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.

Facing Death: What I Learned Mastering Metroidvania, thus the Abject 90s (feat. Kirby, Marilyn Manson and Maynard James Keenan)

“‘Life is precious,’ Yanos discovered, as it was torn throbbing and bleeding from his own body.”

—Kain, Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen (1996)

Picking up up from where ““The Medieval: Modularity and Class” left off…

The Gothic is queer and has been since day one. In the usual holistic manner, I wanted to revisit and reflect on this dark odyssey as it exists for me; i.e., the smaller journey I’ve been on for the past several months (the clerical slut in her latter-day abbey, dutifully engineering the Poetry Module like a machine listening to machines[1]), but also my entire life.

“We’re living in Gothic times.” Keeping with that dire track, we’ll look at critiquing power from one’s past as monstrous; i.e., in ways you can master using a sex-positive lens. We’ll start with my academic past, then use my current expertise to look further backwards. All in all, we’ll dissect my failed academic career and scholarly contributions, per Metroidvania, then turn right back around and apply them to two cadaver childhood friends: the final boss fight from Kirby’s Dream Land 2 (1995), and rock ‘n roll “rebellion” as it was being packaged and sold to the nation’s youth (me) around the same time; i.e., “childhood rebellion” as lucrative dogma vis-à-vis Maynard James Keenan and Marilyn Manson. The ’90s were darkly magical; they also sucked, but I had to “die” first and be reborn (as trans, Communist) before I could see that for what it was, for what I was—abject, alien, stupid.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

As Top Dollar said, “Childhood’s over the moment you know you’re gonna die.” Well, that side of me has been dying for years! From closeted maiden to mighty Medusa, I started off like Bilbo did—closeted; i.e., a spring chicken bred on music that made me feel invincible, but point in fact was just as much a curse (of blindness) as a gift: I look at me in 2014 and see such a spineless bimbo, a late-bloomer who would go on to conquer my fears and become Medusa.

“Death changes you,” I’ve discovered; my familial abuse and extrafamilial abuse—Zeuhl, Cuwu, and Jadis stuck in their ways of causing harm to others, the posers—you don’t just experience something like that and walk away unscathed. It stays with you, lives in you, including in the work that you do as challenging what has you in its grip—the experience, but also the socio-material conditions at large. Even so, I don’t think I’ve fully appreciated the significance of that in my work until diving in and playing with it myself; i.e., getting in touch with my teaching side, my medical side, and my medieval side to better understand my work’s poetic elements: as someone who survived heinous things, sees them everywhere, and chases their Numinous signature on the Neo-Gothic edge of existence—the fringes of reality and cusp of Hell as something to experience while alive.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

My blood pressure seems to go up higher when I write and reflect extensively on my past (but also haven’t actually orgasmed much these past several months). I feel buried alive, my chest tight like I was suffocating—less from a hand choking my throat and more a bodice around my heart. It feels, suitably enough, like someone who chases “death” and “stays under” for a bit too long—stuck there, unable to return home, or home no longer recognizable to them; i.e., haunted by their trauma as something to chase and recreate in pleasure and pain as confused, their crossed wires activated during psychosexual responses in a given place and name:

Skyrider, you supersonic flyer
Nightdriver, you demon of desire
Spinesnapper, you tried your best to break us
Throatchoker, you thought that you could take us

The fright of your life, the fright of your life
The fright of your life is here guaranteed
This is no illusion, confessing confusion you’re freed
Lashings of strappings with beatings competing to win

Oh, what a mess I am blessed, dominations set in

Now we are taken unto the island of domination (Judas Priest’s “Isle of Domination” (1976).

Everyone has their own form, their own name for Death; but like porn, you’ll know it when you see it if you’ve felt it before (it marks you for life, and only in death releases you). The presumption is that in the “Free World” we are free and no harm is caused, that we are protected.

Wrong! America is a settler colony and run by the Great Destroyers of the Earth, safe behind their illusions while the rest of us either feel invincible and beyond reproach (the status quo) or closeted, damned, beyond redemption in this Hell on Earth. Faced with its “new normal,” we become infused and forever obsessed/fascinated with death; i.e., an endless call of the void seeking its epitaphic medicine of sweet escape[2] again, and again, and again. 99 times it goes off without a hitch through respectable but ordinary attempts; then, on the 100th something goes awry… Or rather, something wakes up, speaking extraordinarily through a collective repressed desire: to be free felt psychosexually among differences, through a ghost of the counterfeit preparing to rebel. There for a moment and gone in the blink of an eye, it stays with us all our lives—something to chase into Hell as made right here on Earth: damnation as a nail to hit, square on the head—not once, of course, but over and over as one might the devil’s doorbell (“C’mon, Old Scratch! Pick up! Mommy wants to play!”).

(source)

“Death is where we feel most alive/see our loved ones again.” I know the music and the clichés; we all do, and recreate its tolling bell again and again (e.g., goth-oracle band Scavenger’s Beyond the Bells, 2024—”In the heat of the night, witches fly!” a fleshy parade of clichés and fetishes marrying sex and war to find beautiful release). But I didn’t understand its Gothic riddle maturely until I lived it, experienced it (fucked to metal, pounding Cuwu’s tight little pussy to Annihilator’s “Death in Your Eyes” [2008] or Jadis’ or Zeuhl’s to some similar, whiplash-inducing tune[3]), processed it, and then did all of that consciously through hindsight (“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.”). Faced with that dark reflection, something woke up in me and I felt at home with death as something to embrace through the honest intimacy of other cuties also searching for denied connection and forbidden love—to be dying for it like a beggar of thirst, and begging for more until we’re satisfied. How long until that is depends entirely on us developing Communism to end scarcity once and for all. In short, “When it’s done!”

Believe it or not, this moment of clarity actually stems from monitoring my vitals and observing my body’s various reactions—almost outside, looking in at myself as a doctor does a patient, and all while writing this book and thinking about “death” as a tradition to perform: a call of the void (from Shakespeare to Ridley Scott to li’l ol’ me—a bit like speed balling minus the hard-drug crossfade); and all the while feeling the classic Gothic push-pull of “danger” as a paradox rooted in my actual body as not really in much danger but secretly telling my 37-year-old self to hold together while fucking around. Something might actually be wrong with me!

Newfound appreciation gleans through reflection on things I always enjoyed, including my life as something to reappraise. Yet, doing so has likewise shown me that I’m not entirely sure what ails me—if it’s psychosomatic or psychosexual posttraumatic stress, a more prominent and permanent medical condition. Probably a bit of both, but I recognize the feeling—the actual physical feeling—from before I started thinking actively about my health, and before I was able to go to the doctor and get checked out: when I returned to my mother’s, and experienced separation anxiety with Cuwu after Uncle Dave died. Doing so again, under more controlled and informed circumstances, has rekindled my drive but also a renewed interest in medicine: in regards to me as the test subject, experimenting literally on myself through the playfully scandalous Neo-Gothic fantasies of death, rape and murder. You know, the best kinds!

We become bred on such things, accustomed to death as medieval language we conjure up for the thrill and salve it provides us with; e.g., the devil dragon from Flight of Dragons (1982) the deliverer of all our paradoxical delights. Like a pizza for a bitch in heat, a mommy pregnant with lust (as fat as the dragons in that movie, but especially that fat fuck—an absolute unit of a death chonker):

I see the dragon in my mind and hear the sleeping princess’ line: “No, father, one dragon yet remains, Bryagh. Omadon’s hold on him is stronger than Lo Tae Zhao’s. He has death on his mind and can take them all!” I think in response, Good; now gimme, motherfucker! My command is gentle (the dragon is my childhood friend, someone I love), but it’s still a command: “Don’t stop until I tell you to stop! I shall rewrite you through my decree, a Queen to your King I challenge thee” (from Volume Zero, my fucking with Percy Shelley’s famous poem to immortalize Blxxd Bunny with my drawing of them:

And pillow lip, and smirk of warm delight,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that enjoyed them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, Queen of queens;
Look on my Ass, ye Mighty, and despair!”

As something to face beyond us in present forms that evoke the beyond, reflections on death can be healthy or unhealthy—can drive us mad or “mad.” Poets, who love the sound of their own voices (“one good turn deserves another—from one poet to another”), think by reflecting on things through creation (which is always expanding [cock-like] into delicious pussy-like new forms). In challenging capital, meticulous and informed, I’m a Renaissance girl who suddenly finds herself feeling like a naughty child playing with dead things; i.e., like Jeffery Combs’ Herbert West, dryly asking the other doctor with a straight face/flat affect, “What will they do, embalm us?” Talk about hard kink!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In a way they already have, and as a zombie the likes of Richard Matteson’s, I find myself—having thrust into the void repeatedly—suddenly smiling with a new lease on life (the trans woman, turning as the fags always do, to Gothic media as a therapeutic, rape-play opera expressing the unspeakable as loud as we fucking can); i.e., like Barbaras’ omen from the Jew of Malta (c. 1590):

Thus like the sad presaging Raven that tolls
The sicke mans passeport in her hollow beake,
And in the shadow of the silent night
Doth shake contagion from her sable wings (source).

Though I am just a raven, behold my pretty plumage (weird, to be sure, but bitches like weird; it’s like they are)! Observe how I am at peace with myself and my trauma as something to show off the pain and pleasure of all my ghosts; i.e., with my queerness as beautifully tainted by capital, but burning urgently and hotly with a corpse-like desire that feels oddly fresh, revitalized, ready to take on the world (something to tentatively show and then, post-hesitation, open greater and greater “wounds” that flaunt it all with reckless abandon—my dick not in the book, but in a pussy): scrambling to express what I’ve learned about “death” before Death (the cruel, delicious, thick-thighed bitch) takes me at last. When it does, my tombstone—a fragment of all that remains—shall be peered at, and whose bizarre reply shall thrust, confounding and glorious, back at the same prying eyes: “Her tits were there.” My spirit has fled, but they’re not going anywhere. Remember that as you live and love those close to you!

The Great Tree bemoaned to Deet when passing her its knowledge, “Whether a gift or a curse I do not know!” Likewise touched by Death—to have felt for a second its sweet sting as melting into so many others—I don’t know how long I have. No one does, till suddenly our brief candle (and walking shadow) snuffs out, collapsing never to rise again. But I have questioned the value of my life until now with more fear of death than I currently have (“nothing ventured, nothing gained”). Now that said fear has been lessened by learning something new about myself, the ghost of Epicurus is rapping on my head to remind me: “Death is nothing to us!” Except, the idea of a “corpse” that experiences symptoms, a church of the dead that haunts us while we’re awake out from the imaginary past that returns to our world? It’s all just pretend… isn’t it? Then again, maybe not. You tell me, sweeties!

When someone fucks with you, document everything. But also, play/fuck with your abusers by putting their “ghosts” in quotes—to speak truth to (state) power by going where power is. I have been near power all my life; i.e., that which threatens “death” as a state of constant, painful change, often with alien components haunting familiar ones. Death, then, isn’t the end, but something to face regardless of whom you’re critiquing. Here’s what I learned in doing so—as a failed-academic-turned-Gothic-slut who weaponized her baggage and mastered Metroidvania at the same time (so, Contrapoints but without the trans gentrification, assimilation fantasies and veiled enbyphobia; more on her in Volume Three, part two)! As we proceed, remember as always to take modularity into account: Metroidvania are modular like monsters are, and the two go hand-in-hand; i.e., a castle has monsters in it and is monster-like, and monsters have castles in them/are castle-like, concentrically and dualistically and anisotropically. In other words, they are composite; i.e., you can remove elements of the Metroidvania/monster and it will continue to function/relate to these elements separately and/or together, mid-crisis onstage.

Under capital, Cartesian thought sexualizes, fetishizes and ultimately harvests nature-as-monstrous-feminine; videogames instruct this through neoliberal dogma—household war simulators, whose monomythic formulas must be reclaimed by the real stewards of nature (us) from the usual privateers (capitalists and their proponents). From Freddy Krueger to the final, hidden boss in Kirby’s Dream Land 2 (exhibit 34b2a1a1, 1995) to the Wind Fish in Link’s Awakening (1991) to Ripley rescuing Newt by scapegoating the black queen when the colony falls apart (shooting the Numinous ghost of settler colonialism’s vengeful victims) to the Radiance in Hollow Knight, we’re all Dokken’s dream warriors, masturbatorily punching Tim Curry’s demon clown. I say this while being completely silly and dead-serious at the same time, and this isn’t my first rodeo, my dudes; I’ve given symposiums as an undergrad[4] and written my thesis on this (“Lost in Necropolis“), and finally my PhD in independent form with Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (and if that devalues it in your eyes, remember that T.S., Joshi—one of the world’s foremost and most-cited contributors to independent Lovecraft scholarship—isn’t a professor, but a philosophy major dropout); I’ve lectured about this at the IGA multiple times, on multiple continents[5]; I’ve given talks in-person[6] and on video[7]; and I’ve used the symbols and methods of invigilation to talk about shared patterns and imagery in ways you’ll doubtless recognize from me and elsewhere. There’s gorgons to slay us and “gorgons” to “slay” with, babes; true to my arguments (since my thesis, no less), these exist in the same magic circle/shadow zone (the elite monopolizing darkness as a weapon[7a] against Her Majesty’s radiant numen):

Healing takes reflection and reflection hurts regarding a past that is always being buried or dug up. To that, I’d like to inspect my academic past (above) one more time to make my point; i.e., what I’ve learned facing the death of it (and rebirth). I’ve previously acknowledged which professors I like and which I don’t–you know who you are—but the fact remains that academia as a structure is a den of sycophants suckling the dicks of Reagan and Thatcher’s ghosts; i.e., a nest of shameless schmoozers and utter brownnosers by design (“the money flows up, the shit rolls down”). They have their own thin line to colonize students with, and take a certain pleasure closing ranks and flexing on them. So yeah, it’s personal for me; I have something to prove and don’t like bullies, especially established bullies acting like their shit don’t stink. As we shall see, reversing abjection is a shitty business—one as vast and rank as the single-day cleansing of the cattle stables of King Augeas of Elis (“the Labours of Heracles“; source: Britannica).

For instance, Lucy Burke once told me, “You couldn’t step on my toes if you tried [emphasis, mine].” The Brits really love their Austenian italics. Regardless, the school went onto delete my old email and account (demonstrating the empheral, predator/prey nature of our relationship). In the interim, Lucy went onto flunk half of my postgrad module for mentioning my undergrad pedigree as a point of reference, telling me it “had no bearing on the topic at hand” (though they magnanimously gave me an A for the transcribing element—damn straight); Lucy Burke was also a total cunt whose class sucked absolute donkey dick (and whose tenured helper told me to my face that the Gothic was a waste of life—he was a cunt, too). So fuck her (and fuck the peer-reviewed twats who arbitrarily rejected my paper proposals for being “too repetitive/conversational[8],” or—in several cases—for being too sexual. It’s one thing to be rejected by a romantic interest; in this case, rejection equals censorship, which speaks louder than words)!

As we proceed, my teaching moral is as follows: Don’t be afraid to speak your truth, even if that truth is angry with the establishment (and its settler-colonial profit motive)! Be loud! Wreck shit (if you’ve seen Glass Onion [2022] then you’ll know exactly what I mean)!

Maybe I’m onto something. Some of my instructors certainly thought so. As my teachers at undergrad wrote of me (from my original award letter, above),

Nicholas excels as an attentive and nuanced reader of literary texts and expert sleuth of textual histories. He has an impressive ability to synthesize disparate material, making surprising connections between wide-ranging ideas and experiences. Nicholas, one faculty remarks, “is not afraid to take tangents or draw comparisons that at first look random but end up opening up a new vista for reflection.” We have been equally delighted by the fine scholarly essays and research papers Nicholas has produced in our classes. Faculty describe his writing as “eloquent, carefully organized,” “astonishingly adroit,” comparing, for instance, Tolkien’s image of greed with Shakespeare’s reflection on Shylock’s materialism, via a close reading of Max Weber’s idea of rationality and modern notions of money as status [hi, Craig!].

We anticipate a bright future for Nicholas and wish him the best for his future scholarly exploits. Nicholas is most deserving of the Distinguished Student in Literature Award, and we are grateful to have him as a student in our department. We’ll be reading Nicholas’ writing one day, and probably teaching it [above, originally featured in Volume Zero].

I don’t know about that, my dudes; I messaged many of you for years and rarely heard a peep (a couple responded—to that, I give thanks)—certainly not to the degree of engagement such effusive praise would seem to suggest. Maybe I didn’t deserve all of this? Maybe I was just that dunce of a slut I always felt like?

Looking back, I still get echoes of that doubt. But true to form, I had to go elsewhere to find what I was looking for (the monomyth, but a gay Gothic one that turned me from “Nicholas” into Persephone: “It was I, Dio!”).

I felt that way at the time, too—was terribly depressed and told Christine Neufeld as much in her office, post-award-ceremony. She replied, “We don’t just give this award to anyone, you know! It’s a big deal! You struggled at first [she gave me a C+ in her English 300W course, saved by me writing “Frankenstein essay—Born to Fall? Birth Trauma, the Soul, and Der Maschinenmensch,” 2014] but you pulled through; with these grades and this letter of recommendation, you can go anywhere you want!”

There was some truth to that (others were more honest: “Don’t pursue grad school unless you want to be broke/are independently wealthy!”); I could go wherever I wanted, provided I found the school and the backing (a whole Byzantine circus to thread, which we’ve already gone over but I’ll cite again here[9] in case Quora takes a shit). I’m white and middle-class, so I had friends and means. Sandy Norton gave me a place to stay after my efficiency was canceled. In turn, I basically had to graduate twice; i.e., once in ceremony and once after I met the full, Faustian-grade[10] requirements for the school (which hounded me for overpriced graduation photos for years, afterwards).

If the above example (my Gothic past and quest for power/the Numinous by coining ludo-Gothic BDSM through my scholarly works and slutty adventures) is any proof, facing one’s past repeatedly is painful, but also vital to understanding our place is a wider world; re: “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about.” To that, glibly sloganize the skeletons of your past if it means liberation from tyranny (and if they aren’t tyrants, they’ll let you voice your grievances in public; i.e., the “free” marketplace of ideas). Fuck the king! Fuck Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan! Fuck the schools I went to if they get in my way! Antagonize them! Become the thing they fear most; become the ironic counterterrorist exposing them as frauds—with your Aegis (ass or otherwise): “And no one in all of Oz, no wizard that there is or was, is every gonna bring me down!”

Speaking of skeletons, let’s give it a shot; i.e., with something other than my failed academic career (but still bourne from it)! Kirby? You’re up, babe!

(exhibit 34b2a1a1: When playing this game as a little girl, in the fifth grade, I always noticed the patterns and they always struck me as odd. I felt the drive to conquer the darkness as the game taught me. Perhaps if I did, I thought, then my shitty real father would turn into the man I always wanted him to be [alas, that never happened]. A part of me also to wanted, like Hamlet and the freezing palace guards [“A part of him”], to explore the darkness as a presence to talk to—in short, to ask it why it’s there, to make friends.

In other words, why is the false king false, the sword always there to purify his “corruption,” and send the monstrous-feminine hellspawn back to the dark corners of the Western imagination?

As such, there’s always a priority/Great Chain of Being to neoliberal copaganda in videogames. The male hegemon is sick, possessed—a false king with a false claim [the counterfeit] that must corrected through the usual heteronormative “medicine” [usually force, in videogames, because sex is for adults who take it by force, post-indoctrination]. Tolkien [and his cartographic refrains] framed it as exorcism [Gandalf to Theoden, drawing Wormtongue out as “poison is drawn from a wound”—kinky!] and death by flames [Denethor: “We shall burn like the kings of old!”]. In turn, videogames like the Kirby franchise offer routine protagonists who function, like all language, in dualistic ways. Except the canonical embodiment of the avatar remains bourgeoisie; in turn, the monomythic concentrism, anisotropic motion, and climactic [violent, Promethean] revelation are swept aside in the usual Radcliffean fashion: the horrors of the “past” apologizing for the Divine Right of Kings as having evolved into modern forms that remained, post-nightmare [which Walpole ultimately suffered from, too—the white castle emerging from the black. ACAB, kids—except gay campy ones].

That is, King Dedede is possessed, you see—trying to smite you with his hammer because a dark vague force has “corrupted” him! This counterfeit is both the Western lie of sovereignty it uses to maintain its power structures, and the very thing antithetical to them that we must reclaim and synthesize. In Metroidvania fashion, once the hero collects some of the objects of conquest, he gets a partial prize; collect them all, and he receives Excalibur—the ostensibly noble blade haunted by dark, bloodthirsty revenge to do battle with the Russian doll. That is, inside the American monarch [a feudal displacement of the game’s empty critique of the wider world around it] lurks a shelled series of monsters common to neoliberal canon: the warlock/witch, vampire or goblin [all anti-Semitic tropes] indicative of the Nazi and the Communist in the same amalgam. Per American kayfabe as emulated by Japan, its cultural exports have Kirby [the babyface] whack the Nazi with his sword, the two dueling to expose why the Nazi “broke bad”: the shapeless void—Communism! Red corrupts red.

[source: Zelda Dungeon]

These warring artefacts remain dualistic, mid-duel, but the canonical side/function of their conversation remains clear enough: a witch hunt, one where the Nazi was the nation-state possessed by national Socialism! I.e., it’s always the Communist’s fault! Of course, we all know this to be an obscurantist lie—one furthered by neoliberals [and their pocket academics] profiting off Red Scare—but the fact remains, the so-called Pale King and “Hollow Knight” [see what I did, there?] are likenesses received in praxially-inert symbolic exchanges; e.g., Ganon vs the Hero of Time [above] to pacify workers with, regardless of the labor they put in; i.e., that which preserves a semiotic standard [from Ron Cobb] to uphold a capitalist dialog and its monetary value through Cartesian violence against nature-as-monstrous-feminine.

All of these tropes and contradictions are a historical-material byproduct of those state monopolies and trifectas warring against our doubling of them during counterterror dialogs, engaged in the meta dialog as dialectical-material; i.e., by virtue of me—burning the midnight oil [having done it many times at EMU and MMU]—able to artlessly summon up old ghosts [of Marx] to camp canon with. To that, my childhood locale remains haunted by the object of capitalist fears pushed into the usual myopic shadow zone by Capitalist Realism. The elite cannot hide genocide and police violence in totality after history purportedly “ended” within the established economic order as classic “New-World” shenanigans; so instead, like Radcliffe, they conjure up evil castles and kings to scapegoat. It’s modern-day blood libel, the price paid in all the oceans of children’s blood[11] Kirby’s Dream Land 2 leaves out, but lurks behind the rotting image on its surface. The darkness is the rot, and beyond its disintegrating veneer is the desert of the real.

Plato’s cave is full of those hopelessly reliant on the system’s dogmatic false hope, becoming agents of our and their destruction by maintaining the spell that cannot survive state shift. But boy, oh boy, they will fight like hell to resist that; i.e., by dismissing and attacking us through disguises that announce who they are: corporate cops in suits—spooks of a CIA sort, but internalized/externalized by state proponents; e.g., like The Matrix and its Agents touched upon, so aptly [“That is the sound of inevitability, Mr. Anderson; that is the sound of your death!”]! In that same shadow zone’s half-real space, then, we must use our own ludo-Gothic BDSM’s castle-narrative to infuse better habits; i.e., to synthesize praxis based on the things that were coded into us as children by videogames. “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” No one ever said it was easy to kill our darlings—both because it is dispiriting on some level, but also because it’s work! Topping is work! No cap, fuck-starting Kirby’s face has me dead tired, y’all!

In all seriousness, the takeaway here is the hero, after his final duel, has slain the fag, the Commie, the Medusa, the person of color—to fall from the sky at the shock of seeing himself in Athena’s Aegis [a black blob with a single eye to Kirby’s two—the singular panoptic/myopic gaze of conquest, but also the one-eyed monster capital frames Communism as; i.e., the cyclops giant to blind and kill, empowering patriarchal forces]. He descends from the heavens like a heroic star/constellation [Orion, perhaps] while a cleansed pastoral/Garden of Eden looks on [the artificial wilderness “cleansed,” America-style and mirrored in the Japanese neo-Shogunate, of so-called “impurities”; i.e., through a fascist/strongman return to “might makes right”; e.g., the way of the fist, of death by the sword, of Shintoism and bushido as “brutal” sold to Americanized kids drooling over Akuma representing who they want to be, but also the time they want to return to: the Sengoku Jidai or Warring States period’s return of the demon warrior/the black knight. In fascist thinking this is the “hard times” quadrant of the four-stage cycle; re, from Bret Devereaux’ “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020): “‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.’ The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source).

Whether it’s Akuma, Batman or Meta Knight, white male weebs want to become the Great Destroyer and kill weakness as “degenerate,” impure. It’s like sex to them—how they relate to each other—but it’s unironically harmful, destructive, sadistic, inhumane. There’s no “convincing” them through empathy because they argue through force, not consent—the way of the warrior as an endless battle for territory and dominance. They are quintessential xenophobic meatheads—anti-intellectual, obsessed with death, conspiracy and the remaining fourteen points Umberto Eco mentions. In short, they’re like American colonialism continues to be—self-righteous and macho, but paradoxically afraid of everything around them, which they rape because of it. Smart people scare them, women scare them, fags scare them, etc; yet they want to fuck us, are secretly incel cowards looking for mommy.

It’s all a lie, one that continues into Dream Land coming from older histories in and out of the text: Kirby—startled and scared from his dream—wakes up and finds himself with his monomythic treasures by his side. He has the power, per Joseph Campbell’s uncritical lens, to make the world in his image; i.e., by pacifying the current ordering of things by making nature orderly again. It’s standard-issue Goldilocks Imperialism/neoconservative, with Kirby’s foreshadowed by the sword spearheading the harbinger of capital falling to Earth like a comet, a fallen angel, an incubus of the state, a “gift” from the bourgeois gods [that, like Mega Man, steals its enemies powers and shape]: to make peace through strength, by bad-faith diplomacy, by the sword, Power-Rangers-style [the sentai rainbow]. This tracks. After all, the translation for “Nintendo” is “Heaven rewards hard work”—except “work,” in this case, is the same old ghost of the counterfeit being used to further Capitalist Realism via the process of abjection; re: “The myth of Gothic ancestry endured because it was useful,” leading to the same-old Jewish conspiracies, tokenization, and genocide. White knights become black, good cops become bad because ACAB—all [canonical] cops [and castles] are bad. They swords are bad. Their cute mascots are bad.

[model and artists: Blxxd Bunny and Marlon Trelie/Persephone van der Waard] 

Luckily for us, they ain’t got a monopoly on that shit, and there’s always one more square in the collage to fuck with and lead to a better sequence; i.e., inside the infernal concentric pattern [re: Aguirre] during ludo-Gothic BDSM [me; e.g., above, having collaborated with Bunny and hired Marlon to make our own collective statement; i.e., the Dark Magician Girl (my OC, in disguise) fucking “Medusa” as yet-another-performance]. Kirby’s false rainbow is something we fags can camp in earnest, giving its black-and-white some actual color and sparkles. The end of the world, according to the Bible, is when men hammer their swords into ploughshares; we must do this by challenging capital’s Cartesian treatment of labor during the monomyth and all its usual fear and dogma, medieval poetics, etc. The state will always default to lies and violence, policing sex and force through dead dogma dressed up as fatal nostalgia; we can camp all of this and turn it upside down and back around at them—paralyzing them but also making their masks slip. The more people are aware, the more conscious they become to class and culture war as something to wage; re: emotional/Gothic intelligence as something to synthesize through violent resistance fought on the streets of our childhoods, of the Gothic imagination, of a middle finger to academic shortcomings. We’re taking it back. Submit to our monstrous-feminine cenobites [not Barkers, the sell-out; come at me, Sorcha]—not to enslave your bodies, minds, labor and identities, mid-struggle, but to set them free from the usual capitalist [fascist] pigs.)

I am literally a monster and Metroidvania doctor (the monstrous-feminine, in particular)—a monster mom for whom exhibits like these are as easy for me to make as breathing is while fucking (that gets easier, the more you sexercise). I have a nose for bullshit, and can smell a Nazi/spot a TERF a mile away (no matter how many disguises they have on). As little Kirby shows me (and I show you), Communism and fascism sit in the same shadow zone (from Volume Zero, but also “With a Little Help from My Friends“). The difference, for Galatea vs Pygmalion, is the existence of performative irony and critical bite regarding any darkness visible (re: Milton vs Tolkien/Cameron, vis-à-vis me). For Gothic Communists, our bleak sardonic projections twist the knife and smile at the gods, our hellish Aegis upending the heroic narrative to replace it, mid-Mandelbrot. This isn’t a canceled future that, mid-crisis, decay and duel defends capital; we’re the clowns in the king’s court, the chaotic dwarf from Twin Peaks (1990), but the ghost of the counterfeit remains us, buried or not; i.e., that which waits for you, leering wickedly at the end of a black rainbow, coming forward and speaking the truth in dialectical-material language (throwing pure psychoanalysis and postmodernism in the bin): like Saturn devouring his son, capital is eating us. So we “eat” you during calculated risk, hopefully waking your stupid asses up! Eat ass, kids!

(artist, left: Franciso Goya; right: Jordan Peele)

Sometimes, this means eating your own bullshit (aka, eating shit, crow, humble pie, etc). The present is always remarked upon as haunted, grim. It’s all been said before, and cashed in on by hypocrites, too; i.e., those weaponizing your angry childhood as a product against you, a lucrative dogma enriching fascists playing at false rebels. I call this “white people disease,” and as such have looked at people like Radcliffe in the past. This time, I wanna stick to the ’90s; i.e., we’re gonna practice what we preach and hold my childhood accountable in a holistic sense; re, Xavi: “The ’80s weren’t a magical time!” Neither were the ’90s! Keeping that in mind, don’t get too attached to things; i.e., “never meet your heroes; they will always disappoint you,” except there’s a catch: heroism divorced from a capitalist idea of struggle and money value can rescue this conceit from itself. But you gotta be the bitch, the harridan, the angry oracle “no one likes” because they’re always calling out peoples’ heroes (Socrates had that problem; the state prescribed hemlock). Now let’s turn our Medusa’s masterful, withering gaze onto rockstars of a more musical sort: Marilyn Manson (and Maynard James Keenan, footnote)!

“Your world is an ashtray! We burn and crawl like cigarettes; the more you cry the more the ashes turn to mud!” sung shock jockey (and sex pest), Manson[12]. I (and many people my age) grew up on that shit. Like all splendide mendax, the profit motive doesn’t negate the allegory’s liberatory potential; it just capitalizes on it. Just because Manson was an abuser (or Jadis) doesn’t make me one; quite the opposite, rape prevention by exposing abusers during good praxis/synthesis (e.g., telling reactions to revolutionary cryptonymy) is my book’s raison-d’être, hypocrites and abusers (or their enablers, on all registers—e.g., bad-faith/accommodated intellectuals) my bête noire.

Let me rephrase. The way I see it, the world is a toilet, and little girls are made to fear the bathroom as a place to hold their urine, lest they get raped. Doing so is not protection, as Nex Benedict showed us (re: “An Ode to Nex Benedict,” 2024). There’s two takeaways I’ll provide, regarding that: a) view something as a toilet (covered in piss and shit, full of shit, etc) so you actually clean it, and b) we’re already in Hell, so bring the fury to them (our abusers, the elite) with all the piss and vinegar you can muster (we’re all monsters under capital; be an Amazon, warrior, mother, detective, Medusa for workers)! Take your time and make it memorable, too. Don’t “smile more” (“You found me beautiful once!” “Honey, you got real ugly!” Damn straight, you sexist pig!); skull-fuck them (I’m being figurative, of course: the mind fuck)! Freud might be a bad joke, little more than a trope at this stage; we monstrous-feminine, from cryptonym to cryptomime, pull a black rabbit out of a hat, the cat out of the bag—not to harm the rabbit or the cat (the poor things historically used as lab rats, now free to proliferate on Bunny Island or some such place), but expose capital’s usual illusions relegating us to the underworld. We’re the final (hidden) boss of Capitalist Realism each and every time. As Gamma Ray once said, “rabbit don’t come easy!” Well, we do (we got a wand and a rabbit) and our “hat” is our Pandora’s Box, pulling all manner of dark, hellish secrets out of itself.

(artist: John Keaveney)

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

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

In short, Jedi mind tricks don’t work on me (e.g., Kirby and his cute animal friends aping Captain Planet, doing the little victory dance with neoliberal jingles anthemic of war against “darkness”; i.e., hardly a monolithic refrain, but a diverse polity administered by monomythic dogma—one that clumps Nazis and Communists together but always, always prioritizes the Communist), and I can break any dark (capitalistic) spell meant to stupefy its recipient(s)!

So forget Luke Skywalker boldly declaring to the Emperor, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me!” Bitch, please—I’m the Medusa (and “Jedi” are Sith[11a] waiting to happen) and I’ve worked too hard for too long and survived too much to just lay down and take any more of it! The Earth is my home; Hell is my home as something I design, and I will fight to defend it and my friends from the usual fear and dogma, cops and sell-out academics, et al.

Like Smaug, every sassy bitch has its boast, every dog its day. To that, hear mine: Jadis was an impostor who scared children (ate them, per the usual dogmas)—could only tap her foot or toss her head. I am the Queen of Charn:

“Stop,” said the Witch, just as he reached the door. “Do not dream of treachery. My eyes can see through walls and into the minds of men. They will be on you wherever you go. At the first sign of disobedience I will lay such spells on you that anything you sit down on will feel like red hot iron and whenever you lie in a bed there will be invisible blocks of ice at your feet. Now go.”

The old man went out, looking like a dog with its tail between its legs (source).

Not just of Charn, but the queen of my kind (we’re all queens under Communism, but I digress), the top dog making the magician my bitch (from that story’s uncle, to its author afraid of naughty girls who know what they want)!

As Bay shared with me, “Kiwis are bird rats”; i.e., Nature’s idea of Jewish revenge hunted by the likes of smug men like Karl Jobst or Christoph Waltz (the former sucks in real life, the latter sucks onstage):

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

(source tweet: Harvxrd Palestine Solidarity Committee)

Protests are always violent because the state always treats liberation with violence. To that, we must become a pandemic to the elite—united on every continent, a collective thorn in the side of empire-in-disguise. As such, I provide not just my book or this chapter, but my song as unbroken and unbowed, raising my fist with my friends all around the world (sung despite my fear mechanisms telling me not to, for fear of angering Jadis’ shadow haunting me)! Here goes:

Quoth the Raven (death from the skies, rebellion writ on napkins), “I’m thought and rememory! Full of trauma, appetite and rage, my spells are orgasms! My hexes reek of power that can peel paint, strip peaches of their skin—to send your toenails growing inward, you mess with me! I shapeshift and impart fatal knowledge! I am Ileana, hear me roar! I am Revana, strong and brave! I am Persephone, daughter of Melody, granddaughter of Ellen, great-granddaughter of Mildred, the teeth in the night, the Queen of the Night, Titania and Tamora, and you do not scare me! ‘I feel the universe within me; I am a part of the cosmos, its energy flows through me […] AND I AM THAT FORCE! I AM THAT POWER! KNEEL BEFORE YOUR MASTER!’ (Frank Langella ain’t got nothin’ on me, babes)! I eat capital, fart incense (cinnamon) and shit rainbows! My nipples are like weapons (that lactate ironically), my clothes are see-thru, my thong small (and cute), my legs hairy with Lilith’s “stockings.” I play with dolls and swords, make Zelda butch and Link gay! I am the femboy you wish you had! The pillow princess* you’ll never top! I have survived Majora’s moon and through it wield a power too great and terrible for you to imagine, cursing you with madness and confusion! I am the weirdest boner! The pain in the ass (that you like)! Touch me and I touch you back—become glass, darkness visible, a quagmire to envelope you and expose your greatest flaws (a lack of compassion, game, dress sense, etc)! I am the spectre of Gay Marx, a black swan getting you and your little dog, too! I’m disco-in-disguise, from The Beach Boys to Joy Division to yours truly! I’m rock ‘n roll, Satanism, Metroidvania, the pussy on the chainwax! You’ll never own me, never exterminate me, incels; I’ll never rule the universe with you, I’ll fuck your wife and make her gay! I’ll trans your kids and make them disobedient! You killed my mother, prepare to die! Wind, fire, all that kind of thing! Abra-fucking-kadabra, bitch! Get dunked on!”

*E.g., Zeuhl, in grad school—horny but wanting me to fuck them and lying back as I gently gave them a “medicinal injection (of hot sweet love”): “I was soooo sick!” they’d remember the event, “but I wanted you to fuck me anyways!

“There are only so many rhymes”; i.e., so many ways to say to a Nazi, “Fuck you, I’d rather be hunted for being myself than ‘safe’ like you and those of you that suck up to the state, Judas!” This rat-bird mischief manifests in the natural-material world—from Matthew Lewis to Ridley Scott to me, dunking on Kirby and saving the little fucker from people like Marilyn Manson, Maynard James Keenan and people who police their platforms and the world as exclusively their place to make art; i.e., as a socio-political statement upholding the status quo in small.

This includes the serious risk of standard-issue Liberals masquerading as “progressives” to hide their own fascist elements; e.g., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posturing as “radical” to make her presence felt, but then rubbing elbows with Biden. She’s saying “eat the rich” but then eating with them: to have her cake and eat it, too. It dilutes movements, gentrifying radical politics the way that establishment politics always do (recuperation). But likewise, you don’t have to be a full-time activist who dies for the Cause (re: Che Guevara) to do a rebellion. You just have to call the President and his ilk for what they are: immoral, Israel-coddling imperialists—the irony of Biden getting elected being that Liberal-presenting power structures stalled rebellion as performed by American progressives on campus and elsewhere in the middle class.

As usual, it’s a proletarian Children’s Crusade—the wide-eyed college kids doing the work, not the adults[8a] in the room (e.g., these Poly Cal kids fighting shield-to-shield to with the cops, holding onto each other so the pigs don’t pull them away from the group [source tweet: Call Walsh, April 29th, 2024]. Its protection from the state’s zombie enforcers—an echo of the undead taking to the streets, from The Monk to Les Miserables to The Passion of Joan of Arc). The kids aren’t alright because mommy’s browbeaten and daddy’s a rapist, but also a cop who starves, imprisons, and beats his own children for “being naughty”: “They stand should to shoulder for as far as the eye can see. The very Earth must be crying out from the damnable weight of them!” It’s eugenics, of the Imperial Boomerang coming back around, dressed up as parent/schoolteacher played by undercover cop (de facto vigilantism except universities are official institutions with established socio-material ties to the state and the elite). They take and take and take, at the cost of those who serve them as much as those who don’t; e.g., Prince Vegeta’s dying declaration, “He said he would kill my father if I didn’t obey him; we did everything he asked and more, but he killed him anyway!” The state always takes from positions of extreme advantage—of ultimatum and lies. It is the abusive parent made hyperreal, a cruel god lording over the Earth. Sound familiar? The Greeks predicted the future with that one!

If this isn’t proof that the American government needs to be dismantled and replaced with an anarcho-Communist horizontally arranged form (“land back”), then what is? Saturn will devour his young—is devouring his young—so Medusa needs to come forward and kick the old fucker in the balls; i.e., to strike them where their power is consolidated: soft power and the Superstructure, which—wouldn’t you know it—is just my game! You want someone loquacious, or someone who’ll throw down for you and watch you back when it counts? I gotchu, babes!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Like Meatloaf, it’s all very bombastic, repetitive and loud—a rap battle of the sexes (and gender), no? But all the world’s a stage, and the half-real stage is where we always make our stand! Capital manufactures conflict through false binaries; humanizing monsters through ironic calls to arms remains an appeal to those who dehumanize us on a regular basis. To that, Capitalism isn’t something you can defeat through dumb force, lovelies, but clever transgression and subversion that looks and sounds “dumb” (I’m just a dumb Dutch girl, I don’t know nothin’! Right, Grandpa van der Waard?); i.e., changing how people see the world through yourself as a tremendous altering force.

We must remember that empathy is only radical—only a “myth”—because the state (and Capitalist Realism) treat it as such. The most vituperative, bloodthirsty and self-righteous/self-deceiving person isn’t the fascist, then; it’s the American Liberal as someone we must challenge with our own fire to fight theirs with. What are they silent about? We must expose and put that on blast, “to start a thing.” Our cake is moist and we go to Rebel Town (civil war splitting us into doubles against each other by state). We’re the sum of existence, wouldn’t change it if we could (the butterfly effect ‘n all that). We find our companions in the killing fields, speaking through torment, anguish and peril, but also twinkling glee and delight: to break the Torment Nexus as the state’s Precious Thing to smash to bits.

This includes hysteria as a teaching agent/chaotic source of pride and monstrous self-worth healing from patriarchal instruction: kill the alien; e.g., the cordyceps virus from Hollow Knight being both neoliberal dogma (a threat to overcome by monomythic force) and Mother Nature’s revenge (the Archaic Mother) against the Pale King (the Man) for conducting genocide against something that capital, by virtue of profit, cannot afford to understand. Per Cartesian edicts, nature is always monstrous-feminine, is always the zombie, is always furious; but the panicked system’s purging of any harmful waste (shit) is the planet trying to heal itself, aided by its symbols and stewards that canonizers will always try to colonize, and which per the infernal concentric pattern must be entered and faced by exposing the usual hero as the Great Destroyer’s little bitch, their blood sacrifice who thinks he’s bad. This “one simple trick” is the Aegis reclaimed by us, something the elite (and their proponents) can never monopolize: “You and your kind are dust, and you only have yourselves to blame!”

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

We can reclaim our childlike joy and connection to such things; i.e., from the heart, but through expertise, through/of the monstrous-feminine as nurturing towards our wounded/missing empathy and humanity (our impostor syndrome and piece-of-shit’s lack of value in all directions)! Forget me; there’s a dark slutty wizard in all of us, and the best magic is the practical, sexy kind (“the blackest magic, my soul swims in it”)—e.g., our bodies as abjected by others and which we reclaim (with our “dumpers”); i.e., liberation through iconoclasm a psychosexual act of mind games that titillate through sexy androgynous showmanship: the dark mistress, the detective, the Amazon, the whore, the Medusa, the mommy dom (my own character, Ileana Sanda, may have been Queen of the Night and specialized in spatial magics—in warping space-time—but she loved stage magic). And that, like everything else, becomes something old that we can reinvent (above) as the Gothic does: parthenogenically through backwards (retrospective) fertilization (fusion) and division (fission)—my writing style, in other words, synergizing sex, work and synthesis for funsies (fucking during a self-induced fugue state).

(artist: Noe-Leyva)

Keeping that in mind, let’s face a couple smaller reflections before Volume Two, part two opens grave-like before you (Shakespeare’s “maw of death”); i.e., when we dive into our first Monster Module: the Undead (good things come to those who wait)! In other words, let’s sleep on it (only a catnap, I promise)—ruminate, and then watch what dreams may come. To move forward, we must face the past again (we just did, but what’s next is a transitional segment, not a symposium, so calm your tits). Onto “Halfway There: Between Modules!”

---

Footnotes

[1] With Zeuhl once waking up in the middle of the night, in England, to find me sitting at my laptop—in the dark with my back to them, staring at “ASMR – Alien: Isolation – Nap Time near a Computer Console” (2018); i.e., dreaming while awake, in-tune with a movement they helped introduce me (ASMR) to and would, at times, observe me as I slept, jotting down the weird things I said in my sleep: “And you have to be careful when you use it in the swamp, and there are warlocks!” To think how funny it is that something said by me in passing while I wasn’t even awake—after playing Hollow Knight on my laptop (which Zeuhl would accidently murder like Companion Cube, spilling Uncle Ben’s rice sauce on the old machine to thoroughly “brick” it)—would become a de facto slogan for a passage in my book (specifically in Volume Zero, I won’t say where). All our yesterdays…

[2] The call-and-response, rise and fall of queer-drenched ecstasy—as something to orgasmically croon, mid-rapture, then come down from and into the lonely grave that is life in America and Great Britain. Like a bath of hellfire, the call of the void becomes something to tempt through morbid curiosity and observation, mid-session.

[3] E.g., Constance and I fucked to Slayer’s “Black Magic” (1983).

[4] At my alma mater, Eastern Michigan University:  “EMU 2017 Symposium Script: Frederic Jameson and the Art of Lying.”

[5] For the 14th IGA conference, in Manchester, England: “IGA 2018 Script—All that We’re Told In the Eternal Shadow (within Shadows) of the Hypernormal, Worldwide“; for the 15th IGA Conference, in Chicago: “Always More: A History of Gothic Motion from the Metroidvania Speedrunner” (2019).

[6] For Sheffield Gothic’s Reimagining the Gothic with a Vengeance, Vol 5: Returns, Revenge, Reckonings, 2019: “More My Speed”: The Tempo of Gothic Affect in a Ludic Framework.”

[7] The video I scripted, recorded and edited for “More My Speed,” which Sheffield Gothic played in my stead.

[7a] In true settler-colonial fashion, the white savior is a badly disguised arms broker and fashion statement: “a family defending ‘his’ home from ‘alien’ forces” while aping videogames as a liminal enterprise; i.e., copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex inside a police state when the Imperial Boomerang sails home. It’s the false-flag casus beli for chudwads everywhere—a deception (and profit margin) for weird canonical nerds to aspire to, not critique: stochastic terrorism as an opportunistic product/content brand—one that apes the age-old monomythic, “might makes right” Imperialism to serve Patriarchal Capitalism by policing its Realism with violence (sex and force). Such kingly xenophobia is both dogmatized and very, very lethal.

(source: 1ShotTV’s “BEST Home Defense Shotgun Ammo??? (BIRDSHOT vs BUCKSHOT vs SLUG),” 2024)

I hate men like these guys but I hate the ideology (and Capitalism) more; i.e., profiting off moral panic and persecution mania by opportunistically selling guns during a gold rush, one of us-versus-them (again, we’re the gold: as recipients and givers of state violence, mid-collapse). As Helen Slater said in The Legend of Billie Jean (1985): “You’re a pig! You don’t even know what a pig you are!” Fuckin’ oath, sis!

[8] The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and Dr. Niall Gillespie (dick): “Survival-Horror in Blood (1997): the Weaponized Affect of the Gothic FPS” (2019).

[8a] There are exceptions; e.g., Caitlin Johnstone’s April 28th tweet (abridged, 2024):

This world is so sick because nobody takes responsibility for the things that are happening in it. The rich and powerful shore up more and more wealth and power while offloading the responsibility for it onto others. They destroy the biosphere while offloading the consequences onto ordinary people, while telling us we just need to ride our bikes more and consume less in order to fix the problem. They start wars and back genocides abroad while refusing to provide for the needful at home, and if you complain they tell you you just need to vote harder next election. They take all of the power and none of the responsibility.

We can’t have a healthy world until we reverse this dynamic, and like all matters concerning responsibility that means it begins with the face in the mirror. We all need to step up to the plate and take responsibility for turning this catastrophe around, and in 2024 that means starting with the genocide our own governments are actively facilitating.

We need to unite arm-in-arm, internalizing not just the rhetoric, but the emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness such praxis synthesizes. Silence against genocide isn’t just self-destruction, but complacency leading to complicity in genocide.

[9] From a screencap, because I want an image of the webpage, for proof; re: Persephone van der Waard’s Quora answer to “How easy is it to get into Manchester Metropolitan University?” (2019). Access the original file on my Google Drive.

[10] From EMU milking me for more credits, forcing me to do an independent study by finding a free instructor (ol’ Neufeld turned me down, as did several others); i.e., with David Calonne that pointed me towards Rudolph Otto and The Idea of the Holy (1917) as eventually leading me to write “Method in His Madness: Lovecraft, the Rock and Roll Iconoclast and Buoyant Lead Balloon” (2017). In turn, the acquisition of a research supervision at an undergrad level—and the making of our own class rubric, research goal, and executing it—was actually a lesson unto itself: my graduate program in small, prep for grad school. None of this was structured in any logical, orderly way, of course. All the same, it led me down a long road I’ve already talked about in this book series (from Volume Zero):

This brings us not just to my adulthood but my postgraduate work on ludo- Gothic BDSM, which in 2017 was met with its own barriers. Working under David Calonne, I was only just learning about the Numinous vis-à-vis Rudolph Otto and H.P. Lovecraft and came across an article by Lilia Melani, “Otto on the Numinous” (2003), citing the Gothic as the quest for the Numinous: “It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for the mysterium tremendum” (source). Something about it appealed to my then-closeted kinkster as have previously been titillated by Cameron, Lovecraft and Nintendo (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write), but also the videogames I was playing at the time: Metroidvania (shortly because I went overseas, my best friend Ginger recommended Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight to me, which I eventually made the topic of my master’s thesis).

Eager to go to grad school and learn more about this exciting thing called “the Numinous,” I looked for places that taught “the Gothic” and was directed by various educators to MMU. Upon going overseas, I swiftly collided painfully against various cultural barriers when trying to express myself (and my inherited, lived trauma) through the Gothic mode as something to relay in academic language. The whole ordeal became counterproductive and traumatic in its own right, requiring me to voice my concerns regarding said baggage in connection to the larger systemic traumas I was seeking to express and overcome; i.e., by facing my own painful past in its totality. This meant coming up with a solution through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which in turn meant forming it into a teachable method for this book; but I first had to deal with my unprocessed trauma from my brief, invalidating stint in academia (four years, from 2014 to 2018, not including submitting to academic journals, attending conferences and applying for PhD programs, which lasted another year).

For me, Gothic media more broadly is cryptomimetic (writing about the ghosts between words), but also whose undead mode of expression is embroiled within academic areas of study that yield hermeneutic limitations due to recency biases and disdain for a holistic approach by academic bigwigs. For instance, I noticed these limitations myself when trying to marry the Gothic to videogames in my own graduate work as cutting-edge. It was a tactic my supervisors and academic superiors resisted, simply because videogames were either totally outside of their realm of experience, or “Metroidvania” wasn’t something that had been academically connected to games within their own fields. That is, speedrunning as a practice/documentary subject was just taking off online in 2018 (Twitch had only existed since 2011); likewise, “ludic-Gothic” wasn’t even a decade-old term at the time, was something that ambitious academics strove to stake new claims within while leaving much to be desired.

For example, the same year I wrote my thesis on Metroidvania, Bernard Perron would sum up the broader Gothic rush in videogame academia in The World of Scary Games: A Study in Videoludic Horror (2018) sans mentioning Metroidvania once:

Horror scholars such as Taylor, Kirkland, Niedenthal, and Krzywinska have therefor come to contextualize games in the older tradition of the Gothic fiction, “one of survival horror’s parents,” as Taylor states in “Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming” (2009). Furthermore, the latter even coined a new term to highlight this origin: “The ludic-gothic is created when the Gothic is transformed by the video game medium, and is a kindred genre to survival horror” […] Video games remediate many aspects of Gothic poetics: [the prevention of mastery, obscured or unreliable visions, scattering of written texts in typical Gothic locations and their lost histories, the encounter and use of anachronistic technologies, etc] (source).

Not only does Perron make no mention of Metroidvania at all, neither do any of the other scholars he cites; nor did my supervisors know what Metroidvania were when

I was researching it (nor I, with me finally settling on a concrete definition in 2021; re: the “Mazes and Labyrinths” abstract). Indeed, Metroidvania—despite being an older genre than survival horror—remains a thoroughly underrepresented area of Gothic videogame studies, and Gothic videogames remain ripe for continued study within our own lives. Indeed, I had to connect the two myself when recognizing a knowledge gap regarding Metroidvania as cryptomimetic media within videogame studies at large; and I have continued to do so as a postgrad writing about mazes and labyrinths in Metroidvania; i.e., as a niche area of study to expand upon within my own daily life beyond academia—by writing about or illustrating Metroidvania outside of conferences, but also interviewing Metroid speedrunners for fun in my “Mazes and Labyrinths” compendium (which we’ll give an example of a little deeper into the subchapter) [source].

In the end, as I shall demonstrate, here, I became more knowledgeable about Metroidvania in my thumb than Perron, Krzywinska, and Taylor, et al, were in their whole body of research. I am the Metroidvania master, motherfuckers! Is that arrogant of me to say? Fuck you, I’ve earned it, at this point! Anyone who says otherwise can kindly eat a dick.

[11] As Ward Churchill writes in “‘Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” (2005):

The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of “getting even,” a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the “terrorists” to “break even” for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that’s to achieve “real number” parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage – the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory – they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people (source).

The establishment is centrist, meaning it perpetuates conflict as orderly. There must always be an American and a Nazi, a white knight and black, but also a Communist to conflate as a Nazi to obscure class war. There’s lots of syndromes at work, here—mirror and compartment, but also virgin/whore and white knight. In short, the state’s moderates introduce and arbitrate a paradox of politeness that offers empowerment fantasies that are unironically  violent and class dormant/traitorous. They uphold the status quo’s genocide, rescuing a false equivalency (a fallen paradise) from its own rape as something to routinely bring about, arrive too late and then redeem through revenge. It’s Marx’s tragedy and farce, our parody and pastiche oscillating between degrees of irony and faith.

[11a] In short, the moderate can speak the truth through hilarious gags, but must always reel things in; e.g., Dragnet‘s 1987 camping of police shows and moral panic (“P.A.G.A.N.S.! People Against Goodness and Normalcy!” doing the goat dance and having sex with the Virgin Connie Swail!) before regressing to copaganda itself (with a community scapegoat: the false preacher). This can become aware of its own empty loop, too—e.g., Gloryhammer’s “The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee” (2014)—but this merely outlines the same historical-material cycle inside one phase of itself:

Down from the mountains
And across the river Tay
An army of undead unicorns
Are riding into the fray

Fireballs and lightning are raining from the sky
Chaos and bloodshed while all the people die
In this epic battle begins the final war
Tragedy will strike this day, prepare thee for
The unicorn invasion of Dundee

The townspeople had little hope
They were not ready for war
Fireballs make everybody die
And buildings collapse to the floor

The beautiful princess was raped
And taken to prison with cry
Angus McFife swears a mighty oath
“I will make Zargothrax die!”

The forces of darkness
Are invading proud Dundee
They must find a hero
To save its destiny

[…]

And an ominous shadow fell over the battlefield
As the evil wizard Zargothrax rode in the once mighty city of Dundee
Atop an undead unicorn of war
To enthrone himself as its new dark master! (source: Genius)

Instead of challenging the state, such blank theatrics become the myopic order of business—something to repeat and cash in on by de facto cops doing what cops always do: defend property for the elite; i.e., in all media forms utilizing the modern-day monomyth’s various cartographic, us-versus-them refrains to benefit the colonizer group playing the stage wizard, the critic, the victim. Again, it’s white boy disease, through and through. They let the princess get raped, then swoop in, “rescue” her (from their friend-in-disguise, playing the fascist) to marry her off. They all suck, but the paladin is the worst because he’s hypocritical and genocidal, rapacious—the false friend.

[12] From “The Reflecting God” off Antichrist Superstar (1996). Produced by Trent Reznor (to give the music its industrial sound). When Jadis and I listened to this, Tool’s Undertow (1993) and similar music, we looked on such nostalgia fondly. It’s possible to do both—proven by me and Jadis enjoying the high as children do, but also survivors of abuse: “Each thing I show you is a piece of my death!”

That being said, capitalizing on being a cynic, as Maynard from Tool does in “Ænema” (1996) should be wholly discouraged:

Some say the end is near
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from this (source: Genius)

This is fascist rhetoric delivered by white priviliged men, seeing the “end times” as a “vacation” that is anything but a natural disaster (though Capitalism profits off manmade interference assisting in so-called “natural disasters”); it’s an apocalypse to shoot “zombies” with until things “go back to normal.” Except they won’t during state shift, and the fascists and moderates will eat each other (unable to farm or tend the land around them, much like the original American colonists/so-called “Pioneers” were unable to). The only imbeciles who would say this is a self-centered cunt who paradoxically thinks it doesn’t apply to them; i.e., a white boy’s charmed life posturing as doomsayer and preacher cashing in on their own Kool-Aid to sell to the kiddies:

Fret for your figure and
Fret for your latte and
Fret for your lawsuit and
Fret for your hairpiece and
Fret for your Prozac and
Fret for your pilot and
Fret for your contract and
Fret for your car […]

Fuck L. Ron Hubbard and
Fuck all his clones
Fuck all these gun-toting
Hip gangster wannabes […]

Fuck retro anything
Fuck your tattoos
Fuck all you junkies and
Fuck your short memories […]

Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call L.A.
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away
Any fucking time, any fucking day
Learn to swim, I’ll see you down in Arizona bay (ibid.)

For Maynard, the whole city is the same, no distinction between Ron Hubbard (a cult leader) and junkies (a condition, not a disease—generally one experienced by the poor). It’s an incredibly cynical and reductive baseline—not intellectual at all, but the sort of dreck pitched by Hubbard, of all people. The irony is very thick and lost entirely on Maynard (who didn’t know or didn’t care at the time): they’re singing about themselves. Straight white guy disease, I tell ya—now that’s a disease, alright. It’s menticide and apathy to the rotten, eugenicist core!

Case in point, Genius’ annotation writes,

The word Ænima is a portmanteau of the words Enema and Anima.

An enema is a procedure of introducing liquids into the rectum and colon via the anus. Metaphorically, it could refer to a cleansing of another type, such as the nationwide purging described in this song.

The anima refers to one of two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind in Carl Jung’s school of analytical psychology. In the unconscious of the male, this archetype finds expression as a feminine inner personality: anima; equivalently, in the unconscious of the female it is expressed as a masculine inner personality: animus. It is an archetype of the collective unconscious and it is said to manifest itself by appearing in dreams. It also influences a man’s interactions with women and his attitudes toward them and vice versa for females and the animus (ibid.).

See that “could mean” bit? That’s called “plausible deniability.” Tool doesn’t teach people to read in between the lines; they dogwhistle—i.e., the problem with this is Jung was a quack who hit on a grain of truth that became dogma, all the more likely with such voices airing a very particular kind of dirty laundry in public: genocidal sentiment. Slapping “Jung” on it and vouching for him is a classic academic red herring/disguise, one that generally happens while saying “We’re just exploring our dark feelings”; i.e., as something to commodify and posture in equal measure. The way that Tool is doing it with this song is frankly incredibly reckless and opportunistic, but also gross. This is the epitome of privilege, of posing, of false rebellion (re, Parenti: fascism).

(source)

That moment when you realize that Tool are Nazis (a more recent version of Hawthorne’s Puritan polemic “Young Goodman Brown,” 1835). Fuck me, dead, but also—is it really so hard to believe? Like, for real. You see many black or gay rock bands in the American circuit (for a nice counter-example, listen to King’s X’ 1989 Gretchen Goes to Nebraska—an album with real critical bite and frankly better music)? Just a lot of white “rebels” doing “Roman” salutes, right? The same applies to Maynard (and whoever the other guy is).

I mean, just look at them: faux-intellectuals (I don’t wanna mention the bald head, but so-called “Nazi punks*” are a thing and very much need to be ousted from parallel societies being colonized/gentrified by middle-class white boys) cashing in on fash aesthetic/obscurantism as much as critical thought, calling it wisdom, and bashing their critics all at once (from another song off the same album, “Hooker with a Penis“):

I met a boy wearing Vans, 501s
And a dope Beastie tee, nipple rings
New tattoos that claimed that he
Was OGT, back from ’92, from the first EP

And in between sips of Coke
He told me that he thought we were sellin’ out
Layin’ down, suckin’ up to the man

Well now I’ve got some
Advice for you, little buddy
Before you point the finger
You should know that I’m the man
I’m the man and you’re the man
And he’s the man as well
So you can point that fuckin’ finger up your ass

All you know about me is what I’ve sold ya, dumb fuck
I sold out long before you’d ever even heard my name
I sold my soul to make a record, dip shit
And then you bought one (source: Genius).

Speak truth to those with fragile egos and sometimes the mask slips. In this case, it’s “prison sex”/DARVO mentality (that “boy wearing Vans” really hit the nail on the head, sheesh). Worse, it’s literally a couple hipsters dressing up homophobia (re: “Hooker with a Penis”) and Sodom-and-Gomorrah (re: “Ænima”) rhetoric they think their customers are too stupid to notice (Jadis** loved them, hahaha).

*According to Bay, and I agree, “Johnny Ramone is a boomer who cast off his punk status. Born into the post-war late 1940s, his punk pathos/veneer of world-weariness having none of the legitimacy of his punk brothers and sisters [shortly after 9/11, he said at his 2002 Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech: ‘God bless George Bush and God bless America!’]. To the credit of his wife, he was also a card-carrying Republican.” They go onto add, tangentially, “Russell Brand is apparently attempting to change his name, post-baptism, to escape public scrutiny for his alleged sex crimes; i.e., very similar to Marilyn Manson doing the same—which should speak volumes about what the Church historical does for men!” This, I would argue, includes rock stars as, oddly enough, modern-day versions of what’s known in the Gothic as the Black Penitent, or powerful male figure given protection by the Church as a means of the latter’s saving grace and the former saving face by taking in a powerful lost soul. “Let Jesus fuck you!” indeed.

Of course, the dogma has been subtly updated by Christo-fascists, the latter then and now “calling the cops” (the angel of death) on gay people—i.e., a Satanic-panic hauntology that reinvents the Bible and roll ‘n roll sophistry. These guys, like all fash, know exactly what they’re doing. They don’t say it in plain English, they code it; i.e., in dated psychobabble and thinking they’re clever while pandering to the lowest common denominator—themselves, dogs working for—you guessed it—the Man. I can’t speak to Tool in 2024, but in 1996? Sweet Jesus, they were total fucking posers straight deepthroating capital’s knob (that’s right, Jadis. You couldn’t save Tool from me, either)! Tool are tools without irony!

*The city was smote for refusing to stop idolatry and worship God, not because they had non-missionary sex (though the two are still related, 100%).

**They’re the ones who taught me about Tool to begin with, and the one who fucked off/regressed to their brutal, neoliberal side when they got their dad’s “fuck you” money (so-called “monetary reductionism”—spending money within capital is no more class warfare on its own than a boxing match is).

Don’t be afraid to critique your heroes, kids. Get mad and (always with class consciousness) straight up kill your darlings; kill ’em all (again, figuratively speaking and per Sarkeesian’s adage, of course)! Fuck their legacy and their image! Be forewarned, though: get ready to lose friends. You find out real quick who your friends are when breaking icons (as much through trepidation and angst as rage)! But if that happens, also fear not! Nazis are cunts and you don’t want them as friends anyways. When an abuser leaves you, it’s like taking a big shit: almost always a good thing (I’m channeling Kristeva—roll with it, haha). More to the point, when you stand up for yourself and have boundaries/respect for yourself and others, the real cuties will notice, start to trust and approach you/respond if you approach them. Trust me, babes; I learned from the nymphs!

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)“!

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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.

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.

