feel owed their sissy-like due by their martial-to-marital, monster-girl waifus:

(artist: Cutie Pie Sensei)

Per Imperialism and Capitalism, the monomyth has an exogamous character. It yields a variety of war brides that, per nature-as-monstrous-feminine, must be conquered in foreign lands, but remain tempting and siren-like. Some are… strange, like Zeuhl was, but showed me how to appreciate things differently through forms that deviated from the norm (re: The Doom Generation, Jojo). Others were more standard, more cliché, like Jadis wooing me with Battlefield Band’s “The Devil’s Courtship” (2001): the black cavalier to my maiden-in-white. All were divided, imperfect, waiting for reunion as all workers do; i.e., to reclaim what is lost through subversive forms of monstrous-feminine, of “torture,” of power through the paradox of performance and play as a unifying force; i.e., a ceremony to hold and alter (at the altar) as needed.

Whatever ritual is expended, the aim is to not just avoid harm, but prevent it as something to instruct in ironic forms conducive to systemic release, catharsis, and delight. This involves not just illusions and games, but ploys, gambits, bluffs, etc, that serve liberation just as well. Peace-in-chains is not the objective, for it is merely genocide uninterrupted. Subversive Amazons present the state with a lack of peace to unsettle and haunt them, becoming badass in their terrified recollections of us (which make the original heroes seem horrifying by comparison[13]); e.g., as Gays Against Groomers describe us, “Gender ideology isn’t just a neo-religious cult; it is biotechnological warfare in drag, like a multi-headed hydra with claws in every corporate sector” (source tweet: May 2nd, 2024); i.e., gay Nazi DARVO. The fact that such paradoxes are tolerated in fascist circles at all implies fascists haven’t corrupted the white chateau, which—while imperial as always—is held onto by establishment politicians as outwardly moderate, but no less cruel or bloodthirsty than their vigilante brethren.

In any event, Gothic-Communist development requires intersectional solidarity to achieve (the wider, the better); i.e., targeting the Superstructure, which maintains and shapes the Base. Gothic Communism camps these twin canonical trees, supplanting them with campy doubles. This starts with influencing how people think by what they take into themselves using what we got as normally commodified by capital into alien, fetish, sexualized forms: “meat wizards” with gay (thus rebellious) potential, but also police elements that historically-materially weaponize against labor (as herbos and himbos classically do); i.e., nature-as-monstrous-feminine subjugated to serve the state. Such propositions are always loaded with danger and chance; beware those who abstain (e.g., Jedi: “a Jedi craves not such things!” Bullshit).

(artist: Eric Martin)

Per the Amazon (regardless of sex), feats of strength are present in bodies that look curvy and capable (for male bodies, this is often called “the X frame/factor” and female bodies “the hourglass”)—that seem to suggest “the lift” without moving at all—but also upend gender norms that can serve workers or the state: the commodification and liberation of the monstrous-feminine in art as a beautiful, bountiful battlefield of sex and force, “rape” and “war” as things to put into quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s liminal expression (again, regardless of biology). The clues are all present and accounted for, and we’ve looked at yet-another branch of the monstrous-feminine from my childhood: Toriyama’s meat wizards and Carpenter’s Fu Manchu pastiche as doubled by all the usual Amazons. Combined with your childhood’s go-to heroes as things to rescue from capital, we have to be smarter than the past such men fostered while learning from it, making our own future out of the past(retro)-future that Capitalism aborted to serve profit in future-canceling copycats: witch cops.

Where there’s a cop, there’s a victim, thus a potential rebel—sometimes on the surface of one person/archetype. We’ll consider that through in-person forms—actors—with one example of each: Autumn Ivy as the witch cop, and Claire Max as the rebel, or at least, not the cop. Let’s wrap up a few points on praxis before broaching them (three pages).

Amazons, like all monsters, have sex-positive potential that is “nipped in the bud” by capital and its proponents. To address that, we must abort capital and build a better world through ironic variants of so-called himbos like Gohan and Cell, and herbos like Wonder Woman, Ayla and Savage Land Rogue. Except all must actualize through the Gothic as revived for workers’ benefit, not the state; i.e., the totality of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism—its Four Gs, Six Rs, Gothic-Communist Hermeneutic Quadfecta, mode of expression, and three iconoclastic doubles of oppositional praxis—all used to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness to the highest and widest degree.

Once Capitalist Realism starts to fade, we can start to dismantle the state and rebuild/redistribute power inside itself, but we must reclaim the Base and recultivate the Superstructure through all possible means. My emphasis is theatre and poetic expression—of starting with the Superstructure to transform heroic, monstrous-feminine violence. It is the half of capital the elite cannot control, fence and capitalize; it is what we play with using ludo-Gothic BDSM, mid-ergodic-motion, to trick our foes and their actual unironic defense of the state. Factories tend to be boring from a theatrical standpoint; herbos and himbos (and their kayfabe) less so.

The capitalist is always fascist, always singular and rigidly dogmatic, vertical, and heteronormative; i.e., as something to retreat into an imaginary past thereof. We haunt that as a parallel society’s horizontal, consensual and humanizing application using the same linguo-material devices: to foster good social-sexual attitudes that lead to post-scarcity as stable, thus able to deal with nature’s usual mood swings far better than capital can. As Bruce Lee said, “The softest thing cannot be snapped. […] Water can flow or it can crash. Be like water, friend.” This can be physical, but also symbolic in ways that are witch-like as the Amazon is; i.e., between worlds, exotic, pulled from the depths of a murky ocean’s darkest wishes as paradoxically… soft, pale, and oh-so-shapely. Its crimson, guilty pleasure mixes with Red Scare, which is where liberation must occur—mid-performance, summoning something that you can relate to, not abject!

(artist: Knut Ekwall; source: Robert Lambert Jones III’s “Mythological Beasts and Spirits: Naiad,” 2016)

In turn, we mirror the state’s bad imitations to expose their limitations and widened capacity for harm. We meet their advances in ways they cannot force. However subjugated and complete the colonization might seem, it is a cycle that capital cannot do without. They must always lose control within oscillating rhetoric; there is always a lapse in agency or judgment (such as they define these things as), which means there is always a chance to escape. We are both thetical to profit and antithetical, meaning again there is always a chance to rebel and push capital’s antithesis as something to synthesize: a unity the likes of which Indigenous cultures did not historically have; i.e., a stewardship of nature that preserves her for all peoples, animals and things: a merging of written and oral forms of communication to serve such a development as monstrous-feminine. And so on. We are the canvas and the code, the data as “corrupt,” the ghost in the shell, the fatal portrait, the doubled castle-like body and body-like castle, a parallel mise-en-abyme, a Shadow of Galatea, a spectre of Marx.

Keep all that in mind as we proceed. You have all the theory (complex and simple) and poetic means to forge your own destiny! To be your own hero in your own pro-worker propaganda narrative (a gayer Star Wars), your own himbo or herbo that hurts, not harms (the colonizer, by comparison, can never rape and kill enough; e.g., The Nightingale, 2018)! This starts with learning from the past as something others have played with already. This includes me looking at my past self (this book was written backwards), and said self looking at older forms revived from older forms, on and on. I’ve played with and learned from so many himbos and herbos, including Marston’s, Toriyama’s, Lucas’ and Cameron’s. Male, female, or somewhere in between, all left something heroic behind that yielded pro-worker allegories. So will I, when the time comes.

For that, whenever I die, do not mourn my passing for I am with you, and together we can challenge the state doubling us; i.e., in all the usual kayfabe, monomyth battles of will staring down the Medusa’s Pygmalion-esque double. Except our Song of Infinity isn’t played to send the moon back to a position where it can fall again (re: Majora’s Mask, 2000), nor one where the proverbial conch shatters, William-Golding-style, and demands that force be relied on to make things right in a centrist manner (Tapion’s flute, above), but a total reversal of the counterfeit’s process of abjection—of weaponizing the Aegis to anisotropically send the state’s doom back to them: images of their own dragon sickness, Darkening and inevitable death felt on the surface/inside thresholds of liminal expression the likes of which Amazons and knights routinely perfect; i.e., personas turning the tables through a shared aesthetic of power and death the state will try to police through workers more marginalized to less. From the first and second waves, feminism and queer rights have always historically had a white-to-token fascist element that haunts the sex positivity and intersectionality of the third and fourth. The Amazon is no less yoked by older Judases, non-binary people just as capable of doing it (re: Zeuhl and Autumn Ivy) as any other marginalized sector.

Such likenesses might seem haunted by the same foregone conclusion: class and culture betrayal spelling the herbo or himbo’s orc-like assimilation and defeat; i.e., the yoking of the Amazon regardless of sex (male, intersex, or female) by capital’s heteronormative order—as something to eat, play at, and pretend in ways that police rebellious forms. To this, the Spartans were pre-fascist nutjobs (Unknown 5’s “How Sparta Manufactured Super-Soldiers – The Spartan Agoge,” 2023), meaning slavers in ways that fascists dreamed about, and which post-fascists (fascists-in-disguise) ape behind various veneers more disingenuous still; i.e., those whose imaginary past becomes something to regress into (re: “fash brain”). Beyond your usual lost boys looking for mother as a warrior maiden, tokenization remains a problem insofar as these men become low-hanging fruit to pick, pick, pick at the cost of good praxis.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

As such, there’s the parasocial, predatory scheme of female sex workers more interested in milking cis-het men for money and punching down against would-be comrades than doing anything revolutionary (with false rebellion, again, being a fascist tactic); i.e., whoring the streets of Omelas, in uniform, versus walking away from Omelas (Pax Americana/the profit motive) altogether. I’ve crossed paths with such persons before, which brings us to Autumn Ivy as the picture-perfect class traitor dressed in herbo attire: a dumb-looking, thumper meathead deliberately siding with and working for the Man; i.e., another callous stripper aping Hippolyta to play the white Indian, punching down at other oppressed groups. Let’s interrogate the taboos and values of that aesthetic in-the-flesh, its poetry both in-motion and frozen in time. As we do, remember that capital loves plausible deniability and DARVO.

By extension, so do TERFs (cis or not) playing pick and choose, throwing their own Halloween-grade pity party with its own kernel of truth, mid-witch-hunt. Capitalist tokens find the same sweet spot, and speak out of both sides of their mouth, playing both sides having learned from the best to do so while acting more oppressed than they actually are and looking for revenge (as cops always do). Except they’re not Yojimbo, they’re sell-out white folk with an element of oppression turning coat whenever it suits them and they really need to check their privilege, wealth and status; it’s called “poisoning the well” and they (unlike actual Jewish victims) do it a lot: Jewish cops (and other such marginalized groups), witch cops, Amazon cops.

Whatever the sell-out, it’s all cut from the same hypocritical tree, fashioning into false masks of oppression given an air of reality by ostensibly recruiting from the colony streets (assimilation overlaps with generational tokenism: “bury your gays” and “kill the Indian, save the man” merging during class war as a cultural gauntlet of good and bad actors sharing the stage). Unbridled, combative critiques of the concentric veneers of persecution (and self-righteous police violence and ruthless opportunism) is simply required at this stage, but you gotta learn to a) not only not think with your dick (or taco), but b) kill your darlings presenting themselves as superhero cops, herbo or otherwise!

So by all means, beat that dead horse in matters of argument/discourse, which is what representation is/monsters are! Seriously, if someone’s complicit in genocide/playing both sides—from Mark Hamill to Joe Biden to Autumn Ivy—then let the fuckers have it! In a poetic sense, trash their funerals, spray paint their effigies, crash their weddings, to never know a moment’s peace! “Peace” is a white (wo)man’s word; liberation is ours. If they have the means to say something but don’t—not only keep mum, but have the temerity to try play the victim and the cop? Well, hit ’em with both barrels (again, as a matter of argument, of poetics, of monstrous debate and critique), again, again, and again! Let “Conan” contemplate that on the Tree of Woe! “Port to starboard, full broadsides! No prisoners! Make ’em walk the plank!” All’s fair in Fair Use, babes; i.e., in purposes of education, parody and critique, this is my pirate vessel and I don’t suffer fools or fakes!

(artist: Milo Manara)

I’d say I learned from the best, but my exes never ever could handle what they dished out. They didn’t fight fair, either. They took and they took, dominating me but getting the fuck out the moment I pushed back. So did Autumn, truth be told (expensive, but unable to handle a modicum of criticism with any degree of empathy or grace). To you bitches, this is my spice to give back: an object lesson in my usual, pull-no-punches polemic! I’ve been around people my whole life who were like addicts towards me as someone to punch, to use like the party favor or idiot (the twink). And in the past, I put up with it, covered for my own abusers by bailing them out! In any event, I’m not about to sit by and watch some diva who spurned me after my uncle died and Cuwu left me go on to act like they’re God’s gift to sex work. Like, fuck that noise! Fuck it stone dead!

What’s gotten under my theatre nerd’s skin, pray tell? Remember that Gothic Communism is queer-anarchist. So while the state very much is the enemy we need to check, so are cops and castles in disguise as GNC rebels, pirates, rockstars. No one likes a hypocrite flying a false flag. To that, function determines function; i.e., as a flow of power towards workers or the state. For all someone appears as powerful or oppressed, then, they are only as legitimate for rebellion insofar as they actually challenge the state. If they’re so closeted or self-serving that one muttering of the word “sex work” instantly turns them into a colossal diva, then they’re probably not as heroic as they’re posturing.

Furthermore, whatever the form the girl boss takes, one fact remains constant: “Scratch a moderate and a TERF bleeds (which is what trans misogyny is, lovelies); scratch a TERF and a predator bleeds (which is what cops are: liars, cheats, steals, abusers obsessed with their own image as “heroic,” “rebellious”). Queerness is classically closeted to a matter of degree—we are the domain of beards and lavender weddings, after all! Except while predation and pink-wash opportunism takes many forms, this isn’t a statement of Autumn’s actions as something to precisely qualify or prove, but critique from one theatre fag to another. They’re a sex worker and dom, but a bad one. Bitch don’t represent me, and they don’t monopolize Amazons! In my professional opinion and as someone who’s dealt with them as a client, they suck! Know your enemy but also your trade; I’m on them like a nun in a cucumber field!

A note about Autumn Ivy: They are a public figure who markets an image of themselves as “Amazonian,” which I am critiquing as having run-ins/worked with them in the past; as such, they’re a big enby and should be able to handle whatever criticism I throw at them, especially since their abuse of me in the past is true—is something I stand by and can back up. That being said… this isn’t me condoning violence or calls for violence against them. Unless they accelerate their trans misogyny (or any other fascist tendencies) in public—i.e., use their platform to spread active hate, Nazi-style—kindly leave them alone to figure things out on their own. —Perse

To that, Autumn is our resident witch cop playing the “jungle bunny” but functioning as the token (enby) colonizer/fascist strongwoman enby wearing the clothes of a white Indian (the aesthetics of oppression/rebellion): an ostensibly Texan (or similar state) herbo minus the praxial irony or charity of the fictional examples we’ve already examined, and far more enterprising as the usual sort of person who chased Indigenous peoples out of the territories before ratifying them as “secure” for white families on the Oregon Trail to move in. Now that GNC people are the targets of state violence and bad legislation all along the Bible Belt, I really have to wonder how much Autumn’s comic-book, T&A gym-rat fantasies will do anything other than line their own pockets before swanning charity and getting the hell outta Dodge (maybe they do things that further the Cause, but given their self-centered, one-foot-in-the-closet, one-foot-out-the-door approach to sex work, I seriously doubt it. Feel free to prove me wrong anytime, queen). Like Luc Besson’s Nikita, their Pygmalion fantasy is assimilative.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Except, unlike white straight people—e.g., Turkey Tom (D’Angelo Wallace’s “I’m Not Sorry,” 2020)—who feel surrounded by and afraid of all things alien while playing the victim/detective capitalizing on said dogma, token fash will generally internalize bigotry/self-hatred and triangulate against members of their own oppressed kind (though fascists will punch other oppressors); i.e., divide and conquer. They take the appearance of themselves as “oppressed” (which may even have some truth to it) and join the state in decay as their hill to die on; i.e., Uncle Toms on the plantation; e.g., Low Tier God (Don Ozzy’s “The Tragic Downfall of Low Tier God,” 2024). The same idea applies to enbies like Autumn and trans women like Natalie Wynn, etc. Moderacy is just another mask they wear to conceal the decay underneath during a disingenuous waiting game (which again, applies to straight white boys acting “reformed” in bad faith while using codewords/dogwhistles like “degenerate” when denigrating and infiltrating marginalized groups; re: Turkey Tom’s extensive “The Degenerates” series muckraking in the name of “edutainment”: putting up a “please don’t attack these groups” disclaimer while treating them as a degenerate monolith to hawk to his vindictive audience known for attacking minorities).

(artist: Bite Bunny)

On either side of the equation, monsters embody disordered thinking (madness) and identity (struggle) as a result of capital doing what capital does; e.g., BPD as something to expose and comment on (vis-à-vis, Bite Bunny, above) but also something I’ve known in past people (Cuwu) and present company as part of a larger dialectic (of the alien); i.e., as confusing us-versus-them by virtue of workers historically pitted against each other through icons revived for capital and labor over and over across space-time. Gothic Communism is based on DBT as poison-made-the-cure: “the dose makes the poison.” As such, there are good monsters and bad, and good monsters putting “bad” in quotes and vice versa (dialectical-material scrutiny tends to avoid moral judgements, but I digress). They portend to collapse and relapse, remission and escape, but the entire rodeo is overshadowed by the state being the biggest pig at the trough. It’s a cynic’s feast, a festival of servants backstabbing perceived runts in service to the kings of Capitalism-as-undead: vampires, zombies, werewolves, whatever.

Through capital, monsters are Elvis and his addiction as something to baby/capitalize on for long as possible; i.e., until the liability can be replaced with a fresh copy of itself, generally from the same vault of abused child stars. It’s a complicated smuggling route we can weaponize while being a victim of it: reoffenders and recidivism, “break a leg” less a quaint theatre superstition and more reifying our own trauma as something to witness, mid-crisis, mid-disintegration, onstage:

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Victims of capital are certifiable and fabulous, put together and falling apart. It’s like watching a toy fairy castle—already held together with duct tape—crash slowly and spectacularly into a rock candy mountain: to shatter into a million pieces, then reassemble like the T-one-fucking-thousand towards tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow… Rehabilitation is rock bottom for those of us rehumanizing ourselves (and our rocky-candy bottoms) already broken; i.e., into a shattered gumball machine spilling its sugary orbs everywhere. As such, we break like little, multi-colored triangles—a skittering of so many edible “billiard balls” across the tiles; i.e., as capital always does to sex workers, sexualizing everything as “monstrous” in all directions among the broken shards of glass (from Volume Zero/”What I Won’t Exhibit”): “Porn under Capitalism is always a liminal proposition, one where canon conflates gore, rape, and general harm with supposed acts of love.”

To that, porn is incredibly liminal, thus able to be camped and canonized within the Gothic to varying degrees of blindness and perceptiveness; e.g., Friday the 13th‘s cycling recursive collage of psychosexual, patently Freudian/unironically violent (re: knife dick) wish fulfillment: a stage of dated white-people Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre clichés concerned with more present (and heteronormative) abjections redoubled through capitalist veins of expression. These, in turn, have been recycled from Radcliffe to Scooby-Doo-style moral panics into what has become a neoliberal loop of fatal nostalgia: a never-quite-was time of instability and surveillance when the black castle (and the Reaper) come a-calling. The land darkens, occupied with reinventions of the man-in-black, the banditti as retroactively coded with racial animus and other colonial hazards during fresh nightmares of class anxiety/critique (of vampiric “old money”) invoking the dialectic of shelter (re: Jameson) versus that of the alien (re: me). Like Shakespeare, it’s often bloody and crude, but also surgical and necromantically poetic the way only gay theatre nerds can be!

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

True-to-form, this well-traveled, shamelessly trashy track manifests in varying degrees of irony or straightforward dogma regarding sex and force, death/rape anxieties as dimorphized, which the queer will always have to camp inside of itself as the main attraction: stuck next to Jason Voorhees, Freddy Kruger and Michael Myers (and other infantilized slashers with Germanic surnames, zero game and endless mommy-and-daddy issues); i.e., the giant, Frankensteinian, incel-grade pre-fascist, to fascist, to post-fascist passing the Oedipal curse along through sheer size difference and knife-play menace. Except we’re just as often the twinkish damsel or helpless slut (above) holding but also becoming the Radcliffean miniature, paralyzing the Destroyer as yet-another-moon to push up like Atlas, to bury alive like [insert Gothic heroine, here]. But such things always come back because capital decays and regenerates, a fascist revenant. Our struggle for liberation oscillates within the same space, its surfaces and scapegoat simulacra—classically a Neo-Gothic (white) fantasy reserved for cheap theatre that we, per ahegao-style calculated risk, can use to face our own demons’ disordered thinking; i.e., as stemming from the usual abject historical-material loop as cycling between (wo)man vs nature in some shape or form.

To this, Rogue’s Savage Land (as discussed earlier) extends to all manner of locales (and their wildlife, human or otherwise) playing an important role in the process of abjection; i.e., one that commonly occurs between the rural and the urban as alienated and fearful towards each other—from Radcliffe’s scary rustics, to the Irish Big-House drama of the fearsome Catholics in a post-Reformation world, to Sam Raimi’s evil cabins in the forest as ripped off from Matthew Lewis’ bandit house (several centuries earlier), to The Hateful Eight or Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2015 and 2010). In short, the Amazon always relegates to wherever a given heroine finds herself located but also pitted against all manner of creepy-crawly or Jack-London-style, tooth-and-claw things: alienated from her as someone having a foot in each world. She’s not a knight (white or black), thus is always illegitimate, but nevertheless remains canonized in the copagandistic scheme. She’s the stranger and the savior—a “white Indian,” meaning the Pioneer wife-in-disguise, her Winchester Repeater exchanged for a flint spear and the prairie natives transformed into lizard people/dinosaurs or sabretooth tigers! As Metallica sings in “Of Wolf and Man” (1991): “Back to the meaning of life!”

(artist: Ronin Dude)

Regressive or subversive, the Amazon is always the center of attention; i.e., the rape fantasy voyeuristically framed between certain death and the paradox of performance treating her as a meal and maker of meals (out of the animalistic predators pegging her for a “free lunch”): the babe in the wilderness triumphing over “rape” abjected onto evil cartoon wolves, T-Rexes and other such outrageous codes exhibiting the damsel-in-distress as stripped down to her undies (or projections of those on the surface of more modest clothes) and threatened by something jungle-like all around her. Even when these things are not onscreen, she is always threatened by them as lurking nearby—i.e., by almost-certain penetration in ways that cavemen generally aren’t forced to suffer (not straight cis-het ones, anyways): vaginal, oral and anal. It’s the hauntology of rape as a modern business pushed into imaginary dated spheres. In canonical terms, any monstrous-feminine veneer of strength is a façade behind which ghosts of the counterfeit lurk: exploitation and rape through a Cartesian paradigm preying on nature. Both are essentialized as something to reify and survive no matter where you go.

Within that penetrated membrane, rape is a constant threat, but also “rape” in quotes. Except, the monster-fucking rape fantasy as a complicated, often-privileged one depending on who the target of violence is, and who’s the othered object of fear. For instance, white women are coded to classically fear anything that isn’t white, but also fear and submit to their husbands as violent and seeking Neo-Gothic fantasies that put the “violence” in quotes; re: Radcliffe’s demon lover as a historically exploitative fantasy that weaponized lived white cis-het female abuse to uphold the status quo per the usual Gothic readership: white women and their inherited psychosexual (and profoundly racist) dysfunctions triangulating against other groups. Rape fantasies are perfectly fine, even cathartic, provided a colonial effect is avoided.

Except the traditional Gothic readership still echoes Ann Radcliffe’s own half-real “true crime” hauntology getting her jollies at the cost of other exploited groups; re: “pick me” behavior tied to the profit motive while prioritizing and triangulating white cis women against other groups: as the usual victims, gatekeepers, girl bosses of said groups while fetishizing members of the colonizer group as torture-porn princes (a form of elevation, defending and worshipping the rapist/antagonizing the person of color as a de facto sex slave). It’s unironic bondage dressed up as “activism” and “play.” As such monster-fucking being hot/appealing in a sex-positive rape play/consent-non-consent sense because its appreciative peril/irony illustrates consent in Gothic counterculture (a topic for Volume Three) as often intimidating but nevertheless consensual during calculated risk—e.g., “I’d let a Balrog fuck me”—not submission to the usual, white-penned, settler-colonial demon lover tropes!

As such, the Gothic chronotope is a place for the woman (or anyone coded as “woman”) to suffer endlessly inside. It reliably extends the castle (or manor) to the castle grounds as increasingly prehistoric, but also ahistoric inside a monstrous-feminine Gothic imagination: the out-of-doors invading the imperial structure and vice versa; e.g., Faulkner’s cartographic refrain, Yoknapatawpha County, or Lovecraft’s haunted Providence-in-decay pushing synchronistically onto Tolkien’s Middle-earth, The Twilight Zone (1959), wherever Tales from the Crypt (1989) finds itself, etc. It’s an operatic rape space that scared white people deliberately populate with various bogey people; i.e., as scapegoats to stake, but also hunt the unfaithful depicted per the Gothic readership’s usual bunch: middle-class, naughty-and-curious white girls threatened by a faux “Transylvania” with varying degrees of irony and dogma.

A note about non-white tokenism: Afrocentrism is an issue of militant tokenism, too; i.e., slaves/underclass divided against other slaves inside America as a concentric prison colony through divide-and-conquer rhetoric; e.g. American blackness rape ranking Indigenous black culture in other counties facing white oppression through black skin, white masks as a globalized form of such division:

Dear the US, British Australia enforced a decades-long regime of raping Black women & stealing their babies to raise “white” in order to erase Blackness & Indigeneity from the continent Please stop acting like it worked (source tweet, Strewth: May 12, 2024).

