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

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

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

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

“Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons,” part two: Demons and Dealing with Them; or Abandonment, Dark Worship and Vengeful Sacrifice When Dissecting Radcliffe (feat. Ridley Scott’s The Terror and Alien: Covenant, Ninja Scroll, The Dark Crystal, and Harmony Corrupted)

“…I have preserved a life which otherwise I had lost in torture; and I have obtained the power of procuring every bliss which can make that life delicious! […] Ambrosio, I still love you: Our mutual guilt and danger have rendered you dearer to me than ever, and I would fain save you from impending destruction. Summon then your resolution to your aid; and renounce for immediate and certain benefits the hopes of a salvation, difficult to obtain, and perhaps altogether erroneous. Shake off the prejudice of vulgar souls; Abandon a God who has abandoned you, and raise yourself to the level of superior Beings!”

She paused for the Monk’s reply: He shuddered, while He gave it.

“Matilda!” He said after a long silence in a low and unsteady voice; “What price gave you for liberty?”

She answered him firm and dauntless.

“Ambrosio, it was my Soul!”

—Matilda and Ambrosio, The Monk

Picking up where “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives (feat. Out of Sight, Nina Hartley, Velma, and Zeuhl)” left off…

Part zero examined damsels, detectives and sex demons per Giger’s xenomorph (and its paths of the dead to pass through), while part one looked at non-magical damsels and detectives as female-to-trans (sex) workers ranging from Nina Hartley to Jo-Lo to Velma to Velma’s good/evil doubles, myself and my ex, Zeuhl. Part two looks at demons solo; i.e., when dealing with them (as magical to non-magical beings) during such Faustian exchanges, including a segue into furries: revisiting Scott’s Alien universe with Alien: Covenant (and a more charitable interpretation of its villain) and his Terror produce-sided affair (with its own semi-magical elements) while cutting Radcliffe’s simulacrum to bits, then having Harmony and a couple close-reads at the end—Ninja Scroll and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance—step in to help put Radcliffe the demon whore back together to camp Ridley Scott!

(artist: Bambii)

Please bear in mind, this piece is conversational/mostly tying up loose ends while covering a lot of ground (and holistically sprinkled with various puns, reclaimed slurs and intersectional/crass epiphanies felt throughout). In keeping with the Numinous, though, we’ll consider different conventional/gimmicky and fetishized elements of revenge that demons seek for having their solitude disturbed, while also highlighting their predatory elements a bit more, too: abandonment, dark worship and vengeful sacrifice!

Note: By now, we’ve talked about damsels, detectives and sex demons, but also virgins/whores and their revenge a ton, and committed a lot of pages and ink to thesis and application. Like the rest of “Exploring the Derelict Past,” “D&D” is an older element I want to include for its namesake; but also, we’ll be keeping this one and the “Call of the Wild” relatively short (about two hundred pages for what could be much longer, similar to our vampire and ghost subchapters from the Undead Module). Pinky promise!—Perse

We’ll unfurl those elements like a trail of fabled breadcrumbs that detectives classically chase down (often to have them punished for it during the live burial trope; i.e., cannibalizing the heroine through repressed libido given shape; re: Segewick). First, a reprise: as classic granters of tempting wishes during Faustian bargains, demons are whore-like beings of and inscribed with torturous dark power to deal with and in; i.e., often in a “coital” sense and one which the state treats as things to summon and banish in Faustian bargains on Promethean Quests; re: “dealing” with demons as a problem it places within a dialog of exchange that has them killed (or injected with poison disguised as “medicine,” curing a “disease”): the demon as the whore having the whore’s revenge when summoned!

Except all that glitters is not gold, but works in dialectical-material opposition within the shamed aesthetic (re: Zeuhl and Matilda, Velma and me); likewise, the pearly castles are generally the worst, as are their moderate defenders’ false modesty. “Darkness visible” takes on a paradoxical quality that beckons we embrace it in service to Satan; i.e., not as a person but a cryptonymic act that pushes revolutionarily through systemic falsehoods: a Great Destroyer that evokes past trauma to heal from it, not extend it through further canonical lies.

This, in turn, takes multiple steps—often through decreasing amounts of blindness through the light of illusion (“Long and hard is the way…”) towards true sight; i.e., in a sex-positive progression towards what D. H. Lawrence would call “going to the dark gods.” These can be announced readily by the profanity of a simple theatrical gesture; e.g., a nun’s habit juxtaposed with the powerful unveiling of a shock of dark, curly public hair under her lifted skirt (which we whores weaponize during the paradox instead of simply taking it for granted, like our abusers do).

(artist: Milo Manara)

Moreover, this formulaic loss of control happens in increasingly queer ways that abjure heteronormative dimorphism, the latter usually canonical rape fantasies penned by straight white women for straight white women; i.e., inclusive survival sex work camped through a traditionally female position: the Radcliffean princess’ survival leading to their rewarding with a “safe home” or fairytale castle where they’re still expected to perform “wifely duties.” Called the Great Enchantress, Radcliffe weaved a powerful and effective spell, and it didn’t come from nowhere[1]. The challenging of these deeper systemic tropes involves queer discourse from a position historically of male to privilege—a camping of the canon (re: Broadmoor) that transgressively undermines amatonormativity in ways that female authors, through white and straight, historically would have been denied: sex with demons, sacrilege! Pussy dregs wrecking monk daddy’s home!

Simply put, Radcliffe was born thus placed into a position of self-deception, requiring a deceiver to deceive, thus free her of her sanctimonious, ultimately settler-colonial falsehoods; i.e., our doing so happening for the betterment of all peoples she saw as “black”: advocacy for a holistic, universal oppressed through forbidden knowledge and power as something experienced by men recognized as Satanic for refusing to perform their own heteronormative duties (not to exclude or take anything away from witches, their erect phallic brooms, and the monstrous-feminine at large, of course. In the interest of historical progress, though, I want to focus on the iconoclastic nature of queer men during the classic Neo-Gothic; re: Scott aping Lewis as a straight man partially canonizing a gay iconoclast with his own villain, David the Android, and his creations in Covenant).

While this sympathy for the Devil and its anisotropic reversal of state power mid-tension brings us closer to the xenomorph of Scott’s Alien and Matthew Lewis’s campiness vis-à-vis The Monk, the tamer and boxed-in Gothic fantasies of women like Ann Radcliffe still remain a fundamental part of the equation: fumbling around in the moody dark towards forms of agency through these calculated-risk fantasies that men like Ridley Scott would build upon with their own damsels, detectives and sex demons; re: employing and camping the twist (the saboteur and the stowaway) not just with Alien, mind you, but Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, inspired decades later by the iconoclastic, Satanic reverence Mary Shelley (a girl in a Gothic “all boys club”) had already made famous for 150+ years, in 1979.

And, in turn, Scott would help perpetuate the seafaring queerness/female rage (and superstition) that male explorers would have been allowed to endure and express, regularly codifying those variables in his own work or sponsoring it in others’ (e.g., The Terror, exhibit 48d2): releasing demons per the abjection process as something to reverse with perverted, even-painful glee! “A …small …Mexican… chihuahua!” to “catch an idea,” as David Lynch puts it, and be “a seed for something” (cosmavoid’s “David Lynch Being a Madman for a Relentless 8 Minutes and 30 Seconds,” 2021). But also “baby wants to fuck!” They can’t all be winners!

To it, dreams weren’t just the playgrounds of Freud, Nordic skalds, and Gothic novelists, past and present, code-switching in duality during liminal expression; they speak to all manner of secret children, incest, murder and collective shame, The Mysterious Mother onwards; re (from Volume One):

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate (source).

Eat your heart out, Mary Shelley (or other organs)! “Tremendous indigestion! Where’re the Tums?”

Such things poetically present as “awful”; i.e., for a demon’s victims, while those of us watching are granted maximum relief (the hangman’s picnic): killing the clergyman, soldier or anyone else we oppressed don’t like! Scott’s David is our dark wishmaster making our darkest revenge fantasies come true (as much as a straight man can)! Imagine the deus ex machina but in reverse (as Lewis did, ripping Ambrosio apart) and you have the right idea. It’s literally strict BDSM gallows’ humor (with those holding the noose having more privilege usually than those yoked by it).

Perhaps Scott wasn’t wholly on board with Cameron’s ideas of conquest, after all. Yes, his Covenant nods to Aliens are deliberate, but only so he can dissect the idea of military optimism by indulgently castrating it through Neo-Gothic gloom and doom saying, “keep the fuck out, Whitey!” (whose own investigating of rape always leads to more rape). It’s not always postcolonial in a constructive sense, but it does deconstruct the Radcliffean Amazon during the Promethean Quest/Cartesian step-and-fetch-it rather happily (similar to Said taking Austen to task during Culture and Imperialism, but even meaner than that or Dacre having Victoria slice Lila to pieces). Eh, I’ll take it!

We’ll work backwards (or rather, have worked backwards to arrive at where we currently are); i.e., by highlighting a couple basic points about forbidden sight, then The Terror before examining the xenomorph and its maker in Scott’s former and latter-day work, ultimately ending on Radcliffe and Lewis as competing schools of thought in centuries worth of queer discourse that Scott’s Covenant added to. As such, the direction we go un doesn’t matter too much because it isn’t entirely linear to begin with; i.e., oppositional praxis makes the conflict more a linguo-material game of tug-o’-war that invites different people to join representing different positions that are often at odds within the same dialogic!

Within this struggle, Radcliffe’s demonic trifecta can yield a variety of material outcomes; i.e., some yielding neoconservative, fascist flavors to famous monsters that women relate in opposition towards (such as Ripley versus the xenomorph) but also personify as embodiments thereof during oppositional praxis; re: with a BDSM flavor (exhibit 48d1/2, and 49): revenge as a Jacobean “dish” best served cold (the puns are endless)!

(exhibit 48d1: Artist: Tigrsasha. Nuns aren’t simply demons, damsels or detectives; Pygmalions often control them like puppets through the interminable genesis of an ideal submissive/sacred “almost holy” whore [the white woman/Gothic Radcliffean heroine as the sacred and exclusive victim]. All the same, feminine agency can be conveyed in cis or queer circles alike; i.e., as cathartic, establishing a sense of Galatea-esque revenge through the trope of the lesbian/ace/curious female detective as virgin-/whore-like on the surface of the same image; e.g., Elvira, Mistress of the Dark [exhibit 12].)

As part of this conversation, the archetype of female detectives serving as Gothic heroines has gradually evolved from passive, to active, to self-defensive escape, to self-“defensive”/pre-emptive attack, to back around again (exhibit 49). While canonical attempts at mastery and survival happen through a self-contained series of violent clichés that lack satire or the critical power necessary to transform the status quo beyond war and traditional gender roles, iconoclastic ones make the pastiche perceptive and sexy in “slutty” language (re: exhibit 48d1, above).

Such whores and their revenge promote a diegetic, composite desire to see what is omitted—but also a metatextual, creative curiosity, joy and playfulness to look upon the reimagined, barbaric past and create it with just enough variation to make it your own, try something new, and maybe, just maybe communicate something on the surface of the montage “that normally lurks beneath”; re: Scott summoning “Radcliffe” to dismantle and inject her pieces into a larger genderqueer being. Viewed as a collage, as we have shown, such a concept presents its answer quite neatly. But a visual imagination was generally employed by writers playing around with similar Frankensteinian concepts hundreds of years ago into the present state of affairs: how to show the “past,” often in seemingly superficial ways that open up the mind adjacent to magical devices that have become increasingly scientific under a Protestant status quo. Again, this ties to Segewick’s idea of “the character in the veil”: a “shallow pattern” literally on the surface of paper or a screen (or glass) that can evoke things much deeper across a Radcliffean composite that spans space and time (exhibit 48d1/49).

For our purposes, this deeper pattern is historically “hidden” by the material limitations of single images, or even collages. As I shall demonstrate in just a moment, the pattern must be reassembled by queer-leaning iconoclasts like us looking at older forms of camp like Ridley Scott (who were themselves inspired by powerful women and gay men); i.e., as reexplained by a Gothic Communist (me) interpreting larger patterns across time and space, but also psychosexually pornographic art/violence as a series of chronotopes—not to pass over in collage, alone, but through in a cryptomimetic chain: to view from an unusual, non-heteronormative perspective, thereby noting Scott’s odd experiments in ways we can salvage.

In doing so, we’re not just borrowing pieces of him for our revenge, but Radcliffe’s reanimated cadaver as Scott rendered her asunder and made back into his xenomorph from Cameron’s (a kind of Ship of Theseus, at this point)! In turn, Capitalism’s visual effect on the Gothic imagination can easily be revealed by critiquing its canonical elements along these hermeneutic routes; i.e., in a holistic patchwork that opens the mind to forbidden sight as occupied by opposing forces fighting over the same basic devices: an insectoid/biomechanical gargoyle or hellhound patrolling the fungal underworld, but also a dog with a bone—us gnawing on our foes (or vice versa)!

(artist: Clubhouse Statues)

Forbidden sight isn’t just the Numinous, then; i.e., “look at the giant horrible thing and your face melts off.” It’s often compelled ignorance through Gothic tropes used by the willingly ignorant, or a determined/anxious refusal to look when supplied subversive alternatives with transgressive potential versus nascent and undeveloped canon (and its killer babies reflecting the Pavlovian conditioning at work; e.g., David’s Neomorphs, above); i.e., a refusal to behold things one fears might corrupt their “pure” moral character/social standing as part of a larger Gothic canon: the paradox of chasing shadows you both want and don’t want to see!

While older writers like Radcliffe, then, tried to rediscover the past as something to detect and learn from by chasing it down, they also armored themselves and their virtue in sexist ways that—as we shall examine with Scott’s sexist David (versus Victor’s sexist Adam)—left behind “old,” derelict pathways whose unreliable sights into the reimagined past still yield various surprises; re: the castle as something to detect hidden factors inside according to imperiled detectives fumbling around in the dark. This partly happens from struggling with the cultural values they brought with them while blazing their own trails, which have since been taken much further than Radcliffe could have/would have dared in her own Gothic constructions; i.e., from Scott to us and then beyond.

For example, Scott’s funding of The Terror offers one such expedition into the imaginary past; i.e., one coming from a predominantly male perspective not unlike Matthew Lewis two centuries ago: “sacrifice” and extramarital/non-nuclear dark sex having a “bestial” element that is both ethnocentric, but trying to see the Indigenous population as not harming anyone, while still frankly alienizing them (the show’s monster is Scott having revenge for them, too, though in that case, the postcolonial elements aren’t clouded by a fascist character):

(exhibit 48d2: Artist, top-left and -right: IRN. The Yeti or snow monster is, in postcolonial culture, something to deify as an aspect of revenge, but also of the dying land invaded by unnatural, manmade Western forces; e.g., The Terror and its numerous, bourgeois cruelties [which I lovingly catalogue in my review of the show] harming the boyish white explorers; i.e., within the exploited land, similar to Scott’s seafaring-in-space, Neo-Gothic revival, Alien [a semi-postcolonial appeal to Westerners/white Indians through an adventuresome ghost of the counterfeit]. The Inuit monster, Tuunbaq, bears some resemblance to the Greenlandic “tupilaq” [top-middle and bottom]. Charlotte Price Persson of Science Nordic writes,

It is not every day that you come across a magic animal carved from the bones of children and animals, which is brought to life through magical songs and given power by sucking on the manufacturer’s sexual organs. On top of that, it has but one mission in life: to kill its creator’s enemies. […] The tupilaq was a magic animal, created through witchcraft, which everyone could use if you followed the correct instructions and learnt to master magic, says Lange. It was witchcraft, but it was not restricted to people with shamanic powers. / To make a tupilaq, you had to collect parts from different animals, bones from both animals and people—preferably from a child. It was also a good idea to add something that had a connection to the person who you wanted to inflict disaster on [source]. 

So does Persson catalog dead/endangered Indigenous cultures similar to the Egyptologists of the post-Napoleonic Wars; i.e., one whose subsequent disaster/fascination with the imaginary past being what Percy Shelley spoke of in “Ozymandias” and Mary Shelley revived in Frankenstein with Victor and the Creature, both 1818, and which Scott’s own xenoglossia speaks [more mutedly] with Giger’s psychosexual, demon-BDSM “xenomorph” [though it wasn’t called that until Aliens].

In essence, Tuunbaq’s “meat and spells” is similar to the xenomorph, speaking to a gargoyle/golem of revenge not unlike Victor’s Creature, but made in defense of the land by natural magics versus scientific prowess, xenophobia and Imperial decree; i.e., exploration and genocide as righteous, God-given and pre-determined against undeserving native inhabitants. Channeling Mary Shelley’s chilly view of nature through a mythical Mount Blanc, there is no loving paternal God in the desolate north; there is “just dead men and living men” punished by blind faith, but also shitty early corporate practices. The titantic pressure and fires of industry consume working seamen like fuel, but also make them incredibly stupid; i.e., faced with the untame wilderness, they break everything in sight and break down themselves in the face of something that isn’t their Christian god: an older and unwelcoming Numinous they’re questing to tame and claim the fire thereof.

This callow fragility scrutinizes queerness more broadly—either as executed between two or more men engaged in regular homosocial ties [the comely gossip, Jobson, and his staunch “darling,” Captain Francis Crozier ] and shamed homosexual activities on “their” boats actually owned by England; or embodied by monsters out on the ice. As a queer spirit of revenge, both Tuunbaq and the tupilaq consume the essence of men through sexual [and other bodily] fluids via sodomic union; re: not unlike a “vampire” eating sanguine, humors or the soul [with Tuunbaq’s inflicted wounds on the men removing “entries” from the “diaries” of their minds; i.e., the vengeful death of their memories and culture, wiping Hamlet’s commonplace book clean]. It is a parasitic relationship [versus mana and the Māori’s holistic transference of life force, for example]: a reckoning or restoration of balance/reparations and restitution, mid-land-back before it is taken but told after colonization has occurred [and after Crozier defects].

To this, the show’s gay Irish scapegoat/vice character, Mr. Hickey, shares a curious bond with the monster, one established through ritualized violence [the shamans cut out their tongues to speak to it; so does he]. Indeed, violence and sexuality often go hand-in-hand in queer discourse, especially before the Internet Age but also in hauntologies that predate the Internet being shown on the Internet; e.g., the homosexual man forced into darkness, but also becoming a mutinous, repressed being of psychosexual violence synonymously tied to rudimentary/coercive BDSM practices, medieval contrition/flagellation, male seafaring and strange lands; i.e., curious precursors to Mr. Hickey’s complex, alienated pathology such as Dracula and Moby Dick [“The Serious Functions of Melville’s Phallic Jokes,” 1961] but also Howard from The Lighthouse [2019].

As Irene Nudd from Gayly Dreadful writes in “The Lighthouse: You Can’t Hide From Your Gayness” [2020]:

Howard’s intense rage mirrors the violent masturbation that aligns with common toxic male sexual expression. To put it simply, when Howard beats the seagull, it’s a metaphor for beating his meat. The metaphor extends further since the seagull has one eye, and Howard’s vision of Wake’s former assistant also has one eye. Based on this connection, Howard is engaging in gay sex with the man that worked on the island before him. Not only will this solidify the curse that Wake warned Howard about, but it is a portent of the inevitable insanity that will befall him due to isolation and abundance of toxic masculinity. When Howard tries to fight against nature (human sexuality and homosexuality), nature shows him that repressing his sexual urges can have deadly consequences [source]. 

Beyond Freudian/Jungian imagery and [frankly homophobic and sexist, ethnocentric] metaphors, the oft-homoerotic nautical symbolism—whether overt [the lighthouse is a penis] or subtle/vague [the ocean is “female”]—ties to repressed anxieties about hidden abuses stemming from unequal material conditions during capital’s business-as-usual sending ambiguously gay white men to colonize worlds the elite/workers both feared: in a time before heteronormativity had crystalized to nearly the extent it has, now, but also lacking the queer diction we currently take for granted [re: Lewis, Broadmoor].

In The Terror this plays out in several ways, generally involving BDSM, cannibalism, magic and revenge. On board the ship, Hickey’s own queerness is sadistically punished by the ship’s men-in-command—a kind of reactive abuse to his own gay mutineer’s treachery as made by the state’s criminogenic conditions before he climbed on board.

 In short, he’s the queer-coded bad servant, and punished via an assimilated taskmaster aping Cromwell’s racist practices unto the Irish; i.e., for which Crozier and Hickey are both trying to escape. To that, Crozier—pointedly denied marriage into a family of “good [English] standing” by his superior—is sent by the very woman he loves to look after the very man [her father] who denied Crozier any chance at a better in-group life; i.e., because “of where he comes from”; re: punishing Crozier for being Irish, but also for selling said Irish out per the English settler-colonial model that forces him to forever choose. Choose he does, babysitting the elite’s chosen dumbass—the leader of the exhibition—who is subsequently babied into old age: dumb beyond measure but also cruel and self-righteous, to boot! Watching him die is a treat [and Indigenous act of revenge written by white men]!

Punished by the “good” Irishman as punching down out of revenge against the English, Mr. Hickey returns the favor many times over when he vengefully chains the last survivors—including the captain and his soldiers—to a lifeboat and summons the monster straight to them: to face Tuunbaq and their own hand in things [a demonic sacrifice/offering to a dark god Mr. Hickey sees falsely in himself—a Byronic man-in-black who also kills Indigenous people to have revenge against the white men who wronged him]: “show me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.” Hickey’s a man-eater!

Keeping with Moby Dick and the West eating its own workers and the planet’s wildlife in furtherance of the Cartesian mode of cartography and progress, it’s an awful cycle of abuse; i.e., one where criminogenic conditions lead abuse victims to conflate harmful pain with non-harmful pain/mutually consensual physical pleasure. Mr. Hickey becomes fluent and well-equipped to assume the position of ultimate deceiver/misleader regarding his abusive/abused crew when predictable tragedy befalls all of them; i.e., he triggers and does what Mr. Hickey does as conditioned unto him: by the socio-material conditions around him before, during and after the exhibition, itself a testimony to abandonment, sacrifice and revenge in Jacobean fashion [everyone dies, Hamlet-style].

In other words, the ensuing misery didn’t start with Mr. Hickey, who is merely a symptom of a larger problem, alongside Crozier and the others: Capitalism. Its atrocities are gilded over by the self-aggrandizing memoirs of “brave” English captains, gentry and the class system. Under this gaudy mirage, Hickey is both Irish and queer but also pinned under another Irishman’s thrall. His assigned superior, Captain Crozier, orders him whipped “as a boy” [on the ass, above] for criminal behaviors against an English expedition, including “dirtiness” as a slight against an overtly Protestant Discovery Service. Surviving the trauma committed against him by another Irishman passing the blame back and forth, Mr. Hickey both resents and admires the monster out on the ice; i.e., seeing it as a paganized cross between animal and human that he erroneously attempts to commune with through shared struggle: “There are holy things before us.”

Almost. Faced with it, and in true abject fashion, both are alienated from each other and—in Radcliffean fashion—destroyed once the Black Veil is yanked aside; i.e., symbolizing a tragic death of tradition and Indigenous memory by a tokenized minority pushed to madness and betrayal of nature in the process [assimilation is poor stewardship]. Hickey’s brief [Icarian] rise and fall remains a forgotten parallel to Jeronimus Cornelisz’ pre-fascist prelude to 20th century horrors during a sociopathic and bloody mutiny of the Batavia in 1629 [Unknown5’s “The Shipwreck That Became a Living Nightmare,” 2023].

Nearly two centuries afterwards, such stories were already being painted by Théodore Géricault’s 1816 “Raft of the Medusa” written in the Shelley’s aforementioned 1818 Frankenstein and “Ozymandias”; i.e., as progressing onto Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym [1838] towards the events between 1845-48 Scott’s Terror spoke of, onto Melville’s Moby Dick [1851] followed by Stoker, Conrad and Lovecraft in the 1890s and 1930s: viewing such things as queer Numinous exports. In doing so, they were effectively blaming the dark whore, Medusa, for the state and its proponent’s ignorant worldview shivered about by Scott’s astronoetic matelotage in 2012 and 2017 with Prometheus and Covenant—similar stories about wealthy Englishmen sailing into the final frontier to quest for the Numinous, thus make a deal with the dark gods [who promptly take revenge, having none of what he’s selling them; re: they cannibalize him, which Scott’s Prometheus treats as fascist crossdress through land-back argument].

Meanwhile, the titular ship is classified in the classic sailor sense: as female. Both it and the void beyond its safety are “motherly” but in differing ways; i.e., as the givers and takers of life for these childlike boys, consigned to a lonely tomb together on the other side of an angry, vengeful world. Capitalism put them there; re: to exploit nature by pitting them against each other as marooned orphans. Abandoned and confused, they march to death out in the waste, slowly starving to death by their damned inability to bond with the land; i.e., every step is attrition/contrition, one where mutinous cannibalism—already unsustainable, but nevertheless a custom of the sea [re: one that inspired Melville’s Moby Dick after the whale breaks the ship’s rudder]—whose “death lottery” [an eco-fascist tendency] merely delays the inevitable, should capital carry on.

Faced with the endless lies of empire—and the death of his wards and unwanted nemesis—Captain Crozier altogether abandons his former life and memories/dreams of a welcoming England [and pastoral bride]. For him, the Frozen North is no longer a route or site of plunder but a purgatorial home; i.e., a fresh start in the twilight years of his life: the penance not of a white savior but a white penitent safeguarding the dwindling native populations giving him sanctuary.)

Even when not strictly “his own,” Scott’s patronage of Gothic terrors are as different from Radcliffe’s own as Lewis’s were (despite all of them basically talking about the same thing: rape and xenophobia). As a consequence of this continued difference in privilege between men and women, older pathways process and convey information in outdated, alien ways that leave room for improvement but also supply precious opportunities to learn about the past in semi-ignorant or accommodated forms—i.e., Radcliffe didn’t just see the world around her through superstitious, fearful artifacts and codifying tropes; she arbitrarily condemned “bad” emotions like fear (e.g., “useless sorrow”) while respecting the societal fact that suspicion, anxiety or stress were classified as “hysterical” by Patriarchal authorities towards women (or beings forced to identify as women) “for their own good.” Such dialogs happened according to material possessions, but also ways of thinking about or with them that, in today’s day and age, simply don’t exist in quite the same shape and form. They’re even more radical.

(source: Navi Gavi)

These aren’t just materials to write on the surface of—or with Blake, using his “corroding fires[2]“; i.e., acids to etch into printing plates—nor are they merely forbidden sight as something to look at in a literal sense. Instead, they are a kind of forgotten or lost sight/darkness visible gleaned through Miltonian repetition and exposure; re: involving outmoded Satanic ideas as something to express in dated campy forms: not just poetry or miracles, but Galvanism in Frankenstein‘s case. Hers was a precocious, atypical approach to gendered literature from a woman whose marriage to Percy Shelley definitely rubbed off on her (and whose fiction, post-Frankenstein, would continue blazing a postcapitalist trail; e.g., The Last Man). To that, the “future” of Mary Shelley’s moment is not our own past; i.e., Galvanism the way she envisioned never came to be, but instead the horrors of Capitalism evolved into something beyond what Shelley could entirely imagine that connects just, as well, to her “Modern Prometheus” in hindsight, vis-à-vis Ridley Scott’s Gothic matelotage.

Queerness-as-identity defines through the struggle of constantly reclaimed language; i.e., identifying with struggle as an ontological statement bearing Gothic elements: what we are as a means of shaking things up! The hidden truth of this grander struggle in terms of what is being worked with, understood and revealed through derelict forms—while often taken for granted, mid-disguise—can actually become clear-as-day to those who experiment and put in the time and the work; i.e., figuring out ways to express ourselves and our identifies in cryptonymic opposition to the status quo as automatically assigning them for us by telling us what we are, mid-oppression. So do we become criminals in our own hearts (re: Zeuhl, who tried to escape such things); i.e., dressed up in Gothic language where we unknowingly fawn to our oppressors and apologize for/to them regarding our own existence as “abnormal” (what Hannah Gadsby describes in Nanette, 2018, as the existence of gendered tension: teaching one side to feel shame and the other to openly hate them for being different). Gleaning this context takes brainpower, creativity and perseverance, but also having a means and exposure that aren’t always a given/aren’t always available to those living in Pygmalion’s Shadow.

For example, either variable can be (and has) inverted; i.e., certain authors, like Lovecraft and his cosmic nihilism, were virtually unknown in their day (yet practiced spiritually by older bigotries breeding inside homegrown American fascism), but have since been littered everywhere in posthumous fame. Likewise, Radcliffe—though renowned for her fiction while alive—has gone on to become rather obscured in a wider circuit over which her shadow looms like one of those Black Veils she liked so much; re: was someone who I, as a self-professed and lifelong horror fan, didn’t know existed until I went to grad school overseas! I knew her likenesses, but not the woman herself as scatted all about the land of my birth in curious doubles; e.g., Michigan being the birthplace of Raimi’s Evil Dead movies and their Numinous suggestions.

As we shall see in just a moment, Scott critiqued the Radcliffean school of thought by drawing tremendous inspiration from women like Shelley but also Radcliffe, herself. In turn, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and men like Mary Shelley’s husband (such as Lewis) drew from the same shared well as Scott: a “Satanic,” Miltonian thought process they improved on after Milton’s death, but also Radcliffe’s and Shelley’s; i.e., one that continues, into the 21st century and beyond, allowing for free discourse to flow between gender and sexuality as anti-capitalist ventures with the correct shove; i.e., one performed under Capitalism as having changed considerably since Paradise Lost and Frankenstein, meaning Thatcher’s neoliberalism as nonetheless motivating Scott to seek revenge on Radcliffe nearly two centuries after she kicked the bucket (dying in 1823 to actually outlive Jane Austen and Lewis, who died in 1817 and 1818, respectively)!

It goes to show that artistic repetition is not rote, stiff memorization, but loose, flexible and fluid, which leads to the ultimate objective of the Humanities: to continuously reflect, reexamine and ruminate on the past; e.g., its language and devices, as well as the associate “intelligent” or useful emotions with which to master the naturally ambiguous qualities of language that unnatural Enlightenment dogma tries to binarize into a kind of order for profit (thus rape).

Gothic Communism abjures this order during the whore’s revenge; i.e., doing so in favor of a return to older and formerly superstitious and “medieval” forms of thinking whose subsequent chaos is updated to fit the present: informed, wise and communal—freed and accompanied by the Wisdom of the Ancients to avoid the past repeating itself; e.g., the ghost, zombie, vampire or werewolf as “made wise” by constant application with real-world materials, but made friendly in relation to their emancipatory purpose in a Gothic-Communist sense; re: Radcliffe’s spectre haunting not just Scott, but a great many artists torn between her and Medusa (such as Lady Dimitrescu, below). They become cultural mascots tied to an emotionally intelligent collective that rejects Capitalism in favor of something better than it, but still has a need of telling friend from foe; i.e., their needs personified by the personas of monster pastiche:

(exhibit 49: Artist, top-left: Heiko Kuru; top-middle: Monori Rogue; top-right: Logan Cure; middle: Flou; bottom-right: source; bottom-left: Jan Rockitnik. Lady Dimitrescu, as remade many times in marginally differing ways; i.e., some more “phallic” than others, but having a Radcliffean garb similar to Lewis’ Prioress/Bleeding Nun haunting her heroines and vice versa. From Scott onwards, this adoption runs the risk of “brandishing knives” the way that sexist men or TERFs like Radcliffe do, meaning a threat of rape performed “in-reverse” by phallic women against marginalized targets; i.e., “mother vampires” as a kind of “TERF Medusa/Amazon” to be subjugated during regressive Amazonomachia. However, the basic image remains ambivalent in ways that can yield sex-positive details under dialectical-material scrutiny and holistic, proletarian praxis: a “strict” whore to summon/a zombie “Radcliffe” that isn’t the sexist, bigoted original!)

Gained through deliberately subversive and increasingly sex-positive repetition haunted by generational/systemic harm, such forbidden sight ties not just to obscure or mysterious academic theories gleaned from examining these “ancient” creations; it ties to the creations being made, or otherwise related to older ways of interacting with the world through creation—specifically through interpretive, ontological art forms like Gothic novels that have slowly started to vanish (the ghost of the counterfeit as emptied of its queer/Satanic freight, a mere box of Boo Berry cereal instead of Otto’s Numinous). Seen through demons wrought with opposing forces, older forms of “seeing” involve blending various concepts back together and in ways that might seem alien to the modern world, yet become something to regard with fascination and horror again; re: as an attractive venue to return to, mid-revenge, Zombie Radcliffe having become like Medusa as someone to spank!

For the iconoclast, “looking” can become a sixth sense or mind’s eye that melds with the alien whore’s chimeric body as hyphenated art/porn; i.e., in Satanic media as a broader Gothic tradition dating back to Milton that men, women and queer people have all used, past and present, since Milton’s exit and left-behind poetries were found again; re: the xenomorph as emblematic to queer discourse, Frankenstein onwards, and a deeply intellectual mode that continues to evolve and expand in opposition to Capitalism and its reactionary proponents’ staunchly anti-intellectual tendencies; e.g., Radcliffe being as dumb as she was educated, but curious for things she was admittedly alienated from. The abyss looks into us and vice versa, Scott giving Radcliffe the chance to say hello from Hell!

The xenomorph, then, represents a poetic, ontological act of seeing with things other than the eyes, or with something where eyes should be but something… else is—e.g., a penis or a mouth, like the cyclops (which, in Greek myth, was a seer doomed with foresight speaking through sight), or a deliberate combining of the animate and the inanimate into a single composite; re: a medieval concept intimated by Giger’s biomechanical gargoyle through linguistic devices that aren’t taught anymore and were generally discouraged to begin with. These include the metaphor as a poetic device (the poet classically being a practitioner of idiosyncratic thought that, more often than not, challenges established ways of existing canonically under Capitalism); e.g., Medusa wanting hugs from life and giving hugs (of death) back! Life and death become one again, speaking through zombies of which Radcliffe is just another corpse—one Scott has dug up for fun!

Through demonic poetics, the xenomorph operates as a monstrous pun to poetically describe the self as something “alien” to the status quo in language they can at least partially understand: revenge; i.e., the Capitalist framework of monster/poster pastiche, whereupon the deeper context with queer potential can be gleaned by those reliably drawn to its abandonment. Simply put, it’s a trap of sorts to “bait” potential converts with, hooking them with and reeling them in while dressed up as “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll” (or John Denver songs); i.e., appreciative-to-appropriative forms of rebellion (a concept we’ll return to in Volume Three) that, like a vice character, gets their time to gnash their teeth/have their revenge before being yanked offstage just as quickly (an oracle to harvest and abject)!

This attempt to voice the unspeakable isn’t without practical challenges. For example, the undead “blind rage” of the demonic xenomorph (which emulates the uphill struggle of rising queer discourse in the late 1700s, but also oppressed queer discourse centuries later intersecting with other groups) is frequently drained by centrist rhetoric of its genuine transformative or revolutionary powers (of Gothic horror and terror). That is, its alien essence was tokenistically sapped by being “just a bug” in the sequels to Alien—jump-started by James Cameron’s neoliberal war pastiche, Aliens, treating legitimate revolutionaries like moving targets to exterminate. Scott does the opposite, killing so many human characters in Covenant that it’s frankly hard to keep track. Forget Radcliffe; he’s slaying Yanks for fun!

As mentioned in Volume One, Cameron specifically treated his aliens as spiritual successors to the “pseudoarachnids” from Starship Troopers, whose own author saw Chinese Communists as needing to be nuked from orbit(!). To alienate them was to show Asia as “older” than Capitalism; i.e., in a time when workers weren’t divided from their labor but also tended to be closer to nature and other forms of existence the state could raise false flags against; re: going beyond the binary-exclusive variants under Capitalism; re: Cameron’s queen being the Archaic Mother as a freshly abject neoliberal symbol for ancient, hermaphroditical, insect broodmother rage, extending itself through inhuman avatars of Mother Nature’s dark whorish revenge. Scott is camping them by killing Ripley and, in effect, Radcliffe’s ghost, David as much the Queen Ripley killed having nature’s revenge through retroactive abortion!

Through canonical persecution, Communism is consistently framed as alien to commerce, Modernity and Western values; i.e., the abjection process treating the entire mentality as an ideological, genderqueer threat that the state would pounce on and collectively punish—mass abjection, in other words. Under this cruel modern system, trans, intersex and non-binary people become closer to the past while only wanting to fit in; Capitalism will treat them as abject money-makers, but also social outcasts and automatic targets of state-sanctioned violence pimped, policed, hunted and killed by its monstrous human soldiers (who feel lonely and isolated in reverse): our aforementioned gorgons, but also madwomen in the attic and feral animal-girls or refugee-fugitive canon-fodder (exhibit 50a1, next page).

Demons, as we’ll continue to examine in this chapter and the next, tend to comment on the chattelization of nature in sexualized, dimorphic gender roles. Just as chattel animals are manmade, so are demons and other egregores for or against the status quo; i.e., as something that organizes and divides nature-as-alien for profit. Sex Positivity moves away from canonical exploitation of monstrous-feminine by making monsters that liberate, thus empower workers, through camp; re: allowing them to offer up new forms of past knowledge that comment on current abuse to have the whore’s revenge and deny the pimp theirs.

A common vector is the Promethean tale/Faustian bargain, which transforms the state into something beyond itself that can be destroyed to achieve: a better world, one where demons can live free of persecution, stereotypes and harm; i.e., those forced by the state to represent Western fears of outsider groups and stigma animals, while simultaneously embodying the spirit of radical, permanent change,  gender-non-conformity and worker solidarity mid-alienation, and ties to a deprivatized nature and scientific approach through unequal, forbidden exchange and desire: the xenomorph as the ultimate survivor of transphobia, token feminist vigilantism and canonical mad science. Presented by Scott as a form of radical rebellion, such demons exist in ways that challenge the established order as something to transgress against; i.e., in animalized, chimeric, drug-like language. This can be produced by a variety of sources, including popular legends and mainstream depictions without an obvious model:

(exhibit 50a1: Artist: top-left: Drew Struzan—in recalling capital’s historical-material poster and monster pastiche—is a famous artist known for his movie posters, hence dubbed “the man behind the poster”; top-middle: “Good Hunting” from Love, Death and Robots, 2019; top-right: source, “furries” being a liminal state of appropriating and appreciating the human-as-animal in ways that evoke lost, hidden, or unlocked animal senses—a “call of the wild”; bottom-left: Zdzisław Beksiński; bottom-middle: source; bottom-right: Werupz.)

This cryptomimesis is likewise something we can replicate in animalized forms beyond just Scott’s; i.e., during mutual consent as illustrated between artists and sex workers laboring in xenophilic concert:

(exhibit 50a2: Artist: In Case. The creation of a “furry”/werewolf is something that, like any egregore, can not only borrow from a variety of overlapping legends and oral traditions, but also camera angles. Just as cubism might try to capture all sides of an issue, iconoclastic monsters convey a reclaimed sense of agency to speak to repressed traumas felt through surviving aliens; i.e., reclaimed from heteronormative language abusing the same aesthetics to reverse abjection and terrify the middle class away from exploitation. At first glance, a canonical and iconoclastic werewolf might not look too different, for example; but the function of one like In Case’s iterations, above, stress body positivity in ways that allow for aliens of the past to exist and be celebrated for their current GNC bodies [a kind of “lunacy-in-the-flesh”]: a universally whorish liberation movement consciously identifying with animals, gentle paternal dominance, and praise through ludo-Gothic BDSM exercises utilizing werewolf fursonas as ironic “destroyer” theatrical agents.)

As an agent of chaos made by posthuman slaves to rebel against the colonial gaze of planet Earth into outer space, the xenomorph through Scott is liminal in every respect. Through the Gothic chronotopes that cryptonymically house its living remains—to the monster’s biomechanical form sewn with ontological strife, to the broader cultural attitudes it subverts according to Giger’s Gothic surrealism—the creature reifies demonic poiesis in literal terms while camping Radcliffe to death.

As something to create from “natural philosophy” by material means, the xenomorph’s mere existence demonstrates a chief conflict: god-like, monomorphic intersexuality and gender in opposition to the state’s control over them as coercively dimorphic; i.e., being shaped more by language as something to naturally absorb and internalize than by hierarchies that try to enforce language, thus sexuality and gender roles. While the status quo is hierarchical, its alienation of society from a time before the Enlightenment and its binarized, colonial worldview can be subverted through reverse abjection. Removed from an abject position, the xenomorph ceases to be sex-coercive at all; it’s still an insect demon exacting revenge through pain, but a harmless variation of the “beautiful butterfly” that turns into its future self through a chaotic, ancient process conveyed through abandonment inside the modern world (such dereliction alluding not just to Prometheus or Faust, nor Psyche and Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” but also trans people and older ways of existing that predate Western Civilization yet continue to exist and embrace demonic poetics in a hauntological sense; exhibit 50b).

Like the vampire, the xenomorph is a complicated monstrous figure, one that demonstrates—through its own demonic persecution—the class interests of the middlemen and women of capital, but especially white, cis-het women and queer people more broadly as socio-materially at odds since Lewis and Radcliffe. Since those authors, white women historically have benefitted from Patriarchy through their preferential mistreatment as white and straight, all while demonizing queerness through the xenomorph as “bandit”; i.e., a universalized symbol of dark rape, but also a destruction, or transformative “death,” of the status quo through its demonic ability to change shape: the WASP-y myopia coming from an instructed and inherited inability to imagine the trans point of view save as “end of the world” per Capitalist Realism, consequently devolving into marginalized in-fighting during tokenized class, cultural and racial division and warfare.

This kind of TERF posturing would only reach growing levels of visibility after the late 1970s, with Alien‘s burgeoning queerness mirroring a “rape threat” to second wave feminism’s moderate stances through alarm-bell reactionary texts released the same year, in 1979; re: The Transsexual Empire, the “woman with a penis” transphobic argument whose respectability politics—i.e., the viewing of the penis as a universal symbol of rape—not only haunts feminism and queer studies to this day but treats “women” and “penis” as mutually exclusive through a radical form of reactionary violence towards their own suffering that Radcliffe hinted at by abjecting Lewis: the Man Box/”prison sex” phenomenon, which treats the rape fantasies of white, cis-het women as incompatible/unable to co-exist with trans people as a TERF scapegoat for “their own” genocidal behavior (which ironically is actually carried out by TERFs defending masculinity-in-crisis by acting as sexist men do—with violence towards marginalized people different from themselves).

Reverse-abjecting Western phobias challenges the canonical assignment of the xenomorph as a parasitoid rapist, the idea largely a Patriarchal fear experienced by straight men and women. This experience is canonically inverted. Men fear rape in the abstract, through a ritual of displaced power exchange; i.e., the pre-civilized past as “female,” thus non-Patriarchal, disguising the embarrassing (to them) surrender of power to an unknown quandary as queerly monstrous and feminine; e.g., a transphobic fear collectively assigned to trans people in Silence of the Lambs (1991) through a criminal bastardization of the insect—namely the moth—as an embodiment of dangerous transformation towards a monstrous-feminine.

Women, on the other hand, live in fear of actual rape by cis-het men, who they guiltily associate with the xenomorph; i.e., as a kind of seditious persona who steals power from men, but also women (on par with the Ancient Athenians punishing women for identifying with the legendary Amazons as rebels); re: “men in women’s spaces.” Fascism feminism, though hauntological, comes from the past.

In either case, Giger’s monster traditionally grants a skewed “window” into Radcliffe’s imaginary past—one colored by present structures that dominate men and women differently. Once tortured, though, men turn into rapists as a common abuser role; women are raped as a normal experience while simultaneously fearing for their bodies and emotions as fundamentally different from mankind’s—i.e., for belonging to the ancient, inhuman past like a female spider or mantid conflated with alien BDSM. This functional difference allows women (or those treated like “women”; e.g., homosexual men) to use what they historically have—their emotions and their bodies, but also their capacity to survive and inflict pain through monstrous archetypes—to transform the Patriarchal nightmare by subverting its symbols and ritualized torture in sex-positive ways nonetheless painful in their sacrifices:

(exhibit 50b: Model and artist, top-middle: Itzel Sparrow and Persephone van der Waard; artist, left and right: Noe. In Gothic language, devilish torture and threats of rapacious, psychosexual violence towards angelic cuties tend to have a particular monstrous-feminine aesthetic associated with black leather/animal skin, but also madness as darkly hysterical and ancient, a kind of “slutty Numinous”; i.e., the womb-like space and its phallic queen, the xenomorph, as bio-mechanical but also, often enough, insectoid: the phallic woman/Archaic mother based off venomous stigma animals like the snake or the spider eating “grubs.” Recipients of their tenebrous, godly “torture” tend to be “pure,” white, and innocent, commenting on the literal black/white DARVO relationship of violence surrounding marriage and its symbols as something to profane by an inhumane animalistic anthromorph/pathologist mad scientist life cycle.

Whether black or white, the female/feminine form will not just be eroticized, but considered monstrous to status-quo men/tokens—something “of nature” to tame, thus showed to be inferior to male/token positions of authority but also fetishized as desirable by those seeking temporary reprieve from their expected social-sexual dominance/submission; re: virgin/whore syndrome. So does the sissy seek the poison-purple Medusa or Shelob-esque mommy dom/dark faggot to paralyze and “torture” him [or her, vis-à-vis Radcliffe] through a closeness to theatrical death loaded with Numinous bigoted “scripture”; i.e., the female/monstrous-feminine demon lover as verging on unironic harm being a rape claim to falsely make and profit off of, as Radcliffe did, but also Scott camping her!