“With a Little Help from My Friends”; or, Out of this World, part two: Meeting Rebels; i.e., What Inspires Us to Meet and All of It Carrying On and On (feat. Harmony Corrupted, Jack Burton, and Blxxd Bunny)

“You know what ol’ Jack Burton says at a time like this?”

“Who?”

“Jack Burton! Me! …He says, ‘What the hell?'”

—Jack Burton and Thunder,  Big Trouble in Little China (1986) 

Picking up up from where “Medieval Expression, part three/’Out of this World,’ part one” left off…

To reiterate, “Out of this World,” part one articulated what rebellion is, followed by what a rebel is and why they do what they do—then took a break to discuss modules and criminality (with several performative examples: Samus Aran and Elphaba Thropp). Part two shall now explore how to meet rebels, followed by what inspired us to meet them (hint: them, but also their sexy costumes), and what carries on as all of this repeats, repeats, repeats. Friends are people to meet, fall in love with and care for while shielding them from harm. In doing so, we change before the hypothetical clash, ready to take a bullet for them, should the need arise. Some things are worth fighting for. Some, dying[1] for (“some things eat at a man worse than dyin’!”).

Such sword-crossing push-pull is a kayfabe classic, reducing dialectical-materialism to a simple, visually impactful loop: the duel/wrestling match of pure will converted to thrown energy (from DBZ to The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance to Howard the Duck, etc). It touches on historical materialism as an endless cycle of war that—per Marx—is also the stuff of pure spoof as a result (from tragedy to farce):

“Dayman…” / “Ahhhhh!” / “…fighter of the Nightman!” / “Ahhhhh!” / “He’s a master of karate!” / “And friendship!”

But the shield (and the satire: “Gohan, dodge!” making fun of DBZ, but DBZ touching on fight or fight as also including the freeze/oscillation mechanism) goes both ways: We shield friends from harm, and they shield us from harmful influence; i.e., through the power of friendship, of love, in all its forms, friends make us better and we safeguard them, in turn. We are each of us friends and spies engaged in class/culture war. Historically this includes student revolts (e.g., Kent State) but also sex work as another side of the struggle. We’re sex pirates challenging the same-old imperial forces colonizing and privatizing sex (thus nature) as monstrous—for our own sake, but also the planet’s!

Such things often, like a trail of breadcrumbs (on purpose or not) lead like-minded souls to us: dancing like weirdo Birds of Paradise in our little art spaces (“Let me play you the song of my people!”). Like birds, this can attract mates; unlike birds, this overlaps with asexual artistic expression (nudism) and political maneuvers tied to the social-material world.

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

Note: I often self-reflect relative to emotional experience, but this section delves into a more overtly philosophical area: ontology per experience based on knowledge as something that is difficult to quantify relative to oneself doing so (“the wisest man being the one who says he knows nothing at all,” so said Socrates… because women were inferior to men and trans people didn’t exist). All this being said, I’m not a philosophy major and also don’t put much stock in philosophy as a whole (most of it a lot of white boys saying really stupid shit like their conviction will make it true). But for once, I think it will come in handy making me the object lesson, requiring I go outside of myself to do so. Let’s give it a shot!

My philosophy starts and ends with Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As we proceed, then, I want to avoid the Cartesian dualist trap of the mind and body as separate: “Have you ever seen your own brain?” being the question of someone largely dislocated from what makes them human. For me, I don’t operate like that anymore; i.e., I operate through a monomorphic system of thought that focuses on what I can observe, experience, create and interrogate/understand through Gothic principles in connection with the material world. So “brain” for me isn’t the grey stuff in my head, which is hard to quantify and not something I can play with; “brain,” for me, equals castle-narrative as both history all at once and a learning process comfortable with paradox (especially ghosts, which Volume Two, part two will examine at length).

In other words, it’s the kind of shit Cartesian thinkers absolutely fucking hate. But we are considering me from when I was younger, before I acquired the knowledge that would turn me into who I am. So regressing to a position of ignorance through the adoption of a way I don’t think about the world anymore is a good starting point (thought I will marry this to ludo-Gothic BDSM, of course).

Fourth, meeting rebels. Rebels are covert, but espionage happens in plain sight. So how do you meet a spy? Well, first you spot one—not as a totally-concealed object blending into the background like the Predator would, but as someone advertising the work that they do (as often having a class character that, on top of the images, has a bio that includes pronouns and other markers of socio-political belief; e.g., GNC flags or political slogans). That should be enough to show you the door. From there, getting your foot in (or other things) is straightforward and complicated. I’ll explain how in my usual style—through exhibits concerning popular media—but also include Harmony Corrupted and I as orbiting said media while making socio-political statements through ludo-Gothic BDSM as long-distance compatible (sex and nudism classically are).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

I get it if you feel anxious and/or confused, though. The damsel is generally the thing you have to save the world to “get,” or kill a dragon (or your mother); i.e., to do a quest, which is work and dangerous (she could reject you after it’s all said and done/doesn’t want to be rescued by some white knight who acts like she isn’t already married and happy where she is). But also, she’s monstrous-feminine in ways that evoke a Gothic energy and potential to disempower her attackers by making them empathize with her as classically hunted, kept, and killed under capital. Often, this manifests in attraction that oscillates between virgin and whore, but also overtly Gothic-coded (through appearance) images and context.

Just as “Gothic” is determined as much by context as aesthetics, function is determined by flow of power through these things; maturity of Gothic expression is both the ability to tell it apart as the audience, and garner a second-nature reaction through de facto extracurriculars (“art is love made public”) that engender systemic catharsis through labor and propaganda as something to reclaim and weaponize for worker aims: camping the canon to alter the Base and Superstructure as fundamentally linked, but shifted over to proletarian likenesses through revolutionary cryptonymy reversing the process of abjection (through parallel chronotopes and emancipatory hauntologies, etc). To that, Communism is generally defined by absence as haunted; re: the ghost of the counterfeit as “danced with” cryptomimetically during ludo-Gothic BDSM—all to make cryptonymic statements that thrive under (or at least resist) genocide; i.e., in spite of the usual Pygmalions telling us to go to the box office while playing rebel themselves (re: Lucas, Cameron). And usually we fags are in the closet it for most of it, not always exiting in a way that is immediate and or memorable.

The key is through likeness of childhood that, like a Gothic castle, promote change on the surface of themselves.

For example, I was in the closet until I was 36, leaving it slowly and then all once. I had been thinking about doing it for a long time—a process reflected in my artwork of myself and characters I enjoyed (the exhibit, next few pages)—but hadn’t really entertained the idea seriously until I started writing Sex Positivity as an extension of myself and my current knowledge base as being to evolve and change to ever new-and-improved Pokémon. Then, I thought about Cuwu encouraging me to experiment should I feel like it, and the experimenting I had already done with Zeuhl, and it suddenly made sense. I don’t have the slightest idea what I was doing when it “hit” me; i.e., like Martin Luther minding his own business when a lightning bolt suddenly struck the ground near him and he swore to become a priest afterwards. Instead, it just sort of “popped in there,” and from that point onwards I became a trans woman instead of my previous femboy (and all my other costumes)—not as a job, but way of existing tied to theatre and creative expression united under my banner. Nicholas was toast and Persephone rose from the ashes—not completely different, but like a caterpillar having emerged from its chrysalid as its perfect form (a bit like Cell, but less muscular and grim).

But now that I look at it, my past self had left me plenty of clues leading up to the big sudden change; i.e., a process I wasn’t always consciously aware of, but nevertheless showed me playing with myself over space-time: transforming before my very eyes now and back then with friends, even though I felt alone.

Let’s look at that, then see how I approach art and friends vis-à-vis popular stories now, shall we?

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1b1: Artist, Persephone van der Waard: top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right. Two or more things can be true at the same time. I was a sexually precocious child who both experienced and understood the world through Gothic media. In turn, my art a) was always as much “of me” by proxy as it was of other people I paid to model for me, or who paid me to draw their various OCs/avatars, or who I paid to draw my OC as a reflection of me [and so on]. I felt alone, but even at my most isolated, I always found friends to relate to through my work. This includes high school and early college crushes I’d draw to express my affection and attraction towards them. However, it was also based off the videogames I played and the art I subsequently made and consumed as having a similar complicated milieu—of the feminine and masculine warring back and forth between characters, but also on the surface of a given character who may or may not represent one’s identity beneath the persona: as more than a mask or temporary disguise or performance, but a morphological statement described through masks that projected myself onto various dead ringers/simulacrum.

In videogames, an avatar is someone you control who is and isn’t you, who is both sexy and tough as an asexual and sexual form of personal expression as half-real; i.e., in between fiction and non-fiction, but also the rules as enforced by the player and the text; e.g., Samus as someone who is played by cis-het men who’d sooner be caught dead than in Samus’ underwear and makeup, but which the game routinely has them stripping and exposing them as damsels in distress. Except, for me, I wanted to be tough like Samus was, but vulnerable—to fuck her and wear her clothes in a way that was much more a parody of traditional gender norms and indicative of the way I felt as a closeted trans person. When I was a young girl/teenager, I gravitated towards powerful maternal warriors like Ripley and Samus, but didn’t fully understand what about Amazons, mommy doms and Dark Mothers during ludo-Gothic BDSM appealed to me. Maybe one made sense or the other, but I loved all of them for different reasons under a common thread that eluded me: the monstrous-feminine during unequal power exchange and non-heteronormative gender expression haunted by queer elements [or vice versa].

I definitely had a type, but even this was complicated. I liked shapely and feminine, but also with martial/masculine elements to the body that were dressed up in girly clothes that had “dark” elements in the Gothic sense; i.e., they exuded Numinous power as vice-like, castle-in-small, fearsome but not. I saw Red Sonya [1985] as a kid and studied French in middle school and chose to draw a redhead named after a hag from Myth II: Soulblighter [1997]—not to condemn any element of this odd chimera, but because its hybridity was something I both looked up to, wanted to paint, dress up, exist as, and fuck. It reflected both my desire to transform and control fearsome aspects of my own abusive past through sex and gender expression. I didn’t realize it, but this was my latent identity forming before my eyes out of nearby things I took into myself.

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

I was fearless about it, too [rawr]—never afraid to mix this with that. Because of the monomythic refrain in videogames—but especially Metroidvania as inspired by James Cameron’s cartographic refrain; i.e., borrowed from older conservative science fiction authors [thus thinkers] to regress the Gothic retro-future in a neoconservative direction—such stories merge sex and force more nakedly with the openly warlike theatrics of a kayfabe exchange and neo-medieval hauntology. Samus, like Ripley before her, was generally pinned against ladyhood and demonic whoredom as something external to argue with through literal combat.

But instead of being deterred by this, I felt like it best described my mind—both how it worked and how it felt relative to my trauma and desires, my values in relation to my personality. As such, my ideas of strength weren’t simple, but context-driven; i.e., through BDSM themes within a Gothic aesthetic [of power and death] except I had exactly none of the academic language to analyze what I was doing [and wouldn’t until 2014 or so]. Instead, I just had images of “me” in quotes: likenesses that always looked ready to fight and be “conquered” in ways haunted by actual rape/disempowerment, but also guilty eroticism. It felt a bit like an out-of-body experience, but I was lucid, there were no drugs involved, and I was always ostensibly working on someone else. In a way I was because my style was always changing, thus my point of view. But it was always and forever moving towards what I am now [in ways that feel entirely unsurprising and bee-line, given my neurodivergent nature].

[artist, Persephone van der Waard: top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right]

In hindsight, it was always something else’s birthday but I seemed to be hinting at my own future genesis years before it came to pass; i.e., I was putting myself in clothes and giving a part of me, dressed up by proxy, to my friends. I wanted to be included, but also be the pretty/sexy gift both as something to look at and the “cake” to “eat”! Capitalism treats birthdays as very selfish affairs, but also discourages introspection. Self-reflecting at my own messy past, I can see trends—of me doing birthdays to begin with, but also them being a logically temporal progression where I aged along with my work as leveling up while trying on new clothes [or birthday suits]. Eventually I ditched what didn’t fit and grew into my own dark slutty self. Except I was always thinking of others while doing it, mid-exchange. I guess I was a bit vain without realizing it, but also sweet [I’d like to think] for being such a good present. I didn’t have money to give, but generally could spend as much time, thought and labor as I wished making myself up as my best possible self to give to others; i.e., as I envisioned it at that moment in time.

I’m generally accustomed to taking my sense of self for granted [aren’t we all?]. So it can feel rather uncanny thinking of oneself in the abstract like this, from the outside looking in—i.e., like watching someone from another life [a bit like O’Keefe] grow up and change before me. But uncanniness aside, it is illuminating to how much I’ve not only survived but changed for the better [“And if you survive, you will not be the same!”]. Keeping with Bakhtin’s chronotope and our other three main theories, I think my self-poetic cryptomimesis exemplified the Gothic’s core delivery methods: oscillation and potential—of the self as repeatedly redefined through monstrous tension, not a vacuum. I was always working with dolls I wanted to have sex with and dress up in positions of vulnerability that I paradoxically saw as empowered despite the aesthetic of rape. There was something paradoxical at work and I couldn’t quite place it, other than remark that I was always putting myself into this kind of mise-en-abyme; i.e., as something to revisit while viewing it as an extension of myself, but also fragments of myself given to other people as gifts [the drawing below was made for my friend Lydia’s birthday that I redid several times over the years]: pieces of my personality but also simply how my mind worked, turned inside-out for all the world to see, including me.

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

It felt like I was speaking to things inside myself that were roiling on the surface of a mirror that was and wasn’t referring to me. The secret to how my mind worked lay in how I made art to understand the world and myself, but I couldn’t fully make sense of what I saw. I had to master my craft first and then dissect it as my own gallery critic—model, invigilator, artist, writer and sex worker, etc. Eventually I’d call this process ludo-Gothic BDSM, but that was years off. For me, this puzzle was just as much a thread to weave in elements of my secret self. I played with these games like a doll would—to a doll, but also moving towards the dark, villainous ones in concentric space-time [on and offstage at the same fourth dimensional moment] I generally wasn’t allowed to control, in-game.

[artist, left: Persephone van der Waard; right: Dcoda]

Instead, I made those in my art to acquire some sense of agency over my own expression; I played dress up through a paper-doll approach that often retained a “mil spec” flavor with Revana’s beret, but also had her as my strong-soft trans avatar wearing more feminine clothes: “slutty nerdy tomboy” something I directed others regarding whenever they drew my character for me [a present to myself, while paying others for their work]. Regardless of who was holding the pen, I was always the creative director. As such, I played with cosmetically girly things; i.e., gaining agency through normally policed elements like flowers, makeup, and ribbons, groomed public hair and body piercings, etc. I merged bodily elements that were both masculine and feminine onto AFAB bodies/outfits I felt attracted to, but also saw my doing so—of trying these things on for size—as a creative outlet for its own sake [soft and shapely versus hard and muscular as something to hyphenate]. I combined both of these things with textual elements of fantasy and science fiction the way the Gothic normally does: with monsters, magic, the elements, and medieval-flavored rape fears and “torture” aesthetics; i.e., threatening a palliative Numinous regarding my own repressed queerness adjacent my childhood abuse and psychosexual frustrations I could let breathe through art.

Birthdays [a measurement of time] came and went, and I inherited myself from past copies brought forward less in decay like old diary entries and more through metamorphosis within a living document. This probably explains why I wasn’t afraid, as Baldrick might argue: I wasn’t sick of myself—didn’t feel like I was decaying or cramped but able to spread my wings and move towards a dark state of authentic existence. Given that kind of freedom to experiment and try new things without shame, I enjoyed the process, picking up new ways to think through different kinds of media interacting together to become my eventual current approach; i.e., a multimedia critical poetic that included imitating past artists; e.g., me drawing comics to partially imitate Jim Davis and Bill Waterson, but also rephrase my own past statements [action beats as much as comedic ones]: “If you’ve ever tried this, it’s like that…” I loved it every step of the way!

But also, I still felt lonely and had trouble making real-life friends—feeling like most of my friends were: invisible. I did my best, though—hosting more birthday parties for my clients and friends, all while taking my fluid, at times disassociative/dislocated, idea of “self” apart before putting it back together again; I frequently envisioned myself in various BDSM-tinged sexual fantasies that were as much about asexual gender expression as getting laid. The two often over-lapped as an endless attempt to return to old childhood things to express myself with; i.e., learning from my past as built on older hand-me-downs that, through the Gothic mode, assumed new form at a corporate level, which I took and transformed over and over again: by playing with dolls, having tea with myself as the Mad Hatter might.

[model, left: Mei Minato; right: Blxxd Bunny; artist: Persephone van der Waard]

Sometimes I felt horny and/or pretty in relation to the avatar as its own thing. But just as often, I was identifying with other people [models] as role[model]s to step into and out of again while wearing an imperfect likeness of Samus; i.e., Revana as my creative-ontological statement when encountering Samus, which had the same effect in reverse moving forward, and so on. It influenced how I dressed myself up, my friends, myself playing of/with myself as my friends superimposed over each other [Samus being my friend/playmate in an [a]sexual way as much as Blxxd Bunny [right] or Minato Mei [left] were: as model, avatar, gender role, theatrical foil, holistic mirror and personified desires, fears, shames and so on.

I don’t think such a trend of self-discovery is unique to me, though [the whole point of the Gothic is that there’s always something in the closet we take out and cavort around with when we feel enough safe to do so; i.e., alone, or with people we trust]—but my individual path is a unique combination of elements in this given cycles’ multiplayer ergodic. Fun!)

So, yeah! Having friends and relating back and forth over space and time with artwork made me the woman I am today (whatever you want to call it); i.e., having the poetic, interrelating system of thought I developed, acquiring knowledge through trying new creative and inspirational things with more and more diverse people expanding my understanding, thus capacity for empathy towards others; e.g., drawing them like my French girls long-distance, or making love on cramped student housing beds [or on the kitchen sofa when our roomies were out] in-person. As such, I learned after so many times the value in relationships, mid-poiesis: explaining things to others or relating to them through artistic abstractions of our selves/our other side (re: monsters) according to what was constantly exchanged back and forth as both separate—sex, food, BDSM, and music/other media, but also the various motives, means and materials during an exchange—and combined into new things; e.g., Jadis feeding me Wendy’s baconators because they both a) wanted to wine-and-dine me with fast food, but also because they unironically loved gas station food working as a Florida exterminator (they were a neoliberal, remember). Whatever harmful elements there were to their love language, I took it all into myself and—per the Darkening as something to transmute—made it into something harmless: “The dose makes the poison,” but also the combination, and sometimes “poison” is the cure!

That’s… both incredibly random and seriously complicated? Yes, it is! Welcome to real life! To date is to do a Communism insofar as anything else (the nuclear family model, often via monomythic endorsement) is genocidal in some shape or form. You’re either for the Cause, against it, or on the sidelines; except, standing by is to stand idle while people, nature and the environment are made into monstrous-feminine targets to shoot, kill, rape and reap for old men to count the cost: the banality of evil. Romance is basically up against anti-romance sold as Romance™ and passed off as activism and/or bread-and-circus. We have to do better! We have to do a Gothic Communism now… all without—as directors of our own wacky projects—acting all creepy and weird like Charlie Day does in “The Dayman Cometh” (an unironic Mad Hatter, below, 2019), or being victimized, vindictive and self-obsessed like Sander Cohen, trapped in his own fun house with his former jilted protégés: (“The Iceman fucking cometh, Sander!”).

Beyond all that (which we’ll keeping inspecting as we go), the verb “to meet” would seem to suggest that you can “just do it,” just find a unicorn (again, like Arthur’s coconuts). But there’s an element of chance that capital—in service to profit—treats as an opportunity to prey on others within the same old mythic structures. The classic unicorn myth is the bait of innocence; except I reached out to Harmony with neither of us having much of that! Instead, I had a project I had been working on for some time (my books) and simply asked if they’d like to be involved; i.e., “Hi, I’m working on this project and I like your stuff. Here’s my card.” And a dark goddess like them saying “Yes, hell yes!” isn’t supernatural, though it might seem as such under capital (which frames such girls-of-your-dreams as relegated to media prisons you must pay to access; i.e., good old-fashioned pimping through a commercialized Gothic mode): someone who, once you both agree, will happily accept your dick for their own reasons.

The context is what makes something sex-positive, including BDSM as Gothic by virtue of the castle we’re all trying to escape: liberation through iconoclastic art as not chained to a given approach, but often conveying popular themes by virtue of popularity and/or frequent; i.e., the unicorn’s “horn” being as much her manufactured scarcity as it is the dildo she inserts into herself as something she reclaims, action-wise, through cross-media exchanges that illustrate mutual consent and treat livable sex work (that earns a living wage) not just as a commodity but a basic human right that speaks to the rights of all peoples, animals and places raped by capital to serve profit. We’re not trying to exclude Gothic aesthetics at all; I just want to explain the context of the shoot, its actors, and the gallery agenda before we dress up in the “clothes” everyone tends to like—monsters, sex, kink and BDSM, as generally tending to show up by virtue of historical-material ubiquity and necessity.

Put in more direct language, people need food, shelter and other such things; they also need enrichment, to not feel alone; i.e., whose psychosexual play is generally ludo-Gothic BDSM as camping theatrical scenarios that, per historical materialism and dialectical-material arguments, mid-oppositional-praxis—yield a “nightmare” that weighs on your living brain (though not for the reasons Marx was referring to): the proverbial weirdest boner is that of empathy and love through rebellious theatre; i.e., the rebel is someone who sees the rebel in you and will let you fuck them to make a collective rebellious statement. In that sense, we are never alone because the past is with us, but also because we are each of us part of a larger whole, flowers in a field. Each flower is the same species (for the sake of argument) but each is beautiful. The whole point of diversity is we can bond despite being on a gradient, relating through difference to shared oppression as uneven. And purely from the idea of enjoyable activities, each person will do the same basic activity very differently.

By extension, no individual body is the same compared to its older self or others, including the pussy and other holes but also how these various pieces are used and how the person feels about using them. Zeuhl loved oral and made me appreciate cumming down their throat; Cuwu, somno; Jadis, rough sex and roleplay but also masochism; and I fucked them all missionary and doggy in PIV (only anal with Zeuhl and Cuwu).

Rather than play favorites in some kind of sex pyramid, I discovered I liked each for how they make the same activities feel special differently. And this hinges on circumstances that color the experience. Sometimes the warmth of their “blankets” is welcome, the imagery of their surface fun nostalgic, what-have-you. Sometimes it’s too warm, forcing you to disrobe, too dated (making you remove the blankets); or, it’s otherwise too safe in ways that make you lose respect for the ostensible rebel falling victim to gentrification (re: Zizek, Zeuhl, Lucas, Medrano, etc)—an effect that goes over their own heads, making them believe things that aren’t true but commonly passed off as truth for various reasons that aren’t always intentional—i.e., the Mandela effect, meaning the notion of false memories tied to the proven function of memory assigning actual images to things that didn’t actually occur but remain related to things that did: trauma as a generalization the mind tries to isolate through different abstractions (the Gothic castle/monster).

I repeat: not better than others just different (it is possible to be bad at sex, but the idea is to help each other improve or understand what you like/don’t like while having fun, not being an unironic robot/drill sergeant about it)! Sex and friendships are a lot better if you don’t put them on a pedestal. You’ll only psych yourself out and make the other person feel objectified. You can still be head over heels in love with someone and not reduce them to a homosocial life goal/notch in the belt: “Wake up and smell the roses,” as the saying goes; i.e., the one in front of you, not one from years ago that’s living in your head, rent-free. No one likes an absentee partner hung up over an ex, and relationships aren’t supposed to make your life harder. Instead, they’re supposed to enhance what’s already there and help you experience things differently than you would without someone; e.g., doing laundry versus fucking someone and then doing laundry (for that little extra pep in your step).

It’s honestly not that hard to get laid, either. You just gotta figure out what you want, state yourself clearly and openly, and maximize your odds while treating the other side like a person. Honestly, if you’re clearly available and interested, have okay hygiene and have more personality than a cabbage—i.e., don’t give off superior, desperate and/or creepy vibes—then you should do ok. In sex-positive scenarios, cuties will appreciate honesty and open communication (the less ambiguity, the better). All of these combined with someone whose confident in themselves, not an asshole, and (in my experience) sweet, loving and eager (but not desperate) to please—will do alright for themselves. But you gotta get over yourself, first, and realize the world doesn’t revolve around you; there’s another person involved, and you have to account for them making a decision based on how they feel. No one wants to be reduced to/rated unironically on a shallow-ass number system and discarded for it, nor have their agency removed during a given interaction; i.e., creative expression by illustrating mutual consent is largely what agency between people is all about: teamwork, acknowledgement, empathy.

For example, combined with the above variables, I’ve gotten laid just from having a nice smile and a ribbon in my hair (some of us we like to look nice unto itself as a form of enrichment, but if it helps you get laid, then more power to you)—i.e., someone likes what they see, they’ll act on it. Trust me. Bitches like sex; we’re human just like you are, my dudes. But there’s not perfect situation that works every time because people aren’t predictable unless you coerce them through fear and dogma, which is abusive and wrong. But even then, there’s a reason virgin/whore syndrome is a thing. Morality aside, compelled sex is boring. But removing the subjective element, it’s also unethical in ways that lead to transgenerational abuse (the dick measuring of rape and bodily damage, kill counts, etc).

We need to challenge capital in small, not embody it! So, learn what tends to work. Then, when something does happen, don’t just enjoy it, but make it a night to remember! Learn from it, but also turn it into memories whose material reminders pass better lessons on! Fuck a horror nerd/gore hound, goth cutie, or metal head, then showcase why human, animal and environmental rights matter!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Think of such penetration as an exchange between bartering parties offering up a combined record given back to the world; i.e., as tribute to a symbiotic relationship whose mergers are far more common than once-in-a-billion years (source tweet: Sailorrooscout, 2024). They get cum and attention, you get to cum—win-win! preserving ourselves as living effigies whose hard out shell scratches/loves the easily-upset to expose their bad-faith antics, thus true intentions. Sex Positivity isn’t a self-help book with the promise of easy answers through minimal work, then; quite the contrary, things only become easy when we’ve put in the work to make them seem easy (thought once things are on good terms, the tolerances increase, allowing for more to be said that will work; i.e., to such a degree as you can be very silly with your work choices—e.g., “I love you my bacon sandwich with provolone cheese”—and it will work because humans communicate as much through context, symbols/shorthand/slang and tone of voice/body language as they do words. They animalize each other in sex positive ways that, sadly, can become Pavlovian; e.g., dogs being man’s best friend, conditioned in ways that uphold capital through all of the above linguo-material factors (something we talk about quite a bit in Volume Zero; I recommend you check it out).

It’s why people can fart or swear in front of other, or talk dirty during sex… which again becomes its own arbitration process regarding sex and force; i.e., as put in quotes by trustworthy people who make us feel comfortable/relaxed and vice versa to fart or swear, thus show vulnerability around and agency towards). But as always, there are no guarantees in life, save that people are both unique and members of the same species of flower, all of which are beautiful in their own way. I love all of my muses, friends, and lovers; they’re this queer bitch’s extended found family. Diversity is strength, and there’s always someone who knows more about a particular subject matter or area, or someone who has unique input through a different perspective about a similar topic, etc. all are valuable and welcome, provided they’re sex-positive. This includes—per Lewis, Hannah-Freya Blake and I—palimpsests; i.e., “bad” impressions (what John Carpenter’s The Thing would call “imitations”) that constitute the learning process ever present in human language as a series of poetic exchanges.

In turn, Dorothy needs friends, and she and her friends need a wizard to pimp them out with all the tricked-out luxuries of Emerald City life, they need (dualistically speaking) a wicked witch with flying monkeys, ruby slippers, Munchkinlanders, tic-tocks, and so on. The Grinch had Max, Frankenstein had Igor (a hilariously cartoonish version of Henry Clerval from the book: a step-and-fetch-it in both cases). A knight needs her armor, her horse, lance, lady and lady’s favor as a sometimes-literal-but-often-figurative extension of each other/collective solution to capital’s one-size-fits-all approach of unironic sex and force to serve profit. There’s no “hierarchy of value,” in that respect. Some people are serious (the straight players of the bunch), some are silly (the jokers); all matter provided it goes towards something sex-positive. And yes, this extends to token cis-het friends, too (every queer person has at least one; e.g., a fag hag to watch their backs/to keep tabs on/with regarding the larger world of the Straights), but also popular media as often having a straight bent that queer make gay in hindsight—not by altering the text, but seeing in differently and changing the performance ourselves in our own work.

Five, what inspired us to meet rebels. The answer isn’t just them, of course, but the media we all grow up with giving us courage and ideas (the naughty sort). It’s always a chance, reaching out to new folks on the figurative Yellow Brick Road (and coming out to them to help us all relax better); they might act weird (some have[2]), but just as often they’re not interested for one reason or another. All you have to do is ask; the worst they’ll usually do is say no. Like with all of my partners and muses, though, Harmony said yes. “Going for it” is less about having “all the answers,” and simply rolling with the punches to be “heroic” in different forms; i.e., heroes are capable (“No one laughs at a master of quack fu!”), but also kind of bumbling; e.g., like one of my favorite childhood/John Carpenter films, Big Trouble in Little China (1986):

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1b2: I’m not normally a big fan of movie kisses, but this one from Big Trouble in Little China takes the cake! Kurt’s the perfect cocky himbo and Kim’s makeup and marriage getup is straight fire [the green contacts are fun, too]. Okay, okay! I’m biased; I can’t help it! Mom saw it in theatres when she was preggers with me, and I saw it many more times on VHS, DVD and online. But I’m not blind to its flaws; the movie as a text is problematic—i.e., straight ’80s fantasy schlock [originally a Western with magic in it] set in San Francisco Chinatown as an odd form of half-serious Orientalism.

To that, Miao Yin is the classic damsel-in-distress—beautiful but passive, nearly entirely without a voice [saying six words in the whole movie: “Yes” and “I don’t belong to you!”]. Compared to her, Kim’s Gracie Law is the usual white girl Nancy Drew admitting to everyone [and the audience] that she’s always sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong while enduring a classic settler-colonial problem: she was born into a settler colony [“This is my neighborhood!”] and wants to do good [“You sleep in your office?”]. So, yeah, the film’s “of its time,” ostensibly a statue [or bride] with blind eyeballs:

From a meta standpoint, though, Carpenter’s movie speaks to the ways in which love can bloom in between text and performance as shared across space and time. The production we see isn’t how the actors probably felt, 100%, but there is some element of it captured onscreen, nonetheless; likewise, through all the chaotic fun, we need to remember that what we’re seeing isn’t an actual arranged wedding [the elevator kiss] but a performance of one that gives the actors [and the people observing them] some room to work and convey things with their eyes, their body language, their chemistry as a means of relating back and forth with us. This isn’t meant to steelman the Patriarchy in perpetuity or anything. Is Sex and the City a terrible show? Yes. Is Kurt Russel always playing bigoted creeps later in his career? Yes! Is this kiss still ontologically its own thing and representative of the chaos of real relationships spoken in a play-within-a play—i.e., actors playing characters dressing up in the story to play a false wedding that leads to a true one that could, somewhere in real life, come to play out in similar fashion? Hell-fucking-yes, babes! So many times I’ve found myself experiencing profound and uncanny déjà vu: standing in that elevator asking myself the same question—not in an actual elevator [or standing up] but a figurative one enjoying the company of some big-lug Amazon or diminutive minx melting my heart [and milking my girl dick] while I gasp: “Oh, my god! Is this really happening! My hero!”

In other words, life is like a bad play that can be approached with a certain amount of skill, mid-rarefaction/mimesis to get you—yes, you—very laid [or flush in whatever social-sexual engagements you prefer]! You just gotta acclimate yourself to the process and not be a world-class creep; i.e., nothing scares cuties off more than desperation, and you need to be happy with whatever friendships that you and said cutie[s] are comfortable with/openly negotiate as adults. Harmony and I are FWBs, Bay and I are life partners, and we [and all my other muses and business partners] are routinely some combo of art/porn. As such, we’re all happy as clams… doing clam stuff. So find your people, then make a production out of it! Jack says, “It’s all in the reflexes!” but wouldn’t have lasted two seconds without Wang. In turn, Wang and Jack were best buds, but Wang was hopeless without Miao Ying [to the point of codependency, one could argue]. But what matters, here, is they work together as a group of friends to solve a massive problem: a general and his videogame-grade lieutenants and henchmen magically appearing literally out of thin air [and later inspiring Ed Boon’s Raiden from Mortal Kombat, 1993].

To this, the usual debate—of that problem constituting the same old ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection—doesn’t change the fact that teamwork is important; swap Lo Pan for capital and you’re golden: “The Wing Kong Exchange? The most dangerous cutthroat den of madmen in Chinatown? You can’t just waltz in and out of there like…” / “Like the wind! Yes I can, Miss Law. My mind and my spirits are as one!” / “As two, I said I was coming!” It’s not supposed to be taken seriously which is why I think it works; the spectre of racism is very much felt but also not the point. Wang is the hero, Jack is his sidekick, and the villain of the movie—while worryingly Asian and projected onto the far-off Orient like some demon warlord mob boss—is punished not for being of Asian descent, but for being a sex predator. By comparison, Cameron’s monomythic canards in Aliens make such friendships impossible. You see Ripley making friends with any xenomorphs? Thought so.)

Despite how wacky and monomythic such a story like Big Trouble in Little China can seem, it and stories like it do mirror my own life as seeming to follow the same-old Hero’s Journey: go into Hell, conquer death, get girl (the vanity of the monomyth also synonymizing these things—except again, you can’t kill nature or death any more than you can kill Medusa or make someone love you who doesn’t). Except it’s neither that simple nor that binary in the movie or my case (or most peoples’, if we’re being honest); i.e., we relate to partial likenesses of all our yesterdays that we—our sum of internal [neurons, DNA] and external [childhood events, media, choices] elements factor into a collective sum: as passed along in fragments of itself, becoming objects instead of subjects but haunting the former with the latter as shared. This means that whatever patterns we see in others—no matter how different they seem to us—can still apply to us and vice versa.

First, Jack evolves, finding his courage. Returning to our epigram, “What the hell?” is what he says after drinking the magic potion (a symbol for “leveling up” in gamer lingo); the opening line before his Hero’s Journey is much more craven and in line with his character up to that point: “When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol’ Jack Burton always says at a time like that: ‘Have ya paid your dues, Jack?’ / ‘Yessir, the check is in the mail!'” This is the classic line given by men late on their child support—a dude who isn’t ready for commitment or heroism who suddenly finds himself, like Bilbo, having an adventure (“Dread nasty things! Make you late for dinner!”). In Jack’s case, he’s a vagabond and they steal his horse; he has to get it back. And by the end of the movie, he loves and leaves Gracie for the truck!

Despite the movie playing out like a videogame (monomyth), Jack’s behavior shows preference beyond dogmatic standards (or rather among them: “She’s trouble[3]“)—i.e., people aren’t videogames (which the neoliberal model generally provides under); they’re persons you treat with respect, meaning the courtesy of permission and agency of saying no, mid-contract[4], and not being hounded for it. As such, characters like Jack Burton are larger-than-life and down-to-earth in ways we often feel reminded of regarding people we have the hots for—cuties like Harmony Corrupted, for instance, who seemed ripped from a (Gothic) fairytale themselves!

To that, I very much used to be like Jack before his adventures; i.e., afraid but acting tough. Eventually I faced my own challenges, grew as a person, and become my true self as comfortable knowing what I want informed by the world around be as shaped by past examples of itself in small. By that same token, Jack took the power of the world (the magic potion) into himself, thereby learning what he wanted (or thought he did, anyways) by the end and kept at it, able to go his own way (without the MGTOW vibes). So did I, the two of us having common ground despite our mutual differences—a bit like him and Wang in that respect! Yeah, we’re ultimately very different people and its expressed through equally fragmented, abstract means (again, monsters), but similarity amid differences is felt across shared stories relatedly to differently during a pedagogy of the oppressed made up of unique experiences to alienating factors. Point-in-fact, it’s what Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM are all about!

Also, despite my evolution, uncanny reflection and confidence earned in spite of that doesn’t just apply to myself; it also involves my current friends on similar journeys. Knowing what I know, I want to clue them in on my magic potion as something to exchange through comraderie in all its forms (sex or otherwise) and hopefully continuing learning and growing myself as a person, too. Friendship is us sharing drinks to exchange whatever is needed to overcome ancient problems carried into the present moment and its systems; i.e., Imperialism and capitalism, in our case. When relating to others who faced the same problems, we tend to forget that what we’re relating to is not a living person, but a likeness of one we recognize and relate to during an object lesson at different points in our lives (itself rather tricky as we’re always in the present—find it impossible to image what it will like to be old when we’re young but cannot return to a state of grace after we’ve grown up), which goes on and on; or, as The Scorpions so aptly put it, “Life’s like a sea without end!” (“Life’s Like a River,” 1975).

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

“To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” People are both not cakes and are cakes, in a sense; i.e., a byproduct of different ingredients tied to different thought processes gained as much through trial-and-error mishap as following the recipe. Sometimes blind faith is bad; sometimes, details/repeat exercises become “stim toys” that feel good and help us rest, relax and reflect (absorb and retain, reload and repeat)—to digest, fart, laugh about, then fuck (to metal, of course), play videogames, cuddle, go for a walk, on and on; e.g., Zeuhl and I fucking to Tangerine Dream, then me going to write a grad-school essay to Sodom’s Agent Orange (one of YouTube’s best recommendations, 1989) or the OST to Bomberman Hero (one of Zeuhl’s best recommendations, 1998) while Zeuhl went to make a music video about nature twinks, a Twitter boy bot, or Tarot minigame loosely dedicated to Oscar Wilde, etc.

Eventually we get an eye for such things as something to capture in art of all kinds. We start to envision the process as able to potentiate all cakes through the creation of one suggesting all others (on the surface, per the Gothic); i.e., we acquire the intuition through what to avoid and what to try as a means of engagement as much as singular events—which, again, can all become acquired and maintained at a cultural level relative to the Wisdom of the Ancients: as a second-nature affair relaying a reflexively investigative and poetic pedagogy of the oppressed moving privileged people out of their comfort zones.

Ultimately this should be the middle class, relating to aliens by going native “on Mars” (or some other analogy for “other”). It is both childlike and mature, written and oral, and we should always prepare to be able to create to assist in this transition as enriching and weaponizing our labor value through our reclaimed bodies; i.e., like Hamlet and his writing desk; e.g., like me with my portable “writing desk”: my phone and Google Docs always on me, for whenever I get inspired. The guide for life is a concentric maze unto itself, less leading you out of the ever-changing corridors, and more making the maze (and its monsters, items, power-ups, and other devices) your fearful home to play in; i.e., the monsters are your friends, BDSM/dance partners; e.g., like Castlevania or The Crypt of the Necrodancer (2015). The music takes us back not just to the text, but an earlier time in our lives that we look back on according to everything attached to it brought forward (e.g., Godsmack’s “Moon Baby” [1998] reminding me of when I was eleven, playing Half-Life [1997] for the first time).

The trick is to meet similar people as having a transformatively positive effect on us, but sometimes through different complements; i.e., an element of stability to lend the chaotic elements a sturdy foundation—not because the person is stable through their personality alone, but because they’re learned to find balance regarding who they are in relationship to you and the world; e.g., Bay and I, but also Saul Goodman and Kim Wexler. They grow together, then apart, then reunite in the end for one last rekindling of the old flame—in short, they “colorize” our black-and-white lives, teaching us to see in color as something to make again ourselves with others (when Kim is gone, Saul will continue to help the oppressed inside the prison system; i.e., he never stopped being a lawyer):

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a2b: Model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. “But cubism!” Hannah Gadsby joked, regarding Picasso as a sexist pig who burned women’s portraits on purpose: “To destroy the past she represents.” In response, we should do the opposite—capturing all sides of someone to showcase the best parts; i.e., what Houston calls “A Lifetime in a Moment” [2022]: “Senorita, you’re still on my mind! And I hope that life has treated you kind!” All the possibilities in the world existed, and continue to exist in those fuck-puppy eyes—beckoning you to come inside, to “embrace eternity” [that was a Mass Effect reference] together! In doing so, you can discover some semblance of Cuwu in others; i.e., “other” as in this ghost of them I have left behind, mid-exhibit [from a song they’re sing as we fucked, or after]:  

Bought a chain, get another
With the bands from your mother
Dropped out of school, misfit in trouble
Misfit, misfit in trouble

Queen shit, queen shit level
Misfit, misfit in trouble
Misfit, get the fuck on my level
Bad bitch, queen shit, icon 

Eat spit, get dicked with the lights on [Slush Puppy’s “EAT SPIT!” 2021]. 

They were and continue to be the spirit of adventure for me—of getting into mischief [and into them] as an eye-opening/mind-altering experience: the slut to summon and expand your mind through your other organs of perception, of thought, of creation as hopelessly intertwined.)

 

“I love how your mind works!” Craig Dionne told me once, said mind coming from a family of certified weirdos. I became determined to find others like me (unicorns) that shared Craig’s enthusiasm. In terms of us as living documents and the world reflecting us and vice versa, we should be able to update not just our entries, but entry modes/coding input as we go. This adaptability and creativity will reflect in the world as an extension of us and vice versa; i.e., what we put into it and vice versa, there and back again: “as you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you,” except sex-positive monstrous poetics are vital to our surviving of state criminogenesis (Nietzsche throwing the baby out with the bathwater in Beyond Good and Evil[5], 1886). Learning is taking from others what you apply yourself and/or with them to make the world a better place; it’s to learn to laugh and not take ourselves too seriously but also juggle and be serious in silly ways, camping canon as essential reading by virtue of us fucking with it.

The social takeaway is to find people who accept our good, non-harmful qualities and challenge us to change our bad, harmful ones—to think through monsters and cartoons[6], heroes and moral dilemmas, but also not judge us for our quirks, odious habits (excessive snoring, accidental farting or other things we can’t control[7]) and past mistakes provided we’re willing to change (regarding the more serious ones); and all while, they’re silly themselves in response—e.g.,

• lighting our junk up while singing Electric Six’ “Danger! High Voltage” (and showing us the amazing music video [2002] as ludo-Gothic BDSM par excellence—”danger” + excitement)
• farting long and loud in a pink unicorn t-shirt/white panties while engaging in a staring content with us (that one’s a keeper)
• wiggling out of their clothes, pressing their butt into your crotch while in bed and saying to you, “What are you waiting for! Warm my ass up!”
• threatening “torture” and death through psychosexual theatre as cathartic and educational, but also a brand to advertise within capital forcing people to adopt its system to survive (as sex workers must, like all workers; i.e., Medusa becomes a brand, a joke, a product, with a commentary inside and upon its surface)

(artist: Midna Ash)

Positive or negative, these might all seem like trivial, little things; but per Robbie Hart and Eric Draven, nothing is trivial; i.e., when Zeuhl left me, I was both shocked and not shocked: by the little things suggested but not openly communicated. As such, I still felt bothered by how they acted like things were fine while obviously having planned their escape for some time. I learned from this, and used it to my advantage with Jadis and Cuwu. All their likenesses became a part of me—like the blue Jedi ghosts from Star Wars, but sexier and/or funnier and self-referential (“I am the butt ghost; I am going to eat… your butt…“).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Genocide is incumbent on eradication—not of one portrait of the imaginary past alone, but all of them through the ability to play with said past during liminal expression/gender trouble (sex and gender as radically separate/detached from biology but interrelating back and forth) as anathema to the church of profit, of Cartesian thought and heteronormative expression, etc. Development is liberation, which becomes the past as something to reclaim within historical materialism (time-as-a-circle); i.e., it always involves play during ludo-Gothic BDSM to synthesize praxis (me, reclaiming my older art as something to feel more pride in now than I did back then).

Think of meeting people and becoming friends like solving puzzles, then. To that, games are an effective way not just to play but to learn between the games we play together as distributed across all registers. This can be intended play or emergent play. The difference with some humans versus, say, all bees (Ze Frank’s “True Facts: Bees That Can Do Math!” 2024) is that humans can do both intended and emergent, but also emergent to challenge profit, and all while still having fun! Unlike bees, we’re potentially better at multitasking because our brains are so much bigger. The problem is, most people not only don’t use most of their brains (the old 15% argument) but devote games, play and mastery towards monopolizing emergent play in defense of profit (which bees have no concept for—”For me, sir, the question is totally without meaning!”).

This includes our species-unique abilities to communicate and learn: to lie/conceal, act, and rape, but also consent; i.e., camp canon as something only humans can do/create: putting “rape” in quotes by illustrating mutual consent, while also compartmentalizing trauma as a linguo-material device with complex (symbolic) social functions (the flow of power towards or away from the state) that frequent Gothic (monstrous) forms. These, in turn, achieve multiple functions at the same time—pleasure through play as an oft-imaginary means of social-sexual enrichment, learning and rebellion through gender identity and psychosexual struggle: at cross purposes with the state and the elite; i.e., both of us existing as separate, oppositional classes of existence within capital by design. Drama, comedy and satire are all unique to humans as part of a bigger world; so are games in this larger paradigm we want to liberate ourselves from with, meaning through sex work making iconoclastic art (through nudism, dress-up and sex, etc).

(artist: Nuclear Wasabi)

All games teach something. Our undead, demonic, and/or anthromorph BDSM costumes—our potentially satirical, ironic exchange rituals—happen uniquely during games as subversive coding behaviors (forbidden knowledge) and unequal distributions of power that educate people about trauma through social-sexual engagement; i.e., as a sex-positive, iconoclastic teaching device. In short, we can lie, act, tell jokes, and camp/canonize on a gradient of social-sexual expression that is more or less unique to humans, but which doesn’t unilaterally affect us and nothing else. Humans involve the rest of nature in their silliness, making us the slavers or stewards of our jungle friends.

Not only is the state a superorganism guided by abstract forces (the Shadow of Pygmalion); but certain workers become very good at convincing themselves and others the state is the only way forward; they adopt ruthless, cunning and brutal methods to keep others in line: concentric veneers, premeditation and lying in wait (ambush) to gentrify labor and its art/games. Except their infiltrators don’t have monopolies on violence, terror and monsters any more than the elite and its trifectas do. Their enforcement of terror vs counterterror can be reversed through the natural duality of human language as anisotropic.

By comparison, Gothic Communism is a superorganism that arranges power horizontally. It does so by recognizing the class character of warring relationships between games and players in ways that can be used—per ludo-Gothic BDSM and liminal expression—to learn through emergent play during multi(p)layer, linguo-material, social-sexual interactions across space and time; i.e., as games to play to process historical-material (complex) problems in the abstract, either solo and together, through ergodic (non-trivial) means: through negotiated, half-real ludic contracts where games master/code (re: Giddings and Kennedy) players but for which players can likewise work within this paradigm (me: ludo-Gothic BDSM) to achieve mutual consent, post-scarcity and liberation (This is where I’d say “Yeah! Science, bitch!” except I much prefer the Gothic and natural philosophy [re: Shelley] as liberated from Cartesian edicts of dominance and submission).

To conclude this sidebar on games as social-sexual creative exercises, I’m always playing and creating with other people as a means of practice; give me a blank page and it becomes an opportunity to fill up with new useful information and play (what do you think these volumes are)? To that, I could continue this poetic ramble, but let’s put a pin in it for now and proceed! C’mon, everyone! Let’s mosey!

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

I turn 38 in less than two months, but feel like I’ve already lived so much—and while I’m not exactly Gandalf, Mr. Miyagi, King Kai or Yoda—I still feel excited to pass my knowledge along (as a poetic, Gothically critical system of thought) to all of my friends, but especially an eager younger person like Harmony Corrupted, who will undoubtedly retain and carry what I impart forward to help themselves and others when I am gone. Students like that are rare, but don’t have to be challenging in the difficult sense. More so, they’re always intrigued and interested, which in turn pushes me to be a better teacher! So, sure, it can seem impossible just how cool and hot Harmony is, but also how smart—not because “Capital tells me that AFAB people are naturally stupid, so wow! You’re really ahead of the curve!” but rather, that Harmony is just smart, sexy and hot unto themselves; i.e., as a comrade I feel lucky to spend time with (similar to when I spent time with Cuwu and would say “I’m so lucky!” To which they would respond, “You’re so special, Nicholas!” before booping my nose and squeezing my dick with their cunt).

Bakhtin classically defines heroism in the Ancient Chronotope as one of motion through vast space-time expressed in oral, poetic shorthand—”the road,” he calls it. As such, you meet enough people and get fucked over/treated well enough, you have enough triggers to warn you of danger but also skills to work through your baggage and communicate yourself to all manner of cuties who will treat you right; i.e., as you roll the dice for the umpteenth time, navigating risk through educated guesses, acquired intuition, and learning from past mistakes and successes (it is all in the reflexes!): to spot green and red flags amid doubles, counterfeits, a hall of monsters, mirrors, what-have-you. But this remains a gradient unto itself—one with a tremendous amount of luck involved; i.e., a liminal space whose magical realm of infinite possibility is moved through to encounter special events and peoples in tenebrous membranes—not “Hell” as elsewhere, but right here on Earth as merely alienated from us in all its usual forms: “Be where you are; otherwise, you will miss most of your life.”

Turns out, I was off in my own little world for much of it, but one I’ve thankfully discovered I can make with others and share together with the world; i.e., as an actively sex-positive process. Along with my other muses, Harmony and I can celebrate each other’s birthdays while offering each other gifts that include taking off each other’s clothes while still making art that speaks to who we are as people, as friends, as activists! And, per any kind of activity with someone you care about (though especially sex), you don’t wanna rush it, but make it last—not just to enjoy it (though that’s a huge part of it) but to contribute towards something special that you both leave behind for others to discover and learn from!

That being said, there’s a lot of pressure to meet, perform, do well, and not blow it, especially surrounding sex (so called “first-date anxiety” and the desire to meet someone who fucks; i.e., on the first date[7a]). Finding theatrical, artistic (ace) ways to relieve the tension[8] can not only help you relax and perform better in bed; it can enhance the experience through ludo-Gothic BDSM and build on the social side of things (the ace bonds, gender expression isolated from sex, which is important for support groups); i.e., by including elements of calculated risk that help you function better and face your respective, overlapping and surrounding trauma—in short while figuring out your boundaries, your yums, your yucks, etc. It becomes not “What would I do?” having never done something before, but the same proposition speaking from experience.

This is called learning, which is what knowledge is. Except people aren’t born knowing what they want (thus know in the future); they have to figure it by meeting their future self through the looking glass (re: monsters, likenesses). If you want to draw cuties and make sex-positive art through social-sexual exchanges, you must go where these can happen (maximize your odds) while experimenting to figure out exactly what that means for you (trial and terror) learning from past examples (media, people or both).

Americans tend to underestimate the value (and harm) of what we put into the world; i.e., our creative, pedagogic legacy as pro-capitalist (sex-coercive), or pro-worker (sex-positive). This neatly mirrors the kinds of pressure we feel to meet others expressed in popular stories similar to Big Trouble in Little China (or rather, to the monomyth at large, which Carpenter’s film follows rather faithfully despite its apparent wackiness)—the attractions that happen to us whether we want them to or not:

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a2b: Artist, left: Trey Barks; right: Akira Toriyama. Capital has a tendency to sexualize the Amazon [and other monstrous-feminine] as war brides/waifus for the emasculated guy who will never live up to the great heroes of Western canon; e.g., Krillin and Android 18, above, but also Samwise Gamgee and Rosie Cotton, whereupon the female agent’s “agency” is canonically determined by sexual function-as-action [a pre-1700s sexuality, per Foucault] and the hero, much in the same; i.e., to rescue her by virtue of saving the world, thus deserving pastoral bliss: getting to enter and “water” her “garden of paradise.” For the more awkward nerdy men, this means overcoming the threat of a dominant feminine “tomboy” type to conquer by putting in a wedding dress, then impregnate [the surrendering of power and wealth Radcliffe’s novels fell victim to].

To that, the commercialized monomyth synonymizes sex and relationships with “saving the world” as a means of upholding Capitalist Realism through heteronormative canon’s amatonormative narrative arcs [extortable “shotgun wedding” systems]. In turn, young AMAB people conditioned to be boys, per the Man Box, develop “prison sex” mentalities that trap both them and AFAB people in the same dimorphic scheme. It puts a lot of pressure on both, but also fosters anisotropic resentment when the dogma becomes harmful or fails to live up to what it promises.

The liberation, as usual, lies in Blake: 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour [source]. 

People are precious, and to save one is to save the world entire. But “saving” isn’t through great deeds; it’s through subversion of oppressive dogma as something not just to recognize but perform in opposition to, from every waking moment in our everyday lives. People like being respected, but not having their asses kissed [or kicked] in a way that makes them feel like they aren’t people/that they don’t have a choice, right or say in things: a pedestal for a glass menagerie. Except, the reality is much more humbling. Men are generally quite fragile, and women are generally made of sterner stuff per the historical-material system forcing them to be; i.e., during social-sexual engagements. During social ones [which canonically predicate on sex as something to control in a wider market through a novel-of-manners], women are the gatekeepers, the navigators through matriarchal skill, not patriarchal decree. During regular old sex, a pussy is very hard to break, but the person topping [male, female or intersex] will generally tire much faster!)

In short, it’s easier to meet people and make friends of all kinds, not find that perfect “silver bullet” to answer all your problems with, fairytale-style (which is unfair to ask of anyone, but also canonically violent). Meeting cool people can seem daunting given the size of the world and the sheer astronomical odds of something happening or not. Such rationalizing isn’t really productive, though (“a watched pot never boils”). Just relax, keep an open mind, guard yourself but don’t be weird, be cool, put your best self forward, know what you want, communicate what you want, etc, and see where things lead. Then, when you’re locking lips (or bumping uglies) with a god or goddess in a weird underground dungeon you both built, you can gasp, think “My god, is this really happening!” and then just enjoy it! Keep building friendships that make social-sexual exchanges quick and easy but deep and profound.

To that, Harmony’s awesome, and I love our friendship exactly as it is—the princess who doesn’t need saving (“Into the garbage chute, flyboy!”) and the other princess who can work with her during ludo-Gothic BDSM to raise the rights for all workers. To Harmony, I can only gush at your subversive power (the topos of the power of women, in medieval thought): “My hero! A dragon and a damsel, a mommy dom and a comrade, my Medusa-smirking at Perseus. You’re the best!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

God, what a weirdo! you’re probably thinking. Guilty as charged! Except, the presumed audience for this book is weird-ass adults reaching for a Gothic maturity to better the world with. This brings us to the sixth (and last) step we’ll examine, followed by what carries on as all of this repeats, repeats, repeats:

Sixth, rebellion; or, doing a Gothic Communism. This constellation of smaller points weighs the Song of Infinity as something to grapple with, but also welcome and teach, facing the void. This will include meeting all manner of people and puzzles on the road. Except keeping in tradition with my older volumes, we’ll present our examples in a more symposium-esque, messy and road-like way to surprise you with (if you’re surprised at this point, you haven’t been paying attention); not all roads are mapped and why spoil the fun, eh?

The idea isn’t so much to “make it weird” at all, then, but embrace what’s already weird as something to “make gay” by camping canon as an obscured future cloaked by the fog of war as released as much by ourselves as our enemies. We’re all fucking weird, thanks to Capitalism; the key to praxial success (thus happiness) is thoroughly non-linear and obstruse, amounting to “building weird beacons (castle or otherwise) to attract like-minded folk and start a movement of fellow weird nerds having weird nerd sex, weird nerd babies, weird nerd ideas” (often revisiting them and building “in the dark”; e.g., me and Metroidvania). The results might seem odd, but I assure you there’s a method to the madness. For all the darkness and doom they posture, if you build a Gothic castle, we will come (or cum, maybe both), meaning they’re the one place GNC people feel like we can be ourselves—can strut our stuff, slay and not be judged or attacked for it; i.e., a safe space of “danger” that paradoxically sets us free through asexual play regarding sexual topics (another Gothic paradox), and one whose ludo-Gothic BDSM hides itself as “a midden of trash” our enemies forever underestimate: an “old” messy tom(e/b) to romance, hence learn to think differently while camping the ghost of things inside the castle as ongoing (again, we’ll continue exploring this train of thought in “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph,” in Volume Two, part two). In short, nothing is sacred except our rights, including the ability to make fun (thus disempower) “sacred” things by “making them gay” (ambiguously[9] or otherwise):

(artist: Hark! A Vagrant)

As for my “castle” and its sequential role in things, clearly modesty and poetic restraint are not its strong suits (thought I have tried my best to clamp things off for you, here—to make the mess of this survey in excess quick and manageable). I could go on all night (and, in fact, have been writing this section for weeks); I want to, eager to say more, to give “enough” examples, but feel like I’ve covered all my bases plentifully[10] to speak on larger dialectical-material forces (and have taken enough “cum” from enough donors showing me their amazing booties).

It’s all here and the book, my biomechanical fortress and its mutually negotiated context, should honestly speak for itself. Memento mori are why gorehounds like me watch horror movies. But as the writer of this section who loves it to the extent that I liken it to an orgasm (a temporary loss of control likened to “death”), I have to choke its growth and switch codes a bit, lest the gushing arterial flow drown me and you (to let the soupy metal cool and harden, lest I play with it forever); but as is, my “sum of emissions” remains yet another child and one that I’m just as proud of—my favorite volume, in fact. Don’t merely use it to your advantage as you wander around inside; take what’s useful to open your minds and your hearts (so to speak). Drink of the yummy jizz and feel your mind expand tumescently (swollen with love, pregnant with knowledge, engorged with—ok, I’ll stop); let it loosen strict, rigid minds so they become liquid enough to swim around the very stuff that leads to the kinds of “stepping stone” conclusions we need to escape Capitalist Realism with.

As for the rest, then, someone else will undoubtedly make use of its heaps of rubble—to build with their own liquid (whatever that is) that hardens the structure enough to give it shape, but maintain its generative effect on future burgeoning minds wanting to raise their own structures forever forwards—not a single person beating a dead horse, but a popular idiomatic contagion built up to inoculate us beating an army of drums (or horses, whatever makes racket or raises Cain[11], etc). That is, this book’s exhaustive (and erotic) medieval bag of tricks (treasure trove, art gallery or kitchen, etc) offers copious metaphors useful for speculative thought in “ancient” (Gothic) forms; i.e., it consists of ancient things like magic, myth, and monsters used in relation to Capitalism, a recent phenomenon and a far more cartographic, panoptic/myopic one that thrives on alienation, on policing bodies and medieval expression through unironic force and sex. It’s all there for you to find, based on a life like mine as one full of cuties, monsters, sex and adventure the likes of which dreams are made of.

Any healthy relationship takes work when it evolves, and has its share of growing pains. Relating to other workers (or at least considering the idea), I invite you to consider yours in connection to capital: a disease that takes everything. Surviving it requires a certain give and take but also daring invention and creativity to arrive at a healthy (thus stable) juncture. Development of Gothic Communism, then, must contend with linguistic duality insofar as prescribed modesty is moderation for those persons who frankly don’t have to deal with settler colonialism affecting them as much as those for which modesty (silence) is a death sentence. Those with privilege can afford to settle, thus groan, at poetic clichés like the Gothic’s, calling them masturbatory and inadequate. Don’t settle for that or tolerate it. Instead, try to understand that a) connecting all the dots at once is not only impossible, but says nothing of value; while b) connecting different, incomplete patterns of them in sequence over time is a dialog that says a great deal (re, Volume One: “I’ve done my best to connect the dots in a plethora of interconnecting synonyms, but it would be foolish (and completely impossible) to try and connect them all.”).

So add my work, however you find in the wild (a bunny perhaps, below), add it to your own contributions to capital as a larger problem. Learn from it. Draw your own conclusions, connect your own dots, chart your own constellations in the stars, Hell, the void as something to defend from enterprising capital by using what you got: your body as you fortress, your suit to brave the depths and pressures (around you and between your legs) until your skin burns. Plumb the depths of forbidden knowledge, its hallowed vaults surrendering untold power and pleasure combined. Pursue it to the degree you are comfortable, dipping deep into the oblivious delight of such abyssal spelunking for as long as your body can take it/as long as you can hold your breath before sputtering and gasping with pleasure and exhaustion (sex is work, having fun[12] is work); or, keep at it until the stormy passion leaves you and the fire at last burns itself out:

(exhibit 34a1b2b2b: Artist, top: Blxxd Bunny; bottom: Joachim Beuckelaer. This book be full of riddles, but especially mixed metaphors to playfully gorge yourselves with, choosing different ones at its leisure; e.g., food, plagues, clothes, comfort/sex, shelter and bloodshed, but also oxymorons of these things that, per medieval thought, invite a pre-capitalist way of viewing things to critical capital’s defenders with: the body as essence, food, sanguine, shelter, etc, that isn’t to be harvested by capital, but enjoyed by taking control over such things to liberate ourselves; i.e., away from the state greedily marketing us as sacred/forbidden “produce” to hoard for themselves. We must place this back in our hands. As such, our bodies, though still described as poultry and produce, become our meat to market, our vegetables to sexualize [e.g., the cucumber being an all-time classic] as ordinary and extraordinary while we kick Malthus [and neoliberal proponents of scarcity and austerity] right in the canonical balls [Medusa’s pussy has “lips that grip,” holding onto power as a carrot and a stick useful to worker aims].

With the Internet, the world is literally at our fingertips—with me able to befriend an ace cutie like Bunny and stumble across Beuckelaer’s artwork on a whim through the same search engines. Use technology and poetic history to your advantage; use it to fight censorship, thus extinction, by taking control of what you have access to. You should before the state invariably rescinds your rights; it always wants to, so do what you can now to stay in control of what the state tries to monopolize—violence, terror, monsters, poetic expression, food, BDSM [death and rape theatre] but especially combinations of these things through ludo-Gothic BDSM. Use them to combat scarcity as a myopia, a famine. Worker ownership does not equate to starvation, enslavement, destruction. That’s Capitalist Realism talking [more on this specifically in the “Call of the Wild” chapter in Volume Two, part two]. Time is of the essence, but take your time and enjoy yourselves. Your art will thank you for it.)

This is an operation that goes on and on; i.e., I wrote this exhibit and “Monsters, Magic and Myth” as a grain of sand, alluding to Bunny before I met Harmony and wrote the pearl-like Poetry Module around it. Both Bunny and Harmony show us that all monsters are metaphors (often sexual ones, thanks to Capitalism) that comment through cryptonymic nudism on alienation. Except they also reflect things mid-synthesis that aren’t so easily defined as of one or the other but instead a bit of both. To that, Capitalism must be escaped from within, but also with the help of those who inspire[13] us at different points in the process. As cryptonyms, monsters speak to obvious trauma as obscured by things that point to yet also conceal it: the forbidden, surreal knowledge hidden between language, inside the grey area, as something to track down in obvious forms we don’t want to escape at all, but lose ourselves inside to find a hidden truth contain between the narrative, the castles, the obvious fakes obviously speaking to obvious problems as concealed badly by capital and concealed by us from capital to survive while critiquing it; i.e., cryptonymy and camp; e.g., Giger’s Gothic surrealism, the xenomorph (more on that, later). It’s often right in front of us, staring us in the face while written all over our face as “our” face to face. Monsters are everywhere, donating a wider problem concealed by its own data commercialized.