Note: I’m currently looking for Indigenous and person-of-color models. If anyone is interested, click here to refer to the project details. —Perse, 5/14/2024

We’ll discuss afrocentrism/shadism more in Volume Three, but Volume Zero has discussed how the dark figure has classically been fetishized non-white since before the Enlightenment

(artist: Ary Sheffer)

Before the Enlightenment, Late Medieval stories and media from the Gothic/Renaissance period featured less persons of color because access to actual persons with dark or non-white skin was historically less common, thus more exotic (though it did happen; a pure-white medieval period is a fascist myth); as such, the pre-fascist destroyer persona was coded as black in relation to the “non-European” as Jewish, Germanic, or the broader “Eastern” (white-skinned: from Italy to Romania to Russia; non-white groups: China, the Middle East and Africa). Until the Enlightenment period began and started to orchestrate widespread settler colonialism (and modern nation-state formation), race-based slavery largely didn’t exist; so the biases were less about skin color and more about general ethnicity and religion; e.g., evil Italian counts, but also Jewish people as go-to scapegoats for the Romans and the Christians. Then and now, these devils were seen as threats to the heteronormative order of things; i.e., returning to nature, to hell and chaos. As such, the devil became something that actively corrupts the youth and women as always running off with them into the night (source).

has since gone onto gain a racialized character through Cartesian rhetoric turning minorities against one another through porn: as a dogmatic and predatory industry that must be reclaimed inside of itself; i.e., contending with a fetishized, often stigma-animalized Gothic dialog that generally has an assimilative character extending into fiction and politics at large as half-real (from Volume One):

(exhibit 10c4: Artist, top-left: Margo Draws; top-middle and top- and bottom-right: Oxcoxa; bottom-left, source tweet: Raw Porn Moments, 2023.)

Taarna runs the risk of chopping off workers’ heads who are normally presented as orcs/zombies, minus the threat i.e., labor movements and/or people of color being called “terrorists” by the state—but it’s arguably a step in the right direction provided we camp Tolkien more than Heavy Metal [1981] did.

More to the point, Taarna isn’t so far gone that you can’t reclaim her from total assimilation and decay [or demonic animalization; i.e., Tolkien’s spiders existing purely within female “chaotic evil” forms of nature as something to dominate by pure-white men upholding the profit motive within Capitalist Realism]. These kinds of Amazonian double standards and intersectional biases elide and roil on the surface of the female body as a) entirely mysterious to Tolkien, and b) a complicated billboard he never bothered with in his own stories: the variable undeath of a white-skinned Medusa as killed by men contrasted against the black-skinned Medusa as killed by men and women, both of them [and orcs] fetishized differently within the same punitive structure.

The genuine struggle—to holistically express body positivity during liberation as an ongoing event—becomes caught up in morphological double standards; i.e., the white-skinned “dark queen” either marketed as “black”—i.e., “PAWG” [“phat ass white girl,” exhibit 32b/41b] as a “Goth” collision that elides black clothing with the “black” body as having white skin: the “big [titty/booty] Goth GF”—or kept skinny to be drawn the way that “most bodies are” [code for Vitruvian enforcement, Oxcoxa]. Meanwhile, black female bodies that happen to be skinny and fairer skinned [shadism] are inevitably perceived as “white” [as if most of them “chose” how they were born]: similar to queerness, skin color synonymizes with body size as a false choice, which complicates fat acceptance and liberation in the eyes of those persons seeking representation as something to escape the shared, internalized shame of white/black female bodies as queer [and male bodies in relation to them, the two hailing from the same savage, imaginary place].

 

(artist: Jazminskyyy)

In turn, the trend of the Amazon or Medusa as a powerful warrior queen or Sapphic monarch can be taken into potentially exploitative spheres, wherein the “Bowsette” crown [also Oxcoxa] famously fetishizes the white girl with an “atypical” [nonwhite] princess body to be desirable for the pandered-to male fans; but also articulates the descriptive sexuality of white or non-white AFABs within Nintendo’s fandom—i.e., those who are simply born with bodies outside the settler-colonial standard, and who want to be celebrated for it via a class metaphor of power and status: the girly crown, suspiciously pink [re: Tirrrb’s “The Yassification Of Masculinity“] but tinged with sexy black “corruption” as a non-harmful aesthetic/function. Within this larger dialectic, a viral trend emerges using the same imagery operating at cross purposes, resulting in various amounts of nuance or lack thereof, as well as [un]irony and cultural appropriation/appreciation when the “Yass, Queen!” crown is worn.

To this, Tolkien becomes a funny hypothetical begging “what if?” in a larger conversation the original never bothered with. When we entertain ghosts of his work through Amazonomachia speaking to a lived experience he deliberately distanced himself from, we play with, thus learn from these misfit toys. Doing so, we uncover the potential for class warriors and traitors emerging in arbitration relative to the public’s use of a largely textual/oral tradition to support popular sentiment for or against the status quo: to let one or two minorities rule in a problematic light like Tolkien’s orcs and dwarves did, or for there to be no minorities and for everyone to be kings, queens and intersex/non-binary monarchs in a post-scarcity world Tolkien [thanks to Capitalist Realism] literally couldn’t imagine (source).

(artist: Nyx)

The point with the above quote is that such things reify and continue within popular culture as something to interrogate through those who consume, creation or patron new Cartesian iterations preying on nature-as-monstrous-feminine. You want to critique power? You must go where it is. As a status/sex symbol, Medusa is often “too big” as white or black bodies, hair and cosmetics, which each come with its own double standards per type that—through tokenization at large—erupt in frustrating forms of assimilation, marginalized in-fighting and fetishization. In turn, iconoclastic forms are thicc fire starters that make trouble using what they got: their sizeable, shapely weight as something to throw around. For further examples, Volume One explores this in the Gothic as pornographic per body types and parts—so-called “PAWGs,” “BBCs,” and “BBWs”—but also regarding canonical fiction as something gradually critiqued in a postcolonial sense that is not without fresh struggles: Jane Eyre to Wide Sargasso Sea to modern people of color all around the world. The only way forward is through intersectional solidarity! —Perse

It’s canonically a cautionary space of institutionalized moral panic, one whose almost-holy dogma regards Medusa or Dracula as both the predatory serial killer from beyond—the freak of nature hailing from a fearsome imaginary past—but also crude elements of sodomy and witchcraft as moral lessons delivered in medieval-style parables: what good little girls are expected avoid (or else) on the same confused surface; i.e., something whose curiosity is capitalized on to uphold the status quo with. As such, the Nazi and Communist spectres remain stuck on the same mirror said girl sees herself on, all parties redoubled in a fearsome, concentric echo. It’s not just a cave of darkness, as Plato would have it, but—per Borges—is a mirror cave trapping the hero in an endless Promethean curse: Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern haunting the very monomyths Disney has utterly milked dry.

Again, this goes beyond buildings as owned by humanoid tyrants, extending to nature-as-monstrous-feminine (abject) forcing its way into the Imperial Core: a female boss animal or a tyrant lizard chasing down a white, Vitruvian girl even when she isn’t wearing a skimpy fur bikini (so-called “women’s clothes” are generally designed by men to sexualize woman in a dimorphic heteronormative scheme). The very word “bikini” was appropriated from the Bikini Islands and, in turn, has shifted into a commercialized kaiju-style fiction: Gojira (1954) originally critiquing American Imperialism only to be recuperated/gentrified into yet-another-spectacle to cash in on. They do so similar to King Kong (1933) and other captive fantasies sexualizing spaces/occupants outside the Imperial Core as rapacious and black; i.e., vengeful in ways that curiously target white women with rape: through American-to-Japanese neoliberalism as a cottage-grade content mill through how-to-draw-manga and comic book instruction manuals routinely passing off the usual stories as incredibly pulpy and formulaic. Canon fetishizes the statuesque as often Amazonian/pin-up. It’s both completely absurd, but also lucrative; i.e., abusing those white/tokenized folk afraid of capital’s inevitable collapse and the gators coming home to roost!

Regardless of where they originally hail from, such stories classically feature white (or token) women, mid-peril, inside a collapsing colonial home invaded by nature (and its abject reproductive methods) challenging the nuclear family model; e.g., 2019’s Crawl and the monster literally being a hurricane (classically gendered as female) and gators/the wilderness as something to rescue whitey from, but also confuse the two: who’s the swamp kitten, in this scenario? The savage? Whatever the creature being featured, the fiction is neoconservative, hence weaponizes white women as prey animals against nature-as-black, as monstrous-feminine, as invasive, displaced, and hostile to a false “native” human ordering of things; i.e., said girlies surviving cartoon, escalating and superhuman trials-of-Job whose comical mega-damage occurs inside the colonial home rejecting them. The house floods, grows teeth, chews said family up and spits them out; i.e., the imperial formula as something to decay and survive through the Gothic princess as final-girl-turned-presumed-broodmare: the bridling of the Amazon, post-adventure.

Maybe Jameson’s right in that it’s a tad boring and tired, but the old fart still doesn’t account for ironic forms that inject some much-needed fun (and cum) into the mix: weird iconoclastic nerds subverting the paradigm, however exhausted, into something far sluttier and potent in favor of all workers and nature versus canonical (Cartesian) Gothic apologia! The two exist side-by-side in the same mode of consumption; i.e., as something for people like myself and Cuwu to camp in our own homebrew, DYI porn!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Notably the larger mode becomes something that attracts weird to weird, Cuwu drawn to my drawing of them being hunted, and the two of us hooking up (for a time, left) to make much more art! It helped them face their own survived trauma, and me overcome my trans-woman’s hate of my girl cock—by shoving it repeatedly into Cuwu’s wet-but-thirsty cunt! Before then, I had drawn Cuwu in orange socks (several images back: a colorful homage to Debra Louise Jackson) being stalked by Jason Voorhees; they got horny by the idea—and from our talks about all manner of things, which put them at ease, “scaring” the panties off them. It was incredibly sexually charged before we met, and only led to a lot of fun, kinky experiments (sleep sex, for example) afterwards. I met different sides of them sharing the same body and face—the fuck-puppy high and disassociating and asking for sex, and the little dragon in them taking me for all I was worth: all looking at me with those hazel gold-rimmed eyes. And I don’t regret a single second of it, even as funerary moments like these sometimes feel like I’m digging “Cuwu” up and burying them again. “Here’s to looking at you, kid!”

(source: Fandom)

Amazons or not, the monstrous-feminine repeats in ways we need to utilize as a palliative-Numinous medicine, but also ludo-Gothic BDSM as good praxis. Pastiche is remediated praxis. Repetition is important, then, because fascists (always in disguise—cryptofascists) want us to forget hypocritical things about them; i.e., class betrayals that happened often as briefly as several years ago. To build on Asprey’s paradox of terror, we need to consider the legitimate proletarian function such theatrical devices entertain; i.e., as a vital means of repeating refrains useful to Gothic Communism: to scare children, thus apprise them of actual threats; e.g., Duncan Regehr wonderfully camping the Nazi by playing the fash-coded Dracula (above): exposing those that lurk on the surface of/within costumes and masks worn  on opposite ends of a given iteration of the same-old village scapegoat conversations. As such, this Halloween-style rhetoric works as a collective and warring form of bad theatre (re: “a tale told by an idiot”). Gothic Communists use it during revolutionary cryptonymy—to warn others of fascists serving capital by attacking us behind the mask; i.e., as something to make theirs slip. By comparison, fascists will monopolize terror through complicit cryptonymy—as something to perform, hogging all theatrical devices for themselves and themselves alone; i.e., to an absurd degree as the logical conclusion of exposing their usual obscurantism; e.g., “woke fascism” (The Kavernacle’s “The Rise of WOKE Fascism,” 2024): denude and expose us to attack and kill, ridding the state of another enemy.

To survive, we must put on the mask and dance with other people wearing masks who may or may not want to kill us in service to the bourgeoisie. It’s not about it making “perfect” sense, but subversive workers challenging fascism and those serving its fash-brain regressions as a clever (and ruthless) means for our enemies to hide and still be able to prey on state victims for the state (which we want to stop); i.e., as the usual false-rebel watchdogs of capital acting the monstrous badass and victim simultaneously while spreading Imperialism behind a false flag—in bad faith, bad education, bad acting and bad play. Whatever the venue, they’re craven, sneaky bullies poisoning the well—witch hunters waiting for the next moral panic to put on their spook hats and play victim/cop in equal measure.

Fascists are cutthroat, false impostors. It’s always an opportunity for them: to make money and whip their followers into a lucrative frenzy while punching down as a means of squeezing the usual underclass more and more. They make the persecution gold rush and sell the shovels to dig our graves, so we must expose that ghoulish Capitalism with our own shovels and caskets’ dialectic of the alien: the undertakers of their cruel stupidity turning them upside down, shaking them down. We take what they normally abuse and, per the usual give-and-take of any exchange, weaponize it against them: exposing the killer hiding in plain sight as a pillar of the community (e.g., Salt Baker from Cuphead, below; also, from Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” to Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs or Wes Craven’s The People under the Stairs, 1991).

Per Volume Zero, fascists will predictably respond with deception and violence; i.e., acting “oppressed” when we “break” (critique/revolutionize) their canonical masks and monstrous toys (all heroes are monsters). As such, weird canonical nerds will respond with Man Box/”prison sex” behaviors tied to the profit motive: open aggression, condescension, reactionary indignation and DARVO. This applies to film critics, speedrunners, cosplayers, and basically any form of content/media you could think of/up regarding consumption, creation or privatization. From straight white guys to queer TERFs, canon defends itself in decay versus iconoclasm as a rebellious means of giving the capitalist game away (in other words, we’re gay Dracula being staked by Van Helsing for breaking centrist icons of so-called “balance”; i.e., peace, law and order, etc): defend the nuclear family mode defend the nuclear[13a] family model by indoctrinating women and children through a forced reproductive order weaponizing family as a fascist spear to plunge shamelessly into genderqueer (other otherwise outsider) forces. Never let them forget by always reminding them by antagonizing them; i.e., segregation is no defense, so fuck with them and guard yourself against reprisals.

Nazis defend Nazis, and Nazis (token or not) defend capital. Listen to the stink they pitch and expose them as you do—with your Aegis! They won’t be able to resist tone-policing or otherwise attacking Medusa out in the open, but won’t be able to harm you if you flash behind buffers (which the Internet provides, sex work being so taboo and commercialized that it becomes hard for fascists [or sex workers] to talk about at all because bare-and-exposed forms aren’t “ad friendly” but, for us, become a place to congregate and confer); e.g., Fired Up Stilettos, below, fighting for the decriminalization of sex work (sloganizing “stripping doesn’t equal consent” and “tip me” through them using their bodies to advertise inclusive graffiti/billboard activism); i.e., actual guerrillas out-maneuvering the clumsy imperial pig playing “guerilla” themselves.

(artist: Fired Up Stilettos)

The latter always colonize from a position of luxury that alienates them from actually being hunted by state forces; we will always be more used to it, more nimble and quick on home turf as something to take back from these lying brutes. They’re about as inventive as Mr. Owl biting to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop after three licks. Per Umberto Eco, there’s a variety of modular aspects to fascists, but first and foremost, they’re anti-intellectual and prone to play with dead metaphors, or metaphors to make dead; i.e., to fashion and wear like hollowed-out masks of their victims (monsters being symbols of persecution and persecutor) they them use to blend in and abuse us; we, in turn, play dumb/dead, freezing them and feeding accordingly or shifting shape and exchanging forbidden knowledge (the core functions of undead and demonic egregores/Gothic poetics) to contend with them (and the state) hunting us (e.g., Jordan Peele’s animal metaphors in Get Out [2015] and his other works: fascists body snatching black people to get close to them as a popular game to hunt within capital by the usual capitalist parasites whitewashing Beaver and the Cleaver clan; i.e., including parodies; e.g., Malcom in the Middle, 2000).

They also posture as representatives thereof. It’s real “pick me” behavior, race traitor, class and cultural betrayal overlapping. Tokenization overlaps among scarcity as criminogenic; i.e., a pauper’s sport where “there can only be one,” sloganized into fatal, effacing nostalgia (the beginning and the end of time, erasing anything before white American history and treating after the ’80s as begot from the same immutable nucleus) vis-à-vis Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” (1982) into Japanese neoliberal nation pastiche per Street Fighter (1987) and fighting games fighting on the usual class/cultural struggles. This sell-out’s hierarchy extends across all marginalized groups, treating black men as race horses/thoroughbreds and gladiators, to butch lesbians and other monstrous-feminine brands tied to a “better time” under capitalist regressions to a free market; e.g., Survivor’s “hey, sailor!” matelotage (that gay little beret) versus the Village’s People’s “YMCA” (1978) having its own cultural appropriation (the Native American chief costume) through schlocky gay pastiche/peak disco and fetish camp. Like with feminism, the Gothic, punk, sex work, etc, such things gentrify and then decay/straighten under capital (e.g., The Correspondent’s “What’s Happened to Soho?” 2011: “Where will all the reprobates go?”), aping Poe’s most famous story and arguably Hawthorne’s: families are always rising and falling in America! For us fags, Halloween isn’t a place to spend dough and punch down, though, but punch up and camp the Straights (not all disco is in disguise)!

Such dogma is hermeneutic; e.g., through a canonical lens, Mike Tyson isn’t kid dynamite exploited by a predatory white system (stolen culture/generations and diasporic culture death) from Gus D’Amato and Don King, but the one black guy who “made it,” became champ, had his own videogame character, etc. Except Mike Tyson’s likeness became something to privatize by Japanese executives into infinity as something to likewise embody by token grifters all across the planet: M. Bison, or “Boxer.” Due to localization in the neoliberal deck, Capcom swapped names for him and the other two archetypes, “Claw” and “Dictator.” Claw became Vega instead of Balrog (a mutation of Zorro as a slasher preying on beautiful women), and Dictator became M. Bison instead of Vega (a fash version of Superman-meets-Francisco-Franco, marrying the real-world dictator with Yasunori Kato[14a] into a bizarre neoliberal hybrid). The same kayfabe BDSM could be seem in other fighting series demonizing BDSM in an abject theatrical sense; e.g., Voldo from the Soul Caliber franchise demonizing (and capitalizing on) the strict BDSM aesthetic like Giger’s xenomorph did or Clive Barker’s cenobites.

No matter how tired or aged the performers, the show must go on. In other words, it’s the usual pyramid-shaped, circus-grade, Red-Scare clichés fostering American exceptionalism—with the money flowing up through the usual assistants and updating of East-meets-West Orientalism: from Bruce Lee vs Chuck Norris to Daniel-san vs Johnny Lawrence onto Ryu vs Ken Masters (from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s) onto The Karate Kid 2018 remake as something we must critique (Persephone van der Waard’s “Class Warfare – Classism, Fascism and Whitewashing in Cobra Kai, season 4,” 2022), onto to Street Fighter 6 (2023), and so on and so on. It’s sex-and-force vaudeville evolving inside an increasingly neoliberal market’s growing profit motive (the trifectas and monopolies) to foster praxial inertia, not a valid pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., as forever capitalizing on the imaginary past per the same old heteronormative, settler-colonial, Cartesian predation against nature as anti-American, anti-capital, anti-genocide (war and rape), etc. Anything that challenges that will be gagged, and censorship equals genocide dressed up as “peace (and quiet)” for the usual entrepreneurs: Anglicized capitalists aping the colonizer from Caesar to Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden.

The same goes for Marston’s Wonder Woman and Hippolyta, Medusa, and any monstrous-feminine, as “ad friendly”; i.e., that serves profit, not a pedagogy of the oppressed; e.g., sex worker likenesses being weaponized against and stolen from them. The more narrow the tokenization, the more niche the grifter serving the profit motive’s heteronormative hierarchy of power. Same goes for GNC people of any race, religion or gender identity/performance. Amazonian white enby? Eh, class betrayal is class betrayal. It’s kayfabe neoliberal vaudeville, my dudes. While there’s no such thing as a perfect victim (with reprobates [sinners pre-destined for damnation, per Calvinism] and forgiveness being allotted through the usual “boundaries for me, not for thee” schtick; i.e., an equality of convenience that pushes other minorities’ heads under the water but generally from a cis- or white-supremacist stance corrupting feminism and queer movements: bleeding from the usual gentrified/fascist venues into the usual ghettos), but policing and proletarian victimhood become mutually exclusive the moment a victim becomes an abuser for the state.

The problem with revolution and intersectional solidarity is that it isn’t modular to nearly the same degree as monsters/Gothic poetics are. You’re either for workers or the state, the latter of which is the perpetual cop/enemy to the former. Any aesthetic that you can pick and play with functions through unequal power in this respect towards one or the other, not both; e.g., the black Egyptian mommy dom as the usual victim of those who think “big mommy muscles and faux, campy Egyptology alone = rebellion.”

Sadly it takes a little more than that, my dudes (e.g., Marisa is a fash; i.e., Persephone van der Waard’s “Fascism in SF6: Marisa,” 2023)! Feminist and/or GNC, Amazons—like all monstrous-feminine—historically concede societal gains to enjoy policer positions under the Man’s so-called “protection” (to find the Nazi, observe anyone who gets mad/denies your arguments when you point out the obvious fascist presence in kayfabe, Amazonomachia, and/or the monomyth’s usual predatory bread-and-circus); they become unironic whores lusted-after for their subjugated dominatrix’ aesthetic and Amazonian performance, while exploiting and punching down at others less fortunate (and more principled) than themselves. All haunt the same basic herbo-to-himbo gradient, regardless of the exact appearance it adopts: aping the Amazon, the gypsy and/or Cleopatra (all poetics are made up, but those invented to serve the state do so through profit subjugating rebellion as a matter of controlled opposition). “Oh, rare Egyptian!” my ass!

(artist: Shardanic)

To that, my experience with Autumn was ultimately a negative one—someone GNC who looked the part, but functioned as a herbo witch cop; i.e., a person who loves DBZ (and similar pulpy heroism), but used its herbo, meathead aesthetic to police rebellious elements that speak out against capital (me); i.e., during their own centrist, SWERF-style sex work dressed up as “modest.” The usual nudity is very much implied on the surface of that tiny Triforce thong (several images back): the “gateway to Heaven” as Hyrulian, invented. It’s the hidden ham sandwich to sell on the surface of nerd monomythic emblems, while doing a very common SWERF[14] trick: attacking those who show more skin, denying them the right to exist by virtue of valorizing non-naked cosplays; i.e., that get “naked without nudity” while offering “gym mom” wisdom to the same old hopeless dweebs and acting better than those who do get naked to reclaim their bodies, genders and struggles with.

As such, Autumn and their skin-deep, “bare skin mil spec” approach to the mommy dom (the cave woman) is no different than AMAB versions of the same monstrous-feminine wizard class: a meat puppet gym mom passing off a queer subjugate’s dead dogma thereof while acting like a queen action figure (a diva, in Autumn’s case). Just as the female Amazon combines sex and force like the male variant does, it comes with its own female baggage/double standards that Autumn conveys through a dumb, unironic fulfillment of prostituting themselves; i.e., as the female cop-in-uniform made into an Amazonian token: naked and clothed, strong as the male-warrior-made-female in ways that “act the man” per female double standards—the virgin and the whore defending Omelas, the white Indian punching down at other tribes.

And this is me being nice! Either they’re a useful idiot, or know exactly what they’re doing and don’t care. Like all Marvel canon, Autumn does nothing to challenge the war machine/status quo abuse of a statuesque cryptonymy. They’re complicit, pumping iron and making hay as the poster herbo for the state. Yikes!

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Such things are always object lessons in some shape or form. Regarding Autumn, a cop is a cop, and castles (ACAB) of a pearly “Omelas” sort always regress to rape of an unironic sort that bridles the Amazon (the euthanasia effect); i.e., while expanding the hidden Holocaust. You gotta do way more than flash some skin (and implied genitals) to convince me you’re good faith, my dude. Those tattoos, enby identity and stripper clothes/furry shtick mean fuck-all if you’re still a state proponent, thus an unironic toy for the elite; police work is sex work fetishizing the cop, including in blind parodies that make the cop an undercover agent working for vice in their underwear. That’s you, Autumn—threatening[15] me as such people always do; i.e., the white savior extending to the enby cop policing the AMAB trans woman with all the grace of an unironic cavewoman. Real classy!

(artist: Claire Max)

All the same, Autumn doesn’t have a monopoly on the weird nerd culture of such masculine-heavy monstrous-feminine; e.g., Claire Max is someone who’s frank about what she does, but isn’t a total SWERF and TERF (fash) about it. Her own statements on physical fitness provide a nice counterpoint to Autumn’s decayed, witch-cop antics, Claire’s own life updates overlapping with gym culture

Pretty happy about having a fat ass for the first time in my life, but months of constant lower body work because of my broken arm also mean it’s super plump and round? Good job, me (source tweet: May 1st, 2024)

albeit as something that isn’t regressive and fixated on making money over intersectional solidarity. More than her own reflections, though, Claire doesn’t seem to personify regressive triangulation by token Amazons against trans populations the way that Autumn did with me. She’s a model, but not pretending that she somehow doesn’t do sex work (something Autumn told me repeatedly not to advertise about them; i.e., telling me what to write, but not much appreciating it when I had my own requests. Face it, Autumn: you’re a sex worker and a cop).

To this, the degree to which someone’s skin (and heroic muscles) are showed, implying the genitals, isn’t even the point, nor are any theatrical regressions unto Amazonian spaces and personas like Savage Land or Wonder Woman; it’s whether someone who reaches celebrity status through such iconography starts acting like a class traitor behind the monstrous-feminine guise. Autumn did, and has decayed beneath the paintjob as something altogether rotten; Claire does not, has not. End of story!

Now, take the same idea and apply it to any monstrous-feminine performer under the sun; i.e., not just herbos or himbos (cis or GNC), but various combos of masculine, feminine and non-binary forms of sex work that, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, work within the language of (class) war as something to personify in popular cultural markers/codifiers like the herbo or himbo. Bodies aren’t just lifestyles or goals, then, but punkish class/cultural goals that pass along critical-thinking skills tied to the body as a theatrical uniform; i.e., the flesh as a symbol of strength that can challenge state hegemonies through psychosexual rape fantasies that sit next to trauma, but needn’t actually harm someone.