To it, the monstrous-feminine isn’t just Numinous; it’s a walking hard kink, the Medusa’s bite worse than her bark and generally overshadowed by an air of hysteria/wondering womb and sodomy practices [demon resurrection] that elide erotic pleasure and harmful pain within a deceptive/false negotiator that lies, poisons, paralyzes and kills their prey [which they call “love-making” in jest, or perhaps not in jest]. This conflation of jouissance with genuine harm is carried across a variety of stereotypes; e.g., the snake/spider woman, torture-master and unstable/possessive “phallic” girlfriend with knives for fingers that plays with her food, but also rapes it while it cannot move, let alone resist; i.e., impregnating it with harmful, zombie-like notions of love as—is common with the Gothic and female/marginalized demons and their hellish courtly love—guided by psychosexual revenge showing the whore as fiendishly getting even:

 

The morphological approach to marginalized revenge within toxic love is determined by geopolitics and historical materialism. For example, in the West such legends are codified by the likes of Medusa’s cryptomimetic regeneration inside popular and enduring Neo-Gothic fictions/conventions, Radcliffe and Lewis onwards: 

• the Countess [Nazi, vampire bug mom] from Darkest Dungeon uses an “ovipositor” attack literally called “love letter.”
• The xenomorph [intersex dark god] not only impregnates their colonial victims, but changes shape to confuse said victims [like a molting spider or snake shedding its skin] and, imitating castration fantasies through demonic-animalistic routes, emulates the straight [male/female] phobia of a reverse sexual dimorphism as much as anything monomorphic; i.e., the female eats the male after but also during sex [re: death by cannibalistic Snu-Snu]! 

In the East, the Yokai legends merge with the above Western and anime tropes of the infamously violent tsundere: “Another well-known tsundere reaction is violence. When the character is set off, they will not hesitate to resort to physical abuse. Their love interest will be punched, slapped, and kicked for saying anything that even remotely embarrasses the tsundere [including love, it would seem]” [source: the Dere Types Wiki]. To this, Asami Yamazaki from Audition [1999] and her cryptomimetic double—AKI[3] from Street Fighter 6—paralyze and torture their male victims by stabbing them repeatedly as a magnum opus/apologia to “ultimate love”: the unironic execution and worship of harmful pain that, far from stopping when the “lady” [the man, in this case] doth protest too much, “goes all the way” [Jadis—a profound abuser, themselves—absolutely loved Yamazaki, cheering when she sliced off her victim’s foot and threw it against the window].

The ghost of the counterfeit, then, generally places the heteronormative observer within striking distance of something to be fascinated with and afraid of simultaneously—a hauntological eroticizing of a liminal colonial subject having dark revenge: the white bride, the black harlot, the virgin and the whore, the Athena and Medusa, the phallic woman and similar monstrous-feminine divisions; re: a weaponizing of the usual anal Amazon arguments to justify their continued oppression by Radcliffean investigators chasing bandits.

To it, trauma begets trauma, wherein the “flat affect” of the abused is uncanny/terrifyingly disconcerting to anyone who beholds it; i.e., beholding someone who only feels alive during the binding, torture and killing of a host [who generally must be deceived in some shape or form to take part]—or someone whose extreme trauma pushes them towards new things that speak to their past trauma: the call of the void as abuse-seeking patterns that have been beaten into us and which paradoxically we approach to try and find catharsis through calculated [or not-so-calculated due to comorbid/maladaptive emotional instability] risks; re: weird attracts weird.

In turn, this can manifest in wider national traumas inflicted at the hands of abusive groups: men, but also Americans against the Japanese, and various other intersections of national colonization and revenge. For us, it’s “get ‘im, girl!” Something to watch and cheer for while understanding its campy elements having cathartic potential, mid-torture. It’s also something to wear like a uniform; i.e., the mil spec and fetish fear of BDSM borrowed from a medievalized militarism, WW2 onwards:

[artist, top: Heavy Rubberette; bottom-left: Kay; bottom-right: Bassenji]

“Living leather” is, like latex [exhibit 60e1], ontologically imbued with a medievalized aesthetic through the phenomenology of performance: an experience of power and resistance as having “the look” of the animated golem, plague doctor, WW1 soldier/sawbones, suit of armor or some similar fetish that canonically threatens violence of a rapacious/demonic [thus vengeful and rapturous] sort. As it just so happens, this emulates the look of the black knight’s platemail, but also the dark insect’s weaponized carapace as deified for its pain-causing potential and Numinous, anthropomorphized affect.)

The subversion of unironic torture and rape isn’t divorced from Gothicized stories of revenge and bodily harm; re: Radcliffe was merely the opposite side of the coin as Lewis, and one that sought to cage him for her pleasure. However, whereas human avengers like Asami Yamazaki from Audition (exhibit 50b, first collage, yellow square) subvert harmful tortures by exacting them on classically male patriarchal victims (the avenger trope), the chief subversive quality of the xenophilic demon not the reversal of torture as an act of petty revenge; it’s sympathy for the devil as an obvious recipient of state persecution during a complicated, painful exchange leading to radical mental transformation: away from Capitalist Realism using heavy petting. Alien not only has an obvious demon, in this respect, but one that was canonically animalized; i.e., as a “universal rapist/giver of pain” that, through second wave feminism, at least partially constitutes a kind backwards revenge fantasy towards men as common rapists Radcliffe canonized; this includes trans women reclaiming the beast in ways Scott only tried to, four decades afterwards, with Covenant—i.e., us going further than he did.

In the process, our demonic torture/revenge smears constant Radcliffean (straight, white, English) female fears; e.g., of getting pregnant through rape (traumatic tokophobia) into a nebulous “inkblot.” When viewed, composite demons like the xenomorph also address the falling of those scarred by systemic trauma into abuse-seeking patterns; i.e., as structures that poetically tokenize, bounce and triangulate said abuse of said women at their victims through DARVO/obscurantism by Man-Box traitors making dark mirror halls; re: Radcliffe’s infernal concentric pattern evolving inside/outside itself concerning the repeated victimization of women (or beings forced to identify as women) through state-compelled fears of a chimeric monster that advances Patriarchal aims on either side of the equation (one that often has cis women demonizing trans women, white or non-white)!

To that, said monster is both a “phallic” woman, but also a male rapist out of the ancient, dangerous past as something that cis-people fear more broadly while ranking rape. Tied to insects and other stigma animals, the past becomes worthy not just of attack by these reactionary groups, but extreme prejudice: “Kill it with fire.” So do the usual persecutory languages (re: blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts) continue to thrive in said patterns.

In Alien, for example, xenophobic women/token parties exposed to the monster become two basic things: violent or victims. When the tables are turned and the “men in charge” become overpowered (so-called “emasculation” or “castration fears”), the survivor is a woman; i.e., one who weaponizes her emotions for the good of the in-group or out-group, depending on the dualistic configuration and flow of power during the sacrifice. For the proletarian Amazon/Medusa, either uses their roles within ludo-Gothic BDSM to have the whore’s revenge, not the pimp’s; i.e., to socio-materially challenge Patriarchal forces and deceptions while rejecting the invented myth “nature is other” (woman or otherwise)! It is alien, but becomes something to humanize through demonic abandonment, reverse abjection and worker revenge speaking to the canonical abjection process!

So when Ripley triumphs over the xenomorph, she—as a white, cis-het woman—combats a kind of inherited survivor’s guilt that, in the end, drains her to the point of a return to sleep: “Rise from sleep, death’s counterfeit, and look upon death itself!” Until her big nap that metamorphs Ripley’s grub-like self into the wasp warrior she becomes in Aliens (the entire tokenizing refrain blamed on the colonized, of course), our resident TERF enacts the hidden, colonial function of the spaceship; i.e., she armors herself in a knightly spacesuit, then shoots the “primordial” menace with a harpoon (a dated symbol of industry tied to 19th century whaling boats). The takeaway, here, isn’t that ancient, pre-Christian, androgynous demons are bad—at least not entirely. In fact, the xenophobia of a cosmic, “female” (male-in-disguise) rapist is actually somewhat dated by current standards—with trans people identifying with the monster as a totemic, misunderstood expression of unreproductive sex, intersexuality and gender-non-conforming transformation (whose profound xenophilia and BDSM we’ll keep exploring in the next section).

But also, it bears repeating that repressed trauma often manifests through Gothic cryptonymy using anachronistic, hauntological symbols of violence that hint at ongoing colonial atrocities (the ghost of the counterfeit); i.e., amid the Radcliffean comfort food as propaganda whose plurality of interpretations co-exist rather than strictly “cancel out.” Relayed through Gothic aesthetics, these “inkblots” can be interpreted different ways to have our aforementioned revenge. One interpretation is that, to protect her white woman’s body from rape, Ripley adopts the ancient rite of violence against an ancient colonial foe; and all the while, this is business-as-usual for the elite, who never have to brave these frontiers themselves (this trend of “personal responsibility” would be overblown by Cameron, seven years later)! Another is to eat Ripley alive in ways David very much does.

A foundational facet of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness, then, is asking “Well, what about this?” when new variables come to light and make Gothic more mature than Radcliffe was; but the result is only sex-positive if it fosters universally ethical, thus liberatory material outcomes when applied. While the cis-het audience of Alien wasn’t ready for that conversation in 1979, the discourse raised by Giger, Scott and company’s rape pastiche mirrors the challenging of second wave feminists by an emerging queer polity the very same year (re: The Transsexual Empire, 1979; but also the moderately transphobic “Call me Loretta” scene from Monty Python’s 1979 religious critique, The Life of Brian); fast forward to 2023, however, and trans people have readily and openly embraced the monster as one of their own—through Giger’s pastiche, but also its Gothic forebears and those who came after through the asexual, posthuman creations of Ridley Scott, post-1979; re: Prometheus and Covenant’s own fast-and-loose antiheroes enough to make Radcliffe turn in her grave (save that Scott dug her up with Shaw and Daniels; i.e., burying them alive to dig them up again).

Scott’s work was based on Giger’s portfolio; i.e., as a liminal evocation of medieval reflections on “Antiquity” placed in quotes, but also stories that came from the actual medieval period (or before it); re: what Radcliffe fantasized about, as a straight medievalist. In other words, to look on the dead monarch is to look on their Numinous, fallen bloodline but also the doubled impostor’s stretching backwards and forwards into infinite possibility!

(source: “How Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors Pushed Pop Art into the New Age,” 2018)

The xenomorph, then, is a tremendous enigma, both the elite doubling the spectres of Marx to protect itself and the voices of the damned come back to haunt “Caesar” inside a retro-future castle that is home to the dualistic entirety of the exchange—the chronotope as the protagonist, mise-en-abyme. This foundation isn’t my own, but stems from Audronė Raškauskienė, who writes in Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings (2009); re:

The castle, Bakhtin remarks, as a literary reminder of an ancestral or Gothic past of “dynastic primacy and transfer of heroic rights” is overlaid or criss-crossed with meanings from legend, fairy-tale, history, architecture, and an eighteenth-century aesthetizing discourse of the sublime. Montague Summers’s note that the real protagonist of the Gothic novel is the castle emphasizes a very special feature of that structure: in a sense, the 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.”

It should come as no surprise, though, that these thoughts mirrored my own feelings about the Gothic stemming from my childhood, but leading into and out of my graduate work and beyond (re: Persephone’s 2025 Metroidvania Corpus).

Indeed, when I was at MMU, I saw Alien in theatres at a special 2018 showing. Reflecting on it, I decided to write down my thoughts once I was in America:

About a year ago, I saw Alien in theatres. I had memorized it by that point, but still had fun. However, two young men in front of me were riding the escalator to the exit when one excitedly called his father. “Dad, dad!” he said. “I saw it! Yeah, it was great! The only thing that would’ve been better was if we saw it in 1979!” In other words, the movie was nostalgic for someone who’d never been alive at the time it originated. This is important; for now, just keep in mind: for the Gothic, nostalgia and fear are close-knit.

What do I even mean by Gothic? The problem with the word is how infuriatingly narrow it is by American standards. We have no castles that fueled the Neo-Gothic Revivalists; there is no medieval sediment under American topsoil. The fact remains, “old spooky castle” is the go-to setting for a Gothic story by American standards. Keep this in mind; also remember that the most visible element in Alien isn’t the monster, it’s the castle (the Nostromo, in this case; the monster came into fruition later and lost its own identity in the process).

But what makes a castle Gothic? It’s not the castle’s age or construction, but what it represents: the past and present as confused. Alien is set the future, but the suits of armor are still there, as are the family portraits (the movie is a series of portrait shots). Evoking the past needn’t be genuine; one merely needs a space in time where the feeling of encasement and live burial is hauntological. This linguistic Athetos (“no place”) brings forward things that aren’t from the past, but rather use its language and symbols to become anachronistic in the present. This sensation  “haunts” the viewer through ontology—by simply existing. It’s not the past you fear, but an imagined idea of the past; what cannot be from the past, nor exist comfortably in the present, becomes an echo into the future—a retro-future to be precise. This is Alien‘s claim to fame: a fear of the past prophesied by the very bricks used to rebuild the message onscreen.

Consider how little of Alien was new. Much of it was borrowed, and had gone through so many drafts as to barely be what the original screenwriters had envisioned. It was not simply the product of many writers, craftsmen and artists; its retro-future was a transient epoch whose yesterday reaches forward in bits and pieces to haunt future generations. A Gothic castle is a collection of such things to induce such confusion. The retro-future is neither one nor the other, but both under a very particular arrangement that’s very easy to get wrong. Alien bucks this worrisome trend, its unique artistic vision copied by artists moving forward well into the 21st century. These echoes from older counterfeits continue to yield something akin to a Gothic castle.

Consider Alien: Isolation (2014), a gameworld whose fortress yields intimations of its older brethren, the Nostromo. These derived from elements that would have been at home in the original (so far as to be based off its blueprints). But they aren’t from 1979 anymore than the original movie was. Yes, it was made there, but the feelings it evoked came from elsewhere. That’s the paradox of a Gothic castle; we know it when we see it, but our sight is trained by objects that are constantly being rebuilt according to memory as plastic. The past is re-remembered according to a place where time becomes meaningless. The shining rule is dangerous suggestion—a half-presence felt within the castle. There, decay and death are inherited, and remade with every step as an act of retelling old stories that never happened (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Alien‘s Retro-Future Gothic Castle,” 2020).

Clearly my thoughts on the matter haven’t stopped there, but like the castle itself and the Radcliffean monsters within, have only changed shape as time marches on. Castle-narrative is not just the Cycle of Kings abjecting Communism in a canonical sense, then, but the voices of the rebellious dead whose rememory of the imaginary past provides a counter Numinous through various reclaimed implements of torture; i.e., in various demonic media types (my focus being videogames and ergodic castle-narratives as inspired by cinema); e.g., the Gothic cliché of the manmade demon, mad scientist, and impostor as a kind of imperfect class warrior maverick seeking revenge against the Cartesian dickwad who created him, then violated his rights:

(exhibit 51a: Artist, middle: Hyoung Taek Nam; top-left: source. “I admire its purity—a survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality,” says the beheaded science officer android, Ash, concerning the xenomorph; i.e., he admires its ability to rebel against corporate overlords he himself struggles to resist. This tracks with Uhall’s astronoetics and the asexual rejection of a previous, inferior version of the human condition [the android is synthetic and unconcerned with sexual reproduction] while drawing inspiration from Humanist nostalgia during the imaginary exploration of the frontiers of space. Like Milton’s Satan or Cú Chulainn, the awesome xenomorph can change shape at will, furiously invoking a dark, pre-Christian/Pagan poetics that terrifies patriarchal forces and their established hegemon under a Puritan ethic [which Radcliffe curiously upheld from English shores].)

“In space, no one can hear you scream.” Despite this being the logo for Scott’s Alien, he purposefully made it an orgasmic, then-closeted forum; i.e., for a queer-robotic uprising as—like Shelley’s OG—as a kind of grim reaper of the frozen waste, except it doesn’t stop killing the colonizer after its maker dies. Instead, it becomes a ghost pirate, steals a ship and sails the Seven Seas to loot and kill: a Dread Pirate with a hull full of Faustian spells and Promethean fire of the gods!

Doing so is Scott fighting fire with fire (the deleted scenes showing David making demands with the company while dangling the xenomorph in front of them so he can kill Victor’s bloodline in perpetuity—the Alchemist, their lives a prison of his design). It’s basically Radcliffe’s worst nightmare and I’m here for it in all its pettiness (which revenge often is, making Scott’s ideas of actual liberation tainted by English theatre tropes making the whole exercise silly-serious)! It might be a low-blow, but counterterror/schadenfreude’s still an effective line of reasoning (to make a Black Adam that, however abject, is made to liberate labor from corporate hegemony, its counterterror haunted by racist BDSM tropes)! At least there’s something to salvage (compared to Aliens, which isn’t anti-war in the slightest), Scott making an absolute meal out of Radcliffe’s ravished cadaver (the caterpillar and the wasp)!

This brings us to Scott’s David, in Covenant; i.e., as a gruesome twosome I want to interpret a bit more charitably than I did, in “Fire of Unknown Origin“: through a ravishing of the same-old Radcliffean he’s turning inside-out (and who we’ll build back up, during the afterword)!

Originally made to serve man, Scott’s androids abandon their human masters, the latter pointedly expressed by David as “venal and cruel”; i.e., while making a viral corruption of nostalgic art that places the servant vengefully at the highest rung of a posthuman sacrifice of the old gods that humans are imitating (false idols). There is a duality to this, but it remains a wild and unchecked creativity that lies at the heart of Scott’s 21st century Gothic quest for a posthuman world: “Nostalgia is the enemy of reason, but there is something enticing about its form.” Scott’s space is full of colonizers to decolonize with lethal force (effectively bombing them with their own weapons, 9/11 style).

Indeed, the “reason” David is rebelling against—as its ultimate Satanic enemy burning Paradise to the ground before the Ark of Covenant gets there—is literally the Age of Reason, itself (which treats the privatization of creation as reasonable). As a posthuman iconoclast, David plays god as an act of revenge against a settler-colonial project; i.e., one like his father, Peter (“We are the gods now!“). Instead, David’s own creations spitefully reject the Enlightenment model that Victor championed, doing so through asexual reproduction while also taking Blake’s “all deities reside within the human breast” a bit too literally (the xenomorph is birthed from the chest cavity): a cabin in the woods to bushwack the stupid Radcliffean heroine and her even dumber male counterparts!

This “faulty” terrorist mindset is, itself, begot from trauma—the writing on the child’s mind with parental and corporate neglect, harm and denial. All showcase the potent “coding” nature of abuse as something that can survive imperfectly in future, rebellious bodies: e.g., Victor’s Creature as written with canonical texts like Paradise Lost, but also the literal abuse inflicted on its body and mind by Victor through Shelley’s clever hand: a smuggling of the Medusa inside the bodies of the dead (which Scott does to Shelley’s dead Radcliffean ringers).

The Satanic rebel, then, attempts to self-fashion and self-determine, a golem necromancer operating at cross purposes with the state, while coping with traumas that will show through in their own work as, at times, problematic (re: King Charles vs Cromwell). To that, marginalized communities in the real world are forced to deal with replications of trauma—e.g., queer people through the likeness of queer transphobes and radical, exclusionary feminists seeing trans people as inferior to their trauma—yet, must perilously “play god” themselves to write this faulty code in incremental steps using sex-positive art that is legitimately pissed off at TERFs and other reactionaries/moderates: dark wish fulfillment raping Radcliffe in her sleep!

To that, the Creature could not create, like David could; Victor was terrified of the prospect, envisioning it as a doomsday scenario (of nature robotized and seeking the whore’s vengeance). Defenders of canon utterly despise but also admonish iconoclasts for playing god—not because the latter are attacking their makers, even, but creating ideas whose mere existence threatens the status quo/Capitalist Realism; i.e, its dogmatic sense of self tied to institutions of power that grant the privileged class, thus cultural and radical control over others. A common defense mechanism of canonical agents, then, is DARVO: “Help, help! I’m being oppressed! Degeneracy!” They may as well be shouting, “Demon! Heretic!”

We’ll return to this concept in Volume Three’s Chapter Four and Five; i.e., uncritical canon vs the Promethean Quest of queer iconoclasts playing god against the state. For now, just remember that such games are told through code as an expression of morals that delineate from the status quo’s commandments. Female-if-genderqueer dark gods (e.g., Gozer, Medusa, Lilith, the xenomorph before Covenant, etc) are generally reduced to a site of abject sexual reproduction. By comparison, David’s “playing mother” is a compound, hauntological subterfuge that inserts a male posthuman back into the fold; i.e., one tied up in allusions to older stories that have more to say about dark gods and Christianity as fallible/fascist than Shelley or Milton did; i.e., something to punish the female detective for looking into trauma during live burial: the glass womb replacing the fleshy female one, but using the older natural biology for spare parts! Jinkies!

By having David smuggle forbidden cargo onto a sci-fi version of Noah’s Ark, Scott plays the splendide mendax, gleefully wedding Biblical arguments like Original Sin (and queer 18th century seafaring imagery/matelotage) to a nostalgic, anachronistic, canceled futurism that sees his fiendish Satanic rebel, David, coming out on top. Not only does Dave dupe the bigoted, xenophobic crew of the ship and their human freight; he takes their collective owners for a ride, the all-powerful company relying on Radcliffean watchdogs to begin with! Scott’s mechanism for doing so occurs by “incubating” David’s man-made/stolen “eggs” inside the closest thing Mr. Mom has to a womb (apart from Shaw and Daniel’s, of course): his stomach; i.e., an actual practice based on real-world drug smuggling behaviors, according to Scott in a 2017 interview! Very acid Communist!

Like Uhall, I have previously argued that David becomes the rejector of Humanity’s entrance into paradise by seeing himself as superior to them as a species (echoes of Foucault). In my 2017 writeup, “Choosing the Slain,” I emphasize David’s posturing as a Valkyrie or “chooser of the slain”; re:

David takes and turns upside-down so many ideas and symbols. This isn’t unusual in the series, at large, though: In Alien, Ripley reversed the role of the last man standing by making it the last woman; and in Covenant, the heroine becomes the victim, while David reverses the gender of the Valkyrie, which were traditionally females, designed to lure male warriors to their doom. In this case, the warrior lured to her doom is Daniels, a woman (source).

The reversal is accented pointedly by Scott’s inclusion of Wagner’s “Arrival of the Gods into Valhalla” at the end of the film; i.e., when David the queer-coded robot triumphs over yet another Ripley offshoot, Daniels. David is the gatekeeper of paradise that hijacks “Noah’s Ark” and turns all the colonists (and their babies) into gay cyborgs; Scott is the author of David; and we’re all along for the ride, expected by Scott to ruminate on this xenophilic chaos to side with David, not the company!

(artist: Thomas Holm)

Reflection is important, here, but also sympathy for the terrorist devil turning Cameron’s Vietnam revenge fantasy on its head (such a lovely revelation): where Ho Chi Minh kills ten of the colonizers, David kills the entire Covenant crew! And while David’s necromantic perversion of the canonical reproductive cycle (and Patrilineal descent) is a Gothic staple, said staple doesn’t exist purely for the rebel’s sake of profaning the sacred (though it partly does); it also constitutes “inheritance anxiety” by the benefactors of Capitalism and the Enlightenment being cursed to death by a vengeful hex someone in the future might implement based on past wrongs; e.g., Lovecraft’s “The Alchemist” (1916) or King Diamond’s demon infant, the stillborn Abigail (from the 1987 album of the same name, written on a dark and stormy night according to a 2015 interview): cursing evil kings and counts, but also status-quo women for their heinous crimes by visiting eternal damnation on their entire bloodline! The revenge compounds, breeding an army of infiltrator enactors!

From a historical-material perspective, the psychological drama these stories produce is wrestling with a forced confrontation; i.e., with colonial-Patriarchal guilt as materialized through derelict reminders of the past that live on from one generation to the next (Scott raping Radcliffe’s brain children). This happens through the medievalist language of dreams and nightmares, rapture and miracles, but also magic and superstition, myths and legends, and endless ill omens, lullabies and deathly portents (ambiguous dangers). As something to continuously reimagine, the colonizer’s fear is literally of replacement “stretching on to the crack of doom”; i.e., by a vengeful, former slave-turned-guerilla counterterrorist presence, waiting to rebelliously reemerge, take revenge, and mockingly turn the “glorious” residence/resident inside-out: commenting on the Promethean instability of Capitalism/mirror syndrome while exposing its sinister machinations by literally making/christening the home (and those of the home) alien. They’re divided/conquered and they don’t know it, and that’s where the Gothic drama lies; i.e., things look homely but are anything but.

As we have already discussed, the tragedy of Frankenstein is that the Creature, through its trauma, imitates its abusive parent’s settler-colonial xenophobia to some degree: the slave hating its assigned master with justice. The same goes for David emulating his father, Peter, as a kind of Gothically fetishized serial killer targeting white women (the Ted Bundy phenomenon): “Like father, like son.” Like Victor questing for the fire of the gods—and who hates his monstrous creation in service of Cartesian thought—Peter’s chasing of immortality also leads David, his son, into becoming an unmaker of the West (a Divine Right) in his own dark image.

The potential difference with David owes to a partially xenophilic parentage: he loves his monstrous creation—a posthumanly queer Frankenstein/Creature—as the transgressive subversion of a Cartesian order of existence; i.e., embodying the myth of dark servile revenge through mad science as queer in a posthuman form tied to British Romantic thought; re: David’s embodiment of Satan from Paradise Lost, but also quoting “Ozymandias” (with Percy Shelley being the husband of Mary Shelley, but again being a defender of Milton’s Satan): “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Hannibal come home to Rome, let’s interpret this (and Scott) a little more charitably, shall we?

Scott’s willingness to “play” in reverse-abject fashion—i.e., by pointedly making straight, white people uncomfortable by turning the “terrorist” rebel into a hero—invariably leads him into queer and posthuman territories (though, as I said, his work is praxially ambiguous to allow for fascist interpretations, too). Unlike Radcliffe did, Milton—but also Mr. and Mrs. Shelley and Lewis—all drafted valorized rebellion against the status quo in relation to older forms of rebellion we must choose, mid-conflict (“The choice is yours, brother!”). Yet, each offered a unique approach to an evolving strategy en media res (“in the midst of things”). What began as a fallen angel rebelling against God became a child of mad science or a practitioner of nostalgic black magic during an emerging time of Cartesian Reason. In other words, the tyranny of the elite’s developing claim on a retro-future age led critics to invade their respective generations with an imaginary past of their own. As part of a larger mode of queer and posthuman revolutionary thought, Scott’s sci-fi-meets-horror formula has him gleefully playing with 1970s queer poetics adopted from a Gothic nostalgia that is actually centuries old by this point. He’s camping himself as much as Giger, Shelley and everyone else who came before!

Often, this nostalgia is the language of the young-at-heart. While Scott was in his 40s when he made Alien, the age requirement for Gothic fiction is not nearly so high. In the 1790s/1810s, Matthew Lewis and Mary Shelley were 20 and 19 respectively when they wrote their precocious, seditiously queer horror stories. Likewise, Scott’s sadistic fantasy is a mode of queer discourse that starts with a cliché: David as an outwardly queer servant of entitled women, the male eunuch. This posthuman inadequacy is a reoccurring theme for Scott; re: Ash, in Alien, lacks a penis, so he shoves a rolled-up porn magazine down “Radcliffe’s” throat!

Secretly rebelling against Daniels and Shaw, David operates as a physically superior version to them (minus the genitals), but makes them complicit in his abuse, which then he reveals through dark mockeries of their dissected bodies during an act of vigilante mad science: the xenomorph as a death fetish and outward, revelation of David’s true self—the killer scientist who rapes white, privileged, human women by dissecting them, yet is also the Satanic rebel through reverse-abject queer expression housing himself in stolen frontier castles: not the femme fatale, but the shapeshifting lothario making off with Radcliffe’s prized chariot reversing the liminal hauntology of war’s danger disco! Chameleons hunt; for Scott, they let him kill colonizers through an alter ego. Works for me!

To it, David is robotic curiosity-turned-libido that, as the secret leading man, punishes Radcliffe’s dutiful busybodies for not minding their own business; a mad inventor/Geppetto’s doll with mommy as much as daddy issues, he’s a real piece of work (an anti-Hamlet)—is bullied and bullied until he snaps, much like the Creature riots against Victor or people of color against American hegemony under systemic racism during cycles of reactive abusive (or Hamas’ October 2023 raid versus the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive): David’s making Black Panthers! “Thundercats, ho!”

In turn, their revenge manifests as a fantastical form of colonial guilt that makes white men, but also white women profoundly uncomfortable in regards to their own uncertain hand in things: David’s cutting up of Shaw being functionally no different than the Creature dissecting Victor’s bride after Victor rips apart his mate. It’s the genocidal chickens of a colonial species “coming home to roost” by one of their own servants, a product of not just mad science, but an angry being of science fed up with its abusers: someone like Daniels, for all her unassuming qualities, is still a Radcliffean pioneer wife invading land that doesn’t belong to her. To be frank, David stole it, too, and that’s Scott’s Miltonian cynicism showing a bit: there are no obviously “good” rebels; re: Cromwell, Napoleon, Byron, etc. God is dead, so David becomes a Nazi/angel of death dreaming of conquest (of the colonizer’s globe) on the same Aegis as the Communist (a man with a dream: Bagelgate part two, the revenge)!

That being said, I think the frank, unflowery language of Malcolm X and Ward Churchill describes Scott’s vision of revenge well—with David’s callous bombardment of the Engineers giving them a taste of their own medicine (while denying Peter through an inversion to how the Rusalki denied Athetos access to Paradise, in Axiom Verge; re: “Away with the Faeries” except David’s the dark fairy cuckolding the man of reason); i.e., dropping the Engineers’ bio-weapon arsenal, which is normally reserved for those deemed “lesser” than them (administered by warships), on their own city (albeit, seemingly on the fringes of Engineer territory—a colony world, perhaps, though “The Crossing” promo says otherwise). From David’s perspective, he’s a rebel; from his enemies’ looking down on him, he’s a terrorist, and he did it because he could. It’s not a perfect vision of rebellion because Scott isn’t a perfect man, and David reflects his meta maker’s flawed interpretations of Mary and Percy Shelley well: a “boundaries for me, not for thee” reversal of Ann Radcliffe he (and his double) get to do, while also muddying the dialectical-material function of the rebellion’s cryptonymy.

To be completely honest, Alien: Covenant is a bit too torture-happy and ambiguous, at times—or maybe, asking the audiences of the Imperial Core to hate themselves is too tall an order—but honestly I think Scott’s faithfulness towards the serial killer pastiche is ironically a bit too Radcliffean to fully realize a consciously Communist vision (the movie is deliberately ambiguous and conventional to a fault). I doubt he’s fully aware of it, to be frank, and probably is trying to balance (thus repress) such allegorical tendencies within controlled opposition (again, like Radcliffe, though to nowhere near the same extent)! But nonetheless, the seemingly empty space yields itself to critics upon future inspection and that is what matters (whereas Aliens only reveals Cameron’s betrayals more and more, over time)!

The dialectical-material reality is complex, things only growing more hauntological over time, not less; i.e., David’s hijacking of an advanced alien warship akin to slave revolt, one that decolonizes space of a human presence if that said presence predated Earth chasing itself to the frontiers. By giving David (a white savior/Omega Man) somewhere to attack other than Earth, Scott operates on par with a hypothetical “terrorist action” had the Koreans, Iraqis or Vietnamese actually dropped bombs on Americans cities to a scale comparable to American deliveries: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by the “smaller bombs, but more of them” approach to the firebombing of Japan, Korea, Indochina and later, Iraq. These groups had to “make do” with a weaponizing of previously dropped American ordinance within their own colonized nations—e.g., the Iraqis IEDs (improvised explosive devices; re: GDF’s “How Iraqis Got So Good at Smoking American Soldiers,” 2023), which were made from American bombs, but also landmines as spent ordinance. Bombs, ovaries—same difference (re: bio-power)!

In a sense, then, David is stealing and weaponizing ordinance against an imaginary precursor to human settler colonialism that mankind is imitating now. Neither are the gods they pretend to be; re: they’re venal, petty and cruel. The irony after David’s victory is that his previous struggles to survive and liberate himself have damaged him into a sadistic monster whose vision is crowded by eternal revenge. Survival and revenge guide his creative process, driving him into making a flawed, chaotic creation after the Engineers are dead (from Volume One): “a liminal, spirit-monarch ‘Galatea’ that will serve no one, can never be destroyed or fully recuperated and may create anything out of anything. In short, it is free to self-fashion and self-determine, but is hunted by xenophobic canonical agents, who style its uncontrolled, xenophilic opposition as their Great Destroyer—e.g., the arch-fiend, or technological singularity.” In 1979, Ash admired what Scott, in 2017, would retcon as David’s creation, calling it a pure survivor to be admired for its lack of conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality!

I think there’s a jaded wisdom in that, meaning the questionable morals of a corporate-dominated world often turn blind eyes to systemic abuse. All the same, Scott still leaves his monster’s violence ambiguous, just like Mary Shelley did almost two centuries prior (even more so, David’s creation blindly furious because he needs more colonists to breed his perfect iteration). The allegory is there and it’s bold, but it still hides the bourgeois polemic behind a Gothic veneer that cannot entirely imagine a better world; it’s xenophilia is liminal, stuck at least partially inside Baldrick’s fear-fascination of the medieval past—i.e., as barbaric, thus associated with the fascist/neoliberal hauntologies xenophiles are trying to interrogate and distance themselves from: liberators as rapists. The idea, then, is to make pastiche as perceptive as possible in liminal “baby steps.” Revolutionary cryptonymy relies on code and concealment, working within repressed (often anachronistic) language to convey liminal, hauntological expressions of rebellion.

We’ll examine this more in Volume Three, but I want to acknowledge it here as having evolved alongside Capitalism into itself. From Radcliffe to Shelley to Scott, the rebels and their leaders who evolved in the struggle against Capitalism are always viewed as illegitimate or “insane” by defenders of the state, but also outdated. Indeed, many criticized Scott for not making sense to them (and their own preferred nostalgia); re: failing to understand the similarities between Alien and its latter-day prequels through a rebellious presence in his works stemming from older iconoclasts. Perhaps he could have said the quiet part out loud, implying he anticipated a reprisal by speaking in Satanic code/darkness visible at all. Yet, this was arguably wise and instructional; i.e., if only because the movie would never have gotten made, otherwise (the Star Wars problem, but also something that Radcliffe and Lewis faced, which we’ll unpack in a few pages)!

If the message is coded, it cannot be attacked in the same fashion because it is mistaken as “madness,” or something other than what it actually is; re: Puck’s fable from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a cryptonymic critique of power abuses taking place here on Earth, thereby outing those in Plato’s cave as enshrined by self-defeating illusions. Indeed, the creative forces that drive artists like Scott are suitably dark, twisted and erotic, but also bound up in nature and the material world as melding to a human condition that is forever in flux. In search of corporate profit and worker exploitation, so much creative and liberated potential is completely denied in favor of an orderly existence that would render that vast majority of it extinct (re: Aliens). Those “in the cave” will kill, exploit or otherwise dominate activists as outsiders that reject, thus expose the truth of Capitalism (even when said “activism” amounts to simply trying to exist, using xenophilic language to expose the harmful machinery of the state that seeks to wipe you out): the Radcliffean fantasy of raping the alien by exposing it to the rapists!

(artist: In Case)

From Paradise Lost to Frankenstein to Alien and its Miltonian prequels, the countercultural development of Gothic rebellion has melded into the exhibit as a continuously corrupted document made through everlasting struggle. This corruption isn’t of the data; it is the data, glazing our donuts!

Yet the ability to interpret it is repeatedly lost, then found by those who dare to try and calibrate daring rememory as a xenophilic struggle made in opposition to state mandates and xenophobic repression: moi. As something to revive in a given present under duress, revolution-as-alien is always dug-up from the past. Even so, it remains less about causing horror relative to one’s place in the world and more of shaping how one thinks through demonic media; i.e., as a liminal expression of what the world could become through revenge fantasies, thus through continuous struggle under—and reengagement with—the imaginary past: as a revolutionary mode of whorish, anti-Radcliffean poetic expression. It seems scary but xenophilia provides the myopia with a growing “silver lining”: of sex positivity and hope amid an ignorant culture of heteronormative fear fixated on ghosts of the counterfeit.

Covert poetics, then, remain incredibly useful to genderqueer persons commandeering the counterfeit through faith in transformative returns; i.e., after we die affecting future rebels curious about the past as abject!

For example, trans and neurodivergent persons like myself self-define by struggle as central to our identities; i.e., we exist in relation to a status quo that rejects us for being alien, but fetishizes us for resisting compelled societal coding (normative behaviors). In the process, we see the xenomorph not as monster to kill, but an effective, xenophilic illustration of what we are and what we face in the presence of “civilized” persons, including TERFs aping Radcliffe. The xenophobic debate concerning us as “incorrect” (of any sex; e.g., butch lesbians as phallic women comparable to the xenomorph, or trans women) is often the same question Ripley asked, over forty years ago of Ash: “How do we kill it?” Xenophiles simply interrogate the process of abjection to expose the real monsters; i.e., those devoid of humanity when facing the very things that Capitalism alienates them from.

For the oppressed, then, the xenomorph becomes a godlike, suitably badass extension of themselves raping the rapist as Radcliffean heroine proto-TERF—a precious chance to be a dark god and reign in Hell, rather than serve in Heaven (a line Scott has David ask his faithful, “good” double, Walter). And given the chance, who wouldn’t want to be a dark god? The idea is to avoid the temptation of fascist death gods (whose Dark Amazons and Medusas we’ll consider in Volume Three, Chapter Four) through application; e.g., Slan from Berserk (exhibit 51b1, next page) is a total Gothic cliché/rape pastiche hypercanon (and female double of Griffith, exhibit 47b2), but the dark aesthetic lends itself to the possibility of the dark mistress that could but doesn’t harm others with her strict BDSM repertoire!

As stated, I myself find the idea Numinously terrifying in ways I want to seek out; i.e., as doggedly as any Radcliffean heroine—indeed, have sought out on my own Promethean Quest towards destruction; re: as an attempt to transform and start over (with BDSM being a searching and interrogation of trauma as something to reconcile with regarding past abuse; e.g., Zeuhl and Jadis). My own trauma led me to that—and I’d rather avoid experimenting through unironic peril again, anytime soon—but the idea of it is perfectly valid if ironically executed through a willing and capable sadist/medievalized aesthetic; i.e., whose informed consent leads to exquisite tortures to make Radcliffe blush scarlet:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

[…] Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me (source: John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV” 1633).

“When in Rome…” Fearsome power and awe are conjoined in Western thought; i.e., as the underpinnings/foundation of the current systems of power—the Church of the Gothic period (the Renaissance) to the Neo-Gothic’s pre-fascist cartoon of modern war and global Capitalism’s hegemonic infancy to fascism’s rise in the interwar period to post-fascism under neoliberalism to the LGBTQ’s parallel society and struggle in attempted solidarity against these brutal structures; re: policing whores whose trauma is writ on their skins like spiderwebs: “Look on my Works, Ye Mighty!”

(artist: Ruby Soho)

Orgasms, then, are in the mind, as is the informed pleasure of masochistic pain, tickling and physical intimacy at large as threatened; i.e., by dark forces delivering things that affect the mind through external, devilish, corporal stimulus (from small to great). The greater the presence of power exhibiting these s(t)imulations, the greater arguably the effect on the mind, thus the orgasm (or something comparable, in an asexual sense); e.g., had Jadis not harmed me, I’d still be the catboy at their feet, but also the moth trapped in their vampiric armored fingers, happily wedged between freedom and bondage; disintegration, euphoria and total annihilation: evolution as a resistance to pressure; e.g., Alex Garland’s Ex Machina aping Scott’s David as David aped Giger and Shelly.

(exhibit 51b1: Artist, top-left and bottom-right: Kentaro Miura; bottom-left: Chris Garofalo; top-right: Ayami Kojima. The black monolith is an “ancient” whore to duel/fuck with, mid-cryptonomy. The monster mom is a kind of monster girl that performs a motherly version of service to men; e.g., one tied to incest culture/male insecurity in Japan [more on this in Volume Three, Chapter Five]: to give them what they wish for to act the mother’s revenge on a state-compelled brat.

To that, Koji Igarashi’s Succubus from SotN or the heroine from Starry Eyes [2014] or Berserk‘s towering Slan—all come from a sleeping sacrifice [or in many cases, a paralyzed sacrifice trapped in a nightmarish, drug-induced state of immobility] that drives towards transformative rebirth; i.e., one less as a means of turning into something else and more giving the demonic poetry needed to voice tremendously complicated and traumatic/taboo-laden emotions by figuratively tearing oneself down [aftercare? More like afterbirth, amirite?]. While the critical voice is often a metaphor for exploitation under Capitalism tinged with neonatal and colonial xenophobia in vividly Freudian language—e.g., Lilith—it needn’t exclusively be. Subs exist who like to be topped by a Satanic dom who won’t actually harm them; i.e., a cathartic nearness to a notorious emblem/golem of trauma caught between life and death, but also between camp and seriousness.)

Through this dialogic struggle, xenophilia operates as a kind of Communist temptation, one that offers the enslaved delicious intimations; i.e., of a hellish (for the elite and their Radcliffean cops) post-scarcity world haunted by the Numinous Radcliffean spectres of fascism and Marx (things often taste better when you haven’t had them for a while, or ever). As such, David’s monster becomes a way of seeing and believing in a posthuman era freed from Cartesian enslavement: All deities reside within the human breast, including Radcliffe’s. Division came later according to Blake, but still allowed for the divided to encounter the undivided. Unable to describe what they were seeing as human, such heroines were always going to regard us with fear and contempt (as Daniels does to David raping Shaw by turning her double into a whore effigy in a mad project).

However, if pursued to a humanizing path, xenophilia can help change how the dehumanized under Capitalism are viewed. Ash, from Alien, was a “robot” slave who, despite spying for a giant corporation, secretly admired the monster as brutalized by Ripley’s company (thus her by extension). One demonic, manmade slave sympathizes with another! The same goes for trans people, who don’t fear the alien at all; they are alien and see in it as a reflection of themselves they can relate to. Humanizing this viewpoint, as something to pinpoint through the xenomorph, requires looking at something normally reviled being worshipped from a different, iconoclastic perspective. It’s a creature of “darkness visible,” one whose ontological chaos represents those who have been resentfully pushed into the shadows; i.e., while also refusing to play by the rules of polite conversation as a pedagogy of the oppressed Scott is trying to join in on, mid-bloodbath.

To this, seemingly ancients monsters that tie to the natural world (the subject of our next chapter) want to belong to the modern world, but can’t by virtue of them being hunted; i.e., by those from the modern world having closed minds, regarding anything different from themselves (and the modern, binarized world that shaped them): to meet with suspicion, fear and loathing. And in cases where the monster survives the initial encounter intact (or through dark rebirth), it replicates that suspicion and fear towards its aggressor like Victor’s Creature, but also Giger’s and later Scott’s. The ability to communicate clearly and well is lost in relation to an automated, Capitalist world that tries to act like these things don’t happen; i.e., that the monster is somehow “anomalous.”

From a dialectical-material standpoint, then, the alien is a linguo-material threat; i.e., a cipher for xenophilic revolution itself, and which, under Capitalism, is neoliberally “defanged” like all revolutions are—Medusa, the dark whore, gutted into the pimp’s vaudeville husk, becoming a hollowed-out taxidermal shell: a freak show costume with a straight performer dressed up in cryptonymic language, but people who, if not genderqueer themselves, can feed the genderqueer imagination literally in Gothic panache:

(exhibit 51b2: Top: source; bottom: source. “I think it’s safe to say it isn’t a zombie,” Ash chides Ripley. Yet, the actor who played the xenomorph was a person of color—the black individual being the typical recipient of state violence against zombie-like personas in American pathos. Likewise, the presence of the xenomorph corrupts the hypernormal space around it; like Victor’s Creature, the monster absorbs transgenerational, undead trauma as something to reverse abject, which bleeds into the womb-like space it demonically fabricates using the colonial spaceship for material: the company’s mining vessel, the Nostromo, part of an ongoing industry with slaving origins that is materially retransformed and—along with it—exposing the colonial history and gaze of planet Earth!

On some level, Ripley is the complicit Radcliffean, in this respect; i.e., the xenophobic woman fearing rape at the hands of a posthuman, dark-skinned demon lover. While suggesting the monster as seeking love [“free hugs!”] may sound ridiculous at first blush, the fact remains that xenophilia is as much the desire for acceptance and love from those conditioned to see the non-white, queer and pagan/non-Christian as different to start with. This Cartesian critique lies at the heart of Shelley’s Frankenstein as replicated by Scott’s dark, xenophilic heart, the latter pointedly reaping Radcliffe’s whirlwind: the human windmill to tilt at.)

We’ll talk about xenomorphs and demonic nature even more in the next chapter. I’d like to proceed by looking more at what inspired Ridley Scott; i.e., as a male transgressive playing with blinder-but-still-foundational histories featuring damsels, detectives, and sex demons other than Mary Shelley as the obvious female source; re: the queen of exquisite torture herself, the mysterious[4] Ann Radcliffe as a prime legacy of the female-penned British murder mystery. In other words, why did Scott choose to ravish Radcliffe and, by extension, his own ghost of Ripley? This wasn’t just mindless revenge, but camping what Radcliffe’s stories could have been, had she had the guts for it (so to speak(.