As always, the Gothic is rife with massive[14]-but-useful paradoxes. Fatal knowledge isn’t a detriment or a deterrent, then, but happily sought out for fun as a means of rapturous and creative solutions built on older attempts. “Escape,” for workers, isn’t to bury our heads in the sand, then, but enter authored sites of paradox/dens of confusion (the infernal concentric pattern) to play with cryptonymy as deliberately leading to healing of the home as sick with Capitalism. “Madness” was the cure, accomplished through vehicular adventuresome roundabouts, through off-road fun as a means of suspending disbelief while also solidifying it; but also through birthing as one of intense exertion, pain and work (heavy lies the “crown”—I’ll see myself out) suffered through Oracles as a classically female, and by extension, monstrous-feminine position regarding poor Cassandra struggling to express ignominious truths: the home is hungry and eating us (“They’re eating her… and then they’re going to eat me! Oh, my godddddddddddddd!“)

To that, sometimes the quickest path to “escape” (development) the maze isn’t a straight[15] line, but an ergodic, non-linear one that eventually (over many lifetimes and lives) leads to the exit (a condition of systemic healing inside the home) as stuck within the maze: something to renovate and allude to better and better versions thereof, not destroy or banish like a nightmare (more on this life-long quest in Volume Two, part two: “She Fucks Back”).

In turn, it becomes something to disguise as “mere” fun that defenders of capital won’t abject (throw up) when we try to change the scenery normally fed to them (a bit like sneaking medicine into dog treats). But we’re not force-feeding anyone; we’re presenting them with mazes (and other popular learning devices—music, videogames, movies, theatre, etc) that contain allegory the audience can interactively stumble upon as people normally do: mid-engagement—with a given puzzle of “Antiquity.” Full of obviously serious-silly and often loud, dumb things (“sound and fury, signifying nothing”), even when they fail to stick the landing[16] during a given outing, in total combination over space and time in-text and out will still say something while leaving something out each time, too; i.e., like a sequence of concentric illusions but also a mandala, written in the same Ozymandian grains of sand—erased and written and erased again—inexpressibly expressed through lack as something to uncover and solve, repeatedly absent but forever there on the tip of our tongues, “on the ashes of something not quite present.” Like a Borges-style hall of mirrors, positioned to reflect light[17] all around in dazzling brilliance; like Pinocchio’s nose stretching onwards, forever caught in a lie pointing to the truth. That’s cryptonymy!

(exhibit 34a1b1: To give an example that covers all of cryptonymy’s relative points [not the Four Gs]: cryptonymy is settler colonialism shown and hidden by Guile and Blanka as Global North and Global South; cryptomimesis is this tending to repeat and reverse through mimesis between the characters’ numerous reincarnations; the narrative of the crypt is the entire trail and its semantic wreckage; the internal concentric pattern is the stage containing heroism as trapped endlessly in Hell; the Cycle of Kings is every man for himself—meaning in that kayfabe tournament’s establishing of heels and babyfaces; and the Shadow of Pygmalion is the heteronormative image of these heroes. Per Juul and us, this is where the game takes place, my ludo-Gothic BDSM entertaining the idea of videogames and BDSM going together readily and easily. If anyone says otherwise, they’re a cunt.)

The liberation through this plastic, vapor-like confusion really needs to be experienced, not stated (for if it could be easily stated, no one would ever write anything down—make porn/art, videogames, movies, etc). It happens repeatedly as I have shown by meeting my friends who help me make something I could not do alone. I could have released Sex Positivity in late 2022, but it would have been a shell of itself, a grain of sand. Now it’s a pearl necklace, each a Gothic cathedral, a Heaven in a Wild Flower.

So, in the monasterial spirit of exploration, experimentation and revival, let’s try a small poetry experiment to end the subchapter with. Bear with me and this empheral slab of mental runoff…

An echoing dislocation—nay, an echolocation of dislocated castles, of ruins (the narrative of the crypt)—their string of ghost towns write with/written in disintegration (death, vis-à-vis cryptomimesis) as roads only ostensibly to nowhere; i.e., building sand castles standing in for Communism as the elusive “princess in another castle” but also Capitalism as the intimidating dragon holding her prisoner (or the white woman collaring the dragon, but I digress) as a synthetic (thesis-to-antithesis) plurality of conflict that yields different forms and functions in the same sand: a “collective something-something” that, no matter how far we run, walks (shambles) faster than we do: the return of the living dead as speaking for itself regarding the colossal wreck before, during and after its decay—the hyperreal map of empire hiding something that is already decayed and for which the map is crumbling. Dreams inside dreams, not sure if you’re awake. Per Meatloaf, we can build an Emerald City with this grain of sand that doesn’t lead to a humbug. Look on our works, ye Mighty and despair! Operatic, theatrical, poetic, half-real; a cyclone of wild second winds whose idioms are borrowed from Baum and those before and after, all palimpsests. Every grain a world, every castle made of them to provide a world of world of worlds, mixed metaphors, of tears and blood; a coffin and a cradle; a wedding bed and a slab, a site of infinite bravery, complete futility and total meaninglessness, of wealth and riches to scoop up with diamonds in pockets to small, a cup that runneth over[18]. The endless power of imagination something to survey then pick and choose from, caught and trapped inside dialectical-material conflict and liberation as make-believe, oscillating interrelationship expressed by poets like Shelley, popular authors like Lewis and Baum, and mega-nerds like Jane Bennet (“round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows”). In and out, a simulated disorder until the end of time, captured in a rock opera’s outrageous, bombastic moment of courage, brains, and heart… The beauty of language is a paradox: infinity through brevity as optional. It just depends on your aim, and what you want to try. Many deconstructive forms, like the collage or Walpole’s glue-this-to-that approach to a pseudo-Gothic eventually became just “Gothic.” So while it’s all been done before, try whatever works to do something new.

I don’t want to tire you (or me) by doing more than a page of that, and I think you get the point (if you don’t or want more, go read Danielewski’s House of Leaves, 2009). Arbitrarily concluding this necropolis’ improvised stream-of-consciousness (our castle-narrative), we’ve only temporarily exhausted the bottomless hourglass (all the toothpaste squeezed out of the tube, as it were), and well-and-truly your finite patience. So let’s tighten things back up quit this freestyle (free falling) carnival’s noisy chamber to digress (thankfully) to less tempestuous spheres… to put down our fanciful quills for more restrained ones.

As we do, just remember the Gothic loves big feelings, using the siren-like power of the monstrous-feminine (the classic “girl in a man’s world” taken to GNC extremes) to speak to different abuses haunting the counterfeit; you’ll feel things you never felt before when falling in love—like you’ve gone mad. Simply put, it’s cliché for a reason.

For a start, it’s good to trust the pros with matters of the heart; e.g., Heart as offering up stone-cold classics (and marvelous arthouse outfits mirroring Stevie Nicks) like “Barracuda” (1977), “Crazy on You” and “Magic Man” (1975) that gradually shifted (thanks to their desire to stay relevant in a neoliberal rock market) to become less ironic and campy through unironic commercialized refrains. Even so, they remained haunted by their past, fairy-like selves, as well as the spirit of rape delivered through a trademark Gothic aesthetic; i.e., per the usual sylvan surfaces charged with veiled, psychosexual energies—of force and sex sold to you by dark fairies to make your lives under capital suck marginally and nominally less: “I feel bad so ‘how can I get you alone?‘” It’s a common sentiment—one emblematized by millions of views and record sales. But it’s only the beginning. We—you guessed it—gotta make it gay.

To that, sooner or later you’ll have to voyage out into brave new worlds, seeking what matters to you in ways that songs—however awesome they might sound—can never fully deliver on (the relationship through content ultimately a parasocial one); i.e., because they’re guilty of capitalizing on angst to do the usual white-woman bullshit since Radcliffe: self-reinvention to cash in on societal fears (of being alone). However fabulous and immortal, then, we gotta move past the “Mom rockers” of yore and chart our own fae-like destinies—moving out of their seductive shadows while fostering our own to swallow Capitalism with. No one’s immune from criticism (and adoration), not even these two queens (nor their defenders; e.g., Jadis telling me as much [“You’re not (insert famous person, here)!”] only to go to bat for capital, time and time again themselves):

We’ve largely exhausted “Monsters, Magic and Myth,” “the Fun Palace” and by extension, “Medieval Expression” and Volume Two, part one’s Poetry Module from a holistic standpoint (at least, as a survey we have). But there’s still a few distinctions and closing points about modularity and class that I’d like to make before we move onto the monster modules proper in Volume Two, part two! We’re on the cusp; brace yourselves!

Onto “Modularity and Class“!

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

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Footnotes

[1] Self-sacrifice is a common and touching theme in such stories; e.g., Where the Red Fern Grows (1961), Ravenheart (2002) or T2: Judgement Day (1991) as protecting the master, lover or child from bodily harm by fighting an enemy the protector cannot hope to defeat. The hounds throw themselves at the mountain cat to save their owner; the giant outlaw shields his lady from the firing squad after defeating the colonizer’s champion in battle (“Come feel my hammer, little man!”); the older reprogrammed terminator is devastated fighting the shapeshifting T-1000. Per Hemmingway, such stories are meant to prioritize feelings of bravery and significance amid futility and meaninglessness; we’re the ones that give that struggle conscious class and cultural character!

[2] Re: me, being dogpiled by cis and queer AFAB sex workers (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2022”).

[3] This could be sexist, or it could be people feel differently about each other. Gracie and Jack had sexual tension because their energies weren’t equal. She grew to love him, and he teased her, and they kissed; but at the end of it all, she was the reporter and he, the cowboy in love with his horse more than settling down: “The only way it could work is if…” followed by “Sooner or later I end up rubbing everyone the wrong way…” followed by “God, aren’t you even gonna kiss her goodbye?” followed by “Nope!” Talk about rapid-fire negotiations!

As someone who’s had to (literally) say “Here’s to looking at you, kid,” multiple times, there’s no “correct” way to do this, provided no one is harmed or walks away pissed off. Just communicate your boundaries and get through it. Jack, of course, acts like Mr. Cool, and she takes it on the chin, her accidental hero walking out into the sunset with his worse (three’s a crowd, in that scenario).

[4]  In ludological terms, this is called a ludic contract; i.e., as something to entertain on the field of play as both half-real—meaning “between the fiction and the rules” (re: Juul) but also “between fiction and non-fiction” (me)—and, to some extent, stochastic (what the kids call “RNG”—random number generation). The classic argument is that of ludo-narrative dissonance (from Clint Hockings; see: Pat Healy’s “Ludonarrative Dissonance: What It Meant and What It Means,” 2018): “Seek power and you will progress” effectively describing the monomyth in videoludic form. Except, per Metroidvania and my research into Ludo-Gothic BDSM, there is always the abject element of decay during a Promethean Quest that rapes (disempowers) the hero through self-destruction; i.e., making the ludic contraction an openly Faustian one (versus a furtively Faustian one under more opaque power fantasies. This is not a canonical attempt at transparency—merely a canceled future to expand infinite war and profit [thus rape] inside).

This would seem to abjure the idea of heroism in the Western model, which is always foretold by a presage of destiny delivered by the gods. Instead, the praxial idea of ludo-Gothic BDSM is this playfulness between players and games isn’t just between games as separate from players, but players as playing games with texts and other players on all registers that includes, but isn’t limited to, videogames’ classic “magic circle” (re: Zimmerman): the television screen (or some such oculus) of a home entertainment system. Despite how capital would have it, friendships are no more relegated to that then sex is to the bedroom (re: Foucault). That dislocation and randomness are what make the process as fun and beautiful as it is (what ludologists generally call “emergent gameplay”).

[5] “Apes don’t read philosophy!” “Yes they do, Otto, they just don’t understand it!” We can see this all the time in dickheads dogmatizing media and people, gentrifying classically rebellious things. Whether this is deliberate (the cynic who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing except profit) is moot. Praxis is praxis, pastiche an extension of that, satirical or otherwise. For us, Gothic Communism can prove that self-actualization needn’t be genocidal, while borrowing from older historical-material language to suit our revolutionary aims.

[6] Anyone who says that cartoons “can’t be smart” either hasn’t seen the non-gentrified episodes of Animaniacs, Ren and Stimpy, Doug and SpongeBob, etc (watching them while the nuance and inside jokes/adult-grade humor goes over their heads*), or thinks that Mel Gibson the actor and his characters are the same person. They’re the dad from Holy Grail telling their son “No more singing!” or T-Bird’s gang of hoodlums raping Shelley instead of treating her like Eric, her boyfriend, does (Jadis would discourage me from being myself; Zeuhl sometimes would tickle me until I lost control and then stop, etc. To both of you, I say in response: “Your hemorrhoids are inflamed because you’re dumb!“).

*Cuwu introduced me to SpongeBob and explained a lot of the classic episodes’ inside jokes (e.g., “My legs!” and “Pinkies up!”)

[7] Jadis, for instance, would judge me for snoring but not themselves; they’d also make me feel guilty for getting sinus drainage to the point that I’d gag and have to spit constantly at the sink (a feeling I’ve since described as “the Invisible Man jerking off into my mouth”).

[7a] All the more ironic since I generally don’t date, in the classic sense. I just find people I’m down with and we get down (what they called “loose,” “easy” or “fast,” in the old days); i.e., plenty of romance (and sex), but no stupid capitalist hoops to jump through!

[8] Per the Gothic and medieval theatre, these generally involve death fantasies that ease the tension in various ways; i.e., from purely violent ones (e.g., James Harriot to David Gemmell) and psychosexual ones that merge the two (sex fantasies, but also rape fantasies that oscillate between you raping someone or them raping you).

[9] I would argue there’s ambiguity in any relationship (“They love me, they love me not!”). Those who say otherwise have arguably never been in one. And to those who would discourage questioning our world through relationships or vice versa, doing so is how we learn about/with one regarding the other. Always back and forth, in yawning paradox and reflection.

[10] Think of it per the medieval idea of power exchange: gift giving. Then reflect on the paradox of “too much of a good thing” per said system; e.g., I Am Ninja lamenting the gift of something black: “Something black. Giving a ninja something black is like giving crazy to Angelia Jolie; it’s like giving guns to Master Chief, boobs to Dolly Parton—we already have plenty!” (“Question 14 ‘Ninja Gifts,'” 2008). On one hand, we need to announce systemic issues by speaking through consumption as indulgent to the point of psychosexual excess. Like sex, it can overstay its welcome, but yields the classic problem of “just one more.” Just as addiction is an issue, so is being starved of something to make one behave in acute, pleading demands: “More, more!” E.g., Cuwu demanding urgently as such; i.e., that I fucked their tight little pussy until being told to stop (which generally only happened once their pussy became too sore—unpleasantly instead of pleasantly*—for them to continue). This historically led to problems because they were borderline and couldn’t stop.

The fact remains, having plenty of something is to be spoilt for choice, thus to have options. That’s historically a good thing (to take them away is to infantilize and disempower workers). Also good is taking the opportunity to explore them; i.e., to partake of substances that aren’t immediately and acutely addictive (when presented in healthy forms) like Gothic poetics and sex. Ignoring outlying medical conditions, you can’t really have too much sex; i.e., you can’t die from it, meaning we’re free to explore trauma through medieval poetics/exchange as much as we damn well choose. If it’s just to say obvious things like “shit happens” or “people like to fuck,” then oh well; but if it stumbles on systemic trauma in the process (deliberately or otherwise) then mission accomplished! Such an outcome is only bad for capitalists, making its (crypto)mimesis nothing but good for us. “Capitalism bad” is true and needs to be broadcasted regardless if exclusionary dumbasses try to stall things any way they can. So keep saying it no matter how much of a joke/tired topic it becomes:

*There is such a thing as “too sore,” but it rides a fine line regarding one’s preferences. For AFAB people, this means searching for the right fit; i.e., “Goldilocks dick” (not everyone’s a size queen). It’s a suitably Gothic idea in its own right: pussies that want to be fucked to the edge of genuine pain; i.e., the curious secret of skirting destruction while “hurting so good” as a pleasant reminder after the deed is done: to be taken to the edge but not pushed over its lip and totally destroyed (“spiflicated”).

Regardless of the size, though, too make sex can make people hurt in ways they like or don’t like. Yet, just as the Gothic employs cryptonymy’s double operation (“showing to conceal”) to hide things, it can also reverse them to speak to hidden truths announced by seemingly vacuous cathedrals (which emblematize “too much sex” in a very literal sense). Doing so states the obvious with the obvious (again, with a big-ass castle that’s hella fake) to discuss an obvious thing that is hidden; e.g., Capitalism, genocide; i.e., by weird canonical nerds smarmily playing ball to uphold Capitalist Realism because anything else makes them crap their pants. Medieval comedy, then, is as much about stating the obvious—the jester in the king’s court—and watching Roman fools act like total dumbasses; i.e., giving themselves away to our advantage during cryptonymy as a dual deadly game of show-and-tell, but also concealment for workers and the state as diametrically opposed. Don’t be like them, ignominiously misled inside; change “inside” for the better!

[11] Iconoclasts, after all, are disruptors with a purpose, including their monsters.

[12] I.e., exposing the state through Gothic poetics—to concentrate on fucking juicily or focusing on a headspace of some kind that, embellishments aside, remains poetically concerned with fucking and violence (as stories like Alien primarily are) to deliver a superior project that appears inferior and out-of-focus: focused enough to be, at times, deliberately vague, yet whose own concentrated acid easily and ignominiously burns/eats through the state’s fortified illusions. The state can’t control something like that, only try to monopolize it (“They must have wanted it for the weapon’s division”).

Like sex, headspace is a huge part of the Gothic and its roleplay scenarios, including in bed: focus as something to gain and lose; to help someone concentrate, cheer and encourage (“there you go…”) when someone gets hard and starts to work; to praise them, or to be understanding when failure happens (for manly warriors, it’s not an option, but there’s only so much blood to work with), and supportive and loving in a traditional female/feminine way that translates to classic male counterparts, too: the dutiful servant; e.g., Tolkien’s batmen. There’s also dirty talk (definitely not Tolkien). The idea is to act when the mood strikes (a thing the soldier will be trained to suppress; i.e., “Mood is a thing for cattle and love play, not fighting!”). Headspace aside, sex and war overlap in regards to general human language, but also crossovers of actual physical labor and strain, too; e.g., sweat, elevated heart rate, body odor (“scent” is generally the more accepted term, due to its more positive connotations) and pulled muscles, etc. That being said, the act and language of denial and traditional bellicose/imperial language likened to sex as for sexual stimulation is a real (and hopelessly common) aphrodisiac that works* well enough, but it shouldn’t be used as an unironic war device for capital.

*Volume One talked about Amazons and knights as wild, animalistic heroes, of which “it’s perfectly legitimate for nerds (or those who otherwise indulge in nerd culture) to desire protection from anyone who gives off ‘big daddy/mommy’ energy as tied to an animalistic, dream-like aura—or even wanting to fuck these incredible, otherworldly persons” (source). Part of this certainly owes to the uniform as a “mil spec” (military gear) fetish with a fantasy flavor that translate neatly to BDSM (for harmless fun, but ideally to challenge the nuclear family unit for something more stable, healthy and reliable for workers; i.e., “it takes a village” being the sort capital has alienated and domesticated/chattelized workers from).

The language of conquest takes how people talk and play in regards to popular and widespread activities that overlap, like war and sex first colloquialized by kids using slang to mess with the Gothic affect; i.e., the Amazon is a bruiser herbo who thumps people, with taut capable buttocks, echoing John Webster’s “strong-thighed bargeman” from The Duchess of Malfi, 1614; e.g., the Amazon “fucks” with a “big dumper” that teenage boys want to make their waifu. Second, it happens during Gothic roleplay that generally involves encouragement of one side to “take” the other as one does in battle; i.e., to get rough and push to the finishing line; e.g., to batter the “enemy’s” gate down with a giant, massive battering ram. Jadis used to encourage me to do that all the time, their jet-black eyes glittering with masterly pleasure as I flooded their mistress cunt with hot seed. Frankly, I loved those games we played; it was hot as hell, being told how to fuck an orc-like tank of a woman like them. The only problem was, it became unironically harmful and I no longer wanted to play (we’ll explore this more when Volume Two, part two talks about Jadis in “Transforming Our Zombie Selves“).

[13] I.e., mythically like Ariadne’s thread, except we’re not escaping the labyrinth and killing the minotaur. We’re teaching it to be our friend and make the labyrinth our home (the same concept applies to orcs, xenomorphs, or any other copagandistic notion of us-versus-them canonically essentialized by neoliberal dogma; e.g., videogames). Classically this requires “a woman’s touch,” and in more ways than one; e.g., booties—Harmony and Bunny’s rev my engine and its numerous facilities. More than that, they’re nice to me, their inner/outer beauties awaking enormous passions and connections, so that ideas magically come to me (nightly visitors, taking me to the land of my dreams, or heaven and hell, etc), make my heart race, my mind hot with ideas to get, and my body pulse with fresh energy (and my cock throb with cum, etc). I feel like a quivering troubadour, pressed in trembling exaltation against their body heat, their soft warmth when the world is a cold place. I feel where I belong, imagining my cock inside them where it belongs. There is a transactional nature in the sense that things are exchanged, but it needn’t be reduced to cold, mechanical and lifeless, or bereft of intimacy and closeness despite physical distance. Closeness is a feeling, first and foremost. Per the Gothic, such companionship can traverse any gulf and fill any hole.

[14] While the Gothic speaks of, to, in and with gargantuan totalities, or tries to hit or touch upon them as frustratingly near and far off, the key to expressing totality isn’t to penetrate or list everything (very Cartesian, raping the space beyond one’s own), but something that hints at the whole, a sum greater than that of its parts; i.e., the proverbial elephant in the room. In the capitalist sense, “heaven” is alienated, fetishized and projected onto a space for sex-deprived soldiers to kill and rape—to fulfill their various “needs” as harmfully psychosexual; re: Foucault’s A History of Sexuality and the relegation of sex to the bedroom, with most soldiers not being married; i.e., a virgin and amatonormative stochastic terrorist linked, per usual, with home (state) defense: the pussy as paradise rewarded to good little soldiers for “conquering Medusa and Hell” (nature-as-monstrous-feminine

[15] Even if you could do it with a straight line, there’s no guarantee it will work, and it’s best to rely on all media to raise our chances. It’s always a gamble, but more options engaged holistically better our chances per risk. Likewise, the archer’s paradox means arrows don’t fly straight or true anyways. You can’t just “kill” Capitalism any more than Zeus or Medusa, because it’s a structure, not a person. You have to alter it and that takes time—at the very least a battering ram repeatedly slamming into a given entrance. But I would argue the quickest path to success is being direct in ways that account for boundaries to respect and ignore as required to maintain a healthy relationship with other workers. To that, it isn’t one delivered straight to capital’s beating bionic heart, but a much more roundabout path through multiple parts of its maze-like body directed at the human sentinels. Hearts and minds. Things like Zeus and the language of war and sex generally denote the widespread presence of rape tied to capital as canonically essentialized—literally mythologized, in this case—by patriarchal figures like Zeus, but also those under his thrall through threats of violence; e.g., Hippolyta or Medusa as unironic victims of capital triangulating against labor through a pro-state aesthetic of power and death, of demon BDSM, of witch cops and war bosses, monster girls, et al.

People tend to worship their heroes, not question them, a code of silence around the peerless often staying that way through threats of force against “rats” (omerta); so it behooves critics to examine not just taboos, but what society values in relation to those (re: “Sex, Metal, and Videogames“)—not simply to isolate our own biases, but also identify them in society at large through popular media’s assorted blind spots. The Gothic-as-iconoclastic actively upends canon, the sacred, as sinister and false; this includes heroes-as-sacred, as statues to blemish and take down a peg (e.g., Homelander from The Boys, 2019). Blemishes, in good faith, aren’t even bad, they’re simply different (though often are exoticized; e.g., red hair, green eyes and freckles). But understanding the relationship across a variety of media forms (as the Renaissance person does and which the Gothic mode travels) is the key to thinking critically (thus being sex-positive): where the light gathers and the darkness, then running that through a dialectical-material lens; i.e., dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit to reverse the process of abjection.

We want to ask what’s present, what’s left out? E.g., popular media doesn’t tend to rock the boat (the profit motive), but still has allegory (their better angels). Where are the politically informed metalheads? Investigate that, and so on…

I’ve learned over the years that analyzing popular media critically pays dividends; re: it’s where people’s values are stored as well as their crimes (where the bodies are hidden—in short, what stinks). Being a good critic is like being a good journalist, then; you gotta muckrake, but also provoke and stage things that expose what’s lying beneath the surface—i.e., an ironic version of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Louis Bloom from Nightstalker (2014) or Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman from American Psycho (2000), etc. The Gothic excels at that by focusing on detective stories, but also highlighting forbidden societal taboos among ostensibly sacred things; i.e., in relation to each other.

As we discussed in “My Quest Began with a Riddle,” detectives and actors—like all performance roles—are perfectly fine provided they don’t serve capital (therefore aren’t class traitors); the same goes for heroes, who represent the desire for strength in idealized forms: the oft-traditional forms of dimorphic beauty placed adjacent to Cartesian standards, wherein heroes are strong when people feel weak, fallible, easily fazed, fallen, etc. Unlike a parody of such things, the classic Western hero is the opposite of that (while also emblematic of idealized images of empire—i.e., whitewashing; e.g., Superman). Per Sarkeesian’s adage, we can critique these ideals and still enjoy the non-pernicious aspects to them; e.g., Thought Slime’s “GIVE ME SUPERMAN’S UNDERWEAR, I AM NORMAL” (2023).

[16] I.e., to be “better than the sum of their parts,” insofar as they touch upon something awesome and great that we need engage with in serious and silly ways.

[17] A scintillate burst whose prismic “ballet” offers many different points of view regarding the same function and goal to reflect on, mid-reflection. Luminary.

[18] When I’m vibing it’s very repetitive, and letting some jewels go doesn’t mean we won’t catch more ideas later. But we can’t hold them all right now. How could we? We’re devils, not God.

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.

“Welcome to the Fun Palace!” part three—”With a Little Help from My Friends”; or, Out of this World (Opening)

Whence is that knocking?—
How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red (source).

—Macbeth, Macbeth (c. 1606) 

(artist: Ms. Mars)

Picking up up from where “Medieval Expression, part two” left off…

Like sex and the Gothic, rebellion is a messy business, but also a theatrical one—bloody and somehow bloodless, singing to war as something referenced in something else, perpetually in fragments viewed backwards (from Venture Bros to Looney Tunes to Holst to Matthew Lewis to Shakespeare to Julius Caesar, and so on). To that, part two explored the relationship between workers and media insofar as we want to revive and enrich Gothic media to hug the alien with, thus speak truth to state forces harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine until Medusa strikes them (and us) dead. In short, media is something to befriend to make trouble with, which requires resurrecting it through various troublemakers who—from brat to bitch, dom to sub, mommy to Amazon to Medusa—come in all shapes and sizes; i.e., it takes friends who can literally get up and walk around to synthesize good praxis with, mid-Gothic-poiesis.

We’ve already discussed academic examples and academic ways of relating in part one; and we already have looked at past sex workers I can invigilate but otherwise am out of contact with, in part two. Part three will consider our developing of Gothic Communism through ludo-Gothic BDSM as something to enact between active, healthy friendships—in essence, those we meet at a costume party who refuse to shy away from the slutty costumes, but use them for rebellious purposes! I shall present our ongoing co-conspirators, helping us bring the proverbial house (Gothic castle) down: Harmony Corrupted and Blxxd Bunny! So ferocious!

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a1a1: Artist, top: Blxxd Bunny; bottom: Harmony Corrupted. The Gothic generally puts “sex” and “monsters” [“monster sex”] next to/into all medias popular [videogames, novels, cinema, etc] during performance art designed to teach sex positivity as much as subsist under capital; i.e., the Gothic deconstructs canon, camping it through clever workers’ revolutionary cryptonymy to reconstruct into something new, something sex-positive pushing towards post-scarcity as a canceled future that—with a little help from our friends—can come true now in baby steps! From cradle to grave, then, everyone likes playing with monsters and sex [some are just more closeted about it]. Those who discourage doing so are prudes/enemies of workers, women and children, GNC people, racial/religious minorities and other vulnerable groups, thus not to be trusted. Exclude them from your reindeer games; put your trust, instead, in ludo-Gothic BDSM! Children grow up into liking rape play and sex to achieve calculated risk, thus forever questing for a palliative Numinous—looking for monstrous-feminine “echoes of mommy” to top [thus teach] us about Medusa as good, the state as bad; i.e., with costumes and [sex] toys, but also their bodily theatrics and playful-slutty gender parody conveying good demon BDSM. No one is immune to its foxy-wily charms—their Numinous, stacked “cathedrals'” combined awesome might! “Stare and tremble—with mutually respectful boners!” Suck a dick, Coleridge!)

As such, we’ll have to go over performative context as something to articulate; i.e., as a praxial process: with theory to applied through intersectional solidarity (diverse, all-inclusive teamwork) between good-faith actors synthesizing it across multiple, hybrid registers and media forms while dealing with bad-faith actors. To that, we’ll go over how to meet/make friends relative to theory as it exists per ludo-Gothic BDSM: during complex, multi-gradient exchanges informed by stories that collectively speak to our mutual alienation, fetishizing and sexualization (to serve profit/the elite) amid differences.

As a subchapter to “Medieval Expression,” “The Fun Palace’s” last subdivision, “Out of this World,” is actually too big. So I have subdivided it again (a sub-sub-subchapter).

• Part one, “What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why (feat. Amazons and Witches)?” (this post): Articulates what rebellion is, followed by what a rebel is and why they do what they do—then takes a break to discuss modules and criminality (with several performative examples: Samus Aran, but also the Wicked Witch of the West)
• Part two, “Meeting Rebels; i.e., What Inspires Us to Meet and All of It Carrying On and On (feat. Harmony Corrupted, Jack Burton, and Blxxd Bunny)“: Explores how to meet rebels, followed by what inspired us to meet them (hint: them, but also their sexy costumes), and what carries on as all of this repeats, repeats, repeats.

The monstrous-feminine is the domain of canon and camp, something to color through our own performances informed by older ones for us to “fill in”—like a bra! We’ll look at witches and Amazons, next, as a particularly “phallic” hauntology (of war) to use during revolutionary cryptonymies.

(artist, colors: Hellica-Ordo)

“With a Little Help from My Friends”; or, Out of this World, part one: What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why (feat. Amazons and Witches)?

“Sir,” she said, “I think you are a very bad wizard.”

“And you,” he answered, stung, “are only a caricature of a witch.”

—Elphaba Thropp and the Wizard of Oz, Wicked (1995) 

Rebellion, as monstrous-feminine, is easily commodified to gentrify capital, so we will need to be careful with how to proceed. As stated, part one will articulate what rebellion is, followed by what a rebel is and why they do what they do—then take a break to discuss modules and criminality (with several performative examples: Samus Aran, but also the Wicked Witch of the West).

As this involves satire as something that is modular and intratextual (diegetic), intertextual, metatextual and paratextual, I feel like we should give an example of that; i.e., the Amazon or the witch as something to spoof, revere and wear like a costume making fun of itself (and its palimpsestuous source materials) all at once. Selected at random, the example I’ve chosen is Venture Bros. (2003):

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a1a2: Source, left: Reference Emporium; source, right: Sex ‘n Sexy. Like me, other sex workers are masters of multimedia—specifically of deception and disguise, working on multiple stages with multiple costumes [of the femme-fatale Amazon masquerading as a gymnast] during an endless framed narrative [of people playing as actors, adding to the meta conversation] to fend off unwanted advances and attain elusively consensual and wanted ones through the usual fetishes and clichés of the Gothic as a mode of expression; i.e., one whose serious-to-silly satires can hide class character inside the heart-shaped box worn on the sleeve: “I thought the Cold War was over!” / “It live on in my heart, forever!” Class war is like The Goonies [1987], then: “Never say die!” while gooning[1]. This can be Sontag’s “seriousness that fails”; e.g., Tommy Wiseau’s 2003, great-but terrible The Room. Except, rebellion is actively performative. As such, the actively rebellious satirical idea with Molotov Cocktease is she, as a sex worker, can only go to second base—itself both a) a meta statement on sex workers with others, in real life; and b) clever spoof/parody of the “easy” scarlet woman from James Bond [“Pussy Galore”] but also the Communist “spy” that gives power to workers, mid-performance; e.g., Black Book‘s [2009] Rachel Stein; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM as something performed on and offstage, on and offscreen, having power over big dumb himbos like Brock Sampson, but also likenesses[2] of them.

Aka “topping from the bottom,” you alarmists and “doomers” don’t need to fear it [“There, there…”]: Love can bloom on a Communist battlefield! Just not the one prescribed to us by canon! But rebellion is resourceful, being inventive to incentivize through cheap monstrous [and hilarious means] to get you to pay attention; i.e., to stories full of antiwar allegory amid fetishes and clichés; e.g., Metal Gear Solid [1996] as performed in “five” minutes [scout’s honor] by Mega 64 [and no stranger to ludo-Gothic BDSM: Psycho Mantis knows you play “Castlevania“]. In other words, ludo-Gothic BDSM—like all allegory—is performative and meta.)

First, rebellion. Rebellion, as part two showed, is so commonly reduced to dogmatic caricature in service to profit. So what is actual rebellion? Rebellion is dismantling the state to achieve post-scarcity using Gothic poetics (while fending off weird canonical nerds colonizing the lesson). Except, we only have the past to refer to—from cavepeople’s paleolithic history and Indigenous cultures past and present, to Communists who capital has tried to erase through the usual “vote with your wallets” bullshit: the box office. This erasure’s reversal is easy enough to illustrate. First, we’ll reiterate our previous arguments, then give an example that makes our argument through itself: in the present as a living document (one composed of likenesses we gravitate towards relative to our own repressed feelings and tastes as “never seen,” but familiar through other copies, of copies, of copies).

To reiterate, Communism is already held ransom by cartoon copycats of itself; i.e., canon making the usual bloody “Great Red Spot” of the Communist refrain a big-ol’ target on our back (the process of abjection, which extends to suicidal Nazis using the same color scheme [red and black] to weaponize the fascist aesthetic as a point of practice per cosmetics: the context of obscurantism). Gothic empowerment, then, is rooted in “disempowerment” as something to reenact through ironic forms (the ghost of the counterfeit). This applies to any psychosexual/asexual act doubling as an artistic statement; i.e., our sexuality and its gendered, monstrous expression as something to perform, identify with, and express using: our bodily autonomy and ability to make porn through art (or vice versa) that speaks to these things in defiance of the state dividing them. Except it doesn’t have to be a verbal/orthographic statement nakedly spelled out, because a) camp works through theatre as frequently non-verbal; and b) illustrating mutual consent works through its ironic context at any volume as something that speaks for itself when properly understood—the fact that it, like any (a)sexual exchange, was negotiated ahead of time; i.e., the power thus value of medieval poetics translates to labor value as expressed in highly theatrical forms that, at the same time, meet various important needs; e.g., catharsis through the confrontation of generational/systemic trauma, but also empowerment according to an uncanny ability to voice our concerns (and ability to live without the state) in the process: camping canon. Sometimes it’s a mask, a censor bar, or some combination thereof: teasing the goods but hiding them—social-sexual agency through liberation’s suggestion in the present space and time; i.e., as code to invite playful rebellion; e.g., lipstick and lingerie, etc, exposed as the “scarlet woman” might for those who know to coming knocking about…

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Two, rebels—i.e., what are they (echoing ICP’s amazing “Miracles” [2009]: “Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work? And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist; y’alls lyin’ [the Cartesian creed in action, serving profit] and getting’ me pissed!”)? Volume Zero has already demonstrated camping canon with my friend and muse, Blxxd Bunny. Per the above paragraph, then, I want to demonstrate the utility and productiveness of my arguments using them, but also a different (and more recent) example—not Hannah-Freya Blake from “Medieval Expression, part one,” nor Cuwu or Autumn Ivy from part two, but a sex worker I’m friends with relative to a shared passion project: Harmony Corrupted! Hannah and I might be comrades at face value; Harmony and I are comrades in praxis, getting capital lowkey shook[3] (“You can’t handle the truth!”).

Harmony Corrupted is another of my muses and friends. Just as the Gothic is concerned with shelter and protection, though, this is what Harmony paradoxically provides, mid-rebellion; i.e., per the classic paradox of the Gothic as reanimation, which is acquired through performative-praxial tension of medieval devices and aesthetics: paintings that are “alive,” that speak and move around without actually doing so through warring ideas that don’t stay put; they get up and move around thanks to rebellious workers. It might seem immobile or superstitious, but can move (thus raise) mountains and castles without lifting a finger. Harmony’s “fatal portrait” is one such example. Yet while her presentation is visually immediate in a dangerous sense, her “enslavement” by wearing the collar—and the fetishizing clothing and dark (alien, badass, cool, etc) aesthetic—is deliberate, campy and fun; i.e., the nun-like outfit locked in between sacred duty and secret desire, its owner’s face ahegao (death/rape face) per a choker that seems to “throttle” them only at the quickest of glances (re: Dennis Cooper’s necktie from Frisk):

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

The idea is to protect her (and by extension, the viewer) from the state as Gloria Gaynor does; i.e., through danger disco, by illustrating mutual consent through appreciative peril during Gothic counterculture’s usual medieval tendencies weaponized for workers by workers; e.g., Harmony showing off and me exhibiting her work while explaining it. So, caught between suspended sexual tension and veiled threats of “danger” (for the viewer canonically tempted, and the artist exposing themselves), Harmony seems to skillfully yet artlessly[4] cry out, “Oh, no! I’m naked, exposed and look like a naughty-let-modest slut who’s asking for it, someone who’s already collared and can’t see! Help, help! Just anything could happen to little ol’ me by any ol’ passerby!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

This is no accident. All at once, these photos (taken from different sets speaking to a ludo-Gothic BDSM theme) seem to plead against discovery, capture and torture, yet paradoxically demand to be found, to be witnessed “in peril” instead of rescued as already under someone’s power—Harmony’s; i.e., she is in control the entire time: not because the viewer won’t hurt her, but because they literally cannot. “You won’t hurt me, will you?” Harmony seems to goad, playfully teasing further insofar as all of these items (and their present usage) hint and play at something that—under mutual consent—is completely impossible: rape. The above combinations (and prior exhibits) present Harmony’s “rape” (deprivation of power to cause harm) as a classic case of calculated risk to admire for its courage and ability across the Gothic mode. Actionable, negotiated consent is beautiful—is the exhibit hence the point of what we’re trying to say with Gothic poetics[5] when standing up for ourselves against the state: “We don’t need you! Look what could be—a better world, and one without you!” But per the canonical language of war and rape (sex and force), Gothic cryptonymy remains part of a vital need: to lie to the state through Trojan maneuvers precisely because they always operate in bad faith; i.e., consenting to them is consenting to slavery thus amounts to a win-lose (and ultimately a lose-lose when the state dies).

In turn, the vivid language of war—of castles and sieges—paints both a pretty and straightforward picture regarding what to do and not do while also taking the duality of human language into account. Let the right ones into your “castle” and win-win, regarding whatever your combined hearts desire; let the wrong ones in and suffer Capitalism the Great Destroyer as usual, and whereupon genuine consent (and everything associated with it) becomes not just an alien myth (the Medusa) but a forgotten memory. Per the Gothic, its fading dream must be revived in oft-surreal ways while inside capital; i.e., as a rigged game normally weaponizing shelter harmfully against us (we’ll explore this revival more in “Derelicts, Medusa, and Giger’s Xenomorph” in Volume Two, part two), often as literally toy-like; e.g., the derelict from Alien being a funerary dumping ground on par with the Island of Misfit Toys from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer[6] (1964). This crisis must be subverted to expose the true menace, often through the animated miniature: as something to invoke to achieve bizarre comparisons via jarringly non-fatal nostalgia. Such comparisons and conversations only come up if a given miniature (a portrait, effigy or suit of armor, etc) gets up and starts to move around—in short, when it appears where it shouldn’t but seem to have “grown legs” (or, if having them, is suddenly able to use them).

Per my book, the above example of actionable rebellion with Harmony arranges, and is arranged by, two artists working in concert to make a larger pro-worker statement—one authored through informed, routine exchanges of money, permission, labor and materials: as part of a larger ongoing (multi-volume) project meant to encapsulate consent in an actionable mythological refrain; i.e., an artistic movement captured in small, its organized-yet-playful fashion attained with Gothic poetics. Piece by piece, they complement a larger praxial whole that, like a Gothic castle, is built brick-by-salacious-brick, mid-synthesis (through good habits): consent as an old friend made strange (alien) to us by the state. The state, in turn, is mighty and we’re stronger together if we unite against them by inspiring each other in the process; i.e., while routinely asking for permission, thus communicating openly (with each other) as a matter of principle: by collectively synthesizing not just monsters, but intersectional solidarity through an artistic movement actively and consciously progressing towards a post-capitalist world using pre-capitalist poetics (“darkness visible”) in an early-modern (Gothic) way. Simply put, it’s adaptive and cumulative.

Three, why rebel? Me, in response: “As the chicken crossing the road does—to get to the other side (of development)!” The state lies to rape and kill for profit, abusing Gothic poetics to disguise, defend and advertise this fact as process as a complicitly cryptonymic one (and the other canonical doubles during oppositional praxis). That’s all canon is: copies of copies challenging proletarian versions in dualistic (often sexy and “dangerous”) language. You won’t get very far if you don’t learn to recognize and play with that!

(source, collage: Beard Bears’ “Evolution of Dark Link & Shadow Link in Zelda Games (1987-2021),” 2022).

All of this sits at the heart of Sex Positivity’s underlying message, one whose essential subtext supplies the dialectic of the alien—and in turn the fetishes and aesthetics of death, unequal power and alienization—an important air of irony completely absent from state-sanctioned forms; i.e., the bourgeoisie and their proponents functioning as the usual slavers/settler-colonists of nature: posturing in bad faith as “heroic (monomythic) liberators” while marketing (and profiting from) a body’s sexuality as biologically essential, force-linked to gender and made in constant forced competition, scarcity and consent, etc (the trifectas and monopolies).

As such, any “rape/death” fantasies and performance/play that we produce are dialectically-materially ironic, thus actually able to empower the subject by making them feel in control through calculated risk; i.e., psychosexual theatre and ludo-Gothic BDSM as a campy monstrous means of isolating trauma: as something to confront, negotiate and play with/gossip about (angrily or not) without the state’s “help” (menticide). In other words, “There’s no universal ‘other’ that ‘your’ so-called ‘shelter’ needs to protect us from; we make our own to protect us (and our bodies, labor and art, etc) from you, your prison, your lies.” In exchange, the state, will, per its own heteronormative/Cartesian binaries, automatically see us as a threat to the status quo—to the nuclear unit and the sanctioned order of sexual labor—precisely because our unbridled creativity threatens them by merely existing. It is alien to them per their designs, which reflect back onto them through what we show them, and which they will do anything to abject, thus remain in control of what they have no right to. It becomes a meme, borrowed from older images that may have been unironic once (e.g., Venture Bros. was originally a spoof of Jonny Quest (an old [1964] Hanna-Barbera cartoon with white-savior [thus settler-colonial, abject, Orientalist] tendencies) but, in our capable hands, become ironic through performance as hermeneutic, meaning “interpretative ipso facto“: pussy (on the chainwax) hocus-pocus!

(source: Reddit[7])

I want to close out the subchapter with the fun (and important) part: meeting rebels. Again, this includes how to meet them, what inspired us to meet them, and what carries on as all of this repeats into the future (so long as workers and the state exist). To that, I want to give several exhibits that speak to real life as exchanged between and engaged with different cuties—about twenty pages’ worth, concerning Harmony Corrupted to a greater extent, and an exhibit dedicated to Blxxd Bunny (exhibit 34a1b2b2b). Then we’ll proceed onto modularity and monster classes in the next subchapter before ending Volume Two, part one.

Before talking about meeting cuties to rebel with, though, I want to give a Venus-twin (slightly smaller) fourteen-page note about modules and criminality and how it effects all parties involved through two examples of our monstrous-feminine policed under capital as phallic woman/vagina dentata, “walking hysteria castle,” wandering womb, bicycle face, what-have-you (we are legion, motherfuckers): Samus Aran (the Amazon) and Elphaba Thropp (the witch) as “straddling the broom” of oppositional praxis. This is important; Gothic media is generally not something you can divorce from this aesthetic and still exhibit it—in short you need someone to play the whore, the dragon, the knight, etc, during ludo-Gothic BDSM as something to make sex-positive (“‘Contemplate this on the treat of woe,’ nerds”) within capital; i.e., through the usual monster-girl venues of exploitation tied to Halloween as a cyclical cycle of Cartesian profit harvesting and abjecting nature personified (a profitable scheme, such as the monstrous-feminine yields certain go-to favorites; e.g., slutty-badass witch rehashed for fear-fascination with the ghost of the counterfeit, privatizing nature-as-monstrous-feminine as the Art of Elisa does, below): not pussy on the chainwax, but simply in chains (“Yep! I’m the witch! So scary [kill me]…)!

(artist: the Art of Elias)

To that, capital always has things of order and things not of order that, by virtue of Cartesian thought, lump the latter class of oddities together (so-called “extended beings”) to receive state violence mid-conflict, mid-opposition; i.e., the state is an alien mothership/Great Destroyer insofar as the elite always: a) self-project onto an imaginary displaced alien scapegoat, or b) frame regular disaster as a mystery tied to individual bad actors at home (“bad apples” being fruit from the poison tree). This all applies to monsters being a broader language type, but does (as we shall see) manifest differently and between undead, demonic and animalistic modules that often intersect as alien, draconian beings; i.e., how they manifest and operate, be that feeding, shapeshifting and/or exchanging forbidden knowledge, etc, to speak to sexual/gendered labor concerns under police violence.

As such, capital frames us, the monstrous-feminine, as alien homewreckers that it, the state-as-alien, will punish on principle to exploit nature as required. Anything that challenges this scheme is criminalized; i.e., becomes one-in-the-same with the dragon normally being slain, except token agents are forced to walk the tightrope as sex worker (which is criminalized by virtue of it being monstrous-feminine) and soldier/token cop (so-called “men’s work”); e.g., Samus Aran, but really anyone who fails to perfectly adhere to the “modest” side of the damsel/demon or virgin/whore binaries: Ridley’s a sassy slut, and bitches get stiches (in “boss” language, I liken this to two basic types in Volume Zero: the dragon lord and the Archaic Mother—exhibit 1a1c): except the “final boss” of The Wizard of Oz is a green-skinned “dragon lady” (with Elphaba being an intersex creature who was born under a “bad” sign: the clock of the Time Dragon[8])

By comparison, the work that Harmony and I do subverts sex and force in ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., whose medieval refrains metabolize the usual canonical elements—the damsel, dragon, dungeon, rescue, etc—to yield healthier doubles that, in turn, alter the system as something to perceive differently by changing it and vice versa. To that, someone like Samus provides an interesting counterpoint, insofar as she’s strong in ways the state generally tries to weaponize (the Amazon) in ways that Harmony exudes differently than, which the state also tries to capitalize on (the whore, the demon). Generally the Amazon and the whore are divided by a very thin line, and within a dogmatic paradigm that values psychosexual violence; in short, it eroticizes rape dressed up as “medieval.”

To this, the female actor can actively suit up and, armored, become ready to “play Beowulf” for the state. Except, this remains a problem; i.e., the heroic refrain itself is sexually dimorphic and biologically essentialized—men being central to heroic action as romancing the sword, gun (or some such phallic weapon) as penetrating into Hell: the source of such as something to bring back, along with the woman as rescued; i.e., she’s classically an afterthought, a prize to be won by the state’s masculine step-and-fetch-it playing assassin, rescue operative, retriever of lost goods, territory and so on. The catch, here, is the princess often being a native to Hell as criminalized: a dark queen who isn’t going anywhere, and to which Hell is something she embodies in ways the state can both a) not tolerate, and b) must essentialize to keep the gravy train rolling. For the elite, “sex sells” is “easy money” provided it doesn’t threaten state power as patriarchal; e.g., tokenized lesbians (with Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, being a classic example); i.e., there must always be a pimp, regardless if they’re onscreen or not.

To that, Samus—a female Great Destroyer (note: always killing planets)—must always answer to a man (and generally was controlled by men and boys as the game’s target audience, trumping tokenized women as a secondary consideration). But, as anything that threatens this monomythic refrain is just another dragon, her position (“job security”) lives on borrowed time insofar as Capitalist Realism relies on girl bosses to serve far more temporarily[9] as enforcer educators/military governesses (e.g., Lady Jessica from Dune [1965] a Bene Gesserit ninja-witch made to coach her poor stupid son, grooming him as the universal super being [the “kwisatz haderach” being a cautionary tale/critique of Nietzsche’s Übermensch as made unironic by fascist forces] to conquer the universe, becoming yet-another-emperor through Orientalist revenge serving white needs[10]). This only lasts until capital decays; re (from Volume Zero):

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth (or an Earth-like double)—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force.

Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else. Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite’s exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state’s property (weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc] while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its “wild” variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures […] Neoliberalism merely commercializes the monomyth, using parental heroic videogame avatars like the knight or Amazon pitted against dark, evil-familial doubles—parents, siblings and castles (and other residents/residences)—in order to dogmatize the player (usually children) as a cop-like vehicle for state aims (often dressed up as a dated iteration thereof; e.g., an assassin, cowboy or bounty hunter, but also a lyncher, executioner, dragon slayer or witchfinder general “on the hunt,” etc): preserving settler-colonial dominance through Capitalist Realism by abusing Gothic language—the grim reaper and his harvest. [… I.e.,] convince the hero that a place away from home is home-like; i.e., the thing they do not actually own being “theirs” (the ghost of the counterfeit) but “infested” (the process of abjection). Then, give them a map and have them “clean house”—an atrocious “fixer” out of the imaginary past who repairs the “broken” home room-by-room by first cleansing it of abject things “attacking it from within,” then disappearing with the nightmare they constitute (source).

This canonical reality yields a bevy of problems. Not only does Samus’ bulky, castle-like suit/weapons (and similar examples) function in service to capital by crowding everything else out during crisis (similar to castle-sized, fuel inefficient cars in Ozzie during the ’70s Oil Crash leading to fascist escapist fantasies for their expensive toys: Mad Max), but such an enforcer treats anything different as “other”; i.e., a dragon to slay! And to top it all off, once she does, she will be expected, as is tradition, to strip the armor off for a Male Gaze: as lucrative in part of the same genocidal scheme! Kill the dragon; show me your “dragon”/let me into your “Castlevania,” etc.

Except problems always mirror their solutions, in the Gothic. By comparison, Harmony and I (the artist and the muse, the “master”[11] and the apprentice) subvert these harmful dogmatic elements by treating the dragon as something to hug and love amid the presence of unironic slayers trying to rope her (regardless of form) into the same capitalist model: slavery through a monomythic refrain, meaning “nature is other” insofar as the alien fetish is categorized through stigma animals (e.g., spiders, below) that double as undead and demonic scapegoats for state enforcers to mark and slay by proxy—i.e., the marking of Medusa as “bad girl,” generally in every social-material aspect of a woman’s existence. There’s nowhere for her to go, so she must subvert her monstrous-feminine prison by wearing it differently than canon prescribes; i.e., through performative context as something to capture on-camera and metatextually between actors, texts and exhibits: sometimes with clothes, sometimes not, sometimes in between!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In defense of ourselves, then, we must take what’s given to us at birth and play with it as Harmony and I do: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, in the presence of settler-colonial/monomythic trauma, as a surface sexually changed with “danger” (rape) as promising the potential for change under duress. This involves written stories, thus technology—specifically language in linguo-material forms—as monstrous, alien; i.e., Gothic poetics; e.g., monsters as dolls, likenesses, food to ingest, lessons to learn through needing to eat, sleep, fuck, survive. Survival requires play to unlearn state dogma given to us as children (“And how do children learn?” Sandy Norton asked me once. “They play!”). To survive and escape capital, then, we must learn to play as Gothicists once did: with ourselves as alien, fetishized, and medieval; i.e., to put things together to see what fits even when they seem like they might not—an act of understanding through assembly that appeals to our basic human rights. Capital sexualizes everything; liberation, I’ve also discovered, occurs through sex as an artistic (thus partly ace) performance. Anyone can do it because we’re all human, can all make art in different forms and functions. All that matters is form follows function as proletarian, thus sex-positive, during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Something to remember as well—and across all media, not just videogames—is that content doesn’t automatically equal criticism but can still be gay and educational (e.g., Cheese’s[12] “I Ranked EVERY Star in Mario 64. Bad Idea,” 2024); i.e., a subversive potential that overlaps with the regular monetization of speedrunning (and its documentation and closeted-Nazi potential; e.g., Summoning Salt and Karl Jobst[13], respectively) as something to popularize for profit, thus merch, videos, porn. When approached as canon, it becomes blindly self-referential and employed towards unproductive labor fostering praxial inertia. The same concept applies to ludo-Gothic BDSM. There is no outside of the text, meaning we must critique extratextual problems (Capitalism and its genocidal myopia) mid-poiesis as always engaged with media, mise-en-abyme. Per the Gothic, this doesn’t preclude morbid curiosity; it encourages it through play with villains, sometimes literally as them (vice characters) onstage. Under optimal conditions, it enters a flow state; we become like a well-oiled machine, being handed tools and parts by assistants, but also one’s surroundings as assistant-esque (the algorithm); i.e., one’s surroundings become inspiration, weaponized.

Mid-flow-state, our own psychomachic dialogs don’t presume to talk down to others in good faith, but we will happily lecture, embarrass and otherwise hector those posturing as “benevolent” (re: Jobst) or “dangerous” to the Western hegemony (re: Zizek) while, point-in-fact, becoming hopelessly accommodated by them to infantilizing extremes (re: Jordan Peterson) that play the same game turning them into compulsive liars. Every word out of their mouths becomes a lie; cracks start to show in their perfect masks, and they become infantilized and geriatric: violent, fractured, abusive clowns (a nightmarishly Freudian psychosis, like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet [1986]: “Baby wants to fuck!”); i.e., going to bat for the state (which is why Zizek couldn’t attack Peterson during their so-called “debate”; he was guilty of the same obscurantist/apologetic bullshit). In historical terms, we want to “denude the philosopher,” exposing “Aristotle” as “Alexander” by riding him like an ass, Phyllis-style, but also Diogenes (which had a habit of masturbating in public, it must be said); e.g., in sex-positive doubles of their fictional counterparts; i.e., Elphaba Thropp (Glinda was basic).

Regardless of our age, we can use monsters, castles, and the repetitive, fragmenting language of war (re: mise-en-abyme) to camp canonical, classic forms that lead to genocide. We can build communities to our weirdness and people show up to the ghosts of that and resurrect them (whereas the Straights[14] just try to force people to have sex/make “content” to profit them); these become calls to answer and signs to follow (and follow and follow…) to destinations of an indeterminate origin, time and location, but also duration that builds and rises until it stops, leaving a spectral trail of partial-likenesses and wordy wreckage in its wake (the symbol remains, but in pieces you have to chart again using pilfered gear already stolen).

This pertains to praxis as a half-real affair—of the Gothic as expressed during liminal expression as both made from whole cloth and speaking truth to power (and “truth” from power in response[15]). The best lies mix truth into them; e.g., phobias mixed with witches to hunt, then make into state zombies[16] that triangulate against state enemies through stochastic terrorism; i.e., TERFs serving as something we’ll return to in Volume Three: witch cops saying unironically “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!” When playing as witches, we a) change with the times to adapt with the times, but b) never ever want to be—as the kids say—”mid” (average). Judases are average, and TERFs are mid, posers; we’re the real deal, kids (we hold and hit those high notes/don’t fake our orgasms)!

To free a witch, you must find her and play her yourself, starting with the classics. Speaking of, may as well learn from the best. Let’s take a peek under the OG witch’s brim, shall we? Why is the Wicked Witch zombie green?

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a1b: “I may be bad, but I feel good!” Our resident alien/queen bitch [fun fact: the witch in The Wizard of Oz was originally supposed to be Hollywood glamorous (not that I ever thought Margaret Hamilton was ugly—a handsome-ass divorcé, to be sure)—a history you can see in just about any rendition as, pardon the expression, “butterface”: big noses hinting at the anti-Semitic origins of canonical witch myths[17]; i.e., something to subvert musically in shows like The Worst Witch[18] [1986] and gentrify again with the Harry Potter franchise sans music[19]]. Monstrous-feminine are always fash-adjacent and undead because capital will always triangulate them against labor in bad faith.

But luckily we can just reclaim that critical bite through our own interrogation’s iconoclastic, campy performances; i.e., we take the torture dungeon and its aesthetic [whatever the material or color scheme] back from capital and its stereotypical, profit-driven embodiments. Fascists are zombies because the state turns them into unthinking slaves that defend capital in decay; Communists are zombies because we—like Frankenstein’s Creature—live consciously with trauma as a part of who we are [for a recent critique of the zombie story that humanizes it, consider Dominic Mitchel’s 2013 In the Flesh[20]].

To that, people forget [thanks to Capitalism and dogma] that fear is an argument. It needn’t be dogmatic to serve the state by assigning violence [the process of abjection] but can employ the same theatrics’ oscillating binaries to achieve a gradient of monomorphic expression—of undead sexual and gender liberation. This reversal happens through the same theatrical gimmicks as interpretative relative to an audience conditioned to receive them dogmatically or not—in short, through canon or camp working with the same symbols to achieve different, diametrically opposed ends: liberation and enslavement of the zombie, which our Wicked Witch mostly definitely is [though she’s allergic to water for some reason]: a hungry bitch for those ruby slippers [originally silver in the book but red looks better on Technicolor and helps Dorothy literally stand apart from the Tinman—whose heart was also red, of course].

By the same flexible logic, someone can play the witch as the polar opposite of Dorothy [the witch’s name being “Theodora” in Oz, the Great and Powerful: as a Lilith-esque inversion of “God’s gift,” making “Dorothy” Raimi’s “Eve” inside the Baum mythos] to achieve her own desired results with the wardrobe change: exposing the Wizard and his illusions/servants as perfidious and bourgeois humbugs behind the curtain. Non-binarism [and other GNC ideas] generally work within binaries enslaving them to achieve liberation; The Wizard of Oz is a queer classic because its class character is very queer and unconcerned with profit as an accidental result; i.e., the studio tortured everyone involved, but especially Judy Garland, and the film itself was a box office bomb that only saw a revival on television over a decade later to become beloved for its magical realism as queer-friendly by virtue of the interpretative context as staged [a Broadway-style musical with rainbows in it and crossdressing furries] happening between the story and the audience. To that, the rainbow is the curtain; i.e., as something that, through the usual restless labyrinth’s cryptonymies, serve during a group[21] production to hide and show things only as a rainbow can. Rebellions really are gay! 

This wasn’t the first filmed telling of The Wizard of Oz [though it was the first in-color cinematic version] and Frank Baum had written multiple other books at this point. But a rebellious interest in the film took hold here and specifically here because of the story’s queer potential as set within exploitation as a regular mode of expression, for or against its own dogma in popular fiction; i.e., both the movie and the book are essentially a witch hunt [taking another half century before Gregory Maguire, a gay man, would write Wicked from the witch’s perspective—more on that in Volume Three] but it didn’t stop all the people normally treated like monsters [fags] from doing an old theatre-house classic: falling in love with the monsters they saw in front of them [trauma-bonding: “It ain’t easy bein’ green!”]. Is that really so hard to believe? Most queer people are indifferent about Dorothy as the goody-little-two-shoes; everyone roots for the witch [a total baddie with the best lines: “How ’bout some fire, scarecrow!” Fucking metal].

By extension, the usual fairytale escape became the “head canon” of rebellion as something to do in all the usual ways—with makeup, clothes and props, etc, making gender trouble; i.e., to imitate in undead rebellious forms of subterfuge through disguise as showy and vivid: costumes as a kind of gender identity that had evolved to account for trans expression. Except by 1965, said evolution would have occurred during the Civil Rights movement, free love movement/sexual revolution, flower power, anti-war movements regarding Vietnam, as well as the official codifying of the words “transgender” and “transsexual” into medical parlance in ways that started describing people—not as diseases tied to their biology [as “homosexual” would have, in 1870]: “a species and juridical process,” as Foucault puts it in A History of Sexuality, Volume One—but a classification with more sex-positive connotations/potential that kept the monstrous-feminine attire as carryovers from older more bigoted days; i.e., a heirloom “sword” that stopped killing us, instead “slaying” for us, the wretched, like Zorro [that’s my head canon from now on: Elphie is like Zorro—a swashbuckling Amazon whose woman-of-the-people role upends Samus’ canonical one: being the Galactic Federation’s good little war bitch].

[artist: Persephone van der Waard] 

Over time, The Wizard of Oz has become a queer benchmark. Of course, we take all of this for granted now. But back then it was evolving into itself in ways that still aren’t crystalized. In other words, all of this development [as an actionable idea/aesthetic] happened in spite of the elite because they aren’t great and wonderful. Like Baum’s satirical double [the story’s hot-air balloon being a metaphor for Kansas politicians: “full of hot air”], they lacked the kind of control studios have now relative to technology as different. But the same monopolies now are just as impossible relative to the witch as dualistic; i.e., as something that speaks to our struggles even when treated as the usual scapegoat that TERFs love: to see themselves as the universal victim—a zombie attacking other minorities as the state’s good little monstrous-feminine. We want to take the sexually-charged surface of the witch’s green skin and black, badass, Destroyer-themed dress and make it our Aegis to wield, speaking classically to children through music and song to extend our hexes to a very nude sort: nudely rebellious, threatening “rape” but also the temptation [and allure] of sweet, sweet freedom [of sex, gender and everything in between]. Sound familiar? Elphie’s not just Mary Poppins from Hell; she’s the Great Depression’s revived rockstar zombie—a Gene Simmons simulacrum [also a zombie] repeatedly dug up towards the 1990s and beyond. She’s not just a zombie, then, but the hot, forever-single teacher helping little kids who feel gay find closure “over the rainbow.”

Is it cliché and fetishized? Pray tell, what isn’t, in the Gothic? As the place that lives forever inside the Young At Heart—where all queer people retreat to find escape from evil men—Elphie’s been made into a die-hard icon by people like us across space and time [my version, above, combining the Samus-style Amazon with the classic musical form]. She’s our sexy role model—the person we want to fuck and want to be[22] showing us to stand up to singular interpretations of dogma, of ways to exist beyond the normal zombie/witch as toxic [the witch’s green skin isn’t the problem, but the state punishing and hunting her for it]—someone to keep in our hearts regardless of age. To quote Maguire himself: “Elphaba lives!” Long may she reign.)

