Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this blog post now belongs to a promotion called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The Poetry Module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted.
Click here to see “Brace for Impact’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Further Reading: Volume Two actually divides into three modules/sub-volumes, each with its own promotion and release. “Brace for Impact” is the first (re: Volume Two, part one), but there are also promotions for Volume Two, part two’s twin Monster Modules, The Undead and Demons: “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil“!
Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! I wrote a preface 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 these 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 ally 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.
“Monsters, Magic and Myth”: Modularity and Class (feat. Jeremy Parish and Sorcha Ní Fhlainn)
There is a world just around the corner of your mind, where reality is an intruder and dreams come true. You may escape into it at will. You need no secret password, magic wand or Aladdin’s lamp; only your own imagination and curiosity… about the things that never were.
—Robert Ingpen and Michael Page, The Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were (1985)
Picking up up from where “Medieval Expression, part three/’Out of this World,’ part two” left off…
This is the final subchapter of “Medieval Expression” and of the Poetry Module proper. Before we move onto the Monster Modules in Volume Two, part two, we’ll fittingly need to discuss modularity and monster classes more than we already have. Except, in true Gothic fashion, we’ll elide them to achieve more of an agitated, confused gradient—one populated by doubles amid oppositional praxis, thus propelled by dialectical-material strife as something to convey, mid-lesson: of ourselves compared, mirror-like, to others in the same larger professions.
(exhibit 34a1b2b: Artist, top-left: Jeremy Parish; top-right and bottom: Persephone van der Waard. One’s a slut, the other ostensibly ace, but these qualities apply to us both [with art and nudism being ace qualities to talk about sexual things with, and Clarke Kent taking off his cute little glasses to become “Superman”]. Such echoes of the past reflect on who we were/are going to be relative to “are” as a present paradox caught between the two. To that, I’m currently the Metroidvania doctor having fun with the likeness of an old peer I pin up on this proverbial wall [the page] to throw darts [of pure love, I promise] as the succubus might. “And if we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended”: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” Or as the succubus said to the priest, Matilda to Ambrosio, or I to Jeremy afterwards [the latter recipients all feeling like they need a cigarette, post-“coitus”]: “All in good fun, babe!” And if they react with violence, at least we went out with a bang!)
We’ll address these each in turn, starting with the Gothic’s lack of restrictions and resistance to canonization; i.e., addressing said canonization in white, straight nerd culture via Jeremy Parish as someone whose Metroidvania expertise first inspired me and who I have since eclipsed: as a queer sex worker’s academic/non-academic voice on Metroidvania in a straight world (videogame academia and weird-nerd culture as thoroughly colonized by now). From there, we’ll outline the dialectical-material arrangement of things, the modular nature of the struggle and its academic paywalls and neoliberal stopgaps with Sorcha Ní Fhlainn* (this subchapter takes no prisoners) the basic monster classes that result and proliferate across space and time, and finally a holistic unit that considers them as a holistic practical unit; i.e., one that proceeds towards Communism as something that never was, but with an unchained liberator-Gothic could still come to pass. This starts with something to take the edge off, a color of the rainbow whose fairylike charm and earthly combinations (of white-trash ho [Cuwu liked to “ho it up,” in their words] and little sophisticate) spices things up:
*Pronounced “Surka neh-lahn.”
(exhibit 34a1b2b: Left: Cuwu reading my copy of Mike Dixon-Kennedy’s Celtic Myth & Legend [1998], their pussy fucked for hours until it became too sore and we had to try anal [note: Before going home, I swapped Celtic Myth for Cuwu’s copy of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. Said swap was instrumental in writing Sex Positivity as it currently exists; i.e., Moore and Patel’s arguments were utterly vital in how I think of Cartesian thought relative to the monstrous-feminine as harvested by capitalistic forces]. Right: Cuwu inspecting my copy of Robert Ingpen and Michael Page’s Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were—one of my favorite books—along with old vintage porno mags Jadis’ father inherited from a friend as a joke, and which Jadis wanted nothing to do with after he died. So I gave them to Cuwu.)
A common paradox in the Gothic is to “write without restrictions” or inhibitions that hold us back, down, in place, and so on. But this is less something to pursue full-bore without any considerations to speak of and more something to apply your usual cautions while keeping an open mind. The Gothic is home to the Numinous and similar such tremendous feelings, but a castle is still a highly architectural place (which, you guessed it, is also a paradox; i.e., the unmappable is less easy to pull off—short of pulling a Finnegan’s Wake[1a] (1939)—than you might be lead to believe). So some structure and some openness are both needed to attain the right balance as fleeting[1] and rare. But it is useful, regardless of when it occurs.
This is why I get really mad when anyone says the Gothic has “no power,” thus no way to “actually challenge”—meaning “actually threaten”—established canonical norms (or that only certain voices have the “right stuff” to speak to power—i.e., academics; e.g., Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, who we’ll discuss in a moment). Like, it’s only the power of creation as historically devoted to upending the status quo. No big deal, totally unrelated (sarcasm)!
The fact remains that if the Gothic didn’t have power then the state wouldn’t regulate illusions, including monsters, as things to play with and perform through paradox; they wouldn’t acknowledge it or waste their time with neoliberal cages (re: academia) sequestering such voices to a privileged few as hording knowledge: in a rat-race “fame game” first, helping people outside academia a distance second (or fourth). As such, people who attack the Gothic unironically (or restrict it to/only contribute towards hopelessly patrician discourse) likewise uphold Capitalism unironically, contributing to its defense (and often in bad faith). So forget Jameson’s quaint and pretty observation that we have “a constitutional inability to imagine Utopia” (from Archaeologies of the Future, 2009); he’s speaking for himself, not us (and snobbily values fantasy and science fiction, miraculously ignoring the fact that the medieval is classically rooted in fantasy and one of the most famous and critically potent Gothic novels is also the first sci-fi novel [re: Frankenstein]; more on Jameson and those like him at the end of the volume). The same goes for academic snobs shamelessly and arrogantly posturing as self-important know-it-alls (for once, I partly agree with something Jadis said: “Honey, they ain’t shit!” Fuckin’ oath, sister! Though we shouldn’t discount their arguments wholesale, however much these people as suck as human beings/communicators; e.g., Foucault’s “Imperial Boomerang” speech, “Il Faut Défendre la Société” made by a predatory sex tourist, plaintiff wanting to abolish age of consent laws in France, and addict to self-destruction and (coercive) sadomasochist sex).
Words are easy to find if you have imagination, especially if your imagination isn’t myopic because it actively resists Capitalist Realism’s usual bullshit. The way out is inside, using imagination through Gothic poetics to set ourselves free. This includes, for example, videogames and heavy metal. It becomes—once mastered—something to brush aside like cobwebs (I wrote this critique of Jeremy Parish and videogames after waking up from a dream—that’s how easy this is for me at this point; I’ve become a real magician at least—a unicorn magician!):
(Trippelgänger’s “Possessor (Official Audio),” 2024).
Videogames have, since the 1980s, been a propaganda mill and scam tied to capital. All media has—gentrified for these purposes in ways that include heavy metal as a means of false corruption; e.g., Ozzy Osbourne selling likenesses of “pure evil” to the nation’s youth, but also likenesses of Ozzy such as Trippelgänger, above. Note the usual similarities to Stranger Things‘ own copycat Red Scare and counterfeit’s usual process of, which we can bring to the fore by summoning the ghost of the counterfeit and letting it speak through us (xenoglossia) to reverse abjection with; i.e., through operatic, neo-medieval hybrids that combine heavy metal, monsters and sex as something to move around and play with: inside of itself mirroring the external world as half-real—something like Metroidvania, no?
This ergodic hermeneutic must take the installment and evolution of neoliberalism into account, and the educational power of games. This is older than video—with Monopoly originally being a critique of capitalism until it lost its irony, but our focus will be on videogames because that’s predominantly our focus group (so-called “gamer” culture) plays; fascists don’t play cards or board games (well, maybe D&D but I digress).
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…[2a]). 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 middle class. Except this time, the elite wanted in through ways that didn’t exist during the Neo-Gothic revival: television’s 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—about 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).
Media tend to overlap more than stay separate, but we need to intersect and combine them in ways that yield conscious class and cultural characters; i.e., from physical arrangements that help us present them in different exhibits that playfully comment how different texts don’t just imbricate inside of themselves, but like a series of different display pieces, hang out side-by-side in ways that can be combined, given the chance. That’s why the elite want to reduce physical ownership while maximizing labor and wage theft through siphons of these things installed in every American home as prison-like. Once the system is installed, the elite will take as much as possible while giving back as little in return—all while relaying coded instructions that divide workers against each other through the usual us-versus-them fatal nostalgia; i.e., wanting to regress to a place where such a person can be hunted down, then shot with our ragtag band of (mostly white, straight) Radcliffean misfits. It’s a “lynch mob” character that applies to consumption and critique as equally melded and dualistic.
Any presence of such harm is the bigotries of a normalized Puritanism whose regular causalities push outwards to the margins; i.e., to harm people with the least rights, while protecting those who are always protected: white predatory men and their token imitators (a criminal hauntology classically assisted by white cis-het women as the middle-class gatekeepers for these men). Capital needs Nazis to save itself—as scapegoats, but also as witch hunters levying violence against the alien surface of the menace being haunted by good old-fashioned Red Scare. If you can scare and manipulate a gang of pesky kids into isolating and attacking someone, it’s capital punishment that historically prioritizes the myth of good war against labor to defend capital. These little shits are defending Hawkins as a replica hauntology of Pax Americana seen now relative to a Gothic ancestry that—per Hogle—is false but furthered through the process of abjection. Per my arguments, this delivers the usual videogame-style violence against the state’s enemies in a half-real sense; i.e., by alienating workers from the Gothic means to set themselves free, and all while letting the actual killers—white predators (with token offshoots) —free to run about, murdering and raping with impunity (selective punishment during reactive abuse): inside the Imperial Core as a domestic mirror for settler-colonial atrocities overseas. It’s what happened in Western Europe, once upon a time, and it’s what’s happening right now all over the world as capital once again decays (more on this in Volume Three).
“Evil,” then, is the nature of argument as something to wear like a skin, but also a dwarf in giant’s robes, borrowed for fresh purposes (re: Macbeth). We must extend this to theory as something to apply to things like metal, sex and videogames; e.g., from the singular and limited nature of psychoanalysis and what’s going on up in our skull-capped grey matter to something more holistic that accounts for/plays with material conditions outside of ourselves that get into our heads, that release again, and so on. Brains are idea factories that respond to bigger factories privatized by the casualties of dogma. The usual suspects tend to make things that are content and entertainment first and second, arguments third; i.e., a grain-of-sand, pearl-like configuration we need to reverse through what we produce as playful, but for which allegory isn’t so deeply buried as a matter of Gothic discourse: monsters as things to consume, but also wear and perform in ways that always double state forms—as oppositionally as possible on any register.
This brings us to my critique of Jeremy Parish—as someone who has eclipsed him in terms of me being a queer voice regarding Metroidvania; i.e., as the school of rock such liberators call home as much as the unironic jailors: as something to discuss in academic and non-academic terms, during oppositional praxis not just as a dialog but an argument relayed through a dialogic imagination. In true Gothic fashion, I am the dark sexy side to someone like Parish—a space alien from beyond the stars that, funnily enough also calls Earth home, and practices a similar magic, but far darker and gayer than Parish could imagine. I am Medusa’s best revenge: the past of settler colonialism come back to haunt itself by tormenting its potential champions towards a gayer direction than they might lean without my Aegis’ mirrored smile and hug! “Don’t fight it, boyo! I’ll be gentle!”
We can talk about videogames historically, for instance, but must acknowledge them outside of an “impartial” vacuum (re: Jeremy Parish’s many books of “pure history” being fairly indifferent to overt revolutionary politics, but clearly invested in the overall medium as something to house and express with love); i.e., as a living document that is colonized by lookalikes that, like Vecna, look normal on the outside but, point-in-fact, have the privilege and power to say and do the most good or harm: white America and physical published legitimacy as being a fatal portrait when pushing unironic fatal nostalgia into the market and crowding out self-published ironies (often non-physical works; e.g., Sex Positivity as an entirely digital affair you won’t find on Amazon or Goodreads, just my website). However funny it seems, ignorance should not be a dated point of pride to celebrate in the present space and time if you haven’t really changed all that much; i.e., in regards to ongoing societal issues harming people other than yourself. It begs the question: “What is the use of wizardry if it cannot save a unicorn?” My dude, that is what heroes are for! Are you a hero, or just a weird canonical nerd? Shots fired!