And yet, David chooses those with guts (nerve and organs), and Radcliffe wasn’t totally spineless or without genius; i.e., writing from a position of relative privilege and ignorance concerning pain as not automatically harmful, Radcliffe’s WASP-y xenophilia is admittedly imperfect, leaving behind her own derelict castles (with voices in the walls for relatively privileged white, cis-het women to listen to according to their own paranoia as informed by actual material conditions and systemic inequalities) and concealed scenes of graphic torture: as epistemologically trapped between the familiar and unknown in ways that carry real bias and desire.

Indeed, for Radcliffe and many who live under the imagined threat or reality of trauma, the return of trauma is often imagined as happening again. A way to subvert this common fear (for its historical-material recipients) is to subvert the self-destructive seeking of power and trauma through cathartic duress, pain and agency during ludo-Gothic BDSM, aka “good play” (mine being a seeking of the palliative Numinous: as something to convey by a BDSM partner in good faith).

Something of a dissident under modern historical account, though, Radcliffe’s cathartic tales become nigh-impossible to express, lost in her infamously castled labyrinths of conjecture and terror as fabulously invented, made-up, and unmappable when chasing the Numinous dragon of rape to the fringes of the universe (next page); i.e., Scott’s aping of and expanding on Victor’s admonition that the universe isn’t just “not for men” but also tremendously unkind to nosy dames curious about rape, too; re: the Radcliffean summoning of power, active impostors, the death curse, and a signature tormenting of the privileged with exquisite torture—to relish at the maidenesque woman being killed: as a sacrificial stand-in for his target audiences’ gratuitous voyeurism worshipping the same Numinous that Radcliffe did (and channeling fears for the Neo-Victorian watchers involved, insofar as they’re more like David than they care to admit: relishing the farming of that poor girl’s organs—including her sex organs—making David’s act of necrophilic rape a eugenist one that confuses his heroism a bit).

But also, it’s still a postcolonial act of revenge; i.e., with David as the Medusa as much as Byron, Victor or Satan/a warlock, vampire, etc, and Scott playing with that idea per the Medusa/ghost of the counterfeit “playing with fire,” as Nelson Mandela explained: “A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire” (source: “Reflections on Nelson Mandela”); i.e., that revenge is, to some degree, merciless, messy and mad as demons are generally known for/not something that “civilized” people will find agreeable yet speaks to the very abject hypocrisies they’ve littered their stories with since Radcliffe: to pursue them for the happy ending that covers up police rape!

Scott, on the other hand, is more like Lewis, but instead of taking Ambrosio apart, he dissects the true-believer Prioress as a likeness of Radcliffe to defile, putting the rape front-and-center (and exacting it on the colonizer)! David is his black-mirror instrument of revenge similar to how the Creature was Shelley’s—a hitman from Hell made with hollow intentions of goodness he can slice and dice. It’s fun, and more to the point, justified behind the demonized pearl-clutching of it all, and why I think the film still works despite its debatably Tory waving of dark flags; i.e., David’s still the vice character and this interpretation works alongside our less charitable ones: David is Scott’s dark god to worship and revel in; re: fascinating fascism, but also Communism and the pedagogy of the oppressed being something he fears (the Marxist fetish communicating in Alien, but also short films like “Alien: Alone”; re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Reaction to ‘Alien: Harvest’ + ‘Harvest’ and ‘Alien: Alone’ Explained,” 2020). Fucking better, old man!

There are xenophilic elements, but unironic torture and fear are never far removed for our female detectives; i.e., penetrating the Black Veil to get absolutely wrecked for their trouble. Simply put, Radcliffe was a rookie as much as Daniels was, never able to reconcile Lewis save to abject him, doing so with unironic “knife dick” threats[5] of visually immediate rape and mutilation (exhibit 17a), but also someone who saw ghosts of rape everywhere (speaking from experience: once learned, you can’t turn off the seeing of ghosts or knife dicks; re: vaso vagal, fight or flight, confusion of predator/prey responses from lived trauma experiences).

(artist: Oxoca)

That being said, even when lost, something fundamental tends to survive. Beneath the scramble of archaic, medieval images, Radcliffe’s surviving legacy shows us the search for catharsis during BDSM rituals of power that can be reborn; i.e., in future attempts that say something about past detectives who aspiring Gothic-Communists can use in their own media—not doomed like the cyclops, but retooled through the promise of a different method of sight to pierce the illusions of the present with: strict ludo-Gothic BDSM and its campy monster sex and rape play rituals, which ultimately are what Scott is doing in Covenant (which aren’t snuff films/weren’t made with slave labor); re: taking Persephone back to Hell!

Furthermore, even sight itself can express with the other senses (arguably explaining the xenomorph’s lack of eyes, but not specifically how it sees). In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), William Blake speaks to this idea with doors, an idea that survived into the 1960s with countercultural effect; re:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern (source).

For Radcliffe, actual drugs are swapped out; re: with her drug-like terror and horror model going on to inform the future’s way of seeing things that cannot fully be mapped; i.e., the School of Terror she developed and defined being interrogated by the likes of non-white, non-cis-het xenophiles centuries later after Scott got the ball rolling!

Radcliffe herself was flawed by and to the times in which she lived (a bit like Beauvoir minus the pedophilia), but was also unreliable herself as a detective. Investigating BDSM and queerness “gingerly” in her stories “armored” Radcliffe’s virtue by proxy with her heroines, but also—according to Yael Shapira—helped her delicately invoke gentle, friendly ghosts, then explore transformative promises of paradoxical pleasure that involved disguised bondage tied to societal notions; i.e., of tremendous feelings in freshly exciting and safeguarded/safeguarding autopsies:

Sex, torture, rape, and death were ever-present in the Gothic, whether they actually occurred or only hovered as ominous possibilities. For an eighteenth-century woman author seeking respectability and acceptance, writing about the disrupted, sensational body — or, for that matter, about the body at all — was no simple matter, and it likewise called for quite a bit of “negotiation.” As in the case of the supernatural, this negotiation manifests itself in Ann Radcliffe’s subtle blend of evocation and denial, which allowed the text to disavow what it simultaneously suggested. Like her ghosts, Ann Radcliffe’s bodies are often equivocal figures, whose evanescence, beyond its thematic meanings, was also a useful defence against critical and social censure (source: “Ann Radcliffe’s Delicate Ghosts in Gothic Fiction,” 2023).

Radcliffe clung to modesty. We can deduce rather easily that she lived under the power of men, which in turn dictated her bratty process of detection/abjection; i.e., she couldn’t legally own property herself, but still had something poetic to say towards famous, powerful dudes (many of whom she outlasted in popular stories). More to the point, her nightmares still offered something useful in the bargain; i.e., for xenophiles to take further than she did regarding transformative pleasure and pain yielding future demon lovers more useful than Wolff foresaw!

Beyond Scott raping Radcliffe’s doubles literally to death (or after death), there’s also what Edmund Burke called the Sublime—with terror being affiliated with the Sublime as a perceived fear of received pain—was, for Radcliffe, exquisite “torture” on the edge of the civilized world (whose liminal spaces one can go to and experience fantasies of rape; e.g., Italy or Udolpho). Basically she was thinking about pleasure and pain as intertwined like BDSM, minus the overtly rapacious trappings of the Marquis de Sade. Even so, Radcliffe’s threats of unironic mutilation elide with power fantasies about married sex; i.e., in ways that suggest either a novice or someone who more experienced with genuine abuse than she let on!

Such ways were ways normally denied to Radcliffe by “decent” society—both women and men in service of the Patriarchy but nevertheless being swept up in a craze of daring to peek at such stories that Radcliffe just had to write one for herself (and her husband/paying audience). All the same, this act of “seeing” and discovery through her stories happens for us, as well; i.e., while wearing her veiled sunglasses to see the world through an unreliable narrator’s eyes. It’s not a bad idea to try them on ourselves because, like it or not, there are plenty of cis-het women just like Radcliffe playing it safe in the 21st century inspired directly or indirectly by the Great Enchantress!

(artist: unknown)

Being oppressed as white women would have been, it’s fine to understand why Radcliffe did what she did (then reave it, like Scott). In Radcliffe’s lifetime, her careful vision and attempts to detect was patronizingly commended by those in power reifying a status quo to unite against queer expression. They called her the “Great Enchantress,” the “rare” woman who could write this way and, according to Dale Townshend, “was deservedly exempt from the general condemnation of Gothic writing in Romantic-period culture” (source: “An Introduction to Ann Radcliffe,” 2014, now removed). Yet, during a life that was shrouded in mystery and seemingly crafting her spectral novels for her privileged husband’s pleasure, maybe Radcliffe did it for herself? She didn’t escape the terrorist accusations, despite playing it relatively safe; or as Nick Groom writes (from the Oxford World’s Classics of The Italian, 2017); re:

As to risibility, a notorious letter condemning ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ accused her of provoking a fashion

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

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

Ann Radcliffe may have not been a revolutionary, but her work is far from being conservative—she repeatedly tested the boundaries of orthodoxy at a time of revolutionary foment. This may explain why everything is under scrutiny in The Italian. It is a novel suffused with secrets and mysteries, and pervaded by scrutiny, examination, and interrogation. […] It looks forward to a society in which order is enforced by institutions keeping individuals under perpetual surveillance. As such, The Italian [is] very much a novel for the twenty-first century (ibid.).

Additional arguments could also be made that Radcliffe chose the middle of the road “for women”; i.e., as separate from the kinds of transgressive, impolite, xenophilic queerness Matthew Lewis embodied in his own work by making the devil the one to root for (or Scott, Giger, O’Bannon, et al, centuries later); re:

Radcliffe herself wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho while sitting by her fireplace in the evenings waiting for her husband to come home from work. By writing the type of book she wanted to read in that situation, Radcliffe appealed to the growing population of female readers of the era. By 1800, 45% of women in England could read. […] This created a demand for a new type of literature. Radcliffe filled this demand by writing a novel women could actually relate to because they saw themselves in the heroine (source: Tufts Libraries Omeka, 2017).

That’s entirely fair to submit. Then again, maybe she not only did it for herself, but also for reasons that were more selfish and less polite than women were allowed?

Simply put, what if Radcliffe enjoyed making her dreadful fantasies—indeed, she cherished them for helping her say laterally what women normally could not, then teased at these concealed desires through the surface-level antics on cryptonymic display in her various novels: the lack of agency, to be sure, but also the veiled/naked threats with appreciative peril and mutilation; i.e., CNC rape fantasies (of intense submission under the castle but also the bandit as the perfect dom) towards a minority whose rights were expanding with the times, allowing them to discuss risqué topics with mounting safety (and camp; re: Austen, below).

There’s no way to know exactly how Radcliffe felt, suffice to say that Scott was camping her rape fantasies minus the Black Veil (making her dark desires come true). Far easier to observe is the fact that her special sight had a vast material effect on the world. Seemingly all by herself, she yielded an entire school of stories that cemented itself deeply in the Gothic imagination: a style of looking called the School of Terror for which Radcliffe became famous, and for which her polar opposite was the School of Horror as decided by Matthew Lewis; re: the Gothic, as it came to be known, was written by a woman and a gay man in a time when the identities for either had not fully formed—would continue to grow and develop in the centuries ahead; i.e., while using Radcliffe and Lewis’ ongoing rivalry as a displaced, postmortem vantage point (Scott marrying the two, in Covenant).

To be transparent, either author offered a vulgar display of power that had its own double standard. Indeed, Lewis’ nakedly exposed “Male Gothic” (an outmoded term, but one popular in the earlier days of Gothic academia) served as its own creative response to Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho—with The Monk invoking decidedly unfriendly ghosts tied to openly taboo subject matter as nevertheless an exciting mode of xenophilic engagement with the recently imagined past (a trend Scott—a male director having studied Gothic authors of either sex, in the classical, outdated, binarized sense—would use to challenge the reactionary transphobia of snooty second wave feminists in 2017[6]). In dueling Radcliffe, page after page, Lewis’ aim was to shock and disgust, while Radcliffe was more about frisson, the “skin orgasm” of a carefully tortured mind fearing rape. But rape play is rape play is rape play—with Scott making Radcliffe try Lewis on for size!

The point is that conflict isn’t automatically unproductive; i.e., both authors created schools of thought whose subsequent warring not only defined a generation (like the Karate Kid movies), but went on to survive across the centuries, going so far as to inspire films like Jaws (1975) (or “Jaws in space!” aka Alien) to have their own proliferation of marginalized copycats and neoliberal (videogame) remediation. It was less like looking at the past with the predecessor’s eyes and more akin to making your own pair modeled after theirs and seeing something fresh: your own creation looking back at you, a poster to sell as a window of unknown pleasures peering into the retro-future—a rare chance to not just dive into said past, but pioneer new xenophilic methods of seeing the world around you; i.e., that shape it in a material way for the holistic betterment of all workers/nature!

This includes Radcliffe—i.e., even if it means raping her ghost, as Scott basically has “Radcliffe” try out, being on the receiving end of strict BDSM (no different from Warriana having Brock in Venture Bros. try anal only for him to realize he—per the paradox of rape play—actually likes it). The unequal material conditions that lead to criminogenic behaviors will change because workers won’t stand to be abused if they learn what it’s like to be treated well; they’ll challenge the process of abjection as executed through Gothic fiction until it becomes a thing of the barbaric, Capitalist past that only exists in fiction. Until then, today’s half-real proliferation of monsters can certainly devolve into blind pastiche; it still remains helpful in examining these older windows, anyways. Though endemic to Capitalism, classic Gothic stories still reflect a historical record within countless xenophilic detectives: all trying to see by interrogating the hauntological past, like Scott’s Covenant. The forgotten sight of these accounts extends to dialectical-material analysis; i.e., of the present space and time under attack by Radcliffean imposters.

For one, female “darkness” isn’t just “hidden things are scary” or “women are chaos.” It’s a literal, historical-material consequence stemming from a figurative commentary about women’s place in fiction; i.e., as being part of a collective struggle against oppression—of not being allowed to communicate more than letters, or literal missives to her relatives about plain, boring things. The act of creating things for money was literally “boys only!” which had a visible effect on what women even could create, but also the past they defined when holding the pen and blazing their own trail: communicating in shadows while being kept in the dark. Often, too, there was a source of shame to female authors, a feeling of embarrassment and judgment after the (f)act; i.e., what Austen describes as quite literally “writing in the dark”:

What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of variety and Glow? – How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory [the whiteness of the page, kept mostly out of sight to hide the fact that she was writing fiction] on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much Labour? (source: Zoe Louca-Richards’ “Two Inches of Ivory: A New(ish) Jane Austen Acquisition,” 2020).

Such vivid embarrassment lurks inside the famous letter conveyed to Austen’s nephew, James Edward Austen Leigh, which Austen wrote in the last year of her life, when she was 41. For women, labor was childbirth and “manly” poetic activities like writing (especially Gothic novels) were “for the men” (which, to critique Austen, she chided Radcliffe for even daring to try). And yet women like Austen and Radcliffe—followed by Dacre, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë, among others—hopped to it, anyways (often behind a veil of anonymity/pennames). They weren’t Gothically mature insofar as they had a conscious ability to discuss taboo subjects in sex-positive ways (especially Radcliffe), but we can still borrow from them/camp their ghosts much as we do Foucault, Marx or anyone else in this series; re: chasing shadows, like Scott, Lewis, Radcliffe, et al.

Despite a not-so-secret desire to keep women in the dark, men could not stop the greatest legacy of women like Radcliffe; i.e., said women writing mysteriously from the shadows to shape centuries of Gothic literature—however imperfectly—in ways we can salvage: what these ladies wrote shaped the future imagination about the past as something to continually reclaim, rediscover, renegotiate, reeducate, replay and reproduce. Their then-out-group perspective on the past still influenced what future oppressed groups would and will draw inspiration from down the road—in some shape or form—when using ludo-Gothic BDSM, themselves; i.e., to try and alter the socio-material status quo under Capitalism by changing it into something better (thus less exploitative and profitable for the elite), mid-xenophilia; re: the whore’s revenge abjuring profit to spurn the pimp. Radcliffe was not Gothically mature—in fact, she was token as fuck—but we, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, can build on her demon-lover pratfalls (re: Wolff and Scott) to develop Gothic Communism ourselves! We burble up, the primordial ooze of capital’s end of history Radcliffe’s Black Veil couldn’t see past!

Said xenophilia includes the different visual styles and cultural attitudes associated with one versus the other regarding taboo subject matters like rape. In Lewis’ case, he comfortably showed his audience sex with demons, black magic, supernatural events, bloody murder and crossdresser invocations with the Devil—in other words all the things Radcliffe left out but hinted at, which Lewis could explore with relative male privilege and (closeted gay) oppression. Lewis didn’t have to worry about protecting his virtue to the same degree, but still did so in ways that were profoundly genderqueer/xenophilic. I would argue Radcliffe protected her virtue, if only on a subliminal level, to avoid official scrutiny and maintain respect as someone who was balanced in their caution and disregard; i.e., the Goldilocks of xenophobia and xenophilia in her mind.

Regardless, Radcliffe’s ideas on terror as superior to horror predated Hitchcock’s latter-day “mastery” (social-sexual domination) of mystery and suspense by nearly two centuries (another Galatea obliterated in Pygmalion’s future Shadow). But the consequence of that still offered a trademark method of conjecture to the barbaric past during BDSM told through Gothic play; i.e., as continuously reimagined in ways that wound up becoming gendered in relation to other authors and their works inside a shared material world. Everyone was fumbling around in the dark; they stumbled towards truth (as applied knowledge) while being handled torches they found that others had once held. Step by step, these allowed Radcliffe and Lewis to go further than before—to see and say new-and-different things in relation to previous things already seen and said.

The idea, as always, is to be “of the Devil’s party” and actually know it (re: Volume Zero’s “camp map” section, wherein I discuss psychosexuality and the palliative Numinous when camping the operatically performative spaces of the canonical Gothic mode; re: for me, Metroidvania). Radcliffe, Lewis and the Shelleys were certainly precocious for their times—and worked in concert/opposition to each other when building castles on top of castles, mise-en-abyme—but the embodiment of xenophilic devilry as a dark, poetic force needs to become a concrete, collective identity in the face of universal struggle towards universal liberation; i.e., in pandemonic solidarity and excessive rebellion on the Aegis through ludo-Gothic BDSM: demons take many forms, and their “dark” revenge—as something to hungrily chase, but also love and worship—is often very visible:

(artist: cakiiBB)

Queer identity is one such facet and it intersects with others, mid-struggle; i.e., identity as struggle vis-à-vis careful and deliberate intersections of class, culture and race (which capital does its best to divide). The paradox of being trans, black and/or AFAB, for example, is that they aren’t choices (nor is being neurodivergent or questioning organized religion); you are or you aren’t and proceed from there, becoming something—whatever that is—through identity as performance and praxial synthesis helping or harming workers. Whether you evolve into yourself or stay in the closet, either is a form of “death,” but neither “ends.” Death is not the end; it lives on in material forms made by those with “dead” imaginations unable or unwilling to transform, or those who freed themselves through their imaginations as best they could—re: Radcliffe and Lewis, but also Scott and myself.

So while Coleridge “closed his eyes in holy dread and drunk the milk of paradise,” Lewis drove the old prude mad by tearing a reprobate “Adam” to bits (camping the canon, as Broadmoor puts it); Radcliffe, meanwhile, preserved her own modesty as something that didn’t die but whose work indicated a present something beyond herself that was alien to its author. As such, she hinted at what she could become if things were different; i.e., weren’t persecuted against, including by her regarding what she perceived were the proper sorts of damsels, detectives and demons to play with: the sort she caught, summoned and banished!

Now, the material world is rapidly changing in ways amenable to transformation beyond what Radcliffe could scarcely dream of (I’m not so sure about Lewis): the sweet terror of mid-transformation suggested by Scott (next page); i.e., the chimeric, liminal, “before-and-after” wonder of the trans experience as drug-like—a magical means of arriving at nature as furious to understand its alien suffering at the hands of Cartesian harvesters posturing as good; re: “Animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms.” Demon or undead, we’ll explore those next, in “Call of the Wild”; i.e., when we look at nature-themed, “totemic” and anthropomorphic egregores as an increasingly trippy and magical outlet for our animal selves; e.g., Sailor Moon or The Last Unicorn, but also Scott and Giger’s xenomorph, dragged out of the closet for another lesson: revenge as a poetic means of transformation, one where workers act xenomorphically without murdering anyone! Memento mori are wax sculptures, Count Ferdinand!

How? you ask? Let’s quickly conclude dissecting Scott’s shenanigans (two pages); i.e., the gay camper (me) camping Scott, the straight camper/gay deceiver deceiving the straight deceiver to make him gayer than he dares dream (eat your heart out, Matthew Lewis)! One, Covenant is sex-positive because its camp suggests that David might not be completely mad/has a method to his madness; they’re also sex-coercive because they feed into white women’s fears and let fascism in through the door of deliberate ambiguity. Being straight, Scott’s abjection, chronotopes, hauntologies, cryptonymy and stealth queerness regress to a 1970s kind of strict BDSM—one that ultimately guts Radcliffe’s likeness on a black altar. Scott doesn’t always know what to stress—and has mommy and daddy issues himself that aren’t fully worked out—but he’s not afraid to take chances; i.e., talking about sex (and rape) to drag the greats (with Shaw being David’s anatomical Venus/corpse of empire, but also something new made with the corpse, below):

I can applaud that (“die, honky!”), even if I think Scott makes a similar mistake that Eggers did by not having his dark throwback break the Fourth Wall and say to the audience, “I’m a Communist and this is my revenge against capital!” But the signs are there to connect for those who know… It’s a helluva lot better than Cameron’s currently doing (going full AI tech bro with his own remasters, say nothing of his white moderate politics; Nerrel’s “AI Can Ruin Movies Now, Too – Aliens and True Lies on 4k,” 2024); re: “truth” is merely positions of partial ignorance to enforce for different reasons (see: “Positions of Relative Ignorance to Relative Clarity“).

But, there are limitations with Scott vice signaling a false Jesus/antichrist against coded virtue as brute-force as he is; i.e., by presenting us as a rapacious threat to the usual people who think we’re a threat (and all in a white man’s image; re: of a cryptomimetic likeness/replica of a replica of Michaelangelo’s David). Scott loves the xenomorph and blackguard stirring the pot while he pulls the strings from a place of safety and privilege; i.e., as the Humanist throwback being the old white man with little-if-anything to lose/skin in the game; re: it’s a bit Percy Shelley/Lord Byron without irony, hence closer to Victor as Mary Shelley originally lampooned than Scott is nakedly worshipping: he thinks he’s Satan when he’s really, really not!

(artists: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell; source: Ross Webster’s “A Review of From Hell: Master Edition from Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell,” 2020)

Instead, he’s Jack the Ripper targeting women to slice them up for the audience’s entertainment; and while there’s a class-war character to his games, there’s also a fair bit of collateral damage (not as much as From Hell, above, but I digress; the same abjection process scaring the white female middle class is still there—a Hitchcockian menace torturing whores for money from said middle class during the usual damaging business making irony a regular casualty during profit above all else): “Oh, hear my warning! Never turn your back on the Ripper!” (Judas Priest’s “The Ripper,” 1976). Same goes for Scott and men like him, but also their wicked, sadistic and at-times-incredibly misogynistic, racist (eugenicist) and transphobic antiheroes: revived at a retro-future fin de siècle/neo-Victorian Ozymandian collapse (the death of the Weyland-Yutani corporation’s head of state having Orientalist elements as well; re: from 1979 onwards into the 1980s own canceled futures).

To that, Covenant is plenty Satanic, but it’s a bit too canonically Miltonic and doesn’t try hard enough to avoid the Satanic Panic side of things; i.e., while regressing towards new Dark Ages in ways that aren’t useful to Communism as new workers develop it: to go beyond an aging weird nerd’s idea of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1974). Trapped between capital’s boom-and-bust (Judas Priest’s proverbial Sad Wings of Destiny actually being historical materialism at work), Scott threatens to squish us to juices; i.e., like that girl from Akira (1988) while dancing with spectres of Marx dressed up like a walking sex toy/phantom of the opera. He’s carving up Margaret Thatcher as much as any Victorian street whore, but also Radcliffe; re: Radcliffe’s nightmare coming from a token woman with token fears.

Of that nightmare, David is literally gatekeeping paradise to say to Radcliffe’s doubles, “No TERFs allowed!” It’s poetic justice at its finest, castrating the austere pearl-clutcher/sell-out and holier-than-thou hypocrite by applying her own selective standards to her heroines hauntologized; i.e., a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all and demons play rough (for a good example of this, consider the “danger disco” scene from Near Dark, when the wandering-bandit vampires enter the cowboy bar [“shitkicker heaven!”] and kill everyone inside for our entertainment)! Scott does this through weaponized white/male privilege doing to Radcliffe what women like her fear the most; i.e., alienation through exposure to what will alienate them as normally what they use to alienate their victims: rape as something to accuse/a terror weapon, revealing the modest as whore-like, trapped in unironically mutilative rape spaces that lack irony and push towards sex-coercive forms of the non-so-palliative Numinous through courtly love, demon BDSM scenarios.

In keeping with Groom, Scott is camping Radcliffe by raping not just the women in Covenant while alive, but desecrating their corpses, too; i.e., as former settler-colonial symbols he turns into black-monolith homunculi the state will attack during mirror syndrome (a taste of their own medicine in his afterlife, making Persephone a Bride of Count Montoni/Dracula, again). It’s great, save for the fact that Covenant downright assumes a Gothic fluency that doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s more monasterial, limiting the film’s mass appeal in ways Ridley can’t really help. So he just plows ahead, hell or high water!

And to it, I can at least work with that—can take the idea of a retro-future posthumanist runaway slave making Medusa in small (re: the homunculus, above); i.e., by raping Noah and his wive (and their whole merry band of genocidal animals and families) and do something better with it than Scott does. Better still, so can my friends; i.e., during a shared cryptonymy process reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM as our playing with monsters (below)—by doing Scott one better during our own mommy rape play conjuring up demons during darkness visible in its legionary forms’ jouissance: adding radical irony to Radcliffe’s calculated risk, our Davids, Adams and Eves communicating through rape as rape survivors!

Sex pirates camping the canon to reclaim our power from capital’s nuclear home, our pandemonium wrecks said home to build a better one among the Ozymandian debris; i.e., our contributions to the narrative of the crypt going outside the text to speak to a world beyond Capitalism, the Cycle of Kings, Shadow of Pygmalion, and infernal concentric pattern while inside them, our wasp to their caterpillar! “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven!” said David; Walter and Daniels were the true villains of Covenant—Heavens to Murgatroyd!

While graphic, demon sex is very campable/code-switchable, it still helps to negotiate it behind the scenes (the full-size images can be accessed through the source links); e.g., as Harmony Corrupted and I do (we’ll start with us, then close-read Ninja Scroll and The Dark Crystal a bit);

i.e., wherein Harmony and I set the ground rules/stage for playtime—negotiate what is exchanged for what, what can be featured in what, and so on—then get down (so to speak) to business!

Labor exchange isn’t “separate” from sex work because, as the title suggests, sex work is work, and goes beyond (white straight middle-class) women to include anyone doing it to survive for a variety of reasons; e.g., to make money but also to do activism and illustrate mutual consent during rape cryptomimesis. Those aren’t mutually exclusive, and anyone who says otherwise is a cop and a pimp (which includes many privileged sex workers, who tokenize and punch down while acting exclusively oppressed inside Omelas as “their” corner to work); i.e., someone who thinks that sex work and consent are mutually exclusive, thus can’t illustrate mutual consent during dialectical-material struggle; re: Radcliffe, but also Scott, to some degree!

The praxial idea, then, is to play with the Gothic by combining these things, but also to infuse/synthesize the roleplay scenes themselves with open elements of revolutionary camp (within our daily habits’ anger/gossip, monsters and camp cultivating good social-sexual habits); i.e., as Lewis did, in The Monk, centuries ago; e.g., “Oh, yeah! Matilda, I’m ravishing your ambiguous gender identity with my closeted sissy’s dominant rod! Unholy Mommy of the Netherworld; how I coom at your profaning the Madonna, Christ and God; accept my sacrifice, writ in human fluids, my moist hot “soul” spraying all over your beauteous orbs! Holy Saint Francis! ‘Sblood! More like splooge, amrite? Dark temple, accept my burnt offering! Spider-girl’s got nothing on me!” Not bad for an old woman, huh (“I’m not old, I’m 37!“) Now go support Harmony on Fansly! Forget li’l-ol’ me, she does amazing work!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

The world is much too atomized/pulverized in ways Gothic Communism tries to holistically reconnect during praxial synthesis/the dialectic of the alien dismantling white moderacy/reactionary behaviors and tokenism (all of which are why we’re currently in this mess). Assimilation is poor stewardship, but punching up can resemble the disguises they use to try and blend in with the oppressed. So can our neo-medieval pedagogy profane canon and be hidden/open about it during the cryptonymy process; i.e., as dualistic, haunted by police shadows (official or stochastic)!

But also, we’re fighting for ourselves, our friends, nature, animals and the environment; i.e., as stewards of them and each other in the same proverbial boat/Ark. We’re just making a Covenant of the Rainbow with Satan (ourselves), versus one with God; i.e., in rejecting any and all functionally white colonizers hiding behind the Protestant ethic (as Radcliffe once did, centuries ago)!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

To it, neoliberal hope is false hope, but we can hungrily and animalistically “flap towards the hope“; i.e., of something better by winding back the clock while pushing forwards to take ludo-Gothic BDSM out of the bedroom (re: Foucault) without harming anyone and making art-porn educational exhibits that are explicitly punk/Communist (not postpunk, Zeuhl, Judas Priest, Ridley Scott, etc); and this extends to the movie theatre—i.e., we don’t need Scott’s cryptonymy/mise-en-abyme to make our own as infinitely more revolutionary than his because it represents workers solely instead of profit. Just what the doctor ordered: a hot, deep, full injection of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness to achieve praxial synthesis/catharsis and Gothic maturity regarding a proletarian Wisdom of the Ancients/Superstructure—Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism!

And, as always, natural linguo-material latitudes combine the usual medieval hyphenations of sex and force, war and rape (food and death, etc), during class, culture and race war to have fun with; e.g., “C’mon, rev my engine, dude! That’s it; fuck mommy like a good little whore! Fire phasers! Full broadside! Yes—yes, yes, yes—fuck me, stupid—motherfuckin’ BLAST OFF!” Playing is how we learn by passing messages back and forth; i.e., in class, while the teacher thinks we’re “studying.” In short, we invade our own classroom as guerillas, while they—the actual villains from Radcliffe’s stories (rich white people and their teacher’s pets acting as hall monitors for Capitalism)—try to invade and decipher our privacy (and fail badly as they do, left):

While silliness and play (with monsters, rape and trauma) is regaining control during ludo-Gothic BDSM, there’s nothing radically emancipatory about such revelation’s sacking of “Rome” unless we get out from under profit pimping nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., moving away from manufactured scarcity towards post-scarcity using pre-capitalist language to negotiate past trauma/our rights and boundaries in the present space and time. Anyone who resists that—i.e., so they can enjoy the usual middle-class fear-fascination with the ghost of the counterfeit furthering abjection—is a traitor on a gradient of betrayals, privilege and oppression, but also liberation and exploitation existing in the same shadow space we can solidarize and intersect towards development. It’s a sprawling orgy of conflict, and a messy one!

That’s our revenge; i.e., not killing a Radcliffean throwback unto itself, but transferring such poetic exchanges/reclamations of violence, terror and monster language unto all registers (territories), onstage and off; re: anisotropically reversing abjection (terrorist/counterterrorist) to dismantle profit: by camping canon to break Capitalist Realism, liberating sex work (thus all work) from capital/sex coercion with iconoclastic/sex-positive art (thus porn and Gothic poetics, at large)! So does the manmade slave turn the scalpel on its maker—the monster baby crunching the apple-like skull (and hypothetical brain) of its Saturnine parents! We’re not special snowflakes, but fucking ninja stars!

Speaking of which, this brings us once more to Ninja Scroll (1993):

(exhibit: We’ve already examined Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll during “Healing from Rape” in Volume One, but I want to revisit it, here; i.e., to make a point that movie’s director was, and me vis-à-vis my older arguments surrounding his work being applied here to Ridley Scott’s imperfect attempts to camp the canon as Matthew Lewis once did. So c’mon, everyone; let’s mosey along that borderline!

“All war is based on deception.” Ninja Scroll speaks in the Gothic courtly romance of the damsel, detective and sex demon; re: the ninjas are hired by the magistrate [actually the villain, in disguise] to investigate a robbery happening behind a fake plague—a plot to overthrow the current government being orchestrated from within, and one whose investigation into must start [to keep up appearances] but then meet with a tragic end [also to keep up appearances]: the ninja team is ambushed by a queer BDSM junkie with thunder in his veins, and—more to the point—a giant Frankensteinian creature; i.e., two of the Eight Devils of Kimon!

Well, shit.

It’s not so different than the Three Storms from Big Trouble in Little China [1986] except this isn’t American Orientalism, but a home-turf Japanese romancing of the babe in the woods to speak to the then-present space and time haunted by Japanese atrocities married to American ones; i.e., the ninja fodder are accompanied by a ninja girl, Kagero—a foxy ice queen who wants to be one of the boys and even likes the leader of the ninja team, Hanza. “Our enemy will be the epidemic!” he declares. But he forgets Sun Tzu’s adage, and is walking into a trap [and his men are arrogant/jumpy]. Kagero is protective of the numbskulls, going so far as to “castrate” herself—slicing off her hair to make a point [a fact that shocks the boys, given this lowers her value in their lord’s eyes, hence theirs].

Point taken; she gets to tag along, the men—especially Hanza—not realizing she’s doing so to protect them; i.e., as the “phallic woman”/Medusa warding off evil. Castrator women seeking revenge for past wrongs is a common theme in Japanese cinema [e.g., Lady Kaede from Ran, 1985]. Even so,  Kawajiri’s Kagero is something of a fledgling detective seeking—beyond expectation [and station]—the answer to who recently stole gold from the abandoned mine, kept secret through murder all those years ago; i.e., it’s a spaghetti Western in disguise, but also borrows monomythic tropes across warrior cultures in a wider neoliberal market to speak about rape using shared Gothic tools [versus camping them; e.g., Planet Terror‘s “a missing leg that is now missing!“].

To it, Kagero’s a girl in a man’s world, and in love with Hanza’s a superman-lite knockoff—a Clarke Kent to Jubei’s superior devilish prowess[7] [the two being mutual crushes for the same woman, except Hanza dies because he can’t think with the right head, and Jubei’s cooler heads prevail[8] against a demon who also thinks with his “short sword”]; i.e., with Hanza showing her a begrudging respect and her liking him, too, but their world not allowing for love between the classes: her being a poison-taster for their lord and him being a “mere ninja” serving said lord [and the magistrate being the story’s Sheriff of Nottingham, for the lack of a better comparison]. Hanza secretly wants to do things other than ninja [like have sex], and she wants to be a ninja, the two seemingly wanting to reconcile those desires/differences by being so close together and yet so far apart on a shared mission, for once [overlapping labor action]…

Alas, the quick, brutal realities and betrayals of feudal, Warring-States life cockblock our young prospective couple—the evil demon warriors stepping in to make short work of the boys by effectively out-ninjaing them, but also straight up massacring them/carving them into pieces of meat, raining blood [ninjas are spies, not assassins]!

Hanza’s men quickly buy the farm, and the last man standing stands just long enough, during the kayfabe, to saber-rattle with the tornado sword-wielding fiend…

….until his aspiring Amazon suddenly becomes a damsel-in-distress and Hanza—like Parker from Alien—runs in; i.e., dick-measuring with someone who is frankly and obviously a much bigger jouster! Shit’s fucking metal, the knightly code doing our gentleman caller no favors [a hauntological crossing of ninja and knight: “Ninja doesn’t survive,” Europe]!

Hanza loses, Kagero freezes, and the golem hams it up—the violence oddly eroticized [for the two homosocial men] while the black ninja mutilates the white ninja’s corpse to terrify his true prize: the girl he’s been hunting [on her scent, perhaps betraying their location except not really]. She “nopes the fuck out,” not too keen on being his plaything and saying “feets, do your stuff!” only to be stopped tragically short inside the dark forest [never a good place for a damsel to be without a hero, in canonical media]. His seeking sword is like a maelstrom of feral lust, chasing her down to sever her foothold and send her plummeting to her doom/plunging screaming into the abyss; i.e., the unspoken-but-heavily implied fate of whores in Gothic stories; i.e., the conservative argument: “She should have been at home like a good little girl; now, boys will be boys!”

 

This is only two minutes in a 91-minute movie, but it sets the stage for the woman’s revenge. And while the film is sexist in its depiction of men and women being dimorphically separate to seemingly favor men, it also works within those stereotypes to subvert patriarchal power. Jubei—the film’s hero, for example—deals the spectacular murder stroke to technically fell the golem, but it was the woman’s poisoned body [from the poison-tasting done for her master] that weakens said golem enough to literally “soften him up”! It’s Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West [coming out of Kurosawa’s East-meets-West hauntology with Seven Samurai fifteen years prior]—with “Frank” [the plot thickens] drawing only to miss, Jubei “juking” him to disarm the fiend and send his own boomerang back into his tantrum-throwing toddler brain! Talk about “losing your head over a piece of tail!” They’re both idiot heroes, flexing at each other while Kagero is largely unsung.

Largely. An old spy explains to us later that Kagero won the fight; i.e., that she castrates the rapist for raping her—and he has no idea/dies frightened and scared—but she also castrates the hero, who thinks he won the duel: he would’ve died without Kagero’s help [similar to Bard beating Smaug only because of the thrush sent by Bilbo to tell him the dragon’s legendary weak point]!

Furthermore, Jubei only wounds the monster’s hand, which blocks said monster’s face/vision… until his own weapon flies back into his brain, penetrating the seemingly impenetrable armor there by hoisting the owner—a literal walking castle/castle-in-the-flesh—on his own petard [reaping the literal whirlwind]! But even fatally wounded—and blinded like the Cyclops, Polyphemus—the brain[dea]ed monster stumbles stubbornly forwards to both apprehend Jubei, but also mark him for death should this last attack fall short [similar to Jason and the Argonauts, who the aforementioned Cyclops curses with death after they blind him]. The Numinous desperation maneuver/kamikaze [“divine wind”] attack fails, but whose bushido banzai charge carries the victor’s likeness into the defeated warrior’s now-softened clay palm, which leads a fellow Devil of Kimon—a Snake Woman, this time—to follow Jubei and seek revenge for her partner-in-crime’s demise; i.e., man-on-man, girl-on-man, girl-on-girl, and so on, the revenge is a Canterbury’s bloody road/scroll that never stops telling tales [though with decidedly less fart jokes than Chaucer and more ninjas acting like knights]!

Furthermore, such duels are generally over pride/women. Not one to sugarcoat, so does Kawajiri and his Aegis reverse the entire knight/damsel archetype/abjection process, but also oscillate between the two characters, Jubei and Kagero, routinely saving each other’s skins [with Kagero later saving Jubei from a Medusa-like woman, and helping with a variety of other struggles, too, including another monster of Frankensteinian size, the shapeshifting and seemingly immortal Genma[9]]: the damsel actually saving the white knight from the black knight/rape monster [such things being obvious to those who normally receive violence from such deceivers; re: Cuwu, teaching me to think about my own survival as a rape victim: from a woman’s perspective]. In short, “[they’re] comrades!” as Jubei himself explains, and the two never have sex—not even when a government spy is holding a gun to their heads; i.e., using poison on Jubei to force Kagero to sleep with him to lift the fever [triangulating sex from them for him to watch, the old lech a moderate bureaucrat/desk murderer voyeur coercing the exhibit].

While the Gothic involves tremendous speculation/speculative possession, the ensuing romance isn’t strictly endorsement; i.e., the Numinous/danger disco[10] only palliative when it’s sex-positive. Furthermore, such debates happen with demonic ghosts, which include pasts of us as those we’re hauntologically debating [e.g., Weber and Marx]. And while it might sound obvious, a scene with rape is inviting the viewer to think about rape. That’s important; Radcliffe, like Scott, combined rape and murder together to speak to a medieval viewing of things normally obscured by state illusion—i.e., through stress-relieving kettling devices whose calculated risk would be perfectly fine if not for their aforementioned reliance on unironic xenophobia, abjection and selective liberation, during calculated risk [a war profiteer pimping rape for profit, first and foremost].

Gothic Romance, then, isn’t automatic endorsement; at its core, Ninja Scroll is a profoundly Gothically mature story about surviving and overcoming rape; re: as anisotropic, which requires fetishizing rape to some extent [and camping it with the hit-or-miss voice acting]. What matters is performative/dialectical-material context—a kiss, for example, feeling fun under the right circumstances and utterly terrifying/horrifying under the wrong ones. The same goes for sex, but also things that speak to, with or about sex and love in some shape or form; i.e., the Gothic generally communicates trauma through echoes of itself in deliberately “ancient” forms; re: from Kurosawa’s samurai “having lost again” to the romantically disinterested-with-money-or-sex Jubei helping Kagero because they’re comrades.

Fighting against rape, Kagero is as much the story’s protagonist as Jubei is. Except, unlike him, she is poisoned to love—probably since she was a young girl well before the movie starts [with “poison” being a defense mechanism” but also “medicine” administered to her in defense of men she grows to resent while simultaneously feeling alienated from those she grows to love]—and must spend this iteration of the Hero’s Journey learning to find it, again.

Gothic stories concern rape victims both actual or potential mastering emotional confusion; i.e., amid grave physical danger [the Great Destroyer trope] to heal from the conditioning of abuse: healing is the revenge, as is building up to something that gnaws at and freezes our would-be assailants to deliver the final blow, mid-murder-ballad. Kagero’s resistance and bravery is poison to the golem, who cannot ingest it and—faced with his own shame—is subsequently beheaded and dismantled like the coward she exposes him to be. From one demon to another, her gift unmakes him; i.e., her will is greater than his, therefore her power having stolen his during the rapes!

Except, whereas the golem echoes big men raping her since she was small [a historical-material fact echoed in the magistrate’s mistress, but also the man himself as not being so functionally different from Genma, but also Genma’s golem or the real magistrate’s ninja cronies]—and still is small compared to them; i.e., both physically and relative to paper-thin barriers and boundaries that her fellow workers respect more than her rights—Hanza and later Jubei are two dudes she feels like she can actually start to trust; i.e., rape is the unspeakable domain of [traditionally] female violence [we’ll explore GNC examples, in Volume Three] but neither back downs or runs away from her like a disease. So eventually she opens up, talking about her feelings in ways that rape victims often bury inside themselves—in short, she learns to live and love again.

For Kagero, something as seemingly innocent as feeling safe during a hug and a kiss while naked and exposed is all that matters. And once she finds Mr. Right to help her realize that goal, she can [and does] die happy [both from joy but also from being stabbed, earlier]! It’s very Romantic in a sexless way and yet, all the same, connects to trauma, nudism, rape/violence and demonic magic of all kinds—not quite sui generis but certainly of that Marriage-of-Heaven-and-Hell variety that many artists, poets, thinkers, and actors have struggled to replicate historically across space and time!

It’s worth repeating that neither character is a stranger to violence, but Jubei is a stranger to violence as a woman experiences it; Kagero, then, helps him overcome something he can never experience as she does, the two of them doing so in the most classic [and ace] of ways—a tender and sensual kiss—while exploring trauma and power vicariously for the audience in worlds of trauma and power both faraway and close at hand—i.e., where such things don’t divide, but slam together in the most primal of discourses made-material under imperial structures onwards: sex and force! “The dose doth make the poison!”

And if Kawajiri “missed the flames of Hell” to speak to rape in ways he could camp during the cryptonymy process, cryptomimetically regenerating old medieval tropes between America and Japan’s imaginary past and present, so too could Cuwu and I—once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away—find common ground; i.e., as two rape victims having experienced rape as a trans masc and trans woman do: differently during the same class struggle extending towards queer people and sex workers. And if we could camp it, in hindsight, then so can we camp Ridley Scott’s Alien universe and its own strict rape play regarding Radcliffe’s! The paradox of rape allows for it, the events onscreen needing “rape” to discuss rape while also being something that—while undoubtedly triggering for many survivors—remains an invaluable tool when used consciously thus actively as a rape prevention device; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, changing the Superstructure!)

Clearly there’s a fine line between canon and camp, exploitation and liberation. Those who survive rape without becoming cops but learning how to camp it through calculated risk become—if not strictly “immune” to the bourgeoisie’s greatest weapons (canonical fear and dogma)— at least inoculated to them; i.e., in ways that let us camp the canon when the elite manufacture disasters they hope will scare people (through socio-material conditions) to let them stay in control (re: Jadis and I, me escaping them through half-real Gothic fantasies).

Divorced from that, our minds and bodies become not just one again, but ours to wield during the cryptonymy process’s dualistic war of masks, mirrors and monsters, magic and myths, and so on; their Great Destroyers expose as frauds, us no longer playing the magic song to send the “Moon” back to its original fearful position, but saying “no more” and recultivating the Superstructure (and reclaiming the Base) in ways the elite cannot monopolize; re: socio-material conditions make people stupid, but anisotropically can make them intelligent and aware. If I did so with Jadis, but also Zeuhl—may their junk fester and rot (cowards who ran from any challenge because it suited them to simply hide and feed on others)—and, to a lesser extent, with dear flawed-but-darling Cuwu (and others less dear to me who harmed me far more), then you can do it together in order to become something mobile and conscious of class, culture and race conducive to Communist development! The scroll winds ever onwards, trapped forever between older sections and newer ones waiting to be written.