(artist: Amber Harris)

I’d like to expand on witches as a class of monstrous-feminine, if I may. Witches, like all monstrous-feminine, take many forms. Whatever their appearance, old-school stage theatre is meant to communicate quickly and loudly with purely one’s body, voice and costume; Elphaba is a vice character, meaning her stormy surface is charged with raw, palpable force and unbridled sexual energies, summoning and showcasing immodest exposure of the body and/or feelings as caustic rebellious code; e.g., music that challenges men (Cardi B’s “WAP” [2021] being a good[22a] example of throwing men off-balance; i.e., through the frank, unapologetic discussions exposing the genitals or genital-adjacent topics, normally bedridden [thus invisible] and tied to bodily functions exclusive to uterus-having people to, pardon the expression, rub men’s faces in). Along with the sonic aspects of music are the visual gestures; e.g., a rockstar’s phallic analogs (microphones and mic stands; long fingers, tongues, nails, and guitar necks, etc), tight provocative clothes, and crude hand signs/magic gesticulations (ahegao/funny faces, crotch thrusts, twerking and serpentine wiggling [“playing the cello”] and so on) made not by a male sex symbol but a freaky monstrous-feminine one (for a nice AMAB, non-white version, refer to Lil Nas’ “Call Me by Your Name,” 2021): “love you,” “goat horns,” “hang loose”/”call me” and “the shocker” (“two in the pink, one in the stink, thumb for the clit”).

Vice characters like Elphaba are lightning rods; i.e., inconvenienced by station and accident of birth—indeed, persecuted in spite of them. She’s born different in multiple ways, and similar to the Creature is empathetic through abuse that makes her want for revenge against the so-called “do-gooders” of the world; i.e., those who act holier-than-thou but in truth are merely con men having hoodwinked the public and entrenched themselves in the halls of power (aka establishment politicians)! They’re pulling the strings of persecution mania the likes of which harms Elphaba and her friends, to which she cannot let stand. Point-in-fact, she openly hates them, and with good reason: the Wizard isn’t just an illusionist, but a hypocrite colonizer and tyrant. She’s not really the cute sort of witch, then, but the black, pissed-off sort taking no prisoners!

The man-hating dyke is an old queer classic, and emotions in the Gothic/stage theatre are generally color-coded in ways that survive into comics, cartoons and other popular media types; i.e., color has value and taboo qualities. Except, Elphaba has every right to be angry at men, especially powerful white men (what MLK called “white moderates”). But her anger has an equally volatile, traumatized quality that sometimes causes her to self-destruct/alienate herself (a bit like the Incredible Hulk); i.e., through a burden of care commonly foisted onto her by rebellious men (rebellions are classically nurtured by monstrous-feminine agents).

The color-coded elements have their own origins; “green-eyed monster” came from Shakespeare[22b]—with green skin indicative of alienation, decay and punishment (“to be in a pickle” [also from Shakespeare[22c]] meaning a preservation technique, postmortem, ostensibly from having drunk too much alcohol—a classic coping mechanism while alive under duress) but also to be green with poison, venom, and toxins (with myriad pejorative labels like “harridan,” “battle-axe,” “spitfire,” “bitch, “harpy” and “virago” indicating man’s owed/owned property as very much being against the idea to a monstrous, warlike and animal extreme); i.e., envy and resentment (where green seeks red in less of a crossover with vampirism and more of a shared function: freezing and feeding on one’s enemies and friends). Nietzsche called this “ressentiment,” but he was an elitist cunt; our witch is a cackling fire-starter/pot-stirrer full of piss and vinegar (the “strict” dom) for her enemies and (some) sugar (but mostly spice) for her friends—in other words, all the elements of a disgruntled, sassy whistleblower nakedly and openly challenging male power through female inheritance (re: Maguire)! Elphaba’s literally a walking weapon and bullhorn—a more capable hippy with a flamethrower (the Molotov cocktail being a classic, Communist symbol of armed resistance, the fire-breathing dragon a source of vitality and concentrated, organized military power).

(artist, colors: J-Skipper)

Furthermore, witches are often, per the Male Gaze, sexualized to disempower them. In turn, witchcraft is—like women—classically framed by Western (Cartesian) powers as erroneously having two sides; e.g., a good and a bad, a white and a black, a wild and a tame, a virgin and a whore. As a black witch, Elphaba is very much the wild, bad whore doubling the maiden in the state’s eyes, while also standing in as a fierce, uncompromising enby (trans, intersex) protector of those the state exploits—i.e., threatening to spill her guts to expose their whole operation to save her friends. To that, she’s the classic, natural maverick in the state’s eyes, the so-called “terrorist” with oppositional ties to legitimacy (a rival throne, but wanting to redistribute her power) who’s actually a counterterrorist/activist with anti-establishment goals. Unlike fascists (who Michael Parenti in Black Shirts and Reds [1997] calls [with justice] “false revolutionaries“), Elphie (and her likenesses) look cool, fuck big time, and sit on the right side of history! They couldn’t care less about “making it” (assimilation) or punching down (cliques and so-called “mean girl syndrome”), but instead are prepared to go down swinging at their arch nemesis at any moment: the Man (and his proponents) as fat and happy—completely used to browbeaten pushovers and battered housewives, not little troublemakers who’d gleefully take a baseball bat to their head (when I was a kid, I wanted to be Eowyn or Samus; but the more I think about it, if I could be anyone, it’d be Elphaba).

(artist: Amber Harris)

As such, “compromise” really isn’t Elphaba’s style. She evokes the Destroyer/Medusa persona, albeit with a frank, unyielding aim and wily playfulness to build something less tyrannical (taking the goblin’s playful invention as a commentary on counterterrorism resisting further character assassinations: ducking the so-called “teenage phase” and becoming a way of life that doesn’t preclude Young-at-Heart feelings for even the most pained, ostensibly jaded bitches). As such, she comes from relative privilege but isn’t a black capitalist. Rather, because of her iconoclastic education and stances, she remains ostracized, including by members of her own oppressed group: the weird nerd’s weird nerd. Such a gamut of warring variables makes Elphaba a versatile representative; i.e., she commonly works much in the way of the usual comic book/non-parental role model, but for all peoples who are different—both in terms of sex and gender but also origins (foreigners fresh off-the-boat and multi-generation immigrants/multilingual households), religion, weight distribution, profession (sex work) and skin color. In short, she’s Athena’s Aegis with legs and a bad attitude, reclaiming her oppression to weaponize it (again, similar to black people of color using the N-word, queer people using “faggot” and women calling each other “bitch” to reclaim it).

She’s a paradoxical sum of intimidating, hostile, at-times prickly qualities that apply to all oppressed groups who dare to speak out and own them oppression: an offensive, in-your-face fighter—scrappy, upfront, rhythmic, forward and streetwise (sexually aggressive and crude, but delicious; e.g., a pot of “macaroni” to “stir”); loyal, principled, fed-up fierce, sharp; ready to make a scene, throw down, turn you on, etc; i.e., a diplomat of sex and force for workers, no stranger to interrogating and negotiating with power in its rawest forms: a walking work of art, poetry in motion, a killer/surgeon dissection her patient; a dark momma with needs, appetite, vices, and conviction; someone seeking stability through abrasive combative argument, concerned far less with appearing good (quite the opposite) and much more with doing good tied to a fixed moral position critiquing institutional dogma: rights are sacred, not profit nor their anthems (e.g., “Eye of the Tiger” romancing how boxing is a poor man’s sport that forces black men to be dueling thoroughbreds and women to be sex objects in a kayfabe pyramid scheme: “There can only be one!”). Like the Kurgan, she loves battle—slices, penetrates, overwhelms, shocks, awes, entrances, stuns, dodges and twists her adversaries and friends alike (obviously to achieve different results).

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a1b2: “I only like Batman for the villains!” A good villain/vice character should mirror the frustrations of their good double—i.e., the protagonist, but also the audience. Per the Gothic, this retains a castle-like concentrism/mis-en-abyme that expresses equally in stage/comic book language as sharing the same mythic formulas and cosmetics. People treated like clowns, goblins, Medusa, dragon women, cyborgs, outcasts and witches reliably “better the instruction” through success being the best revenge: on and offstage as a performance. Per the hard/soft divisions that trauma entails, there is often a hot/cold element; i.e., “resting bitch face” and “psycho hose beast,” “pixie dream girl” [mania] and other such warring emotional states embodied on the surface of the thespian as an extension of their own feelings, the story’s, the audiences, etc.

In turn, they collectively manifest/communicate in the usual body language assisted by props, special effects, makeup and costumes: sex and force conveyed in the Gothic dividing into fantasy and science fiction; i.e., the posthuman speaking to the objectification that occurs during alienation versus the fight for recognition, while magic is basically wish fulfillment. In turn, the Western [frontier narratives] and postcolonial stories are liminal expressions that speak Cowboys and Indians through a subversive, dark-rebel aesthetic and mindset: guns, girls, and familiars that meld technology cybernetically with nature’s fury conjured up to eject colonial forces like a splinter [unwanted penetration of an organism, raping it]. As villains, they antagonize the forces of good [the state] as false, exposing their own hypocrisy while humanizing the villain’s plight through the usual interrogations of generational trauma in universal languages; i.e., theatrically and musically reclaimed from their Imperial doubles: sex and force. 

Capital makes us afraid, leading to death anxiety which requires death masks to perform. In turn, monsters are modular regarding criminality per capital’s universal alienation, fetishization and sexualization as something to endorse or reject on a gradient; re: “Animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms.” The language is hybrid and dualistic per dialectical materialism, resulting in chimeric mouthpieces for the oppressed, but also state scapegoats burying the gay during rape play—i.e., literally raping the Dark Mother [the water witch, aka Grendel’s mother as the ancient enemy of Imperial forces, followed by capital and Cartesian thought built on older Imperialism] by humoring such refrains through harmful penetration; e.g., the hero from The Little Mermaid [1991] stabbing Ursula fatally with his mast [a metaphor for the ghost of the counterfeit raped into silence by the ghost ship of European industry and settler-colonialism dressed up as “exploration,” but also “true love”]:

Such villains are popular with marginalized groups because they resist whatever harmful logic the state forces onto them; size queens in more than one sense of the word [queer actors, give and take], they speak to our oppression and liberation, mid-exploitation—i.e., while getting the chance to talk back, give lip, throw sass, and generally throw one’s weight around while vamping it up with ludo-Gothic BDSM. Per the Medusa and the monstrous-feminine, it’s something people love even when they’re not oppressed [the ghost of the counterfeit] and which the state [and its actors; re: Vivienne Medrano] will try to gentrify, objectify or otherwise discredit, silence and assimilate. But again, this isn’t a monopoly. Through this constantly campy rebel mindset [the Satan persona], anything around us becomes a counterterrorist weapon, a guerilla means of liberation that collocates through reliable one-two punches/good habits; i.e., certain words go together and various functions/forms synonymize to flow power in a given direction; e.g., Jadis loved Batman‘s villains and Ursula, so I turned that into yet-another-object lesson to caution against TERFs, SWERFs, and centrism/neoliberalism: rebel-guerilla, anger-Medusa, reclamation and performance, etc, to take Amazons, Medusa, and herbos away from my crazy, abusive ex. “Playtime’s over!”

The Gothic, even when canonized, is useful to exposing and exploiting the enemies’ flaws—through jester-like, intentionally bad interpretive dances, puppetry and acting; e.g., the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal as bad cartoons of capitalist pigs, Nazis, but also the Communist lurking on the surface; i.e., the witch, as canonized and policed by bad-faith performers acting out of routine desperation [re: Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks]: Seladon [whose name closely resembles “celadon,” or a particular shade of green, hinting at her envious nature]. No matter how edgy or rebellious she seems, her act is to police those who would actually rebel, after which she shamelessly bends the knee to state power [mirrored in real life by Hitler being Western Europe’s mad dog—useful until he wasn’t, which Tolkien used to scapegoat the Nazi and essentialize “Goldilocks Imperialism” in his Middle-earth]. Trying to negotiate with a class of people who have total power over her is delusional, Seladon’s feckless cruelty exposed as a farce by the real predators in the room. “So cold-blooded! You could be a Skeksis!” they respond, delighted by her service but encouraged by her submission as enticing them to accelerate their vampiric war of extermination. Pacification is attained through the colonized policing themselves [which extends to fascist ethnostates in real life; e.g., Israel and its own Holocaust denial and war crimes made ostensibly in America’s name, but really taking settler-colonial theory and radicalizing it in practice to threaten the hegemon it claims to serve].

Apart from a multimedia expert, theatre nerd local slut, I’m literally a BDSM, monster and Metroidvania doctor. That means my theory for witches is well-developed, and comes directly from my PhD work [refer to this footnote[20a] for various salient quotes]. Camping the Nazi is just as important as punching them because they often imitate the language of oppression through the aesthetics of power and death to put workers to heel: witches as victimized cops victimized other witches resisting the state. Like Seladon, the practice can be redeemed through an actual reversal towards functional rebellion, mid-performance. The same general idea applies to Elphaba, Ursula, Hippolyta and any witch/monstrous-feminine as paradoxically being both a Nazi, Communist and otherwise “corrupt”/monstrous-feminine force in the shadow zone.

Psychosexuality and the shadow zone are things Volume Zero establishes and writes about a lot, so refer to it for tons more examples and theoretical elements.)

(artist: Amber Harris)

A witch isn’t just a witch, then, but a curious, modular cross oscillating between a vampire, zombie, and goblin. She loves animals, drugs, confrontation, mad science, magic, heavy metal, civil rights and extramarital sex, toys, and contraceptives (the sexual freedom not to have children and enjoy sex purely for pleasure in defiance of state forces/dogma). In short, she’s a sassy spokesperson for alienation, rebellion, sexual health, and rocking out, and is not above getting her frustrations out for all the world to see (going so far as to haunt her enemies after death, Medusa or Pandora-style: “Not even death can save you from me!”). Like solid bop, she’s straight fire that gets you in the mood (to fuck, fight, or both as something to rile up and drive to higher degrees of intensity and passion: “Fuck me like you mean it!”); like a tornado, she’s a force of nature that cannot be stopped, cannot be contained, defeated, or even killed in the rebellious sense. All you can do is get out of her way.

My kinda girl, to be honest (the kind my productive thesis arguments collectively hit upon, but also the repeating canvases of myself and other artists and/or sex workers invigilated here); my kinda power trip (echoing across the Gothic mode’s music, monsters and theatrical materials from Otranto to Chrono Trigger [1995] to piano recitals [e.g., Animalisa Keys’ “Chrono Trigger – Complete Soundtrack on Piano,” 2023] and some such Gothic performance art in the Internet Age using monstrous sex and force to hint at “danger” [quotes optional] and fun, including immense kinds [state shift, aka the end of life as we know it] as Numinous in a palliative way that isn’t capital’s usual myopic Morton’s Fork/centrist dogma). Everyone gravitates to different monsters to embody not just as “content”/dress up but that as satirical, political, rebellious, GNC, and sexily nostalgic all at once (all concepts Volume Three will consider at length)! It’s a veritable monster party/convention to visit and revisit, time and time again! Dress up as whomever you like; hug or fuck whoever you wish provided its consenting (and take photos for memories; they last longer):

(model: Persephone van der Waard [middle] dressed up as Eric Draven, posing for the camera with two cuties at a convention.)

Per the usual commonplace bestiary method, monsters are fun to compile, categorize, and create, patchwork or in whole; per the laws of Gothic attraction stipulate: make it weird (alien), “dangerous” and sexy, and people will investigate/take part. Capitalists cash in on that through systemic abuse; we liberate ourselves through iconoclastic forms. To that, as long as it’s ultimately sex-positive during the battle and after the dust settles, then no harm, no foul!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

The Wizard of Oz takes the usual monomyth and gives it several key twists: one, the Call to Adventure leaves us wanting to stay in Oz (for a fun inversion, Howard the Duck makes the resident alien decide to stay on Earth after being sent there by a freak science experiment[23a]); and two, the little girl meeting her talking-animal friends help her as they all find their true mettle as largely performative, ceremonial. It’s all a sham, one that flips easily on its head, exposing state illusions during iconoclasm: looking at the witch to see why she’s green (undead, alien, fetish and furiously so), realizing the slippers she so desperately wanted were Commie shoes all along! She wanted a home, to fit in despite her trauma, for someone to believe in her and see her as a person instead of a freak, to be called pretty and not have it be a cruel joke (e.g., Gene Wilder to the Creature: “Hey, handsome!”)—something the Wizard routinely denies her by eventually having her assassinated (the real tyrant, more comparable to Louis Carrol’s headhunting Queen of Hearts, versus Elphie as the rebel challenging state figures and power centers: the Wizard and capitol of Oz). To that, you find out who your real friends are when challenging state power through its illusions. Friends are made through theatrical struggle, then, of which iconoclasm informs future battles and future friends based on old tricks leveled against us that we can take and make our own—the Scarecrow’s brains, the Tinman’s heart, the Lion’s noive, and of course, those fabulous fucking shoes (sparkle, bitches!). It’s very gay and Gothic. Lewis would approve. I certainly do (what fag worth their salt doesn’t?)—by reclaiming and owning that green skin as part of the look, the identity, the struggle, but also the hunger (a prime feature of undeath, as the Undead module shall explore in Volume Two, part two)!

So while it’s true that certain phobias stem at least partially from ancient, prehistoric interactions with deadly animals that could kill us in the wild, conflating this basic biological fact through modern dogma built on capitalist forbears modified for profit is the capitalist name of the game. To reveal these utter frauds, it’s best to focus on their “tells” and expand them (“fear is the mind-killer”); i.e., if someone really is as deathly afraid of labor portrayed as monstrous-feminine (undead, demonic and/or animalistic), it behooves us not just to ask why unto itself, but to take advantage and weaponize it against them through class and culture warfare; e.g., a freeze word or phrase that renders them helpless, mid-duel, but also embarrasses them ipso facto; i.e., grown-ass men not only shitting their pants at mythical “spider women,” but having spent their entire lives abusing antiquated Freudian/Jungian psychobabble to foster Red Scare and other moral panics at queer labor action like the Wizard of fucking Oz. Gotta show the world the man behind the curtain, and that’s generally through what they read into (us) as both essential to their rhetoric and completely antithetical to it. A little flash from the Aegis is really all it takes to send their own stupefying illusions back at them! And this, once cultivated, is like Bruce Lee’s emotional content: “it strikes all by itself,” second-nature, united as one.

(source)

That’s all we’ll really have time for, regarding monstrous-feminine examples in this subchapter (the mode is modular for a reason)! My book, in turn, is a coy little toy chest that—in the holistic spirit of things—is a little too full of toys to play with and a little too short of the time required to explore each to the degree that I could (which I leave my readers to do themselves after they throw this book aside and forget about it); e.g., I’m just as likely to refer to Blue Öyster Cult’s Spectres (1977) as I am Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (again, all manner of monster), but am also granting you the chance; i.e., to yeet or yoink your own favorites, mid argument—to make one too many “weird sex metaphors” (as Christine Neufeld said of my work). But isn’t that basically every Gothic novel ever? Getting laid by slaying dragons and playing dress up? We’re all touching upon something greater and older to lead towards something new as founded on these gloomy paradoxes’ choosy arbitration. It’s a heavy load, one I’ve spent this entire volume (and multiple weeks writing from dusk till dawn since late February) storing up; i.e., “ejaculating” metaphorically[23] onto you as a vampiric passing of essence. Witch bukkake!

Whereas killing dragons without irony is “to do a Capitalism,” we’re doing the nasty as liberated from that cycle (and Maguire wasn’t above witch sex, either). All of this dialectical-material oscillation needs people to perform the parts. Despite all this talk of ghosts, then, a production without actors is just a blank stage; we gotta give these ghosts shape, if you follow me. So onto how to meet rebels, what inspired us to meet them, and what carries on as all of this repeats, repeats, repeats—a jouissance that carries Medusa’s message out of the imaginary past into the possible future.

Except—this will be real quick, I promise (one exhibit, three pages)—this begs the question: “Where did all this metaphorical cum come from?” My friends, it came from the muses, of course—my muses, my friends as people I met along the way! I.e., those who take us to Hell and submerge us there, showing us all the secrets normally alien to human existence under capitalist-colored glasses: by “flashing” us, wearing disguises whose revolutionary cryptonymy shows to hide and hides to show as a proletarian counterterror device. They show us the goods, and we advertise them through our reactions, back-and-forth (mine being to ask Harmony if I could use the below image in my book, while also plugging their stuff as I do—note the subtly red lipstick):

(exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a2: Artist: Harmony Corrupted. Communism isn’t defined by red, but often uses it in subtle ways, mid-cryptonomy [to be fair, the lipstick probably won’t be the first or only thing you notice, here]. Said cryptonymy is revolutionary by virtue of function; i.e., as an agent of circumstance who refused to be a victim, instead working their magic to make their enemies poop their pants in public: fascism being a perception of power and legitimacy that falls apart when exposed to what it hates; moderacy an illusion of status-quo benevolence that also falls apart when tone-policing the usual groups they exploit through dogma—sex workers!

To that, red isn’t “just” the color of Communism [though it often is] nor simply the color of sexual arousal, as Jordan Peterson quizzically[24] purports [from Vice’s “Jordan Peterson Is Canada’s Most Infamous Intellectual,” 2018], but certainly something to incite such arousal, mid-rebellion, as an often-asexual [nudist] act; i.e., gender identity and performance as having the potential to arousal others; i.e., without them wanting to or not, but often in spite of them [with Peterson being a die-hard Cold Warrior extending his Red Scare stupidity into quasi-academic legitimacy purported as manna from heaven by weird canonical nerds of his target age: teenage boys]. It bears repeating that rebellion is generally a theatrical device to get a point ipso facto—by virtue of action, those canonized as “female” will be policed if they wear makeup in inappropriate places; i.e., “not for their husband,” tempting their [often-male] bosses, in effect blaming the victim by calling her a whore in so many words.

So we have to ask ourselves, why would someone do it? Wear makeup and clothes? So they’re… not naked and look pretty? The idea that women only wear clothes for attention is to strawman the very spurious claim that they do it for men [or sex] at all; point in fact, they’re often going it for themselves—i.e., they want to play and feel pretty to make statements that become embroiled in largely politics whether the monstrous-feminine party not just woman, but any incorrect marginalized group] wants it, or not. So agency becomes again, a question of concealment to show what is geared to happen regardless to say something about it through the incensed reactions of weird canonical nerds.

Whores get stoned all the time, we might as well look good while doing it. More to the point, we provoke our would-be attackers because they’re going to attack us anywhere they can; might as well have it happen while we’re behind a phone screen or otherwise “in public” where we’re less likely to be raped and killed for it. To say that either cis women queer people [among all oppressed groups] aren’t somehow aware of this reality is absurd; we know exactly what we’re doing and loving every second of it [“smiling at the gods,” as Camus would put it]. Furthermore, the haze of queer existence speaks to the larger portrait of reality you can see in real time: Medusa being shamed. Even when she doesn’t have literally snakes for hair—is relatively modest—she will be battered for showing anything that threats the nuclear model in a phallic sense; re: the scarlet woman, the temptress, the slut, the Medusa.

The idea, in that case, is to provoke in ways that a) are fun according to what we can handle [some people like being cat-called, for instance], b) safe [always take precautions; e.g., avoid doxing and “flash” under safe conditions], and c) intense certain demographics to oust them in public, showing our peers who they are through something they can’t easily hand-wave: their own actions. As such, we show our friends and enemies who our targets [the state and its proponents] are: fascist. They hide not just in the shadows, but among their friends. And this can be very telling by a group reaction, as well—i.e., if you scratch a moderate, a fash bleeds, including the moderate next to them as affronted. Defending Nazis by proxy [calling it “the free market of ideas”] is trademark obscurantism, but also “boundaries for me, not for thee.” The lipstick wearer generating gender trouble is also a de facto educator showing others to learn from theatre as a multi-register/multimedia spectrum of exchanges.

Under these complicated circumstances, its best to pick our own wardrobe, venue and audience to work with while “slaying”; i.e., working it to make money and political statements to actively demask the fash with, thus castrate the state’s classic vigilante arm.)

Friends are things to protect from those the state misleads and victimizes; i.e., menticided through waves of terror until said persons turn coat, becoming class traitors who obey the state’s decree in monstrous-feminine disguise: “You have heart! I’ll take that too!” I loved Jadis as my black knight until I realized they weren’t being ironic, and a) saw me as the thing to take, and b) also take me from me my friends and they from me—to isolate (thus alienate) us from each other while Jadis sang the praises of Joe Biden, J.K. Rowling and Bill Gates. They did so and colonized my work, my praxis, my performance, my life as something to—if they couldn’t take it by guile or brute force—then at least compel to silence (they were Wormtongue as much as a straight-up bruiser, in that respect: opening their mouth to have their mother’s voice come out). So as friends are things to protect, we must do so with the enemy’s most awesome weapon—the dreaded Darkening(!)—as something not just to bounce back at them and nothing else, but absorb and transmute into an empathetic force that blasts them apart! The gentle ones are always the fiercest when you push them too far. So while I can be a good girl to my friends, as I said, I can be a world-ending bitch to protect them using my Aegis as a rare and fatal gift: “Get away… FROM MY FRIENDS!”

Onto part two, “Meeting Rebels; i.e., What Inspires Us to Meet and All of It Carrying On and On (feat. Harmony Corrupted, Jack Burton, and Blxxd Bunny)”!

---

Footnotes

[1] Masturbation, both literal and figurative, meta; i.e., Professor Lando’s “Gooning Explained” (2024). During capital’s crises of masculinity, weird canonical nerds (usually cis-het men) feel guilty pleasure insofar as sex = surrendering one’s power (often, cum) to a monstrous-feminine as potentially inside themselves. They resort to wishful thinking as a state of grace tied to fatal nostalgia, projecting onto others/the screen (the top-rated comment from Lando’s comment section): “I miss the times where a goon was just a [villain’s] lackey.” Any predictions on what kind of person feels threatened by open sexuality and non-heteronormative gender expression during ludo-Gothic BDSM. I’ll give you a hint: echoes of Bill Gates. Boys are stupid, Venture Bros. teases (“The Boys Never Died,” 2010), prone to embarrassing accidents taught to them by emulating their heroes badly* (e.g., the Batman costume Hank has on while jumping off the roof with an umbrella). So, you wanna get laid, boys? To find your own Molotov Cocktease? Well, you gotta learn to play the game by our rules, chudwads! So enter our “vaults” of forbidden knowledge, our castle-like dungeons if you dare!

*Essentially a Quixotic, Beowulf-style refrain built around profit as heteronormative, thus male-centric (Persephone van der Waard’s “Army of Darkness: Valorizing the Idiot Hero,” 2020).

[2] E.g., Jadis—an absolutely genderfluid herbo—absolutely loved Venture Bros. but couldn’t stand (for) my Commie interpretation of media; they hid it from me so I wouldn’t “ruin” their singular (centrist) interpretation of it. YOU COULDN’T SAVE VENTURE BROS. FROM ME, JADIS!

[3] Canon is absurd, thus lends itself well to camp, thus outrage. Rinse and repeat, girls!

[4] Dalliance evokes Baldassare Castiglione’s art of the courtier as one of nonchalance: “According to the Count, sprezzatura is the most important rhetorical device the courtier needs. Peter Burke describes sprezzatura in The Book of the Courtier as ‘nonchalance,’ ‘careful negligence,’ and ‘effortless and ease.’ The ideal courtier is someone who ‘conceals art, and presents what is done and said as if it was done without effort and virtually without thought” (source: Wikipedia). This is a) generally a skill earned working close to power in ways that, while they don’t go unnoticed, must present themselves as subservient to kingly forces, and able to woo His Majesty’s rapacious advances along with other male members of the court (or jealous female parties); and b) one honed in domestic modern spaces by people abused by the powerful who, post-abuse, communicate wordlessly to others who have been abused. Trauma is nonverbal; i.e., attracts, recognizes and begets trauma without much being said. So does weird to weird, prey to prey and predator to predator (and all of them to one another).

[5] To omit them in bare “Utopian” fashion (re: Jameson’s dismal of the Gothic) is to not only exclude trauma, but place the cart before the horse. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

[6] The use of stop-motion to animate clay is a very Gothic idea, as we shall see in the “Demons” module in Volume Two, part two; i.e., secularizing the divine by mocking instruments or fixtures of power between the church and state through puppet shows speaking less-than-charitable interpretations of these public figures and their holiness; i.e., as a social-material statement of power—of being badass/god-like but, projections of the numen aside, ultimately are terrestrial and of a human mind (“all deities reside with the human breast”). Gods are badass, as are anything that seems otherworldly to people; e.g., aliens, angels or demons, Amazons, ninjas, etc.

Also, small aside: Santa Claus is Capitalism enslaving nature for the middle class (those poor reindeer—but also ableism, via Rudolph’s magic red nose); our “reindeer games” gotta do better! How’s that for a “war on Christmas”?

[7] The OP writes,

Context: The illustration was drawn to accompany ‘The Devil of Pope-Fig Island’ from the Fables by La Fontaine (1762). Postcards available from the Vagina museum

The Wikipedia entry for ‘anasyrma’ (lifting of the skirt) has a section on the supernatural power of the act:

“Many historical references suggest that anasyrma had dramatic or supernatural effect—positive or negative. Pliny the Elder wrote that a menstruating woman who uncovers her body can scare away hailstorms, whirlwinds and lightning. If she strips naked and walks around the field, caterpillars, worms and beetles fall off the ears of corn. Even when not menstruating, she can lull a storm out at sea by stripping.”

The same idea plays to revolutionary cryptonymy and flashing those with power, exposing their own bigotries and inner hysteria made external for all to see. It’s not just the medieval topos of the power of women and female witches, though, but any sex worker as monstrous-feminine. Sexist men fear what they can’t understand or control (thank Capitalism for that, and the process of abjection). We gotta reverse that with our “Aegis'” cryptonymic potential!

[8] A theatrical site of androgynous vaudeville, in Maguire’s 1995 novel.

[9] Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) shows how sex and force dogmatically project onto a settler-colonial system as extending into myth built on oppression, which collocates sex and war (force) during calculated risk to unironically synonymize them; i.e., so-called “empowerment” fantasies that not only have a paywall, but uphold the status quo as settler-colonial under Capitalist Realism once internalized. The myopia expands, bringing its menticide along for the ride—a real Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, tilting at windmills; i.e., without the sex-positive ironies that GNC fantasies so often have (which are taken and subverted from canonical ones during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s liminal expression, on and on).

The neoliberalized monomyth’s die-hard adherence to Cartesian rhetoric extends this tutelage into the commerce of videogames: so called “built worlds” spawning out of Hell as a cultural refrain, these remain equally finite and conquerable on cartographic refrains; i.e., maps with open and closed spaces (nature and civilization, rural and urban terrain, forests and castles, etc) being chockful of numerable enemies, objectives and prizes. All operate according to Gothic us-versus-them per nature as unruly and alien, needing to be whipped into submission. This happens through so-called “Goldilocks Imperialism” as pioneered by Tolkien, whose outdoors approach survives well into videogames like Konami’s 1989 Castlevania 3 and its various settings set to heroically (violent) spooky music; e.g., “the Mad Forest,” above. All heroes are monsters, which the state pits against each other to profit on worker/nature exploitation. Viewed externally as a narrative of the crypt, capital’s greed (and casualties) stretch on-and-on in an infernal concentric pattern a given text cannot disguise, only treat as a Mandelbrot-style maze or labyrinth to vanquish (akin to the hero punching the walls that encase him—live burial as driven, per the courtly romance, by promises of sex, of elevation of one’s social-sexual standing during a holy crusade against “evil”).

Such interfaces and their recursive, serialized movement through mazes and labyrinths (my specialty) speak for themselves; pastiche is simply remediated praxis in that respect, of capital moving money through nature-as-alien being something to war against forever (using sex and force as driving rhetorical devices, the carrot and the stick). Each entry showcase a given time given a number—i.e., as an essentialized commercialization of a cycle made holiday ripe for fresh slaughter: the American approach to Halloween suffused with moral panic and psychosexual conquest.

In turn, all collectively translate into various Man-Box biases (double standards) and “point systems” bringing down bigger and bigger game (e.g., Gimli and Legolas literally hunting and counting heads during their own extermination-war-in-small at Helm’s Deep, eventually culminating in Legolas taking down the Oliphant [echoes of the barbarian, Hannibal, crossing the Alps] to aggrandize himself at the cost of nature-in-metaphor): war simulators that mirror extratextual parallels; i.e., “Hell” as a place to enter by means of rhetorical war games extending to games as war copaganda; e.g., such unironically piggish antics like “blondes are worth fifty points, anal a hundred,” and “no means yes, yes means anal,” etc. All constitute videogames as canonically settler-colonial police action between civilians, paramilitaries and military forces against nature-as-monstrous-feminine that translate out-of-text in the so-called “real world” as half-real (again, no outside of the text, my dudes). In short, they’re stochastic training grounds to encourage (more often than not) the conversation of young boys (and token players) into cops that police (thus rape) nature by going to war with it, worldwide.

This being said, there’s a canonical intended gameplay (use) versus an iconoclastic, emergent gameplay at work, here. Metroidvania can clearly be enjoyed independent of the profit motive as holy per the Protestant work ethic, but such pernicious factors should—per Sarkeesian’s adage—be considered. Clearly I can do this and still like rape fantasies, mid-Gothic-poiesis. Mine are simply ironic. Man Box rape play isn’t; i.e., the paradox of playing at rape to embody its actualizing is what they’re all about (a fact they must obscure through American Liberalism and fascist obscurantism working together to stymie Communism).

Sexy enemies always translate to “high risk, high reward” in such police schemes; e.g., succubae enemies, but also “sexy armor having high armor class points,” etc; i.e., combat against “worthy” foes is sexy unto itself as rapacious: “You’re big. I’ve fought bigger!” No matter the shape or size (the form) of the monstrous-feminine, it remains a target for the hero (the cop) to lionize through a Cartesian argument (the function), then take pride in vanquishing it. This yields the usual paradoxes of a witch hunt, the “witch” or “dragon,” postmortem, tragically revealed as no more than a teenage girl or person of color, religious minority, neurodivergent or disabled person, etc—all killed by Brave Sir Robin soiling himself when facing the killer rabbit. Such things are profitable under Capitalism and always have been, abjecting the process to the ghost of the counterfeit as something we must denude and dance with.

In turn, Samus is the state’s answer to being unable to provide actual brides to all its war dogs. War becomes their bride; i.e., their girl, their gun: opting for a girl-boss strategy during state decay that, in the same breath, supplies the quintessential Metroidvania baby formula for recursive (ergodic) motion tied to military objectives Man Box children internalize, menticiding them; i.e., a completionist approach that yields myriad subcategories (from “hundo” to Any%) as, you guessed it, translating to real life: infiltrators that invade a queer space in bad faith* to rape and gentrify it. So keep that in mind regarding what we’ve said in the past about speedrunning solutions needing to go beyond their own text/extratextual solutions; i.e., to collectively challenge capital, not pre-approved texts capital supplies like jigsaw puzzles (we’ll apply this to our own lives in Volume Three)!

*I.e., enshittification; e.g., Berlin, then and now. Built on the backs of sex workers and clawed back for capital by fascist pigs, the latter imitate the hauntological copies they counterfeit—the Roman Caesars and Egyptian Pharaohs, etc—as haunted by our spectres these holy men must exorcise. Except, they cannot—cannot escape their sins and the sin of their fathers, father’s fathers, and so on. The whore and demon cannot be killed anymore than these weirdos can purge themselves permanently of their own perverse/police-style sex drives [that would require conscious thought and effort]. We spectral exiles will be waiting for them—Medusa will be waiting for them—when the Imperial Boomerang brings Imperialism home to empire.

Essentially being unable to pay what it owes workers, the state has given them a proxy bride through a videogame avatar players can control, multitasking mid-performance. I’d almost be impressed if it wasn’t so regressive and submissive of the Amazon myth in obeisance to capital; i.e., she’s in the armor but still curtsying to the Man, is just a pretty cryptonym meant to distract/recruit through sex: The Tube’s “She’s a Beauty” (1983) singing “one-in-a-million girls, don’t fall in love!” to comment on the sex work industry as something that translates just as easily to videogames or any other medium. This isn’t to bash Samus—to punch the Nazi she-wolf (which moderate TERFs are, in disguise)—so much as it is to speak about the larger systemic problem: the recruiting of such figures in copaganda that historically-materially pits Nazis against liberation as something to quell for profit (capital recruits Nazis to punch Commies, then sacrifices the Nazi on the altar of American “freedom”). The more whores in a given complicit stable, the wider the joy division (and its execution and abuse) during collective and selective punishment/reactive abuse.

Such things sell like hot cakes during crisis—doubly so when crisis decays (fear and hunger make people desperate). So we gotta “drop it like its hot,” using our hot cakes” to speak truth to power on the same anisotropic liminal space of power and resistance: the shadow zone as ours to reclaim, our Hell to call and make home.

[10] “Then I will teach you our way of battle!” A conversation with the Gothic mode that wins and loses irony—i.e., Herbert’s original novel as far more critical than its descendants; e.g., his own, versus the cinema and made-for-TV adaptations, etc. Just as Lady Jessica was taught to see opportunities for advancement at every chance—gentrifying the Fremen (a pun: “Free Men”) through her own son, Lawrence–of–Arabia-style—the whole franchise has become, to some degree, gentrified again (the same way that Star Wars did, or Cameron’s doubles of it in his own military-optimistic refrains). Except the Amazon isn’t a monopoly—can be used to reverse gentrification during ludo-Gothic BDSM on all registers (“out of novels and into cinema and Metroidvania,” as my thesis put it).

[11] Contrary to medieval standards, there are no power hierarchies under ludo-Gothic BDSM, just mutually consenting performs offering different elements to a Gothic-Communist performance; e.g., I see in Harmony the opportunity to teach someone the lesson as something they are largely already doing. I just want to make it a conscious one.

[12] Cheese is gay and the video is largely a YouTube cash-grab gimmick that can still teach you about speedrunning as something to apply ourselves however we want. This unfolds according to the Gothic mode’s meta being an intertextual/cross-media and multimedia affair per the verisimilitude of execution; i.e., “how people talk” merging with “how people play” expressing larger ideas though extratextual para-dialogs: conversations about the text merging slang and jargon according to a complicated live performance (thanks to the streaming age of videogames) that adheres to a given media type’s standard execution while also bringing in external elements; e.g., Cheese being a world-class speedrunner who’s very “out” as gay (which inspired me to be more out, too. As Cheese always says, “Love ya, babes!” From one fag to another, right back at ya, cutie!).

[13] Karl Jobst is a good detective, but you can be a good detective/do good acts (e.g., “The Completionist’s Response Is The Worst Thing Ever,” 2024) and still be fash-leaning (remember that Nazis historically cover their tracks according to a costume they can take off; e.g., Hans the Jew Hunter in Inglorious Basterds, 2009). Turns out, ol’ Karl is both, generally a) focusing on people worse than he is to turn a buck (re: Billy Mitchel and Michael Zider), b) pitching Raid Shadow Legends (a 2020 gambling game made by Plarium Games, an Israeli developer) while c) having his own sordid past/alt-right ties he never came clean about and d) sucking our dicks (“Hello, you absolute legends!”)! Woops! But, I mean, just look at the guy! He’s so goddamn white it hurts, and I’m not talking about his skin; the whole unironic “Disney family portrait with matching t-shirts” thing is the stuff of Gothic façade (the fatal portrait): Disney is a horrible corporation you should absolutely not embody with your own nuclear family as the patriarch of—I don’t care how cute the kid is or how nice you all seem! It’s creepy and perfidious!

(artist: Doris Jobst)

Note: This isn’t an invitation to harass Karl or his wife and child, or throw unfounded accusations at them; but he is a public figure, thus merits criticism like any other person. This isn’t the trans witch coming for his wife and kid, but merely her acknowledging how sus he is hiding behind his family (a classic fash trick). I’m not saying homeboy’s a literal Nazi; I’m just saying it’s awfully hypocritical to be bigoted like many other white cis-het speedrunners (e.g., Caleb Hart being staunchly transphobic and cleaning up to protect his image, position and wealth; more on him in Volume Three) and then hide it. Suppression of evidence/refusing to talk about your own shortcomings like they never happened is a form of lying, Karl! —Perse

[14] A metonym; i.e., “the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant,” insofar as “straight” means to straighten what is queer. “The Straights” also speaks to an ideology attached frequently to a larger group; i.e., synecdoche, meaning “a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa.” For us, “Straights” pertains to white cis-het people who do belong to Cartesian hegemony. If the term doesn’t actually describe you, then it’s not meant for you despite appearing to the contrary. So chill, whoever you are. We’re not your enemy.

[15] Which decays into zombified forms that once spoke the truth but, gentrified, lost the ability to be perceptive satire; i.e., The Simpsons (Dead Homer Society’s “Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead,” 2012); e.g., Lionel Hutz from The Simpsons explaining “There’s the truth, and the ‘truth!‘” Profit kills criticism for content disguised as “criticism.”

[16] Zombies are classically slaves, including the monstrous-feminine; i.e., essentially Sublime’s “Raleigh Soliloquy Pt. I” (1994): “I don’t give a shit, as long as she sucks me off when I tell her, ’cause she’s my zombie. I captured that motherfucker, and she’s my cassette” (source: Genius).

[17] See Emma Shachat’s “The Anti-Semitic History of Witches” (2020). Because the monstrous-feminine is always fash-adjacent, there is always a fascist potential to all monster types. We’ll explore the vampire and goblin part of the same series in Volume Two, part two; i.e., during blood libel and other anti-Semitic tropes describing them as blood-drinking vampires, baby-killing witches, or flesh-eating goblins (all from Hey Alma’s “Anti-Semitic History of…” series; 2021, 2020, and 2023).

[18] Tim Curry, as usual, owning his musical roots with “Anything Can Happen on Halloween” (1986).

[19] Rule of thumb: the more musical something is, the more camp potential it has. Though this—like any monster dialog*—can absolutely be gentrified, as Wicked: the Musical (2003) shows us, but also Vivienne Medrano’s 2024 Hazbin Hotel, which varies considerably from its original 2020 pilot: demonizing angels, but not talking about God one bit; or as Volume One writes:

A similar tactic to many post-Miltonian works, whose Satanic poetics/darkness becomes blind towards critiquing patriarchal institutions. For example, Hazbin Hotel (2024) doesn’t even mention God, instead treating good and evil as essential, tediously and unnecessarily reformed by a white “nepo baby” hotel (funded by a serial killer, no less). Worse, her iconoclastic parents, Satan and Lilith, have been chained to the nuclear family unit as bourgeois. The white princess’ plan does suck, so her plight—of people not liking her stupid, small-minded idea—is an entirely unsympathetic one built on privilege, not rebellion. Its real-life author’s hard-fought success is likewise a thoroughly gross compromise with a giant mega-company churning out blind, Rocky-Horror-style pastiche. Like Tolkien’s sylvan trees, the author canonizes camp, regressing towards outmoded debates and harmful caricatures (e.g., Angel Dust as the reprobate queer sex worker) while profiting off them (source).

*A tradition probably not starting with Tolkien camping Paradise Lost but certainly the one my thesis volume focused on! When something becomes canon, you gotta camp it back!

[20] Which I had to watch and review for grad school (Persephone van der Waard’s “In the Flesh (2013): Season 1 Review, part 1,” 2018). As a lifestyle, we Gothic Communists have to stand scrutiny by “checking out” after inspections that shed light on our interest in monsters informing our genderqueer identities. Simply put, I have a lot of skeletons in my closet!

[20a] These are absolutely vital performative concepts, but also confusing ones so I’ll include them here for reference (from the glossary, below):

Psychosexuality

The adjacent placement of pleasurable pain and other euphoric sensations next to unironic harm; i.e., rape fantasy or theatre. Just as canon and camp exist in the same shadow zone, performative irony and its absence are equally liminal using the same shared aesthetics of power and resistance, death and rape, heroic (monstrous) violence: the colors of stigma, vice, power and sin. Canonical psychosexuality conflates pleasure with genuine harm, including bigoted stereotypes that further this pathology.

I don’t have a glossary definition for “shadow zone,” but you can refer to the essay “Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox; or into the Shadow Zone: Where We Currently Are and Where We’re Going Deeper Into,” from Volume Zero for a good introduction to it.

I’ve also supplied various quotes (again, all from Volume Zero) regarding the shadow zone and psychosexuality/Satan poetics that should prove useful. I can’t list all of them, here (e.g., Metroidvania) so refer back to that volume if you’re curious and want to know more.

Regarding heroic function:

All heroes function and appear as monsters in some shape or form. Heteronormative theatre’s copaganda and Military Industrial Complex binarize monster theatricality in service of capital (thus the profit motive as something to replicate and enforce through unironic Gothic poetics/mimesis). There are “correct” male heroes organized between white and black knights, and “incorrect” male heroes who are “corrupt” in ways that destroy the established order of the athletic/athletic-adjacent conflict as lucrative, thus heteronormative (and vice versa). This historical-material gender trouble extends to female/token heroes, who either are monster girls (exhibit 1a1a1h3a2) of the traditional sort—i.e., the damsel/detective (Gothic heroine) and demon (female Gothic villain) or the foreigner whose heteronormatively assigned power conveniently challenges Western (white, cis-het) men, thus patriarchal dominance—and whose warrior-esque compromises with power are allowed for short-lived gradients: the subjugated Amazon as phallic/”like a man,” but who must eventually conform to varying degrees when the state’s perpetual crises enter decay and radicalize the heteronormative model of war at all theatrical registers on- and offstage. Until the woman or token is closeted/collared, they are afforded the same crisis of position— i.e., the white, animalized, undead/demonic enforcer as threatened by the parallel forces of darkness coming out of the shadow zone. But because women/token minorities are coded as “weaker” by canon, they will corrupt “faster” thus be closeted or buried to prevent the spread of infection (what I call the “euthanasia effect,” which I will unpack more in a moment).

Yet, even if women or token groups submit to their “correct role” in regressive Amazonomachia, segregation is historically no defense from the profit motive. Because there must always be an enemy to fight (a crisis to extend war into forever), a woman or a token minority—even when entirely submissive and bridal/slave-coded—are precious but contested property that can always turn into a “bad demon” at any moment (e.g., the wandering womb, exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1), thus are always a threat that must be policed, often by members of their own group (cops defend property for the state; for token cops, this means themselves). The historical materialism of canonical Amazonomachia is a train of girl bosses and their witch cop/war boss variants that manifest on- and offstage as TERFs who unironically punch down against people more marginalized than them while performatively punching up against the elite, who they don’t meaningfully challenge during oppositional praxis; kettled, they instead emulate the Man Box (traditional male sexism and other bigotries tied to weird canonical nerds, who we’ll unpack in a moment) as a token assimilation fantasy—i.e., parroting the colonizer (e.g., Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, 1952). As such, they take war brides from the underclass during military urbanism, colonizing the poetic sphere and real world while furthering psychosexual violence, token “white” fragility and employing DARVO—in short, acting like white cis-het men.

Regarding camp as a living process:

In this perennial, dialogic sense, power and death constitute societal gatekeeping and countercultural transformation through theatrical fetishes and clichés (of which the Gothic is positively rife with) that play out in real life: a means of practicing debate as a wrestling tactic inside human language to better prepare us for its harmful, pro-state deceptions between daily conversations (and sex, or both) that we have with other people that look more or less like us; i.e., by recognizing and challenging them through our own sex-positive Gothic subversions that recultivate the Superstructure and reclaim the Base. In doing so, we’re accomplishing Gothic Communism’s chief aim: taking back the critical, class-conscious power of paradox (thus power)-as-performance, specifically that of monsters, on- and offstage simultaneously. It’s chaotic, but knowing how to swim in the void of the shadow zone (the Gothic imagination/mode) and its “darkness visible can be, paradoxically, an illuminating and life-saving affair—i.e., as something to deliberately cultivate for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism (thus for all workers) by taking back Hell, thus the world, as having been thoroughly colonized; i.e., ever since Milton first wrote Paradise Lost and challenged the status quo (arguably by accident, in his case, and certainly within the traditions of theatre as having been in conflict for far longer—since Hippolyta and the Ancient Greeks, at least). For us, there needs to be a deliberate re-camping of “darkness visible” through our “creative successes” during proletarian praxis.

Of camp as empowering:

Something I will argue repeatedly throughout my thesis (and the rest of the book) is how the greatest power/strength of class-conscious warriors is their deliberately campy “darkness visible” doubling canonical versions (through the Wisdom of the Ancients, though I may not always call it that); i.e., their innate and uncanny ability to camp canon using the same shadowy language/aesthetics that class-dormant class traitors do (whose much touted “greatest strength” is their Achilles Heel, their greatest weakness when the state needs sacrifices). Beauty in “the eye of the beholder” is subjective, but perceptions of power are enforced to a matter of function and objective degree in order to define beauty (and what is “correct” according to basic human, animal and environmental rights as tied to heroic stories) as having a monstrous class character. Everything happens in the shadow zone between dueling hero monsters for or against the state and its profit motive. Meanwhile, state agents are labeled by the state as counterterrorists, calling labor’s agents “terrorists” (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr.) in bad faith; the language can be reversed easily enough, but the function still has to be scrutinized as parsed with a learned eye.

Of said empowerment as dualistic:

Any heroic quest demands a journey into Hell to confront dark forces, and the hero generally presents before the quest as a paradox right off the bat: being of two worlds, one foot in the world of the living and one of the dead, magic/science, medieval/modern, heaven/hell, etc. Their liminal state and privilege of position affords them special education/access to old books (or sages) of wisdom that—as we shall see—can be counterfeited, but work within the same medieval poetics and Gothic mode that can be used for or against the status quo. Our journey (as workers seeking liberation from mass worker exploitation under neoliberal Capitalism) is to bring the campy power of a reclaimed Hell/shadow zone (and its subversive forces of darkness) back with us—to transform the world around us to better allow workers to negotiate for themselves while fighting for their basic human rights (and the health of the planet’s ecosystems and that of animals).

Of camp and Red Scare through animalistic metaphors:

As a symbol shared among the colonized and their colonizers, the symbol of the dog is canonically mistreated as undead/demonic; i.e., a liminal state whereupon it is chimeric, undead, and known for an endless, psychosexual demon hunger that fascism conflates with revenge of a particular kind. So-called “Jewish revenge” is the Red Scare sentiment of anti-Bolshevism shared by the American elite as enacted with impunity until it “crosses a line”—in this case a national boundary into the West by the Nazis:

For four years, numerous Americans, in high positions and obscure, sullenly harbored the conviction that World War II was “the wrong war against the wrong enemies.” Communism, they knew, was the only genuine adversary on America’s historical agenda. Was that not why Hitler had been ignored/tolerated/appeased/aided? So that the Nazi war machine would turn East and wipe Bolshevism off the face of the earth once and for all? It was just unfortunate that Adolf turned out to be such a megalomaniac and turned West as well (source: William Blum’s Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1995).

The same idea plays out in displaced, fantastical forms through undead and demonic language. As such, the assorted “ink blot” stigmas elide within the same poetic shadow zone, whereupon the hungry mouths of dead labor’s zombies bear their fangs and collectively shriek and howl. Simply put, they riot, but do alongside state agents opposing them using the same aesthetics of power and death: the fascist, but also the centrist combating both fascism and labor until asking the black “dog” knight to tag team the Dark Queen and her counterterrorist zombie forces. Mid-riot, various pro-state Beowulfs are generated and sent in to quell the slaves as dissident aggressors, called “terrorist” and certainly treated as such. These foils to revolution can be the man, himself, but also female counterparts who sell out and then are “exiled” by surrendering their power after killing the Dark-Mother orchestrator of such perceived uprisings (labor movements are often oversold as these great cabals populated by a furious zombie horde or demonic pandemonium). It’s mimesis that fails to question the process.

Of camp, monomyth and videogames (an exhibit):

(exhibit 1a1a1a1_a: Artist, left: J. Scott Campbell; bottom-middle: Fabián L. Pineda; right: Tom Jung. The monomyth and infernal concentric pattern are traditionally heteronormative, thus sexually dimorphic canon [dogma]; iconoclastic examples can subvert heroic double standards and bellicose, phallic language/rites of passage, but still work from positions of irony that parody heroic conventions and apocrypha [a popular, didactic story generally regarded as fictional; i.e., a “tall tale” connected to folklore and oral traditions] by toying with them during oppositional praxis as dialectical-material. In other words, iconoclasts tend to mutate what is already present according to what the artist knows about propaganda, thus makes and embodies as part of Gothic counterculture.

Consider videogames [my domain]. As a queer, Gothic ludologist and anarcho-Communist, I can attest to how genderqueer poetics would happily poke fun at Link’s “Master Sword” shooting “bolts of power” when “fully charged”—a mechanic borrowed from Star Wars [1977], Conan the Barbarian [1981, which was reviewed as “Star Wars made by a psychopath,” which applies as much to Rob Howard as it does John Milius] and even older palimpsests [such as the legend of King Arthur] copied by Pan’s own “sword” in Hook [1991] or Simon Belmont’s elongating “chain whip” in Castlevania [1986] or Mega Man’s “mega buster” [1987] or Samus Aran’s “beam cannon, missile launcher and bombs” [1986] or, hell, Mario’s “mushroom” helping him “grow” [1985]: canonical war is full of violent, harmful innuendo; e.g., Macbeth’s cycle of war as watered with blood: “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of growing.” As we shall see, there is always an enemy to kill or secret plot to uncover, thus revealing an enemy from within who “originated” from outside: the ghost of the counterfeit’s false copy of a corrupt backstabber/doppelganger. Instead of an invincible barbarian/enemy at the gates, the white-knight warrior of light faces a corrupt, dark version of himself—a shadow person or Gothic double:

 

[Artist: Gabriel Dias. Keeping with the idea of paradox, the opposition between Link and “his shadow” is both thrown into doubt and extremely dogmatic. On one hand, it’s entirely divorced from material critique in favor of a basic value judgement— literally light vs dark, wherein light is canonized as “good” and dark as “bad”; there’s no in-between or class character because the story has been displaced to a fantasy tableau emptied of earthly history. It’s trope-heavy and mechanical. As we’ll explore later in the thesis and rest of the book, though, class character often comes from gender trouble and parody within canon as thrown into personified doubt [a rather literal embodiment of self-reflection]; i.e., in relation to these prescribed gender roles as “ghost-like” or otherwise undead. Ontologically challenged, Dark Link might not “belong” to Link at all; he might simply be an uncanny simulacrum or likeness that triggers the presumed owner to attack [thus confirm his suspicions by eradicating his fears]. Doing so exposes his own flaws as a self-described “hero,” but also reveals his open-secret intended function: to kill the enemies of the state. The enemy must die, trapping the hero in a frozen state of inaction as they lie caught between their orders and their conflicted sense of identity.]

As a whole, videogames have served as neoliberal, music-heavy copaganda since the 1980s—first, based off Star Wars as franchised, but also Aliens [with the original, self-contained text for each being neoliberal critiques that, in their franchised forms, became operatically neo-conservative] as monomythic canon attached to real-world geopolitics: the American revenge fantasy after a refreeing [deregulation] of the world market post-Bretton Woods under global US hegemony. The common thread to these canonical remediations is a quest for mastery meta-narrative whose videoludic simulation of war helps acclimate the state’s children to endless future war through the Hero’s Journey as forever expanding on- and off-screen: made for bigger and better worlds, but also bigger (thus more phallic), traditionally masculine weapons; i.e., a heteronormative mode of ludic wish fulfillment that routinely sets the player on the path to prescribed empowerment, thus appearing to realize the impossible promise [not the universal fulfillment] of sanctioned sex by a) rescuing the damsel and slaying the cockblocking [ostensibly fascist/gay] dragon/minotaur as something to stab or shoot [exhibit 51d4a1/2] and b) facing off against the monstrous-feminine not just as not-white, female-coded, and non-Christian, but somewhere in between all of these things; e.g., orcs, drow and goblins; Dark Link, Protoman/Zero [exhibit 982b] or Pan’s shadow as the genderfluid, potentially trans, non-binary, or intersex false hero/man, dark twink, “phallic woman,” etc; but also Samus as the phallic woman tomboy acting like Rambo to serve the state, or Odessa from Overwatch 2 [2022]:

“Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty!” [from Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy].

I’ve spent my life subverting them, treating Samus as having the potential to not be a palingenetic handmaid [exhibit 38c1b] or Odessa/Zarya as something other than unironic girl/queer war bosses [exhibit 100c4/ exhibit 111b] while also having a great deal of fun with twinks in iconoclastic videogame fan art that treats the twink-ish hero as the non-bellicose sub [exhibit 93a].)

[21] As theatre productions always are—from Shakespeare to yours truly—or, as The American Cinematographer writes about Oz, “A cadre of creative minds [similar to Alien] infused MGM’s classic fantasy with a timeless supply of movie magic” (source: “Behind the Curtain: The Wizard of Oz,” 1998). Zombies don’t die; Nazi or Commie, they always come back in some shape or form.

[22] As I write in “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” (2021): “I want to fuck what I want to be: sexy. For me, that means a powerful woman like Samus” (source). The same idea applies to Elphie: “I’ve always felt attracted to witches, especially Joan of Arc and the Wicked Witch of the West,” I add:

Though not exactly a knight, Elphie is still a sexy rebel herself. In the musical, she rises from the ground, defying gravity in Icarian fashion while thrusting her broom upwards. Her joy is palpable and orgasmic, and she sings her loudest; she’s also isolated, abandoned by her friends and surrounded by enemies. Elphie’s song is a challenge to them, a “fuck you” to the tyrannical Wizard of Oz.

There’s a tragic element to characters like Joan and Elphie, ultimately hunted by society’s greatest “paragons.” Whether they’re openly racist and sexist, or bad faith allies, these manly abusers lust for the oppressed behind closed doors. Like the plantation owner raping his or her slaves, the misogynist clamors for the witch’s death or the fem boy’s murder, all while jerking off to them. It’s the power imbalance they seek, without which they’re flaccid, impotent; they crave reminders of their own domination over the oppressed. For the witches being hunted, power is gained by taking ownership over their performance from their abusers; their position remains liminal, trapped between the desire for self-expression and unwarranted persecution (see: Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, by Kristen J. Sollee) [ibid.].

As I’ve grown into and reflected on my own Gothic maturity beyond grad school, I’ve seen more and more how the monstrous-feminine isn’t “just women” at all and never really was; from Shakespeare to Lewis to Maguire to me, it’s always been anything that sticks out to flip the script, fighting for equality for all things different/of nature exploited by capital. Standing up for your rights, for what you believe in despite certain threat of death—to do it for the workers of the world collectively enslaved by evil wizards posturing as good—what on Earth could be sexier than that? Elphie’s metal incarnate, bringing home the poundage one flying undead monkey at a time: by being one, herself!

This isn’t just true for Elphie, but any “phallic” monstrous-feminine; e.g., Xena the Warrior Princess; i.e., naked and exposed, but defiant of patriarchal societies as the Amazons in subversive Amazonomachia have for millennia to ironic degrees of empowering nudism: “You see this ass? You’ll never own it! We’re the queens of our own queendoms, our own destinies to forge through battle!” It becomes a confidence-booster in an asexual sense; i.e., not something to sheepishly protest, “Don’t stare/watch me” (often uttered by women in vulnerable positions of exposure; e.g., in bed or the bathroom) but quite the opposite: “Watch me; stare if you like! I am unbroken, unbowed [what Jadis would call ‘chonk, stronk and ready to bonk!’—the herbo mantra]!”

(artist, flats: Hellica-Ordo)

[22a] Though the assimilation fantasy is a little on the nose: “There’s some whores in this [affluent] house!”

[22b] From The Merchant of Venice: “O beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on” (source). Portia, as a white woman with power, is—per Angela Carter—something of a vindictive cunt forced to play stupid games to survive in a man’s world; but also engages in bigoted deceptions (impersonating a lawyer) that crucify minorities (forcing a Jew to convert) to secure her own hard-fought position: as a married woman in control of a weaker man. In short, she’s predatory (envisioned as such by a bigoted gay man, to be fair).

[22c] No Sweat Shakespeare writes:

“In a pickle” is not an easy idiom to unravel, but let’s try and do just that by looking at the context of Shakespeare’s use of the term “in a pickle,” and the modern meaning of the phrase:

In The Tempest King Alonso’s butler Stephano and his jester, Trinculo, are washed up on an island. Stephano has survived by clinging to a barrel of wine and since landing on the island the two of them have been continually drunk. When they later meet up with the king, Alonso observes: “Trinculo is reeling ripe. Where should they find this grand liquor that hath gilded ’em?” He asks Trinculo, “How came’st thou in this pickle?” Trinculo replies: “I have been in such a pickle since I saw you last that, I fear me, I will never out of my bones. I shall not fear flyblowing.”

In this context, Trinculo means he has been very drunk. He uses the word “pickle” in the sense of pickling being a way of preserving food. He is saying that he is so pickled with alcohol that his body will be protected from maggots when he dies and will not decay (source).

Also, medieval works—I think we’ve safely established—generally tended to combine expressions of food, medicine, sex and death (e.g., to smash/to get smashed as war-like, mercantile [“churn the butter”/”stir the macaroni”] and psychosexually erotic, like the medieval history was and continues to be in practice): the corpse, but also the phallic, green pickle denoting necrophilia and cannibalism; i.e., with “coffin” in Titus Andronicus referring to a pie crust, which is something of a play on words to hint at the reality—I would imagine—of cannibalism/necrophilia during natural disasters spurring food shortages and spontaneous spouse shortages (what Top Dollar would call “a sudden case of death”). For Shakespeare, this wouldn’t have been the Black Death in its heyday (the mid-1300s); all the same, he did lose two children to the same disease, the bubonic plague (source: Robin Young and Allison Hagan’s “Shakespeare and the Plague,” 2020). In other words, pandemics are nothing new and Gothic theatre is a poetic, oft-morbid way of combating death anxiety by encasing it in strange, prandial-sexual hybrids.

[23] A metaphor again being “a comparison between two unlike things”; re: my observation, “violence as something to perform and receive are not the same thing despite often appearing identical,” also being an adage that applies to sex, and violence and sex as [thanks to Capitalism] interwoven.