(artist: Jeremy Parish)
Likewise, we want to consider how the inevitable theoretical binary manifests on an actual gradient, meaning any monster has a theoretical fash-to-Commie polarity on which art and porn present; and things that seem separate like art and porn, pleasure and pain are less discrete than we care to admit, but ostensibly divide by a variety of factors—colonization, but also one being focused on (versus the other) in a given moment, etc. As such, we must holistically and intersectionally focus on a) producing non-harmful variants that critique harmful variants while b) giving those forced to cruise/exist in the closet a vital means of self-expression regarding their alienation, shame, impostor syndrome, sexual frustration, and desire to wear costumes—masks, suits, clothes—that speak to trauma and imitate others ostensibly “more normal”; i.e., as a means of camouflage, co-existence, cryptonymy and so on. No one is normal; normal is a façade where those benefitting from an abusive system use normality as a mask to defend themselves with—i.e., by attacking the usual victims during a moral panic, as the state routinely enters in and out of decay—in short, when the chickens come home to roost as a matter of opportunity and exploitation during the liminal hauntology of war usual complicit disguises (e.g., the KKK and their ghost hoods going after fags and [excuse the following expression; I’ve censored it to avoid using a slur that doesn’t apply to my lived reality] “sp**ks”).
Sooner or later you have to wake up and take a side… unless the consequences don’t affect you; e.g., both Jeremy and I work on Metroidvania, but unlike him as a white cis-het man, I embraced the term as a point of praxis while exiting the closet. It became a point of my academic expertise/contributions (re: ergodic castle-narrative and ludo-Gothic BDSM), area of study (speedrunning and Metroidvania) and identity as part of the same ongoing equation. In short, I changed—Parish never really did. I can put on a tux and roll with the homies, but I’ll always be a trans woman. To be fair, I was in the closet when this photo was taken (summer, 2019); closeted or not, even if you had someone as close to physically identical to me as you could get—an identical twin, let’s say—I’ll always be who I was, am and “was will be” (speaking to the past, present and future as one, like the Gandaharian mutants from Light Years): trans, thus prone to say things regarding the world as it affects me!
(models: Henri Albert van der Waard IV and Persephone [then Nicholas] van der Waard)
The inverse of the same principle applies to Parish as someone who, while he is a published expert in his field and did important work regarding Metroidvania (which I learned from and started with humble origins[2] before I honestly far eclipsed him in the academic and activist senses, if you ask me), remains largely untouched by the larger struggles as a member of the oppressor group: white, cis-het men. Allies need to be spokespersons in that respect—not just indifferent, dusty old museum curators, but of the group(s)-in-question; otherwise, they’ll always be on the outside, looking in (“It belongs in a museum!” being a white savior’s cry to salvage, collect and study the colonized, postmortem; e.g., the practice of Egyptology after Napoleon largely being one of grave robbery).
In Parish’s case, he even says as much in his Twitter bio: “Media Curator (but not spokesperson).” It’s all nice and tidy but doesn’t really speak to a reality lived in the trenches of conscious, active class and culture war (re: like Tolkien, Cameron, and Lucas, etc). For him, it’s cushy and safe—sterile, sanitary. He doesn’t get involved—is Switzerland, etc. All involve Metroidvania as something that’s largely still a joke to Parish because it combines different things in ways that are historically difficult to market and put one’s name on (or even invigilate; e.g., queer interpretations/representation in academia; i.e., which is why I wrote my PhD independently—to be able to say what I wanted without exclusion and censorship from the usual accommodated fat cats and their neoliberalized institutions hawking their own books over mine); or as Parish himself argues, “‘Metroidvania’ is a stupid word for a wonderful thing” (source). I don’t think the word is stupid at all, but freely admit that white straight dudes are generally allergic to such portmanteaus—a fact evidenced not just by Parish, but his peers; e.g., Scott Sharkey insisting he coined the term (source tweet: evilsharkey, June 1st[3] 2023) but being more embarrassed about it than anything else, years later. Such praxial inertia is not growth, my dudes.
In good faith, let me be crystal clear about these arguments (and also to anticipate the usual Gamergate types looking for yet-another-spectre of Anita Sarkeesian to dogpile): I’m not some jilted trans bitch saying “Parish is a Nazi” and nothing else; I’m recognizing how the image he puts forth—of the tidy-yet-indifferent scholar indexing games in a growing series of publications to puff up his own image/name (versus socialist archivists focusing on public access and labor value/human rights instead of individual brand recognition and monetary value—of catering to corporate, to investors, to police structures and dogma as a business that starts with archiving all of this through one’s practice as a point of praxis that unironically endorses all of these things)—will always be haunted by the potential for such things to denude themselves, overtime, as fash. When push comes to shove, will Parish remove his mask and announce to us fags, “I am one of you/with you, comrades!” Or will he remove it and declare, “You thought it was Jeremy but it was I, DIO!”
That remains to be seen. Trust is earned, in this case (“once-bitten, twice-shy” and all that).
A note to/about Jeremy Parish: We wizards don’t all “know each other.” Jeremy and I have spoken to each other, but only briefly and in a purely professional and passing setting. However, we’re not friends, and his aims and mine—while in the same broader field of study—I think are somewhat different in terms of research goals (which such Venn Diagrams generally allow for): he compiles and collects for its own sake, and I to liberate my comrades. Go figure. I don’t write any of these things about him as a sign of wanton hostility or unchecked revenge, but want to express valid criticism regarding an influential public figure who, like anyone else, is fallible and not above critique; i.e., another darling—one similar to Radcliffe, Tolkien, Cameron and all the rest—that we can figuratively string up, beat with a stick and see what shakes out.
“Figurative” is the operative world, here; don’t go and harass the guy or anything! Save that spice for actual Nazis and war criminals (e.g., J.K. Rowling or Joe Biden)! But all the same, he is the odd man out, and talk is cheap. If, during discourse you want to test the mettle of such persons to see if they’re “one of us,” by all means! They’ll live. If their sex-positive vocabulary during crisis is simply “no comment,” then maybe they’ve earned a few whacks—not to harm them, but wake them up from their class torpor and de-atomize them as having be pulverized by the myopic nature of classic academic and white nerd culture; i.e., relative to gaming as a medium, but also a way of life, a critical voice. —Persephone
P.S., Such “hostilities” don’t preclude companionship and romance—e.g., me flirting with Ayla as someone who shares a common interest about Metroidvania as another queer person would—but such workers flirting with each other as a point of practice needs to become a point of expertise through thinking critically about things we all enjoy and love to different degrees (complete with chagrin-inducing typos on my end, in hindsight). See what we do, straight white boys, and try it yourself:
As I say to Ayla afterward, “Doing Communism is such a turn-on and socially enriching!” Her response, “One of my favorite pastimes!” Such a gem (and with such a big dick; I wasn’t kidding about how big she is)! The Gothic is a mode of expression that—in iconoclastic forms—breaks through harmful boundaries and venues of exchange to double them in sex-positive forms. Sometimes, though, this takes a rather big “ram” when exchanging knowledge and essence, forming friendships through things whose discourse has been colonized by the usual suspects for centuries and must be reclaimed during the Internet Age through the free-and-willing partaking of things I’m sure Parish wouldn’t be caught dead doing in public: forbidden fruit of a substantial (and epistemologically nutritious) nature. Taking it back starts with such things as wedded to a fatal nostalgia we reclaim by sucking it anisotropically in the opposite direction—not as a weakness of exposure, but an empowering one that, unto itself, showing what “doing a Gothic Communism [the illustrating mutual consent during praxial synthesis]” is all about—as a joke, a last stand, a rapture, green eggs and ham, and a farce all at once: “Mmm, such delicious, tasty Communism! ‘Taste the Rainbow!'”
(artists: Ms. Reefer & Ayla)
Let’s leave Parish alone (aftercare, remember) and press on! As we do, just remember that, as something whose ironic forms resists canonization[4] and quantification (of the Cartesian sort), the Gothic is yet-another totality in our powerful means of navigating capital’s inherited confusions mid-play: swimming happily through the void not to escape it by going outside, but by transforming capital’s bad, prolific and completely lucrative forgeries into communes from within—to camp canon, thus “make it gay” through the same shared, reclaimed monsters made material (our creative means); i.e., devoting these things to something other than just capital (and profit) through moral panic and abjection.
Except, neither is there some actual outer space full of monsters, but merely the semantic wreckage of language that, through a particular surgical (selective) reassembly of old dead parts, achieves cryptomimesis to comment on the things normally hidden (and unreachable) there; i.e., as expressed by our activities with the dead: writing with them, dancing with them, eating or fucking with them as spectres of various classes and subclasses. Again, it’s a vapor trial, one whose paradoxical sight is felt through things pointedly built to evoke what cannot be expressed all at once, but pieces that must be assembled afterward (like one of my collages) until it clicks: within the narrative of the crypt’s vanishing point (the telltale heart in Poe’s infamous floorboards); i.e., our flagging reserves, but also our sanity (and cum) wavering regarding our place in things: among ancestors and descendants, impostors. These cannot be neatly separated, so the Gothic doesn’t try. Instead, it examines them as they exist—in confusion, disorder and apprehension, moving towards something better by confronting the alien as a historical-material consequence of dialectical-material forces that make us and society sick (sometimes to our actual stomachs).
Canon is sex-coercive, xenophobic and violent by design, presenting monsters as demonized personifications of “pure evil” to gentrify and scapegoat, thus persecute out-groups with using medievalized language during ongoing fascist regressions (moral panics). Historically-materially this attaches itself to punishment of the out-group by a hateful mascot in the eyes of the in-group; i.e., the creation of a counterfeit monster that serves to readily demonize in-group targets, while “outing” and branding them with immediately recognizable and marketable duplicates.
The outcome is routine exclusion, segregation and genocide, but also profit through the assignment and execution of these roles under Capitalism (e.g., academia; re: Parish). This, of course, is the entire point. Canon doesn’t explain evil; it assigns it, forcing a punitive, dogmatic binary upon those the state exploits as compelled outsiders of descending privilege according to various intersecting markers. White women, for example, have one foot on either side of the line—are punished most aggressively when they refuse to submit to male authority by bearing children for the state; on the other hand, people of color are exploited by default, as are disabled persons, non-Christians, the queer community and various ethnic minorities separate or together. Zombies, vampires, goblins and demons, et al, can represent them all to various degrees—in short, whatever fascism or neoliberalism demand through an enforced curriculum.
Conversely, iconoclastic monsters under Gothic Communism dissolve the dividing line by de facto, extracurricular educators: ipso facto voicing worker oppression in favor of their social-sexual rights through dislocated, xenophilic means (outside of hyperreal examples, a monster is generally a symbol of someone—a persona or caricature). But liminal expression occurs through conflict on the surface of and within thresholds. While the fight for basic human, animal and environmental rights is universally moral, thus correct (and the state immoral and incorrect), the complexities of monstrous expression (as we shall see) invite the paradox of doubled forms that fight for or against the state during Amazonomachia (“monster battle” but also monster “castles,” “armies,” “warriors,” “damsels,” etc, as dualistic and poetic in discrete-to-indiscrete forms [e.g., castle-like bodies inside body-like castles] of mise-en-abyme).
The state is the ultimate foe, the great enemy that cannot ever be sided with in order for Gothic Communism to exist; our planet’s bloody history of endless wars and deceptions fought to enrich the elite through nation-states (and other status-quo arrangements of power) should be enough to demonstrate how harmful nation-states (and their police agents) are. All choose the form of the destructor as something to rape Medusa and ultimately themselves during state sponsored Promethean Quests and Faustian bargains; i.e., in pursuit of the Communist, monstrous-feminine Numinous to rape her and slam shut her door, thus their own menticided brains as stuck in Capitalist Realism; e.g., Ghostbusters (above) rejecting Gozer’s Aegis to “save” New York (crossing streams emitting from their “swords” but not touching the swords themselves; that would be gay!): all to exorcise the spirit of queer expression as something that could “never ever possibly destroy [them]” but for which they long to return to and which Bill Murray (a sex pest on and offscreen) and company conflate as madness: “Ray’s gone bye-bye, Egon; what have you got left?” / “I’m sorry, Venkman! I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought!” In short, they feel Gozer’s collectively genderqueer pull/call of the void as one towards liberation from New York as a settler-colonial symbol, Gozer (the whore) denuding the Statue of Liberty to expose a TERF charlatan enabled and encouraged by neoliberal men:
(artist: Axel Ross)
It’s not just that the Ghostbusters are cops who must go into Hell to fuck Medusa silent; they’re cops, whose fatal, police-state nostalgia is, of course, tied to a neoliberal “Golden Age” that never existed, and one where brainwashed people collective sigh as one, “Remember when times were good?” What? You mean before you were born, when the elite robbed people blind and use said illusions to do so more than ever? “Suffer the little children unto me,” indeed!
To that, praxis exists in opposition, using language as dualistic, dialectical material. Courtesy of my own Humanities education, Volume Two, part two will apply ludo-Gothic BDSM far beyond Ghostbusters—instead analyzing oppositional praxis as I was taught as much by my past mentors (this book is all your fault, haha) as myself while at MMU and afterward: through modules!
Volume Two, part two will contain two Humanities-themed modules, each dedicated to a specific monster group as something that goes from undead, demonic or anthropomorphic unto perverse (and delicious) hybrids of these things we can use to “pants” capital and look good doing it (to capital, we cry at them: “Eat my shorts!” before mooning them). That being said, I originally—as in, late 2022/early 2023—wanted to articulate a process of understanding information that involved monsters, but didn’t focus on them: dreams, reflection, vision, blindness, transformation and revival. I have since decided to focus more on the monsters themselves, but some fragments of the original blueprint still remain.