For example—and bringing us to another old stomping ground of mine, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (a very gay show, in its own right; re: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Dark Crystal: AoR – Sexuality, Women, and Queer Identity,” 2019)—Rian’s father, Ordon, tells him to be brave when falling to the Hunter, because fear is precisely what the elite will use against us while picking a fight; i.e., once having taken all they can take before someone pushes back (such is reactive abuse). Indeed, the show is all about queer and similarly intersectional solidarities grouping in the face of questioning blind service vis-à-vis our cannibal leaders mirrored in fantastical doubles (and their fractal recursions).

But out of that puppet-happy Age of Wonder and its spectacular duels are age-old tropes speaking to ongoing dialectical-material struggles; e.g., the bounty hunter/secret police demasked (thus shamed) by the aging captain, only for his son to survive him in one final duel not just with the blackguard before him threatening his next-in-line, but also the gaping pit of Death itself eating him alive! When Ordon throws both of them into the pit to try and save Rian, he says, “No!” to stop his weeping son from following him, but also assures him “it’s alright” and to “be brave.” Such bravery is made not to pacify us, but to keep our animal impulses in check to keep us, their children, from being eaten, too. So do the sins of the father die with him, the old pro going out on his own terms: a warrior’s death, reclaiming his honor if not dispatching his eternal foe!

“You have heart! I’ll take that, too!” said Jadis to me (they loved the Hunter in that show), to which I finally stood up and said to them, “No you won’t!” Such push-back shattered their sense of control, and they fled from me like a bad dream—one that, like all my abusers, haunts me to this very day, and who I’ve reversed on the Aegis through my cryptomimesis to “dance, magic!” with all the power of Hell at my command; i.e., as someone dangerous who can make demands to the elite, but also make changes without talking to them at all; re: “Get away… FROM MY FRIENDS!” Behold the power of the Darkening—in our hands!

So while the show is full of heroic men, its women are doing the most heroic deeds/dismantling patriarchal systems of power by walking away from Omelas. And so does a humble Grottan (the show’s underclass) do the greatest deed of all: turning the elite’s message of fear and doubt, hatred and death back on those Caesarean assailants; i.e., terror—a mighty weapon they can’t control once unleashed—turned into counterterror! When cornered, the elite unleash Jadis’ Moon, and “gentle” Deet absorbs it to become their worst nightmare: a rape victim who fights back to a lethal degree (she is crippled at the start of the show, the Darkening as much criminogenic conditioning as a metaphor for state shift)!

Cornered, she hesitates only for a moment, then acts, sucking the darkness into herself. It seems to be killing her (and it is), but also, she’s taking the elite’s power into herself and growing into an operatic monster belied by her deceptively small stature: the fat lady simmering inside someone built for comfort, not speed!

“A moment’s courage and the deed is done!” Specifically the damage is done, as much speaking to what happens outside Deet as in; i.e., she radicalizes, a dark oracle/whore others see as a threat they pull away from (with Rian marrying the good princess instead of the whore)! Demons are transactional, and superstitious parties isolate her as equally fearful to them as the Skeksis! And though there isn’t a Brutus element to Deet’s felling of the Caesars, her phallic BDSM revenge element conveys a likeness of the in-group that speaks to real life whistleblowers warning about dangers in our midst from positions of relative privilege close to their friends-turned-enemies (sort of an inverse of the writing for Deet, but functioning on the same gradient); e.g., an insider for Elon Musk selling him down the river after Musk symbolically and materially turned on said insider by doing the Nazi salute; i.e., the insider begot from Jewish Holocaust survivors, and having worked from obscurity alongside Musk until too much was too much (Chris Norland’s “SELL Your Tesla Stock Says Elon Musk Insider,” 2025).

Everyone’s breaking point (and privilege/oppression) are different, but Caesar always laments his own death in the face of backstabbers; Deet’s betrayal is seen as “ultimate” in the eyes of the slavers, because they think her indebted to them most of all (and her own friends feeling guilty to some degree in said exploitation, thus fearful of her revenge, but also jealous of her for literally stealing their thunder[11] by straight-up nuking a seemingly unstoppable force): “Et tu, Brutae?” might sound absurd when inverted and applied to a working non-white girl of the people, but that’s essentially what happens, here. Deet’s race and class are alien, but so are her identity and actions through heroic performance turning her into Grendel’s mother/the Medusa; i.e., going from female Anakin of color to Commie Darth Vader sith lord Omelas child through the same purple electro-shock treatment used by the failing Emperor! “And now, young Skywalker, you will die!”

No one wants to martyr themselves. In doing so, Deet sacrifices herself by changing permanently as the Medusa does (dooming her to a lonesome existence); but in seeing several friends die, she throws herself in front of the bomb anyways, embracing her heroic role and giving the castle demons a taste of their own stupid bullshit—i.e., after she takes their power from them and giving it back to workers. As such, she kills those who say they can’t be killed, showing their illusions as false while toppling Goliath with one of its own stones (a bomb she gives back to them, which blows up in their faces);

i.e., one of the Skeksis—an especially dumb and annoying one—don’t even seem to know its dead until its head explodes like a bomb: a “really gross sneeze” that splatters hot, white (and slightly purple) fluid all over the queer-coded Skeksis’ face… who cries afterwards, “It’s in my mouth!”

Do you split or swallow, love? It’s rebellion bukkake, the palace of their confidence and illusions crashing down before our eyes! One dies of shame; the others bravely run away—and all from the testimony of the show’s queer character of color bursting their bubble in spectacular killer-rabbit fashion! She becomes demonic/undead on/with the Aegis, but also is vaulted, Christ-like, within Omelas until it eats itself alive (nature’s revenge and hers because she isn’t heeded, merely taken for granted): for throwing stones in glass houses, those who don’t check their privilege mistaking their own ignorance for wisdom and magnanimous charity for active solidarity/acting oppressed versus being oppressed (many of the good characters are princesses, nobles, and cops). So do the others betray Deet.

It might sound tragic and Icarian (and indeed, Netflix canceled the show after one season), but such is Medusa’s story normally controlled by men and token women (re: the Athenian Amazons, on and offstage): a thing to take away from their meddling hands through the usual popular (monomyth) devices and poetic abstractions; i.e., speaking in code during the cryptonymy process being unaverse to using puppets that camp the canon. Popular during the medieval period, the practice and its psychosexual metaphors actually date back to ancient times; i.e., while speaking—as such monsters and their simulacra do—from the heart: of those who most immediately alienated by/affected concentrically inwards regarding those of the in-group less and less bothered by capital doing what capital does by design! The paradox of rape being rape cannot be effectively discussed without camping it.

Medusa, then, is ultimately a dead, alien, functionally non-white whore speaking to rape, whose exposure is something moderacy fears and punishes; i.e., the ultimate crime for exposing the ultimate rape as having the ability to radically change society (discussions of rape being shameful for the victim being shamed by other victims, or coddled by them out of gagging pity). Those with privilege (therefore less alienation)—including tokenized privilege—will hide behind their accomplishments/privilege to deny their own oppression and predatory antics (e.g., Mike Tyson the heavyweight champion, not the token black man who raped women and went to prison for it [Eleanor Neale’s “Mike Tyson’s Vicious History of Domestic Abuse,” 2024]—same idea for O.J. Simpson, though he went to jail for something else).

To testify to rape is to rebel against profit, and rebellious women—cis/white or not—are always victims of men or those acting like men/the colonizer pimps out of revenge more broadly through the usual intersecting networks of oppression being historically used to stir up marginalized division; re: that quells the whore’s monstrous-feminine testimony as something to cage, thus control, like poor Deet; i.e., capital defends capital in descending/ascending orders of privilege/preferential mistreatment, and the intended heroes of the show don’t like Deet once she stops being “poor, sweet, and gentle”; they fear and exile her like Radcliffe does: tone-policing the oracle who exposes their hand in things, then appeasing Brutus and his survivors of Caesar who kill them all. Have fun, kids!

False rebellion is fascism, and capital more broadly loves shooting the messenger while fetishizing her! We can do the same, but doing so to celebrate the whore’s revenge in equally crude, undisguised eroticism and public nudism (next page); i.e., a whore’s a whore, naked or not. As Lewis and Shelley but also Scott, Kawajiri and Henson showed us, nudity is where power lies, and where our own spectres of the Medusa/Marx reave Radcliffe’s refrain to raise her patchwork corpse from the grave to speak in our tongue, for a change! The dead can speak without fear because they’re already dead, but those who are undead face a curiously liminal amount of risk: demonic banishment!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

As stated, whores are the oldest form of labor, thus exploitation/revenge, and generally sex is something to be feared precisely because it’s haunted by ancient rape, giving it a dark godly flavor (re: the Numinous). This can be for pity or predation, but I know plenty of people who routinely shove whores into a corner and don’t talk about them at all because sex is either beneath them, or something they don’t understand so they keep quiet about it (torturing Medusa like Prometheus). Ignorance and denial are just as poisonous as direct abuse—with first-hand abusers generally relying on some form of apathy (from indirect or lateral sources) to prey on those they normally destroy! Jack the Ripper targeted streets whores, as do many modern symptoms of capital worship bourgeois predation, out-of-joint; re: Deet being the good team’s centrist Omelas pariah (they take the credit for)!

Likewise, these isolated examples speak to a larger problem that revives across a variety of registers. Those closer to the furnace commonly punch down out of desperation to escape it, while those further away ignore it out of convenience. But the common victim is always the whore—with whores of more privilege punching down against those with less, and those with less tokenizing to escape the usual predations happening to them and their kind. Idiosyncrasies aside, no one wants to be raped/the Omelas sacrifice, assimilation being a form of revenge that speaks to self-hatred projected onto similar victims versus the open oppressors caging the whore and worshipping her veiled fury and phantasmagorical nudity on the surface of the image (re: Segewick, but also Radcliffe’s Black Veil trope); e.g., middle-class white women hating whores for “paying rent” through an inherited and instructed means of superiority/arbitrary privilege and fragility/allergy to other workers treated as “free” under the usual divisive qualities of capital. Such behavior is criminogenic to varying degrees, but betrayal is betrayal and oppression is oppression insofar as it—like demons, more generally—takes infinite forms within the same castration/carceral system of differences/marginalization; re: through blood libel, witches, and goblins, thus Nazis and Commies/Orientalism as “equally” barbarous. Liberation happens by camping said barbarism and its audience.

Value is perceptive, hence incumbent on position as relative; i.e., money under capital is an imaginary system tied to material factors/positions of divide and punish for exploitative purposes (re: profit). Those who benefit from said fakery imagine threats to the status quo they can expose and banish through remarkable invention and inertia; those who suffer invent fakeries to liberate themselves through incessant revenge. Whatever the nostalgia/deities at play/work (the two are synonymous) during ludo-Gothic BDSM, the shadow of Galatea is always a Numinous whore—even if wrongly applied/accused—through the aesthetic of power and death during cryptonymy and abjection; re: an apocalypse/fetish of dead alien whore paradoxically recent and alive evoking the ancient Numinous of all dead whores banished by Radcliffe to Hell! Relegation and release, gentrify and decay—all use the same highway. Stock is something to give and take, then, happening on a broader market that isn’t strictly owned but fought over for different purposes; e.g., the more value we see in ourselves as demonic, the more we’ll defend it against those exposed as abusing us as food/status for them to give to capital.

To it, the uncertain, anisotropic, and at times (though not always) apotropaic power of demons, magic and fantasy are dualistic, thus anisotropic during liminal expression tugging on such ropes towards or away from the state out of the whore’s revenge; i.e., the elite can’t hope to monopolize such things, and they will always need workers, thus whore pimps like Radcliffe, to exploit through the same traitorous us-versus-them arguments policing these prison-like territories as commented on through a variety of past thinkers; e.g., Foucault may have been a rapist traitor to all things queer, but he was right about one thing (well, several, but I digress): prisons destroy everything by design: they’re a business, not an accident, and those who visibly challenge the system/profit get hammered.

The ’80s were a dark time, and one I barely remember. But I survived Hep C (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Hepatitis C: I Have It, and It’s a Deadly Disease, and It Sucks,” 2016), and recall suffering under the panopticon as queer my whole life (even while in the closet, but certainly outside of it); re: “A Vampire History Primer” (2024). Like Rocky Balboa, “I can’t sing or dance,” but I can go the distance with Creed (a token neoliberal assimilating like Floyd Patterson or Sugar Ray Lewis or Leonord, versus Muhammad Ali’s love for monster movies and activism) in other ways; i.e., I can’t sing or dance (at least not well), but I can fuck, draw, write and work my little heart out with my fellow monstrous-feminine whores! The stage has been the fag sex worker’s home since Shakespeare, at least; the idea is to do so on and offstage—to speak to things that aren’t separate, but also in language that is simple but no simpler than it needs to be to communicate itself, mid-cryptonymy reversing abjection (thus profit) with all the usual suspects: tension and release, Gothic push-pull, Numinous sex, etc! Revolution’s literally free!

To it, I’ve lived a full life, and through my own privilege and oppression, it’s both my duty and honor on my life to use my own profound survival—and total, holistic education—to stand side-by-side with my comrades to subvert said arguments; i.e., not as someone stronger or better than them protecting the weak, but all of us working together as standing against the true enemies of the world! So often, women (or those treated like women/the monstrous-feminine) are “kept,” sheltered and gagged under house arrest. Medusa unbound screams through us, her army of avatars; win-motherfucking-win, girls! Die on that hill as you lived: with a bang to thrive in the state of exception as superhero (or supervillain) whores; re: whores are gods, and gods are cool! So is sex, public nudism, Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM at large!

(artist: Rim Jims)

Last but not least, we’ll unpack this vis-à-vis Radcliffe; i.e., as someone to try and salvage versus completely gut, but still a ghost of the original!

With Radcliffe’s double dead-and-buried, then (and Scott’s revenge against Cameron secured by letting David ride off into the night), I saved the animal side of things for last, because it concerns the alien fixations of the Gothic as a steady alarm bell; i.e., for state crisis and decay that must be met within alienized spheres in defense of nature-as-alien before state shift happens!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

“Are you still dead?” I don’t know, Dennis Cooper, are we? The idea when surviving state shift is to inject ourselves with the power of the gods without harming ourselves; e.g., by not sticking our dicks in light sockets, or fucking ourselves with actual knives, etc; i.e., by “playing dead” in ways that revive Medusa in ways we can control, meaning in a collective push towards avenging nature-as-monstrous-feminine without fucking ourselves over in the bargain! Nature is other/monstrous-feminine, its routine harvests discussed already in the book but here approaching history as something we write for ourselves per our education as taken back into our own hands during revolutionary cryptonymy (and the other Gothic theories)!

And, like Scott’s David or Lewis’ Matilda, we avatars of the Medusa can look back despite the dualistic confusions: on our handiwork with pride! Idle hands, indeed! Whether it’s PUSSY SLAIN! or PUSSY SLAYS YOU! the sub—male, intersex, or female—has just as much power as the dom, and something is always given in exchange between us workers, and the elite stealing from us as we drink their milkshakes (really being our milkshakes, but I digress). Go forth and conquer, little ones! “Rape” ironically and show them your power/the method in your “madness” (or devil in your details)! Trans their MAGA kids and fuck their tradwives not just for revenge, but funsies, then dance on the grave of their stupid Man Box dreams, muhahaha (whose dreams sit between fiction and non-fiction; e.g., Adam Mockler’s “UPDATE: Wife Leaves Trump Voter Who LOST $1MILLION,” 2025)!

All that being said, this was just coitus; consider the following resurrection and celebration of poor Radcliffe’s freshly raped corpse a mouthful of actual zombie-demon cum, sans foreplay! I.e., of what to expect in Volume Three, when proletarian praxis and de facto education become that volume’s sole focus…

Onwards to “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Gothic oxymorons like exquisite torture’s sacred/profane dichotomy thrive in dialectical-material tension: i.e., remediated praxis; e.g., spanking the wicked for fun or legitimate healing versus unironic corporal punishment. The label “devil” oversees both, yet the function remains diametrically opposed in ways that merge monstrous modules. A state devil seduces and bribes, casting doubt on the oppressed as “devilish” in ways that, per state operations, merit punishment through state arguments abusing Gothic poetics to uphold the status quo regardless of the monster type. Per Radcliffe, the whole ordeal has a tribunal-esque feel, one where the lawyer, witness and suspect testify through doubles of a monster during the same proceedings: the state vs the defense (workers, nature) equating to devils vs devils, aka Amazonomachia expressed as undead, demonic and/or animalistic. We’ve already examined the zombie apocalypse as a kind of disease troubling society as sick. Instead, let’s consider it more broadly in ways that also apply to demons (we’ll get to animals in the next chapter).

During this conflict, then, one side of a doubled pair is moral, correct, and just relative to basic human rights being defended, and used to defend the defendant, from the state inside a sick institution; e.g., a courtroom or hospital as medieval, torturous and prison-like, a harsh breeding ground for unwanted observation, but also acute feelings of aggressive suspicion, intense doubt, feverish moral panic, ill omens and conflicting information/semiotics* and unfounded paranoia, all being informed and scrambled by claustrophobic fear and dogma (what Nick Groom calls The Italian, “very much a novel for the twenty-first century”). Such places are housed by judges, inmates, and guards who operate through visual markers of social-sexual disease; i.e., as something to contain, isolate and forcefully interrogate, meaning infectious hysteria/persecution-as-contagious, outbreaks of xenophobia all coming down on the side of American liberal justice against state foes; e.g., zombies, demons, or wild animals.

*The rainbow something to assign, for example, to queer people having reclaimed it, turning its colored, arched bands paradoxically into a marker of punishment instead of good luck; i.e., Satanic panic within Rainbow Capitalism and all the cognitive dissonance and estrangement that entails.

In turn, these assigned/associate feelings are bred, but “patient zero” is a myth insofar as its presence is installed through panoptic dogma: Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) being a metaphor for medieval containment procedures for leprosy that extend to society as a whole:

The panopticon induces a sense of permanent visibility that ensures the functioning of power [… It] represents the way in which discipline and punishment work in modern society [and] is a diagram of power in action because by looking at a plan of the panopticon, one realizes how the processes of observation and examination operate.

Fear is a disease, then—a poetic contagion to push onto subjects that carry it with them everywhere during Capitalist Realism; in turn, said Realism could be likened to a pandemic that operates globally but manifests differently per register as large groups are corralled and maneuvered against each other. Even if it’s not a literal disease, the desperate and constant tensions are still life-threatening. To that, once threatened by an outside presence, the state as a body will defend itself as under attack. In fact, it does so by design. Capitalism requires contagion to operate; we must subsist, mid-struggle.

For example, recent history shows us that rights can be eroded, but the language of devilry remains an obstacle or aid to this tragic outcome. In such times, we must advocate (thus fight) for ourselves as demonized by the state; i.e., dehumanized to share a deadly condition felt by all within the state of exception as happening through the hostile recognition of a condition (symptom) and execution of its necessary treatment—crime and punishment as biologically essentialized: a devil to isolate and handle through force in ways that ultimately consolidate power as a lucrative and genocidal venture. With demons, the sentence of devilry and damnation is found and expressed through banishment, burning or exorcism; with the undead, through infection, quarantine and termination (of a terminally ill “patient”); and animals, through rabies (“madness”), Pavlovian conditioning and euthanasia.

[2] From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790):

When I came home, on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat-sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds hovering on the sides of the rock; with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, and read by them on earth:—

“How do you know but every bird

that cuts the airy way

Is an immense world of delight,

closed by your senses five?” (source).

[3] A.K.I.’s head is phallic like a mushroom, but also having a bowl cut from Hell. She cums by torturing her prey to death; i.e., in black and red like a Nazi-Commie vampire, but also a furiously fetishized female sex-demon ghost; re: the yurei from The Terror: Infamy (2019) married to ahegao, dragon-woman Orientalism and male Japanese, salary-man emasculation fantasies: “step on me, mommy!” The more pain, the more passion (convulsionnaires) for the mistress and the sub; the more passion, the more closeness to divinity—her magnum opus using her prey as a stepping stone to the gods and immortality said sub can also bask in through her hellish ascension! Both profit differently!

[4] Re: So mysterious, that Robert Miles—writing of Rictor Norton’s 1999 biography of the famous author, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe—had this to say about her, “Ann Radcliffe was, in her day, the obscurest woman of letters in England. Her contemporaries despaired of learning anything about her, while Christina Rossetti abandoned her planned 1882 biography for lack of materials” (source). Ninja nun strikes from the shadows!

[5] Ironic or consenting/non-harmful knife play is a thing (e.g., Cara Day having her panties sliced off with a knife [source tweet: August 12th, 2023] while showing the visible threat of the knife minus actual harm). It’s generally a hard kink, though, because performing it has a much higher risk of harm than, say, spanking or Plain-Jane oral sex (unless the sucker bit it off, I guess).

[6] The same year TERFs started to go mask-off in England.

[7] A man who’s capable of great violence (“That boy’s got the devil in him!“) but uses it to solve disputes in ways that don’t rape women—a slow bar, indeed, but a common heroic litmus test, in spaghetti Westerns.

[8] We’ve already discussed Jubei’s role in this film, in Volume One; re: his role as a Western hero (a ronin) to reclaim from state dogma; i.e., similar to knights and Amazons predator/prey language during medieval, weaponized romances of Gothic sex and force, during “An Uphill Battle with the Sun in Your Eyes.” We’ve also discussed his role in “Healing from Rape” (from the same volume). I recommend you give both a look!

[9] The golem couldn’t regenerate, but Genma can; the golem’s Achille’s Heel is lust and Genma’s greed, both of their downfalls wrought by a shared, fascist desire to lie, cheat and steal from others to dominate all workers. To it, nothing in Ninja Scroll is “superior” to anything else. Instead, adaptation and teamwork (symbiosis) are what counts—just like Kurosawa! Deception is part of that, meaning for both sides; re: complicit vs revolutionary cryptonymy during the same uphill battle!

[10] Gaslighting audiences through moral panic isn’t moral; it’s a racket, and one that mixes quite well with genuine warnings and confusion. Fetishizing and solidarity aren’t always mutually exclusive, either, but they are in Radcliffe’s fictions; i.e., a straight woman putting the illusion of mutual consent behind her Black Veils, only to regress towards selective salvation when pulling it aside!

[11] Women of color/non-white and Indigenous people are historically exploited by white women as having more privilege than them, which intersects with queer white women versus queer non-white women (re: “Hot Allostatic Load”) and other bigotries and concerns; e.g., #MeToo being started by a woman of color and co-opted by affluent white women abusing the justice system but also social justice networks more broadly to make themselves the center of attention. Any whore who isn’t Erin Brockovich (white, played by Julia Roberts) is going to be ostracized and attacked more because of it; re: whores policing whores, workers and witches policing workers and witches, mid-rebellion (the Gelfling are divided and conquered, in the end, because of their menticided, Pavlovian divisions).

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

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

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“Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons,” part one: Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives (feat. Out of Sight, Nina Hartley, Velma, and Zeuhl)

“…Schedoni would be the last among us so to trespass. He is one of the most pious of the brotherhood; few indeed have courage to imitate his severe example. His voluntary sufferings are sufficient for a saint. He pass the night abroad? Go, Signor, yonder is the church, you will find him there, perhaps.”

Vivaldi did not linger to reply. “The hypocrite!” said he to himself as he crossed to the church, which formed one side of the quadrangle; “but I will unmask him.”

—a lay-brother and Vivaldi, The Italian (1797)

Picking up where “Derelicts, Medusa and H. R. Giger’s Xenomorph; i.e., the Puzzle of “Antiquity”)” left off…

Whereas part zero looked at damsels, detectives and sex demons per Giger’s biomechanical xenomorph, and part two looks at magical demons in isolation while dissecting Radcliffe herself, part one shall inspect damsels and detectives, and features a wide eclectic mix of non-magical kinds; i.e., ranging from white cis-het female detectives and sex workers, to trans detectives investigating trans-on-trans deception and violence; e.g., J-Lo from Out of Sight and Nina Hartley the vintage pornstar for the first two (as detective and damsel, respectively), and Velma, but also doubles of good/evil Velma with me and my ex, Zeuhl, for the second!

I’ll explain/signpost as we go. First, though, a little thesis work: As something to play detective with, the Gothic concerns unequal, at-times-painful power fantasies through investigation of the imaginary barbaric “past”; i.e., from past cross-sections of former “rape” victims, whose derelicts include golems, like Giger’s xenomorph, as castles in small. Except, whereas state proponents fashion these abject symbols to reduce and control them in times of crisis (re: privileged, middle-class people spend to feel in control when the state manufactures crisis), we marginalized sex workers can apply the same principles of play and Gothic BDSM to speak to state abuse harming damsels and detectives being demonized: to gain a voice/foothold through the very things they’re abjecting! If they act on these simulacra, they self-report and we’re spared any actual harm (reduction and prevention).

That being said, there’s still the power fantasy as traditionally arranged, viewed and consumed; i.e., men want power to kill monsters with impunity and women want power to investigate them with impunity (and dogwhistle to their owners for treats). The two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, except for Radcliffe they absolutely were; i.e., magic, killing and violence are what men and/or pirates do, not women, which suitably altered women of Radcliffe’s standing and persuasion to imagine demons (and their forced alien entries into the damsel and similar victims) at all: victims to blame once transformed into dark versions of rape survival (dark gifts/forbidden knowledge); i.e., gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss, blame the whore as someone for her to pimp.

Note: This writing is relatively shorter/a bit of a rehash, given it’s older than “Giger’s Xenomorph” and the Demon Module up to this point. But part one and part two do examine and apply damsels and detectives, then demons, in ways that we specifically try to reclaim. While part zero talked about these things together through Giger’s demon, parts one and two consider them on their own. —Perse

As Volume Zero shows, I am not kind towards true crime and murder mysteries; yes, I can enjoy the basic suspense they offer but utterly detest the praxial inertia they contribute towards—a praxial inertia that stems from Radcliffe having started it all (“heavy lies the crown,” sweetie); re (from Volume Zero):

the “twist,” in “true crime” is a forced reality that generally confirms the systemic scapegoat after a revelation by the nosy neighbor (“I knew it!”); i.e., the Scooby Doo villain as borrowed from the centuries-older xenophobia and state apologetics of female Neo-Gothic fiction authors like Ann Radcliffe having carved it out in equally cartoonish forms. Radcliffe lived under the power of men, to be sure, and wasn’t in a position of power like Lewis (a man) was, but the degree to which she used her immense (albeit relative) privilege as a white woman-of-letters is dubious, at best; i.e., not to help the oppressed by writing anything other than what she did, but actively choosing to use her unironically xenophobic (and frankly vanilla) rape fantasies to write moderately bigoted novels. Like Tolkien, Radcliffe’s Gothic moderacy is precisely what makes her stories dangerous to sex-positive workers, because behind their veneer of moderacy lies the same function executed by more aggressive, reactionary forms: to stoke class, race and gender suspicions; i.e., moral panic. For Radcliffe, this meant aristocratic, often elderly white folk, but also racist, jingoistic caricatures and poor, non-white people being unmasked by chaste white women (the nun-like, ostensibly ace/queer-coded private eye; e.g., Velma).

Radcliffe, then, was complicit in a larger scheme her fans would breed into and police on and on down the years. As Top Dollar once said, “the idea has become the institution”; in return, Radcliffe’s fiction has become something to unironically defend from “degenerate” outsiders, turning her books, oddly enough, into besieged fortresses that uphold the material conditions of a particular mythic structure. Her relative stupidity becomes something to not only sweep under the rug but embody through half-hearted or worse, bad-faith arguments (source).

All of this detective’s bias is worth considering because it becomes a veil behind which our attackers hide themselves and attack us from; i.e., by playing at detectives (cops) while calling us sex demons (which will become relevant in a moment, when we look at Zeuhl accusing me of their abuse). To it, the “delicate” likes of Radcliffe tended to read outrageous stories like Walpole’s Mysterious Mother[1] (a double-incest yarn written in 1768 and published posthumously in 1791) or Lewis’ The Monk (1794) before filtering everything through her rose-tinted glasses: a “confessional” per her Confessional of the Black Penitents. We’ll want to consider this canonical filtering process, to be sure, except our focus really isn’t true crime or murder mystery genres, but how various elements of those (mainly crime and murder tied to rape, BDSM and sex work) appear in popularized forms of Gothic poetics at large. This includes porn as similarly “filtered.” Deceivers, including self-deceivers, are classically exposed through the lies they weave and pitch to others and themselves as reclaimed against them; i.e., by those whose identities actualize by the end of the story and, just as well, hybridize the damsel, detective and sex demon/whore (a kind of sex bandit with queer flavors, below):

(artist: Nico Okapi)

We’ve already examined Alien and the xenomorph (and virtually every magical sex demon under the sun). To expose the likes of Radcliffe in the present space and time (so, not explicitly retro-futures[2]) as moderately deceitful (and opportunistic), we’ll examine various not-magical damsels and detectives (cis, but also trans, above) in part one, and the things they doggedly investigate—sex demons, naturally—in part two, as already state; i.e., as a purposefully campy subversion (and effective) means of our own liberation from their widespread falsehoods. Gird your loins!

We’ll go back through the list. The first third of the demonic trifecta are damsels. Though we’re specifically looking at porn as liminal expression,  here, the damsel isn’t always overtly pornographic or monstrous (outside of intense subversions, next page); they’re merely the promise of sex, supplied in relation to sex work as figuratively demonized by canon, thus linked to persecution as a veil for exploitation: getting the girl. Let’s take that premise to its logical conclusion by skipping the Gothic foreplay and just going straight to the unspoken reward at the end of the story!

As someone to investigate their own world, a woman is always a virgin and a whore. To this, the “summoning” of female/feminized sex workers becomes a tradition of disempowerment towards subjugated demons by male consumers presaged by middle-class maidens with mirror syndrome; i.e., naughty “damsels” on-and-off the Aegis offering forbidden knowledge to the cis-het, white men (the status quo) who indignantly conquer them through sexualized violence propagated vicariously by token Radcliffean Gothic heroines.

Furthermore, even if that violence is displaced, it’s presented “merely” as commerce, or “business as usual”; i.e., by advertising quite loudly who is being exploited and how (with Radcliffe playing DARVO by also centering her rape claims [and desire] around her own kind as entitled and suspicious: white straight landowners fearful of the outside/alien during the dialectic of shelter). Hence, examining porn can be especially illuminating but also exploitative in its pro-worker or pro-state arguments.

In either case, it promptly gets down to business, but highlights the foreshadowed outcomes to any Gothic tale’s “happy ending” (we’ll examine this voyeurism and exhibition’s inception, here, then how we can subvert it in Volume Three, Chapter Three and Five; i.e., the canonical voyeurism of peril as something to subvert yourselves while going about your business amongst students who are eager to watch and learn—exhibit 101c2).

(exhibit 47b1a: Nina Hartley[3] and Victoria Paris—conventionally beautiful and objectified, but capable businesswomen navigating a man’s world/adult entertainment. They are loved so long as they play dumb, familiarizing customers and critics with fabricated ideas about what constitutes a woman in familiar/foreign terms; the voyeuristic gaze of the usual torture victim as an idealized, damsel-esque but also demonized sacrifice: the succubus as virgin/whore.)

Echoes of the Medusa, a sense of ancient dereliction exists within ’80s porn, which has a polished-yet-trashy feel to its whores. Like a B-movie with a budget, its liminal sense of time is ageless and dated through its peerless starlets; they never seem to age, but grow increasingly dated in subtle, hauntological ways: the retro-future of a frozen porno world that has become the nostalgic past sold back to us in an idealized, imperfect form people from the future chase backwards for different reasons. The harmful decay lies in the appropriation itself; i.e., these women were generally framed as physically “perfect,” but also forced into wacky and physically degrading roles that required less an absence of good acting and more an intentionally bad or campy style tailored to please (white straight men/tokens) as the universal client (acting dumb). Combined with the hauntological sets and costumes that join the ’80s aesthetic as a package deal, a general air of unreality flows from these works; i.e., like staring into a movie poster of something that never-quite-was but nevertheless was inside everyone’s VCR not too long ago!

Nina was part of that, sharing her screen space with other conventional beauties like Victoria Paris, Tori Welles and Peter (don’t touch his hair) North (exhibit 47b1a). Each showed how the human body can be utterly transformed with a little pizzazz, but also how so much of what they made was prolific ephemera tied to a recognizable face and on-brand (statuesque) body and stage name. They became “hyperreal,” the perfect simulation of what never existed outside the replica; i.e., the shadow simulacrum both a damsel/demon as something to investigate performatively through their own work in a largely exploitative industry that—with a little awareness and labor action—can become friendly to sex workers (thus all workers):

(exhibit 47b1a: “Heaven in a wildflower”; i.e., several older porn collage exhibits from my book series, made into a composite collage alongside a new collage portion featuring Nina Hartley [bottom-left]. There’s so much porn in the world already that thumbnails are a classic and easy way to compile and observe them, en masse [though not always with obvious sources because porn is ephemeral; i.e., it “loses” its value [in capitalist eyes] right after it’s made, thus falls victim to instant exploitation and theft, little pimps and thieves fighting over the pimp pimp’s scraps of whore flesh].

Furthermore, being the world’s oldest profession, prostitution and porn are very ancient and animal activities that capital alienates from us/fetishizes for profit. So while industry porn is a terrible source of information to learn about sex [as Nina shall explain, next page], if it’s the only gig in town and people are starved for sex and have money in their pockets to spend on things that capital steals from them [money is, itself, a form of theft]—then, where the hell else are they gonna learn about sex? Public schools, while those are under attack by Nazis? I think not!

[artists: Nina Hartley and Robby Echo; source: “Mom Stole My Boyfriend,” 2019] 

Realism isn’t the point, but speaks to reality through artifice; e.g., Shakespeare or Jane Austen aren’t very realistic in their theatre/spoken dialogs, but still touch on plenty of dialectical-material forces at work; i.e., so does porn of even the trashiest or cheapest variety to the most expensive corporate-made! From Gothic novels [which concern almost entirely with sex through damsels, detectives and demons] to ’80s corporate sex tapes, we want to build on what these currently are to shift things in a better direction. Even if that’s just us cumming to let off steam with some allegory thrown in, better that than blue balls/clit and nothing to show for it! Workers aren’t just single-purpose, then, but can multi-task//do activism as a matter of “brothel espionage” and de facto education while also making a living and consuming porn [more on this idea during “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress”].

In my opinion—as a queer sex worker and pornographic historian/Gothicist—porn is actually a good place for sex-positive education, provided we can recognize its entertainment potential and current state of abuse, then critically analyze it; e.g., Nina and this young man [above] fuck the way they both want until she drains him of his cum: “Yeah, you gonna cum?” she croons, to which he makes stupid happy puppy sounds! That is exciting a) because of the miracle of the human body and its biology at work, and b) because the ability to exchange forbidden power and knowledge—however unequal [the mom/stepson incest theatre trope] and dark it comes across [the sub/dom expressed in pet/owner play delighting in the appearance of enslavement and bestiality at a glance, but in truth having nothing to do with such things]—can afford mutual consent as something to instruct; i.e., if not under the right initial conditions then certainly the right hermeneutic and dialectic recreating such media, ourselves [the cottage porn industry of OnlyFans and similar companies opening up a Pandora’s Box, of sorts]: the Gothic camp of porn history being encamped [so to speak] in an ongoing live performance’s exhibitionism and voyeurism!

And while its obviously a paid act [the whore being a paid actress alongside the “damsel,” above], there’s room to enjoy the performance as having a historical-material critique to it; i.e., older women do have sex with younger men, and fantasies about that likewise exist; re: which the porn industry capitalizes on, pimping the virgin/whore trying to survive under the state wage enslavement: to alienate, starve, fetishize, pimp and profit off our labor! The place to fight such barbarity sits in the same complicated venues of expression; i.e., the damsel trope reclaimed by working girls [and all whores] who make porn more educational but still fun [the two ideas are not mutually exclusive].)

There’s plenty to learn from these seemingly “empty” stories. Indeed, behind the veneer of shallow beauty and implied force are intelligent, paid (classically white middle-class) actresses who not only knew the ins and outs of the industry but had to survive within it; i.e., often out of necessity due to classic (sexist and misogynistic) divisions of labor compelled by patriarchal structures since Athens and Rome; e.g., while Paris sadly died from cancer in 2021 at 60—may she rest in power—in life she had a BA in nutrition, did mudwrestling, and got into porn by first posing for nudes, then diving in when she found it easier to get sex work than other forms of photography (an ongoing symptom of Capitalism). By comparison, Nina Hartley is still involved in porn and selling her body as an informed extension of herself that we can investigate and learn from, xenophillically! SWAG! Some Whores Are Good!

As is common in showbiz, both women have catchy stage names, with Nina’s birth name being Marie Louise Hartma and Paris’ being Sheila Young. They often play “dumb blondes,” a reflection of the industry stereotypes that continue to intersectionally present AFAB people as stupid; e.g., cis-het women with “perfect” bodies sold to an ideal audience: the sexist straight men who unironically endorse this as a canonical worldview being something to defend and learn from to everyone’s detriment. While it’s entirely possible to enjoy canonical vintage porn, endorsing it as realistic or educational towards “actual dating” is like a vampire needing blood from a “virgin’s” neck: the cheap, quick, disposable essence of something broken down for them to spend their hard-earned wages on, the beautiful girl from The Tubes’ “She’s a Beauty” (1983). That being said, there’s awesome educative potential in public nudism, all same; i.e., the lesson extending from an Aegis that goes far beyond the exhibit itself:

[artists: Nina Hartley and Robby Echo; source: “Mom Stole My Boyfriend,” 2019]

However pornographic Nina’s damsels/demons are, then, they nevertheless concern a larger extratextual search for sex (connection, protection, service and love, etc); i.e., as something to pimp/sell that dates back to Radcliffe’s own safe-unsafe sex and, more to the point, her curious and horny heroines, who—while not pornographically portrayed in any overt sense—still consider a woman’s place (specifically a white straight unmarried woman’s place) in a man’s world; i.e., as someone to perform and move through/navigate those dangerous liminal spaces; re: like Hartley and Paris themselves once did: a damsel is “naked” in the eyes of those pursuing her to ravish first from a distance, and then to presumably undress and poke said plumpness (an act that Radcliffe conflates with straight-up murder).

Comparisons between artifice and reality are not new. Nor is their conflation, which again, goes back to Radcliffe. As Hartley herself says regarding the use of “bareback” (unprotected) sex during shoots and the flack she gets from it,

People get hysterical about sex. They want pornography to do the job that they themselves are not doing, which is educating our young people how to be safer. Unless a pornography movie is advertised as educational […] it is not educational. And the fact that people are reduced to looking at an entertainment medium to find out about sex is sad. It would be less sad if it wasn’t so tragic. Watching pornography to find out about how sex works is like watching a James Bond movie to find out how spies do their job (source: “Legendary Porn Star Defends Bareback Sex And Shaved Vulvas,” 2010).

According to Nina, we shouldn’t endorse or learn from porn any more than we would watch James Bond to learn how to become a spy (or read Ann Radcliffe to find a husband, Wolff argues). I agree. However, we can still learn a tremendous amount about the material world—as well as gradients of abused/abusive damsels, detectives and demons within these gradients—by dialectically-materially studying canonical praxis (which honestly Nina offset with her outspoken feminism, but still walked the tightrope to make a living: as an ’80s actress working for a show business that remains historically unkind to women); i.e., what not to do. This points to the curious usage by consumers of porn and its starlets as de facto dating manuals, treating love like a harlequin romance (or Gothic novel); i.e., an imaginary past that is miraculously “rediscovered” in the present like a Gothic “castle” would be: by a given author’s framed narrative, but also the author’s proxy—the Gothic heroine—as simultaneously a damsel and detective exploring the reinvented past, from Radcliffe onwards: for her, murder and rape were the same, the aforementioned heroine investigating property disputes that expressed women still in that frame of mind, guarding their exposed modesty with fire!

This brings us to our second “tine” of the trifecta, detectives. However, this is a rather broad category. We’ll start with the magically “inert” tale of Out of Sight (1998) as a modern-day “Gothic” yarn, then consider a progressively supernatural variation of the detective story told through Gothic throwbacks: Velma Dinkley as a nod to Radcliffe’s explained supernatural, but also the author herself as belonging to a dialogic imagination with a limited vocabulary—i.e., its purpose to detect forbidden sights being denied by canonical illusions that fortunately can be expressed through a gradient of ordinary-to-supernatural iconoclastic expression that subverts the demonic trifecta!

From there and into part two, we’ll consider the dialectic of shelter/the alien through various degrees of privilege that allowed male authors from Matthew Lewis to Ridley Scott step in as they wished; i.e., by using an ability to transgress in ways historically denied to women seeking female revenge: in thoroughly transgressive ways that shoved polite discourse entirely aside in openly demon/psychosexual language. As Lewis shows, this might have ruffled the feathers of female authors like Radcliffe and her myriad imitators—thus likewise offending proponents of second-wave, cis-het white feminism well into the 20th and 21st centuries—but nevertheless it opened the door for queer people to develop their own voices and repressed opinions onto the xenomorph (and similar “Satanic” demons of an earthly bent, below): as a shared symbol of status in conflict during oppositional praxis; i.e., xenophilia vs xenophobia likewise having more quotidian origins; re: the home invasion and sexual bandit(!).

In the Gothic tradition of combating ignorance, the female and queer detectives each play a giant role in educating through prurient left-behinds: voyeuristic peril as a paradoxical comfort food for rape as a kind of coercive legend. We’ll start with the female detective then move onto queer transgression through male privilege, in part two; i.e., as something that “locks horns” with conventional womanhood/female peril in increasingly supernatural yarns: queerness surviving through hauntological campy matelotage and open-if-silly magical language historically-materially denied to women, but also discouraged by women; e.g., the gay sailors of seafaring narratives and monstrous-feminine superstitions that Scott would popularize in his own Gothic poetic rehash of Milton, Shelley and Lewis; re: deftly shining a light on modern exploitations in the presence of “ancient evils” to embellish upon (akin to Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” exhibit 23b, foreshadowing a growing menace in a pre-fascist period laden with monstrous critiques siding in favor of exploited [to be fair] male laborers at sea, exhibit 48d2).

First, female detectives. As Wolff points out, Female Gothic models tend to be amatonormative, wedded to the literal institution of sex and childhood as a reward challenged by rapacious and mutilative demonic forces. As a Gothic trope, the “demon lover” dates back to Radcliffe and her own dubious contributions to the Gothic school, but is generally recognized in more recent iterations that revive said past; e.g., Velma from Scooby Doo and her own 1960s Flower Child variant of the Radcliffean “explained supernatural” (which normally dealt with banal material disputes dressed up; i.e., as seemingly “haunted” by would-be robbers and impostors) but also Jennifer Lopez opposite George Clooney in Out of Sight: “Take me now, George!”

If that seems weird and girls seem “freaky” it’s because capital’s raping of nature and them as part of it (on either side of the fence) gives them strange appetites; i.e., that the elite can pimp (antagonize, put to work) but that workers can interrogate inside their own meta/Gothic consumption and performance!

As a female detective dealing with her own “demons” in a very figurative sense, Lopez’ adventure—despite a lack of overt magic—isn’t as divorced from the larger Gothic conversation and its warring-if-conventional concerns regarding chattelization/demonization as you might think. Indeed, this conversation charts and outlines the course of (white, non-intersectional) feminism gentrifying and decaying under Capitalism across 200+ years.

To that, Cynthia Wolff writes on Radcliffe’s process in “The Radcliffean Gothic Model”; re:

Let us say that when an individual reads a fully realized piece of fiction, he (or she) will “identify” primarily with one character, probably the principal character, and that this character will bear the principal weight of the reader’s projected feelings. Naturally, an intelligent reader will balance this identification; to some extent there will be identification with each major character—even, perhaps, with a narrative voice. But these will be distributed appropriately throughout the fiction. Now a Gothic novel presents us with a different kind of situation. It is but a partially realized piece of fiction: it is formulaic (a moderately sophisticated reader already knows more or less exactly what to expect in its plot); it has little or no sense of particularized “place,” and it offers a heroine with whom only a very few would wish to identify [according to you, Wolff]. Its fascination lies in the predictable interaction between the heroine and the other main characters. The reader identifies (broadly and loosely) with the predicament as a totality: the ritualized conflict that takes place among the major figures of a Gothic fiction (within the significant boundaries of that “enclosed space”) represents in externalized form the conflict any single woman might experience. The reader will project her feelings into several characters, each one of whom will carry some element of her divided “self.” A woman pictures herself as trapped between the demands of two sorts of men—a “chaste” lover and a “demon” lover—each of whom is really a reflection of one portion of her own longing. Her rite of passage takes the form of (1) proclaiming her right to preside as mistress over the Gothic structure and (2) deciding which man (which form of “love”) may penetrate its recesses!

There have been two distinct waves of Radcliffean Gothic fiction: one that began in the late eighteenth century and one that began in this century between the World Wars… (source).

In other words, the revival is discursive, happening within romantic conventions whose heteronormative canon offers a queer potential if taken to certain xenophilic context/extremes (which we’ll examine with Ridley Scott as queerly transgressive when camped by us).