To that, Claire isn’t just a thuggish strength trainer like Autumn is. Autumn takes thirsty men’s money while “returning to greatness” through an imaginary past that chains the Amazon to the oldest cliché in the book: “acting like a man”; i.e., aping an unironic, Man-Box Goku gender swap, but still keeping a bit of dumb sluttiness to the brawny action figure (sluts are fine; cop sluts, not so much). By comparison, Claire uses what she has to pass healthier lessons along without feeling/acting like a literal, functional cop. It could always happen in the future, but as of right now that’s certainly not the vibe Claire gives off. As Claire’s Twitter bio reads, “Built like a steakhouse, handles like a bistro” (source); she caters, but doesn’t pander to fascist dudes by being the strict mommy dom the state loves (as Autumn does):

(artist: Claire Max)

Claire looks like she hits the gym, but isn’t trying to scam anyone or pander for her own sake:

Influencers who claim you can build an ass in 30 days (if you buy their program!) don’t want to tell you this, but if you want a bigger butt? You have to gain weight. And yes, some of that weight will be fat. And no, not all of it will be in your butt. That’s not how bodies work. You can’t choose where you gain fat and you can’t choose where you lose it from. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that you CAN choose where you build muscle, and with the right training and diet, you can get the results you want (ibid.).

We’re all looking for that special, capable someone to nurture us in different ways: the mad lass who brings a cake and “guns” to a gunfight. In turn, capital is a boomerang that must repeat, repeat, repeat. This time we can reject capital and embrace Medusa as someone to hug, fuck and take on the wider call for liberation from state monopolies and trifectas, but also their class traitors in disguise; i.e., not just Autumn being a dumb, diva-grade meathead, but older forms of Socialism that failed by virtue of an ability to corrupt; e.g., Marxist-Leninism as yet another state mechanism to woo with proverbial “gifts from the colonizer”; e.g., the Skeksis orrery given to Aughra, but also the Trojan Horse onto more recent Amazons that gender swap Achilles as something capitalize on, not challenge the state with. They aren’t avatars of/servants to Medusa, we are; and we, as such, liberate that which capital universally alienates, sexualizes and fetishizes to normally serve profit through the Cartesian paradigm—ourselves. We must learn to play with ourselves according to a power that, once harnessed, cannot be denied, destroyed or prevented, only challenged by those dependent on/accommodated by the state.

In short, there was never a moment when Autumn didn’t treat me like a threat (more on that in Volume One, if you’re curious). Except, we don’t have to keep defaulting to the same old Halloween regressions and progressions inside capital’s “comfort zone” (white moderacy and queer tokenization); i.e., controlled opposition’s predictable, DJ-style oscillations on the same vinyl: back-and-forth while not really going anywhere. That’s how centrism works! To foster actual rebellion, we can—to use a scary bedroom phrase—”take it to the next level” (aka “spicing things up”): to wake up Medusa by trying new forbidden things that, per the same fetishized, war-like language of superheroes, often translate to anal, Medusa, etc, as things to guiltily indulge in. Calculated risk maximizes sex appeal, gender invention and class/cultural character while minimizing the potential for actual harm (risk/rape reduction) behind our Aegis’ cryptonymic buffers.

Except, we’re trying such angles “on for size” to stand for something other than profit, hence better liberate workers (and their labor) from a capitalist mode(l) of domination. We’re not the sharks, though capital often reduces workers to bad caricatures of such things (re: Autumn); i.e., manufactured enemies, feeding greedily on a frenzy of chum. Made by Gothic Communists, such Amazonian statements—from Wonder Woman to Ayla to Gohan, to whatever slutty head canon pops into my head when I listen to the Skyrim (2011) main theme—can challenge the state through bad imitations of medieval “history” as counterfeit, meaning the kind envisioned by Lewis as overshadowed by actual rape, but per ludo-Gothic BDSM becomes a rebellious sex-positive cryptonym; i.e., “just” a sex game, but also more than that hidden in plain sight: during sex as a form of “superheroic” roleplay (so-called “action”) that normally upholds the nuclear family model as castle-esque, daddy’s home and daddy’s girl.

(source: Steam Workshop)

Forgetting Freud’s very repressed homophobia (the so-called “anal phase” something he codified into dogmatic quackery), the fact remains that the anus is a site of settler-colonial humiliation: something to enter and abuse. Except, just as anal is letting potentially harmful things into a very vulnerable and sensitive side of ourselves designed to push things out (talk about reversing abjection, eh, Kristeva?), challenging capital’s particular abjection reflex walks a very fine line indeed (think Skyrim‘s infamous “fus-ro-dah!” yawp, but tied to the fetishes of capital in ways that reduce the monstrous-feminine to an abject reversal, when camped: the thunder-clapping dummy-thicc booty suggested by whatever angle you view its owner from, whatever odor [vis-à-vis JomoKiN’s mod for Muscarine’s “Tusk Profligate” mod, above 2021] or sound, any of the senses)! Again, liberation and enslavement occupy the same space, the same monster-girl bodies, the same fantasies as “for profit” or “for workers.” There is no middle ground, but there is liminal expression per monster modules that frequently overlap!

(artist: Georgy Stacker)

To this, male forms of the monstrous-feminine are to sodomy what female forms are to Amazonomachia, the eroticizing of women (or those forced to identify as women) into a gradient of monstrous-feminine; i.e., the herbo and himbo historically-materially yielding infantilizing scenarios of exchange that—per BDSM in all its forms—must go where power is and playfully critique canon: in the same performative scenarios, uniforms, body language, markets, etc, reclaiming the instruments of rape, bondage, pain, and torture as married to the chronotope of sex through compelled arguments: dynastic primacy and hereditary rites (the virginal blood sacrifice dressed up as the whore to please the male monarch). Campy or not, such a theatre is always haunted, like the Gothic castle is, by old-to-recent historical regressions towards fascist variants from moderate, pearly ones under Pax Americana.

In short, unironic rape, decay and torture (which anal can easily become) are always close by during calculated risk, the token cop eventually forced to take part once closeted and/or shackled, their agency disintegrating like their skimpy underwear. This isn’t a threat made by me towards anyone in particular (may Autumn, for their own sake, eventually pull their head out of their ass) but simply a historical-material fact; tokenism doesn’t pay or last. It’s a shitty existence if you ask me, but what do I know? It’s not like I’ve been abused before and wrote my PhD about it in Gothic form… (obvious sarcasm). If it was good enough for Marston, it’s good enough for yours truly! Except, purging the Nazi Amazon is a bit like anal; i.e., it’s like taking a much-needed shit, only not! Something goes in, something goes out, and you feel better/oddly good afterwards (nothing is sacred when camping the canon)!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all of this, it’s that everyone needs a survivor/protector who’s lived it—so that such things become a part of their identity as de facto educator in sex-positive ways—but also who isn’t afraid to let someone else be strong for them (for each other) regardless of the relationship you and they share. This can be regarding live-in situations, but also long-distance/working relations, or even parasocial ones.

(artist: Asura)

To that, let’s go beyond people and media as parasocial, and consider history as toy-like in ways that extend to ourselves and our friends who play with such stories together! Onto “Into the Toy Chest, part one“!


Footnotes

[12] Lynn Stuart Parramore writes in “Like QAnon’s Capitol Rioters, the Nashville Bomber’s Lizard People Theory Is Deadly Serious” (2021):

The notion of shape-shifting, blood-sucking reptilian humanoids invading Earth to control the human race sounds like a cheesy sci-fi plot. But it’s actually a very old trope with disturbing links to anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic hostilities dating to the 19th century. […] Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” the 1897 tale of a Romanian vampire who plans to take over London using his renowned shape-shifting abilities, also carries traces of this trope. The count possesses a number of reptilian qualities — from his association with the knightly Order of the Dragon, from which his name derives, to his cold-blooded nature and talent for shimmying down walls lizard-fashion. Dracula’s protruding teeth, pointed ears and blood-sucking habits mark him as a species apart, a motif of “othering” read by some critics as code for Jewishness. From this perspective, Stoker’s book is part of the British response to the increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe. The vampire is a stealthy invader, passing as a proper citizen but secretly plotting domination and destruction (source).

[13] E.g., Mario as monstrous to Princess Toadstool, from Giles Laurent’s “Mario from Hell” (2010).

[13a] From Rome to “Rome,” the capitalist imperative is constant: defend the nucleus from victims framed as impostors in service to profit, settler-colonialism, heteronormativity and Imperialism, et al. This includes recuperating female avengers punching up against powerful men they castrate as “good enough”; e.g., Lisbeth Salander as punk appropriation (sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, piercings, tattoos, etc) and, as usual, decay mid-cryptomimesis: the grungy, dark ’90s revival, Industrial-grade vigilante bouncing between likenesses of The Crow, The Matrix, The Cell, Batman, Sense8 and similar monstrous-feminine graveyards pulling up killer dolls like mandragora with or without class/cultural ironies: dragon ladies in skintight catsuits, touched by fire and breathing flames in a perpetual, centrist cycle of trauma and revenge, rape and release.

Anything can be stolen for profit or reclaimed from it, but decay is ever-present. Medusa is a zombie, after all, one haunted by hauntologies of all the same-old fetishes and clichés: chase sequences, heroic vehicles (from nightmarish steeds to Meatloaf’s silver-black phantom bike to Akira‘s [1988] immortal motorcycle), femme fatales, masked men/banditti, crime lords, black knights, hackers, spies, ninjas, Nazi Superman disguised as Clark Kent (sleeper agents), etc. Caricatures like Salander (a pun for “Salamander”) always walk a tightrope, threatening to plunge ignominiously into the abyss of class betrayal: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss; i.e., she is always hunted/haunted by state doubles (“two snakes facing each other”).

In turn, the state always prohibits progressions away from mortification of the flesh, black penitents, gang violence, Pavlovian incest/menticide through rape—you know, the usual medieval gags trapped in a criminogenic, palingenetic historical-material loop in dialectical-material struggle; i.e., between state and labor copycats, returning to routine sites of childhood abuse/middle-class decay and indoctrination. Again, the elite can’t kill Medusa, only drag and subjugate her through daddy’s-girl doubles (the usual Red Scare conflating the Nazi and Communist, horseshoe-theory-style, above) versus the runaway escaping trauma as emblematic of state counterfeits and true rebellions: Red Scare as monstrous-feminine, the hysterical Mad Russian and her castle of nameless goons threatening the West with nuclear oblivion (called “mutually-assured destruction” in Cold War dialogs).

As such, likenesses of Salander are less an anti-hero and more “hero” vis-à-vis one side of the same half-real equation: state lapdogs/dogs of war on leads (a portmanteau of a Saxon and Accept tune) versus the folk hero echoed along likenesses of Robin Hood, Zorro, Che Guevara, Trinity, Chelsea Manning and so on challenging ties to king and country but also corporations. Salander’s a Swiss army knife, only anti-James-Bond when she actually decolonizes the racist/sexist areas of computers, espionage, acting, BDSM, games, etc. The 2018 movie, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, does not, only conflating Salander’s “punk” with her Venus twin’s equally bogus “Nazi-Communist” anti-West cartoon. Ludo-Gothic BDSM is always liminal, struggling between resistance and subjugation in artistic and pornographic forms; its erotic-to-ace skullduggery is always trapped between canon and camp: Salander’s androgynous, tramp-stamp dumper branded for treason, a “renegade maverick” with optional quotes facing her crimson Russian double. “Why did you help everyone but me?” “You chose to stay!” As such, Salander blames the victim to save the world from another spectre of Marx.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

We don’t have to abandon such stories and their tricky dualism, and can keep the architecture/archetypes (in the flesh or not), but the revolutionary class character must become active, not mired down in service to forced allegory and profit aiding the usual white, status-quo billionaires playing “rebel” (the Star Wars problem). We must reclaim the whore, the Medusa and her fat-and-sassy ass’ anisotropic decay to serve ourselves, not the elite framing “giving someone the D” as the universal, unironic, Man-Box solution (the silver bullet).

[14] Scratch a SWERF/moderate and a TERF/fascist bleeds: Autumn is a trans misogynist (from Volume One):

Autumn always acted like the boss, even when they had no grounds for it: a queer boss dressed like an Amazon, but also acting like one of a particular kind; i.e., a SWERF and a moderate strongarm/war boss pushing me around while shoving their own sloganized, superhero merchandise through the market. All the while, our trauma and its means of communicating through mommy-dom/thirst-trap Amazonomachia were competing against each other through monstrous language as something to negotiate: Autumn’s needs and wants trumping mine by virtue of their advertised superiority inside the same oppressed community discussing nerd culture.

For instance, Autumn strongly disliked the label “sex worker” being applied to them publicly because it could hurt their bottom line. It didn’t matter that they had an OnlyFans full of thirst-trap materials that very clearly constituted sex work; any mention of Autumn being a sex worker (calling it like it is) was something they were very forcefully against. And while this might sound okay unto itself, they were also a) only too happy to take my patronage for sex work, while b) stressing their own professional status and using that to tell me exactly how to advertise them in my own galleries and writing (which concerns sex worker rights). It honestly felt pretty bossy of them, but also dense; i.e., invalidating of me as a genderqueer artist/sex worker while constantly advertising themselves as a strong-looking enby who honestly was having their cake and eating it, too: showing less skin (no “ham sandwich,” in their words) and putting themselves on a pedestal above other sex workers while doing the same kind of work: talking dirty and showing off to make people cum; i.e., voice work first, with nudity as a pay-walled afterthought.

The problem here, isn’t selling sex, but that Autumn’s approach became prescriptive and self-important; i.e., a weird canonical nerd smiling their Hollywood smile, getting fake tits to emphasize their female attributes within the Amazon persona, and treating false modesty like a lucrative virtue exclusive to them and their brand: the bogus and incredibly harmful argument that partially-clothed bodies and implied nudity are somehow “worth more” than fully naked ones are. It wasn’t explicitly stated, but nevertheless showed in how Autumn treated me over time: they were always the victim, and I could never be one. Regardless of intent, their trauma, their rights, and their business—all trumped my voice in defense of capital (re: intent doesn’t matter, actions do, and function determines function) [source].

[14a] A Japanese take on Melmoth the Wanderer aka the Wandering Jew as seeking revenge against the Japanese empire: the fascist trope of the backstabbing Jew amounting to a dark shadow knight that occupies the same neoliberal kayfabe shadow zone as the Nazi does. As Timothy Donohoo writes in “Street Fighter‘s Greatest Villain Was Inspired by a Spooky Japanese Horror Novel” (2022):

Created by Hiroshi Aramata, Yasunori Kato debuted in the first volume of the novel, Teito Monogatari. This dark fantasy series tells a story in an alternate version of 20th century Japan. One of the many characters in the stories is protagonist Yasunori Kato, though he also acts as the series’ antagonist. A sort of take on Melmoth the Wanderer or the Wandering Jew, Kato is seemingly a former general in the Japanese army. In reality, he embodies centuries of lost Japanese history, with his malevolence representing the rage of those who had once stood against the Japanese. […]

The cinematic version of Kato went into designing Capcom’s villainous Vega, known as M. Bison outside Japan. A dictator with goals of world conquest, his ambitions are not too different from Kato’s. His costume is almost the exact same as Kato’s, albeit trading out the dark blue/black color scheme for a predominately red one. Even their creepy grins evoke the same imagery, making them both hauntingly demonic in appearance. His facial expression on arcade posters for a version of Street Fighter II specifically mirrors the poster of the animated Teito Monogatari adaptation, Doomed Megalopolis (source).

[15] As I write in Volume One,

Autumn’s abusive conduct [is] part of their selling point: the gun-toting, inspirational gym mom, enby aesthete throwing their weight around pretty fucking hard the moment a little femboy artist like me (still in the closet at the time) inconvenienced them, or talked about her rights or opinions for a change; i.e., trans misogyny.

To be honest, I had wanted to say more during our falling out to clear things up but Autumn was pissed and so was I. The fact remains, I didn’t mention my uncle to them because I didn’t know he was dead at the time; my abusive surviving uncle didn’t want me attending the hospital visit, so I was at home waiting to hear about the results of the incoming brain scan. I didn’t know it, but he was legally dead by the time Autumn and I had our fight. And perhaps it’s unfair of me to hold that against Autumn, so I technically won’t. I’ll just say that their video messages largely concerned them hurling the most thinly veiled insults imaginable at me (and not in a professional manner), informing me in no uncertain terms just how unreasonable I had been to voice my true feelings at all.

Perhaps there was no place for them in Autumn’s mind. Except that’s not how humans (or labor exchanges) work. My uncle was probably dead, I was losing my best friend, and still reeling from my last ex’s abuses. But Autumn? They just couldn’t be bothered to put up with me because their horse had been difficult that morning! Far be it from me to compare a temperamental horse to a dead uncle, or to expect Autumn to have known about Dave; but the fact remains that they were entirely concerned with themselves and I (and my trauma) were a nuisance. It became something to mute, treating me like a no-good AMAB dickhead while lionizing themselves and encouraging me to keep mum (something that all abusers do; e.g., Zeuhl and Cuwu).

Given the terrible timing of things and me admittedly nursing some bruised co-worker/client resentment (for Autumn’s unprofessional, one-sided conduct) on top of what I was going through, it was a perfect storm of self-centeredness from them and denied expectations from me. Shit happens, but there’s a still sex-positive lesson to be learned, here. Specifically I want us to reflect on what transpired between Autumn and I in relation to capital and Amazon aesthetics at large; i.e., as a countercultural means of interrogating trauma during the potential for labor and cultural disputes (source).

Book Sample: “‘Splendide Mendax’ and ‘From Herbos to Himbos, part one'”

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Update, 8/7/2024: Originally this piece was written for “Searching for Secrets.” On 6/14/2024, I moved the written material to the PDF manuscript of the Poetry Module (v1.2 onwards); today, I updated each promo page’s table of contents to reflect said change, too, meaning these transplanted posts are featured in the “Brace for Impact” table of contents.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Splendide Mendax: the Rise and Fall of “Rome” as Built-in(to Us)

Our struggle—to hug the Medusa as something to teach, to reclaim our bodies (our asses) as Aegis-like and disguise-worthy—sits inside a dangerous hall of mirrors. The state isn’t just a war machine, you see, but a war factory (of factories) whose own spinning room of kaleidoscopic reflections stretches in all directions, remediates during fractal recursion into/onto all media: a dividing of the natural-material world into linguo-material false binaries and boundaries the state’s servants can acquire, internalize from childhood, and raise then police into the future. To critique power as an illusion, you must go where its illusions—its masks, disguises and performers—collectively inhabit and interact in curious, veiled hostility (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume Two, part one (2024)

 

Picking up from where “Digging Our Own Graves” left off…

“You have your sword, I have my tricks,” said Odysseus to Achilles. The latter dies during the fall of Troy from his Achilles Heel as acquired at birth. This subchapter considers nature vs nurture relative to Gothic poetics, insofar as this can be used to code humans to war against/rape nature; i.e., how for humans under Capitalism, nurture is currently tied to giant linguo-material structures called “capital” that weaponize the imaginary past’s splendid lies against workers and nature: Capitalist Realism dipping the hero into the river Styx. They do this to “gift” him (or her) with the aura of invulnerability but don’t bank on its being haunted by narcissistic echoes of other Roman fools having fallen on the same proverbial sword; e.g., the Skeksis are unicorn hunters on a drug war, addicted to what they are alienated from in rarefied form: cocaine, essence, as the blood of the Earth; i.e., Foucault’s biopower reduced to something the usual capitalist vampires render nature into before injecting greedily into their own veins. In turn, all their splendide mendax/elaborate strategies of misdirection—all their art and science, their Base and Superstructure—collectively aid in this ghoulish refueling process, including heroes as monsters, as elaborate lies that can serve or challenge profit; i.e., hinging on how workers utilize them in response.

The problem to face, then, is Capitalism; i.e., capital doing what capital always does: move money through nature as alien, abject—something to harvest and regress backwards and towards on a black-and-white chessboard of the same-old hauntological chateau guarded by the same-old hauntological watchdogs. Cartesian thought commodifies the monstrous-feminine into predatory herbo/himbo groups, turning such poetic devices into action-figure collectibles that can be bought and sold, but also played with, inhabited; i.e., during an intended gameplay’s dogmatic, copagandistic instruction: rape nature by policing it in tokenized forms of predator and prey. There’s also those who play the part the doll is based on, and the capitalists who run the show behind the curtain. Consumer, creator, capitalist—all are part of the same canonical war machine harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine, as alien, fetish, psychosexual slave valued for the usual imperial “goods” divided along heteronormative lines in a settler-colonial binary as “dressed up”; i.e., in the usual centrist gimmicks: sex and force as things to capitalize on and privatize for all the usual benefactors (capitalists) to the detriment of all the usual victims (cops and victims).

(artist: Emery EXP)

To that, “mommy” might be absolutely stacked (as Medusa generally is) and wet, making that pull-out game weak; she remains forced by capital to serve the usual gooners as a paradoxical waifu (the Amazonian war boss) playing strip-tease. Resistance—per Foucault (and me: ludo-Gothic BDSM)—occurs in the same place, the same stage to perform on; i.e., with one’s body as a playful, linguo-material extension of one’s labor value and struggle to reclaim it through iconoclastic Gothic poetics made material, obvious, tangible: Milton’s “darkness visible.” This is all fine and good, provided the performer doesn’t tokenize and colonize others in turn. Many do, some do not (we’ll look at both in just a moment), but who we are as people factors in through our bodies as part of ontological statements workers make all the time. We’re not always aware of it, even. “Damn girl! You shit with that ass?” my ex’s ex once asked me, regarding my dumper. Amazons, by extension, are cover-image material; i.e., the marquee to imitate through such body parts where exceptional.

In musical terms, this is called a cover. In comics, it’s a cover model, blown up for maximum, repetitive effect; i.e., profit, for capitalists, and critical power for Communists—the Aegis, the money maker, the fucking POW! blocks from Mario 2 (1988). It’s what more cynical grifters might label “an agenda,” but simply is reality as something to perform, thus to achieve something other than menticide, submission, enslavement, et al. Capital’s like a bad relationship, then. Fucking and fighting like a tornado is fun for a bit, but it gets old even when it is our choice. Equality and stability are so much better (e.g., Crash Hard’s “BeamNG Drive – Cars vs Stairs #11,” 2023), except Capitalism doesn’t give a toss about those! It’s a shark; as we’ll see with those who emulate it, they become sharks, too: glass-eyed killer dolls built like tanks. Jadis was one, Autumn was another (as we’ll see); some people have the equipment, but are kinder than either of those ghouls (as I’ll assume Kay is, below). Original Sin’s a persecution mechanic in that respect, but also a liberatory form of ironic BDSM, and people are walking canvases; i.e., it’s not the truck-like dumper that’s the problem, but what you do with it as a socio-political statement tied to your labor as often overshadowed by the body itself as fetishized. It’s not always overt/obvious, then; sometimes, a butt is just a butt, no matter how substantial/fine, but conversely there’s context to any photograph:

(artist: Kay)

When tokenization occurs, though, the problem historically snowballs. The more the state takes to try and cheat death, the more addicted they become, the more alienated, the more rotten—them, of course, but also the alien they dress up and rape, time and time again. Eventually Medusa wins (state shift). And those who play both sides/are high on their own legends of self-righteous do-goodery will pay the price like everyone else; i.e., billionaire Marxism and centrifying variants of the white Indian/savior narrative that erase Indigenous (and other marginalized struggles) by painting themselves as the universal victim, the Amazon of which there is only them; e.g., Star Wars (and its assorted counterfeits) furthering Red Scare by doing a common middle-class trick under American Liberalism: equality of convenience per men like Mark Hamill stuck in this centrist performance that defends the state by playing the white-knight variant of the false rebel.

Fascist or not, a cop is a cop; Mark Hamill isn’t just Don Quixote tilting at windmills, then, but a cop (as knights classically were) who thinks he’s a Marxist space wizard “keeping the peace” (what MLK called “negative peace” as the absence of tension versus “positive justice”); i.e., as white moderates (and their token agents) always do—not just him, but people acting like him in equal bad faith/measure; e.g., Ron Pearlman, Natalie Portman, and Madonna (source: Lauren Sarner’s “Celebrities Leading Support for Israel in the War Against Hamas,” 2023). Like the Nazi outfit, the white moderate becomes something they think they can “take off.” Except it’s not, because people don’t forget; Commies have minds like elephants, and you’ve left behind a mountain of evidence. You make hay during genocide; we take your folly as straw to spin gold out of—our liberation!

(source tweet: Spiderwarz, March 27th, 2024)

Achilles isn’t just doomed once, you see. It becomes a fatal hand-me-down, a counterfeit nostalgia where the warrior’s death is canonical code to embody through the young man or tomboy’s rite of passage becoming the very toys they play with in service to the state; i.e., of flowing power towards the state during the dialectic of the alien, harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine during Cartesian edicts. Under capital, these constantly sexualize, fetishize, and alienate everything during canonical essentialism’s us-versus-them. It is a historical-material byproduct that we, as Gothic Communists, must argue against with our own doubles of—e.g., costumes, masks, and other revolutionary cryptonyms; i.e., by using ludo-Gothic BDSM’s ergodic motion (castle-narrative) during the liminal hauntology of war (the appearance of the grim harvest, beckoning the usual victims towards the usual Call to Adventure as a copaganda exercise): oppositional praxis synthesized to achieve systemic catharsis when challenging the profit motive on all registers and modes of expression.

Our examination goes well beyond videogames and their cartographic refrains (re: Tolkien’s treasure map or Cameron’s urban warfare/shooter) to holistically apply this to all media as something to collectively and individually foster in an iconoclastic, sex-positive direction. Achilles’ cycle of rape and revenge (the murder-suicide) for profit can be broken, but we have to kill a lot of darlings to do so; i.e., break a lot of toys to engender emergent gameplay that develops Gothic Communism in a ludo-Gothic BDSM sense: camping canon, aka “making it gay/political” by announcing our own existence as ironic towards the profit motive unironically killing us through its toy-like dogma.