There are two main modules, Undead and Demon. Similar to the Poetry Module, each divides and subdivides, focusing on a particular monster type as liminal expression: zombies; ghosts, vampires and composite bodies; summoned demons; and animal-themed entities and magics (we’ll focus on adult-themed material for these expression types, but also child education later in the primer). All work as Athena’s Aegis does—through dark, potent, and yes, paradoxical reflections towards state trauma as something to face, interrogate and transform during praxial synthesis as a modular holistic exercise that includes official academic elements, but isn’t a slave[5] to them, either! This brings us to Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (see footnote, above). This next little bit (about two paragraphs) is gonna get a little bitter and heated. So strap yourselves in! *Takes a breathe to steady herself, then removes her metaphorical earrings, jewelry and glasses and puts on her knuckle dusters*
Sorcha’s bio on MMU’s website reads: “I foster a particular love of all things rooted in the 1980s (including its music and film scores!). As a history, politics and American Studies graduate I am acutely interested in current affairs, journalism, feminism, US culture and politics, US Presidential history – and I am an Oscars fanatic.” Furthermore, “My approach is to encourage, advise and most importantly impart a love of the subjects I teach” (source). In other words, their fascination with the 1980s verges on hauntological obsession. This isn’t a criticism by itself—in fact, I sympathize, finding my own thing to care about to a similar extent in Metroidvania. Shit, I’ll even go so far as to say that Sorcha’s main problem isn’t their academic work (though “postmodern” is such a dated and vague phrase that doesn’t go hard enough in an anti-capitalist direction)!
Their problem is that they’re an asshole who wants to make a name for themselves writing about a nostalgia/place they romanticize a little too much (to that, Xavi Reyes once pulled me aside and said regarding Sorcha’s uncritical nostalgic attitudes: “The ’80s weren’t this wonderful time!” I think he was talking about being queer vs Satanic Panic and the AIDs crisis, but I don’t want to presume). But I guess the school can’t put that on her webpage: “Loves the ’80s—is an asshole.” Definitely bad optics/a poor return on their investment (a MMU researchers’ job isn’t just to do research, then, but be a face for the school and welcoming element of authority [good cop, bad cop] to play nice for the local student undergrad body and local MAs—not the international students, because once we were at the school, this meant the school had our money and could revoke our visas if they wanted; i.e., our ability to complain, for all intents and purposes, being curtailed by sobering material factors the university definitely didn’t advertise).
Before I throw down the proverbial gauntlet, though, something that needs to be said about monsters classes that overlaps with the class character and analysis of such things on different registers, from different walks of life, countries, continents, generations, etc. In a nutshell, the alien/other is an egregore and egregores are occult simulacra—i.e., the copy of the thing that never existed touching upon ghastly allegories. They act as semi-abstracted, oft-playful expressions of systemic trauma and collective persecution emerging from a collective imagination; i.e., dead bodies, scapegoats, and codified, sublimated elements/effigies of torture, general violence and policed materials, as well as subversions of evil and exploitation through the same language: doubles, or the failure of sublimation during liminal expression—i.e., thresholds and surface tension. We’ll be focusing on two basic classes of egregores
- the undead as a consequence or expression of trauma, its nightmarish return to the living world, and various feeding behaviors that serve a liminal function between the living and the dead
- the sublimation or subversion of demonic, manmade monsters and their associate knowledge, tortures and persecution tied to mad science, the occult and nature (magic and drugs)
while examining how composites walk the tightrope as potentially undead, demonic or both. Whereas composite undead are made from the harvested, abject materials of dead slaves, criminals, and outcasts, composite demons constitute the transformation of bodies—with further distinction being made towards manmade/occult demons and a nature-oriented classification to all of the above: anthropomorphism and the wearing of animal skins/adoption of animalistic shapes as criminal (re: nature-as-monstrous-feminine under a Cartesian, capitalist hegemon). There’s also the magicians, natural philosophers, summoners, detectives et al associated with these egregores’ creation, embodiment, and investigation.
Per Weber, Asprey and I, such things—contrary to academic posturing and grandstanding (don’t make me laugh, Sorcha)—cannot be monopolized by any one institution. Indeed, they have no hope of doing so, are yet another thing that won’t survive state shift, as it approaches; their little monasterial haunts will go up in smoke, like everything else. Am I accelerating the blaze by fiddling like Nero on ghost of “Rome”? Eh, I’m simply a new order of existence and academic, self-important sticks-in-the-mud like Sorcha Ní Fhlainn are just Robert Neville playing the vampire: a legend to relegate to the ignominious annals of an older history/way of doing things (see what I did there, Sorcha?). I’ll be frank: There’s no love lost between me and my checkered academic past, but I seriously doubt Ní Fhlainn—thoroughly alienated/abducted by academia and taken to their little privileged planet, high up in the bourgeoisies’ ivory tower (compared to Jung’s, or hell, mine)—gives two flying fucks what I think; she’s too busy hearing herself talk (so I am, to be fair—the difference is, I actually include and talk to other people outside the halls of power)!
More power to them, I guess; but when asked “who pissed in your Cheerios?” it’s self-serving people like her that I always think of, and who I will happily burn an effigy of when communing with my own dark gods (raised with my friends to spite academia as a whole) regarding the wholesale (and delicious) abdication their legacy. In terms of their raw arguments, you could frankly do far worse than Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, but as a person and activist outside of academia having active class character on the side of students, of workers, the proletariat (all using terms that describe what they do, not shield it like Sorcha’s “postmodernism[5a]” does)? Personally I think they kind of suck, are part of the problem in how they can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag to anyone but academics. I can’t change the past (or Ní Fhlainn, for that matter) as far as that goes; but I can transmute and give away the useful things they taught me for free (and not for $145 like your overpriced book, Ní Fhlainn—now I know you’re a comedian). Unlike them, fame was never the point for me, nor preserving the past as a particular isolated hermeneutic (another flaw in academia, I think); helping people was, by any and all means.
(source: “Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn in BBC2 Irish language documentary ‘I Lár an Aonaigh,'” 2019)
And if any of you see it as “just a catfight,” a jilted fag shouting at clouds, or some burnout who never made it, then you’ve missed the point. I’m not the one measuring dicks, here, and I clearly don’t want to be kept in power! For all Sorcha’s station as an academic, I can’t recall anything memorable about them except they couldn’t wait to be out of class, researching or talking with colleagues (oof, I still remember how they’d do that—sticks in my craw). I’m sure I could write a few nice words about some argument they said in some book they wrote, but it’s not my job to rescue them from their own unlikeable personality and air of superiority. I don’t think about them often, but when I do, I don’t like them; in fact, I find the memory of them insufferable. Can’t you tell? No point in lying about it!
Furthermore, I have plenty of academics to refer to so I’m not going to cite Ní Fhlainn on principle! Per my friend Sandy Norton’s words (someone who actually treated me like a person and not an international student to grit their teeth at): “Rather than ‘needing to invoke’ Foucault, I choose to apply Foucault because of the speculative richness such application offers” (source: “The Imperialism of Theory: A Response to J. Russell Perkin,” 1994). I’m using the same mechanism to intentionally omit Ní Fhlainn and say my own piece about vampires (while invoking Foucault, of course); i.e., because a) my arguments are rich enough on their own with the sources I already have and artwork and muses already involved, and b) I find speaking for myself far more liberating instead of suffering Sorcha speaking for me through their own gentrified texts. To be blunt, my arguments straight up don’t need Ní Fhlainn for me to talk to my friends/associates about vampires in a class-conscious way that actually helps sex workers. Fuck ’em!
A note about Sorcha Ní Fhlainn: While I don’t like them as a person, I also don’t—similar to Jeremy Parish—condone harassing them or committing violence against them (the above image from There Will Be Blood [2007] is a joke, and I’m taking their 2017-2020 ghost to task, more than the person themselves, who I don’t follow anymore; but also, I’m willing to bet I’m still talking about someone who hasn’t changed all that much since I was at MMU). I’m sure plenty of people like Sorcha and want to, I don’t know, do vampire shit together (“Super! Then you’ll have lots to talk about!”).
My takeaway point with them is, you can’t just “be an academic” to synthesize praxis; you have to have friends, and Sorcha and I are not friends. All the same, it’s equally possible for me to dislike someone as much as I do Sorcha and for both of us to carry on much as we have without getting in each other’s way. That’s the nature of synchronicity. I.e., Coleridge was established and couldn’t stand Lewis, but this a) didn’t stop Lewis from looking better in hindsight, and b) for Coleridge’s poems to outlive the sorry politics of the man, himself. Conversely I’m the outsider in this situation, throwing shade Sorcha’s way because I think they’re a dick. Is it a little petty? Maybe, maybe not. But it doesn’t change the fact that catharsis includes airing grievances when oneself and one’s enemies become objects d’art. To that, Sorcha loves the 80s’ imaginary past and I don’t, and if that means we can’t be friends, then so be it; we’re foils in argument, then. Let this animus inspire me to remind the wacky Brit that America—in spite of their gushing opinions to its dated imaginary past—is a settler colony aided by said past’s Capitalist-Realist myopia. It’s all bullshit, my dude—has always been a vehicle for Western Imperialism and genocide used to pacify the middle class and turn them into state cops/content farmers (and if you scratch a moderate/SWERF, a fascist/TERF bleeds)—so kindly pull your head out of your ass. Sláinte!
Simply put, I’m human, babes, and not above communicating my own misgivings regarding academia if it encourages you to try new things (if someone sucks, don’t sweat it; just get new friends). Don’t take that shit to your grave; let it breathe! Everyone has that one teacher in school they can’t fucking stand, but even with Sorcha, they pointed me in the right direction, and more to the point, showed me how not to treat others while at school. So… thanks, I guess?
P.S. (and a long one, at that),
Like Marx’ Eighteenth Brumaire, let’s swivel from tragedy to farce (our ghosts no less polite) while still speaking in the language of ghosts and dreams. I had a dream after writing this section, and wanted to share it, here. As I do, try to think of the Gothic like the mind—extending materially into the visible, everyday world while not being separate from oneself and the things that shape and make up said self and others past-and-present as hopelessly tangled—like writhing orgies/snake balls and music, but also orchestras and their own tone-poem hauntologies reviving different factors of a Neo-Gothic sort; e.g., Uematso’s “Dancing Mad” (1994) as something to rehash through rock-opera pastiche (e.g., The Black Mage’s “Dancing Mad,” 2003): as something to export back and forth synchronistically over space-time, in endless echo and refrain, call and response; i.e., speaking of a grand psychomachy between the player as hero with their dark half, the dancing clown wanting to destroy the world in-text and loving it (a puppet of the emperor and eventually his master and, without a support group, spiraling out of control to fatal extremes). The Gothic is writ in disintegration inherited. Sometimes, these “self-destructive” reflections are furious; others, curiously “caked-out” (the two aren’t mutually exclusive, mind you): art about people with art, back and forth. “Baby got back,” indeed! Sometimes, a particular revival is someone’s favorite.
(artist: George Roux)
It’s like Bach’s Major/minor conversions (the angel and devil duking it out, fugue-style, through his baroque organ pipes) in a musical refrain; i.e., one felt on multiple registers regarding tremendous feelings (a Gothic staple) expressing warring forces relaid, as is tradition, through rape and war, but also sex and force with an operatic “rape” castle likeness (re: Lewis and Radcliffe’s oppositional gendered perspectives): “Toccata in d minor” in quotes. Such a “feel” is something to “cop” (a modern theft and revival of Bach’s most famous piece—at least, in horror cinema) as something Castlevania took to heart based on older circuits circulating the codified angst—of our resident “mad lad,” Kefka, delighting at the torture and enslavement of Terra (making her like him, under the thrall of the elite, but in a way Terra could ultimately escape—by removing the hypnotic headdress; i.e., much like I did Jadis’ collar and my little double, Alyona, did with Bane’s to help her mother Sigourney [an echo of my mother, of which Alyona also represented both of us] escape bondage, too: me freeing myself, my mother and all the dead-and-future generations from such bullshit). Clearly there’s a divided but nevertheless present presence of trauma that conveys through pastiche as half-real; e.g., the classic Japanese neoliberal refrain—the so-called “final fantasy”—exporting to and from America: a wild 20th century hauntology of fantasy and science fiction, but also Gothic rock operas, of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure [1987] and so-called “boss battles.”
In my case, I grew up on the game, and have my own childhood trauma regarding music as traumatic besides; i.e., both a prison and place to escape inside of itself (where, per Foucault, power and resistance exist in the same space*) that I took with me to MMU, then slammed into Sorcha and the school as a challenging hurdle (to say the least).