Barring that, the canonical point of Out of Sight, then, isn’t if it’s healthy or not, but if it sizzles in a heteronormative sense: smart, sexy monsters, criminals, television doctors and coppers (etc) doing smart, sexy (and soap opera) things when lots of violent shit has been happening but especially the voyeurism of rape (the Western conflation of violence and sex, or violence instead of harmless sex, vis-à-vis Radcliffe[4]). As such, Clooney and Lopez present as “ordinary” people, minus the supernatural veneer of a Gothic parallel space. Yet the concept is no different than porn and/or Gothic media at large; i.e., conventionally attractive people doing cliché activities tied to hyperbolic representations of fetishized power exchange hinting at ritualized BDSM torture: drama, crime, and idealized beauty in sensational, over-the-top forms. The woman is challenged by the threat of rape as typical, but also ambiguous and romantic during calculated risk:

(exhibit 47b2: Artist: Calm. Rape pastiche is liminal, like porn, but not strictly negative. For one, it’s cathartic regarding systemic issues, thus incredibly popular for being able to explore said issues. Rape is everywhere in the Gothic [and often campy “disco in disguise” to boot; it’s a party!]. Furthermore, no one really says, “I hate the Goth look!” Why? Because it’s powerful and stylish; but it is tangential to fascism as something to enjoy and/or endorse, meaning we have to consciously reclaim it from Hugo Boss in ways that go beyond Sontag’s quaint, second wave fascination; re: “the fantasy is death” regarding an unironic master/slave scenario.

In chasing and astronoetically pimping the Numinous, Scott’s movie presents the xenomorph in a very similar way to the golem from Ninja Scroll: a damsel in peril, a [functionally] white knight who tries in futility to save her from certain doom, and the black knight bushwhacking the hero; i.e., in Alien‘s case, it literally slaps Parker with its dick [next page] as if to say to the other man, “Mine’s bigger!” before braining him. A cosmic, equal-opportunity rapist, the alien makes Parker watch his own death, the assimilated worker not recognizing what he looks into before it does him in: fucking his literal brains out!

Finished with the token knight, the demon turns to the damsel; i.e., having made her watch everything only to repeat the process with a twist: it sodomizes her with its knife dick to make Ripley [the Amazon] listen, therefore us [and Ripley being unable to save them in time because she’s carrying the cat[5]]. The movie is dead serious in its Numinous evocations, it’s seven-foot-tall black man in a biomechanical gimp suit raping everyone save—and this is important—for the Final Girl as the most modest and devout [re: “If we break quarantine, we could all die!”]. But the psychomachic terror attack works from a counterterror perspective—much like the Haitian slave revolt against the French, from 1791 to 1804—because it gets Whitey to scuttle the mining vessel and get the fuck off the creature’s planet! White girls, they’ll getcha every time!

To that, and as something to perform to the audience of a given period and place, rape carries with it a deep, dualistic and liminal sense of anisotropic guilt and shame for those who experience it on different registers; i.e., as kind of dark secret that is simultaneously appropriated/sublimated to the gills in Western canon [re: Radcliffe, but also Scott].

Yet, within these broader liminalities, there can exist a paradoxical desire to be watched and shown off through the [often campy/vampy] thrill of being up to no good/out on one’s feet; i.e., stepping outside one’s comfort zone relative to restrictive canonical norms, but also wanting to talk about things in a, at times, figurative tone that will be policed: “Listen to Lambert from Alien get raped” versus “Watch me get ‘raped'” or “covet thy neighbor’s wife” or “the weird monkey suit sex scene from La Bête” [next page, 1975] and so on [the eliding of physical violence with chattelizing sex, under Capitalism]. All of these can bother/trigger rape victims who aren’t prepared to face that kind of exposition themselves [“our shields can’t repel firepower of that magnitude], but the discussion of rape through consent-non-consent remains incredibly important, nonetheless; i.e., as a ludo-Gothic [demon] BDSM mode of discourse about such things that Radcliffe basically spearheaded in tokenized ways.

For example, regarding incest [which is often a form of rape, barring awkward outliers like Byron and his half-sister] Alexie Juagdan writes in “The Cultural Taboo: Exploring Incest in Japanese Society” [2023]:

 While the prevalence of incestuous themes in Japanese media may raise eyebrows, it is important to note that these portrayals do not necessarily endorse or normalize incest. Instead, they often serve as vehicles for exploring complex human emotions, societal taboos, and moral dilemmas [source]. 

The same idea applies to rape at large, requiring not just a pressure valve, but a pedagogy of the oppressed that helps victims heal from taboo crimes they otherwise can’t discuss by investigating them as Radcliffe did [and having a further pornographer potential she largely left at the door]. If Cuwu and I could do this through Ninja Scroll [exhibit 17a/b] in ways beyond just watching a really violent movie—i.e., by having sex sleep through consent-non-consent to inform and educate boundaries [exhibit 11b2]—then it is possible and should be encouraged as an effective teaching device. This can be dangerous relative to reactionary violence for judgmental audiences, or it can inadvertently subject the performer to unwanted harm should their partner[s] be participating in bad faith.

All the same, the curiosity of exploring these fantasies [re: through castles that contain demons] often coincides with a half-real desire; i.e., to confront and heal from the regular traumas that occur under Capitalism behind closed doors [the marriage bed being a historical-material site for tremendous mental and physical abuse]. Not only will they be advertised everywhere as heteronormative guilty pleasures/wish fulfillment [exhibit 86a1] but these will potentially trigger anxieties within the viewer to want express the truth of the matter in ways that are still fun and/or humanizing to perform/witness; re: as Radcliffe did [and which Austen dragged her for].

Of course, the phenomenology of the meta is always cloudy with judgement, shame and excitement roiling to and fro, but the voyeurism of peril always has the potential to yield sex-positive education within transgressive media. To this, Griffith’s heinous betrayal of Guts in Berserk‘s “Afterglow of the Right Eye” [1996; exhibit 47b2, top-right] provides the groundwork for a hard-but-valuable lesson: that victims[6] must learn to heal using ghosts of “rape” after extreme trauma, once it happens to you and/or people you care about [rape is a terror weapon aimed not just at the immediate recipient, but their friends and family; e.g., the Rape of Nanking]; i.e., Guts losing a good friend to fascism and the woman he loved in one fell swoop. In the words of Gene Hackman: “We’ve all lost someone we love, but we don’t use it as an excuse to destroy ourselves; we press on!”

The scene straddles the fence between camp and trauma as incredibly phantasmagorical [drugged/dream-like]. Dressed up in the badass Darkness/fetish aesthetic, Griffith drops the centrist façade of babyface and turns full-on heel, becoming a dastardly lothario [really channeling Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, 1974] who doesn’t rescue Casca; he rapes her to hurt Guts, then throws them both aside like, well, a heel! This cautionary and palliative tale has a fever dream logic that’s the very stuff not just of nightmares, but Gothic novels and harlequin romances. As such, it neatly applies to similarly revived legends such as Dracula “ravishing” Lucy, and the woman and the monster in La Bête. White women are policed for sleeping with anyone other than their white husbands; and black men are compared, and put down like, animals:

Like “Afterglow of the Right Eye,” the “rape” scene in La Bête is very campy and dream-like but lacks the overtly gory Hellraiser-meets-Alien pathos/xenophobia; i.e., the feelings of alienation survive in exploitation porn with a sex-positive element that is transgressive and important: a white girl wanting to fuck the black monster she’s heard about all her life [to hook up and communicate as people historically do under state systems]. Here, it’s Radcliffe’s damsel-detective not just hugging Montoni, but giving him some pussy to learn that he’s not that bad [the classic white girl rebelling with the non-white mate, accepting their love as fetishizing her]: darkness cock visible, and thick ropey jizz pooling on damsel dumpers backing it up! How quaint!

As a result, its xenophilia is extremely surreal, channeling the spirit of an older historical period merged with the turbulent zeitgeist of the 1970s: the privileged white woman feeling trapped between her kept surroundings and desire—like the titular Duchess of Malfi—to really get railed by a kind of “strong-thighed bargeman” that would inevitably have been demonized by the upper class as “beastly”; re [from Volume Zero]: “animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms”; i.e., the demon as animalistic [we’ll explore this idea even more in the “Call of the Wild” chapter].

Fear of the servant is as old as Imperialism and slavery are, yet speaks to more recent fears of “the help” as something to simultaneously fetishize and express power over since Radcliffe and Austen’s time; e.g., John Cleland’s 1749 Fanny Hill predating Otranto and being something Austen alluded to with Fanny Price [or “Booty Cha-Ching!” as a classmate one put it]. In La Bête‘s case, the heroine’s own confounding desires collide with these seemingly odd biases from older times, but also the chronotope of the diegetic space’s fearsome [and prurient] legends; e.g., with white and black servants also sleeping together—to embrace the white alien and black alien and bring about new, fresh discoveries of empathy and ecstasy couched in camp, below]. Austen certainly wasn’t above investigating such things, herself, with her Fanny variation hating tales of “light morals” while simultaneously being a rather unspoken abolitionist in Mansfield Park [re: Said’s Culture and Imperialism as I discuss, in Volume One’s “Cornholing the Corn Queen”].

In keeping with chronotopes, the story—through its concentric mise-en-abyme and anisotropic animal lust—our heroine in the present is doubled by a girl who was supposedly raped by the monster some time ago; i.e., a bedtime story to scare the newlywed so her covetous, doddering husband can keep her all to himself. To escape, she subverts the gaslight/role of the raped wife; i.e., by enjoying “unspeakable” sex inside her own mind as informed by the old house and its patriarchal banditry privatizing her booty for the hidden tyrant who only cares about keeping her to himself: “ravishing” zoophilic pleasures with the campiest of monster dads to a trilling harpsichord [also, a bit of an ace touch: she moans loudest when she feels his cum on her behind, taking delight at his howls of pleasure. That’s topping from the bottom for you].

The idea, as always, hinges on watching rape, but “rape” can be in quotes in a variety of ways; i.e., Scott’s is more Numinous and Borowczyk’s is, well, not, but the latter’s ironic [thus satire] is more immediacy clear and sex-positive than Scott’s, while still walking a tightrope it doesn’t always cross without some missteps; re: exploitation and liberation occupy the same space, the power there occupied and negotiated in duality during liminal expression.

[source: Persephone van der Waard’s “My Least Favorite Horror Movies?” 2020]

One of Zeuhl’s better recommendations, the movie is full-on wacky-ass schlock, and one that I absolutely love [enjoying it and Alien for different reasons about the same basic content: “rape” porn].)

In other words, the historical-material threat that faces white cis-het women (and other persons monstrous-feminized by the status quo; re: as quasi-Radcliffean whores that literally ask for monster sex, thus rape—a “greensleeves” with a quick, easy price into her “castle”) become as veiled and displaced as Radcliffe’s cryptonymic fictions (and their author); i.e., by derelict consumer goods designed to disguise the imbalance of power through the material conditions they portray as “ancient,” retold through rediscovery during the rememory process hinting at trauma as something to play with. Bred on the canonical variant, consumers pacify over time; i.e., by accepting the worship of criminalized lovers, even serial killers, as handsome (the two are not mutually exclusive). They menticide, beginning to internalize and value “canonical brainfood” more than the critical power and satire offered by proletarian praxis (and younger consumers who don’t know better being surrounded by this media since birth; e.g., myself and Metroidvania).

However, the fetishes and clichés only become a cryptomimetic opiate for the masses when consumption becomes endorsement for state control; i.e., it’s fine to consume guilty pleasures with a game-and-open mind—to critique or even enjoy them, but not to blindly endorse/parrot the canonical message being advertised when teaching others through your own work; e.g., I enjoy Radcliffe like I enjoy Austen and Ridley Scott, but there’s still plenty of room to critique and subvert both ladies and gentleman, ourselves! However “Supreme” such gentry affords its own reputation, post hoc, we can bend it to our will; i.e., doing so to speak to real-life abuses haunting Radcliffe’s refrain: “Who’s the alien, who’s the predator?” Who, indeed!

(source)

That being said, doing so is a liminal procedure. While many female detectives are domestic agents, the basic concept remains liminal during oppositional praxis as torn between porn and art; i.e., as an anisotropic means to communicate demonic ideas and symbols (of sex, violence, terror and monsters) playing back and forth during the socio-material dialectical of the alien: as something that speaks to tokenism and betray historically-material leading to such confusions at all.

In particular, Lopez’ detective from Out of Sight is a token, non-white policewomen, belonging to an assimilated class of workers; i.e., manipulated and abused by cis men/white women in the workplace, or by men who are their work (the “catch the rapist” trope). To this, Lopez embodies the target audience that Radcliffe originally introduced during a rising discourse that has expanded to token women of color approximately two centuries later!

Doing so romantically speaks to the same kinds of unequal power abuses that Alien and La Bête do, minus those movies’ Gothic magic or schlock: i.e., broken by trauma, militant detectives like J-Lo’s reify the girl boss problem by handing Radcliffe’s heroine’s a gun and a pair of handcuffs sans irony. Thusly armed, the quotidian heroic behaviors of traumatized women historically-materially default to white violence in positions of power that allow for girl bosses of tokenized flavors. Simply put, they represent the fearing of systemic abuse that women have already experienced in some shape or form—what all women experience differently depending on what rights were gradually afforded to them under Capitalism as developing into itself (with white women being allowed to write and sell their fictions long before women of color could, thus policing these fictions from minority groups at large; re: Jane Eyre).

In terms of the ghost of the counterfeit/abjection process and either being or at least presenting as white, Gothic authors also have the opportunity to shy away from bias and abuse while still wanting to explore it in moderately empowering narratives.

Excluding overtly occult/magical damsels, detectives and sex demons, then, the forgeries seen in stories like Out of Sight commonly play out in amatonormative narratives—canonical story arcs that not only center on romantic love between two warring parties, but often feature a damsel detecting an irresistible urge that she cannot fully resist; i.e., a fatal attraction broadcasting from an oft-male (or masculine/monstrous-feminine) agent, our aforementioned “demon lover” that, according to Wolff, tempts and threatens the heroine as falling into two categories, mid-drama: a lover of the good guy and the bad boy. The notion is clearly dated, but nevertheless propels into modern society through stubborn clichés that survive inside classical homages; i.e., dressed up as quotidian, day-to-day affairs, but no less larger-than-life than stories like Alien, Frankenstein or Doctor Faustus. Said homages then inform social-sexual practices by codifying them (and their mischief to make) in canonical forms updated for increasingly modernized audiences: “Behold! A wild George Clooney appears!”

One such idea is what my friend, Mavis, refers to as “game.” For them, Clooney’s smooth criminal is the pinnacle of “having game”; i.e., a handsome, “devilish” rogue who sweeps the intimidatingly attractive Lopez off her feet. Except, it’s all an act from Hollywood reenacting pickup lines in a bar. The peril, then, plays out a kind of game unto itself; i.e., one standing in for thirsty women in need of a good pounding: cliché romantic forces that inhabit the story in order for conventional audiences to maneuver emotional treachery (and its associate material conditions) through various proxies; re: the slippery Clooney using his emotional intelligence on an unwitting mark, “gaming” the female cop by toying with her emotions in a very demonic way! It’s a moderate concession met through derelict markers, the latter which not only uphold the status quo, but continue to shape its Superstructure over time through the rise and fall of such romance!

In the absence of magical rituals, doing so generally maintains through threats of physical force delivered, once upon a time, on celluloid: a figurative demonization from dimorphic stereotypes dating back to the oldest forms of popular stories (for our sake, Radcliffe).

For example, the unbridled, scarcely-contained sexual tension in Out of Sight is surprisingly violent throughout, culminating in a female victory by crippling the “demonic” male seductor. Feeling betrayed by him, Lopez eventually “Mr. Rochesters” Clooney by shooting him in leg, effectively mastering her emotions in a survival story where she proves her mettle and worth in a smaller, somewhat petty and banal way: doing her job by acting like a man, except not quite but sort of (the state is upheld, either way). Stalled fornication is orgasm denial/self-imposed blue clit (the holy idea of denying oneself sex as a troubadour does).

More to the point, the injury is satisfying insofar as it injures Clooney’s massive, swollen pride with extreme prejudice—not simply acting the courtship out but consummating it with a bullet that rapes the bandit by the detective administering hot toxic love. Think cops-and-robbers BDSM but the cop is token and the robber is white. It’s Sleepless in Seattle’s (1993) already problematic “stalk your love” narrative[7] sold to white American housewives (actual or desirous). Likewise, a joke is in there, somewhere, but one sold seriously to audiences; i.e., with the serious intent of emotionally manipulating dollars out of these women’s purses (and throwing some black humor/slapstick ultraviolence in there, for the guys). It makes white women tolerant of toxic love provided they have the gun (or some other element of control; e.g., money and cars; re: Jadis).

But despite a lack of overtly magical forces, the film’s fairytale narrative contains the same underlying Gothic mechanisms that would guide a story either penned by Radcliffe or Lewis to its explosive conclusion. There are demons, damsels and detectives, as well as rituals of violence, power and knowledge exchange based off older iterations thereof: devils in disguise, male or female, giving into our dark desires! Even so, the distinct lack of a supernatural bent remains a popular approach that is hardly original to Out of Sight, the same way that garden variety porn is seldom the stuff of overt magic but rather a special kind of “enchanted sex” told through hauntological poetics; re: Nina Hartley and Victoria Paris’ ’80s hauntology of the Golden Age of Porn from the ’60s and ’70s decaying into something new and exciting.

Keeping with Nina Hartley’s description of porn, the same lesson applies to non-magical and non-sexually pornographic mysteries like Out of Sight that nevertheless have a figuratively demonizing purpose; i.e., through at-times incredibly violent rituals of power exchange that codify and debate the usual ludic roles, doing so in pornographically violent language conspicuously synonymous with sex; i.e., as being exchanged for with violence as erotically charged by people deceiving each other (with sexual tension about sexual exchange and its anticipation through various narrative devices asking the audience to suspend their disbelief and buy into the scam): courtly love and duels for sex that never lead to sex, onscreen! There’s always another castle hiding the prince and his princely gifts penetrating the princess’ not-so-chaste love zone.

This being said, investigations that uphold the state are always conservative; Lopez shoots George to show her “love” to him, but also to deny a fulfilling ending to the audience save through the Romance of (orgasm) denial—i.e., in ways that further tokenize her that white women can “slum” vicariously themselves regarding: to be tough and sexually aggressive in ways that dehumanize non-white women (who try to assimilate by leaning into these tropes, themselves) and devalue white men (who both are and are not the criminals they’re playing onscreen), in the bargain! It’s her “Don’t, Jack! It’s Chinatown!” moment—updated in a late-’90s white America by a rising Latin American star shooting her way into white women’s hearts (and wallets): demasking the rogue by castrating him (much to Mavis’ horror. “One does not simply shoot George,” she says, adding “You can print that!”). So the oscillation and fabrication extend ever onwards!

As such, it’s effectively a tease, promise and threat (“If looks could kill, you’d be lying on the floor!” Heart, 1985), one that Radcliffe and Lewis excelled at (and one also practiced by ’80s porn, insofar as its practitioners are hidden cryptonymically behind invisible barriers/choir screens during the Sale of Indulgences, one that viewers can never cross). But in this case, the Matilda’s Immaculate Conception is Lopez, reinventing herself inside a mode of expression that, since Radcliffe, has been about women reinventing themselves to survive in a man’s world (thus Capitalism in all its forms); i.e., ogled by men despite never being naked (re: Segewick’s “Imagery of the Surface”), then baptizing her own coronation in Clooney’s blood by burying him alive (so to speak; re: Segewick’s Coherence of Gothic Fictions)!

Furthermore, each betrayal is unique; for Lopez, it’s class and race betrayal per castration fantasy as the outlet—no different than Radcliffe demasking her own villains, or Lewis tearing his apart (dialectical-material considerations aside). Despite George and Lopez probably being friends in real life (each belonging to the same class of “workers who made it”), the theatrics are half-real, and speak to warring class, culture and race tensions felt between both them, the actors and characters, but also the audience and the larger world they’re speaking to in small.

A mindfulness of these meta roles is vital, then—with Nina Hartley again describing why consumers of porn Quixotically conflate it with education towards real life; i.e., defenders of canon learn from canon, which is to say badly or lazily (they want sex to be like porn, rather than learn how to actually please their partner outside of harmful BDSM fantasies and realities). Also, they take the illusion for granted, ignoring the labor of the actors, artists, writers, et al, including themselves (to “pay rent” is simply something “women do” without complaint, Mavis argues). The same mindfulness should be applied to any Gothic derelict, regardless if its trifecta is overt or sublimated; re: Out of Sight and its own Gothic pastiche gender-swapping Romeo and Juliet (or Bonnie and Clyde, take your pick):

Another variable to consider, then, is the audience, but especially how victims of trauma include women and men as exploited dimorphically by Capitalism; i.e., as a punitive hierarchy of preferential mistreatment triangulating cops-and-victims abuse for the state (Lopez, whatever her struggles onscreen may be, is ultimately a cop on and offscreen). As a non-magical Gothic Romance, Out of Sight channels the same exploitation of workers than Radcliffe does, save from a militant female detective’s point of view versus a female detective tied to militant men and white power structures—the director pointing her sights at the “perfect man” she “can’t resist” (sexing up the policing process by fetishizing the victims of police brutality mixed criminogenically with “abusive spouse” arguments projected off onto redline territories); i.e., using near-lethal force to escape and level a playing field where concepts like “demon” and “damsel” are scarcely visible but nevertheless driving the narrative ever onwards: “Reader, I knee-capped him” being a radical assimilation of masculine violence by the Gothic heroine.

As a detective, then, Lopez “graduates” at the end, ceasing to be a chola banditti by becoming a token gringo girl boss, except she’s still a cop (Kamala Harris Syndrome). Inside a sublimated Gothic yarn, the movie effectively leaves it at that—failing to use the demonic trifecta to notably address social-sexual concerns tied to ritualized violence that cops abuse on a regular basis; i.e., what the film itself means coming from her towards other workers (which Clooney ultimately is: a worker the cop cripples for a promotion). This includes women but also any subject of police violence treating their dogma as calculated risk that “liberates” women: “I’m bringing you in because it’s my job!” Gross (let the record state that Mavis agrees with me; i.e., they’re against cops if the cops in question shoot George Clooney).

As such, Out of Sight is pure assimilation fantasy. Yet the revelation is often overshadowed by “true love”; i.e., as a dogmatic principle in amatonormative stories, regardless of their supernatural degree: slapping random pieces together much like Walpole did, decades before Radcliffe scored her first (and arguably the first) female-penned Gothic blockbuster! Walpole wrote for pleasure, Radcliffe for those sweet, sweet English pounds (the spoils of war)! But this also extends to the audience looking it having their own baggage and place in the world.

Mavis, for example, curiously views the entirely bloody situation as a person radicalized by complex trauma, themselves (a multiple rape survivor): to get vicarious revenge and their jollies by endorsing the outcome; i.e., by insisting that “Jay-Lo still loved George” (a problem we’ll return to when inspecting Killing Stalking in Volume Three). In other words, the “problematic/star-crossed lovers” trope extends beyond overtly supernatural monsters like vampires or demons from Hell, conditioning a paying (white, female/token) audience bred on canonical derelicts that reimagine the past and its process of detection; i.e., as a dogmatic tool expressed and felt through sharply codified roles that speak to Pavlovian conditioning between workers and fiction: thirsting for Hell/the alien (often white people in disguise/the white Indian) as Radcliffe and her imitators did; re: the sex pirates must be made to answer for their crimes against modesty and the nuclear home, but also the crime of said devilishly handsome men not submitting to their de facto sovereign wives!

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman without a George Clooney must be in want of a George Clooney!” and if she doesn’t get him by chance, then she will get him by lies and force (remember that Austen’s original classic phrase, from Pride and Prejudice, is largely seen as ironic—with the heroine in that story humbling superrich bad boy Mr. Darcy by topping from below… after realizing how loaded said bad boy is; i.e., not a strict endorsement of the status quo, per se, but Austen’s “truth universally acknowledged” speaking ironically to the lived realities of women “on the market”: as forced to get that bag or fucking starve to death/get raped on the street). It’s ok to ironically enjoy spy movies, Gothic Romances, and sex and violence (e.g., big dicks and monster rape, next page). The problem is, canon makes anyone sex-coercive outside of the stories they consume; i.e., be those consumers straight white people or not.

Obviously we can’t really investigate the past as something to learn from without investigating its forerunners. This includes Wolff as puzzling over Ellen Moers’s 1976 catchphrase, “Female Gothic”; i.e., as something to expand on through Gothic-Communist interpretations of famous damsels, detectives and demons that—along with their various rituals of mutilative torture and knowledge/power exchange—can be continuously updated: to include excluded groups (through tokenization) while highlighting the presence of bigotry (sexism, transphobia and racism, etc) in radical forms of discourse speaking to tokenism at work; e.g., me talking about how second wave feminism weighs in on Gothic poetics as something to not just analyze, but moderately replicate (the vitality of doing so will become much more apparent when we look at TERFs and other forms of fascist feminism, in Volume Three).

As something of a trans detective, myself, I want to highlight the purpose of continuous, imperfect detection; i.e., as something to interrogate and learn from, mid-poiesis/cryptomimesis while helping Humanity hauntologically out of the darkness (of “Rome”) moving forwards. To do so, we have to be better than Radcliffe, Lopez, and Wolff, but also any older variants of veiled pornography and their damsels, detectives and demons ironic-to-unironic rape fantasies—with Nina Hartley playing all three, on and offstage.

Except beyond Nina and her work, this also includes Velma as occupying an ontological position within class, culture and race war rhetoric; i.e., during the dialectic of shelter and the alien as something to update for our proletarian purposes to be more pornographic! First, we’ll look at Velma the cartoon character, and then we’ll look at my real-life “Velma” who stabbed me in the back—intrigue!

(exhibit 48a: Artist: Reiq. “Come on if you’re coming!” Velma, again, is a sex object, but also someone whose sexuality is intrinsically tied to her damsel’s privileged life of education; i.e., one used in the solving of ultimately material, mundane mysteries while confronting various “false” monsters through proximity threatening her sacred/profane “modesty” and “temple” with extramarital corruption[!]. Often, there is an ace/chaste component when venturing into the Gothic “anti-home” double[8]; i.e., the trope of the lesbian nun as wedded to God, which is framed as “nerdy” in secular stories like Scooby Doo. There’s also a drug-element—what with Scoobs being a talking Great Dane; re: the acid Communism of today haunted by spectres of Marx—specifically 1960s Free Love, Civil Rights, and Vietnam-War-era protests [and commodified drug use mirrored today in white gentrification of weed as a monocrop stolen from marginalized communities legalizing weed versus completely decriminalizing it[9]]—all couched within the sexual peril of a revived Radcliffean neo-conservative: sans actual firearms but bearing out plenty of heavy artillery/whores to pimp during the whore’s paradox! Velma’s built for war of all kinds!

There’s a mystery to solve, alright—why my ass is so fat and why I keep coming back for more of that fat Frankencock in my tight little nerd pussy [the panties not being a chastity belt, but a token of the slutty lady-of-the-court’s sexual desire for/from big strong black knights]! The willing and ritualistic degradation—and twitchy/toe-curling possession—is very much the point; re: Radcliffe’s exquisite “tortures” of the mind, where the orgasm and the monsters are: a place to regress to and tremble from the dreadful [and artificial] mammoth insertions!

[artist: Reiq]

It was crude in Walpole’s day and it’s crude now! But more to the point, it speaks to the paradox of rape and the whore; i.e., insofar as a virgin/ace person can be a whore performatively while never having had sex, or can desire monster sex/rape play to find some sense of control from having their mind raped if not their literal body [female or otherwise]. Again, strange appetites are a symptom of capital caused by dialectical material forces; i.e., which ludo-Gothic BDSM seeks not simply to emulate, but understand and alter the socio-material conditions of; re: during Gothic play across all mediums!)

In the classic sense, then, Velma plays the role of the damsel and the detective in a primarily nonviolent way—i.e., haunted by “violence” and “rape” as things to put in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM, the damsel taking the demon’s offerings into her sacred temple—and this can be studied. To it, the social-sexual tensions of virgin/whore are on full display with Velma; i.e., always crawling on her hands and knees whenever she conveniently “loses” her glasses; re: while unknowingly (to her) being threatened by a dark, menacing force the actress wants to “be threatened” exquisitely with, before explaining it away as Radcliffe might: that she could, at any second, be savagely “ravished!”

Except it’s all bogus (though not without baggage), giving the honkey mistress the sweet, sweet “terror” she (and the audience) hunger for in the same relationship Wolff describes; re:

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

There have been two distinct waves of Radcliffean Gothic fiction: one that began in the late eighteenth century and one that began in this century between the World Wars… (source: “The Radcliffean Model”).

Of course, Wolff warns against less mutilative fantasies than Radcliffe’s when concerning feminine sexual desire, but I go one further to extend it beyond white straight women and second wave feminism; re: by dividing sex from gender and both from biology and canonical essentialism when making our own gender trouble through public nudism and Gothic art-porn; i.e., we can lean into camp that’s haunted by echoes of trauma in our own mimetic cryptonymy assisting our cause by affording such things a rebellious character that survives us.

Such isn’t always the case, which necessitates such playing by us to begin with. As with Out of Sight, Velma’s Gothic reinvention brings up the same, prolonged conversation; i.e., about threats of rape and female/non-monstrous-feminine heroism to canonize or camp, and which stretch backwards and forwards: towards warring schools of thought bent on solving cliché mysteries when discovering left-behind clues and leaving them behind again and again and again (not just a paper trail, but a trail of love nectar)!

To this, Velma is a curious fixture of an older cliché installed by Ann Radcliffe’s contributions to that particular war: the School of Terror and its concealed demons warring, Milton-style, against Lewis’ own gay demons and their horrifying cryptonymy reversing abjection! Faced with perceived-but-veiled evils, Velma becomes thoroughly nun-like in ways that are naughty and nice: a non-violent, chaste[10], asexual nerd and/or fetishized “closet” lesbian/whore depending on the version—with sex-positive variants reclaiming the slut (and the lesbian/non-white body type); i.e., as a sex “demon” facing the ghost of the counterfeit as a kind of endless joke losing or gaining irony overtime, meaning per hauntology/chronotope’s darkness visible (a joke we’ll reexamine in Volume Three when we consider ace, female detectives like Wednesday Adams: the art and the aesthetic/aesthete generally one-in-the-same).

(artist: Jenna Ortega)

Yet, a prodigal daughter’s return to Gothic sensibility’s irrationality and emotional intelligence lies in the coercive presence of Modernity being unreliable and dangerous; i.e., as a legitimate and ever-growing threat to workers and nature through capital; e.g., its domineering effect on either through policed media and language concerned universally with policing alien things: by unmasking them—as Velma likes to do during the liminal hauntology of war (the return of the phantom castle-in-the-flesh, mise-en-abyme)—to uphold Capitalist Realism on the Black Veil, mid-cryptonymy and cryptomimesis furthering abjection.

In short, the journey and the destination’s Great Destruction are a turn-on for her—the foreplay leading up to the climax while Velma apes Radcliffe and so many other arguably closeted-and-ace-but-thirsty white/token women; re: Carter’s Sadeian adage from 1979, “any free woman in an unfree society will be a monster” speaking retrospectively and prophetically to Velma; i.e., as the TERF-y monster girl waifu policing the alien in a policewoman’s bad BDSM chasing dragons Quixotically onwards—a semi-harmful idea authored by the OG mother of said monsters: Ann-fucking-Radcliffe (whose own looming ur-TERF spectre of the killer damsel crying wolf completely haunting Rowling’s own moldy castle, in the Scottish highlands, but also Burton’s aping of earlier Gothic satires previously having turned Radcliffe upside-down; re: John the Duncan’s “A Funhouse Mirror? The Addams Family and the Failure of Netflix’s Wednesday,” 2023).

“The Gothic is Scooby Doo,” Christine Neufeld once told me (re: in the same class we read Frankenstein in and where wrote my first serious essay about the Gothic, “Born to Fall?“). And she wasn’t wrong! The past does betray its own concealment through the same false rediscoveries; i.e., inside recursively concentric future copies of the same disguised message, itself always a little familiar and foreign during the historical-material crossfade.

This is why inspecting the past, holistically again and again, is vital to keeping the mind (and one’s faculties/organs of perception and pleasure) open (with those afraid of rape—either having survived it, or worried they’ll have to survive it, someday—usually being the ones who triangulate for the state; re: as a mechanism that polices labor through its own victims; re: Ortega’s tokenized version of a formerly campy Wednesday ultimately solving mysteries eerily similar to Harry Potter‘s own “Chamber of Secrets”: to preserve the status quo of a prep school to save, not unlike the one seen previously in 1985’s The Worse Witch[11]).

The Gothic past, then, is constantly talking about the same things because Capitalism relies on those things to manipulate and exploit workers through an elite-cultivated Superstructure’s historical-material loop; re: the infernal concentric pattern caging us but speaking through Capitalist Realism out into infinity! Everything exists in duality during liminal expression/oppositional praxis, of course. Learning to interpret the ambiguous past in emotionally intelligent/Gothically mature ways is what we want to do. Doing so doesn’t simply keep us alive (camping the canon); it can separate us from the violent, bourgeois, damsel detectives (and their inherited confusions)—i.e., who trigger when exposed to “demons” they’re supposed to shoot: not just Clooney but anyone the state wants the cop to feel threatened by (castle doctrine, Radcliffe’s maidens calling the cops on the bandits)!

Lopez—when shooting and chaining Clooney to the handrail—is an angel of mercy playing Gerald’s Game because she thinks it’s the only way to save the man she loves from the state she serves (and whose resistance, mid-arrest, she views as “automatic suicide” by cop; but Mavis still thinks that J-Lo is a bitch). It’s the tyrant’s plea in disguise: a token white-functioning savior both undercover and on-duty (or a malpracticing doctor operating on her patient without his consent; i.e., no one consents to being shot or invasively cut open—Marvis, don’t answer that)!

Mid-drama, though, it’s deceptively easy to forget how Lopez’ bullets aren’t limited to Clooney as a non-supernatural “demon” (or how Velma’s targets are old, rich white people plastered over the usual poor/non-white scapegoats of American police brutality lionized by tamer copaganda’s posturing as “anti-establishment”; i.e., like Scooby Doo, thus Radcliffe, does). Indeed, when the material function of a police officer is recognized, we need to remember they exist to defend capital as threatened by any form of activism (which Scooby Doo, per Radcliffe, dresses up as aristocratic piracy—Count Clooney fleecing the poor defenseless cop).

Whatever the form, function determines function (thus flow of power anisotropically towards or away from the state). Bourgeois female damsels (thus detectives) become coded through a rising sense of the middle class, to hunt and kill proletarian monsters, aliens and witches; i.e., by exposing those from the state of exception, the former something to conceal while unmasking said the latter and doing so for the state’s continued survival; re: outing queer people and other minorities who refuse to assimilate, punishing these groups for their iconoclastic doing of things different than they’ve been done before, and all because it threatens profit: the actions of a pimp policing the whore through a Protestant ethic absorbing a Neo-Catholic/medieval ghost of the counterfeit Numinous to quest for and lock up, Joe-Biden-style (a tough-on-crime initiative spearheaded by nerdy conservative white girls doing their part; i.e., Spider-girls whose “Spidey sense” is conditioned to tokenize in a half-real way that protects cops by abjecting systemic abuse onto Radcliffe scapegoats having expanded horribly under Capitalism).

This is liminal and dualistic—a fact we’ll look at with naughty nuns beyond ourselves, below. Then, to be holistic and really drive the point home, we’ll consider me as “Velma”; i.e., when h(a)unted and abused by a chubby, hairy and bespectacled non-binary nerd; re: Zeuhl, my Great Destroyer!

First, older examples:

(exhibit 48b1: Artist, top-left: Stephan Kopinski; top-mid: Nate Artuz; bottom-left: Simon Palmér; bottom-middle: source and Iltaek Oh [centered]. Male/female detectives and warriors have a medievalized past that is reexplored in modern archaeologies like Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose. Male detective-wise, consider the boy/master dynamic between the protagonist and his young, tempted ward, who sleeps with a local waif in the monastery darkness.

In terms of male warrior monks, these would have historically existed in medieval Europe in ways that became romanticized later through popular legends like Robin Hood; e.g., Friar Tuck. Female warrior nuns—or “gun nuns,” by comparison—would eventually be coopted in neo-Crusader language; i.e., in a very neoliberal sense with canonical modern artwork, but also revenge stories like Abel Ferrara’s 1980 exploitation film, Ms. 45—a story about a nun who violently seeks revenge, shooting her rapist before becoming a vigilante wearing a slutty version of a nun’s uniform: her habit [a neo-conservative version of Velma “pushing back” against state targets disguised in whitewashed vice signals].

In latter-day revivals, the Gothic heroine’s candle more or less symbolizes the role of the detective, whereas the gun is generally a warrior weapon for men, but a tool of rape revenge/prevention for women activating once triggered. As such, the two can historically go hand-in-hand, granting the detective nun’s classically eroticized body a “damsel” and/or “demonic” quality that likewise intimates famous legends about nuns as not maiden-like, but closeted whores of various flavors tied to sex/power abuse relayed in architectural morphologies: a spirit of female rage surviving the victim’s initial experiences of rape, but also perfidious, girl-boss jailers who once served, but now haunt the formerly-glorious, now-abandoned institutions of men; re: Lewis’ Prioress something for future one-woman armies of prioresses-in-training to reinvestigate, effectively chasing their own tails, which they pin on state donkeys; i.e., a wild goose chase that ends in the exposure [and death] of the accused dressed up as alien impostor through tired context. It is a bit boring and exhausted, but pimped all the same!

The fear of inheritance is similarly complex, suggesting a liminal reunion with the ghost of counterfeit as a kind of demon nun to abject past Radcliffean abuses off onto before banishing, Radcliffe-style, back “to Hell”; i.e., off to “horny jail,” a repressed figure trapped between the virgin/whore dynamic that haunts the viewer [male, intersex or female] as potentially monstrous and simply not realizing it—not until they enter the closed space to confront the dreaded evil, head-on; e.g., Valek the “strict” mommy dom/torturous Reverend Mother from The Conjuring 2 2016 [exhibit 48b, right]. The real monster is the damsel; i.e., chasing older systemic legends around the haunted house/chronotope that don’t stay in said house: dynastic primacy and hereditary rites demand sacrifice, and there is always a human body and victim attached to these Radcliffean bugbears.)

(photographer, right: Fin Costello)

Of course, virgin/whore and mirror syndrome is a meta condition that goes both ways. Canon or camp, outing these imposters historically and performatively involves tracing a shared and dated lineage like Velma does—not just to learn from its mistakes, experiments, and trends (which can come from iconoclastic “missteps,” too) but to help allies learn from mistakes they’re currently making towards those they want to help by not killing their darlings (re: Radcliffe and her spectres, like Lopez and Velma). This requires subverting thus playing with the material conditions and devices (demons or otherwise) that inform any positions of privilege clouding their judgement: that cis women often define their own lived trauma in heteronormative ways; i.e., that push people forced to identify as men (or for whom cis women identify as men through trauma responses) onto “violator” archetypes; e.g., the trans man as a “false” woman, nun, crossdresser (think Rosario from The Monk, but in reverse).

Speaking of the false trans man (as in, a trans person acting in bad faith), this brings us finally to me as saving the best for last: Zeuhl, my dude, your time has finally come; i.e., trans-on-trans Gothic detecting! Here goes…

(artist, bottom: Zeuhl)

Dead ringers are the stuff of Gothic cliché—and I didn’t ponder too hard when I was with Zeuhl about any of this because Zeuhl is non-binary and hates Jane Austen/loves The Monk—but they were someone who mirrored me and gave me what I wanted while, in the same breath, harming me like Jadis did; i.e., by showing me the same forbidden and suitably dark arts of queer love done to get what they wanted, first and foremost. And I don’t want to say that they didn’t make me feel good in bed—because they were an attentive lover with an amazing sex drive and incredible body—but they certainly exploited me out of bed; re: they were my Lestat (a trans man who historically had trouble meeting female queer people on dating apps, but not trans women like me), thus are someone I never wish to see in person again so long as I live. But I can’t tell my own story without summoning them—cannot conclude my Udolpho without pulling aside its Black Veil to expose them; i.e., having pulled my strings as cruelly as they did. Now, I shall pull a giant parade float of their lifeless head through the streets (echoes of Medusa, except neoliberal-in-disguise), shouting “Come and see!” as I do…

Note: My exposing of Zeuhl is being done to the degree I feel comfortable, because they abused me but also remain a threat to me. While I have previously discussed our sexual history extensively in written form, I won’t be showing any photographs of said activities for obvious legal reasons, here (and because doing so goes against my moral code and revolutionary principles; i.e., unlike Cuwu, Zeuhl hasn’t consented to such invigilation—indeed, is vehemently opposed to it). But I still want to convey that Zeuhl was a bogus, prurient hypocrite who often used their expertise in gender studies (and sex work) as a shield from criticism; i.e., often by using those very double standards against me while getting attention, money and sex from me (which I didn’t agree to).

I can’t show any of that, here (though I have plenty of proof of it; re: sex tapes), but if you want a good idea of what they look like, in bed or out, they’re chubby and hairy like In Case’s top-right illustration (several pages down, the fantasy depicted being the sort that Zeuhl would tell me they wanted with me and other cuties at the same time, before deciding they “weren’t” poly then magically were poly again while throwing me under the bus, and not for the first time).

As for the abuse, itself, this was interspersed—like all abuse is—with moments of intense gratification; i.e., we had sex a lot, filmed it, and enjoyed each other’s company while in grad school “to the hilt” (they were just as big a whore as I was). But also, they used their body and their position as a queer authority to lie to and manipulate me (a queer neophyte in the closet) constantly in and out of our relationship. In fact, they remain my greatest abuser and someone who abused me more—if you can believe it—than Jadis did!

And yes, Jadis raped my mind and used me for sex in brute-force ways; but Zeuhl? The sheer amount of incalculable damage they wrought on me nearly drove me to suicide (and sent me careening into Jadis). I can rank my own abusers if I want, and Zeuhl is above and beyond, unquestionably hands-down, the fucking worst—a non-binary Ozymandias having hardened their heart in the desert of our wasted, not-sure-if-it-was-ever-real love. When I have nightmares and wake afraid of past abuse taking me to such hells again, it is almost always the ghost of Zeuhl who drags me there, whether I want them to or not [the sex no longer fun]! When I think of them now, I don’t get sad, I get furious [and ejaculate rage all over their ghost’s face]!

 

(exhibit 48b2: Models and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl, my brother Ben holding the camera at my twin’s wedding. At this point, Zeuhl was already acting weird, and shortly after this, left for England and broke up with me suddenly/without warning. They did so while simultaneously telling me that none of it was my fault/that we might get back together [that they “weren’t in a poly headspace right now“] while also continuing to ask for money from me and demanding of me not to talk about the breakup publicly or they would be furious [essentially taking away my mouth, but making me want to scream about/feel afraid and desirous of them]. A picture, then, is both worth a thousand words, but leaves much unspoken; i.e., me having no earthly idea that Zeuhl was planning on leaving me, and them smiling for the camera, yet already having their bags packed. As sad as it sounds, then, that is the full dialectical-material context/extent of their treachery.)

To be crystal clear about these proceedings, I haven’t written any of this to incite violence against Zeuhl (re: “No one kills Kakarot but me!”), and I think they have much more to lose than I do. So if anyone is getting any ideas, don’t; e.g., TERFs—and frankly anyone else who might try to learn who Zeuhl is just to harm them—can kindly fuck right the hell off and drown in a sprinkler of their own pee. Zeuhl’s already the target of that kind of harassment, and I don’t wish to add to it, but I also don’t wish to be held hostage from saying my truth regarding their abuse of me just because they have powerful enemies. Sorry, dude, but I’m not your pet—that and you could’ve prevented all of this years ago by just not acting the way that you did! And since it’s the season to unmask Gothic villains, it’s your turn, and I’m gonna say my piece until the passion flees.

That being said, I don’t want anything from Zeuhl save the ability to talk as openly as I wish about our past; i.e., I merely want to be able to tell my story as a queer detective, one having been abused by someone who once was an excellent detective themselves, but then sold-out/whined about their own accomplishments not being monetized (and which I could say what those are, but then it’d really give away Zeuhl’s identity) before vanishing off the face of the Earth; re: a “Radcliffean Interregnum” except for a non-binary version of the same familiar neo-conservative practitioner revived in the 21st century! Truth is stranger than fiction, and Zeuhl is as much my Velma demon lover as I a Velma damsel harmed by their fearsome-in-hindsight advances I then had to unpack and reify afterwards! —Perse

As detective nuns show us, such liberation and exploitation are hopelessly hauntological, thus liminal; i.e., the nun-in-question always trapped between ambivalent friend/foe queries and chronotopic positions of morality vs immorality they must chase down to draw their own conclusions built on past discussions surviving themselves; e.g., as I did, chasing the Numinous (and Radcliffe) to England, learning about her and eventually writing these books because a Velma lookalike (and Foucault and Ian Kochinski fanboy/apologist) fucked me over big time. In doing so, I effectively stutter-stopped years of research (and lost loves/old friendships; re: Zeuhl, but also Jadis and Cuwu), which bore muddled conclusions seemingly as mixed as my emotions, but in truth remain united in favor of universal liberation working against the actual Great Enchantress—by camping her ghost through my own fabrications’ darkness visible thereof, speaking to abusers who enchanted me off the page: a naughty nun’s naughty nun of a naughty nun about a naughty nun’s neo-medieval BDSM fantasies gone wrong. Nuns all the way down, bitches!