As luck would have it, the Gothic has done this since the days of Matthew Lewis—embodying rebellion as something that others less campy (and brave) would gentrify to line their own pockets with and fortify state arguments (re: Radcliffe). As such, Castlevania (1986) might seem like dead dogma, now, but the possibility always remains for such heroes to become ironic once more; e.g., from Nintendo’s beef-lord Belmonts to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (1987) as its own campy launchpad of future genderqueer icons. Our best revenge is to become voices they cannot silence, toys they cannot break left behind inside the same proverbial toy chest. To ask questions like “Where does Sir Thomas’ wealth come from?” and expose the state, regardless of the answer! Whereas fascists use straw man arguments as dog whistles to eventually become straw dogs, our game of chicken with the elite becomes an Aegis that traps them in amber.

History is an endless toy chest, and there’s only so many combinations and dialectical-material opposites before you start to get repetition and overlap. My book is an iconoclastic toy chest. First, we’ll have several sections I’d like to reexamine based on what we outlined: the idea of history as toy-like through action figures (the herbo and himbo) as both a) a clever means of replicating and interrogating the imaginary past as empowering through Promethean “disempowerment” (re: Aguirre), but also b) the monstrous-feminine as a ludo-Gothic BDSM historical device that operates in relation to ourselves and its various effects on us and our social-sex lives. After that, we’ll dive straight into the modules to look at the imaginary past: as something to historically learn from now and reapply differently in the future during proletarian praxis (which Volume Three will focus on).

Before we do, though, there’s toys to be played with! First, onto gay himbos and herbos!

“Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’!”: From Herbos to Himbos, part one (feat. Dragon Ball Z and Big Trouble in Little China; Wonder Woman)

“That’s like… super gay!”

—Even, Superbad (2007)

(artist: Silverjow)

Camping war is to make war gay in ways that challenge profit. To that, capital is criminogenic through action-figure echoes of Achilles that have gay potential for or against the state; i.e., Pride as an LGBA conclusion within Rainbow Capitalism that tries to colonize our flags again as previously reclaimed from the usual D&D nerds and metal cohorts, etc (e.g., Dio and Tolkien). I want to explore this in a form of the monstrous-feminine we haven’t looked at as much in the book, but certainly is one this bitch (me) grew up with: beef lords, himbos. We’ll look primarily at relics from my childhood we, as Gothic Communists, want to rescue from their canonical selves. Part one will, look at Akira Toriyama’s DBZ and contemporaries like John Carpenter from the neoliberal ’80s using stories like Big Trouble in Little China as showcasing the magical man-wizard dueling for recruitment purposes; then, to be holistic, we’ll of course look at Wonder Woman as the herbo equivalent. Part two, will account for double standards and copycats—e.g., Ayla from Chrono Trigger (1995) and Savage Land Rogue, among others—under Pax Americana; i.e., as something that canonically apes these blindly masculine, hetero-to-homonormative lugs, but which we can also camp and reclaim regardless of biological sex (Claire Max), but must still watch out for token police agents (Autumn Ivy)!

As we shall see, the herbo/himbo go hand-in-hand, and generally suffer the same tokenized war-bride problems all monstrous-feminine do—albeit on opposite ends of a heteronormative colonial binary. They become eyed by prospecting muscle to serve like King Kong does: in chains (the service varying per type, but always involving abuses of sex and force against marginalized groups).

To that, capital operates within war-as-a-business as predicated on the homosocial, psychosexually erotic domain of male soldiers that threatens to wildly veer off into very-gay territories (female or otherwise). In fact, as Volume Two, part one explored, the language of sex and force through war theatre is something to camp and canonize back and forth:

one look at the weirdness of war-bred child soldiers says it all: baby-brain numbskulls thirsty after “waifus” and howling at the vengeful moon (witnessed inside odd localizations of Japanese media; e.g., “Invitation of a Crazed Moon” from Portrait of Ruin [2006] cryptomimetically touching on total catastrophe as a Western invention embraced by eco-fascist Japanese fandoms [the return of the Shogunate] and tackled by infamous auteurs writing “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis” [1995] tied to a bigger production. From Castlevania to Neo-Genesis Evangelion, then, the Japanese consensus is kick-ass emulations of American rock ‘n roll as thoroughly campy [less so with Mega Man, but I digress]: “Neo-Gothic Bible rock.” Yes, they’re straight-up bops, but the liminality remains indefinitely fascinating inside a capitalist world order).

In other words, love is a battlefield, but also a stage in between reality and fiction; as should hopefully be obvious at this stage, combining sex, nudism and the language of war per ludo-Gothic BDSM (sex as art) is an endlessly productive-and-liminal operation, especially when funneled through the fetishes and clichés of the Gothic—its “Ancient” Romances (stories of high imagination) and real life (the novel: “truth is stranger than fiction”) yielding something special and new (“imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” but “familiarity breeds contempt”) when used in a consciously satirical, campy way. The Gothic, as we think of its earliest origins, was always campy and about queer sex in a partially ace way (re: Walpole and Lewis)—something whose dialectical-material push-pull survives well into Rocky Horror, Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2009) and beyond (source).

By extension, all language is dualistic, mid-opposition; i.e., workers vs the state (and its proponents).

Per the himbo or herbo, it’s like a teddy bear as more outwardly uncanny than such things might normally seem; i.e., ostensibly more capable to harm (as the hyperbolic muscles might suggest) and haunted by trauma, but nevertheless can present a special bargain that per such negotiated regressions between two or more people, becomes a clever means of pushing together towards catharsis and interrogation of one’s childhood as imperfect, monster-fucker-style; i.e., towards openly ridiculous, psychosexual, nostalgic warrior fantasies. Like Toriyama’s Ginyu force (below), a given outing should always get incrementally close to the violence without crossing over into unironic harm. In short, they’re absurd, but also easy to step into in ways that feel legitimately comforting: one’s childhood as silly and serious, campy! In gay bedroom parlance, they’re also “catchers”; i.e., the one’s that, when faced by Goku as the most violent of all, get absolutely trounced by Toriyama’s designated hitter punching gay Nazis.

(artist: Akira Toriyama)

As such, keep this thesis statement in mind as we go ahead (“green light,” babes): the profit motive is fascist, and always decays from more moderate or reasoned forms inside the Cartesian (settler-colonial, heteronormative) paradigm towards an “older” form; i.e., hauntologically evoking a time before the Black Death and “hiccups” of state shift that forced the elite of yore to make concessions (wages, which they try and steal back through profit). These translate in modern forms of pacification that, above all else, serve as so-called “empowerment” fantasies that—through the medieval trope of the dueling knight or wizard (usually a semi-naked hybrid; i.e., the fascist hauntology of the so-called “barbarian”) regresses to an imaginary fascist past that normally leads to regular rape of so many different kinds, but for us can easily be put into quotes: “rape” by the beef lord as something that is always ambiguously gay and which we can stress the gay qualities of in iconoclastic forms (often colorful, fruity and fabulous, but haunted by fascism—above) that ape the gayest qualities of such muscular male warriors; i.e., to camp and spread the cheeks of, partaking of sodomy as a ludo-Gothic device! Taste the rainbow!

And if you’re allergic to “rainbows” (assholes by another name), think of it simply as a “sausage fest” (many queer AMAB dislike anal sex[1]); i.e., the dick-measuring contest as an implied “sword fight” where the audience (the de facto judges) imagine the specimens involved “crossing swords”:

(artist: Sgt Crisis’ “Big Break: a Literal Dick Contest,” 2021)

Total power corrupts totally and those with the most power hoard resources through capital as privatization: the ability to generate profit through the dialectic of the alien harvesting nature as alien, sexual, and fetish through a paywalled privilege to view. It’s predatory but malnourishing for all sides. The elite in particular are “skinny fat,” having both the most and the least; i.e., are the most alien of all, the most decayed when trying to cheat death by weaponizing the Philosopher’s Stone as an Enlightenment corruption of Renaissance thought (re: the Skeksis darkening the Crystal of Truth). They use it to create cocaine-like essence for themselves, inside a dogmatic chain that fosters hunters they can reliably call upon and respond with against those who don’t answer to capital. Anyone who assists in this process—i.e., by whitewashing it or conceding with capital in any shape or form—is ultimately fascist, meaning they will decay or demask eventually to expose what they have been doing all along: running interference for the state while posturing as good (re: Hamill and company).

No one is immune from said decay as relaid through the structure that converts people into drugs the other cannot live without; i.e., becoming slaves to their own grift/grind. This is predicated on the same addictions—a summoning-through-sacrifice that all at once demands an obvious dupe and makes all others dupes despite what they might insist: the wild hunt as recuperated by fascists and neoliberals into something whose folly can be seen in The Dark Crystal to Mandy to Metroid to Ghostbusters and other such-variations of the muscled-to-brainy man/woman as a Cartesian relic. Embodiments of either virtue, when canonically invoked, work as two sides of male culture with tokenized elements; i.e., the egghead, the Amazon, the himbo or herbo, the muscular wizard/brainiac as a sword-and-sorcery type of gatekeeper pushed through a neoliberal lens. Through all the usual ways, “war” becomes personified through an imaginary Antiquity that is thoroughly Olympian, but classically heteronormative (with diminishing circles of other normativities), biologically essentialized and anchoring sex-to-gender to serve the profit motive’s Male Gaze/creation of sexual difference, etc. Such Amazons—including their bodies—are always dressed “for men.” Except, like with beef lords/muscle wizards at large, there is always a campy and very gay potential that haunts the straight prescriptions at work!

First, we’ll look at the action figure as male per Toriyama and his contemporaries like John Carpenter, then consider the fighting trim (that was a terrible pun) of curvy crusaders that take figure drawing to a pugilistic, kayfabe extreme. This can be art on the page (left), but also the human bodies that leap “off the page” and appear in the flesh as actually made of the stuff (re: Autumn and Claire).

(artists: Devmgf modified by Elee0228)

To that, such wonders of creation can bring untold joy to all, but once corrupted to serve the state, become a drug war that cannibalizes everyone to endlessly try a resurrection myth from old arts; i.e., copies of “Osiris” a rotten, insane giant that will inevitably die (echoes of Frankenstein). In the end, Medusa always wins. So we must reclaim the Crystal, the ritual, as a “sacrifice” in quotes we can perform to answer to a higher power and calling than the bourgeoisie. As Jadis taught me, I didn’t just see what I wanted to see, but glimpsed what could be/would have been on the surface of someone cracked, broken by echoes of Pygmalion—a gay Amazon aping her colonizers (any power fantasy having the potential to be unironic, in this respect—Faustian and Promethean in ways that not only disempower but also harm). We must heal the Crystal, end the hunt, mend what is broken by synthesizing praxis to push power mid-poiesis towards Communism; i.e., until it becomes second-nature on a grand scale: to become so robust that it never regresses again! Gozer is home and stays home!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

I love herbos (re: Revana, left), and we’ll talk about Wonder Woman/similar characters (and female embodiments of them through Autumn Ivy and Claire Max) in a second. But first, let’s consider this through the toy-like Amazonomachia of a male-centric canon: of Akira Toriyama’s Z fighters and John Carpenter’s dueling wizards as having a monstrous-feminine character with a penis, not a vagina.

Personally I prefer pie instead of strudel (to borrow a tired gag from Dwayne Johnson), but holistic praxis demands at least sampling the “salami” when playing “hide the salami,” ourselves. In truth, I’ve had many such specimens forced down my throat as an adult, but also a kid, and a part of me remembers and relishes the taste despite my preference for AFAB Amazons (which gay “Spartans” are effectively the AMAB variant; i.e., able to be fascist [e.g., 300, 2006] or gay [re: Jojo] on a liminal gradient of likenesses, of likenesses). I remember the music, the men, their muscles, and their battles as echoed across so many media types; and I recall copies of famous canonical works that, so often, lacked any irony at all. It became holy to me, which I eventually learned the Gothic will make “almost holy” to achieve as much irony as it possibly can.

As such, I had to escape something that, on some level, I still enjoy: the heel upstaging the babyface as something Vegeta (especially early Vegeta) did so well; i.e., he was a psychotic brat, but given understandable motives that spoke to my own childhood trauma. Goku, on the other hand, is so fucking boring! He’s strong and goody-goody because—like Superman—the script needs him to be. I don’t want to reduce him to just that, as there are elements to him that are quite campy. But all the same, at his worst he really is the white knight letting the black knight go to the detriment of millions. In this respect, he can’t afford to be so naïve, but does so precisely because it fits into a centrist scheme he can pass along to his son; i.e., Red Scare minus the overt Cold War language (exhibit 34b3b2a2a1, next page). Like Superman, he begs to be camped:

Think of camping the magical warrior himbo less as a reversal of Genesis, and a parody of it, a la Matthew Lewis unmaking the so-called Dark Adam, Ambrosio. Like Lewis, we’re using such a likeness to push power towards workers, not the state, one that includes female, intersex and GNC variants (the “Conan with a pussy” argument). This exists on the same stage as passed down from him to us; i.e., in the same kayfabe-style masks, costumes, stage music/names, and sets, etc. Capital haunts and occupies them, and so do we. Unlike them, we use all of these things to push towards equality and post-scarcity. But this is far easier said than done. We can’t just camp canon as a content, but as a game whose playful theatrics are a subversive hermeneutic that yields future iconoclasms that, combined, push towards Gothic Communism, not centrism. Take, DBZ’ best duel (for this argument): our boy wizard dueling the end-of-the-world as very gay and inhuman the way only a mad-science experiment can be!

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a1b1: In the show, we see the usual homosocial arguments against Communism per a Japanese imitation of American Liberalism/kayfabe. Cell is the vice character who both represents the Nazi and the Communist [the unnatural product of mad science that threatens state collapse towards naked genocide on the home front, but also state shift towards a perfect organism/polity haunted by state trauma]. As such, the duel is ultimately a proxy war—of Goku [the American] fighting Cell [the Nazi, the Communist] through his brainwashed son: Gohan, the gentle nerd pushed towards a confrontation he doesn’t believe in—all to prove his worth as a “real man,” a rite of passage forced onto him as the monomyth always is. This time, Hell comes to Earth, and he must push it back with the help of his dead father egging him on.

Again, Gohan cannot do it alone. His father stands over his shoulder like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, waiting for the former heel, Vegeta, to turn babyface and kick Cell square in the dragon balls; distracted, Cell turns his back on Gohan, who backstabs the “backing stabbing Jew” to get his revenge [a cycle parodied by Radcliffe of all people, presenting Count Montoni and his ilk as a den of self-stinging vipers]. Gohan unleashes the demon, going “beast mode” to remember all the people Cell’s hurt; i.e., emotional manipulation. Goku could have prevented all of those deaths, but chose not to because he wants to indoctrinate his son. The myth—of patrilineal descent vs a monstrous-feminine menace—is what matters.

Such centrist peddling is pandering to future fascists [which is what moderates functionally are] through chicken hawk bullshit; i.e., Amazonomachia delivered by the likes of those without strength or presence of arms, but have all the abilities of the wormy silver tongue profiting off the war of mythological competent men and women, of might-makes-right heroes punching down against future zombies of a rising labor force sick to death with/of exploitation. Fascism, remember, isn’t just the state in decay, but the state defending itself in displaced, externalized arguments; i.e., while synthesizing the monstrous-feminine as thetical and antithetical to its own existence. The state needs nature to sacrifice and weaponize and that nature is always, to some degree, monstrous-feminine. It doesn’t take a genius to play along [re: Goku] with such unequal power exchange, just a willing and useful idiot.

To this, Goku—and by extension Toriyama and those who parody him[2]—is tremendously successful, leading to reactive violence by a member of the colonizer group: a special youth secretly belonging to the warrior race of Aryans projected into the show’s mythos—the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Saiyans, per Nietzsche’s Übermensch, defending capital from would-be envious parties.

In short, Gohan rapes Cell as the perceived alien, fetish, psychosexual demon clown—a green-and-purple zombie, Hulk-like punching bag that Gohan imitates in ways the state through Goku et al want him to. It’s dogma, pushing the next generation to achieve their “greatest hour” in service to the state through a kayfabe battle of wills that save the world as we know it from state shift, from Communism; i.e., something perceived as the end of the world versus what it could be more nakedly expressed as, and something dealt with through a centrist balancing act of porcupines mating as such animals always do: very carefully in spite of the barbs and warrior theatrics.

My point, here, is there’s a method to the madness that serves the state as undead: a copy of the Olympics glorifying a new power built on empire, which is what capital is. Cell appears, prophesized as a vengeful act that brings Imperialism home to empire through a foreign plot as inside-outside, needing to be rooted out during the Cell Games [our zombie Olympics promising the usual reward of military conquest: glory and gold]. A false flag occurs, and through a series of prescriptive, dogmatic propaganda battles, leads to the big climax at the end of the Colosseum that unfertilizes the egg-like planet as could-have-been-Communist, if not for Gohan cock-blocking Cell’s Communist potential; i.e., by framing him as the Nazi to punch. It’s Red-Scare-in-disguise, but also a thoroughly unironic version of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk told in kayfabe theatre. Young, dumb and full-of-cum. Punch the clown, get fool’s gold. This is very dumb and has been parodied to death:

“I am perfect! I cannot be defeated!” Cell boasts, reducing class war to a mirror-image inversion of itself; i.e., as a xenomorph that—like Radcliffe’s black castle—can be conjured up and defeated with American force. In turn, this can be camped in ways that, while fun—e.g., Mega 64’s “The Cell Saga in 5 Minutes” [above, 2019]—need to do more than just play it for laughs. However funny these guys are, we gotta do them one better: camp the Nazi to reverse the flow of power, not camp the punching of the Nazi simply to make content! Furthermore, this begs introspection through origins of seeming arbitrary cryptomimesis. Mega 64 did what Team Four Star did according to what Toriyama did in response to what John Carpenter did in his own arcade: the two old sages dueling while surrounded by younger strapping men dueling for the honor of women everywhere; i.e., to be married to a good husband, not a bad one [the usual incrementalism, I confess]! Carpenter’s duel is kayfabe through two wizard “gamers”: one good, one bad, the heel pitching a fit, post-dogfall [a tie]. It’s surprisingly apt of rage-quit-style tantrums, nowadays, abiding by the usual mechanisms and positions of power: “You never could beat me, Egg Shen!” It’s a duel, mid-trouble-in-paradise.

An “arcadia” is “a place of simple pleasures and quiet,” which translates to Christo-fascist regressions—of the videoludic space as something to colonize by players who police the various territories of performance, paradox and play for the state again. Milton camped Eden; Tolkien canonized it through Middle-earth as a cartographic refrain that translated well to videogames from table-top versions of the same monomyths; per Cameron, this became a military optimism whose shooter’s refrain translated to profit across venues, from the box office to the arcade hall and into American family households; for videogames like Nintendo, such products became a slice of heaven to brand, then reward good little workers who uphold the status quo through the profit motive: as something to endorse and extend through videogames as the continuation of neoliberal dogma out of older media forms [cinema] into newer ones [videogames].

As I said in Volume Two, part one:

Neoliberalism and home entertainment didn’t really exist until the early 70s (with Atari’s 1972 release for Pong happening on the cusp of the 1973 Oil Crash, and Tolkien—the author of the fantasy cartographic refrain, as I call it—died in 1973, while the subsequence tabletop games of the 1970s would go onto to influence the game developers of the next decade, and the next, and the next…). Regarding videogames as a neoliberal form of dogma, from the early ’80s to the end of the Cold War and beyond, you went from public entertainment devices (arcades) that had a bunch of mostly young male clients cycling through them like a pimped-out sex worker… to the 1983 Atari Crash and subsequent 1985 smash-hit success of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. encouraging the widespread sale of videogames in the Gothic’s usual haunt: among the middle class. Except this time, the elite wanted in through ways that didn’t exist during the Neo-Gothic revival: televisions as personal property that could funnel in their burgeoning ideology through the disguise of (expensive and highly recursive) games.

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

In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual. Meanwhile, the companies making these games have progressively privatized and digitized them to such a degree as to make it easier to pick the pockets of said middle class, leaving them brainwashed, broke and looking for someone to blame—all while being routinely desensitized to us-versus-them violence against a flexible scapegoat refrain; i.e., extending from some combination of open to closed space across numerous themes and genres: from “Mazes to Labyrinths,” “Out of Novels and into Cinema and Metroidvania“! Any counterattack should go beyond something to reference from older works into new ones. Mine are considerable, populous and consistently sex-positive, reclaiming the likes of Castlevania and Metroid to say something iconoclastic with them (versus merely compiling them as Parish largely does; i.e., he spends a lot more time compiling all the games that simply exist instead of making thesis statements that apply to multiple games. Sorcha, by comparison, has thesis arguments that are broader but limits them considerably by specializing in one monster and media type. There are pros and cons to either approach, but especially cons insofar as intersectional solidarity goes. You can’t afford to be critically vacuous or narrow to achieve conscious unity among workers. All forms and arguments must be accounted for) [source].)

Canon “fills us in” (so to speak) with codes that repeat for profit as self-destructive; i.e., to workers, but also capital as the ultimate fortress with the ultimate lit fuse: “Take what you can when you can!” When Shakespeare’s Macbeth famously called life “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he was offering up a disguised critique of Achilles and the “Roman fool,” but also a displaced capitalist refrain (unto an imaginary “Scotland”) that was already beginning to develop through Christopher Columbus formulating the settler-colonial model in small; i.e., one that England, in the 1600s (re: Livia Gershon’s “Britain’s Blueprint for Colonialism: Made in Ireland,” 2022), would put to practice, followed by the American colonial elite and their descendants.

By the time Shakespeare was dead as a doornail, mercantile Capitalism was connected to the Cartesian Revolution as something that gradually evolved into total war through the nation-state of the 1700s and 1800s, followed by fascist imitations of American Manifest Destiny in the 1900s (re: Bad Empanada’s “How the USA Inspired the Nazis – From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum,” 2022) followed by soft-power copaganda after the American elite chose to drop the nuclear bombs on Japan (re: GDF’s “No, We Didn’t Need to Nuke Japan,” 2023). Forget “filling us up,” this is capital “running a train” on our asses! That takes time, work, and careful repetition.

(artist: Drew Struzan)

To this, stories like DBZ and Big Trouble and Little China—but also their assorted himbo offshoots—exemplify a post-nuclear age, one whose statuesque/splendide-mendax neoliberal refrains (videogames) sure love big explosions, but also nuclear-grade himbos and herbos. Insofar as the unironic monomyth presently haunts all media forms, all feel and administer the curse of profit through exploitation—of nature-as-monstrous-feminine through unequal, oft-tokenized power fantasies that many people seek (the white Indian, for example). This quest for power imbalance—whatever dominant or submissive form you could think of as something to perform, just to feel in control again—happens under capital as a historically-materially unequal system. In turn, the unequal power fantasies that occur manifest by virtue of abuse as something to survive and administer in ways that aren’t always sex-positive; i.e., by all the usual Amazons and knights, the herbo and himbo meat wizards playing rebel but functioning as cop and dishing out damage the likes of a dying Death Star spread out liberally over its usual targets: the colonial territories and their theatrical, romanticized offshoots. It’s a (video)ludic contract, the ping-pong oscillation aptly suggested by 1972’s Pong felt moving among updated neoliberal forms promising the same bogus gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow: “One Ring to rule them all!” From speedrunning videogames, to intended gameplay forms, to anime weebs and otaku then and now, the form and interaction with state power is determined by where power flows; i.e., as canonical or iconoclastic, thus sex-positive/liberatory or sex-coercive/carceral ipso facto, by virtue of what future interpretations (and cryptomimetic exchanges) result. On and on it goes, like the One Ring passed from one patsy to the next.

Per Sarkeesian, canonical texts can be enjoyed, but critiqued in ways that, per Fischer, expose Capitalist Realism; per me, this happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM: what we create and leave behind based on older imperfect texts being used to give us a leg-up against weird canonical nerds (and the elite) now—i.e., as fascism waiting not to happen, but already having happened and waiting to strike from behind gentler, “benevolent” veneers/gobstopper masks. For every outwardly hostile fuck, you have masked dickheads like Karl Jobst, Caleb Hart, and Ian Kochinski, etc, who think they can outrun their bigoted past and pass themselves off as “good wizards”; in turn, for every an-Com Medusa like me, you have “progressive”/white moderates like Natalie Wynn who, frankly, are only a jump, hop and a skip away from being exactly like Mark Hamill. This is in appearance, mind you; functionally all of these fuckers are the same! From lowly stooge to all-powerful billionaire, they’re entitled fucks invoking smidges of privilege/charity theatrics to make the lie of capital/American Liberalism work. Conservatism 101; neoconservatism 101. As we’ll see, this applies to Amazons as yet-another-tightrope to walk!

With that being said, let’s examine the himbo’s flip-side: herbos.

(source)

The monomyth and Heracles are as old as Western civilization, as are their female counterparts for or against the state; e.g., Wonder Woman as walking the bondage-to-cop tightrope in ways that skirt the boundaries of canon and camp, of such a character as ever fitting successfully into a heteronormative scheme despite wearing the American colors. As Jesse Kinos-Goodin writes in “From a Sex Cult to the UN” (2017):

There are a lot of mixed feelings around Wonder Woman, mainly due to this feminist figure/male sexual fantasy dichotomy that has followed the character since her inception in 1941. This complexity has a lot to do with the character’s creator, psychologist William Marston, a self-described feminist who also lived in a polyamorous relationship with at least two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne, who both bore children by him. Byrne was a direct inspiration for Wonder Woman’s physical appearance. Another woman, Marjorie W. Huntley, was also in a romantic relationship with the Marstons, and even helped with the inking and lettering of the Wonder Woman comics in the 1940s (source).

Like all Amazons, Wonder Woman is pinned between her dutiful place in a man’s world, the symbol of rebellion likewise defined through her body and gender identity/performance as “like a (straight) man’s” or not. The same problem extends to queer men and any other monstrous-feminine, of course, and frankly to any soldier period (e.g., Jubei from Ninja Scroll [1993] as upholding a dogmatic function or an iconoclastic one): to serve the state or serve workers (refer to Volume One for more on that character).