*I.e., as an aesthetic that speaks to all manner of performances; e.g., leather daddies:
the multiplicity of power and for ambivalent interaction of resistance and oppression in Tom’s drawings. Tom’s pictures draw attention to an idea, derived from Michel Foucault, that power and resistance are to be found in one and the same place. Although ways in which these images are used may give rise to subversive meanings they also circulate racist, sexist, and fascist discourses that contradict their potentially radical meanings. Indeed, the problem with the transgressive pleasures is that transgression may help to sustain the limits that are supposed to be crossed and deconstructed by a transgressor (source: “Dressing Up in Power: Tom of Finland and Gay Male Body Politics,” 1998).
We’ll apply this to vampires ourselves, in Volume Two, part two.
In short, such stories are fractally recursive, oscillating and multiplane interactions whose plastic-poetic memories constitute ludo-Gothic BDSM unto themselves—as mnemonically epistolary and hermeneutic, but ontological as well: pertaining to memory games/parceled engagement as a complex, at-times-befuddling means of study regarding existence as riddle, as “other”: something to reinvent and re-experience preexisting trauma with in new ouroborotic forms.
When I went to MMU, then, I brought all of this with me, would trigger and express myself openly [as a closeted trans women] regarding sexuality and gender in class as something that, through performative dialogs of rape, generally came up; e.g., Rosemary and Satan’s big cock, and Dr. Lonnie Blake commenting on that, but also the girls in class talking giddily about “crowning” (of giving birth as a cross-examination of sex with big dicks/dildos) to make the male members (all two of us) a little uneasy on the other side of the table, followed by my own commentary—i.e., on my own experiences with Zeuhl and how they were teaching me outside of class that, no, you don’t need a big dick to make someone cum, but also that a big dick can represent, as we have discussed in this book, size difference (which can take on other morphological, cryptomimetic forms of Gothic fetish and cliché—Harukawa, below). These generally execute per feelings of impotency in regards to memories of trauma as partially imaginary based on survived abuse: adjacent to lived experiences of rape that, per Gothic phenomenologies, become their own things to live through, but also discuss on multiple registers during a dialogic imagination; i.e., its intratextual, intertextual, para and meta elements, etc. In the words of Robin Williams, “That’s very deep!” But it’s also the gist (the desire for reversal, to turn the tables for once)!
(artist: Namio Harukawa; source: Marijn Kruijff’s “Namio Harukawa and His Insatiable Buttocks Fetish,” 2019)
My teachers at MMU had very different reactions to me. Some loved my enthusiasm and said I wrote “like an angel” (Linnie—bless you, babe); others saw me as something of an enigma, one they lost patience with (Xavi, I think, talking about spanking with me [as a form of psychosexual play between partners] as we walked to the bus stop, but not entirely happy or visibly comfortable that I had mentioned it in class); some, like Sorcha, saw me as something control and clamp down on, per academic double standards (indicating, I would think, an element of projection on their part). The paradox was generally of power as allowing certain people—Linnie, as the person who could transgress because they were the head of the Gothic program—and others to control me as someone there to talk and not waste time; i.e., I hadn’t gone through so much planning and bullshit to be infantilized by a control freak playing vampire dress-up right in from of me while being lauded and celebrated for it by the university I had joined precisely not to be censored by! Like BDSM always is, the reality of such exchanges was different as advertised than in practice.
To that, Sorcha and I didn’t always fight, and this current dance is as much had by me of my frustrations with the whole experience as it was with them personally. But too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth, and in BDSM parlance, this translates to doms like them forcing a contract onto me I didn’t sign, thus agree to, up front (no, please don’t sit/step on me like that). How could they present it as something to market? And yet, here we are!
In other words, Sorcha didn’t excite my subby side, and my dominant side (as you can see) really doesn’t like them (or the neoliberal train wreck that is MMU’s grad exchange program). Per the Gothic dialogic, however, this isn’t a casualty of argument but merely its processing as I go from day to day in a safe space to work through my shit; i.e., all at once, and regarding multiple registers, mediums, memories and conversations. It’s simply how my mind works, but I haven’t always had the skill or know-how (or friends, proper tutelage) to voice that in ways I could teach as the master does to the pupil: as a system of thought. This is my lesson to Sorcha, from one master to another (“Only a master of evil, Darth!” Damn straight).
So after writing this I had a dream, which I relaid to Ginger as follows (indented for clarity):
I had a lovely dream with a secret twist. Charles Dance was my cello teacher. He played a cello teacher in Hillary and Jackie (1998). I think I was dreaming I was Jacqueline du Pré (the famous British cellist). I used to play cello when I was a little girl, and my teacher (an Alison Badger) taught me to sway as I did; i.e., the idea with the cello being you have to wiggle your body like a snake while sitting down. You’re basically dancing while seated. In the dream, I envisioned that I was abused by my father and Mr. Dance came into the room to scold me: “You have no rhythm to the music!” he chided, smartly (speaking in that curt little way that Charles Dance does). “What are you doing?” I looked up from my cello and said, “My father would touch me; I’m playing wildly to escape that.”
And Mr. Dance looked very sad/panicky and said (also curtly): “As you were, young man [I think I was in the closet, in the dream]” and turned to leave, to go cry in the upstairs bathroom in my grandparents’ house. And I stood, holding my cello and my bow and said to him. “No! Don’t go!” And followed in him to the hall to gaze at him imploringly, holding my cello by its neck, with its fat wooden body swiveling on its built-in stand, touching the ground at my feet. And he paused, hesitated, looked sidelong my way but not entirely at me, nodded and wordlessly spoke, then turned to collect himself in front of the bathroom mirror (rereading this, I’m suddenly thinking of D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake” [1923]: “For he seemed to me again like a king, / Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, / Now due to be crowned again,” source).
The thing is—and as I said—I used to play cello as a little girl. My teacher said I was very talented, but I had no focus and couldn’t live up to their vision of me. But I could remember playing in the dream, my technique. I ignored the notes on the page and made my own music (which “Mr. Dance” scolded me for); I had experiences in real life like that, and I grew up watching Hillary and Jackie. Jacqueline was kind of rockstar/wild slut in real life, and her sister wrote about being in her shadow in her memoirs, which got turned into a movie, etc.
It feels very validating to have my trans self revision a past (re)memory as “Jackie” (also, I once cried in front of my cello teacher—the same one, Mrs. Badger—but it was because I was sexually frustrated with a girl I was in love with. She replied, “One day you’ll be fending them off with a stick!” How prophetic, Alison).
In turn, I relayed all of these things to Ginger like Milton did: speaking from dreams to process my own shadowy thoughts, taboo desires, repressed anxieties, and buried trauma, etc, to liberate a dark, secret side of myself that I, awake but not aware, was still party to (re: Jung without the sexist psychobabble, but also not the eugenics stuff Maynard James Keenan* didn’t do a good enough job critiquing in “Forty Six & 2,” 1996). Milton didn’t know he was of the devil’s party (re: Jamal Nafi‘), but at this point I most certainly do. But all the same, there’s still surprising elements that only emerge in frames of reference whose hindsight conjures up past memories in the present; i.e., as hauntological dance partners that assume a chimeric assemblage—one of surprisingly cogent and harmonious chaos (a bit like a Gothic castle, in that respect: the dialog not of one chateau, but a warring legion of them as actual and imagined simulacra).
*Which, like a Tool song, goes on forever! Obscurantism and duration, in the absence of direct statements that actually critique capital, become mere stalling tactics/praxial inertia centered around profit and (with Tool, in particular) a form of self-idolatry and marketing of such things as products; i.e., content as “criticism” drained of critical power (which must be reclaimed by those of us who enjoy Tool [and their sick music videos] but hold them, like anyone else, accountable).
The manifestations aren’t a strict prophecy but the mind working through trauma in ways for which I am not always in control. To that, I think said dream neatly conveys my baggage brought with me to England, which I worked through back then by consuming Gothic media: as relayed in modules to me by various instructors, but also by working through theory as something to master and acquire the agency to analyze my own thoughts and experiences; i.e., Sex Positivity regarding the traumas of capital as a historical-material consequence I had—like Nick Bottom—the confused perceptions, but not the skill or academic language to artfully express As such, let me insert this block quote as an argument-within-an-argument, a framed-narrative mise-en-abyme:
The profit motive is Cartesian and fractally recursive, turning men and women into faster, more efficient machines: the hunter as the universal clientele and the prey as the monstrous-feminine, the “gold”/monstrous-feminine bounty to harvest for labor theft disguised as games. It becomes a contest of one-upmanship where both sides throw away their labor value trying to beat each other. Both lose in terms of what the elite win. It’s standard-issue Man-Box purgatory (a school of “prison sex” mentalities). There’s no end to Hell not because it is infinite but because capital’s drive for profit is. This drive turns more things into mechanical puzzles to solve, through us-versus-them, at home and abroad, inside-outside, more enemies, bosses, levels—in short anything you can count or perform the dialectic of the alien sans irony. Forever.
There’s a method to the madness, though—to voicing the ostensibly inexpressible: If I, like Kefka, could destroy the world, how might I do it without harming anyone but communicating harm? In short, how might I poetically invoke what the Gothic has classically done for fags since Sophocles, Shakespeare, Lewis, and so on to Sorcha, Uematso and I, and past versions of my possible-future self: me as the little cello-playing girl in my dream, but also as clown goddess, as “Maria and Draco” (also Uematso), of Daily Doug hearing this stuff as if (similar to me) hearing it all for the first time, again. These sequences of simulacra and commentators commentate with/on half-real voicings trapped in space-time; i.e., as a liminal, hauntological procedure—one whose various dancers enter to join in, transform, take on new shapes, then come and go again as assisted by technology to express the world as it exists: in dialectical-material crisis through an Internet-era marriage of the oral and written tradition, of the Gothic, of the rock opera; e.g., the Algorithm, right on cue, sending me Doug Helvering’s “Classical Composer Reaction/Analysis to DANCING MAD from FINAL FANTASY by Nobuo Uematso | Ep. 766” (2024).
It goes on in tangents, tangles in Russian-doll insertions part of a larger holism that shifts and morphs over space time in my own Gothic chronotopes (these volumes) speaking to smaller and larger projections of castles, of castles, of castles; i.e., as complex, warring statements to myself, my experiences, and the world as something to perceive in ways that yield good praxis: to heal from rape as power abuse. This isn’t something that can be easily taught in a commercial sense, as it takes devotion and a willingness to face, confront and humanize trauma on multiple levels regarding what capital alienates; i.e., my professors seeing me as the alien they sometimes gossiped about (a fact I learned years later, from talking with Dr. Sam Hirst; turns out I had something of a reputation on campus, one the Brits saw as foreign and prurient, thus unwelcome… which I think is them [the Brits, to varying degrees] projecting their own disparate and tangled social-sexual hang-ups [and echoes of Thatcher] onto me. No, thank you!).
Like Borges, these concentric, anisotropic, ergodic, mobile, dancing reflections go on and go into infinity. Sometimes in that hall of mirrors, standing in the shadow of powerful people (female professors or otherwise), we identify with the trauma of others in ways we don’t actively recognize, but like prey marked for/by abuse, pick up on regardless (weird attracts weird, trauma begets trauma, prey recognizes prey amid predatory sensations through calculated risk); I want to project them back onto you: to show you my Aegis as a potent system of thought that gives you the same degree of critical power mid-reflection, -negotiation, -interrogation, etc—in short, as you play with madness as a persuasive dialog to put on the mask and start dancing yourselves for all the world to see:
(exhibit 34a2a1: Artist: Yoshitaka Amano. Terra doubles Kefka—clutched in the grip of empire like the queer man is, but refusing to follow his lead. In the end, he gains the power of a god, but paradoxically would seem to let her and her friends finally put him down [a bit like Stephen King’s It—the 1990 miniseries being fresh enough in public memory that it, like Bach and Gothic media, would have influenced Japanese artists under a neoliberal hegemon]. Capital, then, doesn’t prevent such discussions; but like the owner of a venue, it does force them to exist in nuclei centered within-and-around profit [videogames, but also academic institutions]. As this postscript shows, we often confront them in reflections of reflections—of me on Sorcha through a memory of a likeness of a Japanese composer responding to Stephen King with a “bad” imitation of Bach. Lewis would approve. So would I. The ghost—like Medusa—becomes rude, magnetic, something to punch like M.R. James’ haunted bedsheets but also pull close to you and embrace like a lover.)