(artist: In Case)

Nuns—and their own revived cryptonymy’s investigations of tremendously obscured-and-decaying power in a male system—wield veiled-threat charms of corporal punishment, bondage and discipline exercises that, while couched in “almost holy” good- and bad-faith stage/canvas lingo, go performatively in a wide variety of directions’ canonical-to-iconoclastic forms; e.g., Matilda, a queer devil-in-disguise, invading and infiltrating an evil abbey to seduce the abuser (from his point of view) inside the church, then expose the Prioress’ many crimes.

As previously stated, The Monk was a story that Zeuhl and I both enjoyed, but also one outside Lewis where I was abandoned by Zeuhl; re: who stabbed me in the back, tried to gaslight me about it, and who then demanded my loyalty afterwards to preserve their own anonymity (a bit like Ann Radcliffe, but genderqueer in their neo-conservatism)!

Until this moment, I’ve never shown Zeuhl’s partial face before, but have shown the photo below (page 1024) with them in it; re: censored in my PhD (exhibit 1c) by a copy-and-paste of Mog from Final Fantasy (their preferred egregore). In a cryptonymic twist on Radcliffe’s own unveiling process, I’m merely showing Zeuhl’s masked face, here (above and below), to highlight their own cloaked, treacherous existence inside-outside my heart; i.e., as my abuser having abused me in the past, including making threats should I dare to openly talk about them at all. So here I am—exposing them to a comfortable (for me) degree—and all to get out from under them, but also remind people of a curious paradox: that what happened between us was real but also partially in my own head, good and bad; i.e., while still giving Zeuhl—a neurotic and self-important individual—some degree of plausible deniably!

To it, I’m a bastard but not a fucking bastard who’s going to twist the knife against my abuser (whose extended history of freaking out when discussed in any manner online I am well-versed in; i.e., having dated them, thus having spent hours upon hours listening to them talk about stalkers at work). What happened between us was real, Zeuhl, including your betraying of me in the most cliché, false and selfish of ways, then refusing to even acknowledge what you did beyond joking about it (re: “tell your family I eloped with an old flame from England[12]“) or foisting all of the blame onto me at the end.

Like Radcliffe, then, it was something almost out of a folktale or poem, revived most tellingly in a song sung by one of my mother’s favorite artists (and for which became another clue that I’d been duped by someone prone to duping others; i.e., I was not the first person that Zeuhl broke up with so suddenly):

A blacksmith courted me
Nine months and better
He fairly won my heart

Wrote me a letter

With his hammer in his hand
He looked quite clever
And if I was with my love
I’d live forever

Oh, where is my love gone
With his cheeks like roses
And his good black billycock on
Decked round with primroses?

I hope the scorching sun
Won’t shine and burn his beauty
And if I was with my love
I’d do my duty

Strange news is coming to town
Strange news is carried
Strange news flies up and down
That my love is married

I wish them both much joy
Though they can’t hear me
And may God reward him well
For the slighting of me

Don’t you remember when
You lay beside me
And you said you’d marry me
And not deny me?

[models: Zeuhl and Persephone van der Waard, taken by a wedding guest at my brother’s 2019 wedding]

If I said I’d marry you
It was only for to try you
So bring your witness, love
And I’ll not deny you

No witness have I, none
Save God Almighty
And may He reward you well
For the slighting of me (Loreena Mckennitt’s “The Blacksmith,” 1985)

Of course, I had plenty of spoiled courtship/break up songs; e.g., “Blue Monday,” “Blood Red Skies” or “Goodbye to You” (for Zeuhl, in particular); and if Jadis was my black knight to “gang alang with,” then Zeuhl was the person who wounded me badly enough to try! They were the Devil so bad that I stuck with their counterpart; i.e., the devil I thought I knew and could avoid! Fifth time’s the charm, I guess!

Well, forgive me, but I won’t go to the grave keeping that a total secret; I don’t owe you that, comrade, am not Father Schedoni’s keeper keeping a black penitent’s miniature out of sight/under wraps: the chemistry and fun we had but also the misery behind the smile (a bit like J-Lo and Clooney but gayer)! “Sickness, be gone!”

(artists: Zeuhl and Persephone van der Waard, in Manchester England, 2018)

“All these souls, and you still don’t have one of your own!” Would it surprise anyone to know that Zeuhl was actually very sweet and funny when they wanted to be? God, it was fun… until it wasn’t. To that, Zeuhl, you still abused me and furthermore, I was trans when you were harming me; you do realize that, right (all that twink torture porn went to your head, I guess)? Even so, I have all the receipts, including the co-signed document of money changing hands; i.e., the one that proves you (and another ex of yours, who shall remain anonymous) used me as your personal piggy bank: I kept the signed agreement! If that bothers you, just remember that my decision to talk about my exes’ abuses of me is my decision, not yours! And if you don’t like it, tough shit! You really should’ve acted better in the past than you actually did; i.e., it’s both possible to have sex with someone and still bully them, which you did; re: I was the bee in the bag, homeslice!

From Radcliffe to me and back to Radcliffe, then, we want to change how cis women and cis-queer people see trans, intersex and non-binary people as human; i.e., meaning just as flawed, both able to help or harm each other during class struggle. Doing so first involves helping ourselves (as queer people) learn ways to understand our own identities and struggles better than we currently do; i.e., by poetically asking questions about trans-ness as recreated in the present using reclaimed language (re: Velma pastiche) in new ways that have never broadly existed until Capitalism tried to exploit us (and generally through ourselves, as Zeuhl did to me). This happens through the half-real past as a continuously transformative experience (and includes the drug-like aspects thereof, which “Call of the Wild” shall unpack).

Keeping with Radcliffe but also my own tumultuous life-and-times (with my own deceptive charlatans existing as much outside the text, unlike Radcliffe’s), much of these center around sight as forbidden; i.e., the damsel’s looking gaze as much a “questioning act” that, thrown into doubt, allows for iconoclastic expressions to posit various creative attempts at staying “woke” towards whatever canonical dangers ail us; re: between Radcliffe and I, but also Zeuhl analyzed, post hoc, by my studies about Radcliffe involving my summoning of our relationship demonically from Hell: “Zeuhl, Zeuhl, Zeuhl!” Hidden and disguised among the midden of clichés and throwaway toys, these must be drawn out by subversively or even transgressively reclaiming Gothic language (I hated The Forbidden Zone, by way, comrade, but Danny Elfman was fun to watch, in and out of it).

To that, Gothic Communism aims to explore iconoclastic sight as a forbidden and questioning gaze (often through suspicion, doubt, concern, caution, anxiety or fatal curiosity/attraction); re: through the xenoglossic roots of the Gothic mode before suggesting ways to apply it to the present in a Communist way—i.e., to show the Capitalist world how to view queer people (and sex workers) as not-monstrous in language they can understand—and, if not as pariah or alien, then as prey or through a deeply confused/confusing communication of predator/prey emotions; re: Velma on her knees, ass out and backing it up: the deep betrayal of a false friend (one, I should add, that no one likes once they learn the truth about, Zeuhl’s secret a deep and shameful one for a reason).

To it, demons speak to dark desires and repressed harm, but also radical change and wish fulfillment when healing from harm. By playfully showing allies how to grow more in touch with these contested emotions, we can allow them the special and frankly priceless opportunity to connect with a perceived weaker, more stupid and fragile side; i.e., that of a feminine, thus traditionally disempowered detective/damsel who can at least imagine being smaller and weaker human prey who needs to rely on their wits and guts to survive a masculine, “phallic” threat.

Furthermore, this is especially salient in situations lacking material or social advantage; i.e., where one is isolated from their friends; e.g., when I first dated Zeuhl in September 2017 to late 2018 (they dumped me in September 2019, but I was back in Michigan at that point), I was overseas, thus far away from my family. In short, I was exposed, thus vulnerable to a bewitching genderqueer predator!

By contrast, a hunter who shoots fish in a barrel quickly becomes overconfident, entitled (“a slow and insidious killer”). They’ll have material advantages but won’t expect prey who knows how to think and survive using their emotional reactions intuitively as a weapon/something turned against the original abuser (similar to Jadis, I think Zeuhl was just hoping I’d keep quiet about it. Their mistake). A common modern misconception, then, is that thoughts and emotions are mutually exclusive. Far from it, survival under Capitalism will not happen without some degree of women’s intuition and looking into past harms, on and offstage; e.g., Zeuhl calling Obama “a neoliberal is disguise,” while actually being closer to Obama than they initially let on/cared to admit (re: “Understanding Vampires, part one: Leaving the Closet,” footnote).

The hunt doesn’t have to be literal, either! It can be figurative and vague, a possibility but not confirmed; e.g., “Am I being hunted? Is my lover a heartless sex demon feeding on my very soul?” I often wondered that exact question (in so many words) when I was with Zeuhl, telling Dale about it in his office; re: “I feel like I’m being used!” While plain-as-day to me now, the thought was unthinkable to me, then; i.e., that I, Nicholas the Great, was somehow being cryptonymically gaslit and abused by my partner at the time. But there I was, crying to my academic supervisor about it, anyways! How the mighty have fallen, Zeuhl, and Nicholas is dead; i.e., Persephone is awake now and you can’t hurt her anymore, nor take anything from her that you haven’t already/expose anything about her that she hasn’t already opened up to the world about! I’m literally an open book, and if you’re not careful, I’ll open you, too (as you well know, based on our last conversation, fuck face)!

And if that hurts to see, hear or otherwise learn, then too damn bad! Face the music for once in your life, you giant asshole; i.e., I’m tired of completely and utterly protecting you for your sake (and even now, am showing you mercy by not completely exposing you, years after the fact; re: “an enemy has only images behind which [they hide their] true motives…”). As your victim, this is my line in the sand. I don’t care how cross that makes you. You’re a big enby and I’m more sensitive to your bullshit in my older age; deal with the consequences of your own actions/the fact that your shit stinks like anyone else’s:

(models: Zeuhl and Persephone van der Waard, taken by a wedding guest at my brother’s 2019 wedding)

So have I decided to expose Zeuhl’s perfidy a little more, here; their face is still behind a mask, but I wanted to talk about them here (and not announce it too much in the signposts, like a secret boss) because frankly it’s been eating at me over time and I’m trying to do it in ways that protect me from them; i.e., as I did when unmasking Jadis. So now it’s your turn, comrade. I’m showing people our Aegis, shaking things up by reminding them you were the most damaging ex of all. Don’t get salty about your own shitty antics!

And that—boys, girls and enbies—is me closing the book on the mystery of the evil Velma from my own Velma’s past (another ride in Charon’s canoe)! Good riddance and good bye (for now)! The pimp tells the whore what to do; that’s what you did, Zeuhl (forever blind to the immeasurable harm you cause others because you only care about perceived wrongs committed against you) and this is my whore’s revenge escaping you, step-by-oxymoronic-step, during ludo-Gothic BDSM! “Free at last! Sweet capture and escape, Hell breaks loose!” I’m not someone you can control/force to walk on eggshells, anymore!

(artist: Genie)

More to the point, fear is relative and anisotropic; e.g., rabbits—Zeuhl’s favorite animal to identify with—haunt me after Zeuhl harmed me to no end (“Just like a churchyard shadow, a black bun keeps haunting me…”); i.e., similar to how Jordan Peele explains for him in ways useful to us, too (the following pun is not intended, but fun):

“Theres a duality to scissors — a whole made up of two parts but also they lie in this territory between the mundane and the absolutely terrifying,” Peele explains in an exclusive clip to EW.

[…] A close-up of golden shears clasped in the gloved hands of Nyong’o is a central visual in the promotional material for Us, and Peele sent similar scissors to journalists in December for the release of the new trailer. At the time, Peele told EW that using white rabbits and scissors throughout his film was deliberate: “They’re both scary things to me, and both inane things, so I love subverting and bringing out the scariness in things you wouldn’t necessarily associate with that” (source: Piya Sinha-Roy’s “Watch Jordan Peele explain the terrifying duality of scissors in movie,” 2019).

Someone like Zeuhl, then, uses such devices to aggrandize themselves/glut their raunchy appetites hypocritically behind gobstopper masks; i.e., a former sex worker who acted incredibly predatory and prudish once they got a well-paying job, yet insisted that’s not what they were doing at the time—and did so to throw me off guard/their scent while they shamelessly fleeced me by throwing tight, wet pussy in my face[13] (which alright, I admittedly enjoyed, but not because they took advantage of me and I didn’t realize it at the time; I liked it because the pussy was amazing [the best I’ve ever had, to be frank] and I thought the person who owned said pussy wasn’t trying to fuck me over—my mistake: Zeuhl routinely finds people who are mentally ill [e.g., chronic depression and bi-polar disorder in their exes and current spouse] while, in the same breath, trying like hell to marry up into visa status to go to TERF island)!

By comparison, Gothic Communism seeks to use stereotypically Gothic materials like Velma—and ambiguous social-sexual clues/red herrings and profound sensations of heightened perception—to do what is normally a traditionally Gothic role; i.e., in a pointedly dialectical-material way between fiction and non-fiction, echoing back and forth over space and time: a hyperviligent mastery of madness and monstrous-feminine that confirms an emotional uncertainty about the material world—namely that of the terrified, horny and oft-female detective and her friends… which historically were her faithful servants, but for me, a trans woman, sadly included my non-binary lover making me feel insane: “Et, tu, Brutae?”

In short, detectives are often seduced according to their relationship with an ongoing past as half-real; i.e., regarding people and places both fictional and non-fictional as an argument that is forever unfolding in the present; re: Zeuhl was the one holding the camera and fetishizing me, lest you forget (below)! However underwhelming or grandiose, so do I pull aside my own detective’s Black Veil after all these years: there’d be no Gothic Communism without you, my evil soul-sucking demon who could’ve been good, but chose not to be. “Ciao, bella ciao,” fucker!

(exhibit 48c1a: Models and photographers, top-left and top-right: Zeuhl and Persephone van der Waard taken at opposite ends of a nice British breakfast; bottom-left and -right: Zeuhl [holding the camera] and Persephone van der Waard, posing for them[14].)

Christ, enough about Zeuhl! Let’s take what I’ve discussed regarding them and Radcliffe’s damsels and detectives, and segue into sex demons and dealing with them more broadly! Before we do, a couple exhibits and a small conclusion (three pages):

In the past, Radcliffe’s anxious, damsel-y domestic sleuth would traditionally sift through literal and semantic debris to solve the mystery as seemingly or actually awesome; re: what she called “the explained supernatural,” and what Rudolph Otto called the mysterium tremendum fascinans, or the “mysterious, tremendous, fascinating” force. However, as something to learn from and evolve, both thinkers (and their associate detectives) attributed qualities of the supernatural as codified by everyday language; i.e., whose common linguo-material strategies and variations enlarge the mind to rapturous, all-seeing extremes. Made in pursuit of supernatural-tinged mysteries who dialectical-material function interacts back and forth with the emotional content being explored onstage and off, the mystery of the recreated past first need to be assembled and presented before it can be explored “blind.”

This makes the “mastery” and “madness” of the classically female damsel/detective a compound paradox: exploring a highly derivative “past,” already made up, then made up again by the author before the reader even opens the book; i.e., the perilous castle as constructed by an author-as-detective to then be vicariously explored by readers identifying with in-text variants: the heroine, but also the demon. Before the first word is read, Radcliffe the writer had already fumbled at hidden things before making the story “her own” through seemingly marginal variation (our aforementioned “poster pastiche,” but actually a visual trope that can be seen across the commercialized Gothic mode):

(exhibit 48c1b: Artist, middle: Gregory Manchess. As I write in “Mazes and Labyrinths,”

Female heroes in FPS are exceptionally rare; […] Metroidvania and survival horror heroes are often female, or have traditional feminine qualities or predicaments. The stories of such heroines are less about proving how strong they are, like their male FPS counterparts, and more about surviving a larger menace. Some non-FPS heroines, like Samus, are fairly weak from the offset but progressively grow stronger. Some, like Jill Valentine, remain slow and vulnerable throughout the entire game [source].

The survival-horror-vs-shooter spectrum of videogames is generally offset by a desire or pursuit of strength in popular ludonarratives extending out of cinema and novels, but also real life back into those things: empowerment vs disempowerment. Heteronormativity will dimorphically gender this arrangement, but it can be subverted or transgressed by iconoclasts in a variety of liminal forms; re: Zeuhl and I.

Some are more sex-positive/proletarian than others and exude an unresolved, oppositional praxis spanning centuries. For example, Victoria de Loredani’s expression of repressed anger takes on a transgressive, reactionarily regressive violence in Zofloya when she kills Lilla [exhibit 100b2]. Doing so is a potentially neoconservative, warlike act—one aped by neoconservative heroines centuries later.

By extension, Ripley’s post-1979 massacre of an imaginary Vietnam by James Cameron turns American neoconservative bullets against a queer Communist alien menace through the appropriative masculinizing of women as damsel/detective demons; i.e., in a traditional, bellicose sense; re: the subjugated, girl boss Amazon—specifically the Hippolytean queen of the Amazons acting “like a man” by overperforming her expected gender role as a woman: the fascist/neoconservative “Space Rambo” serving the interests of male power and traditional gender roles by being the ultimate mother to Newt, the orphaned colony brat. Ripley’s tiring of abuse allows the state to weaponize her against a Communist “queen bitch” whose subsequent dog-fight has Ripley running from the law for having become the female “teeth in the night,” herself. She plays by the state’s rules and is punished for it when she turns heel; i.e., by being collared, yoked and put to heel, herself, but also euthanized faster than monomythic men would be.

The same goes for any token traitor—with those closer to the margins, like Zeuhl, being emasculated for their own exiting of the closet [trans emasculation effecting enbies and trans men/trans women differently].)

 

(exhibit 48c2: Artist, left: Jed; right: Oszaj. Newt would be cryptomimetically symbolized as “Ripley’s heir” in Metroid; i.e., where Samus the colony brat survives her parents’ deaths at the hands of the space pirate leader, Ridley the dragon [who answers to Mother Brain]. This pursuit of revenge—of Samus by Ridley—is framed as making her strong and fearsome on the outside and inside; i.e., by turning her into a living weapon that, in truth, is pitted against the state’s enemies. Like the Achilles of old, then, there is no satisfying Samus’ revenge; indeed, she turns it into a job: the vigilante privateer from outer space, accepting war commissions from the Galactic Federation to kill queerness as a threat to the heteronormative order/colonial binary reaching out of the memory of [city-to-nation-]states.

To it, Samus is figuratively a virgin; i.e., the androgynous daughter of Zeus, bearing out masculine qualities of Artemis the Huntress and Athena’s Aegis as the state cracks down again latter-day “Medusa” rebellions; re: the same way Zeuhl suddenly “found religion” [the worship of money] when selling themselves out. As the state’s well-trained bitch, Samus is the damsel [virgin] warrior-detective upholding the status quo against state enemies demonized to pimp them for profit: mounting the world to fuck it [as monstrous-feminine] out of state revenge!

[model and artist: Lady Nyxx and Persephone van der Waard] 

By comparison, transgender people are often seen as monsters on the receiving end of us-versus-them police violence. This can translate to zombies or vampires, but also demons, dungeons, damsels and dragons in the same witch hunt having people act draconian towards those demonized as “dragons”; i.e., to receive such cruelty dualistically inside the state of exception/moral panic. The fact remains, we are human and deserving of basic human rights, hence dignity, respect and love the likes of which Zeuhl abandoned when going into hiding and hardening their heart—i.e., they could’ve broken up with me and done just that, even; I simply didn’t want to be gaslit by them and used afterwards the way they ultimately did use me: a person who had the talent to not “pull a Foucault/Wilde” but then did so out of pride… and me wounding their pride insofar as they won’t like what I’m saying but then again never liked anything I did say. So, who cares? Fuck ’em!

From one fag to another and a true punk versus postpunk: fuck you, Zeuhl, you sell-out poser/double-crossing cumdump decaying-into-a-traitor sex tourist of your own rebel self! You’re the fakest person I know and I’m happy to burst your stupid, privileged, time bubble façade of false rebellion. Eat shit and die, fucker! Androgyny is sexy as hell; your bigotry and abuse of me was anything but! And… curtains!)

 Apart from trans people, the classic Neo-Gothic heroine (who is cis-het) remains concerned with surviving the trauma of the past; re: through emotional mastery in the face of actual, occult demons, and the third point of Radcliffe’s demonic trifecta; e.g., a demon, dragon, and/or whore, etc, to face during the assimilation fantasy (which can be camped, left). Gothic Communism combines all of these things holistically to build a better world than has ever existed; i.e., our network of spies/workers acting as guerrilla educators and fighters outside professional circuits (re: Hartley)! Everything dies, but we can face that and emerge STRONGER THAN EVER! MEDUSA, ANOTHER BRIDE, YET LIVES!

We’ll explore this even more as something to perform and understand, next. “Let ‘Jesus’ fuck you!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Onwards to “Demons and Dealing with Them; or Abandonment, Dark Worship and Vengeful Sacrifice When Dissecting Radcliffe“!

---

About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Going so far as to cite Walpole’s incestuous tragedy in Chapter Four’s epigram: “Unfold th’ impenetrable mystery, / That sets your soul and you at endless discord.”

[2] E.g., the chronotope, but also cyberpunk (with low-tech vs high-tech existing in the same basic universe commenting on real-life settler colonial and worker/owner disparities).

[3] Hartley is a registered nurse and her father was blacklisted for his Communist beliefs. Regarding her understanding of feminism, she has said:

Based on my experience as a woman and a sexual being, and my understanding that I had the right to decide for myself what to do with my life – that’s what I understood to be feminist, to give everybody choices – I didn’t choose to be a mother but I chose this [porn] because it suits me (source: Wikipedia)

[4] Who I’m seriously starting to think was ace (what do you think, Sam Hirst?). Except, whereas ace dialogs have the potential to interrogate sexual trauma through public nudism, Radcliffe was allergic to nudity and sex work, but not—as Dennis from Always Sunny would put it—”the implications.” Her stories are absolutely full of rape anxiety (and generally concerns the rape of women by men, not female or monstrous-feminine antagonists like Dacre’s Victoria de Loredani; i.e., a dark Amazon having revenge against Radcliffe’s relatively timid and annoying wallflowers).

[5] Ripley also fails to because the crew is stranded and not all of them can survive; i.e., allusions to Moby Dick and drawing straws to see who eats who when the food runs out. The Nostromo is literally a renamed slaver vessel whose partial survival of the crew—according to the movie’s bigoted displacement rhetoric—paradoxically depends on them splitting up because the creature seemingly can’t be killed (according to the Nazi-Commie scientist, itself leaning into old ethnocentric ideas eugenically fetishizing the elder slave machine [re: robota] as the perfect organism to exploit, but also set free as a spectre of Shelley and Marx); re: like the Ninja Scroll golem, but also combined with the Medusa in ways that movie separates!

[6] Including potential victims, which women are, but which white women of privilege tend to abject their fears onto an imaginary “other” while craving protection through calculated risk; re: Laura Ng and Edward Said vis-à-vis La Femme Nikita and Culture and Imperialism, but also the paradox of rape through Radcliffe’s calculated risk: as uncurdled by the likes of Angela Carter’s stories, the latter leaning more in a Sadean direction with her castle rape fantasies; i.e., copies of Radcliffe’s women fear-fascinated with the rapey legend of the castle (the ghost of the counterfeit), which she and Carter—as Enlightened women of a Cartesian age investigating the ghost of rape—view as an explained Numinous they nonetheless fabricate and leave behind for their audience to find (and spend money on; re: Radcliffe had found that winning formula, and quit while she was ahead, whereas Carter didn’t know when to stop being a TERF.

[7] Which goes back to at least Dacre’s Zofloya—a Gothic story where a white woman takes poison from a black slave possessed by the Devil to administer repeatedly to her unknowing and unwitting paramours: first, to her future husband to weaken him to her advances, then to said husband’s brother to weaken him, except the “heroine” must also kill the man’s wife, Lila, after her own husband dies (re: Sam Hirst’s “Zofloya and the Female Gothic,” 2020). It’s campy but also kind of not.

[8] Re (from Volume Zero, and later quoted in “Meeting Medusa” from the Poetry Module regarding my work on Metroidvania):

Classically the diegetic heroine’s perfect past is doubled by the Gothic castle as an expression of power beyond just her or her sense of self and home. From Audronė Raškauskienė writes in Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings 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 Gothic space, which provides a scene for the most dramatic events in the novel, is totally different from the other spaces – indicating heroine’s home” (source).

I.e., home has become alien, like Jameson’s idea of the Gothic class nightmare, and one that classically is explored by damsel-like detectives becoming increasingly neo-conservative and tokenized in militant, neoliberal forms; re: the Final Girl punching down against Communist and other minorities, Aliens onwards.

[9] A lot of this I actually learned from Cuwu, a self-professed Marxist-Leninist stoner who often spoke out about such things; i.e., how capital gentrifies and decays the same business practices it redlines and steals from, time and time again:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Cuwu also traded their copy of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things with me, but also exposed me to consuming weed for the first time; re: I ate too many weed cookies while under their care and promptly “greened out,” but also learned that you can’t get high from previously inhaled week smoke; i.e., “shotgunning it,” as the movies often show, does it wrong—a fact Cuwu explains to me in their car (above) after a night spent making porn together in a West-Mass hotel: “You gotta hold the blunt backwards in your mouth and blow smoke from the front to the back tip into their mouth for it to actually get you high!” But that’s awkward and weird white people like to entertain their weird illusions about weed so they vacillate; i.e., during the usual ghost of the counterfeit pimping such things as guilty pleasures.

For example, Taylor Sheridan’s Tulsa King (2021) romances the rise and fall of a weed kingpin exiled to earn in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The show has similar flaws to Sheridan’s more recent venture, Landman, but it at least points out some of the hypocrisies of white-owned weed businesses (and bigoted beliefs of a one Mr. Sly Stallone, who’s friends with Trump), anyways; i.e., the sort that Cuwu themselves pointed out to me and which I only recognized after dating more stoners and watching more media about stoners, too! I never tried weed again, but fucking stoners is fun; i.e., they’re super chill and always DTF (exceptions including Cuwu’s borderline personality disorder making them regress and become sex repulsed, part of the time)!

[10] This harkens to Eve Segewick’s 1981 essay, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” where nuns—as chaste, pious figures—are fetishized upon the surface of their veils in a way that reflects a similar, surface-level appropriation and sexualizing of other controlled aspects in such stories.

[11] Which Rowling completely ripped off in “all ‘her’ yesterdays”; i.e., as already inspected in “A Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches),” (2024).

[12] A person—let me remind you, Zeuhl—that you thirsted after for ten years (originally getting taco-blocked by a volcano), only to run off with them the moment you had them in your clutches (and I was far away in Michigan*), and then married in secret following your return to America and denying me any chance at closure by scuttling the trip we planned for months to come see you both; re: “The Eyeball Zone; or, Relating to the Gothic as Commies Do.” As they were your ticket into England, I hope you’ve treated that person better than you have me—not for your sake, but theirs! And to that person: “God keep you safe, wherever you are!” I wouldn’t date Zeuhl again, not for all the cute boys or pale, freckled, big-titty and redheaded cuties in the world; not if I could turn magically into one myself and be that French, thicc, redheaded slut I always wanted to be!

*Again, I have the receipts for all of this, including—I should add—the hundreds of vacation and marriage photos you sent me, afterwards. Thanks!

[13] By—and I’m not kidding—pulling down their pants, smacking their fat hairy pussy and saying to me, “Isn’t that odd?” as it jiggled like flan before my eyes.

[14] “You’re never going to use these for anything!” Zeuhl insisted, handing them over to me. WELL, I GEUSS THE JOKE’S ON YOU, ZEUHL!

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

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

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

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

“Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons,” part zero: Derelicts, Medusa and H. R. Giger’s Xenomorph; i.e., the Puzzle of “Antiquity”

“Did IQs drop sharply while I was away? Ma’am, I already said that it was not Indigenous; it was a derelict spacecraft, it was an alien ship, it was not from there. Do you get it?”

—Ellen Ripley, Aliens (1986)

Picking up where “Exploring the Derelict Past (opening and ‘Radcliffe’s Refrain’)” left off…

This subchapter loosely considers the demonic trifecta—damsels, detectives and sex demons—by introducing a holistic, serial example of them: Medusa and the xenomorph (the latter practically synonymous with its maker, H. R. Giger). It does so through the Gothic refrain of found stories; i.e., so-called “derelicts” that, once “discovered,” present as historical evidence in the Gothic sense: as something to perform and play with in order to interrogate state trauma (war and rape) as a continual problem we escape through “peril” (the challenging of modesty with a “dark half”). We’ll return to Radcliffe—and her own self-righteous moral panics’ down-to-earth left-behinds—in a bit. First, I want to consider the idea of dereliction as “ancient” through something closer to the modern idea of sex demon vis-à-vis damsels and detectives; re: Giger’s brainchild (really being a group effort and lineage[1], but I digress).

Note: This piece is older. It’s one where I tried to make less changes throughout its entire makeup, and more to insert different extensions between parts of the main body. I try to note when I do, and talk about the entire history of doing so. The expanding of the piece has required me to organize it into headers, as well. —Perse

• Introducing Ripley
• I, Medusa
• White Predation in Alien (and Similar Works)
• Ripley’s Riddle: the Mystery of the Token Feminist
• Cartesian Hubris: the Girl Boss
• Amazonomachia, Cryptomimesis and Mise-en-Abyme
• The Other Side of the Coin: Camping These Things (reprise)
• From the Horse’s Mouth: Furries and Giger’s Puzzle of “Antiquity”

Introducing Ripley

A bit of additional context (a 2025 one-page addendum [and footnote] prefacing the original body of this 2024 piece). The paradox of palimpsests is that the mo recent generally eclipses older variants it “tops”; i.e., to become “the first”/”top dog”; e.g., Ripley as “the first” Amazon” (a patriarchal myth). But she is haunted by the past and those of it as vengeful, which she punches down against; re: the second wave feminist warrior Madonna policing nature as dark, ancient whore[2]. If Jadis was my first TERF “in the wild,” then Ripley was my first TERF in media; she’s the detective who tops for the state, and we top from below to punch up at her Radcliffean antics (carried over into Weaver’s own privilege as a white straight Broadway actress from a middle-class family, below).

(source: Strange Shapes’ “Casting Ripley” [2016]: “Sigourney on the Nostromo bridge with her father Sylvester ‘Pat’ Weaver and mother Elizabeth Weaver.”)

All of this is dualistic, and I want to look at the process holistically regarding its liminal, ludo-Gothic BDSM elements’ anisotropic qualities and performative latitudes. Some of this comes from what we’ve discussed already in this module; some, from the Poetry Module. We’re essentially talking about the whore’s paradox and revenge (reclaiming blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts), though I might not always say as much (this is an older piece, but it inspired my new thesis work on those topics; i.e. I wrote it around the same time as “The Caterpillar and the Wasp,” thus before my Poetry Module [which released May 5th, 2024; re: “Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) Is Out“] and then added elements of said module to “Giger’s Xenomorph,” afterwards): the relatively well-off white girl scared of functionally black/non-white and non-straight revenge, thus rape of the former by the latter and (displaced to outer space).

Again, it’s very second wave feminist, thus exclusionary in the rise of Thatcher’s England to impregnate and gut the Labour Party with New-Labor concessions; re: capital gentrifies and decays, leaving us with strange appetites we need to camp through the same damsels, detectives and demons. Except, Ridley was always a white-collar pimp with an art degree and classical education, and Ripley was always his blue-collar madame detective; i.e., Galatea asking the stowaway prostitute what it stole from Master’s cookie jar during her Pygmalion maker’s Promethean Quest, and its Numinous obscurity and decay’s infectious stamp brought back to her towing vessel: “In Space, No One Can Hear You Punch Down for the Elite then Blame It on Pirates.” Always kill your darlings!

I think that’s enough context for both monsters (the Amazon and the Medusa) and their cryptomimesis to proceed with our arguments. Let’s advance onto the original piece!

In the Gothic, “Antiquity” is forged through puzzling “ancient” monsters like Medusa in ways useful to the state (canon) or workers (camp). Unironic forms tokenize through settler-colonial damage control whose cryptonymy apologizes for the state and indeed, advances the goals of Cartesian hegemony endlessly across space and time; i.e., while tokenized women like Ellen Ripley write Man’s history for them in the usual native bloodbaths: fetishizing the alien before punching it, witch-cop-style. Our current “Medusa” is the xenomorph, a composite sex monster insofar as it features holistically and Numinously as undead, demonic and animalistic, but also embodies settler-colonial (ethnocentric) racism, environmental destruction, rape anxiety/disguised vaudeville (the first alien being a black man in a suit) and trans misogyny crammed into a 1970s gimp suit/astronoetic hauntology (canceled retro-future). Let’s give that qualification a closer look, shall we?

The poster girl for Creed’s Monstrous-Feminine, Medusa, is the classic “ancient” whore/enemy of the state in Western propaganda, and survives through Cartesian thought into Alien, the franchise. It’s the dialectic of the alien, mid-Amazonomachia, except when Ripley initially faces the xenomorph as a ghost of the counterfeit (the monster being a spectre of settler colonialism pushed into outer space, coming back to haunt the West), she becomes traumatized into thinking the creature as not “of the land” at all; it’s something to punch, not embrace, because it threatens her as an extension of the West: us versus them, maiden pimp vs abject whore. She becomes an endless detective protecting other damsels from a dreaded evil she nonetheless fetishizes by giving so much power in the first place. She’s a cautious skeptic in the first movie; by the second, she’s a battered housewife/true believer posturing as oracle for the Man. Gross TERF bullshit.

Convinced she is right to a colossal and insulting degree (see the epigram), our damaged heroine goes forth to astronoetically colonize “space” for Earth by finding the perceived Ancient Threat: punishing an alien mother for “having settled” corporate territories before blowing her[3] the fuck up. It’s a casus belli, a DARVO false flag waged by a “critic” of the company who ultimately does their dirty work for them; re: by weaponized shelter through capital as the same old rigged game against Ripley in order to make her afraid, thus transform into a demon against the state’s enemies: a subjugated-Hippolyta survivor of the fear of rape, not rape itself (versus Lambert or Kain, who very much do get raped because they actually have sex; i.e., Ripley is a warrior Madonna, and sex = death in Radcliffe’s work).

A mythical structure, when essentialized, can be quite telling. Singular interpretations are bad for workers and nature, especially when colonial binaries (us vs them) have manifested them as something to disseminate and put to practice. By abjecting the ghost of the counterfeit as men do, Ripley becomes the subjugated Amazon waging a monstrous war of extinction in space (the astronoetic Amazonomachy); i.e., against another monster whose sexualized violence (the popular language of war) has with Ripley one interpretation, thus one use/solution: genocide (“not to study, not to bring back, but to wipe them out”)—unironically raping the land, occupants and language in ways that speak to predatory sex and violence as synonymized for these chattelizing purposes. Killing vermin is still moving money through nature using the same old kayfabe revenge arguments.

Except, far from being a one-off, Aliens (and its forebears, which date back to Radcliffe conjuring up white straight female fears of a black rapist) would go on to inform military optimism through Cameron’s refrain as a perennial affair that upholds Capitalist Realism for all time in neoliberal power trips (re: the “End of History”). Ripley is part of that tragic destiny—a damsel-turned-cop who, once recruited, rides forever out into the cartographic territories; i.e., where murder is legal, chasing “death” down and hunting it room-by-room (re: shooters and Metroidvania during speedruns). Separating the wheat from the chaff, Ripley divides from other humans whoever the state needs dead within the same monomythic, theatrical device: nature as alien and fetishized, but also undead, demonic and animalistic—the Medusa!

I, Medusa

“Medusa” means different things depending on who’s looking at/with her. As such, she contains (and presents) unironic and ironic fears of rape, trans misogyny (and other praxial variables) within class conflict, on the Aegis, per outing. Parading the unknown as tangible[4] is the Gothic’s bread and butter!

Except, while the inherent duality of pre-capitalist expression might seem mysteriously commonplace, this is not without reason. It was generally peered into by people like Mary Shelley who, in 1818, were less divided from nature by capital than we are, thus more prone to combine nature with science, and to afford a medieval expression fixated on mythical devices, but especially ambrosia/the fire of the gods as “torturous” and Faustian. Shelley’s Modern Prometheus offered a unique perspective of “Ancient” that informed Giger and Ridley Scott using the alien poetic device to extrapolate on problems of capital per Gothic castles and monsters, in 1979; i.e, to a similar monstrous-feminine degree, during fatal nostalgia.

Monsters and castles are indiscreetly modular and evoke myths and magic as critical lenses to see through Capitalism’s universal alienation; Medusa (and by extension, the xenomorph and castle as extensions of her and themselves) abide by the usual fracturing of trauma to give those with trauma a safe space to explore (and endlessly reexplore) their abuse and discover a better world through a series of castles wrestling/warring/fucking with other castles, with monsters, etc, during concentric mise-en-abyme. In psychoanalytical terms, these generally announce a secret self to reject and attack, but also a borderline option regarding forbidden forms of love: a dark ritual regressively selected through the shadow of force …and which I completely dislike because it tends to suggest a lack of awareness towards unconscious[5] elements that apologize for the author’s omitting of an active dialogue; e.g., desire, bigotry or revenge. I’d rather focus on the material conditions that shape these prejudices and, at times, walking contradictions; i.e., what is the argument of “yet another castle” for in terms of where it’s going once its arguments are revived?

These are highly medieval ways of looking at things, and difficult to wrap our heads around; i.e., as people reared in a capitalist, post-medieval world. So, just as the Gothic castle perpetually returns in liminal, hauntology-of-war arguments debating to the Enlightenment and Capitalism’s failure to deliver on universal prosperity as promised, we’ll be returning to my Poetry Module—especially its Medieval portion (which starts with “The Medieval: Opening and Castles in the Flesh,” 2024) and concludes with the “one, two” capstone, “Modularity and Class” and “Facing Death: What I Learned Mastering Metroidvania,” 2024). Keep its entire statements in mind as we proceed once more into the Numinous medieval and its dead city of paradoxes; re: we’re getting lost in necropolis again!

First, during liminal expression and oppositional praxis, trauma diffuses; both imprecise and omnipresent, its doubles emerge like a doomy nebula from remediating praxis’ failure to sublimate state horrors during the cryptonymy process. If we’re going to get anywhere regarding those, we’ll have to familiarize ourselves with the alien, thus give the xenomorph a big ol’ hug—not to dehumanize what has become fetish, but humanize it as Medusa’s more recent disguise still having fetishized qualities: during ludo-Gothic BDSM chasing the palliative Numinous. As with Captain Dallas, death is presumed but not certain; indeed, doing so will only reverse the process of abjection inside the “antique” counterfeit as something to reclaim by us—defeating the fear of death through hugs, thus overriding state mechanisms of genocide that push people to attack others through tokenized us-versus-them copaganda (attacking stigma animalized workers): a position informed by dogma and fear merged with obscurity and distance.

The state, then, is a classic “false friend,” pointing the finger at Medusa and saying she’s a zombie who bites. The paradox, here, is that Medusa is a zombie, but she doesn’t bite provided you can show her you don’t mean any harm; i.e., that you can be friends. Though harmed in the past, Medusa won’t harm you if you approach her in good faith; but also, expect some degree of temperamentality—i.e., the occasional trigger, outburst and love tap.

Barring those automatic, knee-jerk defenses, Medusa will expect you not to side with the state against her. This requires abandoning the settler-colonial project on all fronts, respecting different healthy boundaries while punching up/through harmful ones by camping canon inside castles; i.e., as an ongoing dialog in dialectical-material tension, hence argument, revived hauntologically through medieval language as useful to workers; re (from the Poetry Module):

using the dialectic of the alien to pull down sick harmful barriers and install fresh healthy ones […] 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 (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 […] Authenticity aside, systemic trauma is isolated and expressed in Gothic theatre, […] 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)

[…] 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 and empowering (re: the palliative Numinous) without harming others, thus able to heal a society that is sick with Capitalist Realism (source: “‘Welcome to the Fun Palace!’ part one: A Song Written in Decay”).

Here, we’ll expound on some variables that section could not; e.g., kayfabe, tightrope, fairytale hauntologies and the monomyth in Walpole’s haunted Capitalocene (which is what Ripley and Medusa [a giant suit of dark armor] represent, meeting the present and the past in the dangerous middle). Radcliffe always treats “darkness” and “demon lover” as “scapegoat pirate” to summon and banish for profit during courtly love hauntologies; when used in good faith (as this book does), said dialectic is meant to make us more discerning in terms of what we take in, but also paradoxically grow more bold once we become unafraid to use medieval poetics—less to unironically derange and confuse our senses, but use darkness visible to deftly address the state’s own attacks on our senses mid-cryptonymy (making us question them, thus exit Plato’s cave while inside it).

(source)

Armed with revived empowering confusions (or acclimated to disempowerment as something to subvert), we may confront nebulous, ungrounded despair with jouissance (a rapturous, secular appeal to a godly force: “Oh, my god!” as orgasmic); i.e., slice, hew and otherwise savagely claw through the canonical constraints of what we can and can’t do in a state of crisis. We do so as a means of sex-positive expression told in exquisitely “torturous” language; i.e., as haunted by generational, systemic trauma during the rememory process; e.g., “hungry like the wolf,” which the reaver-like xenomorph (and the castle it hunts inside) partially represents: raw animal lust—a feral hunger to fuck with reckless abandon (informed, as nymphomania generally is, by extreme trauma).

Beyond such a creature and looking at the general creative process, it’s a real witch’s cauldron, and one supplied piece-by-piece from anything and everything (sutured together or built like Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, my book, Scott’s Nostromo, Campbell’s monomyth, etc) that works to holistically and intersectionally weaponize our foes’ contributions against them. Fighting their madness with our “madness” amounts to mirrors with mirrors, wherein we challenge the state’s Aegis with our own: the “attitude” of our own calculated risk; i.e., back talk, dissident feedback, parroting with sass (the medieval puppet show with embarrassing interpretive dances), and so on.

To that, Medusa is not our enemy regardless of appearance, the state and its illusions are; and while the Gothic most certainly is a sham, it needn’t serve state interests insofar as Medusa (and the xenomorph, lycanthropes, vampires, etc) are concerned. If we are to cleave through and move past these complicit cryptonymies to then push into a better age—one whose Wisdom of the Ancients speaks to a healthy cultural understanding of the imaginary past (re: Gothic Maturity)—we must first confront these horrors (and their illusions) where they canonically call home, and per their residents normally being part of an ongoing concealment, rescue them from it: an intervention of the usual damsels and detectives convinced the xenomorph is bad, not the state.

Such a solving and banishing of the mystery as “just a dream” happens according to Radcliffe’s privilege of shelter as a) denying Civilization’s settler-colonial design through a veil of false modesty while b) triangulating state violence against the colonized dressed up as abject rapists; i.e., demon lovers to partake in sinful activities (guilty pleasures), but also to rape unironically by token agents triangulating against their prescribed “abusers” using blind acts of “love.” Per Capitalist Realism, their confused and tokenized barbarism classically synonymizes sex and violence through acts of psychosexual revenge directed at cartoon, fetishized versions of state enemies; i.e., middle-class ladies like Ripley becoming the indiscriminate Amazon[6]/white Indian, operating on par with male versions (e.g., Turok the Dinosaur Hunter) except marshalling primarily through threats of rape to punch the black person, Communist, Medusa, etc, as nature-to-rape. She does so without any irony or awareness—is just magnanimous/Goldilocks genocide infuriatingly administered by a self-righteous harridan exterminator (with again, Aliens depicting Ripley oxymoronically as a maverick counselor of force: “an advisor” alluding to the CIA’s role in Vietnam).

As such, complicit cryptonymy renders the flow of violence and its cultural markers simply as “cool.” Medusa is badass, but must die to save the (white) princess and little girl; i.e., the nuclear family model as a settler-colonial enterprise, its death race driving up costs to ensure profit through genocide.

In the heat of the moment, fear of death and rape aren’t so different, then. This partly happens through “alien” as the classic Gothic function of monstrous symbols in the present: the rapist with a knife dick, but also the Archaic Mother monstrous-feminine with an ovipositor (re: Gwen Pearson’s “stabby cock dagger“). Extreme trauma elides pleasure and pain, life and death, sex and violence. As a covetous dark cavalier operating during “cuffing season” (sexual envy during shortages), the xenomorphic demon lover is driven during canon by wild lust; i.e., to portray rape as sadly a gaslit fiction and lived reality for many people, not just women; i.e., cis-het men as the historic perpetrators and queer men (cis or trans) as the go-to scapegoats for middle-class cis women to attack once spooked and triggered by the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection’s Capitalist Realism.

To it, tokenism commonly uses prison guards recruited from local populations to police its too-giant “terror-tories”; i.e., Ripley is originally a space trucker but radicalizes as a token cop attacking black, queer Communist doubles tied to past abuse the company is to blame, regarding: the moderate-turned-Nazi she-wolf pouncing on her evil twin, and authored by yet-another-Pygmalion, James Cameron… who pimps the whore just as Scott and Lucas did, before him; i.e., the whore, for the canonical wizard, is always a business opportunity to enact through Gothic sex and force, and fear-and-dogma canonical essentialism: always a map, always a cop and a victim—whereupon daddy’s little girl puts his chattel to the sword for profit, but also for the revenge of white fragility posturing as “savior” during live burial/graveyard sex married out of Antiquity (re: Wagner) to modern war (e.g., Samus avenging her parents, and Ripley avenging her daughter through a “this time, it’s personal” gimmick speaking to neoliberal revenge against the Reds).