Wonder Woman works within an Amazonian pastiche that camps Superman’s iconography in ways that Marston imagined would replace men as the rulers of the world, but also remained haunted by Pax Americana and the myth of the good war. It’s the so-called Superman or Captain America problem[3], which as we’ll see with Wonder Woman and similar post-WW2 offshoots like Ayla and Savage Land Rogue, has a female equivalent to the usual male forms of violence against nature as monstrous-feminine: punch, stab and shoot, but also gag and tie up while shielding yourself from rebellious damage. Wonder Woman enacts multiples of these; i.e., wields a sword, a lasso, and her good-ol’-fashioned fists. Violence is sex for her in ways that yield that the same-old double standards against woman-as-monstrous-feminine: the weirdest boner a rape fantasy that’s oddly pleasurable, aka death by Snu-Snu; i.e., “She can ‘rape’ me anytime!'”

(artist: Dandonfuga)

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with rape fantasies provided they’re sex-positive. Except, those written to serve the profit motive are sex-coercive on principle. Such characters can be penned by immigrants or rebels, but they have generally been bought out (e.g., the original authors for Batman, Superman, or Ghost Rider) or otherwise revived to be recuperated by the state in a neoconservative, “peace through strength” way that valorizes the state; e.g., Gal Gadot serving in the IDF (the Israeli Defense Force) and playing Wonder Woman as a good-ol’-fashioned “punch the Nazi” romp that regresses to older problems that exclude marginalized groups to then brutalize them at home and abroad: white savior syndrome, aka white people/boomer disease. It affects Mad Max even at its most progressive, but also Star Wars and superheroes/the monomyth at large.

Any superhero risks becoming a weapon for the state; i.e., something that sells sex and force and can be sold to children; e.g., sex and force as often overlapping and having animalistic forms: the caveman or cavegirl in animal furs, the primal herbo/himbo who will bonk you—over the head with a club!  The same baton-like quality translates to a Greek hauntology that lends itself well to American pinup Imperialism eroticizing the sword while simultaneously making it chaste, “non-lethal” fisticuffs. Like punk, feminism decays; e.g., from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “hyena in a petticoat” to American, hawkish feminists championing Capitalism as something whose hegemony wasn’t as globally established in Mary Shelley’s day. Wonder Woman is a defender of Omelas—a civilized cavewoman/noble savage descended from when “‘the West’ was great.” Similar neoconservative echoes beget through the likes of Master Chief, Doomguy and Samus Aran (who all echoed Ellen Ripley as a female Rambo galvanized by James Cameron huffing on Heinlein’s hog in stories like Aliens, but also the screenplay he wrote for Rambo: First Blood part two, 1985):

(artist: LeanFoo)

I can’t lie; my iconoclastic work has always centered around Amazons[4]/monstrous-feminine of a particular female kind: the kind I’ve wanted to be and fuck as informed by such statues placed all around me since birth. As such, I’ve written about superheroes (male and female) post-grad starting with Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes as a discontinued book (the only chapter being “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021) that eventually became Sex Positivity in earnest: critiquing the monomyth and monstrous-feminine as my PhD’s primary focus.

Of course, male monstrous-feminine are really not so different from female monstrous-feminine, suffering from various double standards through intersecting axes of privilege and oppression: of service in chains to an Atlas-grade body whose muscles are turned into state dogma and weapons. But my own interests remain very much someone wedded sexually and asexually to these bonafide mommy doms being something I had to learn to divide from biological sex when making my own gender trouble. “With such a confederacy against her—with a knowledge so intimate of his goodness—with a conviction of his fond attachment to herself, which at last, though long after it was observable to everybody else—burst on her—what could she do?” writes Jane Austen[5] regarding Marianne Dashwood as forced when all’s said and done to marry Colonel Brandon.

Simply put, there’s always been an element of calculated risk and BDSM to the Amazon—doubly so under Pax Americana and Britannica. What’s a girl to do? Does she submit, or disobey her ostensible overlords and their psychosexual marital schemes?

All of this doubles and redoubles in pastiche that is, to some degree, blind or perceptive regarding these meta wars taking place. Like any woman/monstrous-feminine, Wonder Woman has always been the virgin and the whore, the slut and the maiden we can reclaim from older forms in recent conversations. She becomes something to canonize and camp, but also write editorials about, about, about. Humanization cannot occur without confronting the objectification that monstrous-feminine play at; i.e., through calculated risk as a liminal sphere that butts up against unironic forms that view sex work as “universal enslavement”; e.g., James Cameron’s second wave feminism bleeding into not just his own maternal, sexless Amazons (of which he married and divorced Linda Hamilton[6]) but also his Pygmalion’s opinions on other Amazons and how they should appear according to him:

(source: Noah Berlatsky’s “James Cameron’s Comments on Wonder Woman Completely Ignore Her History of Sex Appeal,” 2017)

Escape from state chains is generally an ironic performance while reclaiming them in performances that highlight state abuse. Except, this takes nuance and Cameron’s a boomer who suffers the same problem as Akira Toriyama, George Lucas, John Carpenter or George Miller regarding the Amazon; i.e., as something to commodify similar to the Indigenous person: marketing “struggle” as war allegory that commonly cleans out all but the white folk versus a given imaginary Railroad company (with The Terminator having one black side character) or forces an Indigenous group to be the shooting gallery target (Aliens) or be led by a former-cop white boy (Avatar). Cameron has white people disease real, real bad! There’s plenty to critique about Wonder Woman but he can’t get past the first hurdle!

Seriously, we’ve barely scratched the surface of just my own corpus. I’ve written about Amazons and BDSM a lot; e.g., from Volume Zero (for more, use Crtl+F):

There’s also assimilation fantasy vs legitimate rebellion through Amazonomachia/Amazon pastiche as symbolic of class struggle through subjugated/subversive doubles: the war mask, uniform, weapon and weapon-like, athletic (or at least capable/”built”) body as performances that, far from canceling each other out per the centrist axiom, continue in opposition for or against the state as something to wrestle out from under its iron thumb. Because the state historically personifies itself through hauntological bodies that express war, lies, death and rape in unironically fetishized forms that simultaneously perform all of the above, these variants exist to victimize the ironic monstrous-feminine during oppositional praxis. Simply put, a state fetish is a coercive device, one that frames iconoclasm not simply as “incorrect,” but jailed then abused for its sex-positive, thus anticapitalist heresy during “prison sex”/Man Box rituals. Said rituals are often performed by assimilated members of a given minority (source).

and from Volume One:

Some heroes are villainous; all are monstrous. Superheroes, like animals, are trapped between two worlds: the foreign and the domestic, the wild and the tame, but also the ancient and uncolonized versus civilization as a colonial ordeal. To that, their animal considerations stem from the ancient world as something to revive in the present under Capitalism, then hide these secret identities under acceptable-albeit-conspicuous personas; to that, superheroes—like the naked wrestlers of Antiquity—supply the performer with animal qualities during kayfabe theatre as a popular-if-disposable commodity [straw dogs] that includes wearing masks and other performative devices: their statuesque bodies. Some of these animals are so-called “good animals”; others are feared and stigmatized for their inhuman strength, speed or reflexes; e.g., Spiderman (source).

Male or not, why are these buff, wizard swordspeople’s kayfabe/staged wrestling duels (and their pedagogies of the oppressor) so popular/able to buoy the careers of so many sell-outs and blind satirists?

Why, indeed! Beyond my older books, we can look backward from Mega 64 and Team Four Star to DBZ to Big Trouble in Little China to see a shared patriarchal, military-optimist pattern exchanged across oceans, from East to West under a post-WW2 neoliberal hegemon: from cinema, heavy metal, cartoons and videogames (with Toriyama in particular expressed in movies, comics and adaptations of his manga/anime, but also videogames where he became art director like Dragon Warrior [1987] and Chrono Trigger) all communicating the unironic monomyth; i.e., as something to revive the blind legacy of and have faith towards in defense of capital through itself: an endless exchange of content, making more content, leading to profit, uncritical consumption, creation, external genocide, ever onwards. Per the Shadow of Pygmalion, it’s something to regurgitate as blank pastiche—the myth of the good war as obvious, a priori. Except it’s really not; it’s simply enforced.

As Gothic Communists, we very much need to inhabit the same mode as something to make perceptive inside of itself, exported to all registers and media forms; i.e., as a parallel trend that challenges capital’s profit motive and fetishes/clichés of sex and force, of dueling Herculean wizards and damsels to be rescued, demons to rape, etc, through easy-to-digest interpretations: media whose pro-Communist trend avoids the pitfalls of capital and leads workers away from such a praxial quagmire towards development using Gothic poetics; i.e., camping the canon to formulate a pedagogy of the oppressed: “making things political, gay” or whatever else the usual defenders of capital will accuse us of doing. We must be what they fear most—not merely a joke they will turn into a videogame boss to punch, but something they can never kill. Indeed, they cannot—must instead try to enslave the monstrous-feminine as needed for them to profit. This is where our revolutionary cryptonymy’s masks, costumes, bare bodies and virtuosity comes into play. Some people (e.g., Hannah-Freya Blake) bake literal cakes and write books about it[7]; others, like Nacoco Music, jam out with their clams out. So long as it reliably yields to a challenging of the profit motive while subsisting within capital, then go to town, queens!

(artist: Nacoco Music)

In turn, Gothic Communism will face capital’s proponents as such and make them lose all will to fight—by humanizing Medusa and exposing capital for what it is: a killing field to acclimate the usual benefactors (and tokens) of capital to defend its Imperial Core/monomythic profit motive ad infinitum. We must introduce an element of nausea towards that, making them prefer what we offer up, instead: our “cake” as something to eat and learn from through mutual consent as illustrated. This happens not once, but over and over and over…

Amazons, like all superheroes, are like time capsules that get up and move around, but also represent a chance to roleplay and experiment with symbols of power that mean different things depending on whose using or consuming them. Canon frames them as a line to toe (with limited wiggle room); iconoclasm allows for possible worlds known to potboilers the likes of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962): the Nazi as a time traveler connected to possible futures, not unlike Cameron’s alternate timelines haunted by spectres of state violence that, for the Global South (and non-white people), are a regular occurrence. There is also the spectre of Marx, albeit as something routinely bullied by the spectre of “Rome” reifying through offshoots of either Numinous.

In a similar fashion, then, the likes of Superman or Wonder Woman (and a million other statues to play with like dolls or wear like costumes/masks) become a fantasy we can chose to wear or have forced on us—like the Nazi uniform as skin-tight all on its own, a cartoon of superhuman torture and rape not unlike evil versions of our male and female monstrous-feminine; i.e., our himbos and herbos as guilty pleasures, wish fulfillment, pleasure principles and stress relief, but also domination fantasies of the Pax Americana sort: copied by Nazi Germany’s own palingenesis, not the other way around (the American establishment pioneered settler-colonialism as the Nazis tried it: the war of motion as a gas-powered bio-mechanical spearhead thrust into the heart of the Bolshevist nucleus).

Such roleplay and fantasy is canonically prescribed by nation-states. This travels on the human body as encased in a tomb-like uniform draped in the flag as limited to various color schemes (often white, black, and primary colors) evolved out of medieval war standards and heraldic schemes into modern day knights; i.e., as larger-than-life political statements doubled by superheroes. Both remain emblematic of each other in a copaganda campaign haunted by its own past, of past, of past; i.e., the goody-goody as always ready to turn heel, his or her various codifiers challenged by the presence of the fascist ghost on “nobler” semblances (fetish gear having a “mil spec” quality to it evolving out of WW2 to the 1970s onward, into comic books and other pulp fictions): PKD’s potboilers adopted nowadays to speak to the same fascist loop Pax Americana always yields. We’re trapped in a never-ending cycle that blends the usual BDSM mil spec together on the usual bodies:

Observe, then, a nebulous, back-and-forth quality to the imagery of the surface; i.e., the body points to the genitals as implied, and vice versa, as clothed or naked to varying degrees and context. It’s Frankensteinian, with built bodies that—through a Gothic, monstrous-feminine lens—yield postcolonial critiques amid paradoxes with undead potential.

To that, big muscles equal strength and virtue as subjective, but classically are gendered in ways that uphold differently now in a dialogic of the superhero as a given kind of alien; i.e., a traveling castle-like body whose fortress is very poetic, but also built on preference for different codes of regression and subversion; e.g., “buns of steel,” washboard abs, and Wonder Woman’s physique perpetually frozen in the 1940s starlet, wearing the American-flag corset; i.e., “Old Glory” maintaining that hourglass figure (and optional ’40s hairdo) for the Man (or then-closeted lesbian) to guiltily enjoy (craving the whore-like quality that such an Amazon portends relative to a model virgin-esque housewife).

Such an aesthetic is the usual military pinup sort: the sex cop fighting the good fight for the usual presidents and all their horny men. Though functionally “undead,” Wonder Woman doesn’t look like a traditional zombie or Creature, then; she looks outwardly comely—soft, but hard as steel. Like all American™ superheroes, she remains haunted by the spectre of fascism as having double standards that complicate the proceedings: the Amazon as anathema to Nazi Germany but also, just as often, fascist parts of America that try to cram Wonder Woman into the wedding dress her character would have fought tooth-and-nail against. It’s a bodice whose comic-book-style violence “cauterizes” the wounds of any victim of colonial force, similar to Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber (the 1977 original did not disguise the blood of the disarmed bar thug, I admit; but that movie was more rebellious than its kid-friendly sequels would become: cops and victims, the latter trapped between dueling Jedi and Sith).

Wonder Woman is something of a “gentle” dom, then. She draws no blood, but whose BDSM chassis is—like the Terminator’s—”fully armored, very tough,” covered in the usual disguises that a) not only liken her to past heroes, but b) make her appear human and welcoming to the next generation of soldiers for the state! “Grown for the cyborgs,” she’ll tie you up and fuck your brains out!

(Kotaku’s “Make Wonder Woman Buffer! | MultiVersus,” 2023)

At least, that’s the canonical promise, right? The bodice and briefs are something of a compromise—to please “the boys” of a bygone Americana drooling over a fascist, oxidized Statue of Liberty given a fresh coat of paint. Like the ageless vampire, though, it becomes unable to change—just frozen in time, feeding off the Oedipal fantasy as a roleplay that can transfer power and information in either direction depending on how one performs it. “Mods” like the one above recuperate the “thicc Amazon” to serve a Male Gaze, but can also appeal to girls (and GNC people) who want to feel strong as an aesthetic that isn’t strictly canonical; like makeup or clothing, props or jewelry, they can serve different performances that identify around struggle or police violence (which DARVO obscures). In turn, the sword can be “just for show” (a prop weapon) that symbolizes state force, or a reversal of the same cryptonym doubling as revolutionary praxis profaning the American flag: a theft of legitimacy regarding the sword as a theatrical device (re: Weber).

As usual, consent and context illustrate the difference, but this takes dialectical-material scrutiny as not normally taught through canonical stories. But said stores don’t monopolize Wonder Woman any more than Marston did. It can be fun to camp the Nazi-in-disguise (the American hauntological cop), but also fuck someone you know could crush your puny head between her thighs (a closeness to power) but won’t because you’re just that special (aw, shucks)! I don’t even like Wonder Woman’s look, per se, but the concept is not without its appeal (fucking what I want to be, but also what I want to change: taming a symbol of American Imperialism[8] to become a Commie Amazon camping Old Glory): fucking an alien who’s crossing boundaries and fornicating with the enemy to find common ground by misbehaving. What’s not to love about that?

(artist: Zirael Rem)

All of this is rather dated and fresh—a superhero hauntology that extends from color to size to elasticity to genitals (sticks and holes). All synonymize per sex and force through the body language of war as a literal/figurative uniform—back and forth in that respect, but also as a regression towards/progression away from fascist violence as forever out-of-focus (similar to Far Cry‘s 2004 Valerie Constantine, second image, aping so many older femme fatales): the rape castle (or some-such resort for bloodshed made into a herbo/himbo power trip) and its bondage, murder and disempowerment perpetually informed by preference as acquired/congenital; i.e., accident of birth and nature/nurture; e.g., Marvel’s ’90s male pinup series being published featuring two high-profile gay characters Northstar and Hector subverting a straight male readership’s expectations (over time, comics becoming more expensive and bigoted):

(artist: Jan Duursema)

Despite being a Gothic expert of Metroidvania and Amazons, I like herbos and vaginas, and tend to be far pickier with male bodies than female ones, enjoying femme male cuties (e.g., femboys) of a very narrow sort (the opposite of my father) and all manner of female monstrous-feminine. I have an ace attachment to male himbos (many people do) but a sexual, imitative one to female herbos. In turn, it’s certainly guided my research, but I still try to be holistic and make thesis arguments that are intersectionality productive and encouraging of solidarity against capital and tokenism. Enjoy these settler-colonial sex/rape fantasies, but only so you can critique them and their real-world counterparts:

In other words, any power fantasy can be reversed (switched, in BDSM parlance). Capitalism, to that, often swaps genders but does so while tokenizing the fetish topping the male/tokenized audience, mid-Orientalism. We need to do better than that, exploring the same old tombs being raided to interrogate them and the avatar alike as fascinatingly fascist: to interrogate the ghost of the counterfeit where it and its usual rape fantasies can be found, albeit in ways that rescue BDSM from its dated American origins, post-WW2. It’s a good idea to do so, if only because we might surprise ourselves when fashioning ludo-Gothic BDSM beyond De Sade, Sontag or Creed, but also the CIA; e.g., what I learned while writing this piece—that I actually like the idea of Wonder Woman as a sex-positive icon; i.e., one whose many sex-coercive functions I can pick up on through roleplay as praxial. Simply put, it caters to my favorite BDSM theatrical role (the mommy dom) and body part (the booty) while leading me down some fun new rabbit holes. What’s that, Heather Hogan, “Wonder Woman’s Star-Spangled Butt Has Always Been a Canvas for Feminist Hope and Male Misogyny” (2020)? Say more, queen!

How’d that bank robber feel when she slid along the floor in front of a group of hostages and pinged away all his bullets with her golden cuffs? Can’t say, but I know what her ass looked like right after. How did she feel when she was fighting a grizzled Bruce Wayne about assembling a league of superheroes? Not sure, but I know how her ass looked when she was arguing with him. How’d her strut compare to Batman’s, fully suited up? Don’t know, but I sure did see her ass while Batman was skulking away from the camera. In fact, nearly every time Diana of Themyscira, daughter of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons and Zeus, the mightiest of the Gods of Olympus, entered a scene, she did so ass first, and the camera lingered and leered as it brought the men in the frame into focus.

Snyder and Whedon are not, of course, the first men to use Wonder Woman’s body—and especially her butt—as a blank page onto which they could project their feelings about Wonder Woman, specifically, and women, generally. Wonder Woman was conceived as an avatar. Tired of the “blood-curdling masculinity” of Golden Age Comics and endless real life wars waged by leaders of the Western world, William Moulton Marston designed Wonder Woman, in 1941, as his feminine standard bearer who would usher in matriarchal rule in the United States. He believed men needed to submit to women’s “loving authority,” in all ways, including sexually, which is why Wonder Woman’s weapon of choice is a Golden Lasso that she used during Marston’s days to tie up her enemies and friends almost constantly. […] Marston told anyone who would listen that his Wonder Woman represented all women, who could use the “charm, allure, oomph, and attraction” of their bodies to make men submit to them. Marston was a huge fan of bondage, and while his Wonder Woman embodied a lot of still progressive feminist ideals, there’s really no way to look at his comics without acknowledging that they are, in part, real-life bondage evangelism (source).

(ibid.)

Except, Hogan, there’s nothing wrong with preaching BDSM provided you can steer away from its cliché, harmful past! More than that, such dated forms don’t change the fact that ancient-to-medieval poetics, especially warrior poetics, believed that power was stored in different parts of the body that had a weapon-like function: the penis (the sword) or the vagina (the net), to be sure, or the head/mind (the crown), but also the ass as a warrior’s seat of power. And they would coalesce into other organs (the eyes, heart, etc) as connected to martial extensions of power like the sword or lasso as classically gendered: “phallic” and “vaginal.” Amatonormativity prescribes marrying off the rebel-as-war-bride; i.e., there always being something weapon-like about the monstrous-feminine, “nature” extending from female biology to gender performances that both challenge and operate under patriarchal force into capital building on said force; i.e., as something for us to subvert, thus challenge, the nuclear family structure as laden with war brides and their booties crammed into an American war chest far more recent than Ancient Athens, but regressing towards such a hauntology (“Athens” in quotes) to prescribe future war and rape fantasies with.

Seriously, there’s so much stuff to play around with, and Marston really broke the mold; i.e., in ways that yielded a productive power fantasy that could travel outside the bedroom (Foucault would approve) yet still yield subversive forms of play that would endlessly and productively subvert dogmatic thinking through a familiar face with a foreign function: speculative thought chosen in ways that go beyond mere “evangelicalism” into informed choices centered around sex-positivity as transgenerational roleplay—e.g., Sandy Norton and I, my own work informed by their 1994 polemic of Perkin (source: “The Imperialism of Theory: A Response to J. Russell Perkin”).

(artist: unknown)

Ironic or not, there always exist some stand-by arguments to default to. Even just among straight white people, a strong woman is so much more interesting than a strong man because she actually has to overcome adversity as the monstrous sex object men seek to take, objectify and dominate in harmful variations of Amazonomachia—a rich cultural heritage dating back thousands of years. For me, this is both a passing of the torch and opportunity to self-reflect—to learn from the past to synthesize good praxis in the present; i.e., in ways where I suddenly want to include Wonder Woman more than I did in the past. A status, sex and authority symbol, but also a bottom-heavy warrior and statuesque, classic feminist icon that yields myriad GNC potential to challenge modern-day impostors weaponizing the same aesthetic? In short, ol’ Diana grew on me. This extends to superheroes (male, female, or otherwise) as something to camp in dated, nigh-Freudian ways.

For example, while Kevin Smith points out (with Stan Lee’s help[9]) that sex organs are so often the topic of conversation, they generally are eclipsed by the body as statuesque/plastic: hard as stone or as soft and pliable as rubber, and often hugged in form-fitting briefs (echoes of Eugene Sandow’s imaginary antiquity and various strongwomen from the same period in time; e.g., Sandwina[10] as a circus attraction for much the same reasons [raw, brutal strength] married to female double standards trying to get by in a male-dominated America).

In turn, any hero is a monster (as I write), but any hero that deviates from the white, cis-het, Christian male is monstrous-feminine; i.e., as something for the war machine to enslave and assimilate per the Amazon as male or female (excluding intersex, of course) in service to the war machine and profit as its hauntologies/cryptonymies currently exist: the thing from another time, the secret identity that shows by hiding itself in plain sight; i.e., an iconic disguise doubling as a political statement marrying sex and force in oft-naked, androgynous forms: the open-secret identity and alter ego.

Himbos and herbos, like their gentler damsel-esque sacrifices, often reduce to centrist caricatures orbiting around home-defense/assimilation-fantasy action through sex and force tied to war personified; but as Lee, Marston or Smith demonstrate, there’s plenty of room for medieval (sometimes crude) nuance that, while historically limited to men, clearly has extended canonically and iconoclastically to performers regardless of sex and gender. In short, there’s certainly a heteronormative standard, and a gradient of normalizations and deviations that respectively work for or against said standard; but they all use the same basic ideas and tropes, fetishes and clichés. Not even something as wacky as Doom Patrol (1989) really “reinvents” the wheel (not to be confused with Gregg Araki’s excellent-if-sobering twink-murder-odyssey, The Doom Generation, above 1995—Zeuhl loved their twink murder); it just camps it[11].

(source: Creepy)

Through the body language of the statuesque power dynamic, sex is frequently a joke that—whether on purpose or not—seldom measures up and historically-materially translates to statues and statuesque bodies as standing for different things and being camped by nature and those with nature versus anything against either of those things. Except the state cannot corrupt if it doesn’t exist, but this is a long, slow process—one that camps the monstrous-feminine regardless of its biological sex (with big showy genitals, as Flashgitz shows us, classically not even being the point); i.e., the classic problem of gender parody in Amazonomachia regarding female bodies: is the Amazon “acting like a man?” or not? I tend to think of this in terms of class and culture warfare. “Acting like a man” is classically a Man Box idea, and Amazons like Ellen Ripley or Samus Aran classically punch down against Communists represented as space aliens… while still being otherworldly themselves. This arguably started with Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806) and Victoria de Loredani, but it certainly didn’t stop there!

Power symbols become things to symbolize, to hunt, to claim as trophies (which, like sex toys, we can make “dark” in ways that camp their unironic function, but likewise showcase a Destroyer with a light, Liberalist guise). We do so in safe spaces of unequal exchange, acknowledging symbolic freight through the usual places to barter but also work through our biases, phobias, and kinks, inside and out: to push against sin, dogmatic boundaries, to learn not because one is told (through discipline and punish), but because one plays as learning for oneself; i.e., in a safe space that imitates the usual disempowering feelings of state abuse: all the language of the “Imperium” put into quotes.

This being said, American superheroes like Wonder Woman are frequently cops of a white-knight sort; i.e., acting besieged while sticking to trademark heroism as branded: to look and perform as crystalized, thus are much more about imitation with mild variation than anything radically different than the good-vs-evil, us-versus-them formula: aping the “Roman,” Vitruvian statuesque through imperial verisimilitude. It’s bonafide praxial inertia, but similar to the Gothic’s zombies or demons, there’s still room to work and play with these things to achieve proletarian results; i.e., the usual, psychomachic “corruption fantasy” (mirror syndrome, aka “the dark side”) as yet-another-thing to interrogate/play with.

For the rest of the subchapter—part two, as I’ve divided it—we’ll look at fictional examples with Weaponlord (1995), Chrono Trigger‘s Ayla and Savage Land Rogue, followed by real-life performers who can play the witch cop or the rebel as a matter of praxis: Autumn Ivy and Claire Max. To that, let’s look at some more fictional examples other than Wonder Woman; i.e., those that bring the imaginary past forward as a habit that houses a wild persona trying to survive in a world historically very unfriendly to it.

(artist: Norasuko)

Onto “From Herbos to Himbos, part two“!


Footnotes

[1] From Bobby Box’s “These Gay Man Identify as Bottoms but Hate Anal Sex” (2020):

Can you really be a bottom if you don’t enjoy receptive anal intercourse?

When I initially requested to speak with bottoms on this topic, I wasn’t expecting many bites (this kind of information is sensitive!). But I couldn’t have been more wrong. A few hours after posting my request, messages poured in.