In other words, lovelies, we’re all just Terra—a girl in a man’s world, dancing mad—but we’re just as clown-like as Kefka the way that Terra was; i.e., the way that I was relative to her, Kefka, and Sorcha, etc, as coming together in my verse: a personal contribution to the struggles grander Song of Infinity through my confusion of the senses, magical assembly and selective absorption. It won’t change the past, anymore than I can go back in time and speak to Sorcha again (not that I want to); but time is a circle and we can face these things again when they come back around. It’s like a toilet and someone’s left you an upper decker. You gotta recognize that roiling mess in the swirling waters, then find ways to live with it until the water clears; i.e., by virtue of changing the socio-material conditions to avoid such ignominious exploitation in the future. To that, the ghost of Sorcha—the one I’m camping to Hell and back—helped, just as “Jadis” did, or “Kefka,” “Jaqueline Du Pre,” “Mr. Dance,” and so on: by valuing the 80s myopia of Capitalism Realism as something for me—the Metroidvania doctor and resident ho bag—to crack wide open and shove, yolk-like, down “Sorcha’s” gaping throat (slurp it down, now). We see and express this in likenesses of likenesses about likenesses before and after likenesses of likenesses of likenesses—in people, places and things haunted by the spirit of rape, but also spectres of Marx we can feed, free and revive to become active rebellious forces; i.e., even if those we meet and know in life don’t live up to their own Satanic-rebel potential (Sorcha, but also Cuwu, below—someone I think of far more often than MMU’s resident vampire queen); i.e., like something of something exchanged and growing into its own dark spirit, those touched by darkness speaking in/with darkness; e.g., from Sorcha to me, to Jadis to me, to me from Cuwu reflecting back on the little girl I dreamed of earlier as jamming out, Jackie-style, to Tool’s odd, at times pretentious, esoteric prophecy:
(artist: Cuwu)
See my shadow changing
Stretching up and over me
Soften this old armor
Hoping I can clear the way by
Stepping through my shadow
Coming out the other side
Step into the shadow
Forty six and two are just ahead of me (source: Genius).
Or as GLaDOS puts it, “But there’s no sense crying over every mistake! / We just keep on trying until we run out of cake!” (“Still Alive,” 2007). You can’t kill Medusa, but her avatar’s “cake” does eventually (and often) “run out” (insofar as its class character—as a means of performance actively done by the holder of the cake—doesn’t always last/goes stale and, like Marx‘ ghost, must be camped again/made gay anew when gunning for the cake of capital: as something to reclaim from Marie Antoinette and her ilk).
(artist: Cuwu)
To that, I might—as the necromancer does—conjure up Cuwu’s formidable rump/punani to voice my concerns with, but I’m not hiding behind the skirts of little girls, here (I’m in the book plenty enough, as is); to that, this is my voice, Sorcha, and I think you’re a big enough girl that you can handle a little imaginary vendetta/personal argument about you more than directed at you (this isn’t mailed to your doorstep [not that I know where you live] attached to a flaming bag of dogshit, for example). I’m the homewrecker alien reclaiming my sense of agency by critiquing your position defending “home” from valid (and Communist) critiques of capital’s usual nostalgic veils: “Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child you have stolen, for my will is as strong as yours and my kingdom as great. You have no power over me!”
I was the girl-in-secret ironically (as trans existence [for me] is: a heroine waiting to wake up) and you were “David Bowie” (no codpiece, of course) unironically hogging the stage (not calling you a TERF, but… I still have the shoe if you wanna try it on, Cinderella); yet also the other way around: I the goblin queen and you the sanctimonious white Irish girl (doubled by Connelly’s Irish-American roots) as something to colonize me and my Hellish voice/expertise (even then, my 80s American know-how revealed yours; i.e., you were foreign to my shores, my home—always on the outside, looking in). Are you living rent-free in my head, or like Pat Benatar’s wonderfully slutty crooning in “Prisoner of Love” (1980), something to escape and dunk on, in this one-girl show? It’s not like they could be arsed back then to actually treat me like a person, try as a I might to relay that through a bad, medieval-hand-puppet-style imitation of their own 80s craze (which I equally embody and enjoy as something to one-up them on—”I’m your huckleberry, Johnny Ringo!”):
Cold hard labor, it’s a labor of love
Convicted of crimes, the crimes of passion
Caught in a chain gang, the chain of fools
Solitary confinement, confined by the rules
[…]
Find an escape, a key to the door
I gotta get out, can’t take anymore
Make a clean break, to bury the past
I’ll shed these chains and be free at last (source: Genius).
All spells end (or go into new ones); no wizard can hold the witch in enthrall forever. So from one ’80s girl-wizard to another—from Elphaba to Glinda (you’re totally Glinda: playing “nice” but being the bitch): I think some part of you will get that, thus not want to gag me and my truth during these fireworks (“It takes a wizard to beat a wizard”; i.e., like Luke, a younger Jedi said to an older one: “There is still good in you, I feel it!”). And if you do not listen—want to say it’s “all in my head,” the girl boss gaslighting my truth—then, frankly, I don’t give a damn. “Crom laughs at your Four Winds!” (another reference, and one more for the road: “Choke on it”)! You ain’t got a monopoly on these devices (or their critical power/usage), biznatch!
(exhibit 34a2a2: Dark indulgence is dualistic, dialectical-material, historical-material, recursive, ergodic, castle-narrative, rock opera, Destroyer and maiden: exchanging power as a paradox to perform during class and culture war between likenesses of those who wrong and inspire us however wicked they are, with or without irony. It worked that way for Jadis and I, for Jareth and Sarah, for Maria and Draco—back around to a dragon queen I never cared for but must confess some likeness can be found in hindsight. I’ve tried to undress that scandal in public as gingerly and ace as I can—while still making an object lesson about ludo-Gothic BDSM as inspired partially by Sorcha whether she meant to or not: trauma and confrontation pressed together like panties and pussy, peanut butter and jelly, like theatre and metal as a dialog of doubles doubled by a given performer busking and looking good [e.g., Nacoco Music channeling Gothic fury through kawaii and kowai riffing on the usual endless import/export gradients of exchange—of rock ‘n roll, culture, and value—below].
[source: “X JAPAN[6b] – KURENAI (Twin Guitar Cover),” 2024]
Context matters, and performance always has context. Instead of punching Medusa, we can respond by putting her in quotes; i.e., like a vampiric whore working for the academia pimp, whose agent appears like magic at our doorstep. Their naughty bondage gear concealed by a black trench coat, “death” comes knocking wearing the same costumes and props, extending its hand as if to ask, “May I have this dance?” And I, ever the maiden and the slut, consenting for a moment of folie-a-deux: strutting and fretting an hour on the stage with a walking shadow’s walking shadow. “Do what it takes to step through!” “Don’t fear the reaper!” “Can I play with madness?” all messy assemblages of such refrains; all felt on the charged, dark surface of such royalty and their subjects—i.e., swapping power as people do in ways Foucault [ever the deviant] dreamed up inside and outside the bedroom. I’m taking it back and airing it proudly in public to “better the instruction” not for my own aborted, in-tatters academic pedigree, but for the workers of the world! Get it all out there as something to see, tearing down myopia, reputation and paywall alike.)
Well, that felt good to say! Enough about Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, though (I feel a bit like those guys from Kung Pow! [2002]: hilariously beating up on the obviously-a-mannequin double of the hero)! I think it’s all out of my system (the outing of my abuser my choice in this case and one gladly partook of, cackling as I do: “[Her] flesh blown to smithereens and grilled well done! Now [she’s] the queen of the devils!”) and I have, curiously enough, not been struct down by lightning (“Oh, look! I slapped a king! Did my hand fall from my wrist!” Cunt-punting Radcliffe was one thing but it feels so much better with a living icon having abused me that I can rip a new one. “Hurt, not harm,” haha)! Bitch is deader than Julius Caesar (or some-such catchphrase). So let’s carry on to frying bigger fish, then—by considering the application of such poetics’ power/trauma yourselves, and outline the different types of trauma (and power) at play before devoting the rest of the subchapter to holistic analysis regarding all of these separate things.
First, the Gothic isn’t owned by some fancy school (or professor); it’s yours, so do with it as you please to improve your lives (regardless of stature or origins, any bitch can be bad/the Destroyer onstage: Nacoco Music straight up owning “Painkiller” [1990] in a slutty outfit and Japanese theatre mask)! Print your own, and steal everything poetically that you can; i.e., because nothing under Communism is owned; e.g., like echoes of Seventh Heaven (of Cloud, Tifa and Barrett as our childhood friends) to evoke a nostalgia less fatal and more rebellious borrowed from old parts. Don’t wait for some authority figure to tell you to create, to revive, to rebel, to “Avalanche”: our “fake news,” just in—”‘Midgar’ will be free, is free in our hearts and minds!” No amnesty! No quarter asked (or given)!
(exhibit 34a2a2b: source, left: Seabass_Fiction’s “Thick as a Brick – Jethro Tull (Final Fantasy 7 soundfont),” 2024; right: Burning Realm’s “‘Face The Fire’ – EP 2024” showcasing this deathly senescence, debridement and magical assembly from places magical, real and in-between: from Midgard to Dublin. Haunt capital’s castle-narrative with your own! Make the world in your image during ludo-Gothic BDSM! Raise hell when synthesizing praxis, mid-catharsis!)
Originality and efficacy is as much about combination as it is raw materials (re: Sagan’s “apple pie from scratch”). During oppositional praxis, monsters can be bourgeois or proletarian; e.g., the state as undead versus workers as undead. Regardless of which, monsters under Gothic Communism denote a liminal presence or expression of state trauma; they serve as semi-abstracted, “placeholder” memories thereof, tied to specific, tell-tale metaphors about the state and its fearful, unspoken violence against workers, which it links to the legendary undead, supernatural and animal-fantastic offspring of various human minds. During Capitalist Realism, the mind can become “stuck,” myopically unable to imagine anything beyond the ghost of the counterfeit—the abject slum of a cartoonishly evil Hell for scared-fascinated white people to rock out to and parody back and forth; e.g., Slayer’s cartoonishly reprobate (and conservatively vile) variant, provided for 1980s consumers to peer into and wonder about (and make fun of: Moonic Productions’ “How to Make a BURGER, but It’s SLAYER,” 2023).
(artist: Larry W. Carroll)
“Creating my structure, now I shall reign in blood!” In short, nothing is done within this myopia to imagine a world beyond evil as binarized within colonial norms (such outmoded ideas are concerned with dark worship as something to unironically revel in, rather than as a legitimate activist force critical of capital through the Gothic mode; contrary to what others might tell you, “fun” isn’t mutually exclusive to political activism and critical thought). As such, Milton’s famous expression, “The mind is its own place,” concerns us far less than the iconoclastic egregore’s subversive commentaries on canonical socio-material conditions—as a kind of oft-angry or traumatized pedagogy of the oppressed: the monstrous voices of the unheard speaking out against abuse from beyond the grave or from some other dimension, the wild, etc.
From a dialectical-material standpoint, each monster class exists within a complicated, serialized[6] threshold, one whose various liminal expressions include traditional signifiers of power—i.e., the Numinous according to a king or queen monster followed by progressively “lesser” ranks, like princesses, lieutenants, minions, etc (which codify in ludo-Gothic terms during videogames as neoliberal, monomythic, Cartesian copaganda)—during BDSM activities where power is something to express, exchange and argument about.
Regardless of the potency or divinity of the egregore as an unequal distribution of power/trauma, each conveys a type of power/trauma that sets them apart is being either undead or demonic in the modular sense:
- Zombies (and more importantly their trauma) are targets of power abuse inside the state of exception, expanded by the state towards a select group by a select group (e.g., “zombie” citizens attacked by death squads, wherein the exchange dehumanizes both as givers and receivers of state force).
- Ghosts are either past, mighty conquerors or their victims, presenting as chronotopic markers of trauma and hauntological memories of closure and revenge (e.g., the ghost of the tyrannical king vs the ghost of the angry female victim and her hysteria).
- Composites are manmade “offspring” built to serve and be punished.
- Vampires and supernatural, occult demons are practitioners of abuse, addiction and torture, but also queer ecstasy and rapture (with demons being the infamous keepers and givers of forbidden, Promethean knowledge)
- And anthromorphs are ways of life different from the status quo, existing outside of civilization among nature (often through queer magics and drug use) as come home to roost.
Of course, liminal expression complicates these divisions during oppositional praxis, but the state will always push for legitimate violence, terror and morphological expression (separate and together) against an abject enemy within a colonial, heteronormative binary—i.e., that educates bad play through moral panic and rape culture as endemic to Capitalism.
As for the outwardly human classes that summon/face the monster from persecuted/privileged positions, their existence—whether for or against the state (their class character)—inevitably becomes threatened by the confrontation. Either the persecutor is actually deceiving themselves—is revealed to be an imposter or a victim (re: Autumn Ivy, Parish or Ní Fhlainn)—or the witch, magician, or natural philosopher aligns with the monster as an Indigenous class, marking both as recipients for further colonial violence.
During oppositional praxis, the deliberate humanization of monsters threatens the status quo, whose systemic violence against demonized parties will ramp up canonical propaganda to silence dissidents with. Reshaping the Gothic imagination can challenge these reprisals by redirecting state force in ways they cannot control, only cultivate—i.e., how monsters are viewed inside the Superstructure as continuously reshaped by liminal expression being a chaotic, impossible-to-control force. We don’t want them to control us during oppositional praxis because doing so will recuperate our struggles, defanging our means to express trauma thus prevent us from affecting material conditions for workers’ benefits.
(exhibit 34a2: Artist, top: Michelangelo; right: Lera PI; bottom-left, source: Shimoneta. Monsters—especially female monsters—are things the status quo “forbids” from viewing in daily life, yet conversely demands that people not only look at, but pay for the privilege. Capitalism privatizes this scheme, treating female/monstrous-feminine bodies as shameful, “forbidden fruit” that can simultaneously destroy the onlooker if they openly indulge or consume too much in private.)