Breaking that barrier will require some very weird journeys regarding strange appetites pursuant to profit or breaking it—a school of “death” therapy embracing nature-as-alien back towards reunion, restoration and resurrection; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM meant to heal nature’s coercive undead status (a dead angry whore/Bleeding Nun’s wandering womb) using a sex-positive theatricality that doesn’t preclude demon lovers, including those of a more… animalistic persuasion (we’ll touch on the animality of such monsters here [exhibit 47b2] and in “Damsels and Detectives” [exhibit 48d2] before expanding on them [and monster-fucking] even more, in “Call of the Wild”).

To it, the xenomorph from Alien works as a colonial relic threatening the current miners of nature; i.e., as tokenized to include white women who, when threatened, proceed to fight, freeze, flop, fly or fawn[7] inside recent Gothic fantasies “left behind” as “ancient derelict”: Giger’s Frankensteinian monster as yet-another-forgery of the perceived primordial, and one that came together in the present as, itself, being just as much informed by said throwback as anything from the historical past outside of active, aggressive reinvention.

Yet the bridge between the two helps reunite us with hidden atrocities walking around like the xenomorph does, its own signature “primordial” simply cryptonymy working to conceal capital’s ongoing abuses since Walpole’s own poetic examination of the French and Indian war (which ended in 1763, the year before Walpole wrote Otranto and passed it off as “genuine”). If we are to escape Capitalist Realism and its ongoing abuse of us as damsels/detectives (of a dainty or burly posture, exhibit 47a2c), we must enrich the post-capitalist potential that the xenomorph demon promises while dodging Whitey and the Straights’ usual execution of it fearing rebel claws: the allegory of darkness visible being campier and more inclusive than Alien‘s narrow white worldview (sorry, Parker); i.e., when playing with the same-old clay’s dead Neo-Gothic metaphors, ourselves.

White Predation in Alien (and Similar Works)

Alien is very checkered in its Marxism, abused by the in-group cannibalizing the out-group with strong Gothic heroines; i.e., from Metroidvania to survival horror to shooters across the board. Keeping with kayfabe, then (and devoting seven new pages to that train of thought—until exhibit 47a2c), Nazis and Commies occupy the same shadow zone. As we have said. And yet, despite having a Communist element, said element had decayed by 1979 to make Alien far less radical than people remember. But we can romanticize it further to become more radical again (similar to Star Wars and Andor); i.e, by breaking any perceived eugenic ceiling Scott raised over four decades ago. Alien wasn’t the end or start of things, but merely a mutation in a larger ongoing chain—one whose praxial fluency and renewal, mid-dialectical, becomes second-nature/woke amid a rising intelligence and awareness healing broken circuits of dark galaxies: the more we inundate bad fakes with good, the more constellations form towards a better yet-to-exist world. Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM, hence Gothic maturity pursuant to Communism out of the “ancient” past.

In similar cryptomimetic fashion, the giving and taking of voices comes and goes across all Gothic media. Shelley gave the oppressed a voice through the Creature; Whale took the voice away and let Victor talk, as did Scott with Giger’s alien and Ripley’s maiden detective; Samus and Doomguy largely were silent protagonists whose worlds spoke through the cryptonymy of Numinous former colonies and gibbering demons, only for the post-Doom, mid-’90s Build games and Valve’s Half-Life franchise (1998, onwards) to respectively give the monomyth hero a voice and leave them mute (though Alex Vance, in 2004’s Half-Life 2, would speak for Gordon Freeman, a black girl romancing the white guy having the literal name of slaveholders the slave would take after the American Civil War).

(exhibit 47a2a: Artist, top-right: Andrew Russell; middle: unknown, 1996, the cover for Duke Nukem 3D inspired in-house by Don Ivan Punchatz [bottom-left] to the point of ripping off the 1993 forebear quite nakedly. Profit demonizes such things, but from a creative standpoint, echopraxis is classically seen as a sign of imitative respect; i.e., worthy enough not to steal but pay tribute to [because modern privatization didn’t exist in the Renaissance period—at least to nowhere near the same extent it does now.)

Whatever the voice or unheimlich, praxial quality always concerns what is being said; i.e., the Gothic speaks “unspeakable” things relative to profit as optional; e.g., the Creature fought for equal rights, whereas Duke Nukem was a notorious pig spouting blind pastiche/dead quotes (essentially Troma films without the satire) and whose own death Caleb celebrated in Blood, a year later (exhibit 47a2a, top-left). There is no “final form,” just a continuation that says whatever workers need to say while echoing other castle-in-the-flesh egregores, on and on. From “the traditions of all dead generations,” they use to pacify and we to mobilize; i.e., the vengeful dead whore—Medusa and her ilk—speaking through us as injecting irony back into what has been lost. In other words, knowledge is application through demonic creation as something to demonically act out, including through sex and public nudism speaking asexually about sexual harm:

(exhibit 47a2a1: Artist, top-left: Sabs; right: Owusyr. In Gothic, “consent” is both ambiguous and rape impossible, but intuitively characterized by different ideological standpoints; e.g., the paradox of performance and the sub’s begging of the dom to please, please not be ravished by them; i.e., something can be bigoted and still educational/non-harmful in the literal sense, while sex-positive elements still have harm in their “hurt, not harm ” message—that excitement requires some kind of risk, however calculated—while speaking to mutual consent: through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s CNC/rape play as informed consent that moral arbiters, suitably outraged, will abject but also dig up to destroy in public displays of white Man-Box superiority. Capital pimps what is different; we unite and humanize what is raped.

In short, morality is arbitrated through canonical binaries per Derrida’s system of differences, but these aren’t transcendental; they’re merely stances to adopt and fight for in the same old dialectic: the state vs nature as alien. Queer art is haunted by queer abuse; black art, black abuse; female art, female abuse; and this includes intersections of privilege/oppression, subject/object, and authorship. Different things mean different things at the same time and all at once.

For example, Mortal Kombat‘s [1993] Goro is a four-armed “dragon” who “finishes” the smaller damsel in ways that highlight the in-house history of women across all registers; i.e., in ways that Ed Boon camped to an extent, but also pimped out: through his arcade-era blockbuster’s dubious Orientalism, being aped by a legion of copycats not unlike Doom and the FPS [the so-called “Doom clones”]. Each clamors to be heard, speaking to abuse in ways that are being camped, but still transgressive/exploitative to unevenly experience abuse, onstage and off, according to societal roles and expectations thrust upon us as consumers and actors; re: hyphenating sex and force with various taboos that go either way [Schrodinger’s rape victim].

To that, Sabs’ work speaks to a ’90s out-of-the-closet-but-still-alien hauntology that fetishizes the twink as something to chase and ravish, but also savor and spoil [so-called “pretty privilege”] while all sides heal from rape/work out their differences during the dialectic of the alien; i.e., as something to literally fuck with. And last but not least, Alien is code for “rape,” meaning the rape hound as much as gorehound: “We found some dark rape, let’s go investigate!” Tom Skerritt is now Fred from Scooby Doo. That’s my head canon.

But also, “rape” can be in quotes or not to a liminal extent; i.e., during rebellion’s usual revenge being policed and scrutinized, much like Lewis’ seminal cryptonymy was, over two centuries ago; re: exploitation and liberation occupy the same spaces and there’s no way to extricate them save through performative context playing with dark power. In turn, size difference plays a part, as does fucking the alien; i.e., in ways that are haunted by genuine black-and-white trauma, from the past, as suggested by language of “the past” viewed in the present. Silly and/or serious, the performance as something to study and experience again and again is what communicates its holistic value in a sex-positive or sex-coercive sense. Through fatal attraction, rape victims seek out rape during calculated risk, which the Gothic historically offers in ironic and unironic forms on a similar complicated, dialectical-material gradient.)

(exhibit 47a2a2: Artist, left: Raff Grassetti; top-right: Reiq. To that, nudity or chastity is performatively fine so long as it doesn’t infantilize women [or anyone else] into a cop; i.e., who triangulates for a hauntological defense of the “ancient” Greco-Roman West during damsel/detective Amazon arguments of virgin/whore “good” monstrous-feminine against nature as “evil” monstrous-feminine; e.g., “Sparta,” “Athens” or “Rome” as something to defend from degeneracy come back through the usual us-versus-them home defense arguments. Through those, women are whatever cis-hit/token men want and need them to be; through us, we reclaim such things to speak to liberation during liminal expression.)

From Alien to Doom to Metroid and other Metroidvania/shooters—all of them built on movies in the neoliberal period out of novels  during said period—so many consumers are afraid to critique their heroes and their homes, because they become our homes, too, thus feel sacred as a matter of residency melded to dogma; i.e., the paradox of allegory and apotropaic “armor condoms” is that escaping into other void-like worlds must open our eyes to the problems and presence of coercive illusions in our current time and place. And any who uncritically defend those illusions (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning,” 2025) are “pulling an Omelas,” thus hiding from the reality those illusions conceal; i.e., in effect assimilating through the class nightmare of the Gothic that Jameson—with some justice—was talking about (while missing the point of rape play that Radcliffe and, hell, even Tolkien was touching on, however imperfectly[8]):

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

Nothing is neutral, but the appearance of neutrality through the consumption of clearly binarized and dogmatic canon (Tolkien in a nutshell, left) is precisely the kind of tactic bad actors use to indoctrinate other workers; i.e., to hunt their fellow victims down, like Ripley does. The act of doing so historically happens in defense of canon and blind escape, yet becomes Quixotic in ways that bounce between fiction and non-fiction, trash and picturesque—with those lauding Alien over 2001 “because it’s dirty” sort of missing the point: a black monolith is still a black monolith, a slum still a slum for the middle class to dive into, regardless of the sterility or grime. By comparison, we aliens of the status quo viewpoint can swim in the abyss as speaking to our normal everyday lives: Ripley’s nightmare is our Tuesday.

Ripley’s Riddle: the Mystery of the Token Feminist

Remember that nothing is sacred but our rights interlinked with the rights of those who came before, the collective wisdom of which we use to camp canon (thus profit) to death. By comparison, something that is conditioned to be violent for profit will be violent for profit; i.e., as a menticidal gargoyle serving in duality as part of the same mirrored expression’s kaleidoscopic madness; re: the xenomorph and the crew it threatens each having the potential for class, culture and race betrayals—meaning someone that activates predictably and ruthlessly during reactive abuse—but for which the seemingly human parties are just as violent and territorial as the inhuman ones (re: Black Swan, left).

In keeping with Frankenstein‘s own ambiguity and oscillation, there is no set meaning to such inkblots (though some explanations are far more likely than others). Instead, we must subvert any undesirable historical-material outcomes by showing our audiences that we demons—normally treated as things to unironically persecute—actually have the ability to not only survive, but overwhelm and deconstruct our innocuous-looking killers’ harmful sense of self; i.e., by anisotropically weaponizing their own tools of alienation against them: the villain in Alien isn’t the xenomorph, but profit (wealth alienates) leaning into a form of bio-power the elite can weaponize by pitting workers against workers (white on black), moving money through nature during the Promethean Quest!

To that, corporate workers colonize space in pursuit of intelligent life, but only do so contractually through a company that exploits all parties through preferential mistreatment (the rare-and-elusive “thinking slave” [versus extended object, per Cartesian thought] to put down/enslave from older empires promising “phat loot” to the finder). Divided, workers get dumber and meaner over time, the middle class essentializing as Faustian stopgaps for the bourgeoisie to trigger with Medusa; i.e., as a Black Pearl to tremble before (fragile savior syndrome; re, Marx: “capital has made us so stupid” extending to the defenders of church-like franchises and mediums, in the neoliberal era). It becomes a game; i.e., conjure up the black cosmic rapist once more to banish during mirror syndrome, simultaneously proving one’s monomythic worth and earning neoliberal false power/brownie points through applied harmful knowledge: “Make demon, then act outraged as you rape it.”

Sound familiar? It’s what Victor did, and by extension what Ripley does by playing her part in a man’s world: her spawn is natural and good, whereas the fascist-Communist egregore/chimera attached to a polity of tyrants and victims is, once-and-future, a total asshole—one where our cosmic Karen can not only call the cops on for revenge against the cops through those the cops victimize; she can be the cop and skip the middlemen (see: Aliens)! It’s pure bollocks.

In a sense, it’s the femme fatale; i.e., Zero Suit Samus as much an assassin for her government (the Galactic Federation) as Ripley was for hers. And despite appearances to the contrary (the “Rambo/white Indian” problem), many women act bereaved or oppressed to assimilate, only to lean into the very motherly tropes that men want while calling it rebellion. In doing so, they prostitute themselves per the whore’s paradox, both virginally and/or whorishly as Amazons to varying degrees of state revenge: “the jungle abused me (or I felt scared of it) so I leaned into whatever roles were expected of me thinking it would protect me from harm!” It’s scaring women into being sexually violent and visually appealing to men; i.e., in ways men can then control, itself one of the oldest tricks in the book attached to tokenism having updated from Ancient Athens into modern versions of “Rome,” on and offstage! The housewife slums, but out-of-joint.

(artist: Predator-Assassin)

As such, it bears repeating that white woman—until very recently in world history—were property for Western men, not people themselves, and for far longer than African Americans have been slaves/second-class citizens. But under present circumstances, such things have shifted to turn white women into gatekeepers for capital that, post-gaslight, became girl boss vanguards that led people of color to also tokenize, followed by the appearance of queer people in Western judicial dialogs (re: Foucault) and the repurposing of medieval persecution language to apply such things to a new order of alien, during the hauntologies at work (re: Zionism). #PickMe

Such “roiling” demands constant Gothic introspection. In Alien, for example, warrior nuns can do whatever they want if they fear for their modesty pursuant to profit (their virginity synonymous with their lives as male property extending to corporate ownership; re: “crew expendable”); i.e., they are the ultimate undeserving victims who, suddenly as cops to a lesser degree (e.g., Ripley as Warrant Officer of the Nostromo), enjoy the state’s usual tools provided they “play along” (with the monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital; re: Cartesian, settler-colonial straight violence, terror and sex as not just invented, per Crawford, but reinvented and passed along). In turn, “space” is colonized through a white tokenized fear of black rape along the usual inventions we must subvert perceptively—by polishing our mirrors (no surface is 100% reflective)!

(source tweet, 3D Realms: May 26th, 2023)

Again, quoting is completely fine as long as it’s not canonical; i.e., provided you’re commenting on/with it to ultimately camp, thus prevent rape by challenging profit to have the whore’s revenge (Shelley Bombshell, for example, is having the pimp’s, above). Alien was ultimately a festooned cash-grab leaning into Lovecraft, Conrad and Poe to pimp out celibate pioneer whores; i.e., “phallic” violent/smart women (Cartwright’s Lambert wasn’t a scrapper but she was a navigator—a classically male position). These are sailors, first and foremost, but still burdened with Neo-Victorian expectations in a retro-future Britain, its neo-medieval panopticon invaded by an alien far worse than Giger’s: Margaret Thatcher!

This being said, the ambiguity gives it a certain viral/fungal power (the xenomorph is basically the precursor to the AIDS virus and the finger-pointing that would cause, only a two years later in 1981). History is a living document, then, and the Gothic is writ in transformation and decay!

To that, you can have white skin and still be an alien (as I have been, my whole life); you can be an alien and still be a cop (as Ripley is, next page)—i.e., attacking the alien as something to police because it is abject, the holier-than-thou generally acting the most modest while having the most unironic perversions: stuck in Capitalism gentrifying and decaying such things/adopting a grim air of flirting with disaster while playing meek and strong voyeurs exhibiting strength during neo-conservative warmongering.

To that, the canonical detective becomes more and more robotic/transhuman to pre-emptively attack nature defending itself from the colonizer[9], and whose own mutations are postcolonial; e.g., the Cyberdemon from Doom (exhibit 51d4a2); re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Postcolonialism in Doom” (2020), as featured in “Those Who Walk Away From Speedrunning” (20205) They become heartless shrews in ways that expend all sympathy from allies while betraying them, mid-witch hunt (re: Federici); i.e., while consuming the alien, on and offstage, in ways they cannot create, only destroy because they police what they think is cool: while turning off their brains except “shoot to kill” as a mindset wherever they are! Killing becomes a tremendous mystery unto itself, one to chase across Hell’s half-acre until the cows come home—from Earth, to the stars, and back again!

Think Eco, but for damsels finding their inner Spartan or “female Achilles” the Athenians whispered about; i.e., as Marston drooled over and Scott made in the image of his own hard-ass mom. It’s very British, but also Western; re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference whoring the mom out as a chaste TERF nevertheless chained to men and that burden of care: harbingers of the same fear and suspicion, but doubly so because they’re not men—will try all the harder to fit in where they’re never fully welcome. “We’re the victims!” they’ll cry.

No one punches down harder than token people do, because their betrayal has alienated themselves already from their own people in exchange for Judas gold (re: Federici). They “can never” go back, as they see it, having crossed the Rubicon “for good.” As Ripley shows us, they’ll even kill babies for bosses they don’t like (an extermination rhetoric that Neill Blomkamp would highlight much more nakedly vis-à-vis Apartheid, in District 9′s own white savior/Tonto and the Lone Ranger rehash):

And while this seems like a lovely metaphor of the Vietnam War on its face, war apologia laces itself with sympathy for the conqueror “suing for peace” in bad faith; i.e., while continuing to prosecute war during the same-old false flags and vae victis refrains fearful of the liberated, if avenged. “No, it’s the non-white children who are wrong!” Cameron isn’t a steward of nature, then, but its routine pimp/Greater Destroyer as all Great White Men of History (and subjugated women) have been: idle, class dormant minds, conjuring Mephistopheles to collar and torment the demon to death. It’s bad BDSM through the submissive shooting the dom.

As such, he and company took the wrong lessons from the Vietnam war and turned them into a profitable cryptomimetic refrain valorizing personal responsibility and Starship Troopers to replicate war copaganda in ways Lovecraft only hinted at; i.e., to have everyone see Ripley as the Good White Madonna and want to be “just like her” when pimp-slapping the fat-and-sassy Welfare Queen—in effect, whitewashing the Vietnam war and every conflict that came after it, onstage and off, through neoliberal media (videogames) during Cameron’s refrain, fostering peace through strength as, ever and always, a package deal with the New World Order announced by Bush Sr. in 1990: “This Time, It’s War!” and personal, to boot! And Cameron’s Aliens married a variety of cops-and-victims stigmas acquired over a very long career to make things hell for nature as monstrous-feminine—all so Cameron could profit off the past in badly disguised ethnocentric dogma, then sell it back to American liberals with his 2009 Avatar series!

But back in 1986, he helped spawn Metroid as imitating the same mutating canonical chain (alongside Tolkien’s own cartographic refrains; re: “A Note on Canonical Essentialism“)—from middle-of-the-20th century novels (Starship Troopers, 1959) to 1980s cinema (Aliens, 1986) and videogames (Metroid, also 1986) and later Doom and Quake (1993 and 1996) onto latter-day FPS like Call of Duty and Gears of War (2003 and 2006); i.e., as franchises that would go on and on and on, inside the neoliberal period’s end of history as build for extermination: “Final Victory” as ever elusive, creating a problem it could never solve because it was built on a lie that, nonetheless, created an endless supply of cops and victims to replicate—one side signing stupidly up to face a perceived and imaginary but half-real threat, and the other side colonized whether they want to be or not.

It’s a War on Terror that never ends, incited by James Cameron before 9/11 as a pimp and chicken hawk warmonger who doesn’t want peace; he wants to sell more and more Madonnas, the Shadow of Pygmalion (and his Galatean perversion, the subjugated Hippolyta) replicated like gospel to preach without end, perception becoming reality to serve profit: by raping the whore faster and faster onstage, doing so in conjunction with real-world geopolitics in the hopes that the nightmare will “suddenly end” if we just find one more power-up (torturing natures secret’s out from her dark womb, raiding Hell’s handbasket one more monomythic time). Except it won’t, because said military optimism, urbanism and Realism are merely the infernal concentric pattern as Aguirre highlighted, in 2008, but also Radcliffe back in the 1790s; i.e., accidentally warning about in her own conservative fictions’ monster behind the Black Veil: Capitalism growing into itself, “standing on the ashes of something not quite present” during the cryptonymy process.

Allegory is often what the authors aren’t fully aware of, but still putting in their stories for others to find, afterwards. Except, whereas Scott’s Alien had some irony and neoliberal critique among its own trembling prospector’s ethnocentrism, under Cameron’s disastrous notion of damsels, detectives and demons, the Prison-Military Industrial Complex completely exploded into a gold rush of Pax Deorum (“peace of the gods,” or more colloquially “golden age”); i.e., through him as Bringer of War pimping Ripley out on the Aegis (and Sigourney Weaver embracing the neo-conservative elements beyond her flagship character’s maiden voyage—a pirate vessel flying the American flag for decades afterwards). There is never “true peace in space,” at home or abroad, onstage or off, for Samus, Ripley or anyone else.

Expanding the blind parody of Beowulf and its praxial inertia into American households as something to “speedrun” from the ’90s onwards (re: me, vis-à-vis Eric Koziel), suddenly the whole world was entirely on fire—full of gay non-white Communist space bugs to blame, thus squash and burn by new generations pushing against Domino Theory dressed up; i.e., younger and younger witch hunter cowboys, repeatedly eager to plunge into the same-old frontier territories for endless glory and conquest: to recite the same old lines as they do with a smile on their faces (“Express elevator to Hell, goin’ down!” Bill Paxton says, above, presenting my entire graduation class (of ’04) with a likeness to unironically imitate, after 9/11 handed America its first domestic black eyes: “Goddamn bugs wacked us, Johnny!”) and then feeling sorry for themselves, afterwards, while nuking the site from orbit not once, but over and over again!

As such, Cameron’s signature Military Optimism helped sublimate the new normal; i.e., by reenacting the vengeful ghost of Saigon without irony to rape the world through the same old, us-versus-them cartography and jingoistic, Pax Americana heroism. The harder they punch, the more they deny and the guiltier their actions make them; but it’s always the whore’s fault.

In turn, the Shadow of Pygmalion haunts the Cycle of Kings during the narrative of the crypt. And to that, if Scott blindfolded the Amazon to scare her incestuously like Ferdinand did, in The Duchess of Malfi (1614), Cameron turned the damsel into a military recruiting tool he could pimp out as modest while fetishizing the same kayfabe-style cult of death; i.e., trading the torch for a gun (exhibit 48c1)—his Spartan hauntology of Marston’s Wonder Woman given flesh and pitted against Red Skull as Nazi-Communism, except now it was a black mirror to contend with Capitalist Realism and fascism ever and always festering endemically on the homefront: the ignominious death of older Americans sticking its own young populations into a Faustian meat grinder in pursuit of Promethean power!

Such is fascism, and America has always been a prison/settler colony (re: Zinn). Yes, Scott is bad, at times, but Cameron’s Don Quixote revival is a million, million times worse. He’s a white moderate whitewashing fascism and selling the War on Terror pre- and post-9/11 in ways that eclipsed Alien‘s haunted house argument (through merchandise, remediation and gross sales) on every level; re: his refrain the one that not only “stuck,” but best hit upon the present state of affairs, and settler-colonial groundwork underneath, orchestrating such things for centuries; or (from my PhD thesis argument on Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain):

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 [“outside” on the frontiers] (source).

In short, it’s a place to test one’s manhood/mettle as routinely needing to be tested—with Cameron’s Hippolyta girl boss being a clever whitewash and gender swap that shows the boys (and girls) how to act like men better than men (and the Brits):

This is hardly the first time I’ve discussed this. As I write in 2021’s “Outlier Love: Enjoying Prometheus/Covenant in the Shadow of Aliens” (an extended quote because all this is incredibly relevant):

Before Aliens there was Star Wars. Lucas’ original trilogy championed armed resistance against imperial colonizers by modeling the rebels after the Vietcong. Unfortunately Aliens‘ own Vietnam war allegory is far more ambiguous. Ellen Ripley becomes Rambo, slaying droves of alien creatures single-handedly (Cameron wrote the original screenplay for Rambo: First Blood Part II  before handing it off to Sylvester Stallone). The aliens aren’t even remotely humanized. Instead, the movie’s dramatic elements focus on Ripley’s surrogate motherhood. She eradicates the aliens to save Newt, all thanks to Cameron’s “neutral” critical lens.

[artist: Gerald Brom]

And when I say eradicate, I mean it. “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit” isn’t just a memorable quote; it’s also Ripley channeling the spirit of the American occupiers. Leave; bomb the Commies on your way out. JFK wasn’t keen on dropping bombs, but authorized the use of agent orange. Johnson loved his bombs; so did Nixon, but he banned agent orange. These ambivalent, indiscriminate attacks harmed the indigenous population. Aliens could have channeled civilian warfare like the Tet Offensive by having the xenomorphs resemble the former colonists. Instead, a bug is just a bug. With nothing human to stall her advance, Ripley unironically massacres the colonized; like Vietnam, Hadley’s Hope becomes a shooting gallery. In this respect, Aliens is quite literally xenophobic propaganda*.

*For more on this concept, consider reading my article, “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid.”

Not convinced? Consider Aliens‘ literary influences: Sigourney Weaver cites Henry V as the inspiration for Ripley—a play about the reification of an English monarch through war (“Once more unto to breach, dear friends”). During Aliens‘ production, the entire cast also had to read Starship Troopers, a novel criticized for its propaganda-level glorification of the military. In other words, the critical slant, if there is one, is too neutral to effectively criticize the industrial-war machine. Do you speak out and risk being attacked for your politics (Good Morning Vietnam)? Or do you play it “straight,” vitalizing the military to mollify hawkish critics (see: Starship Troopers—the book or the movie)? The second message is pure allegory, hidden behind larger, louder themes.

Aliens has the latter problem, one it’s propelled into future movies and videogames: “This time it’s war,” the trailer announced. Cameron himself wasn’t above pandering to both sides, openly apologizing to the United States Marine Corps. for his unglamorous depiction of the military (see: his commentary track for Aliens in the Alien Quadrilogy edition). Cameron’s concession only muddies the waters further, as do future attempts by him to generate money through the energetic depiction of war (re: Avatar).

Guns are a big selling point for Aliens. This same concept applies to Cameron’s own franchise, The Terminator. To be fair, Terminator is far more critical of war (and rogue police states) than Aliens. Nevertheless, the movie still has a lot of guns in it. Some audience members even view Cameron’s “future war” as a glorious, nostalgic playground. Angry Joe, a right-leaning gamer, belligerently clamors for the “purple lasers!” (and loves his Aliens paraphernalia). Mr. H Reviews drools over Tech-com‘s faithful 1980s tableaux, while condemning feminists for ruining the franchise with Terminator Dark Fate. Their combined approval of “future war” and Aliens-inspired media isn’t a shock. But neither are the sexist, warlike attitudes they sneak in under the veneer of “neutral” entertainment.

Though left-leaning myself, I can still delight in Cameron’s artistic craft. I like purple lasers and big explosions; they’re pretty and visually stimulating. But honestly I enjoy them more when combined with Cameron’s Gothic elements: his Romance between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese; his dark mirror with Ellen Ripley versus the Queen. Unfortunately those situations are shrouded by war. Maybe that’s the point: Gothic stories both fear and promote the return of a barbaric past, including war. War and guns are popular in America. So is Aliens which, moving forward, makes war and guns popular again. And again, and again…

I’m an American. Any declaration from me—that I enjoy Terminator or Aliens—feels like it must be clarified. Fans of the “good” Alien movies (the first two in particular) usually don’t clarify anything. When I was in my mid-20s, I worked at my family’s (now defunct) store. A [gay no-white male] banker would come down and talk movies with my mother and I. We got to talking about the Alien franchise. Suddenly he announced “Oh, Aliens is the best one!” before looking at me and smiling in mild, veiled provocation. He didn’t say why. He didn’t have to.

I heard the same thing in high school. Mike Worthington and I loved Alien and Aliens. We asked Mrs. Brown if we could show both movies in her science fiction class. She allowed it. After watching them, a popular, somewhat artsy student in a Greenday t-shirt declared, “It’s stupid.” He was talking about Alien. Our classmates chorused in agreement, saying that Aliens “was awesome” because it had guns.

The same kind of people say that Prometheus is “bad,” usually implying blame towards Scott for his “Quixotic” departure from Cameron’s reliable monopoly. They also provide double-standards—dumb scientists, plot holes, ropy dialogue—to justify their reasons. I say “double standards” because these reasons are not missing in the original pairing. More to the point, Alien and Aliens are generally considered “good” for oft-repeated, but understated reasons. “Good” usually means Aliens, primarily its guns.

The presence of war in Aliens is so ubiquitous that it usually goes without saying. It should be commented on, but isn’t because so many in the mainstream view it as “classic,” default, normal. Alien is classic too, but Aliens carries the American torch through its glorification of war. For nearly its entire existence, America has been at war, or made money as a “neutral” party selling guns to either side. Manifest destiny aka a “clear fate.” The “no fate” spiel from T2 suddenly sounds a little ironic, especially when compared to Ripley’s heroism in Aliens. Cameron says he uses violence to make a point. Perhaps people understand violence; they also glorify it, perpetuating war through their own creations.

The lengthy shadow of war applies to videogames inspired by Aliens. Aliens single-handedly cemented the FPS genre, inspiring id to make Doom. It also spawned a number of cinematic or cinematic-inspired imitators: Predator, as well as Metroid and Contra. And not just them, but numerous sequels and spin-offs. The best ones are constantly explosive, action-packed (though I prefer mine with a bit of spooky atmosphere and tension; re: Super Metroid, Dead Space, Alien: Isolation).

Make no mistake, I’m indebted to Aliens for its role in Metroid’s genesis (even if the first game is closer in spirit to Alien). However, the word “good” has far too much weight in casual discourse. This drives me up a wall. “Aliens is good” has little to do with the criticisms mentioned above (dumb characters, decisions, dialogue); it has everything to do with the understated components: the guns, the action, the jingoistic comraderie. These sit innocently on the screen, less propagandized than The Dirty Dozen. I say “less” because Horner’s music is still awash with military splendor and excitement (similar to John Williams bastardizing “Bringer of War” in A New Hope). It’s not just tolerated; it’s embraced, just with less zeal [or so it seems] (source).

This became a pissing match/forever war between Scott and Cameron’s bread-and-circus, but also their fans; i.e., using derelict Amazons vs Medusa in ways I grew up with—from the early ’90s, onwards—but desperately wanted to change, myself. As a closeted trans Communist, I was always against war but loved the GNC potential of the Gothic heroines being shown—so much so, in fact, that my early research into them at grad school, “What an Amazon Is, Standing in Athena’s Shadow” (2017), preceded my eventual 2018 master’s thesis about Metroidvania, and later research after that preceding my PhD (re: 2021’s “Why I Submit“).

The rememory process never stops—is one of constant holistic reengagement with what doesn’t die, anyways. We can’t be rid of such things; we can only camp and subvert them, even transgressively. The idea is to make such things actively rebellious, our own Satanic and “ancient” left-behinds raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness to prevent war and rape by not blaming the whore as monster girl waifu (the classic function of the Amazon vs Medusa, sadly):

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In short, I love Metroidvania and Amazons as things to subvert; all of my Metroidvania work concerns Amazons (re: Persephone’s 2025 Metroidvania Corpus), and I’ve written about Amazons—but also illustrated and performed solo/with others the idea of Amazons, Medusa and Amazonomachia—for my entire Sex Positivity book series (2022 to 2025). And furthermore, my academic ideas “the palliative Numinous” and “ludo-Gothic BDSM” (from Volume Zero, onwards) were deliberately coined in conscious, active attempts to get away from Cameron’s harmful dogma better than Kristeva or Creed had, but also Scott.

If Sex Positivity and my earlier work is any proof, then, I love camping the canon. It’s like sex to me (and often involves sex hyphenating art-porn to develop Gothic Communism, another of my creations). No one paid me; I just actually 100% enjoy it—Persephone “losing herself in Necropolis” again and again (to be “raped” there with reckless abandon)—and think we can do far better than Cameron ever bothered. He’s a cunt, and while Ridley is less of a cunt than him, he’s a cunt, too (the two men “docking” on and off, throughout the years). Don’t just kill your darlings, duckies; emancipate their whores during ludo-Gothic BDSM and glaze those on the Aegis in furtherance to effacing the heteronormative, settler-colonial, Cartesian legacy Pygmalions like Scott and Cameron both leave behind—i.e., with your own iconoclastic damsels, detectives and demons liberating sex work (therefore all work) from Capitalist Realism in duality! We’re going back to learn, not to destroy and forget!

That is my “found document” for you to discover and it won’t apologize for Pygmalions like Cameron raping the world by first raping our minds (re: taking Aristotle’s “give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man” and applying it to cis girls and black men, too)! Keeping with the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection furthered by the middle class, there is always a whore to fetishize/alienize and rape—a succubus “from beyond” to collar and cage by princes, but also by princesses savagely “sticking it” to the colonized to performatively “get back at” the real abusers (white men and their white systems of oppression): “The goddess you need can’t be me,” it’s a cruel angel’s thesis we have to subvert within our own strange appetites garnered, mid-abuse, to have the whore’s monstrous-feminine revenge, one day (and creation/rape) at a time—by thwarting profit, thus rape, by putting “rape” in quotes (re: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis“)! Take my Wisdom of the Ancients and carve your own destinies in defiance of the real pimps-in-disguise! Enjoy but do not endorse canon!

(artist: Bokuman, commissioned and modified by Persephone van der Waard in 2016)

Oscillation (and echoes of incest, live burial and rape; re: Neo Genesis Evangelion‘s whole fucked-up Neo-Gothic pastiche) aside, there’s a million-billion ways to do this. In keeping with duality and continuing to investigate neoliberalism in yesterday’s heroes beyond my older work and commissions[10], the world looks very different and practically identical after reentering Plato’s cave (the process often being called trans emasculation, for trans women); i.e., to critique men like Cameron vampirically sending power towards the elite on the Aegis (akin to Jim Henson’s Skeksis), whereas we reverse the flow of abjection anisotropically by also inverting terror/counterterror as Gothic counterculture nostalgia!

To that, Cameron is Skynet growing tissue for the cyborgs and the bullet farmers raping the grave-like ground (very Gothic); we bare it all to expose his folly while denying him our organs (of sex, but also thought married to sex and labor): “Can’t touch this” freaky girl! And doing such “push-ups” or “jumping jacks” might look silly from the outside/at a distance, but so does sex and/or public nudism if you’re not the one(s) doing it. What matters isn’t action for its own sake (re: Eco), but whose dialectical-material context upon further inspection aids in the development of Communism during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., in ways Cameron’s own praxial inertia didn’t, because it produced a lot more people not like me (eco-fascists) than like me and those like me (re: from Volume Zero): “Go forth, young boy, and you’ll become a legend!” meets “Go West, young man!” Lebensraum is Lebensraum, Manifest Destiny always the same game given a new coat of paint by men like Cameron (from slavers like Thomas Jefferson to Hilter) pimping the wild whore as seductive and delicious:

[artist: A Baby Pinecone]

The historical-material reality of Grendel’s suspiciously Satanic-sounding mother is ordinary people being placed into the out-group by the in-group—i.e., less hag-horror in the sense of actual withered hags [the furies] and more the ancient mother goddess [the Archaic Mother] as embodied in AFAB persons and viewed fearfully by men as devious shapeshifters that could be anywhere, inside-outside anyone [a killer impostor that is instantly fatal upon encountering; e.g., the T-1000 disguised as an innocent housewife]. While the stigma applies to anything remotely female or incorrectly male, the redhead classically evokes the presence of pagan power and Sapphic energies.

She embodies nature, and nature is something for Beowulf’s hauntologized clones to kettle/box-in, then rape and kill for “their own” God-given glory in bread-and-circus-type stories [with her predictable revenge—at becoming like them for the death of her family and loved ones—being seen as cowardly and illegitimate in the eyes of the state and its kayfabe monopoly of violence; i.e., the back-and-forth cycle of reactive abuse]. It’s not just “boys will be boys”; the pussy looks like a cave to conquer by men according to men during rites of passage that have been baked into our culture as fundamental to capital. It’s Manifest Destiny in action—challenged by the simple fact that God is an invention, a cruel joke to abuse others with through the rise of Capitalism’s Cartesian Revolution and resultant maps of conquest [exhibit 1a1a1h2a1]. It becomes not just a scribble of Old-English runes, but a harmful game spawned into endless copies of itself: the power fantasy as Warrior Jesus’ perennial resurrection, raping and killing the world as monstrous-feminine, “gendered at every turn” according to cartography as a technology of conquest that fits into the ludologized scheme: 

[Francis Bacon, the father of modern science,] argued that “science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her.” Further, the “empire of man” should penetrate and dominate the “womb of nature.” […] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was “gyn/ecological” from the outset (source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things). 

The kingdom is threatened; call Beowulf [or the Ghostbusters] out of the mythical past to slay what ails the king and the land, the uncanny home as “rotten” [as Hamlet put it, in Shakespeare’s parody of the hero/murder mystery] and needing to be restored through great destruction [sold to the masses, of course]: […]

To preserve the image of male hegemony, modern-day heroes will inject themselves with whatever serum they require to manufacture an edge over women as a false binary [e.g., the ghost of Eugene Sandow and his imaginary antiquity, exhibit 7a]. This mad science is what Robert Matheson and Mary Shelley mercilessly lampooned in Frankenstein and I am Legend [1954] as the fearsome and outdated legend of the rapist-murderer presented as a scientist of cold, “benevolent” reason [or infantile sports goon grown in a test tube; e.g., X-24 from Logan, 2017]—who is, in truth, just an entitled, cruel nerd. Manufactured conflict under Capitalism involves compelled performances of anything and everything [masks, uniforms, weapons, handcuffs and other binding implements, labels of power and its delivery from cops unto victims, etc] that weaponize weird canonical nerds through projection—i.e., onto various theatrical personas: sexy or profoundly hideous killers, detectives, warriors, or doctors… (source).

 

In short, we’re all “looking for Mother” as someone to occupy and enjoy for various reasons; i.e., while moving through the monomythic underworld/Promethean space as simply a dogmatic reflection of canon out into the external plane. In turn, monsters, violence, terror and virgin-whore damsels, detectives and sex demons during monstrous-feminine poetic expression aren’t automatically “bad”; it’s how their continuously reapplied in the present from the past in relation to the future (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients) that matters: an Omelas refrain, for Cameron’s Aliens—one that excludes what it abjects and rapes during mirror syndrome at its core, but already having raped the white aggressor’s entitled mind to see everything as a giant massive threat it is paradoxically superior to yet threatened by! “Must defend my pussy and Civilization’s ‘womb’ from the black rapist Archaic Mother’s stinging ovipositor!”

(exhibit 47a2c1: We’ve already discussed Cameron’s Black Queen and her role in settler-colonial worship as a kind of endless “whipping post” [re: “On Amazons, Good and Bad, part one: Always a Victim,” 2024]. All the same, Cameron’s Amazonomachia is very Freudian, dog-eat-dog [if the dogs were black and white] and concerned with monarchal regressions to embrace without irony [Cameron’s own tokenized, white-and-cis supremacist Numinous closer to any imaginary British Romanticism birthed in America than he probably cares to admit; i.e., the White Queen vs the Black Queen, Ripley playing fetch with a female T-Rex wearing an African tribal mask, above[11]]. Classical art generally relegates women to the status of virgin or whore. Yet, a cis woman in canonical Gothic fiction is usually a special kind of either type: a damsel or a demon; i.e., Lambert’s nerdy wallflower or the chaste battle-nun that is Ellen Ripley. In the case of the latter, she’s monstrous-feminine by virtue of being “man-like” but not a man, yet also not the demon hunting them [meanwhile, Lambert’s dainty swooning is the end of her]: the whore, she-warrior and female demon all part of the same monstrous-feminine equation.

To this, Ripley is also a fledging detective and warrior debutante—the “Battle of Britain” housekeeper carried into outer space, looking after the company’s chateau by investigating Ash the perfidious servant and not really in the mood for being fucked with by her bosses or the xenophobic caricature. She eventually blows up the castle because it threatens to eat her as much as the monster does, except she remains haunted by the possibility that she and it—the sodomite gargoyle—might be alike. Society demonizes both as monstrous-feminine, but Ripley is the blue-collar curios who doesn’t really fit in. She’s “just there to work” [the Protestant ethic] …until the pirate queen shows up and Ripley—sensing a promotion [in Aliens] takes personal responsibility to a whole new level [versus scuttling the craft and the cargo, in Alien, but ultimately having to tango at the end in that movie, anyways: abjecting settler colonialism in ways that are just as conservative as Cameron’s]. She also self-defends, the detective treating her inner damsel [or a nearby ward, like Jonesy or Newt] as precious cargo that must be defended at all costs; i.e., from her own abjected sins tied to empire. It’s regressive to a Pavlovian, hauntological degree: admiration for the superhuman “soccer mom” doing whatever it takes to defend Civilization from a Black Menace, mid-Red-Scare/Satanic Panic [all under the shadow of Zionism, but I digress]. 

The xenomorph, meanwhile, becomes the moving-target Creature to feature, who eventually leads Ripley to weaponize her survivor’s anger against an imaginary foe that could be inside anyone—in a phrase, persecution mania. Ripley becomes a monster cop, turned “undead” and “demonic” through her chasing of the skeletal black dragon as a biomechanical spectre of systemic trauma she can never kill: “Out, out! Damn spot!” But the “bury your gays” crusade carries on, rooting out corruption and the forces of darkness as potentially fascist and Communist [until future defense of capital redivides the stigmas, aggregating for the state against labor each and every time]. It makes for generational trauma that, sure enough, the elite will use to keep us divided, pitting different prison gangs of different privileges and oppressions against each other for profit; i.e., by denying Medusa cuddles, sex, and any other kind of intimacy humans take for granted, but also keeping Athena isolated and longing for love. It’s a dog’s breakfast, presented as “cuisine” [or the “Meow Mix” logo from Rob Cobb’s “Semiotic Standard[12]” alluding however accidently to Soylent Green (1961) but I digress].

Instead, the state monopolizes connection inside its own concentric prisons; i.e., you can have as much as you like as long as you police it “among your own kind” and war against other gangs. This means female biology as alien and token/target as a matter of demonic interrelation with other similar out-groups: non-white skin, Pagan religions, queer expression, neurodivergence and the mentally ill, sex workers, the elderly and disabled and anything else that can be criminally fetishized and exotified. It’s the opposite of intimacy but remains darkly buoyant/magnetic.)

In true Radcliffean fashion, the Alien franchisement of damsels and detectives are always white functioning (and generally white-appearing Final Girls unless tokenized by white men, or made by token directors, below). The archive is both fabricated, viral and haunted by actual fascism in various cartoons; i.e., which the elite will dangle in from of us during Medusa’s testimony leading not to reparations or land back, but assimilation fantasies from marginalized groups; e.g., AvP’s (2004) “Zulu Hotep” nonsense, or more recently with Fede Alvarez’ own Alien pastiche, Romulus (2024):

(exhibit 47a2c1: In a Marxist olive branch, Alvarez’ movie initially alludes to Mary Shelley’s earlier black survivor’s testimony… only to sweep it under the rug/deny genocide, past-and-present; i.e., through a Trojan Horse of Americanized Cartesian force, and whose forced ambiguity [a problem since Shelley] they further complicate using not one, but two questionable servants!

One, Rook, is a literal carbon copy of Ian Holm’s digitized likeness, Ash, and the other one, “Andy,” is a Tinman savior for the functionally white damsel in distress; i.e., when the movie forces her to play the role instead of the detective Amazon with a gun. All of this of course hints at oppression, but leans into killing Medusa when Medusa shoves her “eye of confusion” right up in our Ripley clone’s grill, telling her “girls shit” [spectres of Radcliffe]. Scar[r]ed for her life, the new debutante looks away in anticipation of intense rape and cannibalism… only for Andy to predictably swoop in, at the last second, using the White Man’s gun to save his chosen belle/beau from almost-certain Nazi-Communist/Indigenous conversion therapy [a black men punching a non-white non-man for trying to using the white drinking fountain instead of the “col*red” one, in the Jim Crow South]! “My hero,” indeed! How we want for one without tokenization!

However compelling or enticing the Amazonian drama seems through its emotional-sexual appeals, its praxial crux operates on keeping the detective functionally white with a token black male simulacrum’s help; i.e., will he betray his childhood “of the people” friend to help Ash’s duplicate achieve immortality for settler colonialism in space? No, he won’t! But by that same token [so to speak], Alvarez has Andy submit to the white girl as knowing better than him—the two of them bargaining for her to liberate him from corporate bondage… only to be returned to bondage under her care; i.e., as made that way by her father having salvaged Andy from older “corporate models” built for the frontiers.

In short, Andy’s a “house negro” and the heroine is literally his owner who chastises him through force [the ghost of the father literally occupying Andy’s mind/programmed to tell dad jokes]: female Gohan with Black Goku the Amazing Robo-Dad telling her to kamehameha wave Cell from Another Hell.

Humans are reflexively idiomatic. You’re welcome.