“I find anal sex more painful than enjoyable,” Chris, 23, says. “I know it’s only supposed to hurt for a bit, but even when it starts to feel good it’s still not satisfying. I find myself thinking: Okay, hurry up and finish so this can end.

Though he doesn’t enjoy receiving anal sex, Chris still identifies as a bottom because he’s submissive, prefers giving oral sex rather than receiving, likes feeling protected, and his sexual fantasies often—if not always—depict him as the receptive partner. “It’s that stereotypical big burly guy doing what he wants to [do to] me and taking control,” he explains.

Chris blames this fantasy on the porn industry, which, in his opinion, romanticizes the ease of receptive anal intercourse. “The bottoms always look like they’re having the time of their lives and everything just slips in with no struggle at all,” he says. “The fantasy appeals to me more than the reality [emphasis, me].”

The same idea applies to rape, which sodomy codifies to under Cartesian schemes: butt-rape nature. Make it hurt. It’s a powerful dogmatic tool that crystalizes dominance and submission as patriarchal, but also an aphrodisiac that, under unironic Pavlovian conditions, reduces to synonymizing sex and harm as things to trigger actual harm: a dog whistle. We can subvert this by putting “rape” in quotes, but the ghost of the counterfeit is always there (as is the reality—and I’m speaking from experience, here—anal sex almost always hurts a little).

[2] From “Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Episode 60 – Part 1″ (2019), Team Four Star redubs the anime to say pretty much the same thing as Toriyama:

Gohan, grow up! You act like you are the only one suffering. But I believe Trunks has some stories for you, and I can assume they all end with, ‘And then he died, too.’ And before you start whining about your father, again—and I get it—take a moment to consider that my father made me to be a soulless killing machine to kill your father [oh, the irony]. And that doesn’t come close to the complete tragedy of fatherhood that is Vegeta. […] You think you’re better than everyone else, but there you stand, the good man doing nothing. And while evil triumphs, and your rigid pacifism crumbles into blood-stained dust, the only victory afforded to you is that you stuck true to your guns! You are a coward, to your last whimper! Of fear and love, I fear not that I will die but all that I’ve come to love—the birds, and the things that are not birds—will perish with me. So please, Gohan: stop holding back! (timestamp: 18:13).

It’s so manipulative in favor of the unironic monomyth/status quo at large—a cruel hazing ritual that essentializes good and evil not just within the current story, but all of them across space and time. Cell (a stand-in for Capitalism-in-decay and Communism-in-development) is simply “evil,” and “good” is nature as catalogued and dominated by the byproduct of a cartoon scientist; i.e., the Creature minus Shelley’s pathos or irony as made into a military recruiting device that makes him a liar in the spirit of the original Victor Frankenstein.

Toriyama’s refrain apes older refrains that, per future duplicates, reliably yield Goldilocks Imperialism; i.e., taming nature while repeatedly shooting oneself in the (self-righteous) foot. As such, Android 16 (and those voicing him, time and time again) is persuading Gohan (and by extension all those “like” him and his antiwar tendencies) to “put up or shut up”; i.e., not hold back against the Nazi-Communist monstrous-feminine to “save the world.” It’s a circular argument that reliably leads to profit through genocide by erasing the state’s role in things; i.e., a bourgeois call to violence/false flag turned into yet-another palingenetic/strongman nation creation myth delivered by the canonical posthuman in service of the profit motive: as a voice for the state instead of rebellion (on par with Bungie’s own talking head in Myth: the Fallen Lords versus Scott’s beheaded Ash the android celebrating David’s creation, the xenomorph, post hoc).

Clearly Team Four Star recognize the theme of Frankenstein in DBZ—tragedy of fatherhood through the Gothic (fantasy-meets-science-fiction) making of monsters per the Promethean myth: as an endless, Gothic dialog* to weaponize the usual middle-class nerds to fight for the state in yet-another-cycle-of-violence celebrating and capitalizing on the monomyth. In other words, Team Four Star lost their ironic comedic edge the more they sold out; i.e., blank parody par excellence, used to worship Toriyama and push merchandise tied to his brand through their own. It’s transactional and dogmatic. So, way to go, guys! You suck!

*One I have written about before, and which we’ll talk about more, later in the volume (exhibit 39c2): “Dragon Ball Super: Broly (2019) – Is it Gothic?” (2019).

[3] Captain America initially created the myth of the good war, writes R. Joseph Parrott in “Captain America: Changing [the] Conscience of a Nation” (2015):

In March 1941, the United States remained neutral while World War II raged in Europe and Asia, but the country was inching toward war. Newspapers announced policies to support the Allies like the Lend-Lease Act, even as isolationist sentiment earned space in opinion pages. Yet next to the adult fare at the newsstands was something far less ambiguous: a four-color spectacle featuring a red, white, and blue clad figure holding a shield in one hand and using the other to punch Adolf Hitler square in the jaw.

[…After Korea, Stan] Lee rejected the simplistic, perfect heroes that typified previous comics in favor of fantastical soap operas grounded in very human emotions, where heroes bickered and faced personal crises, punctuated by kinetic fights choreographed by Kirby. […] From his origins in World War II, Captain America waded into national debates with sometimes blunt force. Since the 1960s, his stories have reflected complex ideas about patriotism, recognizing national flaws while clinging stubbornly to an inherent, even exceptional belief in the United States (source).

And there it is—an attempt to balance the argument with give-and-take amid a universal tendency to capitalize on American exceptionalism. Stan Lee wasn’t above it, and nowadays anyone who unironically brandishes the red-white-and-blue is, on some level, relying on its immediate symbolism as something to a) immediately recognize as a brand, and try to whitewash (versus Troma films indicating its perfidiousness through the neoliberal presence of toxic waste).

The idea of the superhero is canonically to revive someone sexy and statuesque, but also quaintly ace to literally stand and fight for the image of war as good in defense of the nation-state model—an idea that Howard Zinn (a bomber pilot in WW2) would lament regarding Saving Private Ryan (1998):

I watched Private Ryan‘s extraordinarily photographed battle scenes, and I was thoroughly taken in. But when the movie was over, I realized that it was exactly that—I had been taken in. And I disliked the film intensely. I was angry at it because I did not want the suffering of men in war to be used—yes, exploited—in such a way as to revive what should be buried along with all those bodies in Arlington Cemetery: the glory of military heroism.

All that bloodshed, all that pain, all those torn limbs and exposed intestines will not deter a brave people from going to war. They just need to believe that the cause is just. They need to be told: It is a war to end all wars (Woodrow Wilson), or we need to stop Communism (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon), or aggression must not go unpunished (Bush), or international terrorists have declared war on us (Clinton).

In Saving Private Ryan, there is never any doubt that the cause is just. This is the good war. There is no need to say the words explicitly. The heartrending crosses in Arlington National Cemetery get the message across, loud and clear. And a benign General Marshall, front and back of the movie, quotes Abraham Lincoln’s words of solace to a mother who has lost five sons in the Civil War. The audience is left with no choice but to conclude that this one—while it causes sorrow to a million mothers—is in a good cause.

Yes, getting rid of fascism was a good cause. But does that unquestionably make it a good war? The war corrupted us, did it not? The hate it engendered was not confined to Nazis. /We put Japanese families in concentration camps.

We killed huge numbers of innocent people—the word “atrocity” fits—in our bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, and finally Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And when the war ended, we and our Allies began preparing for another war, this time with nuclear weapons, which, if used, would make Hitler’s Holocaust look puny.

We can argue endlessly over whether there was an alternative in the short run, whether fascism could have been resisted without fifty million dead. But the long-term effect of World War II on our thinking was pernicious and deep. It made war—so thoroughly discredited by the senseless slaughter of World War I—noble once again. It enabled political leaders—whatever miserable adventure they would take us into, whatever mayhem they would wreak on other people (two million dead in Korea, at least that many in Southeast Asia, hundreds of thousands in Iraq) and on our own—to invoke World War II as a model (source: “Private Ryan Saves War,” 1998).

In similar fashion, superheroes classically make war criticism blind and sexy—i.e., in ways that engender the policing of such venues: gargoyles that spring to life and attack labor as historically sex-positive, thus anti-war and anti-Nazi, which Capitalism is not. Such defenders of the state are always monsters and martyrs for the state, some (especially female and other token varieties) being more expendable than others, but also prone to regress to fascist forms (re: second wave feminism, TERFs).

[4] E.g., “What an Amazon Is, Standing in Athena’s Shadow” (2017).

[5] From Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811).

[6] Noah Berlatsky writes,

Wonder Woman is a feminist icon. She’s also a sex symbol. She’s a wish-fulfillment power fantasy and a sexual fantasy, which is part of why she’s had such lasting appeal to fans all over the gender spectrum. But her sex appeal has been a consistent cause of consternation for critics, fans, and casual passersby since her earliest days as a comic-book character.

Director James Cameron is the latest commenter to claim there’s a contradiction there, that feminism and sexiness are somehow at odds. In a furor-raising recent interview at the Guardian, he said that in Patty Jenkins’ new Wonder Woman film, the character is “just an objectified icon, and it’s just male Hollywood doing the same old thing!” He claimed it was a “step backwards” from his own Terminator franchise, starring Linda Hamilton, who he described as “not a beauty icon” [ouch]. That’s an odd thing to say. Hamilton’s Sarah Connor is a wonderful, powerful character, but she certainly didn’t challenge Hollywood standards of attractiveness.

Marston meant for his Wonder Woman to be sexually appealing to men and women. / Cameron’s evaluation of his own work is questionable. But he at least has a glimmer of a point about Wonder Woman. It’s just an old point that’s been made over and over for decades, largely by people with no sense of the character’s history. William Marston, her creator, believed that female sexual oomph could lead both men and women to matriarchal utopia. His version of Wonder Woman was meant to be sexually provocative, educational, and appealing to men and women alike. Marston lived with two bisexual women in a polyamorous relationship, so he was always very aware of Wonder Woman’s potential lesbian audience. He was also aware of how female sexuality could be empowering, not just objectifying.

Per my arguments, paradox is a performance regarding power as a theatrical, playful means; i.e., to interrogate itself and generational trauma through ludo-Gothic BDSM. Sex appeal is very much a part of this, as is rape play in asexual (artistic) forms.

[7] Re: Cake Craft (2024).

[8] As an an-Com, I don’t really think we should focus on rescuing American symbolism from its own hypocrisy, but there is something fun about the fantasy—not unlike fucking the cop, but more exotic, otherworldly. Furthermore, the fantasy of “changing the conqueror,” while seldom practical, is often fun! And because it’s imperial, we’re not slumming but fraternizing with the enemy as something to subvert and send over to our side—the symbol as well as the people(s) involved! The way to Communism, I’ve discovered, is often through sex and BDSM.

[9] From Mallrats (1995): “He seems to have an obsession with superhero sex organs…” / “He’ll grow out of it!”

[10] A famous strongwoman from the late 1800s I have written about before. From Volume One:

Collared by the state, the “queen bitch” is a war boss who ultimately fetishizes the state’s will, including its historical-material effects: the ubiquitous celebration and female personification of statuesque war, death, lies and rape in a fascinating but ultimately “lesser” form: a lady cop, gladiator and/or reaper in tokenized spaces.

[source]

This appropriation took time, starting with a literal circus persona that fixated on the strongwoman as a dated curios tied to an imaginary past not ruled by men; e.g., late- 1800s strongwoman Katie Brumbach.

Similar to rockstars, pornstars and various other “stage bunnies” of the 20th/21st centuries, she had a stage name: Sandwina, but also “Lady Hercules.” People tend to forget that heroes are monsters. Hercules was a monster that Sandwina combined with the woman as a classical monster type: the monstrous-feminine by virtue of having manly strength and female attributes. Her naturally strong female body dwarfed the men around her [thus threatening the heteronormative order and literally personifying the suffragette movement]. As such, people like Sandwina were regarded in their time as oddities but also potential threats; or, as Betsy Golden Kellem writes in “The ‘Trapeze Disrobing Act'” (2022):

for a long time, unusually strong women were regarded as aberrant curiosities, described with wonder in the same breath as bearded ladies and living skeletons.” They were literally circus acts—magnetic ones that, Kellem continues, “not only destabilized the white-male basis of physical culture, it challenged popular ideas about female ability, all while showing a discomfiting amount of skin and startling muscle mass (source).

Meanwhile, the likes of Eugen Sandow [future icon of the Mr. Olympia organization] would represent an “imaginary antiquity” that suspiciously came with the statuesque, rippling muscles of a patriarchal hauntological past—a historically sexist tradition carried forward by “Pygmalions” like Conan author, Robert E. Howard, and famous Conan illustrator, Frank Frazetta.

[11] From Noah Berlatsky’s “Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol: The Craziest Superhero Story Ever Told” (2014):

The journey from disjunction to order is only emphasized by the fact that the heroes are themselves often outsiders in some way. Superman is an immigrant; Batman has a traumatic childhood backstory; the X-Men are policed and persecuted mutants. Yet despite the fact that they are underdogs, the heroes nonetheless fight for the mainstream authorities. Thus superheroes are often fantasies of assimilation—a dream of outsiders being accepted by, or turning into, insiders. […] The Doom Patrol was initially invented in the early ’60s, around the same time as Marvel’s X-Men, which it resembled in a number of ways: It was a group of people seen by “normal” society as freaks, outcasts, and weirdos, led by a wheelchair-bound genius (the Chief, for the Doom Patrol). Morrison, a British writer just beginning his long and much-praised career in American superhero titles, took the basic concept and pushed it to places where mainstream comics had rarely ventured. The new members of the Doom Patrol who he introduced were not white guys marked, through various fantastic mechanisms, as marginal or persecuted. Rather, the members of the Doom Patrol were marginal in their world for much the same reason that they’d be marginal in ours (source).

Camp can be more liberatory and inclusive, per Morrison, but as Zack Snyder’s 2009 Watchmen adaptation shows us, routinely drops into fascist pitfalls per future adaptations that gravitate towards violence and sex of a particular vigilante kind: Nazi (stochastic terrorism).

Book Sample: “Digging Our Own Graves”

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Update, 8/7/2024: Originally this piece was written for “Searching for Secrets.” On 6/14/2024, I moved the written material to the PDF manuscript of the Poetry Module (v1.2 onwards); today, I updated each promo page’s table of contents to reflect said change, too, meaning these transplanted posts are featured in the “Brace for Impact” table of contents.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

“In Search of the Secret Spell”: Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte-Blanche (feat. Samus Aran)!

First off, there’s nothing critically “redundant” about the Gothic in its more dated looking forms […] ignoring the paradox of the retrofuture’s own hopelessly outdated anachronisms, the wizard, knight, demon or damsel, etc, well as their various stages of performance: their castles, spaceships, graveyards, cathedrals, laboratories of mad science, and other cultural sites of phobias, stigmas and urban legends; i.e., haunts that can all yield creative successes (of proletarian praxis) through dialectical-material roles as determined by function (the aesthetics is just the allure and appeal of power/playing with dead things); in short, they can all be gay as fuck if done in good faith, thus sex-positive/iconoclastic by camping canon with seemingly wizardly power […] Indeed, the foxy flexibility of guerrilla war (emblematized by the fox, but also as thoroughly sexy in how we resist capital in animalized forms—more on that in a bit) isn’t mutually exclusive, as Capitalist Realism teaches the faithful (rewarding these Crusaders with damaging illusions and prophesies of a glorious afterlife). Instead, the guerilla can challenge the seemingly all-powerful, proving just how fragile the power of the elite is: their mighty fortress is a sandcastle, a house of cards (source).

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

(artist: ChuckART)

Picking up from where “Volume Two, part two: Opening and Outline” left off…

The Gothic loves excavating forgeries of old legends; this chapter considers the complex role of the Amazon as one such “dead” thing—dug up and played with like a circular ruin that springs paradoxically to life, its liberatory routes superimposing over the same track as covered in bloody footprints spilled for the state. The classic Gothic heroine is forever facing ignominious death from lack of military equipment or skill; i.e., when curiosity kills the cat. But we must be curious and play with dead things that deliver us from state illusions through the same moribund theatrics reclaimed for sex-positive reasons. Divorced from state control, they remain haunted by sex and force less as discrete agents (above), and more as a singular monstrous-feminine Valkyrie that “chooses” the slain for an ignominious death dressed up as “glorious”: oddly buff, equally magical spellswords of some kind or another to pass trade secrets along to an apprentice, a squire. Such naked (“in the buff”) “meat wizards” neatly encapsulate Freud’s idea of “Medusa’s Head” (1927): the male patriarch’s authority as something to simulate through war theatre and games as testament to such strength as proof of itself, ipso facto.

The meta/multimedia argument, here, is that men are stronger than women under an implied dimorphic scheme (“the battle of the sexes,” Amazonomachia) because it dates back to Antiquity as something imaginary under present schemes that weird canonical nerds, per neoliberal monomyths, will try to regress back into (the fascist return to a past greatness). Videogames are war simulators which invoke war hauntologies for different, often color-coded sides; i.e., copaganda with a deliberately antiquated, imaginary flavor symbolizing power as fought for/over between two group-like armies, two dueling one-person armies, or some variation of these two basic ideas; e.g., the Reds and the Blues, in “50x ICE GIANT vs EVERY GOD – Totally Accurate Battle Simulator TABS” (2023). Except, Freud argues, notions of ancient female goddesses ultimately precede and—per Creed—supersede males ones as fearsome-fascinating arbiters of sex and force against imperialist (and later, capitalist) supremacy during what I call the dialectic of the alien.

Such an idea, I argue, hasn’t really gone anywhere. As I write in “Doom Eternal (2020) Review: No Girls or Trans People Allowed” (2020):

Though technically well-made, Doom Eternal feels like a nostalgic old boys’ club. Everyone’s a male beefcake flexing at each other. To draw from Umberto Eco’s 14 features of fascism, it’s action—specifically strength—for the sake of itself. A perpetual casus beli that grants men total power in society and abroad. This imperium regulates everyone, though, including men (source).

Threatening the regular balance of power as maintained through the buying and selling of such war games will—if the backlash to my writing is any indication (read the comments)—be met with tremendous excoriation by status quo defenders. Any form of subjugated Amazonomachia really is the same old boys club, then, filled with all the usual double standards and token compromises. Just watch Cheyenne Lin’s “The Women of the Big Bang Theory” (2021) to get an idea: If you’re a girl, you belong to the club because you keep the usual white, nerdy benefactors at the top (and token lieutenants in parallel subservient structures aping the colonizer) and otherwise serve them as eye candy and mouthpieces; i.e., as inaccessible sex objects they can grumble about but still ogle at, or enjoy the sexual benefits thereof. Such is the lot of the conquered. Make your bed and sleep in it.

Unlike Freud or Creed, my arguments include the oppressed in a postcolonial, GNC scheme using the same aesthetics of monstrous-feminine power and death. As such, my Amazonian apologia amounts to ludo-Gothic BDSM that goes beyond Freud and (1993) Creed’s limited praxial scope to actually acknowledge and attach trans, intersex and enby peoples (and all oppressed groups) to the monstrous-feminine as a liberatory device; i.e., as likewise seeking liberation under Cartesian, neoliberal shackles in the Internet Age. After all, I took Shiver from Bungie’s 1997 Myth: the Fallen Lords and transformed her for a genderqueer purpose. Originally called, in the Dark-Souls-boss-style naming scheme, “Shiver, Loveless Child of the Unwed Dawn” (meaning “she an ice queen in need of a good humping!”), I instead made her Revana Mireille; i.e., my trans avatar who—hybridized between Joan of Arc and Red Sonya—was rescued from rape at the destruction of her home village, only to become a great warrior and savior of future children: a warrior mommy I wanted to be and enjoy the protection of on either side of a dom/sub relationship.

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a1a2: Artist, top-upper-left: Toroyo911; top-mid-side-left: Sparkie the Artist; upper-center: Harmony Corrupted; bottom-center: Dcoda; everything else, Persephone van der Waard. The monstrous-feminine is constantly trapped between enslavement and liberation, but also alienation, fetishization and sexualization as something to recognize as strong [and fruit-like] in ways that can be harvested through such propaganda battles, but also reclaimed: the juicy ass claps back. Classically the man or state proponent has—like Beowulf—the blessing of the gods and hurls their lightning-esque implements as an extension of his own body serving as an extension of the gods’ will. He always faces giant-like or siren-esque threats—i.e., echoes of Grendel and Grendel’s mother—but comes out on top for the state; but this desire to be nurtured and raised for war can be subverted in proletarian Amazonian forms that use the same palimpsests to foster an emancipatory-revolutionary character to their hauntologies/cryptonymies, thereby reversing the process of abjection inside a Communist chronotope’s staged battleground: the liminal hauntology of war where tricksy workers hunt for proletarian agency.

[source: Giant Bomb]

Per the usual mise-en-abyme as a framed narrative, the Amazon’s monstrous-feminine body becomes the “castle” as something to invade into and from, but also relay counterterrorist propaganda that aids in proletarian sentiment, mid-combat. Instead of the patriarchal proponent [male or female and GNC tokens] striking the state target dead, said target—similar to Deet from Age of Resistance—reverses the direction of the awesome spell; i.e., sending its destructive effects back at the hexer while vampirically siphoning the vitalistic energies anisotropically towards herself and all workers/nature: “She succ!” The usual dynastic primacies and hereditary rites of such a chronotope can become inclusively matriarchal as a matter of fresh history challenging the West’s New World Order.)

Per my PhD, all heroes are monsters, thus have the capacity to wage war through elements of terrifying sex and force as instructional/instrumental; i.e., during a toy-like theatre. This jives with Asprey’s paradox of terror as a guerrilla agent of asymmetrical warfare: “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it” (source: War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History, 1994). From Achilles to John Wayne to Rabican of the Nine (above), all are echoes of Zeus, but also avatars of such authoritative gods warring in ways that have existed since war as a practice emerged; i.e., since battles over territory were codified by acephalous tribes, chiefdoms, and city-states, at least. Campbell really wasn’t kidding with his 1949 title, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Our focus remains the monstrous-feminine, so we’ll consider these mechanics as dogmatic and ironic, using Samus Aran as our trademark Hippolyta: the Metroidvania herbo we have to rescue from state teachings, but also ourselves; i.e., by digging a new grave-like site of Gothic play for us both to inhabit (we’ll examine Wonder Woman deeper in the chapter, followed by La Femme Nikita and others).

People love monsters and sex (drugs, and rock ‘n roll, etc); inheritance anxiety inside the Imperial Core yields the paradox of a particular call of the void—dancing with the dead, aka cryptomimesis (my generous and inclusive extension of Jody Castricano’s definition as originally “writing with ghosts,” vis-à-vis Derrida). The cliché of the white girl—a child playing with dead things, fearlessly peering over the likeness of the pyramid—is her glimpsing the decay of the empire she inhabits as displaced, per the ghost of the counterfeit, onto sites of past colonial abuse that remain in the present as equally far-off but felt close by. The canvassing of the imaginary pyramid is an Orientalist trope for good reason, but we can camp it to dance with the ghost of the counterfeit in a sex-positive sense: in search of the secret spell that liberates us with ludo-Gothic BDSM/ergodic motion as a sexy means of dancing (and fucking) with death through music, nudism, costumes (and other things) as classically asexual interrogations that, true enough, overlap with overtly erotic subject matter and performance.

(source: DarkStalker90Gaming)

Monster girls or not, capital treats nature-as-monstrous-feminine and monstrous-feminine as something whose infinite gradient of sex-to-gender expression the state cannot monopolize. It becomes camp-adjacent, at the very least, thus an extracurricular school of counterterrorist education in the same shared playground: to learn from those we see ourselves in as simultaneously human and monstrous, policed and liberated; i.e., “monstrous” as something to reclaim from its unironic master/slave argument and criminogenesis in the broader dialectic of the alien. This requires using what we got—our bodies, labor value and Gothic rebellious potential as veiled (cryptonymic)—as often playful, sexy and in control while seeming out of control; i.e., calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a theatrical performance of/playing with state trauma as normally codified and sold to us: through toys, music, and games, etc, but also monstrous-feminine examples of these things by which to “better the instruction” for or against state forces.

The state values unironic punishment as the reward (raping the Medusa). Through a proletarian Aegis, sex as monstrous-feminine becomes a proverbial “wild thing,” a hell cat that a) the state can never fully control and b) sexualized workers can reclaim mid-exploitation as a psychosexual liberatory device: a rarefied drug-like being to paradoxically worship and give tribute towards as always partially exploited in criminal hauntological forms we must double and challenge, mid-cryptonymy—all while outing the state as the recruiter whitewashing such things (e.g., Nancy Drew, no matter how naughty or nice, is canonically a veil to conceal the state’s hand in things). Sometimes revenge isn’t just success within capital, but showing the scars of capital on one’s charged, hellish surface; i.e., as animalistic code for those who know—not to count the cost (necrometrics, per Cartesian rubrics and application) or sell out as past marginalized groups have historically done, but form transgressive and subversive exchanges of trauma and knowledge during liminal expression that yield powerful, pro-worker boundaries: the Amazon as a spirit of exchange that transmutes capital’s usual bullshit into an effective means not just of survival, but praxial, creative success as formidable, confident, full.

(artist: Amirah Dyme)

All this being said, the Gothic is historically very white, thus tends to struggle with canonization per “white people disease” and various associate syndromes and eating disorders, including white knight syndrome, but also white Indian; it tends to regress while offering up problematic hybrids of the warrior and the nurturing mother (who sell out due to concessions with colonial powers). Amazon or not, all monstrous-feminine have their feet in two worlds: the world of capital and the white man (and token police agents) and the world of the dark, the Satanic, the other as something of nature (“extended beings”) to conquer by Enlightenment chudwads (“thinking beings”). There’s so many possible forms and descriptions that can potentially reverse the flow of power away from state forces; e.g., a “cougar vampirism” to become the “beautiful death” that puts on her spotted robes to go a-huntin’ for scared Big Men with little hearts that break easy! It’s a complex idolatry with a settler-colonial past that, like the classic ’80s slasher, refuses to die, but instead chases the titular (so to speak) final girl to the final act.

This brings us to Metroidvania and Samus—my domain.