For our purposes, Capitalism is a living system of undead-demonic symbolic exchange, one where labor is made into commodities—into labor, into commodities—for profit harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine, as alien. Subverting profit through degrowth requires worker solidarity during oppositional exchange; i.e., artists working in solidarity against the state during labor exchanges that synthesize Gothic Communism inside the linguo-material world. Challenging canonical symbols and their privatized forms of exchange challenges vertical power structures upheld by these markers of power and trauma in contested, monstrous language. We fags and sluts gotta kill the darlings of capital playing at rebels (re: Ní Fhlainn).
I want to devote the remainder of this section (eleven pages) to considering the medieval, dialectical-material and modular nature of monsters/the alien as a holistic unit; i.e., in regards to Gothic Communism as a recent proposition (mine) combined by me, and one that frankly has a long road ahead of it.
That is, it’s an uphill battle with the sun in our eyes. And if things devolve into farce while two space bitches shout at each other from vast chasms of space-time (and conflicting points of view), it will be entertaining or at least something to watch. Except, my critical salvos aren’t something to advertise a given approach by virtue of words alone, but a dialogic argument felt and seen as action performed about/with monsters; i.e., whose subsequent calling out of the current paradigm favors a new school of thought versus one that has gone on for decades and doesn’t historically yield much by virtue of its class and hermeneutic limitations (e.g., won’t be that useful, in Ní Fhlainn’s case, if one isn’t a university professor or movie aficionado). You can’t propose something new without having something old to transform, to invade, to convert. Bad-faith or not, such a cake can still be full of shit (“the cake is a lie”); the person who unironically cries, “There go the goddamn brownies!” when you make your own recipe is a cunt, ipso facto: defending the institutions that routinely enslave workers while puffing themselves up as “intellectuals” (full of hot air). As Molly Grue would respond, “Off with ya!”
To this, a poison cake is still poison regardless if you’re the little bride and groom on top, or one of the smaller-to-larger columns all the way down—is still in defense of the same out-of-touch weirdos a lackey comforts with hand puppets, hugs, or some such homosocial displays; i.e., the flying monkey to someone Capitalism has made alien to everyone else on Earth. Even if you don’t own a factory like Mr. Burns does, you’re still a cunt if you’re holding the puppet or (as the floor worker) otherwise remain unable to say a single word of criticism because you’re too scared, stupid and/or proud (with Smithers being the dutiful fag serving the factory-owning overlord as a queernormative Judas); i.e., to the Wizard of Oz having made you their little bitch. So find your own brains, heart and noive, you callow fucks (to whom it may concern)! Don’t wait for some fancy dickwad to hand it out as a reach-around consolation prize after they (or their boss) bends you over and fucks you!
Furthermore, it really doesn’t have to be a tried-and-true Leftist saying these things—e.g., not just my gay ass but Renegade Cut saying “Conservatives get into government, dismantle programs, and then use the now-dismantled programs to prove they don’t work! It’s a con!” (“Frank Grimes—the Cult of Work,” 2021)—but strange bedfellows who, possessing a higher degree of education but also self-interest, suddenly turn on billionaires; e.g., Thunderf00t—a smug pretentious knob towards queer folk in the past (donoteat01’s “Elon Musk’s ‘Loop’ – It’s Bad, Folks,” 2019; timestamp: 2:21)—finding out years later after getting his PhD, that Musk is the cunt who will sell people “like them” (white, American-adjacent [Thunderf00t is British] and straight) down the river to bail out his own shitty business practices. This isn’t a trick; it’s the Wizard of Oz’ modus operandi under Capitalism (the wizard being endemic to the Emerald City and Oz at large).
It’s awfully rich to see weird canonical nerds like Thunderf00t hypocritically change their tune, forgetting that their own misogynistic baggage poisons the well. All the same, watching a former useful idiot (and insufferably smug twat) like Thunderf00t calling Musk out for his usual bullshit—including having an alt age-regression account on Twitter (“Elon Musk: 3 years to Bankruptcy,” 2024)—is fun to watch. Took you long enough to pull your head out of your ass, my dude! Maybe find another billionaire or Nazi to punch? Take a look at yourself and your old New Atheist friends (supposedly Richard Dawkins is calling himself a “cultural Christian[7]” now)? In other words, I don’t fucking trust you and with good reason, you goon! PhD or not, you’re still a cunt!
No one’s extreme from criticism—no one is safe from my biting Medusa’s tongue—if they fuck with liberation, with sex worker rights, with the world as something we’re supposed to be the stewards of. I don’t care if it’s a tenured university professor from my alma mater or a fellow peer in my raison-d’être, or your usual white, straight STEM nerd content farming a billionaire on YouTube. In other words, it’s the old “I can excuse racism” meme from Community (2009):
Memes exist for multiple reasons; so do sex work, monsters, Athena’s Aegis. For us, it’s to liberate sex workers through iconoclastic art (with Capitalism alienating and sexualizing everything for profit as a genocidal structure).
As always, our focus is sex work. Gothic Communism seeks to understand how Capitalism sexualizes all workers to some degree through canonical monsters, subverting coerced notions of necrophilia, vampiric lust, demonic hedonism and outright bestiality by transforming them into sex-positive forms of erotic art (which concern, not reenact the fucking of corpses, drinking of blood, metaphysical demons, or animals). The elite use monsters to alienate workers from their labor and themselves—their bodies and sexual expression, but also their trauma (which often has a sexual flavor). This impacts workers’ present and future ability to see the past as a liberatory device, which must be regained—i.e., lost ways of seeing what the monsters even are: something to look at in regard to trauma and catharsis, but also respond to with future copies that have a more sex-positive idea in mind.
To make consecutive iterations increasingly friendly to workers requires engaging with the past as depicted through relatable, everyday means: through what is commonly consumed and enjoyed by people as a whole (not just movies, Ní Fhlainn). The Gothic, in this regard, amounts to delicious “pulp” that presents language as it naturally exists: undivided and raw, full of frustratingly technological contradictions and passions that communicate the whole, often by playing with the concepts in various oscillating and profoundly transformative ways (which monsters are prone to invite).
It helps, then, to view egregores not as people who once lived, but what the now-deceased have left behind as potentially never having been alive but could be in the future (Communism). As a hauntological phenomenon, the author’s language/argumentation becomes separated from them at death—can be exhumed and exhibited after-the-fact, but nevertheless communicates things expressed individually as part of a larger interaction: the funerary markers and chronotopic symbols “waking up” for a stroll. In doing so, they intimate something beyond what they can fully express, but whose dialectical-material engagement is a deeper context generally not obvious at first glance.
Cryptomimesis generally causes the immediate visual resemblance to persist, demanding instructional exhibits across generations to differentiate simulacra as for or against the status quo. By identifying these larger, intersecting forces during remediated praxis, violent mistakes that happen through unguided communion with the dead—e.g., Hamlet and his “father’s” ghost leading to him annihilating his entire family, incel-style—can be avoided; this includes demonic persecution and witch hunts fostered by people having the platforms but not the panache to speak accessibly and intersectionally through a pedagogy of the oppressed.
Egregores are ontologically imprecise language that must nevertheless be spoken to, albeit in ways that avoid worker exploitation and genocide; i.e., by identifying hidden traumas that monsters (and their curators, interlocutors) imperfectly represent, versus furthering their associate colonial, heteronormative violence through gentrification (deliberate or not): a sick society and home (the unheimlich) that sees some of their number as monstrous in ways that merit their execution—monsters vs monsters amid oscillating internal-external tensions; e.g., the outsider expressed on the surface of an insider—a foreign plot coming from within during a liminal hauntology of war. Correct-incorrect, inside/outside, etc. The home and its occupants as undead, demonic, and/or animalistic (of nature) all come into play during oppositional praxis.
Development isn’t a zero-sum game with one clear path to emancipation. To this, I want to take my privileged, but hard-fought, formal education (exhibit 34b) and throw Communism into a sexier light—one that a wider audience of marginalized writers, artists and sex workers can use to liberate themselves in different ways without relying on people who aren’t up to the task or equipped for it (re: Paris, Ní Fhlainn, Thunderf00t, etc). I specifically want to introduce them to a secular-humanist style—one that takes colloquial things generally discouraged in modern academic writing (contractions, puns, slang and figures of speech, but also erotic art, social-sexual anecdotes, videogames, play-on-words and figures of speech) and combines them in ways that regular everyday people actually learn from; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM and ergodic castle-narrative: by consuming them through the Gothic mode, thus absorbing what it has to offer in whatever arrangements work best.
Doing so abjures conventional academic wisdom in favor of older, less-divided forms revived in a new practice that liberates the Wisdom of the Ancients. To this, I wrote the Monster Modules according to four areas of study present within my own body of work: the Gothic, Marxism, queer studies and ludology—i.e., the Hermeneutic Gothic-Communist Quadfecta. Applied to sex work using our aforementioned Six Rs and Four Gs, the primer cares less about addressing an academic knowledge gap in these fields (or dutifully keeping them separate); instead, it wants to inform a worldly audience of ways they can liberate sex workers through iconoclastic, Gothic-Communist art they themselves can make (without a PhD). The problems of study lie in their privatization and division. Generally hoarded by academics behind neoliberal paywalls (whose elusive, academic books are pricey and often out-of-print), the gnosis of Gothic academia has become frustratingly hidden away. The same division applies to game theory, which academia segregates from the Gothic while keeping both under lock and key (something I tried to undo with my own master’s thesis and which Sex Positivity continues that restorative trend).
Moving forward, I propose a humanist, monstrous-feminine jailbreak: the deliberate freeing and recombining of eclectic schools of thought to help non-accommodated workers respond to the organic, oscillating complexities of the natural-material world. Such was the way of older “Renaissance men,” whose once-ventured betterment of the planet was achieved by combining a variety of disciplines together when expressing themselves (recuperated by Cartesian chudwads, of course). Our approach is modular for the same reason, albeit adjusted for the revival of queer thought in the Internet Age. Like a game with many different moving parts and few clearly defined rules, there’s many different things to recognize from the remediated, transplanted trauma, and we’ll only have time to brush up against ideas that could easily fill up whole volumes on their own. Far from being a distraction, the chaos of this inclusive holism is precisely the point, seeking to acclimate users to an undivided approach to critical, dialectical-material analysis; i.e., one that recuses the alien from Cartesian-dualist predation.
Despite the veneer of order, life—even life under Communism—will be chaotic. Heteronormativity is already a coerced myth, little more than sanctioned violence structured historically around patrilineal descent, nepotism, and genocidal bias that one passes down from father to son (or token slave to token slave); and two, exploits all workers sexually by pushing sex workers, queer people and other marginalized groups into the margins, where it treats them like sexually deviant monsters for TERFs to curb stomp (or look the other way when that happens).
Something we shall see much of in this volume is that monsters are incredibly queer. Iconoclastic ones merely try to subvert the punishment that queer people normally receive for being themselves, often satirizing canonical norms in the process (whose overtly comedic methods we’ll look at more in Volume Three; i.e., parody and pastiche as part of liminal expression during oppositional praxis). Canonically queer existence is allowed, but only at the margins or under service to the elite (re: Smithers). As Ní Fhlainn shows us, enforced division/gentrification is entirely harmful, but also incredibly unproductive and dated when learning how to study the world through monsters in the Internet Age; there is generally more than one thing happening at once, especially within expressions of the human condition as diverse and liminal as class and culture struggle (war) Gothicized. There’s room for tragedy and farce among all the dead generations, but also comedic reflection, intense catharsis and genuine self-expression—i.e., a finding of one’s true voice during the transformative chaos.
And with that, I’ve taken an old superior and inspiration to task in the same breath! “The lesson endeth!”
(exhibit 34b1: Model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl, in Manchester, 2018. Going to EMU was difficult—a four-hour commute and awful graduation scheme where the damn school tried to milk me for more money despite the English department telling me I had enough credits to graduate.
However, going to MMU for my master’s was a formidable quest all by itself. Before it even started, there were miles of red tape [source: Persephone van der Waard’s Quora answer to “How easy is it to get into Manchester Metropolitan University?” 2019]. But after traveling overseas, I—a Michigan “yank” in King Arthur’s proverbial court—found myself in a silly place where not only did no one use MLA; but articles were paywalled, took weeks to arrive, and had a short half-life! The best way to collect resources was to go to the library or talk with professors. However, most books only had one copy and these would often be checked out for an indeterminate period of time. As for the professors, trying to pin them down was like trying to corner a ghost—they’d pass right through me, glide away across the floor and disappear through the nearest wall to god-knows-where!)