[23a] A story I always related to through my own experiences; i.e., going to England to meet Zeuhl, who loved me despite how alien I felt. In a way, we were both alien in that far green country (though they had traveled to and from it many times). Oddly enough, Howard the Duck wasn’t a movie we watched until we broke up, but they really enjoyed it, calling it sweet. And now whenever I listen to John Barry’s awesome score or the in-film band Cherry Bomb’s “Hunger City” (1986), I think of Zeuhl and of being in love—of having all that and them leaving my life. It’s easy to feel like I lost them, but if that were the case, I wouldn’t have those good memories and those feelings when “You’re the Duckiest” plays. Instead, I can look back on it all with pride, remembering the many adventures we had (sexual or otherwise) and saying to myself, “Not bad for a talking duck from outer space!” We all fall in love with monsters—with Lions, Scarecrows, or Tinmen. Zeuhl was my little rockstar and I? Not a duck, but a raven: their raven plush. Not everyone can say they’ve loved like that and have something to show for it. Take it from me, babes: ’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have to have loved at all (for real, just look at incels for proof of that).

[24] Philosophers are classically white cis-het men, the vast majority of whom serve the state. There’s a lot of masturbatory self-aggrandize by proxy and hero worship, their equally white, cis-het audiences rising to defend patriarchal figures making incredibly dogmatic and prescriptive assertions of things as basic as women wearing makeup. If a man is angry at a woman wearing makeup, he’s the problem, not her (also known as “protection/transference” in psychoanalytical circles).

This being said, just because Peterson’s arguments are Red-Scare and biologically essential doesn’t mean every cis-het man will agree with him. Consider this reader on Reddit:

Geez, I think this (slightly) extended version makes Peterson look like even more of an obtuse twat, despite the more repeated insistence that he’s not trying to say makeup, or any behaviors, should be necessarily banned, which was not as clear previously though still fairly evident from what he was revealed to have said.

At no point does he seem willing to posit any ideas or even opinions, except (not so) strangely the simplistic idea that wearing makeup is distinctly and totally a sexual display. For a psychologist it’s very odd that he has such unnuanced views of why people engage in certain behaviors. It’s some very pop-evo-psych nonsense to say that makeup and heels exaggerate certain sexual characteristics without considering how those interplay with ideas of professionalism, hygiene and simply looking like a well-put-together person, especially taking into account social norms and pressure.

I think he even has a certain point when saying that women can be sexually manipulative in professional situations, yet he seems to disregard any notions of power imbalances or the fact that this would still entail that it’s the men being driven by their sexual needs over professionalism. Not to get all “tell men not to rape”-y but maybe more emphasis should be put on men to think with their brain, not their dick?

The way he views wearing a negligee and wearing makeup to be on the same spectrum is also frustratingly simplistic, these are all issues regarding how people dress, rather than how they behave (yeah, yeah choosing what to wear is a behaviour in itself, but again it’s stupidly simplistic to compare the two).

So many comments saying how annoying the interviewer is, yet it must have also been very frustrating for this interviewer, trying to coax answers from Peterson that aren’t just ridiculous evo-psych oversimplifications or banal “nobody knows” throwaways. Clearly workplace dress code is dependent on context, yet “men and women working together” is thrown out as some singular activity clouded in mystery. Is NBC’s no-hugging policy not a way of, evolutionarily even, figuring out “the rules”? I hope some people take this interview to show that Peterson doesn’t really offer much in the way of social input or intellectual expertise. Like why would anybody care what he has to say when all he seems to have to say is either egregiously truncated, straight up wrong or just apparently purposefully ignorant? (source: Socratic Voyager from r/enoughpetersonspam, 2018).

Peterson doesn’t care about being right, in the sense that any rationalization is just an argument to make for or against something. The way that all rhetoric power works is through performance, one that people either agree or disagree with; i.e., monsters. To that, Peterson—just like any conservative white man—reliably plays the victim and the charlatan while scapegoating people far more disadvantaged than him, crying like a baby as he does so. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. He’s cooked.

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”: Medieval Expression; or, “Welcome to the Fun Palace!” (Opening)

Hello, are you looking for me? I’m the one to ease your pain
Just call me “the doctor” and I prescribe cocaine
I’m your reason to live, I’m your church and I’m your pastor
C’mon, you’ve got nothin to lose, it’s time to bring you up a little faster

It’s time to kill, let’s have some fun

You’ll fight but I’ll win, ’cause I’m second to…
None (source: Genius).

—Jeff Waters; “Second to None,” on Annihilator’s King of the Kill (1994)

Picking up up from where “Heaven in a Wild Flower” left off…

This subchapter is the fun palace (“the media madman,” Zeuhl would insist)—a place to not only think like a Gothicist/poet, but perform and play as one to achieve a variety of sex-positive medieval effects per ludo-Gothic BDSM: selective absorption, magical assembly and a confusion of the senses all adding to an ongoing Song of Infinity hugging us as alien, rotting and beautiful. We’ll introduce them, then go over oxymorons, the Black Veil, and other terms/devices that help achieve paradoxical empowerment and worker liberation through sex-positive calculated risk.

Due to its size, I’ve decided to divide “the Fun Palace” into three parts:

• Part one, “A Song Written in Decay” (this post): Outlines all of these points, and gives an example of mise-en-abyme through a disintegrating Song of Infinity exemplified by Lewis and his spiritual, academic-prone descendants—namely Hannah-Freya Blake and myself as coming from a lengthier Galatean, gallows-humor tradition not entirely foreign to Gothic academia.
• Part two, “‘Red Scare’; or Out in the World“: Seeks out further examples in between my friends and I for this project specifically—namely the relationship between past media orbiting Red Scare (from Star Wars‘ rebellious allegory to American Liberalism and subversive potential in The Abyss to Chernobyl, and more) as also including non-academic sex worker friends’ old photographs and warlike, often-red symbols that contain Communist potential whose Gothic maturity can be built upon during our day-to-day relations.
• Part three, “‘With a Little Help from My Friends’; or, Out of this World”: Explores an-Com rebellion (the dismantling of the state) as actively expressed between current sex workers using ludo-Gothic BDSM to inspire and invigilate a more recent (and actionable) portrait of rebellion; also inspects the classics—from The Wizard of Oz to Big Trouble in Little China—as things to learn from with our current friends as sharing a similar love for the imaginary past as rebellious for monstrous-feminine rights.
  • As a subchapter to “Medieval Expression,” “The Fun Palace’s” last subdivision, “Out of this World,” is actually too big. So I have subdivided it again (a sub-sub-subchapter):
    • Opening and part one, “What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why (feat. Amazons and Witches)?”: Articulates what rebellion is, followed by what a rebel is and why they do what they do—then takes a break to discuss modules and criminality (with several performative examples: Samus Aran, but also the Wicked Witch of the West)
    • Part two, “Meeting Rebels; i.e., What Inspires Us to and All That Carrying On and On (feat. Harmony Corrupted, Jack Burton, and Blxxd Bunny)“: Explores how to meet rebels, followed by what inspired us to meet them (hint: them, but also their sexy costumes), and what carries on as all of this repeats, repeats, repeats.

(artist: Bay)

Keep your panties on, Hippolyta. First, let’s do a little prep to make sure you sally forth prepared… A few side points, if you please:

First, this entire section aims to explore poetry as an osmotic process; i.e., how our experiences inform our points of view, or language as imbricating with that of others through media (e.g., me shamelessly stealing words and scenarios from a hospital show I’m watching at the moment, then including them among a wide collection of eclectic things; i.e., things important enough to write about and spend time with, meaning consuming as part of my hobbies[1] and profession as one-in-the-same: investing in popular media as the place where wider cultural values [and crimes] are stored in idealized, but also concentrated forms relating back and forth).

This is a volume about the Humanities, which is my domain; so, I’d be more than a little remiss if I didn’t try to scrape different popular media together based on my formative years (experience) and education (expertise) to explore how we communicate using the Gothic; i.e., the go-to means for talking about unspeakable subjects (rape, incest, live burial and suicide, to name a few) using “how people talk”; e.g., puns, ironies, metaphors, quotes, fragments, pop culture references, homages, memes/jokes, monsters, myths, legends, and old wives’ tales; i.e., not that they literally cannot be said, but that they pertain to ways that people normally speak regarding complex, giant issues (a running theme in this book): differently and in ways we’ll merge as a point of practice. This includes the language of war and sex in BDSM forms, a dialogic imagination (vis-à-vis Bakhtin) whose signature headspace, atmosphere (mood, vibes, terror/horror, tone poems, etc) color and fun collectively aim—as much as its precision-amid-vagueness can aim—to unite things that capital has divided (triangulating TERF-style Amazons against labor). For that, the medieval (and its tendency to default to paradoxes by doing multiple conflicting things at the same time) is perfect! Next stop, Paradox City! 

(artist: Sailor Gundam)

Note: We all like to show off differently regarding monsters and sex as things to hug and respect; i.e., cryptonymy’s anisotropic double operation, “showing to hide, hiding to reveal[2]“; e.g., I love Amazons/mommy doms and invigilating strong bodies that are masculine and feminine (the monstrous-feminine), but hesitate to exhibit my hard dick because of personal trans-woman hang-ups (and desire not to brandish it in front of my platonic friends who actually read what I produce). As such, there’s an infinite number of ways to tease and excite through asexual nudism and erotic monster sex. Likewise, it becomes as much a means of chaff and distraction as it does a kind of code to express our true selves with while blinding and disillusioning our would-be killers; i.e., our “pocket sand” to fight dirty with (“All’s fair in love and war,” babes) and our little allies to lovingly call upon, including all means at our disposal in the wider tussle that is universal liberation from state enslavement:

(exhibit 34a1b2b: As I write of Robert Asprey in Volume Zero,

From his War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History (1994): “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it.” In other words, the state’s monopoly of violence—Max Weber’s maxim, “a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (refer to our thesis statement for the full definition)—can be challenged [source].

This applies to what we create and what inspires us that cannot, on its own, necessarily fight back, but can still contribute to the struggle; i.e., our food and familiars; e.g., a food cart my partner visited today being inspirational and delicious, and my very-round pet cat wanting to be included in whatever I was doing at my desk.)

Due to the chaotic nature of what is effectively a poetic brainstorm, I won’t have time to cite everything here (or later) and may mention some things previously discussed. Take it in stride, but bear in mind: there’s lots of fun and handy stuff in here that you should absolutely keep in mind throughout the rest of the volume and indeed, the entire book.

Furthermore, I wrote the “Brace for Impact” module backwards, starting with this subchapter, followed by the “Medicine,” “Time,” and “Teaching” chapters before expanding seriously on “Teaching” and “the Medieval.” It wasn’t a race, but an attempt to collect as much “pollen” to synthesize as much “honey” to catch readers with; re: people like monsters and sex tied to imagination, which is limitless even if our individual experiences ultimately are not.

Doing so has since required that I divide Volume Two into parts one and two—again, not a problem, insofar as it has become the biggest, best Gothic Cathedral me and my muses could raise. Except prior to writing what was originally just called “Monsters, Magic and Myth,” I needed to draw upon a side of myself that I hadn’t used in years; i.e., thanks to academic conditioning from old dinosaurs scared of poetry and sex. Doing so required me to wake my poetic side up (and to sleep afterward, lest the child consume it’s mother, or vice versa, a familial cannibalism). It will be quite a switching of gears and codes, after which I’ll feel used up, not good for much after until I sleep it off. But you might too after drinking this concoction; i.e., a witch’s potion; e.g., a bit like Sancho Panza after consuming Don Quixote’s cursed “healing draught”: “He expelled violently from both ends and the blanket upon which he lay was fit for nothing after!” The medieval is a place for crude humor beyond just raw sex, rape, and death, but all manner of earthly things celebrating these ironic combinations as marketed and sold without shame; i.e., Gothic/”goth” sex positivity during its various creative successes synthesizing praxis for the masses; e.g., cock-warming demon sluts, slutty goblins, naughty nuns (always a classic) and so much more cultivating emotional/Gothic intelligence and sexual health during class/culture war (the Gothic basically puts sex next to anything it presents: sex demons, sexual awakenings, etc). Sharing is caring and the Gothic, when sex-positive, loves to back it up, spread it around and pay it forward. 

(artist: Jinedem)

Second, this portion outlines our aforementioned medieval devices, which—through the Gothic’s tendency for raw, unfiltered paradox—will show you the way forward while appearing unrelated: the recognition and observation of various assorted dots for you to connect (at your leisure), which per the Gothic is common; e.g., sexy things (“uwu what’s this?”) versus profound and Numinous (“owo what’s this?”). In the spirit of fun, I’ve laid them out conversationally and one at a time (“a trail of breadcrumbs, like in a fable”) while defining them on the fly but have, similar to Volume Zero, emboldened and color-coded them for your convenience (this being said, the emboldened words without color are signposts). The underlying points are based on my theoretical arguments, but the texts I choose to highlight them with have all been chosen at random; i.e., just about anyone can be a poet/medievalist developing Gothic Communism, because popular media under Capitalism is thoroughly Gothic, thus full of things (monsters) we can all play with!

Third, much in the same spirit of the entire book, this segment is partly a visual/reading guide, partly an appeal. It was difficult to write, insofar as the sheer abundance of Gothic metaphors opened up something of a Pandora’s Box that, while fun, was a bit… arterial: overwhelming[3] and tricky to close once breached. I could have closed it sooner but partly wanted to convey something through my love of words expressed here as a master poet, Gothicist and wordsmith: their various refrains and patterns indicative of a rambling verbose flexibility that defines my profession. I don’t wish to show off during a pointless jaunt, but demonstrate the selective, neurodivergent pride I take in my work; i.e., my love in playing with language as a learning device (despite not doing it as much in this book as I would secretly like). For the purposes of educating my readers in a variety of ways besides just listing complex theory and simplifying it, I hope said love comes across. —Perse

“Welcome to the Fun Palace!” part one: A Song Written in Decay

For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to reproduce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration (source: my grad school notes).

—Chris Baldrick, “Introduction” to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (2009)

To quote Mary Shelley’s Creature, “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct” (source). She may as well have been describing queer existence, which—per settler colonialism as heteronormative—is relegated to the underworld as a midden of tremendous unspeakables, refuse and rot, but also (if you have a knack for it) tremendous joy as something the normal world of straight folk hasn’t the slightest fucking clue. We want to bring that to them, but first you gotta bring it in; i.e., for a big old hug: of the sick, disintegrating alien in all of us as reflected on queer-tinged tapestries’ mise-en-abyme (and maybe beaten a little with a hard stick). Part one looks at that through academic origins and venues; i.e., Lewis, Hannah-Freya Blake and I (all walk into a bar).

We’ll get to that, in a second. First, let’s unpack our points relative to where they are used. Vis-à-vis the neoliberal trifecta, Capitalism isn’t configured any way except for money to flow up to the smallest group of people to the widest possible margins. By extension, the state (and any aspect of it; e.g., the police or the medical industry) justifies its own existence by virtue of an imaginary or theoretical threat (us vs them) that necessitates the state through its various trifectas and monopolies driving up heteronormative/settler-colonial fear and dogma to universally alienate and sexualize workers per monstrous language that serves profit and maintains Capitalist Realism. When reducing people to numbers or objects[4], the profit motive will always shrink that, teaching us to attack what it needs us to—ourselves—through organs woefully immiserated, but also bleeding internally thanks to sources inside and out.

Capitalism cheapens life, hence language in all its forms, and by extension gentrifies material things necessary for our survival and enrichment (which the Gothic combines): food, education, monsters, our organs (both literal and figurative), etc. With Gothic Communism, we’re brokering for something better (access) using “what we got” as not expendable: our poetry as tied to our bodies and nature in ways we can afford to trade back and forth; i.e., linguo-material exchanges not surrendering our power as workers but—per BDSM—trading in power-as-unequal in terms of expressing the inequalities/comorbidities that Capitalism foists onto us, including its resultant pain and stress; its reoccurring panic, doubt, suspicion, nausea, paranoia, and other such harmful feelings. Except, they indicate harm as much as give it, the paradox being that by listening to our heart, we can heed its warnings as separated by us, post-exam, from false omens.

(artist: Jocelin Carmes)

In turn, we can do one of the Gothic’s specialties (one might say “the oldest trick in the book”): using the dialectic of the alien to pull down sick harmful barriers and install fresh healthy ones (the bare[5] skeleton, left, quintessentially symbolic of the medieval Grim Reaper during the Black Death) that make us selectively absorptive and able to contain and process trauma to source, contain and heal from; i.e., a deliberate confusion, thus blending of, the senses that frees them to see more clearly than Capitalism wants: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste[6]“; e.g., the eye-opening power of monstrous sex that, per Shakespeare’s slutty faeries, is wholly druglike and BDSM-infused. This “boundary selection” is not only useful for challenging the state’s “boundaries for me, not for thee” mantra during selective/collective punishment through the denial of shelter and other basic human rights[7] (if that seems cruel, that’s because it is); but it happens through another Gothic staple: the scary room of death/Black Veil, but also the homunculus; i.e., the castle as something giant we live inside, and whose giant’s belly of the beast is concentric in both directions (anisotropic) and phenomenological/analogous of an organism during liminal expression: full of bright spinning alarms, choking smoke and encroaching darkness collectively symbolizing systemic distress less as discreetly organic or inorganic and more a combination of the two.

The result is reality being thrown into question, what normally seems solid suddenly feeling gaseous and unable to support our weight. It can be quite exhilarating to suddenly feel one’s boundaries disintegrate—to cleave through them like fog—but if taken too far can also make us feel unmoored, adrift and disempowered: floating in the purgatorial void as something with which to tumble through until we die, if we die. The basic idea with addressing state-sanctioned impotency (menticide) is to fight madness with “madness” (calculated risk). So if the state’s disorienting conditions offend us and make us feel out of control, then our target addressal of their vacuum grants us fluency of their absence of gravity. Swimming natively through space as the “natural” ground state for our kind (those treated as monstrous-feminine by the state), we can grow accustomed to its strange conditions, thus empowered; i.e., Edward Said’s pleasures of exile: one’s home as foreign—a place to restore while existing in limbo, perdition, purgatory (and similar such Dante-esque states of existence). Getting our “sea (space) legs,” we can focus on the enrichment of our dark forces to then heal our imperiled world with, but we have to acknowledge it as such, first.

In turn, our flush infusions are collective, thus able to address systemic problems provided intersectional solidarity is achieved on an intuitive, second-nature level: from praxial synthesis to catharsis, a new baseline per Gothic Communism as a historical-material fact once achieved. This happens through targeting children as more sponge-like and playful, but also by showing teenagers and adults that it’s not just ok to play with Gothic things during ludo-Gothic BDSM to gain some feel for medieval intuition; it’s absolutely essential. A “torture” castle of doom is, oddly enough, the best place to foster empathy because that is where we can express chattelization, alienation and similar abuses in ways that can’t actually harm us (the pearly castles are the worst); per the Gothic, it’s a buffer and a passage, a valve to open and close in memento mori, oft-funerary language. Such calculated risks aren’t “for the dead,” but those who survive as needing to acclimate to mortality as soon as possible by hijacking medical language as torturous (thus more able to understand what’s at stake).

Such subversion becomes, oddly enough, a way of life—a language to speak easily and “naturally” with, post-acquisition; i.e., to become one with the world as a Gothic chronotope still occupied by nature as bird-like in ways Indigenous cultures still speak of; e.g., “Birds,” Bay explains, “are very important to Tikanga Māori; including the Tūi’s[8] songs warning of danger and of war—to, as I put it, call the warriors home and to battle against our foes. Through art, and the useful myth of Gothic ancestry as a counterterrorist device, such things are personified through art to make us better stewards of nature; i.e., by identifying with it as routinely hunted and harvested to extinction by capital: treating all as alien-fetish prey they may reap until such beauties vanish from the face of the Earth.

(artist: Amber Harris)

In turn, we shake off the yolk or the snare by virtue of fooling our hunters, but also persuading them (through animal magnetism, among other things) to see us as monstrous-feminine humans. Accuracy is less important than empathy as having socio-material results that foster cryptonymic labor and propaganda against state doubles.

Authenticity aside, systemic trauma is isolated and expressed in Gothic theatre, which workers can synthesize through daily habits that allow proletarian praxis to occur successfully. From most complex to most simple, good praxis requires a successful pedagogy of the oppressed, which requires synthesis, which requires the Basics (from Volume One): anger/gossip, monsters and camp.

Ironic or not, castles are the most famous and camp-prone Gothic location (from Britain, anyways). It’s not just castles, though, but anything capable of operating in terms of any aspect of the Western home/nuclear family unit as compromised; i.e., as alien (doubled) and fetishized, especially in medieval, dated forms reflecting on societal decay as barbaric, torturous and regressive: the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection (unironic xenophobia) threatening an invader demanding access from outside (“Let me in!”). According to these criteria, our “torturous” camp can manifest through any location; i.e., to inherit and reenact shelter through as disintegrating thus dysfunctional, disempowering.

(source: The Darkest Dungeon II)

Except also in turn, Gothic empowerment is rooted in “disempowerment” as something to reenact through ironic fetishes; i.e., the aesthetics of death, unequal power and alienization (which the state wants to monopolize and ultimately prevent: our reclamation of their power): rape/death fantasies and play that, when ironic, actually empower the subject by making them feel in control through calculated risk; i.e., psychosexual theatre and ludo-Gothic BDSM; re (from our teaching section): “a dark freaky church where no one gets hurt and there’s lots of sex, it’s the Neo-Gothic in a nutshell.” Trauma manifests through the body and depictions of the body in “ancient,” castle-like forms, to which “rape,” “torture” and “sacrifice” are very different in quotes than without: a “prison” that sets you free, a “torture dungeon” that restores your passions and your health, a “dangerous” place (often a castle in some shape or form) fronting as Capitalism decayed that opens your mind once inside.

As a result, their “dangers” paradoxically become medicinal[9] and empowering (re: the palliative Numinous) without harming others, thus able to heal a society that is sick with Capitalist Realism; i.e., the state as a myopic/panoptic, cartographized sickness, a cancer that affects institutions, but also officers of that institution and symptoms as half-real; e.g., the chirurgeon’s leeches and trepanation devices (above) but also (for an example we’ll discuss far more often) the Nostromo from Alien, Ripley the warrant officer and the monster inside (castles, Amazons, Medusa and mad science—all Gothic par excellence) all begot from the company’s displaced abuse commenting on real-life horseshit (“That goddamn company! What about our lives, you son of a bitch!” To which capital would respond: “You’re workers. You don’t have lives!”).

Along with the buckets of slime and fake blood (the lubricants of the ancient world, fun fact), such calculated risks reflect us as existing inside inherited confusions; i.e., within symbols at war and wherein state trauma (and worker rage) is not far-removed from a given production. So while Medusa and her magic cannot die, they can get sick. So can myths and monsters at large, which requires “poison” to cure them; i.e., the reclaimed monstrous-feminine as a subversive, paradoxical means of reunion with nature-as-furious that enrich them to move again once stuck in the voracious mud: consuming us (and our friends) through a cryptonymic presence of unseen-but-palpable woe (next page). We must liberate, thus uproot ourselves through ironic calculated risk—not to a pre-capitalist state (feudalism) but for us to proceed towards a post-capitalist paradise (the paradox of “forgetting” how to imagine something better that hasn’t happened yet).

Such a tug-o’-war is generally hard to conceptualize, and per neoliberal refrains like The NeverEnding Story[10] (1984, two pages), become something to frame as fear and dogma to anything outside of Capitalist Realism: “People without hope are much easier to control,” Gramork says; but the wily cunt forgot to mention, “False hope does just as well!” Ende’s novel foreshadowed neoliberal hegemony that, in 1984, was well on its way to becoming the New World Order (which would echo into the fatal, essential nostalgia of postmillennial stories echoing Red Scare pastiche/moral panic through Giorgio Moroder’s excellent film score [Still Watching Netflix’ 2020 “The Full Dustin and Suzie NeverEnding Story Scene” having fifty-two million views, by the way[11]]: disorder appears, so scapegoat a Nazi-Communist “corruption” in the shadow zone[12]):

“First, do no harm” requires us being the watchdogs/whistleblowers to challenge state hounds obedient to profit and genocide—to expose the latter while our friends say to us, “Get ’em, girl!” (I can be a good girl to my friends, and a nasty bitch to protect them; i.e., I dislike weird canonical nerds, but like the overenthusiastic dog chasing the mailman, will happily take a bite right out of capital’s ass to expose them). The idea of post-scarcity is to reach towards something difficult to reach through awesome barriers (often with really bitchin’ music, as Moroder shows us during classic fatal nostalgia from childhood favorites, above), which has another metaphor per the Gothic that goes with it: natural philosophy or the Numinous, also called the fire of the gods/mysterium tremendum. The Modern Prometheus may have been written in 1818, but it’s only just beginning. Per the Gothic, “home” is inconclusive and vague, always imprecisely under attack and needing to be defended from ghostly invaders that, seemingly incorporeal, have a profound physical impact on our mental, physical and sexual health. To flirt with them is to invite disaster.

Like Communism, though, a Gothic castle is always incomplete, in continuum, but seems to suggest its full potential as a powerful, unmappable palimpsest each and every visit. Yet the veneer of formless, vague imprecision is, suitably enough, misleading. Again, it’s the usual paradox of seeing through Satanic darkness (visible) to bypass shiny state illusions (ACAB), but also suggesting the whole with a starting quote that leads mnemonically to unspoken elements historically concealed; i.e., clue phrases (our Easter eggs) Sex Positivity supplies in a chapter of a volume of a book as a fraction of a larger history in small, one looking backward curiously to go forwards boldly towards post-scarcity’s written things and other technology married to the past as liberated from capital: food, graveyard and sex metaphors combined in very raunchy, thus medieval ways that, like it or not, survive anisotropically well into the present; e.g., vampirism for or against the state (so-called “staking,” below); i.e., popular media encompassing ancient forms of entertainment as food-like in vitalistic ways: sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, which frankly extends to monsters, myths and magic, but also castles and cathedrals, mad science and various other psychosexual things to get the hang of (and taste, concerning forbidden things; e.g., pussy cream coating your dick which goes back into your mouth when she kisses you).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Since Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Gothic has dealt in voyeurism as an exhibition to challenge dogma: “Abashed the Devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined His loss” (source). The call of the Gothic towards Communism, then, is felt across all media—be that novels, cinema or videogames—as haunted by things we routinely recognize and respond to (usually sex and violence in different forms, above). When playing with the Gothic to interrogate power and trauma yourselves, take what is useful and leave the rest. It only feels unintuitive and/or mad/rare because Capitalism discourages it, treats it as the exception. The proof is in the pudding—our pudding—as abused along viral, cryptomimetic copies of itself.

Our endlessly deliberate (and productive) mixing of metaphors also merges with Hogle’s double operation of showing to conceal (from “The Restless Labyrinth”) as something to reverse: concealing to reveal. Walpole did it with castles and “Gothic” as a style; Romero does it with zombies; Otto did it with Latin placeholders to denote a mysterium tremendum as not being God but, per C.S. Lewis, evoking an uncanniness of the divine in “the other room.” The same idea personifies with blindfolds, orthographizes with words, manifests with architecture and maps, spatio-temporally with the chronotope, and blends between/across them collectively as liminal expression holistically useful to containing and suggesting through perpetual incompletion: the structured chaos that is Gothic Communism. It’s a hyperobject too big to suggest, and opposite Capitalism’s liminal hauntology of war (the castle-as-omen to a grim harvest tied to fatal nostalgia), is deliberately obscured by those in power to stay invisible using big obvious forgeries that, seemingly formless like mist, appear like a vampire to envelope and drain us. But they can’t suppress it, leading it to haunt the presence as spectres of Marx that, per artists like Giger or Lewis are surreal, campy or a bit of both: serious-silly (e.g., Monty Python’s “Camelot” or Blue Öyster Cult’s “psychedelic doom boogie”).

Capitalism will adopt any shape to defend itself, including within the Gothic as yet-another-revenue stream (whose blood, sweat and tears come from labor as something to siphon out of their bodies). We can likewise transform, switching gears to build whatever is required wherever we need to achieve our goals in any media form. Except whereas capital hides itself from workers, workers hide rebellion from the state. Boundaries and divisions are little more than curtains in the Gothic that we can push aside, but also drape over our creations like a funeral pall the enemy is too lazy to check; i.e., seeing a castle or statue that, through the power of Gothic poetics and human imagination, springs to life in ways that survive across lives. It becomes a data that conquers death and speaks of it, mid-senescence (deathly blossoms symbolizing our flowering minds as necrobiomes in small parts to a larger one, of a larger one).

Faced with that, our friends might adopt the medieval as a critical lens, challenging Capitalism’s universal alienation with reverse abjection to open their closed minds; or equally suitable use chronotopes, cryptonyms and hauntologies in a similar fashion/combination that serves Gothic Communism not merely as something to suggest and whisper but develop as loud as a cumming banshee. This must be done holistically—by combining things that, when surveyed like a toy chest, can themselves be combined together to come up with fresh inventive solutions to old problems using “ancient” symbols: monsters as critical lenses, but also critical ways of using a given lens; i.e., to hold or view it in such a way to achieve a desired effect; e.g., Hogle’s cryptonymy or Bakhtin’s chronotope (or both) when reuniting with the “past” of our own future as something to revive in the present, brick-by-brick, reflection by reflection, as something to return to (e.g., part of exhibit 1a1a1c1 from Volume Zero) that couldn’t have been made back then, but rather must be reassembled into its new self after the Gothic has aged, matured enough to try again:

(“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” [“The Eighteenth Brumaire“]. To this, the oral traditions of the stage play can be especially medieval, thus plastic and vivid. Macbeth’s fatal vision isn’t just “A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain” [Macbeth], but a copy of a copy of a copy in an endless nightmare loop. The yawning hall of kingly mirrors shadows him as shown guilt and revenge of a smiling past victim that somehow is all around him, having already won. The psychomachy [“mind battle”]—of this reunion with the past by the anxious, sleeping mind—imitates the Gothic Communist’s own futile grappling with the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern as a narrative of the crypt that outlives us to haunt future generations with, putting potential class warriors to sleep. The imagery is the same, but the context is altered through the performance as a meta-narrative: 

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing [ibid.].

Macbeth’s notable lack of cheer at the prerecorded nature of history needn’t be prophetic, provided the nightmares are reclaimed and used by us to awaken future workers to a class-conscious approach within Capitalist Realism; i.e., an altering of prior historical-materialisms [and all their fatal crypts, tyrants and black knights] as something to collectively escape through an actively reclaimed Gothic imagination/”darkness visible.”)

Such a reunion never ends, insofar as it raises the question of intimacy with things old-and-hitherto-tried (feudalism) and old-but-yet-to-manifest (Communism), but suggesting themselves through the kinds of make-believe haunts that GNC people have constructed and occupied since Shakespeare, Walpole and Lewis (and their gratuitous, outrageous theatre stretching “on to the crack of doom”); i.e., on various registers all at once.

This yawning concentrism means the relationship occurs between us and nature as exemplified by us, mid-synthesis; i.e., between friends, family and lovers, but also co-workers, FWBs and total strangers regardless of how fast we work—straight to sex, or asexual to varying degrees of artist and muse, but also muse as artist per a collective endeavor. We all respond and provide differently and it all goes into the same melting pot’s succulent heraldry/mise-en-abyme:

(artist: Alphonse Mucha)

In turn, “death” paradoxically becomes a memory “living on” while endlessly grasping at itself through the evocation of larger unseen forces; i.e., that actual medieval standards can seem “new” by virtue of “ancient” placed in quotes through a novel attempt at Gothic maturity to do something different with Gothic poetics; e.g., my book’s challenging of capital surveilling us (which isn’t really that novel, is it, consider the novels of the past—pun very much intended—often did as much). The stress and thrill of observation makes it hard to tell who is looking and why (the state’s panopticon vs worker eyes and spies).

It bears repeating that this goes both ways, insofar as time becomes yet-another-boundary serving as part of a deathly reconnaissance. Therefore time is just as arbitrary to whatever degree is needed; i.e., we can heartily play and fuck with death, time, space, fluids (semen, blood, urine, or their assorted poetic and occult/alchemic variants) and memory bleeding optically together as needed to reach towards difficult-but-imperative truths, struggles, and outcomes (rememory jogging memory to achieve widespread catharsis). Fucking is fun by itself, but with all of these becomes exquisite, scholarly and salubrious! So don’t be a prude; learn to indulge in seemingly “masturbatory” acts that blend pleasure with revelation as gossip, campy and monstrous (to borrow from Volume One).

To that, voyeurism through monsters (the passing of data back and forth, as much as the literal theme of watching a given exhibitionist) is a consensual revolutionary act reaching towards ostensibly unreachable things in Gothic language (often made onstage with props, costumes and “rape/death” achieved through more immediate effects: offal from an abattoir[13]). Fighting state-sanctioned rape is consent, in that respect; i.e., we have rights to protect us from the state as the ultimate rapist, the latter taking down those rights in order to abuse us; e.g., denying us our ability to use the palliative Numinous (and similar sensations) in “another castle” as one signpost in an endless chain that requires workers united together to successfully challenge the state’s half of a double-helix spiraling into the void (matricide and patricide both being classic theatrical devices that, per the Gothic, address different things: rising concerns of a disillusion of the nuclear family and medieval family units, but also violent staged arguments[14] about/of family ties more broadly alienated and atomized by Capitalism).

So while I am a medievalist and specialize in the Gothic at large, I’ll say again (and not for the last time) that I couldn’t have written this volume in one go or by myself; i.e., without writing Volume One and Zero before it, proceeded by my postgrad work, my master’s, my hobbies, my friends, my upbringing pointing me towards those peoples, places, and adventures. They’re too complex to map out fully and that’s what makes it fun. Likewise, all cathedrals require a group to raise, an army aligned against another in some shape or form (for us, workers vs the state). Composed of trial and error upon older examples, it’s all connected, fleeting and unique per venture, but also never stops because Capitalism is always a threat to those I hold dear as working with me (and each other) to protect workers and nature from Capitalism. What matters is an intense poetic reaction—a jouissance (“playfulness,” often likened to an orgasm) to such factors (e.g., the butts of my muses; god, I love butts) as something that—when the feeling as such is recognized (e.g., my author’s foreword from Volume Zero accounting for the exhausting delight of such labors)—becomes something of a lover or a midwife: to  miss dearly and hold onto, not letting go until it is done, then (at times) gladly release until one longs for it again (more with sex than babies, though some people like those). Like sex, pregnancy and childbirth are exhausting (especially as you get older[15]).

Through the various warlike sensations, seemingly endless birthings and mind-numbing ejaculations spill purple prose to and fro; i.e., hazy-yet-vivid ornamentations (to touch upon something tremendous, the issuing sensations of which—like striking oil—spray forth in all directions), our memory blurs through osmotic closeness (and, at times, neglecting our daily needs; i.e., forgetting to eat or sleep in ways that—whereas traditional pregnancy’s cravings seek out edible food—we seek out knowledge as something that feeds our curiosity but not our bodies) to something we can only suggest, try as we might.

As such, our vibrating garden’s praxial goal is not just to write up a storm, then ejaculate and jettison material for mere fun alone (not that doing so would kill us), but through fun (and ceaseless metaphors) lead to an operatic, musically monstrous empathy both synthesized and synergized to account for Gothic maturity of expression on all fronts; i.e., as collectively understood and embarked upon time and time again—it’s a bop, a righteous jam. As such, when we reach towards the unreachable, we grasp for that which Capitalism routinely denies us through myopic, umbral tortures: friendship, warmth, food, etc, including poetic interactions that yield the actual out of the fabricated. It becomes something to leave behind as a document of itself—no longer alive but rife with potential to “walk again”: an endless graveyard of dry bones, each castle a clackety piece of a skeleton[16] of ever-compiling of knowledge, a circulating library (to use an old Gothic term, generally as an insult to the books being circulated) that is generally quite pulpy and bigoted[17]:

(artist: Michel Whelan)

Except our Ship of Theseus is haunted by all manner of spectres offering up fatal knowledge that kills capital; i.e., spectres of Marx in all shapes and forms oxymoronic (false copies that, like Walpole’s Otranto, have a dubious origin story but a noble goal: escaping barbarism). There clearly isn’t a monopoly on empathy as expressed through monsters, magic and metaphors—including big ones (castles), but also schools of these things playing with the ghost of the counterfeit; e.g., Radcliffe and Lewis’ Schools of Terror and Horror, but also intimations of general-purpose “necromancy” or goth culture as a psychosexual, monomythic (adventuresome) performance with kayfabe[18] elements: “Zombie Marx or Zombie Twain? Choose your fighter!”

(source, photo: Bay)

Nevertheless, our juggling and balance in whatever contributions we can supply is important. Again, don’t suffer for your art if you can help it. But also remember that trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird. The idea is to combine them in ways that alleviate sickness, stress, tension and harm, but also avoid predation by perfidious elements in our daily lives coming from structural abuse: the Gothic castle as a beacon to attract and house the like-minded while the state tries, as it always does, to dominate us through its own victims.

Yet despite having previously discussed martyrs as a powerful form of reverse abjection, it’s not something that should be shot for each and every time. It’s done out of pure necessity and frustration, which we want to move away from. A classic (thus sacrificial) state of grace is no substitute for systemic change. We need to be more constructive and inventive when the options are available; i.e., to offer up enriching poetic gestures that lead to socio-material change without us dying routinely and en masse as a result (as the rats who follow the Pied Piper do). “Magic, myths and monsters” means taking what we need and putting things that seem like they won’t fit together together and passing through barriers that, for the Gothic, is a piece of cake (see, below). As the kids say, it has “pull” (the gravity of what Matthew Lewis [next page] lovingly called “beauteous orbs[19]“).

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

Keep in mind, this magical assembly isn’t a question of literal miracles, but lenses of critical thought that, when played with in personified forms, yield post-capitalist possibilities. Pieces of my enemies went into this project, words and images from shows, parts of my friends (e.g., Cuwu’s booty and curves, above). Gothic Communism is about raising not just absorption, but exchange in order to communicate and form new bonds—in short, do whatever we need to adapt. Capitalism has its sword, first and foremost, and hides it with tricks; we, as counterterrorists, have our tricks to disarm Capitalism—not just one, even, but a veritable bag of tricks that comes quite handy in penetrating difficult barriers for ironic reasons. So Odysseus, while ever the trickster, claims to have invented the Trojan horse per Homer[20] (with Athena’s help materializing it), we can reply in kind: “You have you sword, I have my tricks.” Except our tricks anisotropically reverse the flow of power away from the state and in workers’ direction; i.e., by disguising revolution as its own splendide mendax, one to help not “Rome” rise, but Communism (“You thought it was Rome, but it was I, Dio”)! In our hands, monsters make the impossible possible again; they unite against the state and say to those who come next, “You’re not alone, but armed with a palimpsestuous Song of Infinity to challenge empire as tragically and thankfully brief—a thing that won’t last the night.” Also, it guards our castle-like pussies, bussies, what-have-you from Greek-like forces bringing harmful gifts; i.e., “Boys will be boys; girls will be mothers.”

(artist: H.W. Pickersgill)

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” For iconoclasts like Matthew Lewis (as in, equally “bad” likenesses, we shall see), this is somewhat sarcastic and glib. For them, the Gothic becomes a shoddy-on-purpose printing house used by weird iconoclastic nerds; i.e., a naughty place to upend trauma dumping as a stigma, thus bond with “trauma” in quotes regarding repressed desires and survived, unspoken anguish.

Even so, the Gothic has always been a middle-class luxury in this respect—i.e., performed not by kings or the bourgeoisie, first and foremost, but those on the cusp of such powers fearful of partially imaginary forms; e.g., Walpole was the son of the first British prime minister, and Lewis—while being an MP—was not an executive officer. Even so, both men loved them some medieval rape fantasies; i.e., with Walpole having his own castle containing a boxed-up manuscript of The Mysterious Mother—a double-incest tragedy[21] privately distributed in 1768 but published publicly after his death, in 1791[22]—and Lewis’ infamous The Monk becoming so scandalous as to become eponymous with the man, himself (full name: Matthew “Monk” Lewis). The tradition had to evolve, coming out of the invention of terrorism during the Reign of Terror being yet another crisis pushing labor to violence that the elite capitalized on to regain control (re: Crawford’s “Invention of Terrorism“).

For us fags, though, Walpole and Lewis had access to the privilege of those closer to earth, more in touch with cloyingly profane things they dispersed into public discourse; i.e., “the almost-holy” spoken not “in vain,” but as something that was reifying through the existence of monsters as pop-culture icons not unlike they are today (though far less firmly attached to profit in the neoliberal sense; e.g., The Monster Squad’s poster pastiche): a thing that cannot be monopolized.

To that, the so-called “Male Gothic” was and has always been a) gay-as-fuck, b) firmly in-cheek per a freakishly long [“phallic”] tongue (e.g., Real Honey Ma), and c) invested in magic, sex, and brutal, horror-style death from a queer perspective. Except it was classically penned by cis gay men (with Walpole in the closet, and Lewis also closeted but far more open about his raunchiest stories being [for the time] quite risqué). As such, the term “Male Gothic” is incredibly dated, requiring the umbrella of representation to expand ever outwards after terms like “homosexual,” “transsexual” and “transgender” having all come to the fore (originally published: 1870 and 1965[23]) despite capital’s best efforts to eradicate them and their monstrous brethren. We always come back, baby!

(artist: Graham Humphreys)

As such, the shoulders of a given author’s giant forebears play an important role—one in a long chain of mise-en-abyme channeling dark wicked currents; i.e., monsters as cheap, easily replicable cryptonyms speaking about rape through “rape” (to varying degrees of irony or its lack, above). It becomes a bad game of telephone, of copycat done with shared relish: a dark echo speaking to ghosts (of the counterfeit) to reverse the process of abjection with glee. Don’t believe me? “Monk” Lewis started his infamous book with an imitation of Horace; a Gothic PhD I knew put an imitation of Lewis in her thesis; and now per the same Galatean tradition, I’m doing the same in my book.

Let me show you.

First, Lewis quotes an imitation of Horace at the preface, readily acknowledging his book’s sordid nature

Go then, and pass that dangerous bourn
Whence never Book can back return:
And when you find, condemned, despised,
Neglected, blamed, and criticised,
Abuse from All who read you fall,
(If haply you be read at all)
Sorely will you your folly sigh at,
And wish for me, and home, and quiet.

Assuming now a conjuror’s office, I
Thus on your future Fortune prophesy:—
Soon as your novelty is o’er,
And you are young and new no more,
In some dark dirty corner thrown,
Mouldy with damps, with cobwebs strown,
Your leaves shall be the Book-worm’s prey;
Or sent to Chandler-Shop away,
And doomed to suffer public scandal,
Shall line the trunk, or wrap the candle! (source).

as well as his own position and class

Respecting me and my condition;
That I am one, the enquirer teach,
Nor very poor, nor very rich;
Of passions strong, of hasty nature,
Of graceless form and dwarfish stature;
By few approved, and few approving;
Extreme in hating and in loving;

as well as his own precocious age and love for something he knew others would shit upon precisely because of its camping of canon (re: Broadmoor):

Again, should it be asked your page,
“Pray, what may be the author’s age?”
Your faults, no doubt, will make it clear,
I scarce have seen my twentieth year,
Which passed, kind Reader, on my word,
While England’s Throne held George the Third.

Now then your venturous course pursue:
Go, my delight! Dear Book, adieu!

In short, Lewis dates his work, then gives a list of everything trashy he crammed into its pages (often poetry and supernatural horror stories—eat your heart out Hirohiko Araki):

The first idea of this Romance was suggested by the story of the Santon Barsisa, related in The Guardian.—The Bleeding Nun is a tradition still credited in many parts of Germany; and I have been told that the ruins of the Castle of Lauenstein, which She is supposed to haunt, may yet be seen upon the borders of Thuringia.—The Water-King, from the third to the twelfth stanza, is the fragment of an original Danish Ballad—And Belerma and Durandarte is translated from some stanzas to be found in a collection of old Spanish poetry, which contains also the popular song of Gayferos and Melesindra, mentioned in Don Quixote.—I have now made a full avowal of all the plagiarisms of which I am aware myself; but I doubt not, many more may be found, of which I am at present totally unconscious (ibid.).

In turn, this staged gallows’ series of rape jokes/other implements of poor taste[24] becomes something to imitate much as he and Walpole imitated (badly, on purpose) “Gothic” manuscripts that critiqued present tyrannies; i.e., through the ghost of the counterfeit’s inappropriate laughs timed for maximum, well, laughter (e.g., Parody Place’s “The Shining Gets a Laugh Track,” 2007)!

Moreover, it was a blasphemous tradition carried forward by the likes of Gothic scholars nowadays; i.e., weird iconoclastic giga-nerds; e.g., Dr. Hannah-Freya Blake asking me in 2019 to consider their PhD’s poem as a cryptomimetic imitation of Lewis’ original imitation—of dancing with the dead (as I expand Castricano’s argument to allow for):

Go then, and pass that deadly scrutiny
whence post-grads emerge in despair or victory:
and when you find, condemned, criticised,
applauded, rejected, and/or verified,
that I have, in fact, survived:
let me sleep without ungodly dreams
of Bleeding Nuns with bones that gleam,
of beauteous orbs, vice and violence,
of Ambrosio with Matilda in hellish alliance –
all that my sanity long suffered in silence.

Assuming now a doctor’s office, I
thus on your future Fortune prophesy: –
soon as your novelty is worn away,
and darkened memory fades to grey,
once more into the breach I’ll fray
to pick apart that Cheshire grin
that makes many a-devil fall sick of sin –
for only madness finds a method
to hear the laughter in monstrous treads,
and see the humour in haunted heads.

Now then your venturous course pursue:
Go, my delight! Dear thesis[25], adieu!

I went on to put it in my postgraduate work; Hannah went on to write a spooky cookbook (far more fun than a PhD, or at least less torturous):

(artist, Mia Carnevale; source)

Within such recursive, live-burial refrains, we queers are often the butts of our own hopelessly nerdy jokes telling beautiful, tasty lies (“the cake is a lie”). Sometimes those

• don’t treat us well (as Lewis’ rebellious nature followed him around for the rest of his life)
• per the Gothic academic tradition, are not easily found (re: Walpole’s Mysterious Mother, but also Hannah’s PhD—not being available online, even by title; i.e., not being listed as a publication on their LinkedIn, unless I missed it somehow)
• are composed of fragments of references and in-jokes (with Hannah’s Twitter bio being full of memes)

Even so, this recursive, imitative, and yes, self-depreciating dialogue (the rape joke as self-imposed, -cutting and -inflicted, but also punching up at the upper crust; e.g., John Belushi’s, “I’m a zit! Get it!“) has expressed itself through disintegration-in-jest; i.e., something that requires the luxury of privilege to trace fancy manuscripts that deliberately deconstruct language (vis-à-vis Derrida) to offer up new palimpsests[26] that comment on inevitable decay and avoid-on-purpose any so-called “transcendental signifieds” (re: “Structure, Sign and Play,” 1966) imposed by capital; e.g., my maternal predecessors passing their Galatean wisdom onto me—from my great-grandmother to my grandmother to my mother (the last of whom taught me about Russian history and the real Vlad the Impaler[27]): often, per Lewis and Walpole, but also womanly war stories alluding to rape.

Like a doomed bloodline haunted by rape, such destinies (as things to meet) really do go on forever; like a Kevin Smith movie, it plays with dogma in ways that piss off the old folks using regular pulp: “Mention you’re the Metatron and people stare at you blankly! Mention something out of a Charlton Heston movie and suddenly everybody’s a theology scholar!” For GNC people, ludo-Gothic BDSM is not so different—i.e., working with pulpy garbage to sing truth to power palimpsestuously (even “incestuously” vis-à-vis Walpole’s Mysterious Mother as a kind of rapey “your mom” joke)—save we’re doing it to fuck with the Straights (including Smith) and make a post-scarcity home for ourselves while speaking to our own rape under capital. It’s possible to do both; indeed, it’s actually quite effective, insofar as making strange-but-cool friends goes. Who wants to be normal or safely famous[28] (a defense mechanism, the allegory of “madness” making our enemies underestimate us, but also for they and we to enjoy what we produce as a fun game)?

Or sober/clothed, for that matter! The Gothic often has a hard-drug-like, strip-tease quality to its infernal, repeating medicine (clothes: “Now you see me, now you don’t!”); and, while not to lend unnecessary credence to total unadulterated hedonism, our Song of Infinity speaks to “cheap” desires that, through endless replication, escape the high cost of prison-like conditions by painfully subverting them[29] (which, there’s still a time and a place for understanding if not condoning that, provided the conditions were different). I also think that, provided one’s intake is informed by morals and moderation not granted by an oppressive barbaric system (e.g., Ambrosio and The Monk reflecting queer panic in a late-1700s England, which Lewis commented on as much as a nerdy 21-year-old MP was able), a little shameless indulgence and excess never hurt anyone (again, in moderation). This is doubly true if repeated excursions thereof (and their assorted footprints) lead to something better across media, jumping from medium to medium: from Walpole’s OG Otranto and Lewis’ queerly sacrilegious namesake, to Konami’s “Demon Castle Dracula,” Castlevania (and other Metroidvania, of course) to my book, ever onwards into the increasingly gay and parthenogenic[30] future clobbering capital right in the bollocks.

(artist: Emery Exp)

We’ll consider “acid Communism” (and “total derangements” of the senses) in Volume Two, part two. The whole point of the Poetry Module is it really doesn’t matter how betterment occurs provided the theories we’ve explored are palatable (spiced properly) and nutritious, but conversely that our spices and nutrition respect these theories to better assist in Gothic Communism’s greatest paradox (or certainly most imperative): of reviving a retro-future of our own past that Capitalism never allowed to exist.

These ideas pertain, then, to the Young at Heart as feeling alien, fetish, rotted; i.e., preyed on in an unfriendly residence; e.g., the Overlook Hotel’s shared, priceless idea that no one is too old to play with monsters, magic and myth. With a bit of a smirk, the echo explains how we aren’t just magically adults who, suddenly entering adulthood at eighteen, slave ourselves to the grind until we drop dead; we’re, like Jack Torrance puts it, home (which for us is sick, so we ward off actual harm with black humor that nevertheless speaks to the truth of our condition stuck on repeat: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”: aped ironically by my currently million-plus-word project). Whether expressed as boulders or pebbles, campfires or conflagrations, in novels or videogames, such overtly Communist sentiments are sorely lacking from modern life. Using the Gothic to develop Communism as learned from older palimpsestuous echoes, we must regain control of what we make and put back in over the course of our lives as a locomotive (dated and nutty) investment in the future. Again, it’s a mood, a vibe check, a way of life expressed in “deathly” paradox:

(artist: Ickleseed)

The Gothic’s mise-en-abyme—its crumbling affect, monstrous-feminine spirit, and ghoulish disinterment, living in raunchy decay[31]—doesn’t take someone like me or Lewis to do; nor does it take a wealthy atheist[32] nerd like Percy Shelley writing “Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the imagination'” in a partial and flowing blurb[33] like “A Defence of Poetry” (1821)! Contrary to Percy’s arguments and those of the same generation (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, etc), Walpole and Lewis’ spiritual successors show us that anyone can play with monsters, magic and myth, thus be a poet; i.e., as things to excavate and present as “archaeological findings” (vis-à-vis Jameson’s “archaeologies of the future,” even though he hates the Gothic[34] and reserves literary critical power to fantasy and modern science fiction—more on that stupidity in Volume Two, part two’s “The Future is a Dead Mall”) regardless if some culture dickwad benefitting from slavery says they’re worth a lick (re: Coleridge, who hated Lewis; we’ll cover him when we look into Jameson).

Volume One posits the Gothic’s patterned cryptonymies as a revolutionary site for queer folk to work their magic during the usual grim harvests:

While Baldrick also argues how the likes of Walpole use this dichotomy to both erode the presumed “superiority” of classical culture and to fear the medieval world as a dark and brutal place amid this ghost of the counterfeit, I posit that Baldrick is astoundingly incorrect in assuming that

[u]nlike “Romantic,” then, “Gothic” in its literary usage never becomes a positive term of cultural revaluation, but carries with it […] an identification of the medieval with the barbaric. A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages [source: “Introduction” to Gothic Tales].

Yet, this incorrectness stems from the invented, imaginary past as “medieval” in ways that potentially rewrite the conventional wisdoms regarding said past… which Baldrick conveniently ignores. Indeed, the kinds of stories Baldrick is writing about were predominantly written by white, cis-het men and women centuries ago, when queer discourse was in its infancy and racial bias was phased out of the conversation through regressions to a pre-fascist 15th century that was more interested in enjoying one’s privilege and playing silly pranks (source).

We want to bring that forward in ways that kick assertions like Baldrick’s right in the balls. In short, we fags exist in a state of decay that heteronormative agents do not, thus have the belly for a bit of gross excess and bad taste. “‘Disintegration,’ you say? Mondays, am I right?” For us, it’s just Tuesday.

As such, consider this passage my everyday defense of the Gothic, and by extension, Communism as expressed across its ouroborotic mode: forever unfinished but alive and beautiful in its chaotic, crumbling and splendid ornamental branching despite the Gothic’s many critics standing in the way of Communist development. Our works survive us, thus mark our place like gravestones, in concentric graveyards of increasingly larger size. I will die and leave my work unfinished, because Sex Positivity is more than just a book; it’s an idea and a very old one! Hugging the alien as something that’s rotting but looking for some love; i.e., a little novel, maybe you’ve heard of it, called Frankenstein. I liken myself as echoed in Shelley’s portrait—the monster as much as the woman who birthed it:

(artist: Richard Rothwell)

But my work, however incomplete, lives on as a beautiful composite of a joint effort: my years of schooling, research and writing/illustrating married with the human (thus beautiful) experience of others also struggling to survive through their true beautiful selves forced to feel undead. So whether I finish every volume I want to write or never write another word, I can die happy knowing my work will live on through other natures’ warlike struggles, its caterpillars[35] and butterflies. Gothic Communism is ultimately out there among all of us, waiting to finally be built no matter how many times the champions of capital smash it down in defense of the status quo. We just have to be playful, osmotic (and brave) enough to reach for it, again and again, using fresh bricks to make it out of as taken from the neoliberal (capitalist) world around us: an alien sex castle of “rape” that, like a misfit toy would, cultivates class consciousness while liberating workers using badass (“fucking metal!”) iconoclastic art. Sometimes, it can feel empheral and mad, but there’s a method to the madness, meaning it’s not mad at all, but in on the joke, however sick or ostensibly depraved it all seems. In that sense, we’re all size queens, darlings (and not always prone to using the holes canon prescribes—our “war vaginas” and “war assholes” being “ravished” most heinously by Mommy’s little helper giving us the D)!

To that, meeting “the right person” (girl or otherwise) is both quite complex (which part two of this subchapter shall explore) and as simple as giving them the D in whatever hole they want it in; i.e., once both sides’ boundaries are established—in effect, sticking it to capital by proxy. “Lady Justice was has been raped, money tips the scales again,” sings James Hetfield, only not.

(artist: Temporal Wolf)

Now that part one of “Medieval Expression” has laid all these ideas bare, part two (“‘Red Scare’; or, Out in the World“) will continue exploring them beyond purely academic circles; i.e., to look to more plebian and earthly but no less vital examples of weird iconoclastic nerd culture: the sort contained between me and my friends’ shared alienation and liberation through this book as a living document; i.e., one concerning sex work as a profession seeking legitimacy and emancipation from SWERFs while doing work and getting paid for it to thwart capital’s total privatization of sex worker bodies (“if you scratch a SWERF, a TERF bleeds”; source tweet: itshoneylive, 2024). Sex work isn’t just work, my dudes; it’s paid work.

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Footnotes

[1] “My blog concerns the Gothic, but also sex, metal and videogames (not quite sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but certainly healthier). I’m also an atheist, and write about that in this post. In any case, I wanted to briefly cover these areas of interest—why they’re so important to me, but also how they tie into the Gothic according to my overlapping tastes” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Sex, Metal, and Videogames,” 2021).

[2] Me expanding on Hogle’s outlining of the procedure in “The Restless Labyrinth” to outfit it for class and culture war’s revolutionary cryptonymy during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

[3] The paradox of genius being a tightrope with madness, insofar as it stems from an illogical fear of one’s inspiration never coming back versus coming back a little… too often; i.e., less forgetting how to write and more us feeling a persistent, steady drive to take advantage while the gettin’s good. Per the Numinous, these anxieties extend to Quixotic feelings of isolated grace (dementia), but also an elusive “white whale,” the endless questing for a non-existent planet, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Holy Grail, the City of Gold, the Fountain of Youth, etc, not just as unattainable, but folly (which also is an architectural term regarding towers that tend not to stay up). But once you catch the bug (what I’ll call “jouissance”), forget about turning it off; it henceforth becomes a periodic itch you randomly get and that’s pretty much that. It straddles the fence between pleasure and pain, fun and annoyance. But it’s also hypomania, hence when one is most productive. Anything in excess is bound to disappoint in that regard; i.e., like Midas’ touch, sounding good on paper but in reality being a giant pain in the ass. Like sex, though, I miss it when it’s gone, and through ease of access can experience something that, if it happens too often, quickly overstays its welcome.

[4] I.e., people are numbers that cheapen life to produce maximum dollar signs: to gamble and collect like poker chips. Similar to the unironic approach to war language and a shortage of “free brides” to go around, rape becomes ubiquitous within endless war as filled with monsters. Genuine rape and its honest practitioners are everywhere, including popular culture; i.e., Said’s Culture and Imperialism exploring Orientalism; e.g., so-called “harem romances” (with their own princesses, assorted royalty and palace guards, bandits, wizards, etc). Meanwhile, Capitalism is designed to always have the money flow up. “Trickle-down” is generally an individualized occasion, not a systemic one; i.e., whistleblowers poking and prodding at Capitalism as a cancer that defends itself (and its endless settler-colonial war chest); e.g., my book as a concentrated effort that nevertheless is extracurricular.

[5] “Bare” insofar as ossuaries were common and generally iconized postmortem, whereas the dissecting of dead human bodies was considering sacrilegious (and after the Iconoclasm during the Reformation led to its weaponizing by Cartesian forces; i.e., medicine serving the state, not workers).

[6] From A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

[7] The state depreciates and keeps people deprived of any amenity through paywalls while robbing them in crisis and decay of their labor and wages. It will take/steal as much as possible short of killing its worker population outright. Generally they’re expendable (e.g., Alien) through efficiency. However cheap life is, then, Capitalism ultimately requires it to keep operating.

[8] “The Tūi birds,” Bay explains, “have a cosmopolitan distribution, including in Papaioea/Palmerston North in Aotearoa, New Zealand [a lot of diphthongs]. ‘Papaioea’ comes from Māori in the area exclaiming, ‘How beautiful it is!’ in reference to the location of the settlement next to the Manawatu river when it was established. Depending on where the birds are found, they’ll even have different accents.”

[9] Per the British tradition as carried over and transplanted elsewhere, medieval language vividly speaks to power in ways that remain barbaric and dated in the present space and time (e.g., corporate or Hollywood royalty little more that gaudy pirates, czars and racketeers). This expands not just to tell-tale mythic elements like the Medusa, but the medieval and medicine, misunderstanding and superstition: the likes of zombies and vampires as critical lenses tied to older historical beliefs; e.g., actual bloodletting, lobotomy, mercenary surgery (committed by certified quacks but also relics of the Dark Ages: renegades, banditti, blackguards) as yet another thing to poetically revive as an echo of its former harmful self—call it a shared psychosis. Its echopraxis tackles conflicting belief systems, hidden material problems (cover ups; i.e., buried waste), and dramatic, social-sexual considerations using the same symbols to critique current dire administrative problems. This can be sexual rape, but also rape as bodily autonomy removed through the barbaric practice of modern medicine centered harmfully and panoptically around profit over people: the state’s brokering in flesh as a classic trade in punishment (the pound of flesh) and pleasure (slavery and flesh traders) but consumption through so many of these things; i.e., the state consuming raw flesh in ways that reduce workers to pieces of meat to be carved as the state wishes.

[10] Originally from the German title, Die unendliche Geschichte (1979). Note the agglutination in the English localization.

[11] Neoliberal escapism is a powerful drug for workers terrified of state shift and Communism; like an addict, they will kill to acquire the drug, and defend their dealer who supplies it: capital.

[12] What the Duffer brothers, born in 1984, treat as magical realism to encase Capitalism in amber, trapping us along with it. It’s praxial inertia par excellence—all from two people who barely lived to remember the 1980s while alive. For them (and their bigoted antics on and off set*), they are just another pair of Pygmalions/hauntological conmen to challenge the snake oil thereof. Just look at those pedophile beards (Jon Lajoie’s “Pedophile Beards,” 2008):

*From Constance Grady’s “The Stranger Things Creators Were Accused of Verbally Abusing Female Employees” (2018):

This isn’t the first time the Duffers have faced criticism of their treatment of female employees. They were widely lambasted after the release of Stranger Things’ most recent season for joking about pushing one of their young actresses into doing a kissing scene against her will.

Fifteen-year-old Sadie Sink (who plays Max on the show) said in interviews that she found out that she’d be doing a kissing scene when she showed up on set the day of the shoot:

“The kiss was not written in the script,” she said. “I get there the first day of filming the Snow Ball, me and Noah [Schnapp] are walking in, seeing the decorations and stuff. One of you — I think it was you, Ross — was like, ‘Oh Sadie, you ready for the kiss?’ I’m like, ‘What? Nope! That’s not in the script. That’s not happening.’ And so the whole day I was stressed out.”

“You reacted so strongly to this. I was just joking,” replied Ross Duffer. “And you were so freaked out I was like oh, well, I gotta make you do it now. That’s what happened. That’s why it’s your fault” [sweet Jesus, what a gaslighter].

Teasing or not, Ross Duffer’s response that Sink being uncomfortable with the situation is what inspired him to push forward with the kiss struck many as inappropriate. Summarized one Twitter user, “The director, an adult man, saw that a teen girl was uncomfortable with a situation, which made him MORE EAGER to put her in the situation.”

Sink later walked back her characterization of the kiss in an interview with The Wrap, but when pressed on whether her response was coached, a publicist intervened. The controversy soon died out (source).

The same problem extends to the children—Sink being pressured to silence herself “for the good of her career,” but also Noah Schnapp; i.e., the queer-coded character whose (admittedly milquetoast) sex-positive legacy was utterly compromised by supporting genocide (The Kavernacle’s “Noah Schnapp Has DESTROYED His Career by Supporting Israel,” 2024).

Simply put, there’s no outside of the text, kids; bigotry and genocide onstage, bigotry and genocide offstage. Power aggregates, so we gotta push back together by breaking the very spells that lead to unironic moral panic, the enabling of sexual assault, and genocide denial, etc; i.e., by roasting their weird canonical nerd attire as the cosmetic of white American men being universally protected by Hollywood’s silver screen; e.g., roasting their glasses [Jon Lajoie’s “Rapist Glasses,” 2008] and owning ours as a sex-positive counterstatement [Harmony Corrupted, next page] that—like John Carpenter’s They Live (1988)—sees through corporate bullshit.