In the neoliberal spirit of things, this capitalist scheme has, since its inception, recruited liberally (so to speak) from feminism’s historically neoconservative side, pitting the vengeful white woman’s reactionary creed against the local Commies-in-disguise; i.e., a female Rambo displaced to a magical far-off land to play—as Star Wars did—the white rebel, Indian, what-have-you: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away….” The profit motive always tokenizes just enough to rake in profits, warning against fascist regression and Communist development as one-in-the-same (a false equivalence). It does so while simultaneously recruiting from fascist elements of the local, domestic and gentrified populations; i.e., to play at being more marginalized than they often actually are: slumming as “two-world people,” with one foot on Earth and one in Hell. The promise of pastoral bliss is always-and-forever preceded by an endless monomythic game of “kill the Indian, save the Man.” This is what Samus fundamentally is: a white Indian.

Except Samus—the phallic, subjugated Hippolyta sent by the Man—answers to the Man by destroying the entire area she approaches as “lost”; i.e., denied to the American double in outer space (or anywhere else): “If my bosses can’t have it, you can’t either!” This foregone conclusion neatly adumbrates the limited lifespan of any colony, the castle-in-question literally a ticking timebomb that, per American copaganda, pushes its own exploitation onto imaginary pirates to then seek revenge against. It’s an exorcism haunted by the ecstasy of gold inside the counterfeit as equally gilded, a launderer of the usual blood monies tainted by a cycle of conquest, a wedding band and Faustian bargain as ring-like: “I have a poison of the soul of which only gold can cure!”

(artist: Josef Axner)

Samus demonstrates this ipso facto. She is the colony brat “raised by wolves” (or giant bird aliens, in this case—the Chozo aping a benevolent Indigenous waylaid by cruel pirates, but also their own Icarian hubris) seeking revenge against the same old dragon who killed her dad and adopted family, only to revive again and again as an undead/robot version of itself, mecha-kaiju-style. In turn, Samus plays with power as men so often do in these stories, serving the state in multiple ways; i.e, a tokenized Amazonian colonizer robbing the dragon of its hoard (similar to Tolkien weaponizing Semitic symbols in 1937 to illustrate dragon sickness in The Hobbit, ultimately a bigoted tactic that critiques capital but also upholds it, like Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice did—through a Protestant work ethic[1]) and stripper “robbing” men of their paychecks (from Volume One):

Volume Zero extensively explored how rape is a triangulation device employed by state forces in Gothic media; i.e., of Amazonian women raping state enemies/targets: the state’s chosen female war bosses giving police, “prison sex” violence to nature-as-alien. Biological similarities and differences aside, their xenophobic function is identical to men’s—an assortment of gun, war, and rape pastiche through a co-opted, centrist Amazon: the good monster woman, Ellen Ripley, furiously slaying her evil double, Medusa, in service of the state [who redirect her rage at their abuse of her in the first movie towards whatever target they want killed next: destructive anger]. The neoliberal, neoconservative “revenge fantasies” of Aliens and Predator [1986-87] are rape fantasy in that regard, as are their videogame offshoots: “Rape the Communist; kill the pig, spill its blood!”—all in service of the owner class back at home posturing as righteous, but also displaced by neoliberal “arms merchants” like James Cameron and John McTiernan […]

Just as the shared, us-versus-them rhetoric owes a symbolic debt to Beowulf’s post-Roman treatment of monsters inside a Christian hegemon that survived in future English forms, neoliberalism’s prime videogame mode—Cameron’s refrain, the shooter—owes its own abject warrior symbolism to earlier stories putting future ghosts of Beowulf in seemingly unusual environments like outer space [whose dark hostility emulates Grendel’s mother’s underwater cave]: Starship Troopers.

Beowulf’s various offshoots survived into a retro-future copaganda whose military optimism contributes to the ongoing myopia under Capitalist Realism in male and female videogame forms; i.e., “Conan with a gun” aping Rambo [the white savior playing guerrilla] and Amazonian, Hippolyta-in-spirit Beowulfs like Samus Aran doing the same. Both offer a de facto “good” parental role to challenge the bad parentage of corrupt and/or monstrous-feminine entities [the evil double of the hero’s homestead and its occupants]. Conjured up, Beowulf aborts the spawn of Cain and Grendel’s mother on their illegitimate home turf encroaching on colonized lands; Samus crushes her own tall, hideous enemies using her own armored body and superior “phallic” weaponry. He’s the Great Destroyer shooting Red Falcon’s biomechanical offshoots to dust; she’s the Medusa, as strong as the Earth as she cuts Mother Nature [and her draconian offspring] down to size [below].

Per the kayfabe clichés of wrestling monsters, it’s not long before both hero types get naked, reviving binaries from Antiquity stressed post-Renaissance—he, stripped down to stress his masculine “invulnerability” and she, her feminine “vulnerability” during a recent creation of sexual difference. Within this settler-colonial trend, they pointedly denude towards a native, “white savior” state, mid-combat, which then regresses back to nuclear family roles after the action lulls: Hippolyta, the if-not-bridal-then-at-least-maternal role, playing house/mother while Beowulf goes home to be a family man… until the fight begins anew [which it always will under Capitalism; if there’s no one left to fight, the elite will make new enemies to confront based on Cold War kayfabe archetypes: the Nazi or the Communist as a bad parent to the hero’s good parent] (source).

Samus armors up and then strips as she always does, becoming monstrous-feminine as something maternal-warrior to endure the Male Gaze while becoming synonymous with rapist and false Indigenous (from Volume Zero):

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

Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else. Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite’s exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state’s property (weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc) while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its “wild” variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures […] Neoliberalism merely commercializes the monomyth, using parental heroic videogame avatars like the knight or Amazon pitted against dark, evil-familial doubles—parents, siblings and castles (and other residents/residences)—in order to dogmatize the player (usually children) as a cop-like vehicle for state aims (often dressed up as a dated iteration thereof; e.g., an assassin, cowboy or bounty hunter, but also a lyncher, executioner, dragon slayer or witchfinder general “on the hunt,” etc): preserving settler-colonial dominance through Capitalist Realism by abusing Gothic language—the grim reaper and his harvest (source).

Samus is like Superman, then—the small-town girl surrounded by farmland (a space colony, in her case) owned by a small group of men stolen from the Indians, thinking she’ll go off and fight the evil empire, only to become said empire’s whitewashing girl boss: “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! What’s that in the sky? It’s a bird, it’s a plane? It’s Samus’ spacecraft given to her by the man to go play Cowboys and Indians!” As such, Samus has Superman’s strength, agility and super speed, but also his X-ray vision; she has to settle for a miraculous arm cannon that shoots missles and beams, but can roll up into a ball and lay bombs like a some kind of fucked-up bird robot! She even has the same S logo as Superman does, but is worryingly shaped like a lightning bolt (a Nazi dogwhistle: a single “Sieg” rune)! By the time she reaches her ultimate prey (the Medusa), Samus has killed everywhere on-site—is the skinny-thicc Amazon/white Indian having donned the European’s suit of medieval retro-future armor!

As the Amazon, Samus is the part-human, part-alien enforcer who plays the cop and the victim, but is always functionally white, aping the monomyth to skirt the line of the hidden princess made through Shakespearean violence (with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley channeling Henry V in Aliens) to push the story forward, only to then bridal the Amazon and strip her of any sort of castle at the end. Even so, she will always try to fit in, pleasing daddy with bigger and bigger conquests. But she always is stripped of everything and starting from scratch, going from place to place as an unironic Traveler/Destructor (Gozer without the irony). She never promotes—is always a fledging recruit bossed around by men; i.e., chasing the dragon as a monarch-like status symbol the state will always keep from her (“no crown for you”).

Instead, they feed her crumbs while making her chase crumbs; i.e., a kill-list that takes on the form of the enemy she must destroy to progress (“seek power”) as Promethean, Faustian, colonial, horseshit:

Exploring Metroidvania is incredibly destructive. Forbidden areas often require sacrifice to access. Far-removed from the site of murder, the sacrificial altar is often the shape of the [victim.] Sated, the statue will either dissolve or physically move to open, reveal or create a door or bridge that the hero might use to progress, literally into the beyond, to face the Other. […] The returning hero is doomed to face the past again and again, a series of doubles. They can subvert old tyrannies by seizing control, but remain trapped or exiled, themselves.

For example, Samus is nomadic, without a home; so is Ellen Ripley from Aliens or Victoria, from Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806). […] For any [Metroidvania] hero, it is not simply a call to arms, but a rite of passage wherein the hero constantly infers whatever lies in store for them whilst inside; yet, it is always hidden, revealed too late: they were the destroyer all along (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania,” 2018).

Escape from Metroidvania is as mythical and performative as Samus’ power is. It’s a feeling that asks the player (usually a teenage boy) to ignore what’s going on while piloting the Amazonian avatar as his reward, mid-game and at the end: the speed and strength of Artemis, stripping her for a split second before she shoots you in the face!

Instead, the Golden Statue Room becomes a grim, haunting nod to idolatry and blood sacrifice, hinting at Samus’ thirty pieces of silver when turning the statue to stone. This chimeric totem’s bogus exorcism—built on the forged lie of Western sovereignty enacted through force (“the Galactic Federation” married to “Indigenous” revenge against an invented pirate that in real life, would be the Federation) happens, piece-by-piece, when she kills one miniboss at a time; i.e., the one-woman-army that targets a local population’s elements of resistance (so-called “power targets”). Once all of them are dead, Samus goes to the nucleus of the rebel fortress, the maternal brains of the operation, and strikes the proverbial Medusa dead, beheading her. Then, she takes off and nukes the site from orbit. She’s literally war fetishized, a walking bomb/starship trooper, the fucking Death Star in the flesh. It reduces to Cameron’s billionaire Marxism—the Liberal white man drooling over Heinlein, his own Competent Woman’s military optimism[2] making what didn’t happen during the Korean war a reality after Vietnam; i.e., in a fictional what-if world neither quite here nor there.

Similar to Volume Two, part one’s “Brace for Impact” (2024), Volume Two’s second half will also have a book sample series (“Searching for Secrets,” 2024) that releases one piece of the volume half at a time until, once the puzzle is complete, the way to the next adventure opens and the next! In Metroid, this is called “boss keys,” successfully implemented as a statuesque gate that cannot be crossed until all the “pirates” are dead; i.e., a casus beli (false flag) enacted by alien invaders calling a local Indigenous population “pirate” before sending in an infiltrator to blend in and destroy the locals from the inside, out. Such dogma is no way to live (and works out badly for Ripley and Samus), but we gotta subvert it within and/or from itself as a work-in-progress, much like workers (and Communism) are, from moment to moment. In the spirit of Gothic subversion, then, I want you think of part two’s table of contents as an inversion of the classic capitalist “hit list”; i.e., Samus’ golden statue as something to modularly cross off, one-by-one, until we proceed to Volume Three (where TERFs await).

This progress should intimate our critical-thinking abilities instead of our dogmatic faith in peace-through-strength. I have loved Castlevania since high school (especially the DS and GBA handhelds) and Metroid since 1994. I’ve made artwork that celebrated the Amazonomachia of our infamous heroine, battling statuesque beasties akin to a Theseus the minotaur (or any other dude-bro with magic and a sword killing for the ancient city-state):

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a1a: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. I drew these a year out of high school, identifying Samus as a human who sought down time and R&R in between the colosseum-style duels with walking animal statues. This didn’t just ape Greek myth—i.e., like the Japanese post-Cold-War neoliberal of the mid-90s—but mirrored my own life during the War on Terror as still ongoing back then and now [Biden wouldn’t pull out of Afghanistan until 2021, but the US isn’t leaving the Middle East anytime soon, and is still funding Israel as their foot-in-the-regional-door as of me writing this]. I listened to The Minibosses on CD[3], but also Grant Henry’s Metroid Metal [2003] as something to listen to online through the QuickTime plugin, and order over the mail by check. It seems both like yesterday and light years ago. I was nineteen, just writing characters like Revana, Ileana and Alyona in spiral notebooks with no.2 mechanical pencils and lined paper.

[artist: Edwin Huang]

So much time has passed since then. I would lose my virginity several years later, but wouldn’t have my first real-life partner until I went back to college the second time around, ten years later when I was twenty-nine. I wouldn’t meet Bay for another eight years after that, and would have multiple abusive partners in between. And even now, I remember Samus as the person young men could control—to be warriors, and then, if they were “good” enough and killed and explored and destroyed fast enough [speedrunning Rambo-style settler colonialism through CIA-style shindigs], she’s let them touch her boobies. It doesn’t take much to convince those in the Man Box to go and kill non-white people overseas; Samus, it turns out, was the perfect blend of masculine-feminine hawk: a monstrous-feminine recruiter/poster girl thrown into relief by an exploding planet—a pinup girl on the side of the Enola Gay and undressed by fallout, pushing down her billowing skirt like Marilyn Monroe [or as I originally wrote by accident, Marilyn “Manroe,” to which Ginger told me: “Best drag name ever!”] from The Seven-Year Itch. People hand-waive it all like it’s some cosmic coincidence, but it’s no more a gaff than Walpole’s giant falling helmet in Otranto or Hamlet’s father’s ghost: war as destiny by dressing the scene and guiding its action every step towards imperial hegemony.)

As someone who’s been there, done that, the children of today—to defeat Capitalism by breaking Capitalist Realism, thereby liberating sex workers (Capitalism sexualizes everything) with iconoclastic art—absolutely should play with dead things like Metroidvania and Amazons, albeit in a way the state doesn’t want us to! So hustle up, kiddies! Time to enter the Crypt of the Necrodancer (think Thriller-meets-DDR but extended to Castlevania, Metroid and so many other counterfeits whose playgrounds can be used to camp dogma with)! Exploitation and liberation occupy the same space, including its hauntologies and cryptonymies for or against the state. The state will perpetuate rape of colonized spaces into their hauntologies/cryptonymies to maximize profit and canonization. To that, such a “black Egypt” is an Orientalist counterfeit we must paradoxically use to free ourselves while strung up with (and out on) its mummy-like bandages:

(artist: Magion02)

Dancing feels good; so does confronting trauma during calculated risk as “cool,” familiar but foreign (Castlevania‘s “In Search of the Secret Spell” [2006] shamelessly sneaking in a disco beat to groove among the pyramids with). Per Matthew Lewis all the way up to me, it becomes the Gothic’s usual bad, musical game of telephone, celebrating monstrous-feminine sex and force while turning Imperialism (and its semantic wreckage) into a campy joke of itself. My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn’t so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference). I’m hardly the first person to notice this:

As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng’s “‘The Most Powerful Weapon You Have’: Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita,” 2003).

I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, “Commy-Mommy” means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the “rape” castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others.

I sign myself as such for a reason—not to be an edgy slut (though I am a slut who walks the edge). Rather, my pedagogic aim is to consider the monstrous-feminine not simply as a female monster avoiding revenge through violence, but a sex-positive force that doesn’t reduce to white women policing the same-old ghost of the counterfeit: to reverse what TERFs (and other sell-outs) further as normally being the process of abjection, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought tokenizing marginalized groups to harvest nature-as-usual during the dialectic of the alien. Like any good videogame OST, it repeats, throbbing and dancing orgasmically mid-live-burial: right in that little “garage” as simultaneously haunted but incredibly small and tight (claustrophobic/philic) and filled with a big present-like presence of Medusa; i.e., the drug mule, “packed and ready” as doubled by our orgasmic, passionate cries thereof: “Medusa” and her church-like melon-like orchard as yours for the taking. Clean those pipes!

Such fruit (and its forbidden knowledge) needn’t be denied, but its continued expression needs to be mutually consensual and otherwise sex-positive to thwart Capitalist Realism, thus save us from Medusa’s feral revenge (state shift). Doing a Gothic Communism is riddled with jouissance and camp—the sort where we stick our tongue out, mid-ahegao, at capital!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

To that, these books have been a continuation of my own struggles to quest for a palliative Numinous that can, with proper love and care, become a Communist one (from Volume Zero):

We have to learn from the past by transforming its canonical depictions to avoid repeating Capitalism’s unironic genocides.

This brings us not just to my adulthood but my postgraduate work on ludo-Gothic BDSM, which in 2017 was met with its own barriers. Working under David Calonne, I was only just learning about the Numinous vis-à-vis Rudolph Otto and H.P. Lovecraft and came across an article by Lilia Melani, “Otto on the Numinous” (2003), citing the Gothic as the quest for the Numinous: “It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for the mysterium tremendum” (source). Something about it appealed to my then-closeted kinkster as having previously been titillated by Cameron, Lovecraft and Nintendo (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write), but also the videogames I was playing at the time: Metroidvania (source).

Playing with the imaginary past can feel, at times, like chasing one’s own ghost as blended with the camp-to-serious ghosts of ghosts of ghosts during a shared mise-en-abyme. It’s all part of the fun, babes!

  • Splendide Mendax: the Rise and Fall of ‘Rome’ as Built-in(to Us)“: Outlines the problem of the Achilles Heel as built into any canonical heroism, including the tokenized monstrous-feminine, as meant to rape and harvest nature at the cost of one’s humanity and freedom; further divides into
    • “‘Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part one (feat. Dragon Ball Z and Big Trouble in Little China; Wonder Woman)” (included with the “Splendide Mendax” post, above): Outlines the idea of history as toy-like through Gothic action figures: the herbo and himbo (aka the Amazon and the knight).
    • ‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two (feat. Ayla, Weaponlord and Savage Land Rogue; Autumn Ivy and Claire Max)“: Explores further examples of the herbo as pro-state or pro-workers, and gives two real-life examples.
    • “Into the Toy Chest: Picking up Where We Left off; or, Gothic History as Toy-like Amongst Ourselves”: Considers the monstrous-feminine as a ludo-Gothic BDSM historical device that operates in relation to ourselves and its effect on us.

As Fishtopher and Friends eloquently puts it: “Untethered optimism is simply escapism. We must use our optimism to create realities we do not need to escape from” (source skeet: May 4th, 2024). To that, we must learn from the past in small—to learn to prevent rape-by-capital by camping rape as the Gothic does; i.e., by cryptonymically “crying wolf” (a Gothic mega-nerd pun: vis-à-vis Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s 1986 The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy) in quotes: “Help, help! I’m being ‘ravished’ and I’m a zombie!” People will definitely check out that “car crash”! Onto the graveyard of Pygmalion and Galatea, but also all of their zombies and zombie-like strudel, cake and pie, cream puffs and other treats! Put “necrophilia” (a kind of rape) into quotes; mix and match, but dive into it and see what you learn! Or, what you’ve learned from the Amazon mommy dom helping you dig your own (or someone else’s) grave!

Onto “Splendide Mendax: the Rise and Fall of ‘Rome’ as Built-in(to Us)“!

Note: I’ve gotten a little bolder showing myself off, lately! My past lovers (the ones I have permission to show) will appear in here, but so will my bare, exposed and hard junk, mid-coitus (lead by example ‘n all that). Think of it as a hidden boss inside the temple, dungeon, ruin, what-have you! Per Gothic poetics, the language of sex and force merge with the body language of war as something to camp; e.g., “Oh, yeah! Put your big fat torpedo in my tight little… tube?! Flooding! Prepare to fire! So much ‘sea men’!” —Perse

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)


Footnote

[1] Re: Persephone van der Waard’s “‘Dragon Sickness’: The Problem of Greed(2015).

[2] Re: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” (2021).

[3] And even put my favorite version of “Kraid” by them, the 2000 version, up on my first YouTube account: Nicholas van der Waard’s “Kraid, Minibosses 2000” (2014).

Book Sample: “Volume Two, part two: Opening and Outline”

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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

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

Volume Two, part two: Gothic Poetics, Their History (opening)

“But you’re dead! You can’t taste, can’t smell!”

“Ah, but I remember!”

—Schmendrick the Magician and the Skull, The Last Unicorn (1982)

(artist: Quinnvincible)

Volume Two’s poetry and monster modules encapsulate Gothic poetics from two different ends; i.e., that which collectively concerns the imaginary past as something to reclaim and cultivate for a more intelligent and empathic Wisdom of the Ancients, pedagogy of the oppressed, etc. As such, Gothicists fear the return of a barbaric past; the way to escape that under Capitalism is to break Capitalist Realism—i.e., by studying the imaginary past as something to learn from and create new liberatory forms of “enslavement” with. Part one explores the usage of medieval poetics (of monsters, magic and myth) when making new proletarian histories (the Gothic—of which the Neo-Gothic revives in the present); part two reverses the arrangement, examining the history of these monstrous poetics in two basic modules that future workers can learn from while thinking like Gothic poets—through monstrous creation that represents struggle through monstrous identity as paradoxically pleasurable, cathartic.

When there’s hell to pay and Medusa’s out for blood, neither oral nor written traditions are enough to avoid state shift by themselves; they must be combined and considered as such: a new combination of both to avoid disaster with—holistically pushing for post-scarcity as something whose slow-but-steady progression moves as quickly away from older harmful systems as it can. This includes the uncontrolled chaos of the natural world as enslaved by Cartesian forces. Capital is an old, brutal system that enslaves nature to profit from its cheapening (thus genocide). We want to be stewards of nature (thus ourselves) by transforming capital (and “Rome”) from within using Gothic poetics as oral and written, half-real.

Monster Volume Outline, part two

“Didn’t you just love the picture? I did! But I just felt so sorry for the creature at the end!”

“What’d you want, for him to marry the girl?”

“He was kind of scary looking, but he wasn’t really all bad! I think he just craved a little affection! You know—the sense of being loved, needed, wanted?”

—The Girl and Richard Sherman, The Sever-Year Itch (1955)

This is the volume outline for Volume Two. The first half will be the same for parts one and two, summarizing the goal of the whole volume; the second half will list and summarize the main chapters/modules per volume half.

Capitalism leads to universal alienation, sexualization and fetishization to serve profit, which has a functional opposite—worker liberation. This means that monsters speak to the evil in and around us as a historical-material consequence of those dialectical-material forces. They take infinite forms, but do fall into some fairly distinct classes.

To that, Volume Two is composed of various essays/chapters, but primarily three modules that divide the volume in two, before segueing into Volume Three: our Poetry Module and Monster Modules, which holistically invite readers to partake in all monsters to find what is useful between them. That is, rather than focus on one exclusively for the entire book, my focus is diversity-as-strength to contribute towards monstrous pedagogies of the oppressed; i.e., on holistic modularity with emphasis as needed to better illustrate (thus achieve) intersectional solidarity through oppositional praxis, mid-synthesis. To that, I implore you to try things out—to mix, match and combine rather than specialize in just one, when making your own. Most people have a preference, but most monsters are also quite flexible, walking the line between demon, undead and/or animal during the Gothic’s fatal nostalgia and “exploitation” put into quotes; the more flexible the monster, the more flexible the mind using it as a critical humanizing lens. I try to cover the classic monsters, here, but may leave something out:

(artist: Oh No Justino)

The state and workers are always at odds; the Gothic fixates on nature as fetishized and alien (monstrous-feminine) to better notify workers of the state in decay—i.e., as data that manifests linguo-materially as pain, stress and death in various half-real forms (meaning “between fiction and non-fiction”). The Poetry Module focuses on the poetic procedure regardless of the monster type; by comparison the Monster Modules consist of two primary halves—undead and demonic—of which animals (and other nature-themed beings) are included in the demonic side. This being said, there is an undead component to nature-as-alien being harvested by Cartesian forces, leading my thesis volume to argue (and my manifesto to both simplify and expound upon):

As a kind of deathly theatre mask, something else that’s equally important to consider about demons and the undead (and which we’ll bring up throughout the entire book) is that animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms; i.e., stigma animals relayed through demonic BDSM and rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized: marked for trauma or by trauma that parallel our green and purple doubles onscreen.

So when I say “animalized” vis-à-vis Gothic aesthetics, this is predominantly what I mean (source).

All monsters are alien; Capitalism, Volume One argued, chattelizes workers to serve profit, making them (and those peoples and places in connection with them) alien and fetishized, thus ready to be abused in all the ways that Capitalism demands in order to profit. In turn, power and material flow towards the state through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection; i.e., by sexualizing everything to serve profit through Gothic poetics that flow power towards the state. As my thesis statement from Volume Zero argues:

Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes all work to some degree, including sex work, resulting in sex-coercive media and gender roles via universal alienation through monstrous language; this requires an iconoclasm to combat the systemic bigotries that result—a (as the title reads) ‘liberating of sex work under Capitalism through iconoclastic art.’ Gothic Communism is our ticket towards that end (source).

All in all, the Gothic plays with the past as monstrous. Put in more blunt language, the monstrous past becomes something to, at times, quite literally fuck with, mid-consumption; i.e., in ways that cross undead, demonic and animalistic forms during a social-sexual ritual of some kind or another as meant to humanize the dehumanized: the alien, the other as normally ripe for slaughter by Cartesian forces, but for us expresses in delicious, food-like forms of theatre that are quite old—the Comedy and the Drama, but also the Ancient Romance revived in Neo-Gothic forms. On the Internet, workers can take things further than historical forms have dared to. We can embody the imaginary past as something to recultivate in ways that change the flow of things by literally fucking with it ourselves:

(exhibit 33b1b: Model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard. Often, an effective way to humanize monsters is to romance them; e.g., Beauty and the Beast or The Creature from the Black Lagoon [1954]. However, those narratives “transform” the monster, either killing/banishing them [as with the Creature] or converting them into an acceptable human shape [the Beast]. The latter is as much a historical-material concession of the princess as it is the monster itself: the canonical “kissing of toads,” hoping they turn into princes [which isn’t really fair to actual toads or those who identify with them. Indeed, many monster-fuckers hope the monster stays exactly the way it is].)

These are the primary sections/chapters of part two of the volume. Modules are sections that concern multiple chapters (which divide into subchapters that I will not list/summarize here):

‘In Search of the Secret Spell’: Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte-Blanche (feat. Samus Aran)” (chapter): “Sets the table” by transitioning from what Volume Two, part one outlined (using Gothic poetics to make new histories/a sex-positive Wisdom of the Ancients) to focus on the imaginary historical aspect of Gothic ancestry we’re always inheriting, playing with and subsequently learning from as a self-defining exercise. This chapter outlines the riddle of exploring said past as “half-real,” commonly as a member of the privileged group (the Anglo-American middle class) whose various privileges intersect with various axes of oppression (similarity amid difference) that allow us to play with the past and heal from its older rapes by putting “rape” in quotes; i.e., to cultivate a pedagogy of the oppressed that acknowledges power abuse (which is what rape is) dressed up as xenophilic ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., a complicated, multimedia and transgenerational means of liminal expression that can serve workers or the state, but for us is a potent means of interrogating trauma to prevent it again in the future.