Gothic Communism pointedly views the exploration of the Gothic past as a perpetual, modular dialogue. Happening between imaginations across space and time, it invokes a dialogic imagination where language and study are anything but discrete; they are liminal, with bourgeois and proletarian forms that engage back and forth in opposition. As we conduct our own investigation into the half-real, imaginary past, we’ll likewise oscillate between fields of study and monster types, generally in relation to one another. In doing so, I want you to consider how monstrous creativity can become your superpower in the present—one able to transform the world over time when utilized collectively by emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers united in solidarity against the state and its usual benefactors (white cis-het men and token professors). This can be incredibly empowering for people the state commonly targets, including those with disabilities, or any worker considered “disabled” or less valuable by the status quo while fighting for equality under it: any of these monsters as “made up,” invented and worn in ways that make workers feel self-empowered by using what we have in whatever way is successful, in creative-praxial terms.
For real-life examples of this, consider Beethoven, who was stone-deaf well before he wrote the Ninth, admittedly a bit of an asshole (artist: Kate Beaton) yet also a mere commoner whose most-famous symphony preached universal joy and brotherhood for all humankind[8]; Emily Brontë, forced to adopt a male penname—Ellis Bell—in order to publish Wuthering Heights (1847); or Christy Brown, an Irish writer and painter whose cerebral palsy limited the use of his body to his left foot. For a more recent example, though, look to Moonic Productions—a modern-day polymath whose birth defect, a deformed left hand, left them ostracized by other children growing up. As a teenager, they turned to creative activities, only to realize, in their own words, that “creativity was their superpower” (“My Left Hand,” 2021).
As we move into Volume Two, part two and these different monster personas (and their trauma) are explored per module and throughout Volume Three, I’ll also be applying my own experiences, education and trauma to Fischer’s idea of “Capitalist Realism”: as a creative means of articulating worker emancipation through a reclaimed Gothic imagination, one whose monstrous “rememory” is informed by personal traumas, but also spectres of Marx and oppressed pedagogies that challenge official history in incredibly subversive, exposed, and sometimes-terrifying language. The point isn’t to shock, but challenge and overthrow the historical-material myopia of Capitalist Realism: as the ultimate darkness of a self-imposed ignorance informed by the socio-material world; i.e, to change the material conditions of a bourgeois Base by recultivating the Superstructure through our creative successes and survival stories (re: camping the canon, and the canonizers).
In turn, subversion must happen through the oppressed telling their own stories through reclaimed monstrous language[9] as a humanizing tool, one that grants us the necessary room need to play with our bodies, sexual orientations, and gender identities/performances as separate, flexible categories liberated by the usual police agents and reactionary-to-moderate cops, sell-outs, rogues. Only in this way can we transform the state, the world, and ourselves, bringing workers closer and closer to a natural-material position of equality—a post-scarcity world where things like neoliberalism, fascism, Patriarchy and heteronormativity (and their monstrous, dehumanizing canon) are things of the past.
If capital’s historical materialism creates a gaping imaginary void—one whose myopic darkness and evil are extended into the future as forever decayed and undead—then Proletarian praxis subverts the graveyard by playing with the dead. Doing so is pioneered in smaller pieces and steps by visionary artists who die well before their work can be completed (knock on wood); regardless, the rediscovery of people like Ann Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis postmortem yields future, invented “archaeologies” that help the working public regain their imaginary powers by engaging with the dead of the past as darlings to kill. This constitutional ability—to imagine Utopia beyond Capitalism and its vast, neoliberal illusions—maximizes Jameson’s elaborate strategy of misdirection into a sex-positive, Gothic labor movement he’d ironically want nothing to do with (which we’ll focus on at the end of the primer once we’ve covered the central monster types).
The continued aim, here, is acquiring the Wisdom of the Ancients: to relearn from the past differently than before, transmuting the self-destructive, brain-rotting lessons of yesterday (that Jordan Peterson simultaneously drools over and cries like a baby about—a literal Baby Boomer and accommodated intellectual scared to death of cis-het women, let alone Gay Communists) in favor of a better world than has ever existed; i.e., one that we, as workers, can self-determine/-fashion by playing god in iconoclastic ways: the forgotten poetics of the so-called “dark gods” as a pedagogy of the oppressed, a xenophilic rememory or beautiful lie that presents us as splendidly non-heteronormative. To quote Seneca again, “I’m still learning”; when it comes to death, decay and power—as things to express, satirize and feel curious about, aren’t we all?
(exhibit 34b2a: Model and artist: Ashley Yelhsa as a death fairy surrounded by mushrooms, by Persephone van der Waard; design inspired by Xinaelle [mid-upper-left]. Death is often expressed with a “black” aesthetic, but also various decomposers from different kingdoms. Common ones include insects from the animal kingdom like the wasp, butterfly or scarab, but arguably one of the most famous [and innocent-looking] are mushrooms from the fungi kingdom [which gives the Mushroom Kingdom from Mario something of a pun-like quality—drugs, sex and the Numinous]. It’s also an apt metaphor for yet-another-ingredient to go into the pot that is our book:
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble [source: “Song of the Witches, from Macbeth].
Keeping with the nature theme, then, fairies are a class of monster that associate with the natural world as spellbinding and deathly. For one, the seats of a fairy circle—those where they’d host their supposed gatherings—were exclusively mushrooms [though not to my knowledge poisonous ones]. Furthermore, as we’ve established with A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Volume One, exhibit 8a/b, the potions of fairies were synonymous with sleep and hedonism; i.e., an ability to transport the consumer to hellish, dynastic spaces of forbidden desire and godly power. Many mushrooms are incredibly toxic to humans, and virtually all of them involve decay in some shape or form [several more famous species also prey on insects; e.g., the cordyceps fungus, which we’ll examine in Volume Two, part two, exhibit 35b]. However, some species of mushroom are hallucinogenic, leading to profound visions when consumed; i.e., visitations of otherworldly sensations upon the viewer having ingesting them—fairy visitors and boons of vitality [e.g., the fairy hearts from Zelda but also whatever else Link could collect in his four glass jars].
It can be rather tricky to say exactly what mushrooms signify at a glance, or the female/monstrous-feminine bodies often associated with them, but combining a fairy with a BDSM aesthetic, villainous color wheel [green and purple] and regal persona lends it a Numinous appearance—powerful, drug-like and fearsome/deathly according to an order of monsters tied to the natural world, but also mushrooms as fearsome in different ways. A queen does what she wants and gets what she wants—an idea alienated by the current order of things as hellish, alien and fetishized; i.e., the monstrous-feminine as simultaneously crowned and chattelized by capital. As discussed in Volume One’s synthesis symposium, Cartesian dualism requires such “coronations” to present nature as weak and strong while harvesting it. Anything outside of the status quo, then, is commercialized inside of it as a highly specific [and seductive] power fantasy whose Western forgeries remain haunted by the ghost of the counterfeit, mid-abjection. Such hauntings, per Capitalist Realism, become synonymous with the end of the world, thus demanding these queens—similar to historical female monarchs—either be yoked by patriarchal forces into fruit to slice up or girl-bossed by them into “think positive” slogans; e.g., “Yass, Queen!” To this, death as regressively symbolized by dark queens [of modern-day fantasy realms] remain something to be curious about and, more to the point, something to learn from and transmute. If you’re genuinely nice to a given “castle,” she’s more likely to open her “doors” and let you inside without anyone getting hurt. A win-win!
As someone who’s been there, trust me, babes: You can learn more from them than your entire time at academia with the queens you find there [through said persons often, like Gandalf, can at least hand you the right books to explore].)
(artist: Ashley Yelhsa)
Onto “Facing Death: What I Learned Mastering Metroidvania, thus the Abject 90s (feat. Kirby, Marilyn Manson and Maynard James Keenan)“!
Footnotes
[1] Likewise, the forces you’re working with can often overstay their welcome; i.e., to be on a roll, but like Sisyphus. During my hypomania for this module, I experienced some familiar but unwelcome disorientation: “Everything sticks to me, my distraction overwhelming. It’s my rambling moment from Dead Poets Society that I always thought was fake. But here I am, doing it. Yet it does me no good if I can’t control it.” Indeed, the whole point of the Numinous is that it can’t be controlled; i.e., Shelley’s fire of the gods. I’m less inclined to essentialize myths and more inclined to think that said fire resists control according to hypermassive forces that, when pressured, apply unequal pressure back onto dissident/subversive elements. It’s destiny through canonical essentialization as a Promethean means of prolonged torture that maintains the status quo—something we have to smile (as Camus says) and take in stride; i.e., including stumbles and pratfalls when camping canon ourselves.
To this, balance is more about application in terms of timing and schedules: to know when to quit, to sleep it off and when to rest and achieve placid tranquility (so not everything I touch, like Midas, turns into words). Instead, we seek release as a means of letting out what builds up inside to overwhelm us. This can mean a great many things, often several at once; e.g., love’s “sweet sting” being of a pleasantly sore pussy after sex, or just as likely the Viking analog coming down after “sex” (rape), drunk on blood, actual drugs, Paganistic bliss, and war frenzy to observe his bloody work. It’s anisotropic in terms of the fact that the flow of power—while playing and performing with monsters, rape and war as combined—can go in either direction, praxially.
As such, ludo-Gothic BDSM is a potent means of interrogating trauma by which to heal one’s home as sick with Capitalism. For me and my voyeurism, for instance, I love to observe the sexual gratification of others; i.e., mutually consensual voyeurism agreed between me and the people letting me watch them. I love being put in that headspace, that altered state of mind: someone else’s shoes; i.e., one where that person feels good. It feels good to occupy a role attached to a real person feeling good in ways that I want to feel, too. I think that speaks to what my book is really about. Healing through social-sexual exchanges like these, but also slipping into different roles to face difficult traumas; i.e., the “rougher stuff” as something to take off the shelf only when absolutely required—to heal tremendously through a dedicated service (for an example of one, refer to exhibit 39a2 in “Transforming Our Zombie Selves,” when Volume Two, part two goes live). As we’ll see with Jadis, there’s certainly no shame in “getting got” with a seasoned pro used to preying on smaller vulnerable people—especially when they catch their flies with honey. It becomes something to recognize, accept and heal from: that we’re not just mortal, but able to fall for/victim to seductive agents who know our ins and outs (our trauma markers) better than we do.
[1a] “But what does it mean?” I asked Xavi Reyes in grad school, to which they replied, “Ah, if you can tell me that, you get a gold star!” Sassy bitch!
[2] My attempts to branch out originally being through YouTube (my account: @PersephonevanderWaard) as a place to make videos about Metroidvania—a practice I largely performed out of grad school alongside my old blog (which I still use), before switching over to erotic art and writing part-time, before devoting myself to my books and illustrations as one-in-the-same with me the author and largely abandoning YouTube due to repeating censorship issues. Still, the history remains, and I’m proud of that work I did, too; it all went towards my current understanding of things through Sex Positivity as a whole:
[2a] The boy-gets-girl formula is as old as the monomyth, but translates from D&D into videogames via the usual imperial language of sex and force—from Donkey Kong (where the hero, Jump Man, is actually the villain) to Jump King (2019), where it (and content [not criticism] about it; e.g., Karl Jobst’s “Jump King’s Biggest Barrier Was Finally Broken!” 2024) is suitably less ironic or critical of the media circuit it contributes towards. Instead, the developers (and speedrunning symbiosis) bank on the sexist headspace of Earthworm Jim (1994) or Dragon’s Lair (1983) to valorize male action; i.e., to conquer Hell as a place to enter then oust false dark kings or monstrous-feminine beings to restore balance to the “natural order” of things: by alienating and fetishizing nature as something to conquer by virtue of traditional male action (force) under Cartesian thought. It’s unironically something that wins the princess as a prize (who apparently is just lying in wait, dressed up like a bimbo* waiting to be taken back to the hero’s bed to be “lanced”).
*There’s nothing wrong with slutty outfits; there’s everything wrong when female/GNC agency is removed to choose outfits that cater to the Male Gaze (as classically white, cis-het) to serve profit like usual (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Borrowed Robes: The Role of ‘Chosen’ Clothing — Part 1: Female Videogame Characters,” 2019). This does nothing at a systemic level but engender class dormancy and betrayal from the usual breeding grounds for fascism: the middle class, but especially the male middle class as having bought into the quest for mastery as literally “the quickest, straight-line path to sex by reducing nature to trad-wife slut (the virgin and the whore) and biologically essential/female.” It’s so gross!
(artist: Timbo the Champ)
In-game, Jump King literally calls said prize “Smoking Hot Babe”—ostensibly no different than Earth Worm Jim‘s “Princess What’s-Her-Name?” except it’s worse because the princess, this time around, is actually a princess and not a cow in a princess suit. This canonical prostitution doesn’t stay “in-text,” but reflects in how Karl Jobst (re: a man with former fascist ties, as well as being an honest-to-god pickup artist* in the not-too-distant past) valorizes raw manly execution to get to the titular babe as fast as humanly possible. It’s a game for straw dogs, investing so much energy at a hamster wheel that, in the same breath, is gentrifying the practice around heteronormative/monomythic gaming tropes. Simply put, it’s regressive and capitalistic, not satire, because it does absolutely nothing to meaningfully challenge capital—all while actively reducing its target audience to rats in a race chasing the same-old prizes (clones not just of Princess Toadstool, but Princess Peach made extra effusive, sleazy and demure not unlike Arnold’s dream girl in Total Recall… minus the satire), then making them king for a day!