[13] Which Ridley Scott used for the “birth” scene, filling Kain’s fake chest with buckets of the stuff. The birth scene isn’t just unabashedly Freudian and a go-to movie for Gothicists everywhere since it released; it’s a veritable bloodbath, putting the “torture” in porn-as artistic at a primal level—i.e., transgressing as it does by tapping into a rather animal, nigh-primordial vein. No one does gore quite like Scott. It’s almost holy.

“Almost holy” is honestly a rather pithy slogan for the whole Gothic, bastardizing churchly architecture and language to carry their power and meaning over when brokering its own wages of sin (sex) divorced from church bullshit; Gothic Communism extends that divorce to the state: a post-capital resurrection, rebirth, and revival, post-Iconoclasm. Nothing is sacred but human rights, whose social-sexual protections extend to nature as expressed through monsters. Iconoclasts talk about these things to borrow their power, to retain and imbrue its fleshy or stone-like elements with one’s own mark, often as bruise like, through discipline and restraint, through the flesh as mortified, rotting and caned, but also impossibly alive and vivacious. Doing so grants it an air of elegance and profanity well known to the Gothic: the miracle of the statue weeping blood (which Castlevania literally turned into a rock ‘n roll song to slay monsters to: “What a horrible night to have a curse.”).

[14] I.e., duels, including of dueling monsters during Amazonomachia. These require and express often as actual foils, literally dueling like swashbucklers in a play on a stage; e.g., Ripley dueling the Alien Queen (the Dark Mother) for the status quo in Aliens. Similar to that, we fight in the halls of power as expressed through medieval poetics, facing the consequences of inaction should we fail to act; i.e., our lose-lose versus the state, and their goading, Lady-Macbeth-style: “What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness” (source). This canonical usage threatens being “too much like a woman,” which we shall see, Lady Macbeth demands shortly after to be “unsexed,” to become like a man; i.e., a phallic woman (a concept we’ll return to during “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph,” in Volume Two, part two).

[15] The medieval is a rough-and-tumble existence; even when conjured up, post eulogy (the living dead a—you guessed it—paradox), it still demands essence. So make sure to take care of and look after yourselves when beckoning Medusa (aftercare). See to your needs not just through food, but things food can’t satisfy that the Gothic can; i.e., odd comforts for those touched by powerful things (seeking power again to feel in control, but not burn up like Icarus chasing the sun; re: calculated risk): to distract and wile away/whittle down the hours with wordplay (time becomes vague, as such) yet lead us where we need to go; to stimulate but not overstimulate. This can be for any nervous organ, be that the brain, or more overtly sexual organs riled up by a touching of the senses; i.e., not physical alone, but anything that makes the system “go haywire.” This wild brainstorm, if caution is not heeded, can become a frenzy of fixation, of building a charge perpetually waiting for release: both keyed and drained, but lopsided wherein the scales tip too far and the energy or spirit (what-have-you) is stored too much in one side, the imbalance seizing the engine. Again, it’s all about give-and-take to better distribute what’s available where it needs to go. Doing so is an endless but all-important balancing act.

[16] The Gothic is a strange, giant lover to be sure, an old headspace that breeds strange thoughts. Dissection of a large dead thing more undead/mostly dead than totally dead and inert, its autopsy yielding all manner of priceless treasures and treatments to whatever ails us.

[17] I.e., class nightmares—of those inside the Imperial Core capitalizing on their personal inheritance anxiety as something that travels across the larger mode’s recycled materials; e.g., from Lovecraft, to Whelan, to various metal bands and beyond.

[18] “A form of ancient popular media that helps people historically relieve systemic stress through individualized forms of psychosexual violence,” one whose therapeutic exercises—boundary-setting and boundary-breaking—we’ll touch upon more in “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph” when we look at the monomyth and Amazonomachia as predicated on psychosexual violence; i.e., which provide a theatrical device that helps children and adults relieve stress in monstrous, toy-like ways.

[19] In reference to the false Madonna’s ta-tas, but I digress.

[20] “The Odyssey must be mentioned in a discussion of Odysseus because without it, a large gap of material is left out of his tradition. On reading it, the warmth and admiration that Homer had for Odysseus is clearly evident. This will be contrasted with the writings of many other Greeks. The other important point to make concerning the Odyssey is that it mentions the Trojan Horse. Odysseus may have gone grudgingly to Troy, with only a small battalion of men, but he ingratiated himself with the important Greek generals and gained their respect and trust. And he was the one who came up with the plan to use the Trojan Horse that allowed them to enter Troy undetected. Of course, it was built with Athena’s help, but the idea for such a sly and cunning invention came from no other than Odysseus. So Odysseus accomplished what Achilles could not: the sacking of Troy” (source: Moya K. Mason’s Odysseus: Fascinating Man and His Many Transformations (2024).

[21] Which Lord Byron, a literal practitioner of incest (who sired a child with his own half-sister), openly praised.

[22] To clarify (from Horden House’s “Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Paintings,” 2024):

A tragedy about incest which suffered from more than the usual attention from pirateers. In the preface the author offered an apology for its appearance in public, claiming “it is solely to avoid its being rendered still worse by a surreptitious edition…He is sensible that the subject is disgusting, and by no means compensated by the execution”. The first edition consisted of fifty copies privately distributed in 1768. Summers (A Gothic Bibliography) gives the first public edition as Dodsley, 1781, but this edition which was not published in a formal sense, but undertaken by Walpole to discourage a threatened unauthorized printing. This was followed by a second edition in 1789. There was a pirated Dublin edition of 1790, reissued in 1791 (source).

[23] From The Psychobiology of Transsexualism and Transgenderism (2014).

[24] Such as murder as a joke; e.g., Pulp Fiction: “I shot Marvin in the face!”

[25] Brits are weirdos who call PhDs “theses” instead of “dissertations.”

[26] “A manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain” (source: Oxford Languages).

[27] When he was four, my little brother wanted to change his surname to Vlad’s posthumous moniker, “Țepeș” (“Sep-esh”), meaning “Impaler” (originally used as a way for the Count’s political enemies to demonize him after his death): “Joe the Impaler.” My mother loved that!

[28] I never “made it” in academia, and Hannah ghosted me (an academic classic); but I still was able to say my piece (over a million words, and multiple volumes—i.e., like Foucault’s A History of Sexuality minus the, you know, predatory elements in his work as an actual rapist), doing so as something to invigilate much like Lewis did: a weird faggot nerd’s magnum opus. No hard feelings to Hannah, though; they were always kind, and also helped me figure out my PhD work before fucking off.

[29] What Ren & Stimpy (1991) would call “whizzing on the electric fence.” Like that show, the Gothic is abject, crude, hilarious and oddly beautiful (and the site for unironic sexual predation in nostalgic criminogenesis; re: John Kricfalusi’s pedophilic tendencies. Trauma begets and attracts trauma).

[30] A queer jest, given how queer folk are often alienated in academic circles; e.g., my grandfather seeing on a bathroom stall at Case Institute in the 1960s: “Kill all fags,” under which someone snarkily replied, “You think they’d be at a biological disadvantage.” The point being, people like us can reproduce, but generally procreate through our academic-leaning work as anathema among straight nerds (Coleridge abhorred Lewis). We’re the joke, and a bad (rape) one at that—one living on in decay as a social disease that is, at times, literal (syphilis and especially AIDs being treated as “queer diseases”) but also the byproduct of constant censorship against us. For us, the funerary language takes on a procession we must inject with our own paradoxical jouissance; i.e., healing from rape as a penance forced on queer culture transgenerationally.

[31] And before you ask, yes, there’s porn of this; there’s always porn of something under capital and the Neo-Gothic “medieval” is no different (source: Ickleseed). Except, the Gothic iconoclast uses it not to make bank or commercialize oppression, but to speak to an imperiled human condition threatened by capital as conveyed through Gothic poetics’ usual senescence and debridement. Naughty-naughty “necrophilia.”

[32] From “Introduction,” by the Poetry Foundation:

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born to a wealthy family in Sussex, England. He attended Eton and Oxford, where he was expelled for writing a pamphlet championing atheism. Shelley married twice before he drowned in a sailing accident in Italy at the age of 29. His first wife committed suicide, and shortly thereafter he married his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who was the author of Frankenstein and the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Among Shelley’s closest friends were the other famous Romantic poets of the day, among them John Keats, whose death inspired Shelley’s “Adonais,” and Lord Byron (source).

[33] Aligning with our arguments, Shelley’s essay is famously incomplete. He set it aside, then died tragically at sea.

[34] Re: “that boring and exhausted paradigm,” quoted frequently in many sources; e.g., Alex Link’s “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots” (2009):

In the midst, of its definitive arguments, Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) pauses to consider the Gothic just long enough to single it out as a hopelessly “boring and exhausted paradigm.” The Gothic, he declares, is a mere “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised” and it should not be mistaken for a “protofeminist denunciation of patriarchy” nor “a protopolitical protest against rape” (source).

[35] Re: our “Teaching” refrain, the caterpillar and the wasp. Jadis often had to explain to children about the short lifespan of butterflies—that they wake up, eat and eat and eat, take a dump and fall asleep, wake up as a butterfly and bone until they croak: “That’s not so bad, is it?” she’d ask them. But furthermore, they have the right to be butterflies, even if for a moment or never but trying to break free under false chrysalises arresting their development (which, for humans, is partly self-authored). The undead struggle—to survive and become what we’re meant to be in opposition to the state rotting us—is ultimately what matters.

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”: ‘Heaven in a Wild Flower’; or, Exhibiting the Monstrous-Feminine Ourselves

In the past, I have stressed the Aegis as a counterterrorist weapon with revolutionary potential as a kind of “spectre of Marx”; i.e., when removed entirely from its state function, but also haunting it vengefully from the inside during all manner of inheritance anxieties; e.g., the Radiance from Hollow Knight[1] [operating] as an ancient queen, haunting the mind-like tombs of mere mortal men and eventually being banished back to Hell once hunted down and exposed by a male hunter inside his fallen master’s ruinous crypt (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume One (2024)

Picking up up from where “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” left off…

This subchapter was written and invigilated this morning—specifically the morning after a night with Harmony Corrupted, the two of us playing together but also talking shop as comrades. To that, it’s something of a postscript to the previous subchapter. “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” was a series of Marxist signposts and exhibits, first and foremost; “Heaven in a Wild Flower” focuses more on the gender studies hermeneutic; i.e., regarding the monstrous-feminine in relation to everything discussed so far vis-à-vis the broad strokes of Volumes One and Zero:

(artist: Jody Muir)

In short, there is always a war-like, rebellious aspect of the Medusa to any monster that isn’t—in part or in whole, figuratively or literally—a white, Anglo-American (“Western,” of the Global North, “Occidental,” etc) cis-het, Christian male; i.e., the monstrous-feminine as non-white, non-Western/non-Occidental, queer and non-Christian, therefore an extended being under Cartesian hegemony and thought, thus something to commodify and harvest under its gentrifying refrains/neoliberal franchisement; e.g., female vampires or orcs, the dark figure as of color (male or female); i.e., an ink blot to project inherited colonial anxieties and confusions onto, then scapegoat and ultimately enslave and mistreat in unironic forms. Through our “girl talk” (anger and gossip), monsters and camp, the abuse becomes ironic: something to denude and appreciate as a revolutionarily cryptonymic process unto itself (whose engagement with state forces is equally fascinating to watch).

There is an intersecting gradient-of-gradients among various axes of oppression, of similarity amid difference concerning the dialectic of the alien: as something to murder and dissect through unironic sex and force according to what Lenin called the highest stage of Capitalism, Imperialism (source: Marxists.org); i.e., as appearing in between media and real life as half-real, monopolized, and cheapened to serve profit, not workers, nature and the environment. There is always a harvest under capital and it always becomes grim during the liminal hauntology of war as alien to the middle class; i.e., a wandering castle that moves without motion and appears without warning to engender mor(t)al panic and attack labor and nature as “other” during unironic us-versus-them—all to shape, maintain and serve the profit motive through hybrids of industry and dogma.

Luckily these can be challenged—an act I shall now exhibit, ipso facto:

(exhibit 34a1b1b1: [artist, top-far-left: Reiq; top-mid-left: goblinDepre; top-mid-right: Lady Red; top-far-right: e.streetcar; middle-left: Just Some Noob; center: H.R., Giger; in-center: Lera PI; middle-right: Lilian; bottom-right: Roxie Rusalka]. The monstrous-feminine is very broad and dualistic. It would be impossible to cover all aspects of it here, because there are an infinite number between overlapping/intersecting gradients. In gender-studies fashion, I’ve isolated three gradients for your consideration: biology/sexuality, gender performance, and performance-as-identity. Though I could devote a book [or series of books] to each, I will merely supply one exhibit per gradient for you to keep in mind as we progress. As we do, remember that canon both divides and essentializes nature as discrete and fused; e.g., biology is essential under capital, and sex and gender are both discrete in terms of critical analysis and dogmatically fused insofar as canon treats them like one-in-the-same and chained to human biology serving the state [the challenging of which Judith Butler calls “gender trouble”].

First, biology and sexuality [above], which illustrate through art how sex and force compel the viewer [through compelling arguments] using calculated risk; i.e., as the medieval presentation of a personified, staged dialogic to invigilate and express in a Renaissance form: monsters as things to entertain, meaning natural harmony within change as an imperiled proposition. Gothic Communism camps canon by “making it gay” in ways that account for the language of “sex” and “war” as put into quotes, thus “rape” and the warlike monsters involved as theatrical devices that subvert canonical norms on the same complicated stage: a war of words, with words, over words and other forms of expression whose mise-en-abyme is conducive to rebellion in opposition to the state; e.g., monster girls like the African princess superhero, redhead, orc girl, xenomorph, Amazon, witch, et al; but also male and intersex monstrous-feminine and people of color and Orientalism [the jinn] as coalescing to invade the home expressed on a shared stage, on and off itself [and which swaps out invaders during moral panics of a given type to focus on]. “ You are not immune to thick witches,” Roxie Rusalka says [source tweet, 2024]. The same cogent irresistibility applies to the ghost of the counterfeit as something to reverse the process of abjection with, mid-consumption [the doggy pill hidden in the doggy treat, doggystyle].

 

[artist, top-and-bottom-left/mid-right: My Emetophobia; top-right: Pancake Pornography; bottom right: Paladin Pleasure Sculptors]

Second, gender as performance [cosmetics]: clothes, but also material expressions of toy-like genitals with chimeric qualities—of undead and demonic elements, but also animal qualities that would, under natural conditions, be impossible. Except, they aren’t just unequal, taboo fantasies to reify by naughty agents; they’re literally artistic products that can move data [regardless of type] along a given track. Consider Volume Zero’s critical refrain, “Animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms,” and how this generally has a predator/prey mechanic to hyphenate; i.e., function determines the flow of power and information insofar as morphological expression—to craft the Medusa-in-the-flesh—is often literally plastic [silicone, vinyl, whatever]. The textualities are literally textured in ways to invite comparison between materials that, unto themselves, have their own communities and cultural values; i.e., in those communities and their various artistic-pornographic extensions exported outward. Medieval paradoxes abound, insofar as these creations aren’t harmful but appear as such during calculated risk as a revolutionary voice. Caught between pleasure and harm like Giger’s xenomorph is, but also its biomechanical medievalism, such playful gender expression very much yields a colorful, food-like quality that, while it can certainly be tasted, cannot be safely digested by humans in a literal, prandial sense; i.e., sex toys aren’t food, but food-for-thought. For genderqueer folk, it speaks to who we are ipso facto—unto itself as action made material.

[artist, top-far-left: Dirty Ero; top-mid-left: Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri; top-mid-upper-right: Caravaggio; top-far-right: Benvenuto Cellini; bottom-far-left: Femboy Kai; bottom-mid-left: Moon; bottom-middle: unknown; bottom-right: Belle Delphine]

Third, performance-as-identity: No matter how ornamental or crude, Medusa is both the classical victim and abusive reactive response to patriarchal forces. Under capital, this happens to extant feminine elements within workers and nature. Be it a pussy or a penis, then, the human body’s genitals are vulnerable sites of state force as something to give and receive upon themselves. There is generally something engorged [the Medusa’s power indicated by crop-like size (often a produce/poultry metaphor) as much as intensity or some other value]. The maiden/wallflower is the delicate little thing to dominate because she automatically submits; the Medusa, on the other hand, must be conquered through battle: Amazonomachia.

As such, performance of the Medusa is synonymous with rage, beauty and harm, insofar as “harm” may be put into quotes [or not]—i.e., as a rebellious identity whose struggle is expressed through the facial mood-board, mid-“rape”: the AMAB, AFAB or intersex cutie finding agency, mid exploitation, and to varying degrees of irony—of the historical colonizer’s power commonly expressed in phallic terms castrated by the monstrous-feminine as having vaginal and phallic energies that challenge settler-colonial horrors; i.e., witch hunts [the beheaded Medusa] and rape [the ahegao genre] as legion by virtue of pastiche remediating praxis to serve profit but also challenge it. Within canon, such prolificity remains incumbent on profit through criminogenic conditions expressed cryptomimetically for or against the state, thus profit as canonically reduced to awkward-sounding genres like “grimdark” or Metroidvania, etc. The iconoclast disrupts these categorical divisions by crossing boundaries, transgressing to fashion new ones through performance as identity under paradoxical duress: guarding our virtue through theatrical exposure and vulnerability to make a larger point. Sluts rock, the state does not—cannot tame or control us as the revolutionary Medusa [not the TERF version]. What matters is the attempt, the passion, as something that makes an impression, striking a chord to echo worker aims into the future.)

All these collage’s thumbnails have been selected at random, and from readily available sources, to make my point. They’re everywhere, their codified rape and war ensconced in myth that comments on material reality as lived and breathed through Gothic poetics, and can be used for workers or the state—the biology and sexuality as something to showcase, the clothing or flesh-as-“clothing” to depict in a variety of forms, the performance—of the ahegao Medusa saying “get fucked, nerds” to capital while refusing to submit/die under its routine wars of extermination extirpating her kind—as all connected within liminal expression. To synthesize these points, I’ll do so in one paragraph, to keep things brief:

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Nature, as something to harvest, is treated as “unsafe” around the nuclear structure unless collared and choked into fetishized commodities that cannot hide the ghost of the counterfeit, only showcase it; e.g., Jordan Peele’s 2019 Us; i.e., made tame and sold into slavery as housed in dungeon-like kennels, uniforms, and conditioned behavior matrices. The bypass—of this regular gentrification pointing towards the state devouring anything and everything around it—requires reversing the polarity of such language. In turn, Gothic language is—like all human expression—fundamentally dualistic, kayfabe and costume-/mask-like: an us-versus-them exchange of ostensible corruption and dogma becoming the data unto itself as something to subvert ipso facto, meaning by changing the context, not the code-like aesthetic; i.e., hugging the alien as monstrous feminine; e.g., the cryptonymy of the vampire as a blindfolded, cum-guzzling slut invoking the vitalistic (thus alien) aspect of nature: to humanize the harvest during a shared, seminal ordeal. The elite and their proponents will always try to pacify the rebellious nature of Gothic poetics as Medusa-esque, but maintain the shadow zone they routinely appear inside as a colonizing device. The state doubles ours and we double theirs. There is no escaping this praxial reality. Instead, we must embrace it and fight back using monstrous-feminine expression as our silver bullet, one wrought with ironic xenophilia challenging state harm/xenophobia, making their fear-fascination with the other dyspeptic to the point of dispelling the dire illusions it normally supplies.

In short, the elite don’t own our future, however they might try to suggest that. Make it your own—a pandemonium felt, seen, smelled, heard and tasted (and other senses yet to be expressed in some shape or form) by what we produce and spread out into the world at large. To break Capitalist Realism, though, we must remember Sarkeesian’s adage and critique canon as something to enjoy if we must, but not endorse its unironic (thus imperialist) treatment of sex and force. Our pedagogy of the oppressed (and its praxial doubles) must reverse this universal process of abjection (of alienation, fetishization, exploitation) through the ghost of the counterfeit, the other three of the Four Gs, the Six Rs, our iconoclastic doubles, as humanizing the harvest—to camp canon, thus the twin trees, thus synthesize praxis while confronting trauma during the calculated risk of ludo-Gothic BDSM: to reverse the flow of power and information (namely trauma), shifting form and function’s utility towards workers, not the state.

To be sure, we can individually focus on particular interpretations of the monstrous-feminine; i.e., to achieve universal liberation for all marginalized groups, but must do so as a collective united intersectionally against capital, the state, its proponents, et al, as preying on us during the state’s cycles of recovery and decay—its monopolies, trifectas and dualistic, dialectical-material opposites to our own creative successes. For every goal we have—e.g., good sex education to prevent rape, thus harm—they had a polar opposite that, even in moderate forms, ultimately concedes power to the state by not only refusing to challenge the status quo, but police anything that even remotely does to maintain the current holistic arrangement. Historical materialism denoting state shift becomes yet another thing to scapegoat, and bury and otherwise abject during oppositional praxis against workers; only profit matters, only canon (and any synonym you could associate with state defense, including tokenism) matters. Anything else must be held down and beat into submission; so we must “better the instruction” in ways that, per counterterror and asymmetrical warfare, reject the colonizer on all colonial territories and fronts.

This very much includes home soil and its commercialized venues as holy in a secular-to-religious gradient: commerce synonymous with greed, with bastardized religious symbols, as holy through a bourgeois context meant to acclimate workers, from the youngest age possible, to capital, its Protestant work ethic, and Capitalist Realism.

We must… disabuse them of this folly. By any and all means at our disposal, we must hit them where it hurts, using our mutual action’s raw labor and propaganda, but also exhibits of mutual consent uniting against state minorities, copaganda and proponents as always having the potential to police us: as monstrous-feminine behind their disguises mirroring ours (fascism is a game of inches behind obscurantism; liberation is a game of anisotropic reversal [of terror and counterterror] meant to terrify state forces into perpetual hiding). In response, some people push back; i.e., we do, shouting “This one’s for Brodie!” as we descend, witch-like, from the skies to deliver righteous (and hilarious) guerrilla  violence before cackling and gliding away again. A fly-by fucking of your brains.

(exhibit 34a1b1b2: “Bye, bye, Easter Bunny!” The death of an icon, whereupon the childish defenders race to avenge their fallen hero: to dispatch our two blackguards with ruthless efficiency!

I jest, but also, I don’t. Anyone who says this scene is “just” a silly prank isn’t paying attention and/or not using their brain on purpose. Silliness aside, we must remember, here, that children will rush to defend their heroes as things to love and preserve, the ensuing melee a rush to defend a given example with whatever’s on hand. While the “beating” of our dynamic duo with harmless fluffy toys [compared to the absolute drubbing they administer to the man in the suit] is ultimately harmless. Except, children grow up and will defend their icons in a similar-but-lethal fashion; i.e., with the araments of the chronotope as something to put the likes of Jay and Silent Bob down for good—all to preverse the sanctity of the icon as something whose nostalgia must be upheld no matter the cost of human or animal life.

So don’t be afraid “to kill your darlings,” to think of the children as yours to defend from bad parents, teachers, guardians, etc—not to ensnare through a wicked scheme tied to profit, but a iconoclastic means of liberation that acclimates them to calculated risk; i.e., as a deft, playful means of handling their own trauma as something to play with [as children so often do; e.g., drawing their abusers]. Make yourself their heroes to see in themselves and defend from capital, and let nature do the rest.)

Faced with state Trojans, we must employ our own splendide mendax to kick them right in the “eggs” (of the guy in the suit, but also the ideological power of the icon he’s wearing). Anything less is settler-colonial endorsement and cannot be tolerated; i.e., actions have consequences, the blind consumption of canonical media leading to a septic bowel that will spread like a virus, killing not just the worker or the image, but the community and the environment, the state and the world. So the icon has got to go, along with the bourgeoisie behind it as poisoning the nation’s youth against all other forms of life. This includes the worker-turned-moral-crusader (for the state) as always correct-incorrect (the only “correct” thing under capital is the elite, which workers are not; they always have the capacity and potential to rebel, thus require constant policing by class traitors, which the elite cannot survive without: “Trust, but verify.”).

Thought guides violence as informed by material conditions. War isn’t just fought with guns and bullets on physical battlefields, then, but thought (pun intended) on mental ones that are just as real; i.e., inside a half-real space performed by class and culture warriors breaking state illusions by unplugging workers from the machine controlling them: Plato’s cave (the Torment Nexus) as surrounded by what slowly is becoming an inhospitable desert in a very real sense. The world is dying and the illusions of empire—its cartographic refrains and hauntological, hyperreal, infernal concentric patterns—won’t be able to hide that fact forever. No matter how it escalates conflict or seems to dial its waves of terror back, the state is the enemy. So are its cops, castles, and canon—its doves and hawks. It must be completely dismantled, which takes tremendous time, effort, and reversals during an uphill exchange (what Volume One calls “An Uphill Battle with the Sun in Your Eyes”).

Think of it as a dark ritual. The problem is, our chanting (which is often musical for various reasons) is met with bad-faith refrains—akin to them (the state and its proponents) clapping their hands over their ears and babbling[2] to avoid the reality of state shift. These often occur amid snooping inside privileged white neighborhoods threatened by dark Satanic forces; i.e., as much something to poke fun at as embody ourselves; e.g., Joe Dante’s sublime and hilarious The ‘Burbs (1989), above. Unironic forms are meant to fill the air with chaff, meant drown ours out as we say in response: “We are here and cannot be ignored. Not today or tomorrow, but eventually and not too far off, your age is over! Some say in ice, some say in fire. The choice is yours: ignominious death by your own hand, or helping us build a world better than the ones routinely made for Cartesian conquest and hegemony put to practice.”

This corporatized procedure is untenable in the long run, assuming (as Jason Moore and Raj Patel argue) infinite growth in a finite web of life. For Gothic Communism, the whole idea is to take away the state’s ability to fight through its labor force and propaganda as interconnected with each other and rebellious factions; i.e., through the Gothic imagination (and its imaginary past, present and future) as our domain as much as theirs, and whose media circuitry can be overloaded and subverted by dark Satanic forces hell-bent on doing the job right: “It’s Hunting season!” / “Applesauce, bitch!”

Said forces humanize labor and nature through the Medusa as a spectre of Marx during historical materialism (and, per Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire, Chapter I,” invoke and involve all the language/war-like fronts of sex and force intertwined by two basic sides working in fundamental opposition: workers vs the state, capital vs commune, cops vs victims, Medusa as doubled into pro-state vs pro-worker forms; i.e., of costumes and masks to wear and discard [often on top of each other—re: concentric veneers] as needed, etc). Physical violence isn’t just limited to a single area, of course (terror campaigns and hate crimes/deputized stochastic violence), but an idea can spread throughout an entire population to cripple or liberate it through paradoxical enrichment and release; i.e., through the ability to install canonical gargoyles that afflict menticidal torment onto pacified workers, versus replacing said statues with iconoclastic doubles: those that appear to function the same during liminal expression, but point-in-fact engender critical thought amid Gothic poetic expression rarefied during worker relations with each other and media.

Like any good friendship, then, it becomes something to return to—to try, try again in echoes of the original attempt; i.e., the crossdresser wearing Mother’s clothes, the latter having a warlike potential that must “wake up” during complicated thought/ontological experiments performed to summon the Medusa as something to “slay” on a comely heartthrob’s youthful flesh and blood. All occur while expressing deeper truths on the surface of things as veiled when nude and nude when veiled (re: Segewick vis-à-vis Hogle).

To that, consider Harmony and me, playing together for multiple reasons—to have fun, and to think about said fun as capable of arriving at fresh discourse. The canvas is the body as covered in clothes that exude sexual energies, but also the cum involved as broadcasting a given “slaying” of the cutie (“Fatality!”); i.e., as a formidable “adversary” (from a dialogic standpoint) in a given kayfabe “argument’s” psychosexual exchange: “scrappy” cummies and clothes, and a mommy-dom body that begs for fresh tributes, cross-continent, mouth open and expectant, waiting dutiful and demanding for another hot sticky load. Harmony wants it to splash all over her as “conquered,” but also as helping both parties find release inside a special paradox: the palliative Numinous existing between the Great Destroyer and the mother nurturer in ways that abjure heteronormative interpretations on and offstage. As such, the entire call-and-response is why we’re there. Harmony is the dark mommy dom, her bare, exposed skin—stripped of its dark, fearsome garb, all the way down to the soft dermis underneath—anticipating tribute to give her satisfaction; i.e., amid an oscillation of dominance and submission where the receiver of force holds all the cards during mutual consent: as the dominant topping from below that, all the same, submits to the physical top (me) mounting them (in spirit, given the distance between us) while wanting subby feelings, mid-roleplay.

It’s the ol’ switcheroo for both of us, and we love it.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

We love it because it’s fun, but also because there’s a larger lesson to leave behind. Similar to the Medusa, Harmony appears when called (with me being respectful of the schedule she keeps, of course); i.e., like the fabled Great Destroyer per Gothic aesthetics, but per ludo-Gothic BDSM travels like the dreaded flying castle, landing on my doorstep and waiting to be let in; but also, like greased lightning across a likeness of one thing or another between a vast gulf of space-time: Harmony’s real body and the doll I fuck under me as indicative of our shared bond, mid-exchange; Harmony’s fat purple dildo (next page) a tell-tale likeness of their SO’s equally big cock (so-called “dildo verisimilitude” being where an owner picks a given toy to match their partner’s cock in shape and size), but also my cock as I think about stuffing Harmony’s tight little mommy cunt while thinking about their SO doing the same (my headspace is a busy one). Per Foucault, it escapes the bedroom, bringing the mountain to Muhammad in all directions. And that is a group effort between Harmony and myself; i.e., the mommy dom and the trans woman being her good little girl. I love learning and fucking but also combining the two with a like-minded cutie.

To that, Harmony is a wonderful dance partner (consider supporting her work; she’s worth every cent), helping me achieve new synthesis as our worlds collide into something special. Sex is like therapy in that you get what you put into it. Playing with Harmony is like fucking a meteor falling to earth, a mighty cake that pounds back (an equal and opposite reaction) as you give as good as you get—it’s sublime, a slice of Heaven and Hell married to discover new wisdom in their union: sex-positive expression in sex work as an ancient volatile industry made even crueler by capital. The way to change that is through our bodies and labor reclaimed by us.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Our collective bargain’s dotted, electric current channels and harnesses the power of creation with a female slant that extends to all monstrous-feminine (which, as trans, I definitely am): the versatile, populous and rebellious womb of creation, the sex organs, of one’s sexuality and gender expression (to parody and raise trouble) as gendered organs of thought incentivized and encapsulated by pleasure as physical exertion and fluid exchange both in a given step of exchange, but also a running gag (the vampire); i.e., as often painful/asexual amid eroticized aesthetics, fetish, and kink as appreciatively ironic Gothic counterculture. To break Original Sin as part of Capitalist Realism, ludo-Gothic BDSM is precisely the delicious, maternal prison whose dark mommy doms (and their castle-like booties and other tasty fruit) set us free once tasted with an open mind.

To that, take it from me, cuties: you can’t just taste it once, but need to sample it again and again and again (“just in case”)—to revel in the minutiae of a given position. It might look familiar and done to death, but in truth is just slightly different in ways that yield endless potential! Or as Blake puts it in “Auguries of Innocence” (1803):

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour (source).

Except as Harmony illustrates during their own interactions with me, this ain’t no idle verse, homeboys; it’s the awesome means of escaping the jail by transforming it from within (and not resorting purely to lame-ass academic forms without spice to help them go down our parched throats, thirsty for cum): “We have a microphone and you don’t, SO YOU WILL LISTEN TO EVERY WORD WE HAVE TO SAY!—made with real trauma!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

So try and keep these wide and seemingly disparate factors in mind. We’ll conclude the first half of Volume Two (after this chapter) as being a more poetic implementation of historical-material Gothic poetics (the predication of history on socio-material conditions, of which the Gothic is the social factor infused into material forms), and consider a more historical reading of the Humanities with part two of the Volume (“more” being the operative word, here, as we won’t reduce Volume Two, part two to a purely historical device).

So steady on, girls! We’re past the antechamber and have our premise-supplied pamphlets. Onto the palace proper! Onto “Medieval Expression, part one“!

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone

---

Footnotes

[1] Or some such monarch—Jody Muir’s creation, above.

[2] “I’m not going to listen to this…” (over and over) to “Ray, you’re chanting! Unconscious chanting: ‘I want to kill everyone. Satan is good, Satan is our pal!'”

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”: Knocking on Heaven’s Door; or, Prepare for Entry!

“What knockers!”

—Fredrick Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein (1974)

(artist: Jeff Waters)

Picking up up from where “The Eyeball Zone” left off…

Ok, we’re finally here, but before we enter the palace, let’s reiterate (this page) and go over some Marxist signposts and liberatory sex work exhibits.

As the previous subchapters established, the Gothic has always been campy as fuck—”rapacious” as a genderqueer (often ace/nudist) means of confronting and subverting actual trauma (the ghost of the counterfeit) by reversing the process of abjection: through the poetic, often-paradoxical language of war tied to monsters, magic and myth as “bad theatre”; e.g., Chris Farley’s meat wagon skit from Tommy Boy (1995); i.e., as everyday activities often set to music gleaned through rhythmic, synchronistic intuition during cliché ceremonial fetishes and broad Gothic conventions (“Giddyap, faster!” having Phyllis riding Aristotle [the incel giga-nerd] like an ass). The Gothic, as such, transcends mediums to speak across them in everyday relationships that help put out fires while not starting new ones (a complex spectrum of social-sexual exchanges, whose material factors and aesthetic elements of unequal power and trauma hyphenate to address systemic abuse). From campfire stories to novels to cinema to videogames, ludo-Gothic BDSM is a veritable “city of paradoxes,” one whose fomenting sediments we can shape into new, more sex-positive (and less profit-driven) likenesses from what Jeff Waters[1] might call the “Fun Palace” (1990).

As such, Capitalism blinds us through cheap likenesses; to see through its Realism, we must play and make our own preceptive forms that (as we shall see) use Gothic paradox and oxymoron, mid-historical-material debate, to dialectically-materially confuse (thus critique) the senses, then assemble them magically again in selectively absorptive healthy boundaries that tear down old harmful ones (and other medieval tricks we’ll all explain once we’re inside the palace proper). Like Radcliffe’s Black Veil, it becomes something to pull aside; like Matthew Lewis, it becomes something to campily fuck until we’re breathless (a veritable “meat wagon” to piledrive until you’re deaf, dumb and blind; the Gothic is not for the faint-of-heart—its rough-and-tumble sexual aesthetic riding hard and putting away wet):

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Per Radcliffe, it’s also the greedy old man behind the mask; per us, Lewis and the Gothic’s love for crude, iconoclastic puns, it’s a mask we can wear while wearing… not much, really! We’re not gonna let “him” (the old man) get away with it, but the way forward is through Medusa as someone to embody as a psychosexual educator (which extends to ace critiques of unironic psychosexual violence; e.g., “I’m here and you can’t touch me, incels!”). It might seem random, but it all fits together pretty well, trust me (I’m writing this as I listen to Annihilator and think about how Harmony’s fat pillow pussy [seriously, just look at those plump, puffy lips] blew my mind a few hours ago; i.e., hitting my stride [as sex generally encourages]. But this is my third book and umpteenth exhibit/excursion into the shadow zone’s realms of metal, BDSM and taboo hedonism [and doubles that invite troubling comparisons, but also abject language that is inevitable under capital[2]]—of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll as an aesthetic to enlarge the mind [and other things] with): to kick ass (with ass) and chew bubblegum, and we’re all outta bubblegum (chewing Capitalism up and spitting it out, crying “Avaunt!” as we do)!

The paradox of “thinking with your dick” (or cunt) through the aesthetic of fear, theatrical degradation/disintegration and “doom” (as contained inside the castle-like body-as-fun-palace) is that it hits just right, hurts so good as an acquired taste (re: native-speaker intuition); i.e., learning to like the pussy’s little bit of pleasurable pain from a hard dick chaffing a tad and stretching the willing-but stubbornly tight entrance open during consensual, fun, monstrous sex (Zeuhl’s would be extra tight and dry until I eased, millimeter-by-millimeter, all the way in and then, sploosh! It would suddenly gush with a sudden eruption of pussy juices).

As stated, this poetic thought process/ontology is generally operatic, rhythmic and musical—a collective, flute-powered nympho dance held through the Gothic mode as the gateway to forbidden wisdom: a better world that happens by facing our fears in sustainable ways that speak to people through how they operate and what they consume as monstrous, musical, drug-like and medieval (ace people fuck, too, or at the very least read about stories that contain “murderous” sex and “rape” in some shape or form; beware those who don’t—they’ve drunk capital’s Kool-Aid, high on dogma as a capitalist virginal screed and modesty screen: TERFs [and other incels] killer virgins springing from the Man Box to enact “prison-sex” violence onto other workers).

(artist: Joseph Tomanek)

To that, Gothic reinvention and reclamatory learning occur amid total creative and labor control over our bodies, sexualities, genders and performances, such a liberatory venue/playground giving us (the proverbial good doctors, mad scientists and bad girls, etc) the final say during sinful, iconoclastic rebirth—a dark Renaissance unafraid to say the “quiet part” as loud as possible (one-upping a cumming banshee, a singing fat lady shrieking with pleasure about her own death and transgenerational salvation amid time-as-a-circle—its hefty cryptonymies speaking truth to power according those for or against the state): knowledge found in “desolation” and activities far more conducive to sex-positive learning than unironic penance and mortification of the flesh (unironic, scorched-earth torture dressed up as “righteous”):

Centuries of war and waste
Have dealt a mortal blow
Mother earth begins to rot
Humanity on death row
Life does slowly cease to be
Death seems so surreal

As earth becomes a vacant lot
There’s nothing left to heal (Annihilator’s “Imperiled Eyes,” 1990).

If a whole album (or series of albums, a career) can skillfully[3] speak to that awful reality—of Medusa’s revenge as reclaimed during calculated risk to save workers from state shift—then it merely joins in across a larger Gothic dialog as holistically expressed: with our bodies, sexualities, genders, relationships and labor in sexual-to-asexual ways reclaiming the language of war in castle-like bodies: “Yeah, baby! Take my ‘castle’ if you can! She’s thirsty for cum!”

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

Or as Cuwu once said to me, “Want to hit it from the back, little man?” It’s a Numinous peach of doom, a forbidden freaky fruit that—once tasted—you’ll want more and more of (making the mattress squeak and the walls [of your partner’s pussy and the room[4] around you] shake).

In turn, Gothic-Communist cultivation involves a wide variety of forces challenging capital as a process internalized by workers; i.e., professions yield different paths, and armies provide specialists and general-purpose versatility where both can be useful to serve workers in ways canon classically does not; i.e., Heinlein’s Competent Man trope (originally from his 1973 novel, Time Enough for Love) as something to acknowledge as imperialist, then subvert accordingly for workers and nature’s collective benefit:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

“Insects,” “invasion,” “orders”—the language of settler colonialism is clear and present not just in Heinlein’s work, but those who followed him in franchised neoliberal refrains (re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains in cinema and videogames) colonizing and capitalizing on the Gothic (and the monomythic fantasy and science fiction genres stemming from it) to serve profit. This gentrification all but require us to be competent in opposition to the material and social factors that push dogmatic, Cartesian versions of such ideas out into the world (ultimately to privatize, thus enslave, sexualize and alienize workers with).

In regards to my work and that of my comrades, I’m a holistic cutie whose Renaissance-girl approach yields a complex solution to a complex problem: a book series built on negotiated art exhibits whose context illustrates mutual consent as labor action and sex-positive propaganda; i.e., something accomplished exclusively and demonstrably through the intimacy of muses and artists illustrating mutual consent, mid-struggle and in concert.

Like Jeff Waters, then, I am the director of my brainchild’s labor of love, thus familiar with all aspects of its production. Of course, this familiarity with labor goes well beyond artwork and simply into work at large; e.g., housework, aka “woman’s work” as labor that, like all forms thereof, is infinitely valuable (thus infinitely exploitable) and requires that we reclaim all of these things through our daily lives synthesizing good worker habits, thus good praxis as our pedagogy of the oppressed: all those things conducive to imparting good social-sexual habits (thus education) reclaimed from pre-existing colonial forms. But I could not do it without the likes of my friends. It’s a group effort, and two heads (and bodies) working together aren’t simply better than one in terms of intersectional worker solidarity as self-evident; they’re required when it comes to certain kinds of work that can’t be performed and invigilated solo:

(exhibit 34a1b1: Model and artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. Yes, there’s a lot you can do with modern smartphones, selfie sticks, lighting and mirrors. But the simple fact remains, certain types of sex work can only be done together with cooperating and mutually consenting parties; i.e., sex-positive forms of mutual action [which can still involve mirrors, above]. Assuming that mutual consent is already established as part of an exhibit’s underlying context, you can only spank someone else’s booty if two [or more] people are present to perform the action, can only film an actual couple’s sex scene with a present-and-willing-couple. This includes the penetration, the foreplay and the climax/creampie [below], but also the dialog in between, the interactions between a couple, the aforementioned subtext of consent I can invigilate and express while my friends and I camp [thus subvert] canonical media’s fear and dogma, but also the profit motive as linked to Cartesian [settler-colonial, heteronormative] propaganda.

To this, capital treats labor and its sexual and gendered expression through the narrow function of exploitation and theft, vis-à-vis the dialectic of the alien—not to communicate the rights of people, then, but to establish people as products first and foremost [especially female workers, or anything seen as feminine, thus monstrous-feminine]. Workers are owned, their rights diminished or virtually non-existent under a system that treats corporations as more human than human. By extension, capital frames things as “content,” insofar as you have a goal to make as much content as possible, appealing to the profit motive according to a universal clientele [white, cis-het men] and their tokenized gradients; i.e., to adhere to the widest possible audience catered to by the state, whose money flows through the platform-in-question to move various products that adhere to and uphold the status quo—from Vitruvian bodies to dimorphized clothing [diminutive female underwear or pocketless garments] to the division of sexual labor treated either as directly pornographic products or artwork under capital. All are “for sale” in ways that keep money moving through nature, and generally in ways conducive to censorship, control and ultimately genocide.

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

By comparison, Communism hyphenates sex and art, but must challenge all of these factors through what we create inside our own systems of thought. It can all sound rather drab [or hilarious, insofar as Marxist theory generally does adjacent to sexuality and queer camp]—fighting the good fight against a largely invisible structure that is felt through commerce and economics inside the Imperial Core, first and foremost. But I can assure you, there’s plenty of room for romance, playtime and “action” amid our own poetic expression. Simply put, we’re not slaves to the grind, and can multitask with the best of ’em; e.g., my fucking of Cuwu’s tight pussy was good praxis, insofar as it was mutually consensual, but likewise produced for content we could express ourselves with, and which continues to inform this book’s revolutionary ideas.

Expressed in binary form, Capitalism is patriarchal, imperial and criminogenic; under Cartesian thought, capital harvests nature as monstrous-feminine to serve profit, which is theft of labor’s universal value during police violence, setter colonialism, AI and tech bro shenanigans [“Why create when you can steal stuff from artists and sex workers for free?”] and so on. Communism is monstrous-feminine, and must reclaim what capital tries to privatize/monopolize by seizing labor’s infinite value as something to weaponize against capital through subversive media, work, relationships, Gothic poetics, et al. This happens through Sex Positivity as the camping of canon by virtue of there being capital/the state versus anything else that refuses to compromise with the state. There’s sex positivity and sex coercion, liberation and enslavement, genocide and salvation, rape and consent, and so on. And all can be invigilated through exhibits like these that amount to both services and acts of group and self-expression; i.e., to survive under capital while doing activism as a means of mixing business and pleasure, but also direct demands and allegory through the things that people enjoy that likewise store value and comment on taboo, policed subject matter [thus workers].)

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

The worker-to-media relationship, then, isn’t just nomadic in-place—a wonderous athetos/Gothic-castle circus on part with Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’” (1972) or Montrose’s “Space Station No.5” (1973)—or indicative solely of our rights spoken through Gothic poetics, mid-interpersonal relations inside a larger spectrum of intersectional exchange; it’s symbiotic, “Pan” needing the “nymphs” to dance to his music (the muses) and they needing his music to dance. Ideally they should be able to perform in isolation, but the practice is practically meaningless without a performance to share with, and experience among, the world. A cake needs sponge to squish, but also frosting (and other decorations) to give it flavor. For us, this serves workers through mutual action, not the elite through profit. Taken to an extreme, profit will always cheapen/lessen the quality of things—e.g., videogames, food and people, etc—and capital is built exclusively around profit; i.e., per Jason Moore and Raj Patel, Capitalism puts nature to work as cheaply as possible by making it as cheap as possible, thus life. Per me, liberation of work as sexualized (and universally alien) occurs by camping the twin trees of capital, thereby clawing profit (and labor value) back from the elite, along with power and class consciousness (awareness), emotional/Gothic intelligence, and so on during sex-positive iconoclastic art.

Contrary to what sad pathetic nerds like Fredric Jameson would insist, then, monsters aren’t “boring and exhausted,” but priceless[5] and die-hard, populist ways of reducing the risk of unironic rape and war in all their forms; i.e., by developing Gothic Communism! Rape (re: “the taking of power to harm someone, somewhere or something”) is ubiquitous under Capitalism through unironic forms maintaining Capitalist Realism, hence heteronormativity in warlike, poetic language caught between boundaries, but also castles, castle-like bodies, and “rape’s” concentric “mise-en-abyme” existing in quotes: during ludo-Gothic BDSM questioning normally through “unnatural/unknown pleasures” preventing catastrophic events by playing with the dolls (re: Waters) as alive-unalive, correct-incorrect, inside-outside (and other such hyphenations the Gothic loves to invigilate while profaning the sacred as “almost holy”); i.e., as something to endlessly revive in the present space and time (and something for capital to commodify and paywall in blank, canonical forms); e.g., Heinrich Lossow riffing on old dated clichés while having Friar Tuck making his Big Thighed Goth GF “fly” (“I’m an airplane, weeee! Faster, motherfucker! Don’t fucking stop…”): sin is relative to those who would contain healthy activities (fucking) inside oppressive systems (churches, capital, the state) whose oppression and liberation must take place inside of themselves. There’s no outside of the text, kids; and besides, why think outside the box when you can be inside one (if you follow me)?

(artist: Heinrich Lossow)

As we shall see, such an imaginary past’s liminal expression/doubles are a black mirror and oft-orgasmic (re: jouissance) release valve—a “deathly*” escape from repression (and the holier-than-thou) something touched on by metalheads, freaks, and creative misfits playing with undead, xenophilic taboos; i.e., from Matthew Lewis to Jeff Waters camping the canon backwards and forwards to achieve activism on all fronts (a chorus of the damned [there being endless orchards of flowers blooming in Gothic fields, all of them lovey in their own special ways] all speaking to all rights in seductive forms; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit as something to revive and interact within to achieve new knowledge that yes, is a bitter bill to swallow [war and rape in all their forms tied to capital as a menticidal system stuck on repeat to drum up profit], but one coated in the sweetest of sugars; e.g., queer and environmental rights per Lewis [re: Colin Broadmoor’s “Camping the Canon: Matthew Lewis, Milton, & The Monk,” 2021] and Jeff Water’s “Stonewalled,” 1990). So, if you can recognize the myths and magic that generally accompany them, too, then all the better! You’re gonna need ’em if you wanna tell this from that and successfully add to the Cause!

*I.e., ahegao essentially is a “death face,” aka an “O face” where one ostensibly loses control (thanks to Harmony Corrupted for the idea, making me cum super hard again). Creed describes the Medusa as having such a face, post-unironic-decapitation: “The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa’s own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view. Athena’s aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother.” While the unironic, dated version of this used by Creed amounts to endless female rage at sobering patriarchal violence—i.e., to terrify insecure and rapacious men through undead revenge—my applications of camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM see the notion of monstrous-feminine turning the idea on its head (so to speak): the campy (thus ironic) performance of intense social-sexual gratification. Often this happens with an assistant making the “performer” give in to a calculated risk, putting on a show where things are at least half-real. It’s less phoning things in, then, and more to bring down the house from a wild, crazy orgasm that has the likeness of Medusa cumming defiantly at settler-colonial forces—all to frustrate them. As such, “decapitation” translates to any kind of rape play that can be exhibited, and whose formidable powers of projection “castrate” insofar as they humanize the Medusa as any feminine force perceived as monstrous that exhibits an uncanny ability—a) to not only subvert torture and resist harm, but b) take power away from the state dominator by showing the Medusa as human(e) and the state enforcer as not. “Can’t touch this.” It’s not just the refusal to be a victim, but also not an abuser while being sex-positive. The state’s repulsion, humiliation, anger and frustration is the Medusa’s aim, smiling at their would-be killers’ loss of control in seeing the Medusa quite unharmed and satisfied in ways only a good cum can do.

Got it? Ok, you little fucks. Outta the car! It’s time to learn… inside the fun palace (which, plot twist, is slang for “madhouse”; you’re the inmates and I’m the nurse)!

Ok, I lied again; I wrote a postscript that concerns the monstrous feminine; i.e., as something to relate to the above point about ahegao in a broader context: regarding the monstrous-feminine in relation to everything discussed so far vis-à-vis the broad strokes of Volumes One and Zero. Onto “Heaven in a Wild Flower“!

(artist: Peter Corriston and Dave Heffernon)

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Footnotes

[1] A real Renaissance man, Waters’ expressed all aspects of the production inside and outside of itself (akin to Walpole’s Strawberry Hill evoked inside Otranto and vice versa):

The album has a song titled “Alison Hell” which is based on the true story of a little girl who had the fear of the dark so to speak, the fear of seeing a bogeyman-type monster at night. This eventually made her go insane as her parents ignored her cries. The album cover depicts exactly that. The artwork is brilliant and comprehensive, making the average fan curious about what the music on the album is about, specially taking into consideration the fact that this was Annihilator’s debut effort and Jeff Waters being responsible for the cover art in addition to writing all the lyrics, playing guitar and mixing the album by himself (source: Aniruddh “Andrew” Bansal’s “Top 25 Metal Album Covers of All Time”).

[2] E.g., Taking dick during anal felt alien to me, so much so that my only point of reference for it was—in true abject fashion—taking a shit. But this obviously isn’t the same as taking a shit, thus doesn’t fall into that particular kink field. It’s merely an abject form of language tied to bodily functions to describe a reversal regarding a part of the body that normally under capital is “exit only.”

[3] I.e., virtuosity, regardless of type; e.g., Water’s guitar or Radcliffe’s quill as skillfully held to at times speak out, and others, to “cash in” (ol’ Radcliffe sold out big time, and eventually Waters did, too): to find tropes you can repeat for profit, not critical power first and foremost.

[4] The self-destruct metaphor in Alien also being a crude erotic one: the heroine-in-small being inside a cumming giant currently “dying”; i.e., the house, the monstrous-feminine, getting off during “hysteria”: exclaiming and cumming as loudly as possible—the proverbial “big finish” that, for AFAB bodies, can take a while to achieve in order to get out of one’s system (along with the trauma it sits adjacent to during psychosexual expression’s historical-material markers: the ghost of the counterfeit).

[5] Per the difficult, anisotropic nature of the Gothic, its recycled myths have a particular dual function that very much can be used to assist in Communist development; i.e., by exposing the usual state heroes as cowards and humanizing the people, places and things they dehumanize or otherwise treat inhumanely; e.g., Ripley sucks (Cameron’s version), the xenomorph rules, and military optimism/Capitalist Realism need to end, along with their rape-like, unironic function under capital (which debates through brute force and in bad faith: a presumed air of infallibility and superiority that necessitates genocide per the Divine Right of Kings segueing to the Protestant ethic and profit more broadly in the 20th century onwards).

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”: The Eyeball Zone; or, Relating to the Gothic as Commies Do

“If only you could see the world as I’ve seen it through your eyes!”

—Roy Batty, Blade Runner (1982)

Picking up up from where “Green Eggs and Ha(r)m” left off…

This piece was written and invigilated in a handful of hours in regards to my sex work, but also a family issue (the catalyst for this piece). It’s an unplanned pregnancy or “quickie” (which both often are) whose flow state explores the usual Gothic playgrounds, except its own alarm bells focus on interpersonal relationships in the broader context of ludo-Gothic BDSM during class and culture war—how we can relieve stress and address praxial concerns that we leave behind; i.e., to be consulted when we become overstimulated (or don’t exist anymore) relative to our own web of relationships (which lends this subchapter a more autographical feel, as it requires me to speak from experience, which I’ll do when I discuss my history with Zeuhl, as well as my other exes): a buffer when our walls go up, a “glory hole” to peep through and engage with while the blinders are on. Like the damsel under attack by the banditti and saved by the gallant knight, then, we workers are survivors of trauma.

Except, living with it as in and around us, we can select any facet of the damsel (or similar) roleplays: to a) speak theatrically to larger cryptonymic issues during calculated risk, but b) nevertheless acknowledge that we are human and can still be triggered through our coping mechanisms (rape play), syndromes (mirror, virgin/whore, compartment, etc) and cliché slogans; i.e., “ignorance is bliss,” per the Gothic, illustrating macabre hypotheticals in spite of our desires’ own psychomachy wanting to resolve relative to capital’s “new normal”: the swooning damsel thoroughly ravished (opps). Our sex-positive forms can subvert that travesty through an iconoclastic theatre that preserves the mood and look, but alters the context; i.e., it protects the bound “maiden” as a powerful vampire slut who cannot be harmed provided their subby mode is understood by all parties (which is what my book and its exhibits with other sex workers are ultimately about). If someone violates that, then they are an abuser and not to be trusted with power again, but per fetish gear/aesthetics, sits on the same surface: the virgin and the whore intermingled with the tiger and the lamb, the cop and the victim, etc:

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)

Ludo-Gothic BDSM is holistic—a multimedia hermeneutic. So when power aggregates to defend capital-in-decay (which it does by design), the solution arbitrates in different forms on different scales, forms and functions per an aesthetic of power and death—in short whatever one feels like (in the spirit of the eyeball and vagina as lubricating organs, this subchapter is a little gnarlier and schlockier—hence my exhibiting of the wonderful Mercedes, a schlock queen). A given iteration, per person, isn’t always a dominant or submissive one, then, but does require mutual consent as the realm of the sub guiding the dominant away from unironic demon BDSM’s fatal nostalgia linked to capital; i.e., Radcliffe’s demon lovers and implied mutilation fantasies, vis-à-vis Cynthia Wolff. As usual, the key to catharsis and stability is paradox; i.e., the dominant surrendering power unto the sub as non-abusive in a larger system that precludes harm, mise-en-abyme. This requires productive interpretations that flexibly speculate to avoid canonical, singular enforcement of dogmatic roles through sex and force; e.g., the damsel needing “protection” from a cis-het man when such factors are tied to a systemic problem linked to profit: the male family annihilator killing his clan because he can’t “protect” (own) them or surrender his own power.

To that, I’m literally a common-law doctor of Gothic love in multimedia forms; i.e., the Metroidvania, which concerns power relations according to socio-material factors amid Gothic/medieval poetics. As such, my praxial/therapeutic desire with this impromptu session/subchapter is the same all the others: to advocate for the oppressed, developing Communism and class-cultural consciousness in Communist configurations that abjure the nuclear family model as relayed in object lessons. I apologize for yet another pit stop, then, but I really want to supply it before we go into “Medieval Expression”: as something to engage with between workers in flexible relationships; i.e., that allow for different configurations (numbers) and types (qualities; e.g., FWBs, metaphors, business partners) of relationships to overlap. Reality becomes something to invent, serving worker needs:

For example, I mentioned in our previous subchapter “doing a Communism with Harmony.” But per “Medieval Expression,” this will come up in relation to the imaginary past as something to engage with and cultivate for workers based on older forms while we roll along. As such, the praxial idea is creative successes (something we’ll focus on in Volume Three): to gather and collect the usual factors as points of view to perform, process and synthesize, then release back into the world; i.e., like Blue Öyster Cult’s “Harvester of Eyes” (1974) minus the, you know, unironic harm and death:

Harvester of eyes, that’s me
And I see all there is to see
When I look inside your head
Right up front to the back of your skull
Well, that’s my sign that you are dead
My list for you checks off as null
I’m the harvester of eyes! (source: Genius[1])

In turn, Gothic roleplay scenarios that are partly hypothetical, partly not (half-real) work through disillusionment, grudges, shame, guilt, frustration, and discouraging factors, etc; and require a series of opinionated interlocutors during a dialogic, an argument, conversing together instead of one side being a sock puppet/sound board. It’s a back-and-forth, a negotiation meeting each other halfway, an honest discussion concerned with investing energy to achieve the desired effect: equality and deprivatization, a mutual agreement to meet the needs of both sides without an obligation to the state’s heteronormative nuclear model; i.e., paying rent under a wage-based arrangement that favors the man, relegating the woman/monstrous-feminine to the ignominious position of sex object compelled to surrender their labor without pay as defined by capital. Meeting your basic needs (food, shelter, enrichment) is not a wage under capital, and money within capital grants whoever has it an unfair advantage that classically favors the man. Women’s work is historically unpaid; Communism precures payment per negotiations that allow for a variety of exchanges that ultimately express creative and morphological freedom as pointing towards a post-scarcity world.

Capitalism requires cruelty to function. Hence, the cultivation of the Man Box teaching boys to be cruel from a young age: be cruel, get a prize. Except this is not a natural behavior because it goes directly against our older evolved behaviors of cooperation and teamwork to survive. So, it must be stoked, fueled and incentivized by us versus them during crisis and decay as cyclical in a centrist refrain; i.e., one that grants good and evil an elemental coding function under capital; i.e., the creation of an enemy alien (a stranger) to fetishize and kill in a dimorphically sexualized, settler-colonial scheme. As such, humans aren’t cruel by nature; they’re taught to be cruel to serve profit during settler colonialism at home and abroad. Accustomed to the Man Box, boys grow into young men, then adults who maintain a cruel streak fueled by us versus them; they fall prey to guilty pleasure, wishful thinking and the pleasure principle as Pavlovian. They’re always chasing that fix and cannot conceive of anything outside of it: a murderous flow state whose headspace is conducive to violence against the enemy as alien. In turn, the enemy is “out there,” so that is where men go—to war and for marriage (military exogamy and war brides); i.e., war booty to drag back to the ancestral home as restored from a mysterious decay through far-off bloodshed.

The problem with chudwads is they don’t know how to love anything except through force, and as a result feel utterly alienated from the world unless it matches up perfectly with what is sold to them. Except this is always unsettling to them, unsatisfying by virtue of them a) constantly feeling surrounded by enemies they must rape and kill, and b) somehow owed the right to treat the world as something to rape, destroy and rescue from “dark forces.” So long as they kill state enemies, it will “get better”—except it never does because it’s all a lie meant to disguise how capital decays on its own (“the cake is a lie”). The promise is largely the adrenaline of fight or flight as a drug to fuel their killing efforts. They become a hammer surrounded by nails. As such, their masculinity becomes toxic (watch out for so-called “parodies,” as they are often endorsements in disguise; e.g., Saxon Hale from TF2, 2007) and they lose the ability to fairly negotiate or humanize others, beating them down while feeling self-centered, dogma infantilizing them by appealing to their vanity and self-importance as centralized in heroic stories; i.e., the monomyth; e.g., Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone. But for every “noble” king (all knights are cops from castles and all [canonical] castles/cops are bad) there exists a “lesser” man sitting in his shadow—an envious “Boromir” longing for what Capitalism routinely promises but cannot deliver on by design; it can design simulations of reward, however. Men unable to relate to their wives retreat into these places (e.g., Everquest, 1999), seeking “the ring” as something to win through treachery and by the sword, the manly men spilling buckets upon buckets of unhappy “orc” blood.

The Ring of the Enemy. “Tis a trinket that Sauron fancies.” Per Cartesian edicts within Capitalist Realism, the neoliberal franchising of cartographic refrains like Tolkien’s portray the classic monomyth as a built world; i.e., one to escape into by white cis-het men and conquer for fantasies of power that mirror settler colonialism’s day-to-day operations as displaced (the videogame as a war simulator since the 1980s). As such, these same men adhere to the nuclear model in their interpersonal accords; i.e., they fancy “the ring” through marriage as a compelled gift assigned through dogmatic institutions distributing socio-material factors: to serve the status quo per smaller eyes seeing as the panoptic and myopic Cartesian eye does—to dominate, own, conquer and rape through power (wage and labor) theft as entitled by the usual culprits of indoctrinated state enforcement. It becomes a map to cover in blood, the ring a suitably vaginal metaphor penetrated by an enterprising male digit. To free the slave from a ring that cannot be removed, we have to sever the contract and “castrate” the slave: snip-snip goes the wee-wee.

Again, the system is entirely unnatural and compelled, and only able to teach men (and tokenized groups) to “win” love through violence—to become protectors that ultimately trap those forced to identify as women in prison-like homes. Castles. But men cannot appreciate what they have because they are always looking for enemies; their wives become Madonnas to put on the shelf, the man chasing the whore as any monstrous-feminine person (which is why you see so many conservatives secretly paying to sleep with twinks, catboys and other [often] effeminate men; i.e., there must always be a “woman” to dominate). But even the 1:1 ratio is untenable, insofar as it’s far less fair to the female/monstrous-feminine side, who quickly must adapt to survive against the marital decree as martial: “what is owed.” Capital can’t deliver on that because not everyone will agree to it; but the elite can condition as many men as they need to maintain their ranks for a given generation. Thanks to Cartesian thought, colonizers tend to think of themselves as rational “thinking beings” that hold dominion over “extended beings”; but humans are animals and absolutely can be conditioned (“broken,” as Meerloo puts it). Far better to face this problem as early as possible, calling out Tolkien’s fantasies for what they (and similar stories) are: “Goldilocks Imperialism” that conditions boys to be cruel into adulthood.

In response, liberation from the state and its proponents is our natural right, the thing to ask for when those with power cry towards us, “It is not yours save by sorry chance! The ring is mine, it should be mine! Give it to me!” Except we’re the ring, the sex object, the promise. Resisting such forces includes other workers having conceded to state force, but also echoes of capitalistic regressions towards fascism; i.e., as a post-capitalist apocalypse that leads to further scarcity in a world devastated by Capitalism (the “desert of the real” not an illusion at all, but a barren wasteland felt inside the counterfeit, the rotting map of empire). Breaking the spell of Capitalist Realism, then, ultimately takes discipline, restraint, accountability and patience; i.e., as something counterintuitive to build on intuitively according to sex-positive values as second-nature: through native speaker intuition cultivated by community projects on different registers.