The Undead (module): This module explores the undead as creatures driven less by active intelligence and more by a desire to freeze and feed in the buried presence of trauma and harmful conditions. It explores how the state’s monopolies lead to a state of exception within its sites of settler-colonial violence, which in turn create a violent upheaval/silent scream among the oppressed and oppressors alike; i.e., the voice of colonial trauma and the vengeful, desperate feeding on the living by the undead as the genocided dead, having come home to roost—zombies. However, the alienation and feeding also affect the ruler class, leading to vampirism as a canonical effect that must be personified in healthier forms of medieval nostalgia that, for their usual logical motions, become ghost-like, copied and imperfect. Reclaiming these modules requires embodying and subverting the very traumas the state relies on to control us by keeping us hungry and braindead (a process I call “lobotomization”)—to, as the undead generally do, paralyze our prey and feed on their frozen bodies, albeit in ways that pointedly develop Gothic Communism.

Demons (module): This module explores the poetic history of demons; i.e., as actively cunning-yet-alien shapeshifters. Canonized as treacherous within transactional dialogs of forbidden, unequal exchange (of power, knowledge and darkness) and permanent transformation, demons frequently yield a repressed desire for radical change haunted by systemic abuse; i.e., of rape and revenge as things to canonize or camp through the Gothic mode: as untrustworthy beings made deceitful and torturous through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. As such, we’ll consider the subversive, cryptonymic potential of demons; i.e., to reverse abjection through revolutionary cryptonymy’s double operation (to conceal and reveal taboo subjects), all while dealing with state doubles (re: DARVO and obscurantism, including tokenized variants). Be those people, places or something in between (the chronotope and its castle narrative/mise-en-abyme), we’ll do so through their classical function—as seductive, mendacious granters of dark wishes, including fulfilling the whore’s revenge: of nature policed, thus pimped, as monstrous-feminine by the state for profit, which the demon (as a vengeful, monstrous-feminine whore) challenges said motive (and its raping of nature) in favor of something better.

To it, we’ll explore the dark, hauntological creativity and endless morphological variety of demons, but especially how they manifest and behave; i.e., as a vengeful, nebulous, psychosexual matter of exchange, transformation and desire, onstage and off, during ludo-Gothic BDSM and liminal, half-real expression: composite bodies like cyborgs, golems and robots that are built with mad science (the Promethean Quest), occult beings that are summoned and dealt with (the Faustian Bargain), or overtly natural totems that are hunted down within nature-as-alien.

The Future is a Dead Mall (chapter): Monsters are classically devalued outside of canonical forms utilized by state forces, which leads to Capitalist Realism under the current order of things. To critique Capitalism, then, we must critique people’s devaluing of the Gothic or otherwise misusing/scapegoating it for Capitalism’s woes: Radcliffe, but also Coleridge and Jameson. Through a cultivated Wisdom of the Ancients (a cultural understanding of the imaginary past), we can confront Capitalist Realism through the monsters normally pitted against us instead of speaking for us and nature as exploited by the elite. It becomes something to synthesize through our creative successes—a concept we’ll explore entirely in Volume Three while reflecting on Volume Two’s monstrous histories.

“The Caterpillar”; or, What’s to Come (conclusion): A conclusion to the volume based on its contents, but highlighted through medieval expression and a coda (the caterpillar) to encapsulate everything the volume has discussed moving into Volume Three.

Capitalism treats bodies as monstrous to compel and enslave workers through set intended uses that serve the profit motive (thus genocide) through Cartesian thought; we, to liberate them using the same language—our bodies and poetic extensions of them and their sexualities, genders and orientations serving as a potent, emergently playful means: of storing and exchanging precious forbidden data per outing to challenge Capitalist Realism as a settler-colonial project. In this volume, then, we’ll be playing with monsters you’ll undoubtedly have seen before (often as little [sex] toys), but will be asked to think about now in ways that may seem new and strange to you and me (and I’ve been doing this awhile); re: “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about.” The shape doesn’t matter provided the function (and flow of power) is consistent—for and towards workers united in a Cause that is in-the-flesh, intuitive, second-nature. The continual idea, then, is a constellation to reassemble and reflect on trauma in a holistic manner using monsters to liberate workers (and their bodies) with; i.e., to illustrate mutual consent with Gothic poetics to break Capitalist Realism once and for all. “New vistas of reflection,” indeed!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Onto “In Search of the Secret Spell“!

Book Sample: “Searching for Secrets” Module Contents and Disclaimer

“Searching for Secrets*” is a blog-style book promotion, originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series. This specific promo post includes the Undead Module’s table of contents (and hyperlinks to each post), followed by the book disclaimer.

*Inspired by one of my favorite Castlevania songs from Portrait of Ruin (2006). You gotta dance and play in the ruins to camp the counterfeit with its ghost, lovelies!

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! I wrote an epilogue for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, 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 at the bottom of the page.

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.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Contents (for Volume Two, part two) 

Volume Two, part two divides into two Monster Modules, which will release as separate sub-volumes (due to length issues). Both halves contain the opening thesis statement, “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis” (which discusses the overlap between trauma/feeding and transformation/power and knowledge exchange); the first half, “Searching for Secrets,” holds the Undead Module, whereas the second half, “Deal with the Devil,” contains the Demon Module and volume conclusion.

All in all, these individual posts are the primary sections/chapters of each module for Volume Two, part two. Modules are sections that concern multiple chapters, subchapters, and so on. While the Poetry Module focused on Gothic poetics as a historical-material process whose history we contribute towards, the Monster Modules shall focus on the history of Gothic poetics as something to learn from when poetically articulating our own pedagogy of the oppressed.

Playing with Dead Things (opening and thesis chapter)

Summary

The opening to Volume Two, part two, as well as the thesis chapter for the Monster Modules. Each module will have its own promo series, and each promo series will only contain its respective module/sub-volume.

Update, 8/7/2024: Originally “Playing with Dead Things” contained two additional chapters: “In Search of the Secret Spell” and “Back to the Necropolis.” However, to keep Volume Two, part two from getting too big, I’ve decided to transplant those into Volume Two, part one (as of v1.2 onwards, which you can access on my book’s 1-page promo). I’ve updated this content page and the content page for “Brace for Impact” to reflect those changes. —Perse

Posts

The Undead: Zombies, Vampires and Ghosts (module)

Cover model: Harmony Corrupted

Summary

This module explores the poetic history of the undead; i.e., as creatures driven less by active intelligence and more by a desire to freeze and feed in the buried presence of trauma and harmful conditions. It explores how the state’s monopolies lead to a state of exception within its sites of settler-colonial violence, which in turn create a violent upheaval/silent scream among the oppressed and oppressors alike; i.e., the voice of colonial trauma and the vengeful, desperate feeding on the living by the undead as the genocided dead, having come home to roost—zombies. However, the alienation and feeding also affect the ruler class, leading to vampirism as a canonical effect that must be personified in healthier forms of medieval nostalgia that, for their using logical motions, become ghost-like, copied and imperfect. Reclaiming these modules requires embodying and subverting the very traumas the state relies on to control us by keeping us hungry and braindead (a process I call “lobotomization”)—to, as the undead generally do, paralyze our prey and feed on their frozen bodies, albeit in ways that pointedly develop Gothic Communism.

Module Posts

  • 2. “The Undead: Zombies, Vampires and Ghosts” (module opening): Signposts the Undead Module and quickly preps you for its two primary concepts: receiving/giving trauma and feeding. Opening Length: ~10 pages.
    • 2a. “Bad Dreams; or, Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse” (chapter opening—included with the above post): Explores the giving and receiving of state trauma through undead bodies; i.e., various aspects of military urbanism/state decay at home and settler colonialism abroad, as well as how to reclaim these devices and use them to freeze our enemies in place inside the state of exception (re: Athena’s Aegis). Length: ~29 pages.
      • 2a0. ” part zero: “‘Fatal Homecomings’; or, Return of the Living Dead (and Vigilantism)“: Goes over some important points regarding the history and function of a zombie apocalypse, but especially the role of pro-state vigilantism as something to introduce to children at a young age. Length: ~23 pages.
      • 2a1. ” part one: “Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang“: Concerns the domestic side of Imperialism; i.e., when the horrors of a zombie apocalypse return to the source: empire. Opening Length: ~5 pages.
        • 2a1a. The Imperial Boomerang, part one: Survival (feat. Night of the Living Dead, Left 4 Dead, and The Last of Us—included with the above post)”: Considers the dialectic of privilege waged against the alien dead when the chickens come home to roost. Defines the zombie, Imperial Boomerang and state of exception, then considers the ways in which zombies are policed through sex and force, mid-apocalypse; i.e., something abject to attack and divide, blowing apart/away with guns and otherwise dismembered as a form of pro-state discourse. Length: ~45 pages.
        • 2a1b. “part two: Cryptomimesis (feat. The Last of UsScooby Do, and more)“: Explores various stories that repeat on echo (through cryptomimesis) to normally divide workers too scared faced the consequence of state operations (zombies); i.e., how such things can be reclaimed from state monopolies, while nevertheless weighing on our minds (awake or not). Length: ~25 pages.
        • 2a1c. “part three: Rememory, or the Roots of Trauma” (subdivision opening): Examines the ways zombie apocalypse stories can be interrogated; i.e., as haunting our literal dreams, and where death/tokenization under capital can be reassembled and confronted after we wake up—as a polity/being to humanize and question per Toni Morrison’s process of rememory (through my personal experiences with the idea and writing this book). Opening Length: ~10 pages.
          • 2a1c1. “The Roots of Trauma, part one: Assembling Trauma and Questions of Betrayal in Beloved, Frankenstein, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Terror: Infamy (feat., Toni Morrison and Howard Zinn)” (included with the subdivision opening): Confronts zombie-esque assemblages of trauma and tokenization not just in Beloved, but it and its author in connection to such things in Frankenstein, The Last of the Mohicans (and a few other examples, to be holistic; e.g., The Terror: Infamy [2019] and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, etc). Length: ~30 pages.
          • 2a1c2. “The Roots of Trauma, part two: Healing through ‘Rape,’ or the Origins of Ludo-Gothic BDSM as a Matter of Rememory (feat. Harmony Corrupted and Cuwu)“: Examines rememory as a matter of performance per ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., rape play as something that, while it dates back centuries (e.g., the French convulsionnaires), actually accomplishes among the living through interpersonal experience; e.g., Harmony and I, who will give you an instance of consent-non-consent invoking the dead of the half-real, partially imaginary past, albeit as a matter of good praxis informed by even older experiences: DBT as imparted to me by Cuwu for much the same reasons (re: “Healing from Rape,” from Volume One). Length: ~49 pages.
      • 2a2. ” part two: “Transforming Our Zombie Selves (and Our War-like, Rapacious Toys) by Reflecting on the Wider World through the Rememory of Personal Trauma” (subdivision opening): Examines the broader relationship of rememory through personal trauma as an expression of the material world becoming “undead” in zombie-like ways (also considers the formulation of my academic idea, ludo-Gothic BDSM, in response to this lived trauma as something to reflect on: per my abuser, Jadis). Opening Length: ~6 pages.
        • 2a2a. “Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse” (including with the subdivision opening): Covers some basic points about personal trauma and rememory as a liminal, radicalizing process, including the therapeutic function of dolls. Length: ~30 pages.
        • 2a2b. “Meeting Jadis; or, Playing with Dolls” (sub-subdivision opening): Explores how Jadis and I met—indeed, were attracted by our mutual weirdness and trauma, and related to each other through toys that were equally sexy and weird. Divides in two halves, which explore further ludo-Gothic qualities to dolls useful during BDSM, which I had to reclaim from Jadis to eventually escape them and write this book with/about. Length: ~104 pages.
        • 2a2c. “Escaping Jadis; or, Running up that Hill“: Articulates my escape from my abuser, detailing the tremendous feelings I felt at the time (and which shaped my scholarly and artistic work afterwards). Length: ~39 pages.
      • 2a3. ” part three: “the Monomyth and Cycle of Kings; or, “Perceptive Zombie Eyeballs”: Paralyzing Zombie Tyrants with Reverse Abjection (and Other Gothic Theories)” (subchapter opening): Considers the monomyth as undead; i.e., undead tyrants per the Cycle of Kings, Gothic chronotope (the castle) and mad science narratives (the Promethean Quest) as something to subvert away from Capitalist Realism. Opening Length: ~19 pages.
        • 2a3a. ” part zero: “Mandy, Homophobia and the Problem of Futile Revenge (feat. H.P. Lovecraft)” (included with subchapter opening): Briefly examines Mandy (2018) as monomythic pastiche par excellence as married to Lovecraftian homophobia, then considers the function of sight as a reverse-abjecting factor in against zombie tyrants’ futile revenge. Length: ~25 pages.
        • 2a3b. ” part one: “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics: the Man of Reason and Cartesian Hubris versus the Womb of Nature in Metroidvania” (subdivision opening): Covers the Cartesian hero/man-of-reason and its Metroidvania offshoots: the decayed man of reason versus the Archaic Mother during movement through the hauntological castle; i.e., castle-narratives. Opening Length: ~9 pages.
          • 2a3b1. ” part zero, “‘Men of Reason Suck’; or, Ghosts of Freud in Forbidden Planet, and the Gendered Components of Gothic Space (and Its History of Scholarship) as Tied to Capitalism in Disguise” (included with subdivision opening): Sets the table. Looks at the history of Promethean Gothic expression through people and places, looking at older theatrical works and mythic structures—i.e., about/disguising Capitalism as surviving in more modern examples like Forbidden Planet through which Metroidvania like Metroid operate—then catalogs that history of scholarship (my contributions, some of them) for you to consider and refer back to, when reading parts one and two (the close-reads). Length: ~25 pages.
          • 2a3b2. ” part one, “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge“: Considers people first, places (and space) second; i.e., the seemingly Freudian, Amazonomachy-style astronoetics (colonial gaze of planet Earth) and parental themes from Frankenstein and Forbidden Planet, translating nicely into the Metroidvania space, of which we’ll consider through a dialectical-material sense pointed at Thomas Happ’s 2014 one-man-show, Axiom Verge. Length: ~31 pages.
          • 2a3b3. ” part two, “‘Look upon my Works, ye Mighty’; or, the Infernal Concentric Pattern and Rape Play in Hollow Knight and Metroidvania at Large” (sub-subdivision opening): Considers space first, people second; i.e., explores my grad school and postgrad research into Metroidvania, but especially Bakhtin’s chronotope and Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern in Hollow Knight as informing what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM: a means of rape play (whose performative, revolutionary nuances we’ll also unpack). Opening Length: ~2 pages.
            • 2a3b3a. “Geometries in Terror; or, Traces of Aguirre and Bakhtin in Hollow Knight‘s Promethean Castle World” (included in sub-subdivision opening): Outlines Bakhtin and Aguirre in relation to Team Cherry’s Numinous gameworld; i.e., its oddly homely and relaxing setting as something to explore and understand Gothically (through the chronotope and Promethean Quest) as both largely devoid of people while simultaneously being overridden with decay regenerating into different potential outcomes. Length: ~26 pages
            • 2a3b3b. “Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes“: Articulates Aguirre and Bakhtin’s ideas per my evolution of ludo-Gothic BDSM after my master’s thesis and into my graduate work, then considers the Promethean Quest as something that presents the whore as normally hunted by police forces, only to escape their subjugation and imprisonment by acting out her own rape; i.e., as Hollow Knight‘s final boss, the Radiance, does. Length: ~53 pages.

        • 2a3c. ” part two: “The Monomyth, part two: Beyond Castles; or, Criminals and Conquerors” (subdivision opening): Considers open-space territories, like cities and battlefields, which per the Promethean Quest are occupied by two other zombie monomyth tyrants: undead heroes and villains—specifically the crime lord and the warlord, fascist cult of death. Opening Length: ~2 pages.
          • 2a3c1. “‘Ruling the Slum’; or, Crime Lords, Police Tokenism and Sell-Outs (feat. The Crow and Steam Powered Giraffe)” (included with subdivision opening): Explores crime lords, in The Crow, as setting up the basic premise; i.e., of paralyzing the monomyth zombie tyrant as something to perform—by looking into the film, but also similar kinds of “punk” performances (e.g., cyber, steam, etc) that historically incur sell-out tokenism and police violence on and offstage, our example being Steam Powered Giraffe. Length: ~27 pages.
          • 2a3c2. “‘A Lesson in Humility’; or, Gay Zombie Caesar (and His Token Servants) When the Boomerang Comes Back Around (feat. Myth: the Fallen Lords)” (sub-subdivision opening): Explores queer aspects to the undead warlord/Zombie Caesar in Myth: the Fallen Lords (and his token, anti-Semitic servant, in Myth II: Soulblighter); i.e., by diving into the game’s DARVO-style, empire apologia, effectively describing how empires-in-decay endlessly recolonize themselves in between monomyth fiction and non-fiction—not just with the raw mechanics of colonialism (chiefly armed conflict) stuck in a self-destructive loop, but spearheaded by past historical figures who, as current genocides committed by the good guys are abjected, return as fascist bogeymen to colonize empire from the outside in. Opening Length: ~3 pages.
            • 2a3c2a. “‘Hail, Caesar!’; or, Balor the Leveler as Gay Zombie Caesar in Myth: the Fallen Lords” (included with sub-subdivision opening): Explores the man himself in Myth: the Fallen Lords, including the game’s Promethean, fatal-warrior mythos reviving Zombie Caesar on loop (the Cycle of Kings) to uphold Capitalist Realism through the zombie monomyth. Length: ~36 pages.
            • 2a3c2b. “‘Hell Hath No Fury’; or, Soulblighter’s Gay Nazi Revenge (and Giants/Female Characters) in Myth II: Soulblighter“: Further unpacks Bungie’s Cycle of Kings (and its various terrorist/counterterrorist double standards) by camping Myth II‘s titular character as a token gay Nazi cop; also considers the franchise’s gigantic and female elements, while linking everything to Capitalism and the zombie monomyth’s Promethean Quest. Length: ~49 pages.
        • 2a3d. part three: “‘That Which Is Not Dead’; or, Capitalism as a Great Zombie(-Vampire)“: Concludes the “Monomyth” section, discussing how Capitalism is the zombie; i.e., one that through its endless undead wars and decayed power fantasies haunting Capitalist Realism (regardless how the tyrant comports)! Length: ~13 pages.
    • 2b. “They Hunger; or, Reintroducing Liminal Expression through Undead Feeding Vectors: the Universal Feeding Mechanism of the Undead” (chapter opening): Articulates what vampires basically are, and what about them we want to study and focus on; also considers the anti-Semitic, fascist, witch-hunt treatment of vampires in Gothic canon, and how we can recognize and subvert not just greedy authors, but various traitors (e.g., TERFs) abusing and policing the same vampire language we’re trying to reclaim! Opening Length: ~13 pages.
  • 3. “Deal with the Devil: Transitioning Modules; or Between Demons and the Undead” (module conclusion): Segues into the Demons Module, whose subsequent promo series shall bear the same name. Length: ~6 pages.

(disclaimer exhibit: Artist: Harmony Corrupted, who provided me with various materials from her Fansly account to use [with her permission] in my book, including cum photos. For those of legal age who enjoy Harmony’s work and want to see more than this website provides, consider subscribing to her Fansly account and then ordering a custom/tipping through her Ko-Fi. You won’t be disappointed!)

Disclaimer

“If it was not good, it was true; if it was not artistic, it was sincere; if it was in bad taste, it was on the side of life.”

—Henry Miller, on criticism and the Supreme-Court-level lawsuit he received for writing The Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Regarding This Book’s Artistic/Pornographic Nudity and Sexual Content: Sex Positivity thoroughly discusses sexuality in popular media, including fetishes, kinks, BDSM, Gothic material, and general sex work; the illustrations it contains have been carefully curated and designed to demonstrate my arguments. It also considers pornography to be art, examining the ways that sex-positive art makes iconoclastic statements against the state. As such, Sex Positivity contains visual examples of sex-positive/sex-coercive artistic nudity borrowed from publicly available sources to make its educational/critical arguments. Said nudity has been left entirely uncensored for those purposes. While explicitly criminal sexual acts, taboos and obscenities are discussed herein, no explicit illustrations thereof are shown, nor anything criminal; i.e., no snuff porn, child porn or revenge porn. It does examine things generally thought of as porn that are unironically violent. Examples of uncensored, erotic artwork and sex work are present, albeit inside exhibits that critique the obscene potential (from a legal standpoint) of their sexual content: “ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse” (source: Justice.gov). For instance, there is an illustrated example of uncensored semen—a “breeding kink” exhibit with zombie unicorns and werewolves (exhibit 87a)—that I’ve included to illustrate a particular point, but its purposes are ultimately educational in nature.

The point of this book isn’t to be obscene for its own sake, but to educate the broader public (including teenagers*) about sex-positive artwork and labor historically treated as obscene by the state. For the material herein to be legally considered obscene it would have to simultaneously qualify in three distinct ways (aka the “Miller” test):

  • appeal to prurient interests (i.e., an erotic, lascivious, abnormal, unhealthy, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion)
  • attempt to depict or describe sexual conduct in a patently offensive way (i.e., ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse)
  • lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

Taken as a whole, this book discusses debatably prurient material in an academic manner, depicting and describing sexual conduct in a non-offensive way for the express purpose of education vis-à-vis literary-artistic-political enrichment.

*While this book was written for adults—provided to them through my age-gated website—I don’t think it should be denied from curious teenagers through a supervising adult. The primary reason I say this (apart from the trauma-writing sections, which are suitably intense and grave) is that the academic material can only be simplified so far and teenagers probably won’t understand it entirely (which is fine; plenty of books are like that—take years to understand more completely). As for sexually-developing readers younger than 16 (ages 10-15), I honestly think there are far more accessible books that tackle the same basic subject matter more quickly at their reading level. All in all, this book examines erotic art and sex positivity as an alternative to the sex education currently taught (or deliberately not taught) in curricular/extracurricular spheres. It does so in the hopes of improving upon canonical tutelage through artistic, dialectical-material analysis. 

Fair Use: This book is non-profit, and its artwork is meant for education, transformation and critique. For those reasons, the borrowed materials contained herein fall under Fair Use. All sources come from popular media: movies, fantasy artist portfolios, cosplayer shoots, candid photographs, and sex worker catalogs intended for public viewing. Private material has only been used with a collaborating artist’s permission (for this book—e.g., Blxxd Bunny‘s OF material or custom shoots; or as featured in a review of their sex work on my website with their consent already given from having done past work together—e.g., Miss Misery).

Concerning the Exhibit Numbers and Parenthetical Dates: I originally wrote this book as one text, not four volumes. Normally I provide a publication year per primary text once per text—e.g., “Alien (1979)”—but this would mean having to redate various texts in Volumes One, Two and Three after Volume Zero. I have opted out of doing this. Likewise, the exhibit numbers are sequential for the entire book, not per volume; references to a given exhibit code [exhibit 11b2 or 87a] will often refer to exhibits not present in the current volume. I have not addressed this in the first edition of my book, but might assemble a future annotated list in a second edition down the road.

Concerning Hyperlinks: Those that make the source obvious or are preceded by the source author/title will simply be supplied “as is.” This includes artist or book names being links to themselves, but also mere statements of fact, basic events, or word definitions where the hyperlink is the word being defined. Links to sources where the title is not supplied in advance or whose content is otherwise not spelled out will be supplied next to the link in parentheses (excluding Wikipedia, save when directly quoting from the site). One, this will be especially common with YouTube essayists I cite to credit them for their work (though sometimes I will supply just the author’s name; or their name, the title of the essay and its creation year). Two, concerning YouTube links and the odds of videos being taken down, these are ultimately provided for supplementary purposes and do not actually need to be viewed to understand my basic arguments; I generally summarize their own content into a single sentence, but recommend you give any of the videos themselves a watch if you’re curious about the creators’ unique styles and perspectives about a given topic.

Concerning (the PDF) Exhibit Image Quality: This book contains over 1,000 different images, which—combined with the fact that Microsoft Word appears to compress images twice (first, in-document images and second, when converting to PDFs) along with the additional hassle that is WordPress’ limitations on accepting uploaded PDFs (which requires me to compress the PDF again—has resulted in sub-par image quality for the exhibit images themselves. To compensate, all of the hyperlinks link to the original sources where the source images can be found. Sometimes, it links to the individual images, other times to the entire collage, and I try to offer current working links; however, the ephemeral, aliased nature of sex work means that branded images do not always stay online, so some links (especially those to Twitter/X accounts) won’t always lead to a source if the original post is removed.

Concerning Aliases: Sex workers survive through the use of online aliases and the discussion of their trauma requires a degree of anonymity to protect victims from their actual/potential abusers. This book also contains trauma/sexual anecdotes from my own life; it discusses my friends, including sex workers and the alter egos/secret identities they adopt to survive “in the wild.” Keeping with that, all of the names in this book are code names (except for mine, my late Uncle Dave’s and his ex-wife Erica’s—who are only mentioned briefly by their first names). Models/artists desiring a further degree of anonymity (having since quit the business, for example) have been given a codename other than their former branded identity sans hyperlinks (e.g., Jericho).

Extended, Book-Wide Trigger Warning: This entire book thoroughly discusses xenophobia, harmful xenophilia (necrophilia, pedophilia, zoophilia, etc), homophobia, transphobia, enbyphobia, sexism, racism, race-/LGBTQ-related hate crimes/murder and domestic abuse; child abuse, spousal abuse, animal abuse, misogyny and sexual abuse towards all of these groups; power abuse, rape (date, marital, prison, etc), discrimination, war crimes, genocide, religious/secular indoctrination and persecution, conversion therapy, manmade ecological disasters, and fascism.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)