Like Total Recall (the director of that movie loving to critique American culture, but especially power fantasies), the procedure isn’t just lobotomizing but a gold rush (and people like Jobst—the one’s selling the shovels—stand to make a lot of money for themselves). It’s why the kids from Stranger Things both unironically treat Sadie Sink like a piece of meat and support Israeli. It all connects because capital relies on dogma as something to internalize and serve profit on all registers—on and offstage, at home and abroad, by white male predators.
*From r/speedrun: The drama starts in 2021, when a person known as Tomato Anus (we’re off to a great start, I see) severed ties with Karl due to some company Karl kept; i.e., a Neo-Nazi named RWhiteGoose. There’s a lot of messages going back years regarding the server Goose was on, but those are from someone who’s own testimony isn’t the most reliable (a fash). Take a look at them if you want and decide for yourself what to think (Karl was friends with this person for years/frequented the server with other like-minded people). There’s also Karl’s explaining away of his own racist language (the following quote is from Emtech1, on Reddit):
The reason why I struggle to see Karl as a decent person is that some people would bring up their concerns afterwards and Karl would outright lie about the N word having any negative connotations in Australia. I’m Australian too, and this is absolutely not true. Karl is from Queensland by the way which is why that image references several places in that state that used to have or still have the N word in it. That word has historically been used against our natives, and a 30+ year old man, especially one who has an internet presence would know better.
Whatever you think about Goose, he has been very apologetic for the last 3 years and I think he’s made a genuine effort to move in a positive direction. I believe this to be a genuine change in character, and if it isn’t, I’d rather accept someone faking being a changed person than turn my back on a genuine one.
Karl on the other hand has never apologized and instead lied about it. Even worse, once on Discord he was ranting about people accusing him being racist and he brought up his Asian wife as his anti-racist shield. Do I need to mention that Derek Chauvin had an Asian wife? It’s really beyond me that the community continues to ignore this guy’s behavior.
EDIT: Here’s some more receipts of him justifying using the N word, bragging about sleeping with many women, his past of being a pickup artist, him bragging about his “massive cock” and wanting breast implants for his wife. He named his son “Maximus Wong.” I seriously can’t not think this is related to his penis/eggplant obsession.
Apart from all of that, though (which honestly is bad enough), I think the pickup video is the biggest red flag because it’s obviously Karl. Like, he made it and it’s garden-variety sleazy in all the worst, most stereotypical ways. Combine that with his crusader veneer and it doesn’t take long for it all to fall apart (fash disguises generally aren’t very good; they just surround themselves with people as scummy as they are).
I’ve seen the video and honestly it tracks rather well with Karl’s current streamlined (and slightly sanitized-but-still-sexist) approach to games; i.e., he—per the pickup artist approach—treats woman like games: as objectives, things to observe, learn and manipulate in a mechanical, knee-jerk fashion that can then be conquered. And of course, he capitalizes on it as a “free” scheme for which the video-in-question advertises his own book based on “beginner stuff” and having a stripper silhouette on the cover (real classy, dude)—”First one’s free,” in other words. I found it to be really odd, because he kept saying in the video, “Final step, get the hell out of there!” And I’m like, “Dude, that’s bad-faith. But two, why break the ice if you’re just gonna fuck off each and every time? That’s conditioning bad habits!” Maybe don’t take dating advice from a white supremacist who spent his teenage years and twenties speedrunning Goldeneye (1997)? Dude unironically thinks he’s James Bond or some shit.
More to the point, a relationship isn’t to perfect mechanical actions/routes like Jobst explains, thereby bouncing when things inevitably get rough/complicated; it’s to be flexible with someone that you want to relate to on an interpersonal level as equals. Your partner isn’t an adversary to conquer but a peer to treat as human. So Karl’s advice is actually terrible for dating reasons, too, because that’s not what it’s about; for him (and all pickup artists), it’s purely a “headcount” to pile up and use to brag about with other white, cis-het guys. It’s terribly cliché but also cruel. Also, again, his son’s name is apparently Maximus Wong? I can’t verify that, but I’ve seen the Maximus shirt, so at least half of that is true. Like, what the fuck, dude? People like him make the world in their image: through genocide and vanity projects at the expense of nature-as-monstrous-feminine. That’s how white supremacists work; i.e., what Andrew Tate calls “a genetic legacy” while in the same breath making an old sodomy argument that reduces sexuality to action: having sex for reasons other than sexual reproduction is “gay” (The Kavernacle’s “Andrew Tate and Conservative Men now say it is GAY to Like Women,” 2024). They think they’re oh-so-slick, but really they’re just gaming a system that’s made for them to do so. So congratulations, Karl, you are playing life on easy mode!
[3] And to which I respond to (source tweet: Persephone van der Waard, 2023):
Whatever exchanges take place, these are the whirlwind to reap, the chickens coming home to roost on Link’s twinkish head.
[4] The Gothic, like a parasitoid, survives through a dance with death (odd motion), but also an unnatural prolonging of its lifespan inside something that it eats alive and emerges from (waste not, want not). What a lovely metaphor for Gothic-Communist development (see: “The Caterpillar and the Wasp,” 2024).
[5] Sorcha Ní Fhlainn might feature Axel Ross’ iconoclastic painting on the cover of Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (2019), but is fairly limited by wanting to be the first of a hopelessly narrow scope of study (much how Creed is—all the more ironic since Ní Fhlainn was the one who first recommend The Monstrous-Feminine to me when I was looking for a graduate supervisor at MMU):
Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture is the first major study to focus on American cultural history from the vampire’s point of view. Beginning in 1968, Ní Fhlainn argues that vampires move from the margins to the centre of popular culture as representatives of the anxieties and aspirations of their age. Mapping their literary and screen evolution on to the American Presidency, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, this essential critical study chronicles the vampire’s blood-ties to distinct socio-political movements and cultural decades in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (source: Amazon).
And while it’s all very fascinating, my dude, let me turn the tables: how can this intuitively translate to sex-positive struggles expressed in non-academic speak (while employing some of the theory)? No sex worker I know is going to refer to your book—not because its heart isn’t in the right place, but because it’s literally closed-off snobbery!
For example, Creed eventually wrote Return of the Monstrous-Feminine in 2022—thirty years after her original book, and one that expanded the critical lens to things other than movies (to actually account for multimedia expression on the Internet). But even then, her follow-up costs—sweet, Jesus—$144.99 in hardcover? What are you printing it on, Creed, solid gold? Both you and Ní Fhlainn have the same problem (with Postmodern Vampires costing $66-$166 on Kindle and $154 hardcover): gentrifying knowledge while simultaneously narrowing it into inaccessible, inapplicable, elitist gnosis squirrelled away in the usual neoliberal monasteries by the usual cognitive estrangement/dissonance, but also establishment. Just as Columbia University students are protesting genocide right now, students at large don’t just historically protest against the state elsewhere; they also protest their own faculty and power centers, too. Like, fuck neoliberals; supporting behavior like that reflects in social activities (Sorcha was a bit of a bully at conferences, too) and publication habits. Such persons literally are sitting on their ideas; i.e., making them hard to access on purpose while students riot! If them’s the breaks at academia, then why the fuck are professors often still there? No, no—don’t get up. Allow me. It’s because they’re accommodated, that’s why!
Excuse my own ríastrad, Sorcha, but I won’t apologize for what’s been a long time coming. That being said, I won’t say what you’re doing here is worthless, either—because I think a narrow, specialized lens is ultimately still part of the larger rainbow (one we shoot from our butts to wrestle, DBZ-style, with capital’s own during Rainbow Capitalism). But from one intellectual vamp to another (and someone who’s learned a lot since her time in your classroom; i.e., where you didn’t want me to openly acknowledge that it doesn’t take supernatural strength the likes of a vampire such as Edward Cullen to give a girl like Bella Swan a bruise during sex): Girl, you’re really behind the curve when it comes to holistic expression!
[6] Queerness generally conveys itself (and survives) through campy theatre, thus humor, as something to take in and take out per outing. With the horror genre—from the days of Lewis and Radcliffe—typically being a serial affair whose ascending numeration oscillates between canon and camp per issue, but in the days of film involves titular numbers (e.g., Halloween 4, 1988) and generally with a vague labeling of “the” + [noun] to grant said noun an air of menace and/or silliness to varying degrees: The Car (1977) as true camp, The Descent (2005) as serious, and The Babysitter (2017) as in on the joke; or in one franchise, Evil Dead 1, 2 and 3, etc (1981, 1987 and 1992).
[6a] No self-respecting (note: functioning) Communist calls themselves a postmodernist. It’s dated academic bullshit from the 1960s and 70s, insofar as people like Derrida put that before active rebellion (he made up for it a bit with Spectres of Marx—thirty years later!). Not to “hand it” to Peterson, then, but there is something ridiculous about academic labels (though failing through his own Red-Scare, “faceless fash” hysteria to describe us Commies in terms we actually use [e.g., “an-Com”]—opting for the usual dogwhistles made hyperbolic: “postmodern neo-Marxist” a malapropism and monolith to assign conspiracy and blame to, thus state violence as something to give and receive).
[6b] This relationship is as much between the critic-as-consumer as the guitar hero [and nudist] virtuosity on display. For example, I love X, my ex recommending them to me as something to review on Rate Your Music, which I dutifully at the time did:
What a fun album! Yes, there’s speed metal rhythm guitars and a roaring singer, but this isn’t Concerto Moon. Instead, the vintage nature of the music allows for battery of ’80s-style trademarks: twin harmonies, unison palm-muting; multiple, varied solos (“Endless Rain” evokes Brian May and Rudolph Schenker; other songs channel Tony MacAlpine, Steve Vai or Vinnie Moore), and ballad-ready steel strings/piano (straight out of a Savatage or Skid Row album). There’s loads of energy to spare, and a muscular, clear-sounding production that really lets the music rock out in all departments.
In this regard, the instrumentalists all pull their weight. “Kurenai,” for example, features busy, tornado drumming and energetic bass playing. The singer is a bit raw, sounding a bit like Doro Pesch (which is a nice switch from the bellowing sort of operatics I envisioned, going in). Equally enjoyable are the compositions, which put out tremendous amounts of energy amid the constant variety. Little repeats over the album, but there’s still plenty of room for a memorable, fist-pumping refrain per song. “Blue Blood,” “Week End” and “X” are all high-octane, chorus-heavy songs—with dozens of small, clever hooks expertly woven into the pummeling rhythm sections.
If you need some breathing room, there’s a couple looser, funner numbers, written more in the spirit of White Lion, Van Halen, or Great White (the album closer sounds like vintage Gamma Ray, but boasts a bit more swagger). “Xclaimation” adds some ethnic flair with world percussion, wind chimes, and obligatory harmonic minor melodies (and some excellent drums and bass). Under three minutes, “Orgasm” is pure, balls-to-the-wall thrash, full of manic fills, double-bass and wild guitars; like the best sex you’ve ever had, it rocks from start to finish.
I loved this album. There’s enough consistency to given the album an overall tone, but enough experimentation to keep things vital and fresh (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “A Time Machine of Rock Heroism,” 2019).
What matters isn’t that my ex sucked and ultimately fucked me over (boy, did they ever), but that they gave me things to constantly engage with, thus keep me sharp; i.e., potential ammunition that continues to be useful to current socio-political struggles they have largely exited the stage regarding. Styles make fights; class and cultural character define flow, form and function during a poetic engagement with the past—i.e., between and of two (or more) unlike things as likenesses (of likenesses) to reclaim through adept and flexible maneuvers: anything that accounts for good showmanship and public appetites, mid-critique, as yet-another performance of a Marxist marquee. To that, ours (Gothic Communism) poetically accounts for monsters, magic and myth—for music, Medusa, etc—as addictive, nostalgic, and medicinal improv as something to evolve into itself again and again; i.e., just what the doctor ordered.
[7] From Rebecca Watson’s ” Richard Dawkins: “Cultural Christian” or Supremacist Bigot?” (2024).
[8] Allison N. Zieg’s “Joyful, Joyful! The Musical Significance of Beethoven’s Ninth” (2022).
[9] Monsters are historically a colonizing device. Something important to consider, then, is how reclaimed language historically takes racial or sexual slurs, etc, and turns them into revolutionary language. Once this happens, the word in question cannot be reverted to its original usage, as this will out the individual; i.e., they will self-report as belonging to a colonizer mindset; e.g., a black person reclaiming the n-word versus a white person wanting to say the same word, or a queer person using the f-slur versus a cis-het person (or calling everything “gay” in a sex-positive sense); but also either oppressed group identifying with a particular monster type. Conversely, the Right and Capitalism more broadly will historically co-opt language of rebellion that was never used by the colonizer group; e.g., “woke.” Unlike reclaimed slurs or demonic language, a historically revolutionary term can be emptied of meaning by associating it as exclusively belonging to a harmful activist group “victimizing” the oppressor class.
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