For creative endeavors but also any relationship, expectations must be tempered and negotiated fairly between both sides for things to work; i.e., by those who understand the value of negotiation (my exes did not—were, as Bay puts it, “totally cooked”) and open communication prior to entering talks to achieve new agreements (that compromise between workers, not workers to the state); i.e., not treating one side as powerless and voiceless (talking over them). You have to find people not in denial or prone to blame others, but those who take responsibility for their part in things, thus are ready enough to face things as clearly “not okay.” We start there and build/expand off that to widen one’s social network/support group; i.e., as part of a larger potential community and its negotiations and communication. A Song of Infinity to bolster our ranks and our hearts against the disastrous charms of capital.

In turn, healing must be approached with a willingness to participate, not to agree automatically a priori or expect the other side to. It goes both ways, of course, but still must consider the present dysfunctional factors (commonly expressed as a lack of sexual desire towards one or the other, but also a willingness to spend time together) and inequalities that make negotiation untenable. A wife is not a cat (or some other pet), and a husband isn’t a doormat, but however browbeaten the side with money (a wage or inheritance) and means (a residence, which classically would be a castle; and transportation) seems, they have more material control thus are the dominant in BDSM terms.

(exhibit 34a1a1: Model and artist, top-left collage: Lil Miss Puff and Persephone van der Waard; artist, bottom-left: Lil Miss Puff; everything else: Mercedes the Muse. Pastiche is remediated praxis, which expands during dialectical-material conflict amid liminal expression—a “poster pastiche” whose mise-en-abyme involves people, monsters, and monsters-as-people through oscillating degrees of irony and its lack. For the umpteenth time [from Volume Zero]:

Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about [source].

Here, that’s shown in the collage above: as a smaller historical-material pattern I’ve assembled to speak to larger patterns harnessed by workers who partook in my project; i.e., to speak to our collective rights as stunted by Imperialism, but also reclaimed through the Gothic hyphenation of pleasure and harm, of ludo-Gothic BDSM expressed in classic forms. Said forms endlessly update using a war-like hauntology workers wage with theatrical props: Mercedes’ pistol or gasmask, but also her fetish gear at large communicating the larger connection; and Lilmisspuff’s enjoyment of Tolkien and goblins within a mommy-type position as submissive to her husband, but for me, topped a client from below.)

Except, this goes beyond “just roleplay” and into reality as invoking scenarios of roleplay informed or otherwise involving everyday life caught up in war narratives: the toy box as alive in Gothically poetic forms; e.g., the goblin dance, the torture dungeon, a playground of intramarital strife to work things out inside relative to larger issues and smaller symptoms as comorbid: to face and debate our shortcomings, stupidity and other externalized challenges expressed in human-to-building form. The side with power needs to respect the side with less in order to achieve mutual consent. Otherwise, it’s merely compelled labor. It needs to be mutually consensual, lest the theft of power becomes abusive, harmful (rape). These proceedings can drag out, and invest such as time (sunken cost) as can spoil the goodwill between both parties. A man who admits he was wrong, can apologize, can listen and adjust will adjust; i.e., the less you fight or act in bad faith (sissy subs trying to haggle with the dominatrix to steal through false tribute), the easier it is to adapt. But it’s human to make mistakes built around love fenced by trauma; e.g., it took me ten years and multiple exes before I reached the right point in my life to write Sex Positivity. I learned how to be the woman I always was, thus saw the world through a woman’s eyes.

As such, I learned different things about men, about my closed-off/closeted former self—i.e., there’s nothing men hate more than being told there’s a route to relationships and sex than the one they’ve convinced themselves is correct and have spent their whole lives biting the bullet to. Alternatives challenge their narrow, heteronormative worldview. Again, full transparency up front and a frankness in terms of what both sides have to offer is best (not triangulation, when the side with power feels frustrated). This is not taught in schools or canonical media because it fosters equal relationships, which aren’t useful to capital; i.e., it liberates labor (which again, under capital, is dimorphically sexualized to serve profit) from an unpaid/uncompensated arrangement: the nuclear family model.

So such proposals (and the media that supply them) are banned, restricted or otherwise censored, making them an entirely extracurricular ordeal, a de facto education challenging state dogma and Capitalist Realism. This is not hypothetical, but based on real dysfunctional relationships that fall back on said model dogmatically instead of engaging with it in a critical, active manner conducive to mutual understanding and liberation. We forsake sex coercion by virtue of sex-positive action, including the former’s bad-faith acting, play and education: the abject illusion of saying what someone else (the mark) wants to hear. Saying “will do” instead of doing what is required is an action, specifically an enabling mechanism. You have to meet it with a demand or there’s no incentive to change. And if the abuser refuses to change, there is no shame in walking away to expose the abuser as a false protector—i.e., while protecting oneself, and to make amends and sustain an actionable praxis that prevents harm: the protecting of workers by abandoning the nuclear bloodline (and its chronotopes) routinely crashing down (up in smoke); i.e., swapping them for parallel societies challenging narcissistic state forces/proponents. Indeed, my galleries are full of such protects tied to a larger epic that exhibits all of them in different ways; i.e., each in term, solo, or all together to make a different argument about the same issues plaguing workers sexualized, fetishized and alienated under capital:

(exhibit 34a1a2: Artist, all: Persephone van der Waard [top-right, top-left, bottom-left, bottom-right]; model, top-left: Jadis; bottom collage: Blxxd Bunny; and bottom-right: Itzel. Each monster is a cryptomimetic, BDSM gradient of expression and unequal power roles amid a shared, dualistic aesthetic of power and death; each emblematizes mutual consent as a pact, a performance, a playful agreement that turns the flesh into art of a particular kind: the memento mori as a sexpot, a destroyer, a horny slut, an Amazon or Medusa [or some combination of these things]. What matters is that all of these “ghosts” [of the performer, of the counterfeit] are sex-positive.)

There is a historical-material cycle to this whose coiling double helix can be viewed in past relationships and familial dramas swooping in and out of real life; e.g., from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables (1851) and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, to my great grandmother saying, “do your hunting where the money is,” my grandmother going to college to find a husband and education, my mother going to college to escape her husbands and find intellectual (ace) stimulation and enrichment, and me going to college to find (whether I meant to or not) a Communist education and queer love. As such, learning occurs between individuals part of a larger collective enslaved by capital; i.e., John Donne’s infamous question, “for whom the bell tolls” being incumbent as much on our interactions with people (dead or alive) as media about people (also dead or alive).

Lessons of past successes and mistakes within capital (and hauntologies of capital) can yield fresh achievements under capital; i.e., as something to develop into a better system, one relationship (thus negotiation) at a time: the combination of sex and art, business and pleasure, security and freedom of expression through the respecting of those normally without power and rights, thus a voice that branches out in all directions. The unspoken must be heard through a pedagogy of the oppressed that acknowledges and upholds their lived reality as generally alien to the side accustomed to power under capital (e.g., me versus Cuwu—both of us abused, but they as the person who lives with the trauma of sexual rape, compared to my emotional rape). This requires humility and maturity from the dom, which again, is sadly not taught by capital for reasons of profit; i.e., bad BDSM, which instead of rape prevention, precludes agency amid unironic power theft and abuse:

Support to one’s spouse, partner or friend should not be the surrender of one’s rights. Cuwu taught me that by first seeing in me qualities that spoke to a good student, but also victim. If this cannot be supplied, then a given relationship is untenable; i.e., by a stubborn partner with power refusing to listen to the side without power and instead taking out their own frustrations out on: attacking others by venting to the point of triangulation, of unironic harm. Recognizing that both sides are at an impasse is important, though, as it gives them the chance to consider separation as a healthy and vital next step. It took me ten years and many relations (working and/or romantic) to hash out this methodology. But ultimately it was beneficial because I cultivated a system, Gothic Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM, which I developed in motion; i.e., while calibrating my search parameters and expectations to mete out said system, mid-development.

Introspection is vital to changing the draft for the better. In evolutionary theory, this is called adapting. Failure to do that leads to system (relationship) death. The host dies, the parasite/enforcer dies, the body dies, the environment, and so on. It’s about balance. And staying the same is an issue if problems exist, meaning they will survive if things continue to go on, unaddressed. Those with mechanical, actionable power (doms) must be held accountable when consent and consensus disappear—for the sub only has power when mutual consent exists. This doesn’t preclude the ability for the sub to negotiate poorly with the dom (or other subs), but their lack of material power during unequal power exchange must be acknowledged and respected for new exchanges to take place, thus have the relationship not only continue but progress in a healthier direction. If things are sick, then no amount of comfort food (actual or in media form) will resolve things; i.e., band aids for bullet holes.

(source: AH96’s “Kinney Survives ED 209,” 2018)

Except, the person with power must be the one to make concessions (“with great power comes great responsibility”), and it is entirely possible to be a bad partner and still materially and/or sexually provide. This canonical, heteronormative (or homo, queer, etc) expectation of obedience under a material provider is not a discussion and the oppressed must be heeded to make it one. If a wife/sub is depressed or otherwise “hysterical” or down in a hole, the notion of choice becomes further moot by virtue of that being the byproduct of multiple trespasses between them; i.e., chronic neglect of their concerns, which to be fair can stem from their inability to communicate as likewise induced by capital. Women are taught not to “talk back.” Thus, the killer remains at large, Medusa’s anguish ongoing (the ghost of the counterfeit).

But beyond theatrical doublings of socio-material arrangements, these and the large factors of Capitalism (its tree twins) exist in dialectical-material conflict: the workers vs the state, spectres of Capitalism and Marx, as endless. It’s a mercy to openly face that and deal with it, but also empowering and delightful to acknowledge human failings as a species amid the individual mistaking of this (the dungeon) for that (the home); i.e., as something to lessen the odds of actual, unironic harm. “Death,” then, is only the beginning—of the fall of the venerable imperial house (e.g., “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 1839) to raise a new, more inclusive and less elitist cathedral within/upon the old one; i.e., one with all the ornaments and might of Hell divorced dualistically from state copies: the ghost of the counterfeit given a home to breathe, speak out, expand and absorb capital (to assimilate it instead of capital assimilating workers).

On a local level, if a partner pulls away and/or becomes hostile, it is a sign that something is wrong. To solve the problem, you have to compromise within your abilities and power as part of the problem to solve. Even in my case, when I was being abused, I still had the power to plan my escape, but this took a willingness on my part, a courage that had to develop, then execute. But in times of crisis between parties, things will invariably get messy. This is what’s called “not being ready” for a relationship. And it can come about from lack of experience, but also the experience of tragedy or otherwise life-threatening, -changing, or -altering factors that cause people to fall in and out of love. Ideally, relationships are stronger (last longer) if they’re founded not on infatuation and lust by themselves, but first and foremost rest on shared core values and open communication (which doesn’t preclude lust and infatuation, of course; e.g., I adore Bay and Crow as my partners, and likewise relish my friendships with Mercedes, Bunny and Harmony, etc). Lacking those, a relationship will die not prematurely but in a predictable fashion that could, if these values were present, last longer. Luckily they can be improved upon and rewritten to achieve stability but you have to put in the work and go from there afterwards. Otherwise, it’s “too little, too late”—not just for two people once in love, but for the workers of the world during state shift; i.e., when the world as we know it ends “first slowly and then all at once”: the portal to Hell opens up and the forces of the furious dead envelope the living space as overrun with generational trauma—a demonic possession yielding to gnarly shlock rigged and shot in hostile chronotopes.

(exhibit 34a1a3a1: Source, right: Ron Magid’s “Unearthly Terrors: Event Horizon,” 2020. The Gothic is the quest for the Numinous, or destructive power in different forms and functions. Per Capitalism, these forces are like a black hole that cannot be seen past, but whose awesome gravity is felt at all times; per Communism, those of us in the Imperial Core must look past the myopia [and Faustian bargain] of Capitalist Realism to face settler-colonial horrors before they overwhelm the Earth during state shift. The threat is real but felt in fictional palimpsests hauntologically invoked, making the grim-and-graphic allusions to Dante’s Inferno during Event Horizon [the original Hell sizzle reel, which is fucking gross: don’t say I didn’t warm you] become a latter-day image of damnation—a cult-classic to timelessly reinvoke for purposes of seeing through state illusions during rituals of extreme torture, death, rape and decay as martyr-esque; i.e., the glass-eyed stare of the crucified’s paradoxical jouissance, but also the forbidden sight of the blind prophet as looking with different eyes that the ones in our skulls. It’s a nexus of the crisis; i.e., the nucleus of state power made unstable, alien, fearsome—an Id, graveyard place to walk around inside and through calculated risk, bump into the Great Destroyer as a walking castle/torture dungeon. Linked to hypermassive objects like Capitalism, these encounters routinely annihilate anything they come into contact with: a psychosexual, faux-medieval [Neo-Gothic] visual refrain not unlike Jeff Water’s “Second to None” [1994]: “Welcome to my world / I hope you see there’s no way out / I’ll take you higher / So just scream it—scream it out” [source: Genius]. Gothic Communism takes the same cosmic matelotage and applies it to a “queenly” [genderqueer] Medusa to scare the Straights with.)

This might all sound unfair and hopeless; but the one thing counterterror/asymmetrical warfare has going for it (apart from the hubris of colonial forces, “high on their own supply”) is the power of invention through necessity as the mother thereof—to call through need, but also eventual mastery of magic to pull our asses out of the fire; i.e., “The power will come to me whenever I need it; one day it will come to me when I call!”; e.g., Schmendrick summoning “Robin Hood” to save him from the reality that bandits, living under kingly abuses, are far less noble and more opportunistic than Captain Tully would like to advertise. The way to hoodwink them is through likeness of themselves they’ll want to court, threatened but curious by this odd appearance (a bit like Hamlet, staring at his “father’s” ghost):

State forces default to brute force—a bullish goon-like slugger cracking skulls for state fat cats. Yes, professions exist in any field, but the state values sheer results—i.e., lethal force and raw cruelty—ruthlessly administered versus surgical precision. Capital doesn’t require precision because profit is historically “efficient,” meaning it generally occurs (under neoliberalism) through the usual bourgeois trifectas: manufacture, subterfuge and coercion. Compared to our creations, state doubles of Gothic poetics will always be fearful and dogmatic, hence stupid and unable to contend with our cryptonymy through anything other than brute force (including disguises). But per my arguments, you can’t kill “Medusa” through military optimism; you have to address it theatrically at an interpersonal level as something to humanize and befriend (or reap the whirlwind during state shift).

In turn, this requires engaging with creative forces that even a little lightning rod like me, buzzing with creative forces amid a similar flow state to my thesis, can’t easily control despite the easiness of the writing and invigilation at this point (and I should hope so after doing this for as long as I have); if anything, I’m just a conduit for them running through me, riding out the storm inside of and around my little princess body.

Overall, creativity is the ability to materialize and express through merging disciplines that speak holistically to complex problems and elements of the human condition among colleagues/comrades-in-arms (my partners, muses and cover models, invigilated in my books but also on my website through mutual action giving them something normally alien to sex work under Capitalism); i.e., bricks in a wall, gargoyles on a shared grim cathedral made by cuties united in a higher cause (Gothic Communism, which includes human sex-positive expression through Gothic poetics). For instance, Mercedes blends sex work, BDSM, performance art and filmmaking into a unique combination that shifts shape depending on the current delivery method, but remains focused on the same topics (namely expressing human rights in familiar schlock and desecrating American institutions and zeitgeists):

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)

By comparison, I paint in a cinematographic way over photogenic models (with light and shadows as makeup) who tend to be queer leaning, politically radical and gyno/androdiverse. I combine this with my writing and music/film expertise, holistic approach to Gothic studies, love of exhibitionism/voyeurism and sex; but also can team up with people like Mercedes to make compound statements. It’s expressive and fun, but also flexible, organized, demonstrating teamwork on a social level vital to good praxis (versus petulant cis-het men, who get mad at their wives or their pets, useful for barking orders but not at creating things. Killing is easy. Creativity takes effort and humanity to achieve):

(exhibit 34a1a3a1a: Artist, top left: Blxxd Bunny; bottom-middle: Marlon Trelie; everything else: Persephone van der Waard. A creative process is always a chain, transformatively borrowing from different contribution factors. The completed picture, bottom-right, took many steps to achieve: Bunny took a shoot for me to paint them with [not gratis but in exchange for my labor to be featured in this book] and to which my original painting used a different series of poses from the same shoot. However, having lots of extra photos to use, I hired Marlon to paint Bunny based on a commission sheet—i.e., one I deliberately threw together to build on Bunny’s original pose; Marlon sketched out the piece per my instructions, to which I gave feedback; they supplied the final painted figures; I completed the background and lighting for the final render before invigilating it inside my book and on Bunny’s special page on my website. Yes, money changed hands during the operation, but likewise boundaries were negotiated and established; i.e., to be involved with, and displayed in, this project. Faced with insurmountable problems, there’s nothing that workers united under intersectional solidarity can’t do.)

In regards to the above exhibit, what Gothic Communists do is ultimately propaganda expressed through poetic intuition, mutually consensual tit-for-tat (something in return for something else as optional, voluntary and negotiated by both parties; i.e., despite the inevitable imbalances that will routinely come up during trade, especially the giving of Gothic ideas of subversion and disguise) and cryptonymic double operations (that show through concealment, or vice versa). It allows for the expression of monstrous synonyms, insofar as the function is maintained through a legion of simulacra; or, as Volume One puts it:

Conscious rebellion also includes the Gothic mastering of madness and monsters present in the evolution of the female detective/damsel-in-distress into holistic, inclusive forms, merging into increasingly liminal/queer iterations (the imperiled twink) that transform themselves, and the material world around them, as things to “quote” imperfectly on purpose; i.e., to invoke gender trouble (whose progression and praxial friction we’ll examine throughout this roadmap, but also in Volumes Two and Three; e.g., the “Conan with a pussy [except not bigoted]” concept seen in exhibits 84a and 112). As something to expound upon ad infinitum, our Gothic-Communist making of gender trouble is two-fold, then: to one, synthesize old terms with our individual/collective artistic output and exhibits; and two, invent new terms and codes (this book is full of such things) that likewise “do the trick.” Development towards Gothic Communism will constantly put us in uncharted territory that requires updating the lexicon as needed—i.e., by pulling out old classics, but also making new ones to adjust to the social-sexual, linguo-material “growing pains.” All of the synthetic terminology outlined thus far should be a clue. All the same, it generally comes from older language that was (and is) used to maintain the status quo (source).

In short, whatever works insofar as it cultivates a conscious and empathetic intuition confronting and interrogating state trauma.

To that, if the body is sick, you must find the cure; but if the abuse that led to the sickness also makes it presently impossible to implement solutions, then again, the impasse appears. This includes transgenerational problems; e.g., mommy and daddy issues, inherited settler-colonial trauma, community mistrust of state forces (as they rightfully should) and so on. When these repressed factors come to a head, Medusa can read her ugly head (the bad side); if the Medusa becomes blind to suggestion by virtue of said abuse (triggers), negotiations become impossible and the impasse again appears. It becomes a question of crossing the Rubicon, then—of open, honest communication by facing the music of something a long time coming: a failure of tolerances, of those dead-set against confrontation with hard truths. Capitalism sucks donkey dick.

The confrontation, for the puller of the Black Veil, animates the thing behind the veil—the rotting statue—as restored to a mobile and speaking condition; restoration of the foundation is done to achieve systemic catharsis and forgiveness, not assign blame (which isn’t required, given the elite’s clear-and-obvious role amid the cryptonymic back-and-forth’s clear-and-present danger); i.e., when one side, the other or both lose interest/aren’t attracted anymore (always a bad sign, the proverbial “beginning of the end” when falling out of love). And this can be terrifying to codependent couples and those who know them and want them to be happy. It requires an impartial mediator[2], but can result in unwanted side effects that, however unpleasant, constitute progression through motion: going through Hell as a liminal space (to move through) wrought with conflict on the surface of and in thresholds, but also the potential to learn from past mistakes (ours or other’s) in simulacratic, object lessons: xenomorphs and dragons, echoes of mad Saturn devouring his son (the Pale Man, below), black angels furious and delicious. Dance with the devil and they’ll “gift” you with “fatal,” delicious wisdom—threatening imprisonment and liberation both at the same time, all at once.

Like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, like Samus plumbing the Zebethean depths—love becomes something to fall in and out of. It can feel like a private hell, one without windows while you grapple and scrap with a dark figure in a dark room. It completely sucks when the thing you loved dies, surviving in a monstrous form that stares back at you from the abyss, suddenly alien and devouring you; but you can stare back, undaunted while defiantly meeting new aliens who love and respect you as equals, and making your own abysses to harbor useful truths. It becomes something to learn from and bravely dive into—to learn things you’d never learn if you didn’t, to experience joys and hardships, sorrows and delights normally relegated to the halls of Gothic fiction; i.e., its dream-like nightmares.

As for me, I learned with Constance (and later with Zeuhl) that I love hard, but also fall in love quickly and out of love with great effort. But this isn’t a weakness, merely something different that I eventually learned how to apply with compatible comrades; e.g., Bay, Mercedes, Harmony and Crow. They joined me on this quest, the lot of us grappling with a Greater Destroyer in a dark room threatening all of us—a Numinous defiler I liken to Capitalism while citing C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain (1940):

Now suppose that you were told simply “There is a mighty spirit in the room,” and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger [the tiger]: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words “Under it my genius is rebuked.” This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous (source).

In human fashion, there is a historical-material counterpart to this numen, a Communist double yearning to be free. Love, then, is something that survives Capitalist Realism to challenge bourgeois illusions, before, during and after death (the same goes for hate, in capitalist forms). Bay will love me forever and I don’t doubt it for one moment; they loved my work and support it (when Zeuhl asked me to stop talking about Gothic things, I knew they were pulling away from me).

As such, what we build together lives on in ways I’ll call “true love.” Zeuhl was ultimately false, but even with them, they led me down a dark road that brought me to brighter places/greener pastures (re, Milton: “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light”); i.e., camping canon to develop Gothic Communism as a school of thought to rival Lewis or Radcliffe’s, one that I learned from a younger, more innocent age, into “a sad and wiser” one:

(model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl, 2017)

The music they showed me (e.g., “Blue Monday,” 1983) and the authors they shared (re: Cooper and Jarman) have helped contribute to something better that I am raising with braver souls. I’m doing great work, having left Zeuhl in the rearview mirror while moving forwards (I could expose them—to name and shame them—and will always have that power should I choose to; but I have better things to do, and want them to live privately with the knowledge that they fucked up and I won, in the end—i.e., that I survived them).

So as the bombs fall around us and the planet heats up, I’m not sad at all. I feel united across space and time by people I’ll share my final moments with—to make our lives memorable and the envy of milder folks as the bullets fly and the bombs fall, fusing us orgasmically together through trauma as something to face, kicking the state in the balls while we go out with a bang/on our own terms: “We’re Romeo and Juliet, we’re Bonnie and Clyde! We’re the lovers of Teruel[3]!” We’re born to die, but how we meet that end and what we leave behind is what ultimately matters/makes for good praxis. “People die, buildings burn, but true love lasts forever[4].” We don’t just wrestle in the dark with unknown forces and pleasures, then; we duel with them, fighting back in glorious, scenic exchanges:

(exhibit 34a1a3b: It might beg the question, “Why a rooftop duel during a rainstorm?” The answer isn’t just because it’s exciting to watch [which it is], but because that’s how things feel for those who see the world that way—i.e., while being drawn, through their own trauma and deep-dark desire for love, towards things that speak to what has become a part of us, and which shapes our view of the world through a broken mirror and mask [the dual operation of cryptonymy]. Life imitates art and vice versa through cryptomimesis as a historical-material operation with dialectical-material polarity. I felt that pain as a little girl and found safe harbor in the mise-en-abyme of the Neo-Gothic sanctuaries I came across; i.e., a larger pattern I felt across media at large—the music and footage of The Crow combined with Metroidvania and other Gothic fictions. It became a concentric, half-real graveyard dug ghoulishly up and made love to with other necromantic weirdos drawn moth-like to the same hellish flames [there are numerous interpretations to any word, but especially “necrophilia”; we stick to the sex-positive ones]. I wouldn’t change a thing.)

As such, pleasure amid struggle becomes something to dive headlong into with reckless abandon; i.e., like my cat does, anticipating my thrown pillow but cutely still wanting to be involved, to be by my side.

Capital hurts us, and people as extensions of capital hurt us, causing us to hunch and anticipate future pain. Only in “death”—through lived and theatrical struggle and pain (calculated risk)—does our life rise to its greatest potential. Zeuhl taught me that; I’m simply returning the favor—one given from the former apprentice outdoing the master in a way that subverts their harmful lesson: ludo-Gothic BDSM was learned from their cruelty and care (the former which they proudly declared were lessons to begin with. Whatever helps you sleep at night, my dude). They tried to erase our relationship from the face of the Earth—to bury it, thus deny me closure while riding off into the sunset with their future husband (who, as it turns out, was something of a spineless bimbo); so I have documented it here to have my delicious, beautiful revenge—one had with cuties sexier (and kookier, sometimes) than they were, but still cautious; i.e., Cuwu granting me permission to use photos of us on OnlyFans and elsewhere, provided I left their real name out of it (hence the alias). So I did, curating a gallery of mementos of Medusa (while never showing Cuwu’s eyes, much in the style of that monster) that I, like an old lover, can pull out of my aging billfold and show off with pride to a younger generation (and which Bay watched me insert into this manuscript with glee). To Zeuhl, though, I can only say to them, “Suck it, ‘Trebek’! Suck it long and suck it hard!” (don’t fuck with a multimedia expert and Gothic nerd, biznatch).

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Per Shakespeare, everything that has been said already has, life “but a walking shadow” caught in a framed narrative’s mise-en-abyme/cryptomimesis. As such, life in death is an endless graveyard that often expresses in popular media—from novels, movies and videogames, but also performance art—in orthographic/audiovisual terms. We, the so-called “poor players,” huff and puff as we “strut and fret” our hour “upon the stage and then [are] heard no more.” Classically this is to make the Straights (sword-happy Scotsman, Macbeth) lose heart dressed in borrowed robes; but for us fags, the endless yawn becomes a place to play and express ourselves mid-trauma, inside the necropolis—i.e., “letting things breathe” while meeting friends and lovers to confide in, versus one’s aging family members in the middle of the night after we’ve ostensibly grown up. In the process, we leave behind these markers of ourselves abjuring Keats’ 1819 “Ode on a Grecian Urn[5]” for something a little more hands-on: “We totally boned” with bones (and boners) through fields of “grass” to play “ball” on (for those of you telling me to “touch grass,” I’ve touched plenty, you jackanapes).

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

“Misery loves company” and it takes time to build trust for those previously harmed; earning Cuwu’s (and they mine), I blasted their vociferous snizz to a mutual clamor that literally speaks volumes. As such, the more we plough, dig up and fuck around with trauma in safe, psychosexual forms, the more comfortable we become showing others our scars, our vulnerable strength. In turn, there becomes so much more to say and fun to be had (e.g., me, three volumes and hundreds of exhibits/multiple relationships later); i.e., which Zeuhl—pushing their head into the sand—refused to do (as did Jadis and Cuwu). As such, my holistic rumination and constant revisiting of Gothic sites of trauma (whose manufactured reunions include my volumes testifying to former and ongoing relationships with seemingly “dead” things—my exes, but also those I relate to now living with trauma) eventually reached maturity (albeit after ten years of academic hardships, and my introduction to relationships running along that same fabled track). In the interim, all of the above helped me explore campy “rape” and “murder” fantasies while dying slowly (as people normally do) and learning as I do[6]; in turn, these gave me a chance to stick it to Zeuhl, pounding Bay’s pussy and thinking to myself, “Yeah, take that, Zeuhl, you bitch!”

We might, on some dark, unconscious level, always feel angry with those who harm us and want to harm them back; Gothic playgrounds give us a theatrical means of letting off steam without damaging anyone and finding ways to move forward, building a better tomorrow through good praxis; i.e., a pedagogy of the oppressed that serves as our devil’s workshop made from old parts, the bricks and bone(r)s building a new “torture” dungeon to escape unironic torture with. This includes people who volunteer to be the punching bag—letting you “beat up” their pussy (and other holes) in ways that you and they might not be fully aware of, but which isn’t so surprising in hindsight. Who doesn’t want to say “fuck you” to a shitty ex? Try it, babes; it feels so goddamn good.

Furthermore, if you ask them to consciously help you work through some shit, some people might say yes (we’re all freaks, one way or another); i.e., because that kind of catharsis feels good for you, but also because it might help them as the healer or the “victim” needing their own calculated risk. It all comes together in that respect. So long as that stays in the bedroom and you treat each other like people at all times (respecting mutual consent), then getting a leg up from an eager and willing cutie de facto playing the ex/Great Destroyer getting their ignominious comeuppance, not dancing but straight up fucking on your worst enemy’s “grave” ipso facto (evoking the Gothic master-trope, live burial, in a classically erotic manner[7]), it’s all fine and good. Go down, down to Goblin Town, my dudes! Make “Tolkien” gay to spite your exes breaking your heart!

Everybody does this to some extent. In my experience, Zeuhl would grumble about exes and tell me about their deck of “spank bank” images they’d rifle through, as I dicked them; Jadis and I would, me rage-fucking their tank-like snatch when I felt mad at them, thinking about likenesses of past exes to get through their abuse; and Cuwu would talk about their ex and trauma and I would talk about my exes and trauma while we hooked up to process our feelings, mid-fantasy and during conversations about trauma as something to perform, consume, and address with the Gothic, with BDSM, with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll:

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Everybody living with trauma who can find a way to love again generally measures and metes out grief as something to grieve through psychosexual combat and catharsis. Just remember your safe words, boundaries and aftercare before, while and after you “link up. “Hurt, not harm,” babes.

On and on, until we’re old and grey, shit happens/people do shitty things and act like it’s all good. And these are informed by copies-of-copies inside a hall of mirrors inside a palace of mirrors on a planet of mirrors (and so on). Time is a circle, with people stepping into the archetypal roles exemplified onscreen (e.g., Kyle Reese’s various resurrections in the Terminator films—from twunk, to twink, to hunk). Such interconnected, cross-medial/transgenerational dramas affect all of us, requiring healthy boundaries and values that, when cultivated and upheld, we implement to self-protect and care for the group, acknowledging pain while prioritizing our own health and well-being to help others with. In other words, there is triage involved, and preference; i.e. the queer persons found-family vs the nuclear model I very much caution against in any and all relationships. Capital is unstable by design—aging horribly during a given generation’s rise and fall, turning workers into unthinking and inflexible machines per a heteronormative (dimorphic, Cartesian) dialogic: the fall of a generation as sacrificial by design, one king eating his own children as efficient profit. I intensely dislike this by virtue of experience, but also because we need to devise our own structures and machines—horizontal systems that we and our actions embody and uphold, taught through our object lessons; i.e., as possessed and intuitively understood during life as a chaotic series of multiple interactions happening on multiple fronts and dimensions all at once in a loop.

As such, the desire for things “to be good” becomes realistic only when the conditions are there for it, which we must supply while moving workers and the world away from manufactured scarcity (and the other trifectas and monopolies) towards a better world: one ultimately rarefied by a Gothic-Communist aesthetic as a means to think, exist and create. I see a problem, and write, write, write (and invigilate) to solve it. This takes a willingness to partake of sample biopsies to render not just tough love (as required, not as dogma) but object lessons, which both requires energy and effort to materialize. I live for it, solving complex problems through my creations made alongside my friends; i.e., to show you glimpses of a better world that exist right here on Earth, this very moment: through our delicious squishiness, but also friendships and relationships at large. Return to nature as something to bond not just with workers, but animals—aka, Mr. Squirrel: not Tolkien’s sorry “burrahobbit” demonizing Cockney folk, which Peter Jackson paraphrased as an “over-sized squirrel”; nor the female/monstrous-feminine Numinous or Gothic Communism, really. Just a motherfucking squirrel captured on camera (consider this a palette cleanser/aftercare after having Medusa’s fat cock down your puny human throat hole).

(exhibit 34a1a4: Artist: Lydia, who explains as Britishly as possible: “He so chonk; he’s standing on one of those things you put grave flowers in. He was using it to hoard food: li’l grave fridge.” To which I was reminded of T.S. Eliot’s funerary “The Waste Land” [1922]: 

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain [source]. 

Never mind that Eliot dedicated the “I. The Burial of the Dead” section to Ezra Pound, a fascist sympathizer [thus fascist]. The poem still speaks to healing from the trauma of war as a modernist ordeal—the chaos of city life merging with the transplanted flowers plucked up from the likes of Flanders or some other mass grave linked to the nation-state; i.e., as a war machine designed to grind workers up for profit. That’s all it does.)

This Humanistic medicine/education issues from ludo-Gothic BDSM as founded by me: on a system of thought as intuitive and developed; i.e., as everything connects to everything else according to whatever connections we (and our cultivated social-sexual habits) choose to make; e.g., like my books as galleries but also their ideas, ipso facto, per a priori value statements: the universal valuing of worker rights. I will always advocate for the oppressed, but especially the monstrous-feminine. It is my preferred client, but also my desired mode of existence. The best job in the world my job, then: one of counselor, lover, mother, protector, educator, slut, artist, and writer—a Renaissance girl whose galleries and cathedral-esque codexes extensively explore the world as Gothic through the Gothic; i.e., pulling things apart, seeing the world through each other’s eyes, at home in the home-as-Gothic-castle: the screaming chateau-as-gâteau-homunculus (the cake-like person as fortress-like, “torturous” and delicious) howling in pain and pleasure per psychosexual “harm” haunted by harm during confused fight-or-flight responses: “Hurt, not harm!”

Like Ripley stuck in the Nostromo, I continuously volunteer to be topped because, as a little girl, I felt the healing transformative power of calculated risk; like Mandy‘s demon bikers, the Black Skulls, I fucking love it when playing with fresh consenting cuties as adults!

(source)

Love you, babes. Now, finally, without further ado, onto the fun palace!

Actually, a slight delay. Onwards to “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” which let’s reiterates the previous subchapters in relation to some Marxist signposts and liberatory sex work exhibits. —Perse

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone

---

Footnotes

[1] From Genius:

According to Buck Dharma, “Harvester of Eyes” is about former U.S. Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas. The following is from CompuServe’s American Academic Encyclopedia:

Abe Fortas, b. Memphis, Tenn., June 19, 1910, d. Apr. 5, 1982, was a prominent Washington, D. C., attorney and presidential advisor when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965. Johnson’s subsequent nomination of Fortas as chief justice was blocked by Senate foes of his activist stand on civil liberties, and the nomination was caught up in a clash between the executive and legislative branches. In 1969, following charges of questionable ethics and conflict of interest, Fortas resigned from the Court. His arguments in GIDEON V. WAINWRIGHT (1962) established the right of the poor to legal counsel.

What’s all that got to do with “Harvester of Eyes”? Not much, the song is mostly nonsensical satire that appears to be about some eye-collecting madman. However, it was Fortas’ Senate nomination hearings which inspired Richard Meltzer to write the song’s lyrics. When Fortas’ avoidance of service in World War II was questioned, he responded that he had ocular tuberculosis–which inspired the lyrics, “I’m the eye-man of TV, with my ocular TB” (ibid.).

Except I would argue, it’s not nonsense at all, but satire performing to powerful and abusive men in BÖC’s usual poetic weirdness: judges, however stupid they sound, kill people thanks to a systemic power imbalance. It’s perceptive eyeballs, not blind ones (re; Jameson’s Postmodernism, 1991).

[2] I am hardly exempted from this. E.g., Zeuhl and I, and me not wanting to break things off, trying to be polite and a good ex, but also hoping we’d get back together (on account that Zeuhl literally said we might when they broke up with me). As a result, I floundered; I needed a mediator (Ginger and Lydia) not “to make things work,” but to survive the terrible conflict that ensued.

So I get it. People want satisfaction, the frustration of that raising its own temples of discontent. But there are no guarantees in life. It can get incredibly messy when you’re attached to people who fuck you over. Things “seemed good” with me and Zeuhl (partly because I foolishly ignored warning signs); then they weren’t because Zeuhl pulled the rug out from under me. It led me to question the whole of our relationship, its veracity and worth. Except it wasn’t pointless, but it can feel that way when someone isn’t being honest with themselves or others, or trying to make their actions seem unplanned, but also feel ashamed for what they did to an unsuspecting victim. Zeuhl was all of those things towards me as the victim, and as a result of their actions I will never talk to them again; but I had to reach that stage, too. Instantaneous death might seem preferable to dragging things out, but sometimes we aren’t ready for that, even if in hindsight it makes sense or if we want them to in the heat of the moment.

Having history complicates things, in that regard. I had lived with Zeuhl in England and we’d been through a lot together (trauma bonds make for strong glue). All the same, it was fun while it lasted and I have no regrets. Plus, I walked away with my dignity intact and wrote these books detailing how they loved and hurt me. I’d say I came out on top, then. Relationships die, but the messy love we shared will haunt these pages. Zeuhl wouldn’t let me share them with the world in picture form, but I can say with confidence that, however bittersweet I feel about them as a whole, the good moments I detail next were good. I loved them with all my heart, and went all in; they pulled away in the end for selfish reasons. They killed it; I fought like hell. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. That was just the point of my life I was at. When I look back on it, it almost seems quaint: they didn’t want to be with me, were taking advantage, and had the desire but not the words or the grace to separate peacefully.

In short, Zeuhl continued to help me and use me after the break—twisting the knife whether they meant to or not, but also helping me learn (e.g., my website, online dating advice and helping me set up my Fetlife profile, etc). It sent me careening into Jadis, but Jadis was also a learning opportunity despite the harm they caused (which to Zeuhl’s credit, they were partly present for as a means of solace). Two things can be true at the same time; a cutie can help and harm you. This isn’t a defense of Zeuhl, but merely a fact: I suffered at their hands and benefitted from their actions because I slowly learned how to stand on my own two feet; i.e., to take what they (and my other exes) did to me and transform it into a message of Gothic healing and hope, of calculated risk doomsaying about state shift to promote Gothic Communism. I couldn’t have done that, on some level, without capital abusing me, but also my exes (that’s nothing to be proud of, on their ends, however).

The basic mechanics seem simple enough; the complications are often emotional, thus invisible or alien to those not under the same spell. Each case is unique, in that respect—a sex bubble/cuddle puddle that you both share until one of you leaves the other alone inside; i.e., The Golden Egg being the 1984 novel that The Vanishing (1988) was based on, and which I eventually wrote about*. While you feel that sheltered connection, the world is your oyster. When it stops, it’s like walking into a brick wall. To that, it well-and-truly sucks to finally realize you were the take-out cheeseburger in a college town primped for international exchange students; but then again, I got more than my fair share of “full helpings” (of sex) from Zeuhl (so many creampies, and in the world’s fuzziest, tightest pussy imaginable), plus enough funny stories to fill a book. When you feel it together inside the bubble, you cherish it; when one of you leaves the bubble, you feel scared and alone but also afraid of going outside for new partners; then finally you burst the bubble to sally forth (“saddle forth,” to use a Zeuhl malapropism) onto new adventures. When you do, the events you experienced and the scary feelings you once felt will appear to you again in new joy and understanding.

*Persephone van der Waard’s “Gothic themes in The Vanishing / Spoorloos” (2020).

I’d like to express that next, if I may. It’s a protracted footnote in a very long volume in a very long book. But I will place it here all the same for someone to find. Again, no identifying photos of Zeuhl (e.g., only a hand or a shoulder). For all the smack I’ve talked, it’d cause nothing but harm to them, which I don’t want; but I also don’t think they’re a good comrade and don’t want to include them as an example of sex positivity (which I don’t think they are). So I’ve chosen to detail it in purely written forms (or exhibits of things other than them). I couldn’t have managed that until now, so let’s do it!

A quick sidebar before we proceed: First, there’s only so many ways you can say “fuck you” to/about an ex before it gets old, or at least not cathartic. I chose to avoid writing an entire book dedicated to Zeuhl for these reasons. Still, dragging their cartoonishly silly effigy out to the curb every so often before teeing off on its big balloon-like head is satisfying. Even so, that won’t be the point, here. Instead, I want to evoke some nicer memories about Zeuhl to illustrate my own skin in the game.

This ballad’s plaintiff nature aside, then, it serves as a remembrance to bury the old fucker once and for all (or at least until I need to summon them again to make a larger point tied to my work). As such, it really isn’t meant as a “hatchet job” (though it does feel good to dismember and dissect the painful memories of them a bit, and give voice to the good ones); but if for some reason my fair-and-balanced recollection seems unfair or somehow “jilted and unhinged” to anyone, know that Zeuhl did everything they could to earn these exact words.

This time, I’m going to say a few nice things to their figurative “corpse” before setting it on fire and blowing it up again (which is symbolic of me—secure in my new life and goals—feeling comfortable enough to let go a little, not indicative of any violence being done towards Zeuhl. I do not condone that. In the theatrical spirit of Prince Vegeta towards his frenemy, Goku: “No one kills Kakarot but me!” In the words of Cara Cunningham, “Leave Brittany alone!”

Got all that? Good! At long last, on March 14th, 2024, I shall tell my and Zeuhl’s tragic love story to the world… —Perse

Zeuhl and I met in Manchester, England while attending MMU for different programs. We’d been introduced briefly after flying in, our housing program officer having everyone say hello in our hallway flat. I liked what I saw but didn’t have enough time to really take them in or plan a rendezvous. Instead, Zeuhl made the first move.

(exhibit 34a1a3a1b: Various photos of my initial arrival at Manchester in September 2017.)

Bear in mind, I—the proverbial Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—was incredibly homesick and—in true adult fashion—crying on the phone to my mother about my room; upon arrival, I discovered it was unfurnished and I only had my leather jacket to sleep on. Bogus. Ma told me to ask one of my roomies for some blankets: “Now go ask the cute French girl to hook you up!” (Zeuhl’s future nemesis, I should add—they hated the French girl with a passion, though to this day I haven’t the slightest clue as to why. They never spoke, and when I tried to get them to, Zeuhl promptly flipped me the bird and shouted, “Fuck that bitch!” Okay, then).

So I asked the French girl down the hall for a pillow, to which she anxiously lent me one. Turns out, Zeuhl had overheard, and the next morning at the Student Hall, it all came to pass…

After a lonely night’s sleep, there I was, standing in a crowd of peers the next morning. All of us were enduring a forced inauguration; i.e., being overseen by MMU’s then-dean, a well-dressed middle-aged man giving a trite, cliché speech to welcome us internationals to his school (and for giving him all our money in tuition, travel and living fees). Eager to get my induction ceremony over with (glorified paperwork), I suddenly heard a small voice speak next to me:

“I have blankets.”

Somewhat surprised, I turned to see the owner of the husky voice and behold, a pale horse! Not the awesome picture of death incarnate, but a stout, bespectacled and shapely androgyne/princex eager to make my acquaintance (and not wearing a bra). Zeuhl introduced themselves to me, and invited me to their room. It was directly across from mine (and literally selected at random: “All the gin joints in all the world, they gotta walk into mine…”). So we agreed to meet up after the assembly and passport exchange. Cool. I did errands at the city center for the next several hours, then stopped by later in the afternoon and knocked; they answered, smiled and let me inside.

Over the next few hours, Zeuhl and I hung out—them sitting on the edge of their tiny bed (not really big enough for two) and me in a single chair in front of them (the rooms were small and cramped, like jail cells). We talked about ourselves for a bit, when I noticed some magazines on the countertop behind me; I noticed they mentioned polyamory and turned to Zeuhl to remark that I was poly (I’d met someone genderfluid at undergrad who exposed me to the practice); Zeuhl said they were too, so I suggested if they needed someone to “do stuff with,” that I’d be happy to help. May as well try! I figured. Much to my surprise, Zeuhl smirked, laughed* and replied, “Well, I’m not for closing any doors!”

*Zeuhl had a quick, full smile and easy laugh—something I discovered I could extract from them with ease, and to which sounded like music to me. Also, once we started fucking on a regular basis, I relied on this ability to make their pussy squeeze my dick during sex (the way to a cutie’s enby heart is through their laughter). I don’t want to chalk it solely up to my charms, though; I think on some level, Zeuhl had me pretty well-figured—had already sized me up and made it easier than it could have been otherwise. But also, we had a lot in common, and they made me feel good in ways other than just sex. It was a perfect storm, really—one that led to some wild-and-crazy times, but also my education. I’m not kidding when I say that Zeuhl mentored me about genderqueer politics.

After that surprisingly easy exchange, Zeuhl told me they were worried because they’d left their laptop in the Student Commons, having walked away from it after their mother told them some bad news: that she’d just been diagnosed with cancer and was starting chemo treatments. Luckily I had an old laptop (with Windows XP on it) that I’d taken with me on the plane, and had brought some ripped DVDs on the hard drive. One was Forbidden Planet (1956) and I offered to watch it with Zeuhl to help them relax; they agreed, and offered me some snacks in exchange (caramel corn). Set up for a nice night, we set about watching one of my favorite movies as a kid growing up. This bitch loves her some Robby the Robot!

Zeuhl and I sat on the edge of the bed, then the middle of it, which was so small that our sides touched for lack of room. Zeuhl had on some dark tights. Partway through the movie, though, they suddenly said without any hit of ceremony or guile, “My legs are hot. Can I take off my pants?” To which I, surprised but not bothered, responded in the affirmative. After that, I spent the next little while glancing down next to me, looking at the dark spot between Zeuhl’s legs because I thought they had panties on but couldn’t tell; i.e., they looked see-thru, except I couldn’t say if that’s what I was seeing or if it was their bush (the room was dark, with only the laptop screen surrendering just enough light for me to make them out, next to me).

I wanted to be a gentleman, though (still in the closet, remember), and kept my thoughts to myself… until I swiveled my head slightly and looked sidelong next to me, shoulder level, to see Zeuhl glancing at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read (the motive, not the appearance). Our heads turned and our eyes met. Both sides shyly surveying the other but not announcing it out loud, I felt a profound and sudden sense of déjà vu (the same thing basically happened with my first partner, Constance, except we were watching Rosemary’s Baby at my folks’ place; we only got halfway through that movie, too, before we switched to sex).

Reading the room and sensing an invitation to make the first move, I looked for “an in” and noticed Zeuhl’s septum piercing. I had an epiphany and suddenly remembered having talked to a girl on the bus, back in Michigan as an undergrad; i.e., breaking the ice by mentioning how I liked her tattoos and getting an effusive, eager response. So I said to Zeuhl, “Nice piercing! Do you have any others?” (I did like the piercing but also wanted to break the ice). Zeuhl beamed like the Sphinx and replied, “I have two pierced nipples!” I asked them if I could see them; they nodded and removed their shirt to show me. Sure enough, they weren’t kidding. Two pierced nipples, puffy from the procedure. I asked (without hesitation, this time) if I could suck on them; Zeuhl broke into a happy smile and cried, “If you want!” To which I did, most enthusiastically.

After that, we fucked (I don’t remember if we finished, but we used a condom) and lay naked in bed together listening to one of Zeuhl’s favorite bands, Natural Snow Buildings, while they told me about the esoteric tattoo on their body. Then they teased me as we spooned, remarking how I was being “so cute” glancing repeatedly down at their crotch during the movie (turns out, they had a big full bush, so thick you have to push through it like a thicket to get to the goods). I didn’t realize it at the time, but they’d been counting on it; and I—holding their warm wiggling body with my dick pressed between their buns—couldn’t complain (I had gotten lost the day before, exploring the city as the sky rained on me, merging with my uncontrolled tears). But I didn’t realize that I was the blanket Zeuhl had quickly acquired to make their stay in Manchester more comfortable. Like Odysseus and the sirens, I got taken for a ride, but at least it was a comfortable one!

(exhibit 34a1a3a1c: Many of the books I borrowed from the MMU library and which Zeuhl shared with me as well. Fun fact: It was basically impossible to find three-ring binders in the UK; they only had these fucking stupid two-ring binders with no pockets!)

After that, we fell into something of a routine. I got some American money exchanged at the city center (thirty minutes from our housing block) and purchased my own blankets (and a “brelly”) that I had to carry home in my arms (exhibit 34a1a3a1b). Zeuhl and I slept in my larger twin bed that night (or thereabouts), trying sex with condoms for a bit even though my sexual history was limited and they’d had a hysterectomy. After we discussed all of these things—and the fact that I’d had Hep C but had gotten cured in 2016 (though the antibodies stay in your bloodstream forever)—we had sex again. And I, without asking for Zeuhl’s permission, did something I’m not proud of: I took off the condom while under the sheets and fucked them bareback. But I told them afterward.

Initially they seemed shocked, and said, “Why would you do that?” in a small, quiet voice.  But we both quickly decided afterward that it had been done with both of us knowing that contracting an STI or them getting pregnant was impossible. So ultimately their response (in the same conversation) was, “Well, you were naughty!” To which we proceeded to have much more sex in the days and months ahead (so many times, I lost count, but into the triple digits). Turns out, the event brought us closer together (not that I would recommend anyone do what I did—it violated Zeuhl’s agency and ultimately was wrong of me): I became less anxious and found that my dick—which had been a little shy around Zeuhl—suddenly stood at full attention whenever playtime was nigh. As quickly as it had happened, my gaff was water under a very forgiving bridge.

After that, we experimented, trying new things; i.e., sexting with Zeuhl right down the hall, and both of us getting so worked up that they asked me if they could come to my room to fuck. I said yes, to which they soon entered; i.e., poking their head through the door wearing a silly cartoon smile (what we would later call “parade float”). They had on a pretty black dress, and spun to show it to me. Then they sat down on the front of my bed, hiked up their skirt, lay back and spread their legs and hairy pussy for me. We chatted happily about how exciting and new it all was, talking conversationally as I took out my hard dick and shoved it lovingly into their wet hole and started to fuck them (for reasons previously explained, it went in more easily that time). I learned they loved creampies, but really loved to suck dick and swallow cum. So one time when I was close, they had me pull out, which I quickly did, the “metal” still hot; just as fast, they quickly swiveled on their butt, scrambled to their knees, and took my whole dick into their mouth—closing their pretty eyes and breathing slowly through their nose as I moaned loudly and came down their throat. As I did, I could hear Zeuhl gulping noisily as they swallowed every last bit of my cum; I watched them do it and remarked to myself how happy Zeuhl looked.

It’s not something I want to speculate on—save that it’s a precious moment to me (one among many others) that I acquired spending time with someone special who eventually hurt me; i.e., needing a big loan from me (which, to be fair, they paid back) that we had to negotiate with another eventual ex of theirs living in Britain (a twinkish, anxious musician—let’s call him Todd—Zeuhl met through their photography work and frequent flights to England to stay with him), and to which money was often something that came between us—to the point that, when the other partner failed to acquire a living situation until our lease was nearly up, I was just about ready to hop on a plane back to America to finish my thesis at home (re: “I feel used!” I told Dale Townshend, in his office; to which the other replied, “Nicholas, this sounds like bullshit!” He took no prisoners, that one. Bless him). But Zeuhl, when hearing my confession, cried “No!” and pulled me close to them. Eventually Thing 2 got a place in Wellington (a 20-minute train ride from MMU) and Zeuhl and I carried all our shit (that Todd’s friend’s truck couldn’t take the week before) with us to a train station. As we did, we stopped periodically to rest, convening briefly at the local Spar convenience store on Oxford Road to get drinks; we drank them greedily with the sun on our faces before pressing on—onto our new home… which had no furnishings or internet.

Fuck.

We gradually got things set up. A week or so later, we walked several miles together to a used furniture store (the only place they sold tables and chairs not in pre-packed sets) and bought Zeuhl a worktable/shelf and wicker chair for 14 quid*. Then, we carried them back home through Wellington (a train port in between places, mostly for tourists), getting raspberry ice creams from a nearby truck and leaning against our hard-won table and chair in the town square, eating happily together. It was one of my favorite moments of us together, and one that I’ll never forget.

*Until that point, we slept and fucked on the floor. Workwise, I’d been sitting with my back to the wall every night, prepping for the upcoming IGA 2018 conference, for which I wrote “All that We’re Told in the Eternal Shadow (within Shadows) of the Hypernormal, Worldwide,” while typing on Thing 2’s spare laptop (for Zeuhl had accidently destroyed mine by spilling Uncle Ben’s rice sauce on it, requiring me to use the school’s computer labs for the rest of the semester, which I no longer had access to) and using a heavy-ass plywood model of a theatre diorama Zeuhl inexplicably had me help them carry from the Photography Wing apropos of nothing… but which did make for a good improvised table, I’ll admit (and which they never let me forget).

(exhibit 34a1a3a1d: Various fun photos and remembrances: some of my favorite [or available] foods; a photo when Zeuhl and I ate out after first becoming an item; the aforementioned table and chair from Wellington; and of course, Sisyphus the slug making his nightly journey across Todd’s floor.)

After that, we got home and Zeuhl set up their workstation. Over the following days, I helped them figure out how to light the gas stove; I encountered a slug crawling on the tile floor night after night (who I dubbed “Sisyphus” for his courage); Zeuhl and I hung out with Todd; Zeuhl and I fucked repeatedly on the floor (to which afterwards they looked up to the ceiling and thought it was leaking but then looked embarrassed, realizing my cum had leaked out of their pussy and dripped onto their foot). We had so many adventures, and I remember them all like they were yesterday (with Zeuhl, and all my cuties).

I remember them and feel at peace knowing Zeuhl gave me these despite paradoxically hurting me more than anyone else. If Jadis was my most antagonistic ex, Zeuhl was my “Scarecrow,” the one I’ll miss the most. But I don’t miss them anymore because the best parts of them live inside me and now in this book. They didn’t want me to include photos of them, so I won’t; but I have included these stories/exhibits in this footnote—less to spite them (though sadly they’ll see it that way) and more to celebrate the love that we shared. We met on September 16th, 2017, and started fucking about 48 hours after that; I shyly said “I love you” to them, while fucking them doggystyle several weeks later (wherein we became an item); we cried in each other’s arms in a dark, lonely hotel room (fucking in front of a mirror) before I flew home, August 2018; Zeuhl left me for their husband on early September (the 9th, I think) 2019; our friendship hobbled along until March 11th, 2023. We haven’t spoken since, and I’ve spent a lot of time since, writing this book to heal from their abuse. Let its culmination be my best revenge.

I suppose I could have done this or that differently, but I was just the unicorn in Zeuhl’s pocket. Furthermore, in the end, the exact path I took led me to my partners, muses and friends, as well as this book becoming something I have worked hard to build. And while the real Zeuhl didn’t have the guts to take part, their friendly “ghost” (simulacrum) is the little shadow of a rabbit, happily munching the greens and flopping in peace, their fur sleek and their little nose wiggling. Is that forgiveness? I guess it is. You were a bastard, Zeuhl, but I loved you, and the best parts of you will live on in this book. I only hope since then you’d learned not to lie to others or stab them in the back/take advantage of them (weeping as I read this; but not with shame: my heart is not of stone and I remember you, bunny, warts and all).

To Zeuhl: Be well, comrade, and may you live the rest of your days in peace.

(exhibit 34a1a3a1e: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl [mostly off-screen] at Persephone’s brother’s 2019 wedding. Frozen in time, several months before the breakup, I had no idea what adventures lay ahead—who I’d become after Zeuhl. They were my world, and surviving its destruction made me stronger than ever. I suspect they knew but didn’t have the guts to break up with me on my birthday after my twin brother’s wedding. Whether that’s a kindness or not, I do not know [but will say that the last time we had sex—on my birthday the day before they left for home—was a night to remember]. All the more fitting given I’m someone accustomed to tumult and rancor, but also love eternal:

The remaining years of Raymond and Agnes, of Lorenzo and Virginia, were happy as can be those allotted to Mortals, born to be the prey of grief, and sport of disappointment. The exquisite sorrows with which they had been afflicted, made them think lightly of every succeeding woe. They had felt the sharpest darts in misfortune’s quiver; Those which remained appeared blunt in comparison. Having weathered Fate’s heaviest Storms, they looked calmly upon its terrors: or if ever they felt Affliction’s casual gales, they seemed to them gentle as Zephyrs which breathe over summer-seas [source].

Fucking A.)

[3] As Berlin says (mockingly) to Ariadne, in Money Heist, season two (2017).

[4] As Sarah says (fondly) of Eric Draven and Shelley Webster in The Crow (1994). Their love mirrored Brandon Lee and Eliza Hutton’s, she widowed by his untimely death, on set in 1993, but their love—and the love of the story as a class-war effort (more on this in the Undead monster module)—carries on as an essential part of children, adults and children again. Lee said as much, paraphrasing one of his favorite authors shortly before Lee was killed on set:

Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, and yet everything only happens a certain number of times. Only a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood? An afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being you can’t even conceive of life without it. Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet, it all seems limitless (source: Analog Jones and the Temple of Film’s “The Crow (1994) Brandon Lee’s Last Interview,” 2020).

In this sense, a person’s spirit “lives on” in the music, the miniatures, the mayhem of the performance expressing larger turmoils—of workers liberating themselves using Gothic poetics to speak to the human condition as one trapped between capital and commune.

[5] Specifically the lines about the male lover (the hunter) chasing the female lover (the quarry):

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (source).

[6] As Seneca said on his deathbed, “I’m still learning.” So am I.

[7] Despite its “inherited confusions (re: Baldrick), the Gothic tradition indisputably mergers trauma, pleasure and centuries of human history and theatrical practices into the same messy chronotope (me): the castle a living residence and an aesthetic that speaks to past, present and future crimes, legends and romances tied to sex and force. This isn’t just Bakhtin speaking to the Brits, but a historical precedence that, per the Western tradition, goes back to Rome—specifically Roman cemetery prostitutes. As my friend Mira explains,

Mira: Prostitution was legal but they were seen as so filthy by the town guards that the only place they could operate was graveyards.

Me: Talk about abjecting sex.

Mira: During the day they’d make money by being rent-able mourners for funerals, and at night they’d deliberately wear makeup to make them look like corpses or ghosts and hook up with guys in mausoleums. The rent-able mourner thing is just smart. You’re only allowed there anyway so make money where you’re needed. Show up, cry, get paid. Shit, I’d do that.

Mira went on to provide this fun source:

The Bustuarie used chalk on the backs of headstones to advertise their prices, and engaged in sexual acts within tomb passages and secluded plots. Graveyard prostitutes could be found throughout the Roman Empire, and even in the outskirts of Londinium (modern-day London). Their clientele was made up of grave diggers, eager pseudo-necrophiliacs and vulnerable mourning widowers. They were exquisite navigators in finding the emptiest of mausoleums, the softest of burial plots, and even the cold slabs of tombstone that presented an opportunity for intimate discretion.

There were even stories of fair-skinned women resting on ancient tombs with gold coins upon their eyes, not as a payment to the ferryman to cross into the underworld, but payment by the God Orcus for her lustrous services. With a reputation for sexually satisfying the God of the underworld, the Bustuarie were able to provoke the interest of any young Roman wishing for an experience bordering the boundaries of death and love. However, what of precaution and disease when in the presence of a prostitute surrounded by death? (source: B.B. Wagner’s “The Graveyard Prostitutes of Rome and Beyond,” 2020).

Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, but also a psychosexual means of making ends meet (so to speak) while addressing one’s social-sexual-monetary needs on a complicated spectrum; the Gothic is a playground to play with dead things as historical-ahistorical, social-sexual material markers of paradoxical trauma and pleasure hyphenated. It existed with the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the Graveyard Poets who capped off the Renaissance, and survived anew with Walpole’s “rape” castle onto ever new-and-evolving simulacra adopted and adapted for an increasingly capitalist world; i.e., as something to escape in some shape or form. Gothic Communism isn’t the ghost of the counterfeit furthering the process of abjection, but a reversal of said process to weaponize said ghost against the state during class and culture warfare—to cryptonymically seize the means of undead, xenophilic production in no uncertain terms (despite the masks and theatre), hence reunite with a possible post-scarcity world that never quite was but could be in one possible future: Gothic Communism!

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”: Green Eggs and Ha(r)m; or, “Fucking’s Fun, Try it!”

“Say… Would you like a chocolate covered pretzel? They’re a bit melty but boy are they exquisite!”

 —Brodie, Mallrats (1995)

(artist: Dr. Seuss[1])

Picking up up from where “Castles in the Flesh” left off…

I’m a medievalist, a Renaissance girl. So I want to go over some things that, per Gothic poetics, have a pointedly medieval flavor. They won’t come up pointedly throughout the volume, but conversationally will be all over the place (“all over the shop,” as Dale Townshend used to gripe, regarding my graduate work); i.e., stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster and sculpted loosely but lovingly like Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, both assembled eclectically but also in contemplating thematically the kinds of nerdy gay things that Shelley and Walpole had in mind. I won’t signpost them, though, after mentioning them here. They’ll be hidden like Easter eggs, albeit in plain sight (you’ll know it when you see it).

Partly it’s a flavor thing. I want this volume to taste different, hit different, but say basically the same arguments. And now that you have access to my pure and simplified theories (Volumes One and Zero), I can stretch my wings, let my hair down, and really have a bit of fun! Seriously, I love monsters, and who ever said scholarship has to be dull? Yes, this module/chapter is the kind of indulgent, flowery writing that scholars absolutely hate (e.g., gratuitous food, sex and food-as-sex metaphors), but I’ll be using it to spice my arguments, not lead them going forward (except maybe this chapter). To that, we want to be picky insofar as we’re mindful about what we eat, but not to the point that we refuse something that can change how we see the world; i.e., the Gothic as our proverbial green eggs and ham (“you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”). Keeping the last page in mind, this isn’t actual food; it’s a metaphor for trying new things like sex, the Gothic, ludo-Gothic BDSM, etc.

Before we get to the fun palace, though, I want to give a ten-page note about our “green eggs and ham,” Gothic castles and draconian occupants in their half-real, dialectical-material totality.

This “note” concerns our aforementioned “castles” (and all their morphological variations). Except, because it’s not baseline, but extreme, intense, operatic, and over-the-top, the Gothic castle is a perfect place to manifest one’s fears, guilt, biases, self-consciousness, and confusion, etc, and then face them with more power or less. It’s a stage-like place of performative torment to confront one’s shortcomings, weakness and doom; i.e., an intervention through a popular paradox central to calculated risk: empowerment through “disempowerment” against one’s self as threatened, often by invaders-in-disguise, evil concentric/cryptomimetic reflections (mise-en-abyme) of an imaginary past, and yes, sexy aliens and armored killers hellbent on “violating” us in ironic and unironic forms (doubles).

We’ll explore that more in “Medieval Expression.” For now, merely remember that this also means the Gothic castle is an excellent place to experience and try new things—a safe space despite all its perceived menace, thus perfect for confronting trauma during liminal expression (Athena’s Aegis and hugging Medusa) and interrogating power through paradox involving big battles; i.e., as Volume Zero explored, the Gothic ostensibly swapping sophistication for crude (vulgar) power but in truth loving complicated cat-and-mouse battles of the mind, praxis, and monsters as sexualized—of psychomachy and psychopraxis, Amazonomachia all working through psychosexual partition, the divisions at odds in a liminal space. The hunt and hunting grounds are brutal but elegant (“…the Gothic art is sublime,” Coleridge says; re: General Character of the Gothic Literature and Art [1818]. For once I don’t totally disagree with him); the ticket forward—developing Gothic Communism via systemic catharsis—is by reclaiming the imaginary past (and its Wisdom of the Ancients) for ourselves: to camp the twin trees of Capitalism, replacing them with our own Base and Superstructure using dark, Gothic [Satanic, etc] poetics; i.e., as a de facto educational device.

(artist: Patrick O’Brien)

There’s a history to this, but a largely imaginary one. Per the Gothic, the romancing of flagship battles isn’t just a Western marquee, but one whose “big splash” yields a ghostly Numinous signature; i.e., the spectre of such counterfeits abjecting the settler-colonial horrors of raped Medusa  (the alien, fetish harvest) through regular spectacle: wartime theatre as glorious, something for the target audience (which historically would have been young white cis-het boys to men of fighting age) to recognize by sight; i.e., like wartime banners and battle standards, whose streaming colors serve as code: for who’s fighting who, who’s on whose side, etc; e.g., Flash Gordon (1934) or Star Wars (1977). Per Lucas’ matelotage upending the 20th century neoconservatism of American science fiction, his antiwar narrative is maritime-themed, albeit in disguise; i.e., it includes playing at war in “space” (whose cold vacuum again acts as a metaphor for the vast crushing depths of the unforgiving ocean): with a pair of dueling warships locked in a fatal chase/sea battle, Star–Trek-style (except where one ship is generally smaller to make things fun and comment on American Imperialism), meaning complete with broadsides, boarding, princesses and duels and other pirate-y clichés borrowed from older, land-based medieval spectacles (e.g., Radcliffe’s banditti and other such artifacts of the Historical Gothic genre she transformed into her signature School of Terror for a white, cis-het female readership).

Unlike Lucas, Ridley Scott ditches a lot of the overtly fantastical and warlike tropes, keeping the maritime themes but merging them with a Neo-Gothic retro-future: a ghost ship and castle-like echo haunting a failed, decaying whitewash exposing all the usual corporate decay anticipating neoliberal dominance in an astronoetic refrain (with sets that are both self-contained, but somehow too big to film in single static shots; they must be captured in tracking shots and assembled later in collages, above). The castle is there, the forbidden power is there, mad Medusa is there. But first, the fresher maze has to superimpose over the older ghost of the counterfeit inside of itself. It has to “wake up.” It’s a very dreamlike film, inviting the audience to vicariously explore a somnambulist BDSM scenario, which is as different from Lucas as Lucas was from Heinlein (the infernal concentric pattern’s closed space vs the Marxist monomyth’s open world/space Western vs the neocon monomyth of competent men conquering “space”): something big “out there” as fighting with something else that’s making us feel out of control. Those hypermassive things are Imperialism and liberation, which manifest currently as Capitalism and Communism by other names, further expressed by Scott as the black castle and the white; i.e., as ancient things to reify and investigate as spectres of “Rome” and of Marx.

In turn, Scott’s skillful and continual employment of the Humanities amounts to an expanded vocation (an occupation or employment) to non-vocational elements of trade in hyperreal forms: murals, hieroglyphs, pyramids, monoliths melded expertly by a troupe of art nerds saving the lives of people currently and soon to be in the line of fire—workers, postponing their own investigation of the regular bourgeois snakes (excuse the term) due to a misplaced investment in capital as “their” home; i.e., a “nice place,” at a glance, but beauty is only skin deep. The praxial idea is to be scarier and more well-connected as a means of survival from the usual deleterious effects, learning from our mistakes in “fatal” forms of Gothic theatre: a place to fuck up royally and live to tell the tale, thus become better class warriors against the elite as well-equipped, shrewd and violent by default. There’s a lot riding on these depositions, the game rigged against workers by the most unscrupulous, unfeeling cutthroats on Earth: capitalists.

Medusa is angry for a reason, no love lost between her and the men who took her head; they’re not a “bad batch,” but rotten to the core (empire decays by design, doesn’t discriminate), treating life as cheaper than dirt, squeezing blood from a stone to chase, chase, chase dollars. To humanize them would be dubious; to settle would be a fatal underestimation: of those who would cradle-rob your grandchild’s crib for a nickel (except “taking candy from baby” applies to how they view all workers) then light it on fire. They prey on vulnerability and expose our flaws to diminish our fortitude. Their prescription? Fear and dogma as something whose waves of terror lead not just to fight or flight, but addict behaviors that pit workers against each other—to ensnare and trap potential rebels with what historical drives us: fear, anger and threats of force, but also liberation, pleasure, and knowledge—curiosity. We’re already “on the edge,” with them enabling our destruction akin to Zofloya handing Victoria de Loredani a vial of her own poison, or Mathilda the portrait that sends Ambrosio spiraling to his doom (and his dreams up in smoke). Make no mistake, these are agents of incredible alienation, thus cruelty.

In short, capitalists are dragons without irony, caring for one thing and one thing only—profit, which requires unequal socio-material conditions, requires unchecked rape, theft and murder without irony towards nature: Tolkien’s Smaug minus the theatre, verbosity or cool factor (the banality of evil). To that, the gloating is unsaid but ubiquitous—an aura of invincibility Tolkien put best in his finest[2] work, The Hobbit (1937): “My armour is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!” (source). It’s not accurate for Smaug and that’s the point, but equally accurate is his possessive and vindictive nature as greed rarefied to speak to capital: “His rage passes description – the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted” (ibid.). To catch my drift, apply this to Sex Positivity at large: capital couldn’t care less, and workers and nature pay the price!

In dualistic terms, we ignite the flames of the dragon for our aims, but enrage theirs to send an arrow into their bare-and-exposed heart. Summoning the dragon just to kill him isn’t the point (Radcliffe’s predatory[3] and fiscal-minded summoning and banishing of the haunted house); understanding “dragon sickness” affecting all parties in a brutal ugly fashion is—e.g., summing up WW1 in the Battle of the Five Armies (which sadly Tolkien tries to rescue the good name of war from in 1954 with the Lord of the Rings novels. Class war isn’t the romance of big battles, Tolkien). To that, I applaud the old fart. Nice job, Tolkien. Have a cookie from beyond the grave.

The moral here is intellectual savagery. Don’t be afraid to kill your darlings, lovelies—to critique your heroes, then chop them up and stitch them back together as new zombies to dance with (which might seem unintuitive, but I assure you, there’s a method to the madness); re: our campy ghosts of Marx. Doing so is vital if we are to unfasten ourselves from the capitalist myopia’s vast, shapeless quagmire—to break “our” icons (given to us by Capitalism), not restore them (thus maintain Capitalist Realism)!

As such, sucking Tolkien off or going down on Radcliffe “as is” does not good praxis make! It’s idolatry for those who want to keep things the same, watching the world burn for profit (which is effectively wanting to just watch the world burn, fiddling whilst “Rome” burns and with it, poor Medusa until she fucks us to death; e.g., the Hollow Knight psychomachy harboring the Pale King and queenly Radiance in the same shell’s bloodthirsty eyes); better to melt that down and learn from it, our minds agile and dexterous through our bodies, sexualities and genders’ combined riches (a small fortune) as our own. Consider the paradox of the conquered, of the archer, and of the tortoise and the hare:

• slow and steady wins the race
• in non-linear routes (to the pussy [or other holes]. Generally the in-and-out thrusting is more straightforward, but even then you can come at it from different angles, speeds, depths, and amounts of impact, etc)
• to win not from crossing the finish line (“cumming” like Eric Liddle from Chariots of Fire, 1981) but also from the struggle of reaching it and enjoying the feelings that emerge throughout!

Keeping all these in mind, one’s devilish “dance” partner isn’t someone to use and cast aside like a piece of meat (unless they actually want that and you’ve negotiated it ahead of time); they’re someone to—for me, anyways—give tribute to with thanks, not recite Richter Belmont’s half of the Dracula speech (“Tribute?! You steal men’s souls and make them your slaves!”). For the high of weird canonical nerds to work, they have to kill, dominate or otherwise harm others through lack of consent. “Paradise” is a unironic boneyard to them; we weird iconoclastic nerds subvert that harm in campy venues of social and monetary exchange (what Volume One calls “humanizing the harvest”; i.e., Medusa as a Big [insert body part here] Goth GF we must rescue from harmful Cartesian bondage).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

To that, Harmony’s massive, tasty buns (not shown, here); dark, church-like pussy and spread-open thighs made me cum so hard I felt like I couldn’t walk—that, in boxing terms (the usual sports-like metaphors that work so well for topping someone, but also getting topped from the bottom, “rope-a-dope”-style), I’d had “my bell rung” and was “down for the count”—i.e., as if my enlarged soul had swelled to stupendous extremes before exiting my body through my dick (the “little death,” through the Eye of the Needle); and all while sweating profusely and panting like a slut, having given Harmony the biggest cum tribute I’ve ever produced and they’d ever received (and all while Slayer’s “Angel of Death” [1986] played on their end—terribly fitting)! “Taking my head” in that way is a sign of respect to and from Harmony—of sharing and “doing a Communism[4]” with a good friend while paying them for their time as we play together in sexual-to-asexual forms of artist-to-muse forms of Gothic artistic exchange (nudism and erotic psychosexual delight a tightrope to walk). To that, my girl cock is obedient and good; it gets soft until I know my partner is ready and willing. That’s how it should be (versus being able to fuck someone no matter what, which is literally not a virtue)!

On one level, we can hardly blame those who harm others; it’s often all they know and are taught (we are alien to them, fetish). On the other hand, they are our sworn enemies and cannot become our friends until they try to change their core beliefs (a very difficult thing to do). Rags-to-riches isn’t belt with many notches, but a vaulted character full of emotional wealth (I’ve always been materially poor [for a white American male] but the cuties I’ve fuck never seem to mind). Each failure isn’t a failure at all, then, but a special chance to learn and change, to do things differently in the future that can still be funny in hindsight (sex generally is): to release pent-up fatal stress (laughter and orgasms mimicking the symptoms of the orgasm as intense physical labor under duress[5]) before the fat lady (Medusa) sings orgasmically to our curtain call. She’s literally a planet and will be absolutely fine; our head, crushed ignominiously between her strong thighs, will not outlive/outlast her orgasmic “death throes.”

I could exhibit that. Except we don’t even have to see her abstractions to understand the larger thing at stake—the world; one look at the weirdness of war-bred child soldiers says it all: baby-brain numbskulls thirsty after “waifus” and howling at the vengeful moon (witnessed inside odd localizations of Japanese media; e.g., “Invitation of a Crazed Moon” from Portrait of Ruin [2006] cryptomimetically touching on total catastrophe as a Western invention embraced by eco-fascist Japanese fandoms [the return of the Shogunate] and tackled by infamous auteurs writing “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis[6]” [1995] tied to a bigger production. From Castlevania to Neo-Genesis Evangelion, then, the Japanese consensus is kick-ass emulations of American rock ‘n roll as thoroughly campy [less so with Megan Man, but I digress]: “Neo-Gothic Bible rock.” Yes, they’re straight-up bops, but the liminality remains indefinitely fascinating inside a capitalist world order).

In other words, love is a battlefield, but also a stage in between reality and fiction; as should hopefully be obvious at this stage, combining sex, nudism and the language of war per ludo-Gothic BDSM (sex as art) is an endlessly productive-and-liminal operation, especially when funneled through the fetishes and clichés of the Gothic—its “Ancient” Romances (stories of high imagination) and real life (the novel: “truth is stranger than fiction”) yielding something special and new (“imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” but “familiarity breeds contempt”) when used in a consciously satirical, campy way.

The Gothic, as we think of its earliest origins, was always campy and about queer sex in a partially ace way (re: Walpole and Lewis)—something whose dialectical-material push-pull survives well into Rocky Horror, Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2009) and beyond (the hero’s treatment of Dracula in the latter film being much more self-loathing in a straight way—a fact hilariously exemplified by the great [non-Dracula] song, “Peter, You Suck,” still managing to sneak in a shameless vampire pun as “hidden in plain sight,” minus the stage makeup). Like our own lives seemingly divorced from it, the Gothic, sex and gender expression are not simply a vicious cycle or comedy/tragedy of errors, then; e.g., something to sing satirically about (Obscurest Vinyl’s “I Glued My Balls to My Butthole Again” [2024] being the “hot new single” to dominate the American airwaves); i.e., that makes us cover our mouths to keep quiet (from shocked, orgasmic laughter), bemoaning to ourselves (and the audience, our partners or whoever’s watching us) in a half-real sphere: “Not again!” (and which the audience double-takes, staring widely as they sputter back, “Again?”). But you gotta learn not to shoot yourself in the foot, and some people really can’t help themselves. No bullshit, it’s literally all they’ve been taught, thus all they know.

For example, my roomie, Beavis, from Volume One, had both a) a father who raised him to be a gun nut, and b) a mother who wanted him to—no bullshit—use a Catholic dating app to meet “good girls” (translation: “hopelessly ignorant and dependent”). In other words, Beavis wanted to have his “cake” and “eat” it, too: an angel in the streets, freak in the sheets who would sire his children after the first date. But he wasn’t smart enough to listen to a certified “pussy slayer” (that’s not how I see what I do, but in jest, the expression more or less translates to “someone who fucks”) and instead decided to keep doing the Romeo thing: loving from afar. Like, dude, I’m all for the “love-by-letter” approach, but nobody chooses to do that—not unless they’re desperate or unable to meet up, in person!

Dating advice through half-real things like Gothic poetics might seem like a like a paradox unto itself, a fool’s errand—”don’t be afraid of fucking up” versus “fortune flavors the bold,” etc—but it’s simpler than you think (and still prone to hilarity and risk): a) keep an open mind, b) find out what you like (and what people who share your interests like), c) communicate your needs while treating people like humans, d) see where it goes. The more open you are without being a creep, the better your odds provided you don’t get preyed on by abusive people (which happened to me multiple times until I learned how to avoid them). So look for opportunity and “go for the gold” yourselves. To the victor go the spoils, except you need to know when to be stubborn and when back off, to… [reads “Polonius’ advice to Laertes”; source: Stage Milk, 2022]. And so on. In a nutshell, don’t act like Andrew Tate (a smaller version of an unironic dragon’s cheap imitation) and you should be golden.

(artists: the Brothers Hildebrandt)

To that, Tolkien’s Smaug the Stupendous (the OG daddy dom, not as “big” as he thinks he is) is both a dated abstraction and precise localization of the spirit of capital (the Protestant work ethic) channeled through the bourgeoisie. Like him, they’re full of themselves—completely vicious, arrogant, and utterly without mercy but able to understand power and force, which workers have: labor and propaganda, tools to camp canon and recultivate and reclaim what’s ours and always was. It’s a team effort, though—each of us encapsulating Communism’s castles, armies, leaders and laborers—one of horizontal configurations issuing demands, commands and ultimatums on human, animal and environmental rights. We can be sweet and fierce as needed, this hell-of-a-fight calling for all our stratagems, elaborate strategies of misdirection, and sexual energy and gender parody that we can summon—in short, all the powers of Hell at our disposal sent capital’s way to level them in broad strokes (and backsides); all our disguises and cryptonyms, spy networks, webs of intrigue, brothel espionage, angles and flair exposed all at once, Aegis-style. It’s literally “how people talk,” meaning some degree of selfishness, pain, lust, fear, lies and superstition are necessary to keep us alive inside capital’s concentric façade.

Like Tolkien’s Barrel-rider and thirteen dwarves, then, we are the proverbial Thief in the Shadows (except, we’re good goblins, wargs, and creatures of darkness that don’t moralize geography or nature into good/bad factions):

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

To that, “eating” so-called “green eggs” is a diagnostic process that welcomes risk if it means a fun opportunity to learn and try new things—to play and have fun with in the process. Why are the eggs and ham green? Clearly if something’s new, we’ll want investigate it. That’s what heroes, detectives, teachers and mothers all to: do make sure something’s safe, then relax and go for it! “Where there’s a whip, there’s a way!” (not the LotR song from the ’70s cartoon, but Vulture’s updated version—a blast-from-the-“past” on their Sentinels album, 2024). Be your own sex(-positive) goblin and see who answers back; the response might just surprise you! Big Booty Goth GFs are real, but you must be prepared to play together in a ludo-Gothic BDSM (thus Communist) sphere. Trust me, I’m a professional slut and career weirdo with a bevy of yummy comrades I call “friend” (“speak ‘friend’ and enter!”) collectively raising Cain, going “dungeon-crawling” together. There’s no friendzone, and a cutie wanting to be your friend is always a good sign (castration fears being the byproduct of antiquated revenge fantasies that Angela Carter[7] and Barbara Creed borrowed from Freud and his ilk).

Like Frankenstein’s mad science, it’s less a science at all and more a social-sexual act of catching lighting in a bottle (sometimes “riding” it, Strangelove-style). Social activities and sexual activities generally don’t work well if you’re too relaxed, tense, or aloof. It’s about balance and awareness (vibe checks) towards yourself and your surroundings’ historical-material mise-en-abyme as things to question and play with in a dialectical-material critique doubling as a fun time; i.e., a clever way of making friends that abjure the nuclear model, Cartesian edicts, settler colonialism, Capitalism, et al. So do that yourselves as a matter of taught habit! Before you know it, you’ll be like me: the next Energizer bunny fucking and building others off their feet, the envy of natural philosophers everywhere while you “ride the lightning”; i.e., seeking not to conquer death (which, apart from being impossible, capitalists don’t try to do; they just horde all the material conditions for themselves and weaponize social conditions that maintain the imbalance) but whose sorcerous “stones” increase qualities of life: by challenging state structures, illusions and procedures. It doesn’t always take much to achieve a new outlook, or put one on a path towards something that changes oneself: a bookshelf, a gallery or person-like device (or vice versa). So tuck in! You wanna live forever, Conan? Eat those green eggs and ham; eat the Gothic!

Removing the Herculean imagery from the question, consider it less as a terrible task that takes a lot of effort and more of a silver bullet: small, but effective (though anything would be if fired through someone’s heart). All that change requires is patience, a willingness to experiment—to frequent queer joints and entertain queer propositions, to hit it off accidentally and see where things go, to wield a cautious optimism where you live to see that day where you find that thing that works like a charm, just what the doctor ordered, etc; i.e., instant relief amounts to a bouquet of medicine, bleeding effigies (“miracles”), wall dildos (a strange quiver), those blue health orbs from Doom (1993) or the wall meat from Castlevania (strange foods), where you heart (or genitals) belong: inside someone else or them inside you, John-Donne-style.

(artist: Mercedes the Muse and a playmate)

Also before we start, here’s a quick (two-page) tangent about Dr. Seuss, just because I can’t allude to Green Eggs and Ham and not talk about the man, himself! I mentioned those emerald eggs and celadon pork flesh because, while I think a great many people (Americans, anyways) hate diets, a change in nutrition (standing in as a poetic device for pro-Communist reeducation at large) is far from impossible. Point in fact, Dr. Seuss himself did it, having once been more racist as a matter of production and consumption, only to change quite radically over time in a more inclusive and accepting direction:

While the vast majority of the works he produced are positive and inspiring, Ted Geisel [aka Dr. Seuss] also drew a handful of early images, which are disturbing. These racially stereotypical drawings were hurtful then and are still hurtful today. […] Mulberry Street was written in 1937. By contrast, the much-beloved The Sneetches was written in 1961 just as the Civil Rights Movement was well underway. Ted wrote The Sneetches as a parable about equality. By drawing bird-beings, he transcended the boundaries and pitfalls of using humans as characters, and allowed all readers to relate to the characters as best they could. On March 2, 2016, President Obama agreed with Dr. Seuss telling a group of interns: “Pretty much all the stuff you need to know is in Dr. Seuss. It’s like the Star-Belly Sneetches, you know? We’re all the same, so why would we treat somebody differently just because they don’t have a star on their belly?” (source: “Dr. Seuss Use of Racist Images,” 2024).

Sure, it’s a bit Aesopian, but that’s not a negative in my book. Less endearing is the dubious, false-smile endorsement from a token neoliberal like Obama (saying “we’re all the same” is valid insofar as we all have human rights, but we still need to acknowledge that we’re not all treated the same thanks to fuckwads just like Obama; i.e., he’s a war criminal [war drones[8], anyone?] and gargles non-consenting balls). Still, Seuss learning to eat crow demonstrates that people can change with the times, meaning they stay “writeable” into adulthood; i.e., their work can change, hence the culture attached to it (Gothic or otherwise).

In other words, it doesn’t matter where the process starts (though ideally it should happen all over the place), provided the Base and the Superstructure are reclaimed and recultivated (which, per Kapital, shape and support each other as, per my arguments, a socio-material event married to Gothic poetics): reimagined in a serialized poetic trend; i.e., looking backwards and proceeding forwards through a malleable, writeable Wisdom of the Ancients: “in the blood” less in actuality (hereditary intuition) and more as a second-nature emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness we cultivate through language acquisition during ludo-Gothic BDSM (native-speaker intuition and Chomsky’s LAD) from moment-to-moment, over time, forever onwards. This takes conscious effort over space and time between an organized, intersectionally solidarized collective (what Capitalism wants to stay unintuitive, like “herding cats,” unable to group together thanks to dogmatic pacification and controlled opposition).

Cautionary arguments about “chameleons” aside, this would seem to apply to Dr. Seuss, whose “later works show an evolution of values and beliefs. Those who knew him believe that if he were alive today he would have jumped at the chance to be a part of the country’s evolving dialogue about diversity and inclusion” (ibid.). Except while I’m generally a tough sell and frankly think that many American cartoonists compose the nadir of morality (are far as such litmus tests go); e.g.,

• Walt Disney being a racist anti-Semite (source: Lisa Gutierrez’ “Walt Disney Grandniece: Meryl Streep Was Right, He Was Racist,” 2014)
• Scott Adam’s decades-long racism and all-around horrible weirdness towards anyone different from himself(Behind the Bastards’ “How The Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind,” 2023)
• Earth Worm Jim creator Doug TenNapel’s own conservative praxis when interacting with awful chaser/soon-to-be-divorced dudes like Steven Crowder (“Surviving the Leftist Mob,” 2021)
• Matt Groening’s proud, middle-of-the-road, smug-as-fuck centrism (source: David Scheff’s “Matt Groening,” 2007)
• and John Kricfalusi’s pedophilic tendencies reflecting in his art, but also his abusive relationship with underage female artists that he worked with to draw in his problematic, nostalgic style (blameitonjorge’s “John Kricfalusi: An Open Secret,” 2019)

I’m still fair and open-minded, taking artists and their creations like Jim Davis’ Garfield and Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes into account. Dr. Seuss might have sucked initially but eventually became remembered for his anti-war actions (on par with Bob Ross and Howard Zinn). That’s what really matters; i.e., what we leave behind that makes an impression and is then carried forward. So many of the dickwads mentioned above canonized their work to deify themselves and become multi-millionaires; but Dr. Seuss saw the error of his ways and tried to change. That’s important.

As we’ll see, if it worked for Dr. Seuss, then it can work—indeed, has worked—with famous texts that, through their less-divided relationship with nature under a pre-to-early-capitalist world, are able to pass something “that sticks” forward towards a potentially post-capitalist world. One can hope, but there’s some vital things to keep in mind insofar as reinvented medieval poetics (the Gothic) are concerned before we jump into monsters (and their modules) specifically.

So enough about Dr. Seuss and his silly green eggs and harm; let’s defend poetry and the medieval as monstrous, thus useful to Gothic Communism! Onto medieval expression in earnest! Onwards to the fun palace!

Actually, a slight detour. Onwards to “The Eyeball Zone,” which explores the idea of synthesizing Communism through healthy psychosexual relationships and ocular expression.  —Perse

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Footnotes

[1] “Like Norman Rockwell, Dr. Seuss created every rough sketch, preliminary drawing, final line drawing, and finished work for each page of every project he illustrated” (source: The Art of Dr. Seuss, 2024).

[2] He gentrified war in a cartographic refrain that apologizes for capital, post-WW2 (which I discuss extensively in my thesis volume); and his incorporeal, ring-based use of vampirism is interesting as well, which I explore in Volume One; but The Hobbit is an excellent medieval critique of capital, and to which I wrote my best early essay on—re: “‘Dragon Sickness’: The Problem of Greed,” (2014).

[3] There’s no love lost between me and Radcliffe at this point. To see deep that rabbit hole goes, check out my thesis volume.

[4] This isn’t as in-jest as you might think: Communism is where labor value is infinite, regardless of the task, and barter (for us) is done in exchange for labor value, not money or privatization (which impose limits on labor by giving it a set, numerical money value called a “wage,” which it can then steal, trapping labor within a system of theft made to serve the elite); i.e., seizing the means of production, but also recultivating the Superstructure during all of this. Whereas women/the monstrous-feminine are normally reduced to a singular use and low price for themselves—one that capital reaps to maximize profit for the literal/de facto pimp (or other forms of free labor)—class/cultural war aims to return sexual labor (and Gothic poetics) to an exchange incumbent on labor instead of money (deprivatization).

In these cases, exchange-equals-barter for labor value (which again, is infinite; i.e., the exchange value for pussy being highly variable/non-fungible, thus retaining its idiosyncratic, uneven value regardless of its material factors: workers can negotiate unequally to make both parties [of a given exchange] equally happy). This isn’t “giving it away from free,” but for whatever is being bartered for/of interest; e.g., attention, time, touch, and emotional contact with someone you like, and money and material goods maybe involved or vice versa (Adam and Eve were as naked as jaybirds). This barter occurs within capital—not to submit to one’s surrounding capitalists and compelled ownership by pimps (the world’s oldest profession) trying to squeeze profit out of the pussy (or any other monstrous-feminine part). Rather, the pussy is owned by the worker and fairly exchanged, “giving it up” without relinquishing their basic human rights (re: protections from the state), and doing so in attempts to adumbrate a horizontally arranged system beyond the current vertical one.

In turn, teaching and learning go both ways, as do pleasing and being pleased, giving and receiving. There is neither harm, genocide nor profit under Communism (Socialism is a different beast, transitioning away from genocide but still capable of enacting it when kettled by state forces during reactive abuse). Harmony is a “dragon” in quotes, then—never taking too much (re: Cuwu) and me not giving too much by virtue of our informed and negotiated boundaries. Capitalist Realism would frame this as “impossible,” requiring invented disaster to “restore balance” during genocide. Moderacy and centrism, then, are merely settler colonialism with more steps; e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains: “Goldilocks Imperialism.”

[5] I’ve already touched on this in “Medicine,” but Cameron from House says it best (the devil-in-the-sheets fucking with Ozzie twink, Chase):

Sex could kill you. Do you know what the human body goes through when you have sex? Pupils dilate, arteries constrict, core temperature rises, heart races, blood pressure skyrockets, respiration becomes rapid and shallow, the brain fires bursts of electrical impulses from nowhere to nowhere, and secretions spit out of every gland, and the muscles tense and spasm like you’re lifting three times your body weight. It’s violent. It’s ugly. And it’s messy. And if God hadn’t made it unbelievably fun, the human race would have died out eons ago. Men are lucky they can only have one orgasm. You know that women can have an hour-long orgasm? (source: “Occam’s Razor,” 2004).

The discussion is a thoroughly cis-het, amatonormative one—reducing Cameron to the tease in a workplace environment where men are afraid of women much as maritime sailors would have been centuries ago. “Some things never change” because Patriarchal Capitalism likes it that way!

[6] Cover by Ama Lee, 2017.

[7] Again, “kill your darlings”; i.e., even if everyone in Gothic academic quotes Angela Carter, she’s still a second wave feminist, thus has major problems we must critique. As I write in Volume Zero:

Second-wave feminism was (and still is) infamously cis-supremacist and white, and we can’t just rely on a bunch of fancy (and highly problematic) white, cis-het female academics to accomplish the sum of all activism for all workers. Even if Carter wouldn’t have been caught dead in Rowling’s company today, she still died in 1992—one year after Michael Warner introduced “heteronormativity” to academic circuits, two years after Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble and one year before Derrida wrote Spectres of Marx.

To be blunt, Carter’s most famous works feel oddly dated in terms of what they either completely leave out or fail to define, and thereby supply clues to the vengeance of proto-TERFs like Dacre’s Victoria de Loredani that Carter doesn’t strictly condemn. As Brittany Sauvé-Bonin writes in “How Angela Carter Challenges Myths of Sexuality and Power in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ & ‘The Company of Wolves'” (2020):

The men in de Sade’s stories exercise sexual perversions which enforce annihilation. However, it is the women in de Sade’s stories that are seen as even more cruel as once they get the rare opportunity to exercise power, they begin to use this power to seek retaliation over the submissiveness they were forced to endure in society (The Sadeian Woman 27). Carter bluntly concludes that “a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster” (27). Due to women being oppressed for so long, when they get the opportunity, they can retaliate in the most extreme ways (27).

According to Henstra, this has resulted in critique by other feminists including Andrea Dworkin, who have concluded that The Sadeian Woman displays a “complete disregard for the actual suffering endured by Sade’s – and pornography’s – victims” (113). Carter chooses to focus more on how women had an outlet to retaliate that de Sade had openly introduced. While some of his women suffered, some of his women indeed inflicted the pain. Hence, Carter rationalizes de Sade’s work by saying “pornography [is] in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical [harmful] to women” (The Sadeian Woman 37) [source].

Again, what is a woman, Carter? And what did they do with this outlet? The vast majority turned it against other minorities more disadvantaged than themselves—i.e., from 1979 into the present (source).

[8] He endorsed the things, pushing for their manufacture, sale and use, then lying about the death toll (which demonstrates intent). As Jessica Purkiss and Jack Serle write in “Obama’s Drone War” (2017):

Obama embraced the US drone programme, overseeing more strikes in his first year than Bush carried out during his entire presidency. A total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush. Between 384 and 807 civilians were killed in those countries, according to reports logged by the Bureau. The use of drones aligned with Obama’s ambition to keep up the war against al Qaeda while extricating the US military from intractable, costly ground wars in the Middle East and Asia. But the targeted killing programme has drawn much criticism.

The Obama administration has insisted that drone strikes are so “exceptionally surgical and precise“ that they pluck off terror suspects while not putting “innocent men, women and children in danger.” This claim has been contested by numerous human rights groups, however, and the Bureau’s figures on civilian casualties also demonstrate that this is often not the case (source).

All presidents lie for the state because the state lies to function. No god, states or masters, my dudes.

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.

(artist: H.R. Giger)

Prep, part three: the Medieval; or the Root of the Humanities: Their Mise-en-Abyme, Medieval Expression and Modules

Capitalism has always exploited us according to how it deems us useful/not useful, thus superior/inferior inside the colonial binary and its heteronormative rubric/moderately normative offshoots. / Sex Positivity illustrates this complex reality through what I’ve learned, reassembling it for you as a kind of monster compilation to play around with. As you play, experiment and learn, think about your own modes of monstrous self-expression and what you put back into the world: your poiesis and creative successes. In the end, we’re all defined by what we leave behind (source).

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

Picking up from where “Conflict and Liberation” left off…

“The Medieval,” or chapter three (of zero) for “Brace for Impact,” constitutes the last bit of prep before we dive into the second and third modules. I have divided it into seven subchapters (and multiple subdivisions, and sub-subdivisions)—“Monsters, Magic and Myth”—which cover some of the messiest (and most exquisite) aspects to what Volume Two is about and which we’ve touched upon, but here I really want to go over as thoroughly as possible: as things to sell to others not as commodities, but propositions; i.e., for them to buy as a social-sexual exchange between cuties’ interpersonal mise-en-abyme (“to [mimetically] place in abyss,” over and over…): consenting mutually to enter forbidden “castles” of delicious “danger” (calculated risk).

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

• “Castles in the Flesh” (this post): Charts our course by picking the destination. Outlines medieval derelicts as castle-like in terms of the body-building arrangement the Gothic generally entertains, and provides a personalized, anecdotal example of “Antiquity” through derelicts: Cuwu and I.
• “Green Eggs and Ha(r)m; or, ‘Fucking’s Fun, Try it!’“: Partway on the road. Considers the Gothic as something its critics turn their noses up at like green eggs and harm, conflating capitalist forms with our iconoclastic doubles (making them bad critics); this subchapter outlines Gothic castles and draconian occupants in their half-real, dialectical-material totality (ours vs theirs).
• “The Eyeball Zone; or, Relating to the Gothic as Commies Do“: Still en route! A more autobiographical subchapter, one that explores interpersonal relationships in the broader context of ludo-Gothic BDSM during class and culture war—how we can relieve stress and address praxial concerns that we leave behind; i.e., to be consulted when we become overstimulated (or don’t exist anymore) relative to our own web of relationships: a buffer when our walls go up, a glorious “eyehole” to peep through and engage with while the blinders are still on.
• “Knocking on Heaven’s Door; or, Prepare for Entry!“: Arrives and waits for the door to open. Goes over some Marxist signposts and liberatory sex work exhibits, which seek to underline how the Gothic (and Communism) transcend mediums to speak across them in everyday relationships that help put out fires while not starting new ones (a complex spectrum of social-sexual exchanges, whose material factors and aesthetic elements of unequal power and trauma hyphenate to address systemic abuse).
• “‘Heaven in a Wild Flower’; or, Exhibiting the Monstrous-Feminine Ourselves“: Greeted in the antechamber, and given pamphlets. Supplies a gender-studies hermeneutic, regarding the monstrous-feminine in relation to everything discussed so far in the book; i.e., there is always an aspect of the Medusa (war-like, morphologically diverse, and rebellious) to any monster that isn’t—figuratively or literally, in part or all together—a white, Anglo-American, cis-het, Christian male.
• “Medieval Expression; or, ‘Welcome to the Fun Palace!'”: Enters the palace. Explores the idea of the Gothic as a liminal, holistic dialog that transcends mediums, precluding harm through a confusion of the senses, jouissance, magic assembly of old dead things, and other medieval devices tied to magic and myth as a dark, sexual affair (often an operatic one linked to popular controlled substances—metal when reclaimed by fags camping the canon with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll as synonymous with each other and iconoclastic learning and expression). In other words, “Medieval Expression” explores the dialectic of the alien as generally expressed through monsters, magic and myths, mainly paradoxes and oxymorons that blend all of these things; i.e., how they hook up and interact, once conjoined.
  • Due to its size, I’ve decided to divide “the Fun Palace” into three parts:
    • Opening and part one, “A Song Written in Decay”: Outlines all of these points, and gives an example of mise-en-abyme through a disintegrating Song of Infinity exemplified by Lewis and his spiritual, academic-prone descendants—namely Hannah-Freya Blake and myself as coming from a lengthier Galatean, gallows-humor tradition not entirely foreign to Gothic academia.
    • Part two, “‘Red Scare’; or Out in the World“: Seeks out further examples in between my friends and I for this project specifically—namely the relationship between past media orbiting Red Scare (from Star Wars‘ rebellious allegory to American Liberalism and subversive potential in The Abyss to Chernobyl, and more) as also including non-academic sex worker friends’ old photographs and warlike, often-red symbols that contain Communist potential whose Gothic maturity can be built upon during our day-to-day relations.
    • Part three, “‘With a Little Help from My Friends’; or, Out of this World”: Explores an-Com rebellion (the dismantling of the state) as actively expressed between current sex workers using ludo-Gothic BDSM to inspire and invigilate a more recent (and actionable) portrait of rebellion; also inspects the classics—from The Wizard of Oz to Big Trouble in Little China—as things to learn from with our current friends as sharing a similar love for the imaginary past as rebellious for monstrous-feminine rights.
      • As a subchapter to “Medieval Expression,” “The Fun Palace’s” last subdivision, “Out of this World,” is actually too big. So I have subdivided it again (a sub-sub-subchapter):
        • Opening and part one, “What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why (feat. Amazons and Witches)?”: Articulates what rebellion is, followed by what a rebel is and why they do what they do—then takes a break to discuss modules and criminality (with several performative examples: Samus Aran, but also the Wicked Witch of the West)
        • Part two, “Meeting Rebels; i.e., What Inspires Us to Meet and All of It Carrying On and On (feat. Harmony Corrupted, Jack Burton, and Blxxd Bunny)“: Explores how to meet rebels, followed by what inspired us to meet them (hint: them, but also their sexy costumes), and what carries on as all of this repeats, repeats, repeats.
• “Monsters, Magic and Myth”: Modularity and Class (feat. Jeremy Parish and Sorcha Ní Fhlainn)“: Packs up to leave (carnival prizes underarm, balloons in tow). Considers the purpose of this volume’s pointedly medieval voicings through a signature lack of restrictions and its thoroughly iconoclastic nature, as well as its dialectical-material function, modular devices and monster classes separately and then together. Also criticizes a former academic superior and research inspiration of mine (Ní Fhlainn and Parish, respectively).

Gothic castles are things to pursue and build anew based on old likenesses we see in between people and media as hopelessly conjoined when speaking to the alien as experienced differently between a shared pedagogy of the oppressed (of rape something to heal from in all its forms, sexual or otherwise): all grasping onto something (often each other) in-frame, our step in an ongoing mise-en-abyme pursuant, per a framed narrative, to a palliative Numinous; i.e., indicative of a Communist one—Medusa baring it all (fangs and flesh) in furious lust as the prime iconoclastic educator defying Capitalist Realism.

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

To that, onto our first step of the quest, “Castles in the Flesh!”

“Monsters, Magic and Myth”: Castles in the Flesh; or, a Personalized Example of Derelicts

[T]he Gothic castle is ‘alive’ with a power that perplexes its visitors. It tends to have an irregular shape, its lay-out is very complex and mysterious, whether because of an actual distortion of the whole structure or because a part of it remains unknown. In Manuel Aguirre’s words, “this basic distortion yields mystery, precludes human control and endows the building with a power beyond its strictly physical structure: the irregular mysterious house is, like the vampire, a product of the vitalistic conception of nature.” […] In Radcliffe’s novels the Gothic castle is in the first place an anti-home, a nightmare version of the heroine’s perfect past, in which many of the elements of her home are exaggerated and replayed in a Gothic form. […] The heroine’s parents are replaced by Gothic substitutes or Gothic opposites. The castle hides some family secret the revelation of which usually helps the heroine to disclose her own identity. At the same time, the Gothic castle is the place of confinement in a literal and figurative sense. Moreover, the castle may be interpreted as the image of the body and, eventually, as the heroine’s secret self (source).

—Audronė Raškauskienė, Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings

Gothic castles have many different academic interpretations; e.g., Bakhtin, Summers, and Aguirre (all who Raškauskienė mentions). Per Hogle, though, Gothic castles are essentially “antique” (counterfeit) left-behinds that uphold an “ancient” lie of sovereignty that maintains the state through the process of abjection; for myself, Gothic castles have personable qualities that generally resemble people and vice versa—e.g., Metroidvania being the level, the heroine and the enemy as all monstrous, meaning “rapacious, bellicose and castle-like”; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as a highly subversive, even transgressive means of reversing abjection to develop Gothic Communism through iconoclastic sex work: those who are “built,” “stacked” or some such medieval architectural metaphor for their sexual prowess and overall sex appeal/gender invention, but also trauma (which combine the concentrically medieval language of war [mise-en-abyme] with sexual activities; i.e., Walpole’s satirical, undead chivalry prototype, the “rape” castle Otranto; e.g., “castle = demon lover/dominator vs vanilla basic bitch”). Capitalism treats it as something to expect with teenagers, then paywall for adults: a ghost of the counterfeit to abject vis-à-vis state shift; Gothic Communists seek to reclaim such things within capital (I’m not showing off my hard dick, per my rule; it’s inside Cuwu):

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

We’ll discuss “ancient” derelicts throughout the volume; here, I want a give personal anecdote illustrating them: my troubled relationship with Cuwu leading towards a pedagogy of the oppressed (relating to the alien side of each other using Gothic media) that I tried to raise in their memory long after our friendship officially expired.

(artist, paintings: H.R. Giger)

Another way to view Gothic derelicts, then, is a castle or an extension of a castle as an unheimlich storage facility—as something that seems to move or have human qualities when it doesn’t, or that actually gets up and moves around like a person despite ostensibly lacking a pilot; i.e., like a giant suit of armor inside an atmospheric, maze-like space that threatens to animate (thus return) in much the same fashion: a fearful imaginary past. Such events are generally meant to unsettle the audience, and carry along cryptomimetically (Giger and Scott, left): castles come from other castles, as does their hostile affect. As we proceed, then, synonyms to “great doom” or “apocalypse” should pop up, regarding a group effort to face and subvert them in demonstrable ways that survive us; i.e., in more permanent, castled fixtures rooted in the ashes of our non-existent bodies reminding someone of where we once were having been survived by material suggestions of us as made up of older things globally improvised with (our “junk”). This stark reflection often plays out in small, relayed not just in Hamlet’s graveyard fight with Laertes or his holding of poor Yorick’s skull; nor the Metroidvania’s infernal concentric pattern exemplified by Slave Knight Gael’s battle with the player (the doomed hero) at the end of the world/the end of time inside the hourglass inside the egg inside the painting (the narrative of the crypt); but also our own lives in small: our own derelicts having a personified quality that resembles old lovers as shadows of their former selves (what the Ancient Greeks called “shades”).

To that, Gothic derelicts (castles or castle-like bodies; i.e., suits of armor) are cumulative—easy to build[1] when you get the hang of it—but also express in more literal human forms, on or offstage: those we relate to using Gothic media as a means of “thinking with” (what the Brits would call an “aesthetic”). In turn, our friends are generally informed by what we were saddled with; e.g., my and Cuwu’s song being “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” (1998) by Neutral Milk Hotel (a song supposedly about Anne Frank, but one which I heard unbeknownst to that while Cuwu was sucking my dick: in their car outside of a pet shop while we were both in love):

And one day we will die

And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea

But for now we are young

Let us lay in the sun

And count every beautiful thing we can see (source: Genius).

Faced with loss (or its memories), it’s easy to slip into a state of mourning anew, describing one’s current emotional state as a concentric funeral—of all our past selves speaking to us presently (their echoes reaching from Radcliffe forward to Scott to Jadis showing me The Witch’s House and Mad Father [2016] to me taking that to Cuwu’s, to my friend Seren’s fascination with such things, to my mother upstairs constantly watching horror movies so that it sounds like my house is haunted by copies of female “trauma” [with an actual ghost of the counterfeit] to Gerard Way’s “Baby, You’re a Haunted House” [2019] and so on). But the Gothic thrives amid disintegration as profoundly alive, not just fearful as Chris Baldrick describes (inheritance anxiety). It’s closer to Black Absinthe’s “Nobody Knows” (2024):

Making fake friends trying to get by.

Nobody knows the feelings are the low and you’re trying to stay high!

Sweet Serenity, I can’t fight when the night

Comes calling me!

[…] All day you’re runnin’ but you can’t escape the grave;

No one knows when it’s time to die!

When I heard that, I was like, “OMG, that was my relationship to Cuwu!” (never a good sign, haha): a former dancer and thong-wearing sexpot smiting this goth nerd with their portentous assets. Their heavenly-hellish body and unquenchable desire to be seen mirrored my aching desire to view and express such things; i.e., the artist and the muse’s asexual nudism and erotic voyeurism/exhibitionism something I want remembered precisely because it was special, good, pure and true (it ached to build, but feels better post-release—a bit like blue balls/clit). A humanist appeal to the slut in all of us, yearning to be free and loved for it.

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

So, like The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), I find myself slipping little clues of Cuwu to remind me of them—not my abuser as someone to love, but loving and remembering what I saw in them that was good, which I will look for in someone/somewhere else: the provocative likeness of Cuwu, who inspired me to write this book. If Jadis was the neoliberal who didn’t believe in my work, Cuwu was the Marxist-Leninist who did, and whose killer-queen persona (“sophisticated and precise”) and hungry-eyed stare, maternal commands, and tight little mommy pussy I have happily quested for in new an-Com mommies, post-separation. In the interim, I’ve decorated my hallways with echoes of our past pleasure, of likenesses to their best side while discussing them as they were in totality: monstrous-feminine—both a hot, fuckable, little mommy dragon consuming everything in sight and a killer doll whose portable house (and yawning train of Atlas-grade baggage) met me with irresistible bedroom eyes, a Klonopin dependency and the abusive tendencies of a twisted past. It takes me back to some wild, campy times: big feelings crammed inside a tiny cutie (who admittedly had a fat ass—a PAWG).

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

What we have here are all the usual BDSM antics with a deliberately Gothic aesthetic: sex-positive (thus harmless) hair-pulling, spankings and rough sex whose ludo-Gothic simulations intimate actual torture/trauma during fetishized kink, roleplay and straight-up sex sessions (skin-to-skin contact and fluid exchange, which often overlap with the above things, but don’t always). The praxial idea is mutual consent between those who can consent, not children dressed up against their will like show ponies groomed to emulate a parental enforcement of white America; i.e., so-called “beauty pageants”:

Well it’s true just take a look
The cover sometimes makes the book
And the judges, do they ever ask
To read between your lines
And in your cage at the human zoo,
They all stop to look at you
Next year, what will you do
When you have been forgotten (Styx’ “Miss America,” 1978).

(artist: MHSABA)

As Gothic Communists, we want to illustrate and foster mutual content, helping the better parts of those who wound us to be remembered, along with their humanity and ours inside-outside the same “superfreak” exhibits going on and on (“the kind you don’t take home to mother!”). Socio-sexual stimulation during ludo-Gothic BDSM provides healthy reality checks that activate vital ways of speculative thinking. These, in turn, are conducive to mutual consent and Gothic-Communist development, which help workers (each other) understand why people (often those who give birth) have breaks with reality (e.g., Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988) and otherwise do what they do as not always rational, but nevertheless having a reason tied to the real world; i.e., where they happen and what causes them: through our bodies, relationships and socio-material conditions. It starts with feeling sorry for them and ends with us helping them and each other as part of the same world to heal together. Empathy isn’t a weakness; diversity is strength; those who say otherwise are moderates and/or fascists (the former a disguised version of the latter) and not to be trusted. Those pro-state defenders saying something is “uncalled for” call for rebellion in spite of their sanctimonious tone-policing “going there.” No gods or masters; just Satanic[2] sluts from outer space, lovingly making Hell on Earth a sex-positive place for all workers, animals and the environment. Fuck the bourgeoisie (as in, “show them a sign of class resistance,” not actually have sex with them—gross), punch a Nazi (worker solidarity against capitalistic vigilantes) and make hot sweet love to Commies; i.e., “make love, not war” except class and culture war to break Capitalist Realism and develop Gothic Communism.

The source of the disease isn’t anomalous or idiopathic, it’s Capitalism. This means the cure relative to that anatomy is equally idiosyncratic. Single or together, married or common law, monogamous or extramarital—divide and conquer goes the other way around, with workers taking capital to task. Moguls, czars, billionaires, et al, dogmatically conflate as gurus when they’re really nepotistic charlatans acting like the golf ball (or the “hero”) from Happy Gilmore (1996), too good for its home[3]; we’ll melt them with our beautiful wickedness: spotting their markers (of the state’s critical illness), combating a worsening condition with partial/full transplants (as low-risk as we can manage, as high-risk as we need to: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their work” and eventually “need”), donations, and other forms of medicinal and palliative care (aimed at the self and the community as part of the same organism).

Homeostasis is not centrism; it’s anarcho-Communism, and the key to praxial synthesis and catharsis lies in the maid-and-butler dialogs we generate with Gothic poetics—i.e., our castles in all their funhouse forms and functions: our cute nicknames and interpersonal slogans[4], brash tattoos, stylish makeup, daring piercings, and other “loud” qualities (our tits, asses, dicks and pussies and other attractive qualities[5] relayed to us, our personalities and bodies—our money-makers of any shape, color or size—front and center) giving the pulse we also check for in others (what the Irish call a chuisle mo chroí: “the pulse of my heart”). With them, we rope bunnies, mommy doms, and paypigs collectively shake hands, kiss babies, rub elbows, moisturize (facials and creampies—with willing and consenting adults), and fund rebellion (and yes, sometimes kiss ass) in fiscal and social forms conjoined: “Use my body to keep you alive!” “Lactate ironically!” If not during fascism, genocide and climate change, then when exactly shall we pronounce these vows? We’re cutting it close as is (urgent care); i.e., it’s now or never, so time to commit and hop to it! Forget Bon Jovi’s neoliberal anthem; it’s a frank bleed, as crimson as Lena’s “99 Redluft Ballons” (1983):

Ninety-nine knights of the air
Ride super high-tech jet fighters
Everyone’s a Super Hero
Everyone’s a Captain Kirk (source: AZ Lyrics)

So pardon the irony, but it’s time to go nuclear—and not just for the current generation, but all life on Earth (solidarity with workers and nature)! The planet’s already on fire, so good luck “simmering down” to put down roots when the icecaps fully melt! With that being said, what are you afraid of (a rhetorical question; obviously banks, public shaming and the routine policing of media and bodies are real, ever-present concerns)? Let it (those giant “Luftballons”) all hang out; even if it’s all in vain[6], we’ll have turned a buck, enjoyed ourselves and treated others like humans/acted humanely in our final moments!

(artist: Keighla Night)

And yet, while nothing lasts forever, we can induce change that builds a better tomorrow by moving in a better direction—diligently and one step at a time, but whose earnest and nightly erecting of “chapels” (optional quotes) and their “nocturnal emissions” (ditto) guide the Superstructure directly away from profit and towards a post-scarcity world: our own echoing palimpsests leading to new reinvention (what’s commonly referred to as “remakes” in the movie business; i.e., Neo-Gothic) and social-sexual learning incentives (sex, companionship, food, etc). Just as state shift is brought about by the state, the state’s leveling is a seminal catastrophe we can embark on to build a Communist castle that puts us more in touch with all those forms and functions we’re alienated from save as commodified fetishes under capital; i.e., the medieval, whose funerary likenesses of those we love—its fine arches and buttresses (Cuwu, the page before last)—make for a bittersweet, but ultimately beneficial Sphinx: “a,” as Bay put it, “gravestone of something that never was, but could be in the future with someone else”; i.e., a naughty act to celebrate in: saying “Oh my god, babe! We’re totally doing a ‘Communism’ right now! I love ‘Communism’ so, so much!” / “Yes, baby! Now don’t stop!” while spreading the peach, splitting in half our muse-like FWBs and life partners (defined not hierarchically but through difference), forever and ever. Like the Joker, we’re always smiling (minus the harming of others). Let each encounter be your finest hour—one worthy of a castle all unto its own, buried gloriously alive in concentric undeath (made from stolen parts inventively reassembled; e.g., as Tolkien did with Scandinavian myth, minus his gentrifying cartographic refrains)!

Also, not to beat a dead horse, here, but try to keep our talks in mind regarding the medical side of things. Capital overwhelms and confuses, essentializing a want for answers. Beyond white (Cartesian) truth seekers, dysfunctional medics, or combat-trained, spandex-wearing enforcers, our payment is friendship, love and yes, sex often enough… or physical exercise of different kinds, often set to naughty music to “keep time”; e.g., dances, such as waltzes or tangos, often given a Gothic flavor commercialized by white cis-het men; i.e., the target audience of Pax Americana who desire a “midnight” or tone-poem/danse macabre quality to the proceedings: kinky sex with a goth flavor something routinely quested after by these same cis-het weirdos seeking a “Big Titty Goth GF” (waifu/war bride) to “dance” with. Unused to rejection, their brittle, infantile egos and bitter, cynical outlook learn to love the copy instead of the person; i.e., Pygmalion courting the statue as raw material for him to dominate, to own and do with as he pleases, but somehow always left wanting and alone. Their dolls become sacred and worthless, an entire generation becoming tantrum-prone, attacking and blaming real women for the boys’ inability to humanize anything around them or treat it with genuine love and respect. It becomes yet another war to wage against the harvested side.

Contrary to their perpetual angst and self-imposed schadenfreude, the joys of sex-positive bonding are what we find (out) and where the answers come from when we fuck around, experimenting to varying degrees of calculated risk[7]; i.e., our relationships to other workers and the world as interconnected, oceanic: to treat our gut instinct as something to trust more, not be skeptical of regarding workers-as-unicorns—what Bay calls mana. It’s not our addiction, it’s our microscope to cultivate in opposition to the state Superstructure, something to hold against our patronizers abjecting us. And if enjoying laughter, friendship, cosmetic gender expression (makeup, hair-care products and clothes) and sex is an “addiction,” so be it; bear in mind, though, if approached to non-harmful degrees, achieving harm regarding hedonistic factors as “drug-seeking” is literally impossible.

To that, you’re pitching in for those in need, not taking hemlock! Short of drowning in them, then, you generally can’t choke to death on a liquid (semen or otherwise); short of freak accidents, you can’t wear too much clothes or laugh too often, suck too much dick, etc[8] (so-called “gateway drug” arguments being the stuff of fearmongers—easier to fall on that sword than admit that you could have been fucking this whole time). There’s always something new to try on, seeing not just “what fits,” but what looks good (sometimes as little as possible—nudism being a common choice among partners and FWBs). It’s also not a race or a competition; i.e., cuties are not prizes to win or mountains to climb, but people to share company with and treat like humans. You’re there to relate to them, not shave seconds off how quickly you can lull them into a false sense of security that lasts “long enough” for your latest sexual conquest: to peel their panties off and battering-ram their coochie (sex is definitely a technique you can master, but there’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach, no “open-sesame” to help a given “cave” surrender its delightful treasures; each body is unique, meaning you want to listen to your partner and learn what they like and how they respond to your efforts to please both[9] of you).

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

In other words, this isn’t drugs or food; there’s no such thing as too much sex-positive love, friendship, clothes and sex (within reason, taking medical conditions into account, age and personal stamina). And if you ever think you’ve had “too much”—one, good for you; two, trust me, you’ll live. I fucked Cuwu, Jadis and Zeuhl multiple times a day, every day for months apiece (well, about a month for Cuwu, in-person, and less frequently than the others; but it didn’t matter cause they were a straight-up freak). And if you’re worried about broken hearts, they absolutely suck, but focus on landing on your feet; i.e develop better habits/outlets and learn to pick better partners and venues (the gayer, the better in my opinion). I’ve had my heart broken multiple times, and in lieu of self-improvement through conscious hard work, it only gets easier, babes. Embrace it; girls/fags don’t bite or have cooties (make sure to get tested for STIs with new partners, though). Got a sickness? Dare to find the cure; try something new “on for size,” panties or pussy (as castle-like, surrounded by/fortified with various towering battlements, above: “the raven himself is hoarse…”). Just don’t lose sight of your humanity (and that of those around you) as you experiment together—lost inside your own palaces, their fleshy labyrinths of “fatal” conjecture offering up forbidden knowledge, power and lust as chaotic, farcical, screw-loose; i.e., in ways that unhitch Marx’s nightmarish portents (“on the brains of the living”) to achieve praxial irony as mobile towards Gothic Communism.

That being said, if someone’s being hostile, treat them as such! Love conditionally, meaning always, always protect yourself; someone might look outwardly cute and adorable, but can still harm you. You deserve better—can do better than someone who harms you no matter how they look (Cuwu) or how much money they have (Jadis)! Treat them as human by saying “Enough is enough!” in so many words; i.e., cutting them off or leaving when they get abusive (aka, toxic love). It’s the DBT way. You don’t have to scrub them from your life if you don’t want to (i.e., a love-hate relationship; e.g., Cuwu); simply take away their ability to harm you and pass that along as a sex-positive lesson. Quit the rapey chamber/exit the harmful haunted house and make your own “rapey” one, instead!

Gird your loins! We’re off to “Medieval Expression” (the fun palace), but are only partway there! Next up, “Green Eggs and Ha(r)m!”

---

Footnotes

[1] It just takes enthusiasm, inspiration, and time to build a cathedral. Gothic cathedrals stem from big, exaggerated emotions, downplaying calmer forces in favor of intensely dramatic vibes, sadness, eroticism, and doom (the liminal hauntology of war), etc. They’re all at once maudlin, somber and furious—a boxed entropy, a myopia, an umbra, the eye of an angry god, an event horizon, Castlevania/Demon Castle Dracula, Satan’s asshole, etc—as something both spatio-temporally and physically alien to plunge repeatedly into: an altered state, a different plane or order of existence, an alternate dimension, etc, as accessed by forbidden artifacts or pathways (e.g., Clive Barker’s infamous Cenobites and Lament Configuration).

[2] Meaning “devil-worshipping atheists, Pagans, or something akin to that; e.g., Persephone van der Waard’s “I, Satanist; Atheist: A Gothicist’s Thoughts on Atheism, Religion, and Sex” (2021). But also something to legitimately fuck; i.e., the green women from the original Star Trek (1966) but less sexist and maybe a little goofy and weird; e.g., Clerks 2 (2006): “Like, be the first motherfucker to see a new galaxy, or find a new alien lifeform… and fuck it. And people’d be like, ‘There he goes. Homeboy fucked a Martian once.'”

[3] Which isn’t really fair to the ball; it’s a golf ball. Happy Gilmore, though, should know better. If he can get mad at a lifeless object, imagine what he could do to a woman who doesn’t want to sleep with him (actually don’t; watch how he handles rejection, right here).

[4] E.g., Cuwu and I calling each other “cummy Commies” and “cumrag comrades” to help Communism cutely cum—to arrive in the future through our efforts now as adorable.

[5] E.g., our body aromas, green thumbs, comedic windups, dramatic swan/frog songs (our swanning but also “little green boys,” our pets), and ironic addictive jests (not Edward Cullen’s codependent/terrible heroine metaphor for his old man’s predatory infatuation with a 16-year-old girl named Bella fucking Swan).

[6] And for those of you pearl-clutchers worried about your slice of the pie at hearing our fighting words: we’re not your enemy, the state is. Good girls and bad (“virgins” and “whores”), enbies and twinks, healthcare and sex workers, good friends (sexual and platonic) and perfect strangers—we’re all Queen Shit of Fuck Mountain, loves; all our stories (our loss, internalized guilt, divisions, attracting opposites, impostor syndrome, shared trauma, bonds, etc) are valid, mid-struggle, extending to our satirical deceptions and lies both white (“I’m just a dumb Dutch girl not up to anything!”) and splendid (e.g., Gulliver’s Travels, 1726), our idiosyncratic social-sexual configurations/qualities/distance (mono-to-plural/flings-to-FWBs-to-SOs/live-in-to-long-distance), our miracles, powerhouse Hail-Marys, and skeletons-in-the-closet. All water under a bridge if we try to change for the better! We reserve our judgements for actual cunts who only care about themselves.

Speaking of which, the state’s fascists, neoliberals, billionaires, class traitors (cops) and unironic rapists/sadists don’t change by design. So fuck the lot of them! Fuck their moral panic, “tough love/austerity politics,” personal responsibility rhetoric; their War on Drugs, on Crime, on sex work, on Christmas; their Capitalist Realism; their bribes and blackmail; their self-serving optics (“perception is reality”), vindictive smear campaigns (“witch hunts”) and mendacious charm offensives (“Trojan horses”); their insurance scams and micro transactions, charity tourism, compelled monogamy and love triangles (amatonormativity, heterosexual or not); their conspiracy theories, either kernel-of-truth (their rich political enemies attended Epstein’s pedophile island, person-of-color antivaxxers having felt the effects of genocide and medical abuse) or shit nuts—e.g., flat-earthers; i.e., neoliberal illusions blinding and harmful, like staring into the sun to cause eye and brain damage: stupidity by proximity, creed, and imaginary misuse leading to walking hyperbole as unironic farce—less “total brain rot” and more akin to multi-organ failure of one’s critical-thinking faculties; source tweet: AntiVaxxer (2024). It’s comedy gold to some extent, but also profoundly worrying given how dead-set these persons are against something so well-established (not any different than climate change in that respect, or vaccines; the colonizer group thinks they are beyond reproach, always right, and invincible, etc).

While chimerism is sadly a reality of class war and liminal expression, it’s self-defeating if it doesn’t ultimately abandon the Faustian bargains the state provides. So we must expose and cast out false parties until they lose all the masks (concentric veneers—more on these in Volume Three); i.e., until they change in ways actually beneficial to the Cause. Don’t be their kept Judas, their fascist patsy—their tokenized, TERF-to-SWERF-grade dupe or centrist chameleon turning coat!

[7] E.g., to fuck Cuwu not just like an animal or a mommy dom who topped me from below, but like a doll who vampirically could control me without blinking or moving an inch. Obviously with Cuwu it became harmful, but to some extent until that point it was a lot of fun (as Gothic/war scenarios offer plenty of theatrical potential for unequal power exchange and roleplay variation; e.g., the Western rape fantasy’s age-old tropes materializing inside a given period piece or hauntological mish-mash: to be chased down, overtaken, stripped and “violated” most indecently by unspeakable forces); i.e., bondage of a variety of forms that, whether most people realize it or not, have some element of consent-non-consent (aka informed consent) to them: sheathing and unsheathing my sword in their scabbard while they were awake,  but tied up or otherwise immobile; but also on drugs to literally fall asleep during “somno”/sleep sex (consenting beforehand to a mutual agreement built on trust). The rituals supplied a calculated risk meant to give them, as the sub, more power. Eventually it became lopsided—not a problem while in person, but certainly during physical separation, where they could control me from a distance to get what they wanted; i.e., like a queen in their castle, issuing gambit-like orders to someone held at arm’s length, past the raised drawbridge’s moist entrance, stuck on the other side of the moat.

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

All relationships involve some risk, of course, and I’ve talked about Cuwu’s abuse of me in Volumes One and Zero; suffice to say that they primed me—a vulnerable person just out of an abusive relationship—to care for them, long-distance, and then took me for every bit of emotional surplus they could muster. Though their “ballistics” were persuasive (the ass that launched a thousand ships), eventually I just couldn’t do it anymore. But to be completely honest, it wasn’t easy signaling the end to that relationship, either, and they drove me absolutely nuts in the meantime; indeed, I had to start Sex Positivity just to get over rebounding with them. Call it a blessing in disguise, though, and one with many fond memories (e.g., of a goofy vampy fae wearing my cloak, above) despite all the manipulative bullshit. I hope I’ve successfully conveyed that, here–that I wish them nothing but happiness and hope that our experiences together can help people like yourselves learn from our mistakes and achievements. Call it a fair and balanced criticism, a Gothic Romance based on my time in Transylvania: with the transgender crossdresser one generation removed from Dr. Frankenfurter.

[8] It’s far easier to injure yourself working out—or taking drugs (steroid abuse) to work out—than it is to fuck too much. Just with cis-het men, gym rats are a dime-a-dozen; there’s not exactly an overabundance/”epidemic” of sex-positive Casanovas in the cis-het male population.

[9] The exact ratio varies; e.g., I’m a service top and get turned on by helping my playmates feel good. Some people are sadists, masochists, tops, bottoms, switches, etc. All’s well that’s sex-positive!