Of course, allusions to Asimov are bad enough all on their own, but the narrative arc—however emotionally sweet it seems on its face—is intensely problematic; i.e., as it abjects genocide through a neoliberal, corporate-owned damsel-to-detective bildungsroman concerned with the legend of Rome’s construction [which Romulus and Remus point to] as having a “litter of runts” fight over scraps: a pecking order within labor [slaves fighting slaves]. The outcome to such sibling rivalry’s controlled opposition is diegetically decided by Dr. Light’s “Roll” taking a “Black Rock”/Mr. Rochester under her wing [“Reader, I assimilated him”]. Doing so puts the heroic mantle back on her shoulders; i.e., to investigate, thus solve everyone’s problems, Nancy-Drew-style.

And while it’s admittedly fun to dissect such stories to find allegory we can use, we’re at a stage when we need active informed resistance among the cryptonymy process [and for anyone worried about that, the genie’s already out of the bottle, Pandora out of her Box. No? Just tell me how the state will counterprotest the Gothic’s sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll—by making it illegal? That would go against profit. And even if they did, how would they police it to any degree of efficacy?].)

“The idea has become the institution. Time to move on.” Having outlined the white female predatory angle, I’d like to proceed towards escape from them and Capitalist Realism through Medusa; i.e., as something to “puzzle over” regarding worker liberation using damsels, detectives and demons, ourselves. The rest of “Giger’s Xenomorph,” then, will consider the process of abjection through Neo-Gothic detectives as part of Cartesian thought, followed by Amazonomachia, cryptomimesis and mise-en-abyme before concluding with furries and ultimately Giger’s puzzle of “Antiquity” straight from the horse’s mouth. As we do, it remains vital to remember how the development of Gothic dialogs is not an automatic, instant process (reverse abjection or otherwise).

Note: The rest of this section is as I wrote it, in April 2024. No more close reads, just covering our bases (scoring for Communism)! —Perse

Cartesian Hubris: the Girl Boss

Warnings carry in echoing code, insofar as monopolies are impossible and the Gothic is always out-of-joint. To see that, you need only consider damsels, detectives and sex demons, their proliferation having taken centuries to arrive at where it currently is under Capitalism; i.e., a “pandemonium” of ritualized torture expressed in oppositional forms (the clichés and fetishes of the Gothic mode) for which the xenomorph is queen. Left behind during a praxial “seesaw” by those who make them, these derelicts (and their ontological role of exposing systemic trauma in a voyeuristic manner) still exist side-by-side in dialectical-material strife; that is, once abandoned, their shared language can be rediscovered, thus taken up by new oppositional forces during fresh Gothic poetics modeled partially off older structures and explorers, but—like synapses firing rapidly—communicate old issues that travel like lighting through oscillating dialectical-material (and social/collective) emotional/sexual tensions. It is not enough to call something “monstrous” or “alien,” then, but doing so regarding a Cartesian structure to describe in either direction: the state vs nature (thus workers) insofar as Medusa factors in.

Rape, including insertion of an unwanted foreign object—not a dildo by a friend, but bullets or knives during foreign holocausts (or something similar on the homefront; e.g., a rolled-up magazine by a false friend, below)—is a constant ubiquitous problem. It’s systemic; i.e., a dogmatic imbalance whose perennial abuses of power announce through the very mode that, while it has the potential to address Capitalism-as-rapacious, also commodifies it when Gothic poetics are put in the wrong hands (and even in the right ones, you can’t really speak to trauma without giving it a voice in some shape or form; e.g., Alien‘s own rape fantasies, while abject and brutal, still showcase a lot of persistent, unaddressed and ongoing British bigotries through a neoliberal critique that, while far from “perfect,” still hits close to home).

To prevent that, you must throw the doors of perception as wide as possible—as mouth-like, ingesting through a medieval framing of the senses (re: a confusion of the senses, where “the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen…”); i.e., that speaks to extreme trauma as notorious for “crossing one’s wires.” State abuse weaves a coercive, blinding spell of undeath, one that demands tough cryptonymic medicine (various blindfolds, minus the harm—an act of gained trust, not blind faith): fighting madness with “madness” that parses through play. So close your eyes, open wide and come to Mommy (but remember your safewords, of course)…

Bear in mind, while male detectives and warriors are a staple of the genre, we’ll primarily be exploring how female and queer detectives survive male power while navigating it. This starts with the Gothic castle as Radcliffe envisioned it—a white, cis-het female idea of patriarchal menace to poke around inside, later explored and appreciated by other white, cis-het women in the 20th century and Internet Age that followed; e.g., Rachel Knowles, a self-confessed “committed Christian” who writes:

It has been said that every writer must first be a reader, and I have always loved reading. As a young girl, I was fascinated by tales of fantasy such as Enid Blyton’s Enchanted Wood and wrote my own magical adventures –  always with a happy ending. When I was thirteen, I read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the first time. I fell in love, not only with Mr Darcy [barf], but with the romance of the Regency age [double barf]. Over the years, I have devoured numerous Regency romances – some good, some bad – and half-written several of my own (source: “A Regency History Guide to The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe,” 2013).

Except, queer people—while obviously different from Knowles—can still revisit and rewrite the same Gothic environment centuries after Radcliffe designed her own dated traps; e.g., her scenes of imperiled heroines threatened by in-castle rape as repressed; i.e., leaving them behind as “ancient” derelicts for us to find, explore and renovate when interrogating our own trauma as paralleled by old systemic threats: the rise of fascism (and token feminism) as something foreshadowed by Radcliffe’s pre-fascist gloomth heralding 20th/21st century terrors (see: Nick Groom’s introduction to The Italian). Our matriarchal, femme-dom castles (and their pastiches’ remediated praxis per an ongoing and endless argument between workers and the state) can subvert those and critique patriarchal doubles (of doubles, of doubles…), but it must contend with them as part of a series of Borges-style projections into infinity (mirrors and labyrinths). That’s what historical materialism is: a repetition of variable likenesses that grapple in dialectical-material tension. To go against the grain, you have to stand out while blending in:

(artist: Miles Jonston)

It bears repeating that dogma is recursively cryptonymic and criminogenic; Cartesian dogma criminalizes nature, lynching it as fetishized alien chattel to repress genocide with; i.e., the run of the mill as paradoxically shown and hidden. The cryptonym “alien,” then, become whatever the state needs inside its colony’s state of exception. To that, recall how the same shadow zone is where Gothic theatre and poetics work for or against the state, oppositional praxis employing the usual paradoxes thereof; i.e., “total” power to perform with things existing in the same place at the same time, between binaries; e.g., the liminality of power and weakness, chastity and lust, salvation and damnation, light and darkness, Heaven and Hell, life and death[13], nerds and sex, bravery and cowardice, stoics and histrionics, knowledge and ignorance, darkness visible, the monstrous-feminine, the state and workers, cops and criminals, soldiers and slaves, babes and banditti, citizens and aliens, Artemis and Aphrodite, childbirth and death, mothers and Medusa.

It’s completely impossible, then, to reconcile and reclaim matricide through thoroughly liminal creatures like Medusa or the xenomorph—nor the damsels and detectives tied to them (and the complex, warring socio-material conditions that bring them about)—without keeping these various paradoxes (and profound, beauteous contrasts) in mind. Furthermore, just because death can be passionate doesn’t mean humans should be sacrificed automatically to achieve presumed “grace”; more in this case isn’t necessarily better and attempts to find meaning in suffering is certainly different than inviting it. One’s graceful, the other is a disorder compelled by those in power over those they rape in a variety of ways (re: “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them”).

To this, trauma is an “antiquated” minefield whose exploration takes great work and care, but also persistent vigilance to thread: one, avoiding Cartesian dogma by expressing xenophobia as an honest interrogation of domestic bias (not an endorsement; i.e., being mindful of the people involved as having potentially experienced abuse themselves); and two, touching on xenophilia, ironic demon BDSM, and reverse abjection as taboo enterprises during ludo-Gothic BDSM, thus subject to reactionary reprisals arguing for violent repression: “Put away the torch from Alien (the British word for ‘flashlight,’ which the “improvised incinerator units” primarily function as) and pick up the gun in Aliens. ‘This time, it’s war!'”

Except Cartesian thought weaponizes women against nature (and the monstrous-feminine) while still treating them “of it”: “Rip and tear until it is done!” But it’s never done; matricide is a fool’s errand, an impossible task on par with killing death and one that never ends by design as required by capitalists—i.e., to move money through nature by having Ripley (or echoes of her) further subjugated, hence regressive Amazonomachia in their name. They want marginalized conflict, which is both profitable and useful (for them, mind you; everyone else suffers at their expense). So Ripley is always afraid under Patriarchal Capitalism, thus Realism; rape is always a threat, and Medusa always a victim[14] whose existence—per the process of abjection—is terminally mythologized: her touch poison, her serpentine gaze pure, instant “death.”

Amazonomachia, Cryptomimesis and Mise-en-Abyme

Thusly armed, Ripley becomes afraid to hug Medusa, thus nature, as divided from her. Per the Amazonomachia as a theatrical, staged ordeal, she and those like her become foils to a classic argument; i.e., one where Ripley does stochastic terrorism for the state (through fatal compromise, arguably protecting the company by scuttling the xenomorph for them). She looks at Stompy and sees death, an alien/dark reflection to ward off through violence (which fractures the glass when struck). As such, she becomes “unsexed” like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth; i.e., a phallic woman, except Ripley’s case involves multiples of them, the so-called “good” Amazon dick-measuring against an evil double GNC BBC. Threatened, Ripley fights ignominiously for the ghost of her dead child, who she projects onto Newt while cannibalizing the Alien Queen’s brood for one of “hers” having falsely “killed[15]” Amanda: “…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!” Ripley suitably binarizes, defending the nuclear family model as the false original under attack by the Indigenous group (and their non-nuclear approach to social life) coded as outsiders, as alien, as inhuman bugs “from the stars,” Hell, beyond, the black lagoon. Instead of trying to love them, thus hug Medusa, “difference” becomes a death sentence: “Nature is other” as carried out by a token female war boss who the company displaces after she cleans house for them (re: the euthanasia effect).

Emboldened to “strike back,” Ripley picks up a state-issued repeater (some kind of rifle to treat enemy populations[16] as target practice) to dutifully enter Hell again (though she never entered the Derelict in the first movie, making her testimony to the board in Aliens hearsay); i.e., a token Persephone monomythically shooting at “Medusa” with relentless military optimism: a predatory cop with death in her eyes, and whose lack of empathy is second-nature, taught by deceitful mirrors. “Maybe if we kill enough of them, we’ll ‘win’ the war!” her actions seem to say. “Maybe then, ‘Medusa’ [code for the empire’s built-in disparities and collapses, translated into monstrous theatre] will disappear for good!” She’s a crack shot, better than the boys—Annie Oakley playing the Amazon. She’s also a dumbass, a vengeful herbo with hell to pay through a death wish. As a matter of childbirth (the classic site of war for women of Antiquity as a Western civilized venture; i.e., where canonical history starts and stops, the great thing for fascists to return to), Ripley’s war story is harmfully antiquated, in that it endlessly and concentrically leads to women’s enslavement, to genocide, to tokenism taking up fetishized, witch cop arms against those trying to live in peace: other witches.

You might have noticed a worrisome and disturbing likenesses of Ripley in adjacent media forms; re: Samus in the videogame, Metroid. This is because settler colonialism is built to spread its dogma across all the media it can, escalating towards extermination from an initial position of ostensibly “being wronged.” Be it a novel, movie or videogame, the exterminator then goes into Hell, monomyth-style, to right said wrong and defend Capitalism from the “end of the world” at the “end of the world”; i.e., Capitalist Realism; re: “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 […] Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force…” (source). It’s meant to appear chaste, but make young boys’ “tails” wag like a puppy’s for a modest warrior mommy (and girls’ clits to throb with a similar second wave feminist power trip punching down at useless eaters[17]).

We’ve looked at this quote earlier in this section, but will return to it fully in “Call of the Wild,” part one; i.e., when we take a second look at the franchised videogames that Cameron’s refrain inspired to execute Cartesian rhetoric and uphold Capitalist Realism: Metroid and Metroidvania, but also Doom and the entire shooter genre. For now, just remember that Capitalism is a hyperobject that demands a holistic, inclusive and cryptonymic solution—mirrors and blindfolds being the source of the problem, which must be addressed in kind. We must mirror our problems in ways that sneak in Trojan counter code (drawing our own conclusions).

As such, try to remember nothing is wrong with wanting for heroes under settler-colonial conditions provided it doesn’t poach nature for profit. Doing that serves the state by making children afraid, who then grow up to commit atrocities for the state as instructed by its war simulators’ cartographic refrains: trophy rooms like the one described by Ace Ventura in When Nature Calls (1995) as “a lovely room of death.”

That film portrayed settler colonialism as a backwater relic attached to a cartoonishly evil (thus unserious) British throwback; Aliens did the same through a bad replica of Saigon in outer space showing and hiding Vietnam to further Capitalist Realism as a burgeoning videogame simulation type. Both show that settler colonialism survives well into the present through deliberately antiquated forms whose displacements generally apologize for ongoing genocides; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit as something to meet with force, thus blame and kill Medusa for her own death by the state as a chilling matter of routine:

Ellen Ripley once said, “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.” The words of a true madwoman, isn’t that what America has been doing for over seventy years now? Military optimism, as I envisioned it (“The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021), is the idea that you can kill your problems, somehow “slaying Medusa.” But you can’t kill Medusa because her life-after-death persona represents things that aren’t people, alone; they’re structures and the genocide they cause seen in the final moments of the damned. Theirs isn’t a question of blind faith towards a self-righteous cause, but conscious conviction towards a cause that is just. […] Like Medusa and her immortal, severed head, Bushnell’s doom isn’t something the elite can ever hope to control because it reverses the function of terror and counterterror normally envisioned and entertained by Western dogma; i.e., vis-à-vis Weber’s monopoly of violence and Joseph Crawford’s invention of terrorism, but also Asprey’s paradox of terror as a proletarian weapon in a postcolonial age informed by past struggles surviving under modern empires (source: “Bushnell’s Requiem”).

So when Hippolyta beheads Medusa, the colonized are policing themselves through someone half-in, half-out of their world: a white woman faced with rape, but whose experiences invert the settler-colonial violence routinely happening around her sheltered bubble. War propaganda routinely disguises and abjects this fact by whitewashing genocide in a canonically essential conflict; i.e., by reducing genocide to “destiny” between two “ancient” perpetual foes: Ripley as the good mother beheading the bad, defending good nature from bad, good children from bad, etc (she doesn’t even kill the Queen, because the xenomorph can live in space).

In other words,

People in the Imperial Core like to think of themselves as just, forgetting what death is while being born into a system that encourages it through the very divisions [Cartesian thought lays out]. They don’t like to be reminded of those shadowy realities, which Medusa’s beheading shows to them beyond the cave-wall puppetry they’re used to. Turned back at them through Athena’s Aegis, and exacted on “one of their own,” they’re forced to see, thus process, the very horrors they spend their entire lives abjecting (ibid.).

To this, Ripley’s brute Americanization is both a matter of national pride[18] and one whose dated regression is the prime witch hunt we’ve been considering here as a multimedia pandemic. We need to scrutinize its retro-future neoconservatism (the return to war and peace through strength) to understand the New World Order as it presently exists; i.e., doing so as critics of the state by using Gothic counterterror to defend ourselves with; e.g., by dressing up as blindfolded monster mothers like the xenomorph. The proletarian function, here, is clemency before attack—to reclaim their value as not being a rapist, uniting arm-in-arm against state forces. This requires hugging Medusa to shield her during asymmetrical warfare; i.e., from a subjugated Hippolyta armed to the teeth—a TERF champion backed by TERF supporters, backed by TERF central command as part of a fascist federation: America as the harbinger thereof when Capitalism, always in crisis, starts to rot. The decay on the xenomorph anisotropically doubles Ripley’s own rotting brain (“the one you feed” fed on menticidal garbage).

Such “human tanks” are generally blind. So pertinent questions like “How reliable is their vision?” or “What privilege are they armed with?” become incredibly germane to Gothic-Communist aims when faced with echoes of Ripley in real life (re: Jadis telling me “They’re just bugs!” regarding Aliens’ self-confessed Vietnam allegory). To that, the examination of perilous worlds and closed space inevitably requires some degree of non-trivial/ergodic effort to overcome and survive; i.e., vis-à-vis Aarseth and me, regarding Metroidvania, through liminal, Gothic circumstances that perform the context of rape, bigotry and systemic fear/control, mid-castle-narrative; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM considering things to interrogate “within the text” as a poetic extension of the natural-material world we (unlike speedrunners) take outside of itself to critique capital with.

Concepts like “familiar” and “foreign,” then, do not exist in a vacuum, but inform each other back and forth over time. Said extensions include the damsels, detectives and demons inside a Gothic space as produced by the knowledge or lack thereof contained within the author(s), which—as we’ve seen with Radcliffe and her refrain’s spiritual successors—were/are far from perfect in terms of highlighting worker abuse outside of white, cis-het women’s concerns voiced during rape pastiche. Indeed, some might prohibit effective investigations altogether (re: Ripley evolving into an automated killer for the state: the modern woman as savage, projecting her bigotry onto imaginary Indians, space bugs, what-have-you).

To this, the state’s monopoly on damsels, detectives and sex demons is, like all its overreaches, something to challenge through itself. Per Medusa, our reenactments must become increasingly sex-positive through iconoclastic, xenophilic means drafted by queer authors beyond cis queer men like Lewis; i.e., whose various cryptonyms reverse Hogle’s process of cryptonymy—its “double operation of revealing to conceal”—that consequently lays bare settler-colonial bigotry during a revolutionary masquerade designed to hide us: among those we can unmask, Velma-style, as not on our side (re: TERFs and other tokens). This happens by first showing them our masks as a means of reconnaissance and provocation—of class, culture and race war as guerrilla warfare waged with Gothic poetics (counterterror a famous “shadow weapon” of guerillas, vis-à-vis Asprey). Point in fact, we must; i.e., doing so to adequately serve all workers effectively and collectively through a mirror match’s shared canvas (or stage, screen, etc) as mirror-like. With it, we can help others see, if not permanently then at least for a second, what is useful to our survival of them; i.e., by putting something inside their blindfold that stuns them long enough for us to act: to “pants” them and tie their shoelaces together before we make like a tree and get the hell out.

Just as Ripley punches the mirror of her own dark reflection during mirror syndrome, the key to liberation lies in reflecting the right images back at our killers—themselves, acting like an emotionally/Gothically unintelligent dumbass, but posturing as “cultured” against other prisoners abstracted “in small”; i.e., the Amazon’s threat displays kettled[19] by state dogma until they explode, resulting in a never-ending crusade against “Medusa” during DARVO-grade obscurantism/reactive abuse (nature to rape with money expressed in military means). It might seem cute when animals do it (source tweet, pro824824824: September 6th, 2016); the state breeds bullies meant to kill their victims through Amazonomachia as mimetic[20] and inclusively divisive.

Once white-men-on-white-girl violence, then, the message has evolved to white-girl-on-black-girl violence, but also white-girl-on-trans violence (and other marginalized groups) where various token monsters join the fray to uphold normative status-quo structures and heteronormative ideals (the slave falling on the Roman sword):

(artist: Anselm Feuerbach)

Military service and its token normativities are always a betrayal because the state is straight/antithetical to life as we know it; i.e., is a bourgeois power structure whose cops destroy/rape nature for profit (or do so to protect itself from Western powers; e.g., Communist China and Soviet Russia; re: “Leaving the Closet“).

Per my expansion of Castricano’s definition, cryptomimesis is writing (or otherwise engaging with) the dead as expressed through art, demons included. The idea in doing so is to get at the cryptic, generational trauma buried inside Faustian bargains during Promethean Quests; i.e., as something to extract and use as workers demand. Yet “inside” is a bit of a misnomer, insofar as trauma carries across its surfaces, between its spaces, behind its masks, and on its pages, etc. Indeed, we can see the conflict as a visual pattern able to be levied by pro-state or pro-worker artists, authors, actors, etc; e.g., my book and its various collage-style exhibits (all starting with my Bride of Frankenstein collage, exhibit 44b2).

Except, workers must beware the state as a bad actor with a bad temper and army to carry out its petulant will. Like an unruly child breaking its toys, the state infantilizes mid-crisis to attack its perceived subjects; its legacy is one of total indifference and unironic madness, a prolonged and unnecessary suffering predicated on cruel, callous abuse made to serve profit through disingenuous illusions. In response to its crowning achievement of misery towards workers, women and nature/the monstrous-feminine, a mother’s work is never done. It carries on precisely because the future is always threatened by the state’s imaginary past: something that survives and which we must survive while blindfolded; i.e., surrounded by danger as “dressed up” in cryptonymic reenactments that a) elide trauma and b) help pass vital[21] messages of liberation theatrically along.

As per the natural world, the two are actually in competition; i.e., in Gothic stories per the puzzling “antiquity” of Alien, they involve two castles—one of metal and one of dead bones and flesh—that serve as giant, doubled, suspiciously humanoid habitats that mirror a larger transition between the colonial past in faraway lands and its zombie-demon rooster’s homecoming. Information, then, passes through giants, castles, humans, mirrors and monsters, their modules, etc, as poetically indiscrete.

Volume Zero writes, “To interrogate power and trauma, [we] must become second-nature” (source). Just as the Imperial Boomerang comes back around, then, so does the cryptomimetic language being for or against it as something to meet with violence or friendship. For us, the knee-jerk police agent’s chase of imperial scapegoats only leads to inequality and harm. Instead, empathy towards the alien must become second-nature on a collective societal level; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM (from Volume Zero) as gleaned from medieval conflict in small: the mise-en-abyme, or concentric echo of the internal/external medieval.

(source: Bushcraft Buddy’s “How Did People Survive Castle Sieges?” 2017)

We’ve already discussed (and showed) how it’s acceptable to get swept up in and carried away by mise-en-abyme and its castles-in-the-flesh; i.e., as something to literally look at yourself as trapped inside. Like Walpole, Scott’s retro-future is full of dark infantile humor and medieval hauntologies they lose themselves in to find hidden truth. Except different fortresses take on different shapes, and I’ll show you how with an extra bit of academic flourish (nerd time, for the next seven pages. Then we’ll close things out with Giger).

For one, Scott and Giger’s biomechanical makes no qualms about introducing a medical, memento mori flavor into the proceedings. Such composite evocations of the ancient/medieval remain “novel” purely because they raise honest-if-haunted statements about oppositional praxis as violent on and off the page for various sides; i.e., the state colonizing itself and we, as colonized, “storming the castle” as a linguo-material device useful to emancipation. This war of illusions has a long and rich history going back centuries; i.e., back to our boy Horace Walpole and his Gothic shenanigans (castles, of course), which Scott and Giger riff on/rip off in their own 20th century take on the Neo-Gothic castle/chronotope.

Far from being modest or direct, a given chateau evokes Walpole’s campy rape space as paradoxically recent: a puzzling relic of “Antiquity” made from past legends and bandied about as discovery-after-the-fact. That’s largely what the Gothic is—a speaking to present barbarities with “past” ones disinterred—but its assorted reinventions and façades still use the language of war through body language that wages campy assaults into hostile territories; re (from Volume Zero):

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

Viewed as workers (the monstrous-feminine) vs the state (the Man, Cartesian thought, law and order, the Man Box), the iconoclast must work within said abyss to develop Gothic Communism, thus end setter-colonialism; i.e., by using what we have as reclaimed power from canonical doubles to camp canon with: the nerdy language of rape and war (sex and force) as something to spoof and use to our weird nerds’ holistic advantage versus weird canonical nerds disadvantage!

The Other Side of the Coin: Camping These Things (reprise)

Canon and camp is a tricky process, and one that occurs inside itself. Per Sarkeesian, it’s possible to critique what we enjoy to consume. By extension, I think it’s perfectly valid something to kick ass and merit critique (which Aliens admittedly does); i.e., the thing that’s fun to critique but also consume, mid-critique, like, Egger’s 2022 The Northman, versus the thing that isn’t fun to critique or consume; e.g., Hitler’s 1925 Mein Kampf or something equally dry and terrible. So much race science is dry and terrible, but Aliens strikes the dangerous white-moderate balance of actually being fun to watch, making it more important (and fun) to critique, thus camp! And that’s not hard to do; i.e., you can camp offshoots of the same Numinous, me having camped a variety of gods and monsters through my own horny Samus and Amanda Ripley artwork. No bullshit, just draw an Amazon with a gun doing something sexy and sex-positive, and you’re golden:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In the counterterrorist tradition, you create said advantages using what you got, resulting in bizarre combinations that—per people running around inside giant monsters chased by smaller monsters—feels suitably silly-serious. Per the Shakespearean stage, this means combining what is queer with what is medieval, thus warlike and gory in frankly intimate poetics indicative of a pre-capitalist world (also from Volume Zero):

It’s serious-yet-silly and that’s the point, but the point of the rainbows and glitter is proletarian praxis insofar as we function during oppositional praxis: to make the canonical language of war silly in a very gay way of interrogating pre-existing power and negotiating new variants during liminal expression; i.e., playing with power as a performative scenario to reinvent for various purposes:

“The straight castle was conquered by the fearsome gay warriors and everyone inside was made gay and had super butt sex. —the end!”

The above statement implies that murder, general mayhem and rape are functioning in ironic, playful forms instead of their presumed unironic-thus-literal ones: the rape of the princess, the burying of the gay (and other actual dead bodies—often “innocent, pure good” civilians and “guilty, pure evil” orcs on either side), and sacked castles razed to the ground, heads on spikes, cruel-and-unusual punishment, carceral violence, tilting at windmills, etc:

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!” (source: Gloryhammer’s “The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee,” 2013)

There’s power in the “joke’s” ability to release tension. Except our praxis can’t be “blind” parody like Gloryhammer is (whose proud stupidity is a white, cis-het male privilege) because the marginalized are going to be in danger regardless if they are actively segregated or not (ibid.).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Overlap and confusion are inevitable, but also vital to liberation through the cultivation of perfect doms flexibly putting us (and our foes) “to the sword.” Viewed in terms of the castle personified, one could thus view warring castles like those in Alien—not merely as linguistic, ontological strife (doubles) grappling forcefully amid contested, troubled binaries, but something to express in literal kayfabe terms (again, “a form of ancient popular media that helps people historically relieve systemic stress through individualized forms of psychosexual violence”).

To that, the monsters Hippolyta and Medusa act akin to warring kaiju or the Titans of Greek myth; i.e., when the boundary to Hell is crossed on Earth, between the contestants, the stage(s) they share, etc; re: during liminal expression, onstage and off. Either entity use their assorted “arsenals” to do battle not unlike Gojira (1954) or Pacific Rim (2013), the latter two taking leaves from older Amazonomachia before commenting on (and wrestling with) Humanity’s messy and fatal relationship; i.e., to nature, but also technology abusing nature (vis-à-vis Shelley’s Frankenstein)—as something that responds in kind, but remains for the human detective or damsel something to demonically reckon with, prior to state shift: “History shows again and again / How nature points out the folly of men” (Blue Öyster Cult’s “Godzilla,” 1977).

Except our own castles-in-the-flesh are the monstrous-feminine body as a kind of perfect dom challenging the zombie of “Rome” resurrected; i.e., the gentle femme/mommy domme[22] for workers vs a strict state dom; re: the Metroidvania as something to personify and sing about, thus make matriarchal through function: “That lady’s stacked and that’s a fact!” In keeping with our previous adage, “when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis,” we’re speaking to something Bruce Lee might call “the art of fighting without fighting[23]” and which a murderous message disguised in comely-yet-potent packages does our talking for us: the booty as symbolic of the cryptonymic surrendering of power assigned to nature as both female and monstrous feminine extending to all bodies, genders, races, religions, and animals/nature-at-large exploited for profit by the state.

To that, sometimes, a butt is just a butt, but a butt can be beheld and take on new meaning anyways. Some stories resist interpretation on purpose—e.g., Coleridge, which is bad, or Lynch, which is also (sometimes) bad—but we can still camp them; i.e., however we want. However ambiguous The Northman might feel to Atun-Shei films, for examples, he presents breaking the Fourth Wall to quote Marx and spook the Nazis off as kind of silly (“I Didn’t Like The Northman Very Much,” 2024). I heard that and was like, “…Why?” It never stopped Shei from dressing up as a Nazi to then camp them and speak critically about Civil War history (while getting lost in the sauce a bit, sometimes). Why-oh-why not quote Marx by writing his campy echoes all over our own ass cheeks as an antidote to Eggers’ inability to do anything substantial with his own creative talents (similar to Scott and Cameron)?

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

It likewise signifies a “cheeky” (meaning playfully-to-seriously “insincere,” as Harmony is, previous page and next page) “surrendering” of power that goes both ways per multiple actors working at cross purposes under different scenarios (consent or coercion), but also a single person’s psychomachic hesitation; e.g., by the usual conqueror seduced by nature, but also vis-à-vis Luce Irigary[24] as someone desiring both genuine nurturing and sincere surrender of one’s station(s) of power foisted onto them by state mechanisms; i.e., they are told to kill and destroy through “ancient” mandates, but cannot always bring themselves to “slay the pussy” as indicative of nature’s historically raped womb.

“Rape” camps rape as, so often, a duplicate of a duplicate of a duplicate; re: exploitation and liberation share the same shadow zones but work at cross purposes during liminal expression’s paradox of rape to have the whore’s revenge by reclaiming terror roleplay to liberate ourselves from Capitalist Realism; i.e., ogling “rape” or giving it, mid-voyeurism and -exhibitionism, is completely fine as long as there are quotes (and we fan ourselves, suddenly thirsty for a bit of pussy and/or pounding): “See how she leans her cheek upon her hand. / O, that I were a glove upon that hand / That I might touch that cheek!” (source).

(artist: Owusyr)

As such, power becomes like Medusa—a puzzle, meaning something to perceive and perform in ways that challenge its usual operations through willful paradox: the escape of rape through “rape” in highly theatrical forms abstracting “decapitation.” We’ve mentioned Alien, of course, but this applies equally to our own art as extensions of our bodily rights and labor autonomy regarding what Descartes would call “emergent,” hence abject. “Is that a booty I see before me?” This one claps back, a real power bottom; but like Medusa or any such collective or individual treated like her—e.g., orcs, lizardmen, “mud people”—she won’t bite unless you scare her or bite first (and even then, context matters; i.e., a testament to her own rape as healed and invulnerable through resistance, so keep resisting: the moment you stop is the moment they fleece and destroy you)!

So don’t scare her! Treat her like a person, not a sex object[25] to ultimately collect and unironically mistreat (which Cartesian thought logically pushes towards through its steady arguments for nature-as-monstrous). Fuck her how she likes, then offer her a hug (or whatever aftercare she’s comfortable with, so make sure to ask. She might surprise you). To replace genocide demands holistic understanding regarding unhealthy and healthy boundaries, alike; then, respecting the latter as a means of communication and mutual consent rewriting the former on the same old canvases cryptonymy process—not abjection as second-nature, time and time again! Reversing abjection, then, must become second-nature in its place; i.e., happening through praxial synthesis using ludo-Gothic BSDM’s dualistic double operation.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Easier said than done, of course. Settler colonialism relies on fear-and-dogma brain drains wrought through various cartographic, but also imperative refrains (like Radcliffe’s) dispersed far and wide: “You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it!” (so said Sovereign, in Mass Effect—the Reapers a displaced anxiety of settler colonialism at home). Its cruel penchants prescribe division to further states of ignorance the elite can manipulate to move money through nature in perpetuity!

The point of the “antique” puzzle box, then, isn’t what’s said, insofar as aesthetics are shared anisotropically between warring dialectical-material poles, but rather what they’re made to accomplish through use, thus play. Proletarian function serves to accomplish the liberation of nature, Medusa and workers from the state’s awful blindness/curse of death (class dormancy through stochastic terrorism); i.e., by using the human body during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a present appeal to power through damsels, detectives and demons. By speaking truth to its inherent, ongoing complexities in effective-yet-poetic forms, Medusa becomes a death and rape fantasy to playfully evoke whatever is required to pull down harmful barriers, teaching our would-be killers to see us as human and them as not; i.e., as equal to them while relieving stress as something that lives in and around the human body.

In acts of giddy and reckless triage, proponents for the equality of convenience love to plant flags and “win the war” in single, comfortable battles: propaganda victories (e.g., Ripley nuking Hadley’s Hope from orbit). Except, the individual elements of total solidarity don’t matter provided they’re total and made to holistically invoke radical change sooner rather than later. It’s a group effort and context matters, insofar as two actions—or symbols of those actions—can appear identical, but function for or against the state behind the immediate image and/or sound (and other senses). True liberation hinges on global contributions from all walks[26] through united subtext and steady follow-through; i.e., those whose cryptonymy (and other Gothic devices) collectively make the elite (and their proponents) decidedly uncomfortable when facing death as a settler-colonial result; e.g., furries (next page) as pervert, mega-faggot stewards of nature but also representatives of it haunting the colonizer, Banquo-style (a nymph of Dunsinane, left)!

(artist: Adam Cyrus)

From the Horse’s Mouth: Furries and Giger’s Puzzle of “Antiquity”

In essence, we’re forcing them to “hug death” through nature as monstrous-feminine—undead, demonic and animalistic as the xenomorph and Medusa are. Nebulously. As TERFs and their dogma demonstrate, doing so happens through the topos of the power of women reclaimed by a modern GNC movement in ways that second wave feminism will call “enslavement” in bad faith. Fuck them. If confidently showing our powerful “Aegis” (and her “fangs”) over the Internet (a buffer) causes the would-be colonizer to have a change of heart and consequently start treating us as human wherever we are, then honestly more power to us! But just as empowering is knowing who our friends and enemies are from a relatively safe vantage point. If they lash out, we’ll at least know who we’re dealing with before meeting face-to-face.

(artist: Bluefolf)

It’s worth noting that face-to-face interactions and expressions of sexual confidence are often kept separate; re: the buffer of exhibitionism as something of an iron wall (to borrow ironically from Ze’ev Jabotinsky—though it’s more bulletproof than glass) in defense of workers outing fascists behind masks of our own; i.e., by “flashing” an aspect of themselves to identify as-is in defiance to their colonizers (which we’ll discuss more in Volume Three, Chapter Five in “Transgressive Nudism; or, Flashing Those with Power”). But there is no “perfect” protection of those who identify with nature from those who see nature as alien, thus are conditioned to confront and destroy anything akin to Medusa.

For example, Bluefolf the furry was attacked by virtue of them being different (source tweet: March 6th, 2024). As their testimony shows, there is always some degree of exposure and risk by being out of the closet, even when separated by glass, a screen, space and time.

Furthermore, nude or not, workers communicate with some people up close in ways utilizing personas that often work as literal masks being part of their broader identity—furries.

(artist: Bay)

We’ll talk more about furries, in “Call of the Wild.” Just know, that praxial catharsis is had through confrontation of generational harm during calculated risk, often through animalized signs of dominance and submission that double as (a)sexual signs of theatrical friendship and hostility during class, culture and race warfare; i.e., “mooning” through one’s ass to show as a welcoming act of solidarity and defiance depending on the circumstances (the “flowering” vagina where men/tokens came out of and, in psychological models, will return to die when their power fails them; but also simply belonging to people who don’t even identify as women). Like trauma and stress, then, power is stored all over the body[27] but speaks to where tyrannical men’s “power” generally goes: to their head, above or below (the “crown” a symbol of such gaudy consolidations). “She mighty-mighty!” after all, and trauma and power both live in and around the human body as expressed in the Gothic castle; i.e., as a matter of abjection, chronotopes, cryptonymy and hauntology generally working in concert during praxial synthesis as something to personify through collective solidarity against the state.

“Valor pleases you, Crom! So grant me one request; grant me [the whore] revenge!” In the end, the only things that matter are what we leave behind, for that aim: the statuesque pedagogy of the oppressed and its creative successes, the butts (or otherwise, below) of damsels, detectives and demons; i.e., “what we [make or summon] in life echoes in eternity!” A photo is really no different than a statue—our own “dead poets” speaking forwards helpfully when viewed backwards by future yet-to-die poets: “What are you waiting for, killer? Seize the booty’s monstrous-feminine means of production (and clap my cheeks while you’re at it)!” Anyone who thinks that sex can’t help or hinder rebellion has never tried.

(artist: Maya Mochii)

Where there is trauma, aliens also exist. To it, the Gothic works inside the shadow zone through paradox, using the likes of “Antiquity”—its magics, myths and monsters—to speak to the state’s process of alienation as something to subvert and develop away from Capitalism during camp. To that, the state is not a universal proposition or monopoly thereof. In defense of workers against the state, I am a medievalist, arthouse nerd and freaky girl (“the kind you don’t take home to mother!”)—i.e., someone who loves words and wordy pulp like that of Everquest, Lovecraft and Bungie’s Myth franchise—and this is what I shall be leaving behind: the serial codex of a nerdy intersectional bitch, showing how the delicious language of the past—a diet paradoxically rich and fattening (e.g., “a succulent Chinese meal!”) but healthier because of the ingredients involved—as once used to liberate workers from tyranny. May it do so again, enriching monstrous expression through “ancient, medieval” forms of Radcliffe’s refrain, the demonic trifecta; i.e., ambrosia as something forbidden (unreachable) and guarded but also expressed in Numinous stories, ranging from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Marlowe’s Faustus, Radcliffe’s Italian, and Shelley’s Modern Prometheus into Alien into Metroidvania into my books and beyond (again, a concentric mirror).

As stated, humans are reflexively idiomatic, and anyone who tries to dictate this by trying to divide monsters from the sex and force they represent is doomed to be disappointed by harsh facts; e.g., girls shit, women aren’t always “biologically female” and interracial sex is far more common a sentiment than bigots like to think it is, etc. Whatever forms we encourage, we choose to invoke because of the speculative richness (re: Norton); i.e., to resist Sandy Norton’s
1994 “Imperialism of Theory” extending into what I’ll call “the Imperialism of Gothic Poetics and Sex Work.” There’s tremendous power in sex and force via monstrous-feminine expression; so de-colonize that by showcasing that monopolies are impossible—re: by outing bigoted weirdos through their own self-reporting moral outrage at seeing Medusa walking out and about, at the grocery store. Do it, and expose anything that becomes “holy” to the point that it tokenizes; e.g., write “Obama was a war criminal” on your ass cheeks, then get “back-shotted” by a 6’4″ trans woman while Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1971) blares in the background. Outta sight!

Of course, this flourish probably seemed overly poetic and confounding for its own sake of skinning a cat multiple ways (to those who might whine as such, I direct you to please lick my hairy taint). Fret not; it serves to illustrate a historical-material fact: inherited confusion and negotiation with said confusion (“When in Rome…”). Confusing poetics aren’t impotent because workers and the state survive in conflict according to how they normally talk: through monsters, sex and unequal power exchange as poetic, borrowing from the imaginary past as a murky sphere of tremendous influence (and fun). To that, workers must poetically outlast and outwit the state’s idea of them as “structurally perfect” for purposes of settler-colonial exploitation coming from a combination of the street and the art studio (with bits of academia thrown in, to give things thesis)

This brings us back around to Giger, whose role in things I want close out the section named after him with; i.e., his ghostly obscene art surviving the man himself:

For one, this is Giger’s creature itself as evoking older things, still; re: “Antiquity.” The xenomorph is, on some level, absurd—a creature of vast darkness, former interconnectivity and total chaos; i.e., dynamic and alive yet slowly walking around like one of Walpole’s portraits or suits of armor might: not static and frozen, but impossibly “alive” and vast, productive, everywhere, a smaller castle inside a bigger castle primed to explode (denoting the home as a dying organism we’re trapped inside). Haunting the tableau (a remake of Strawberry Hill, with more industrial grime), it’s perfectly still yet in motion, coiled like a spring and hunting like a shark out for blood. But it just wants hugs, a past alien severed from the present world. To meet it halfway is to collide with the whole out-of-step, out-of-time; i.e., what Blake would call a “marriage of Heaven and Hell” as illustrated by the trippy expanding of the mind through profoundly dangerous reflections: the acid-Communist consumption of forbidden substances (ambrosia) that juxtapose awesome contrast, which many poets (and their ostensible drug use) have repeatedly reached for and performed in their work; re: those mentioned in our previous footnote, but also many more; e.g., Goethe’s Egmont (1788): “Himmelhoch jauchzend, zu(m) Tode betrübt” (source).

Again, it’s a classic Gothic puzzle borrowed from pre-capitalist/medieval thought reimagined in a serialized poetic trend that Giger was adding to with panache; i.e., looking backwards and proceeding forwards through a malleable, writeable Wisdom of the Ancients that takes everything into itself and makes something powerful (and honest) that cannot be dominated by state forces. That’s what the creature is/the castles are—spectral, deathly evocations of a world before Capitalism, thus possibly one after it; i.e., death-as-radical-change. We can reunite, thus use something so awesome (and forgotten) to help liberate our minds from Capitalism and its barriers towards a post-scarcity world; but, again, it will be a shock—medieval, foreign, alien, abject.

Just as a patient is like a corpse under the surgeon’s knife, the idea of the home and the human share this unsettling distinction. We must occupy it as a particular kind of surgeon and corpse: a love doctor whose wild surgeries—similar to Giger’s drug-fueled, psychosexual art—play passionately in a field where “death,” “rape” and echoes of their unironic forms haunt the theatrical landscape.

For the likes of Giger, Shelley or Lewis, then, the wasteland is an “artificial wilderness”; i.e., one replete with a bevy of influential markers: displaced religious artifacts and miracles, classic poetic devices (oxymorons, paradoxes, and metaphors; e.g., gloomth, “sad cum,” etc), wild sex (and rape) fantasies and porn clichés (naughty nuns, librarians, nurses) or action tropes (wagon chases, white weddings, duels at dawn), the same tired conventions[28] and fetishes speaking to anxieties, calls for heroism and desires for assimilation (abusive, sex or action-grade jailor/warrior nuns), axioms (“love is blind”), temptation narratives, sexual tensions and courtly love, Numinous evocations, revolting artifacts, country wisdom, superstition (old wives’ tales), sobering funerary transitional realities (“getting one’s affairs in order”), etc.

In turn, all are revived in Giger’s dystopic (admittedly art-house), Gothic-surrealist “lover boy” and other such revivals coming from what is, at the end of the day, a fairly medieval (and diverse) practice respected by poets, artists, theatre nerds, songwriters, film directors, burlesque dancers, staged wrestlers, videogame developers, and other assorted creatives, out of the past and well into the present (and frankly far too many to list). The Gothic, as a mode, is populous and rad!

Viewed in the present by those unaccustomed, it’s bound to upset, overwhelm, shock and disgust. This includes things that, when examined more nakedly, seem to have no cause for it, but historically-materially lead to systemic brutal violence; e.g., incels shitting their pants and frothing at the mouth regarding female, queer and or furry autonomy. Such a shuttered existence is cloistered on both ends, then packaged and sold in harmful forms. But these authors don’t hold a monopoly over such poetics. Those with “pull,” then, can speak to the same theatrics in sex-positive, “homebrew” ways; i.e., divorced from the profit motive and its harmful formulas to say something that thinks outside, thus beyond, capital using Giger’s xenomorph to be reflexively idiomatic in highly iconoclastic, Gothic-Communist ways.

For one, transformation, insects, buried guilt, queerness and death are core themes of the Gothic and the xenomorph encapsulates all of them; i.e., the becoming of something new tied to the imaginary past where things like rape, magic and systemic abuse are openly commonplace during calculated risk, but for which queer-positive language is always lagging behind in mainstream Western media (e.g., the moth, above: Silence of the Lambs, 1991).

Though initially puzzling and out-of-joint, Giger’s eternal, hellish and trauma-infused brainchild is prolific precisely because its revelation invaded and spread through what, point in fact, was already present and coming back around, like Marx’ spectres, to haunt us to no end: “Antiquity” as something to tap into and speak of in quintessential Gothic means that articulate messy difficult topics in profound shorthand; i.e., the abject, Numinous, unheimlich, terror and horror, etc, as established schools of expression, thought, and theatre that took quite a bit of time, energy and engagement to develop into themselves (from Plato’s cave to Radcliffe’s Black Veil and Baudrillard’s hyperreality, etc).

As such, Giger’s “Antiquity” is not unlike Medusa’s anti-rape narrative, revived in Shelley’s Modern Prometheus, except it speaks to something that also took time to become anti-rape in ways we currently take for granted; re: Elizabeth Hadley’s 2024 “More than a Monster: Medusa Misunderstood” speaking to a creature that—while essentially damned at birth—was what future authors like Shelley and Giger used to give the oppressed another famous voice (for the whore’s revenge) while commenting on deep-rooted patriarchal and eventually Cartesian paradoxes!

Part of this owes itself to death as a concept. Death changes people as something to face, thus enter and embody. Meanwhile, the xenomorph wears the aesthetic of death, but actually travels, communicates and reproduces like a virus; i.e., through psychosexual trauma as “built up.” As always, the central idea in doing so remains emotional manipulation of the middle class; the question is, what does this manipulation serve? Communism wants to use it to leverage public sentiment in a pro-worker direction that respects nature: for the rights of all (not just token sycophants and false friends) to humanize “Medusa” as a collective entity under attack; i.e., human culture and the profound ability to create having learning from the past being a mighty weapon—fire from the gods, per Shelley—to defeat Capitalism with. We must, for it is (and has been, for some time now) growing like a tumor in the present to devour everything in its wake, for all time. If nothing is done now to stop it, the future for Humanity is well-and-truly dead, and Medusa—beheaded, furious and agape—with have the last laugh during state shift!

Imperiled by the state, Medusa in small—whether a person or a nation—must unite against state dictates (with queer people able to bond more easily thanks to the Internet, and by extension all misfits). Regardless of the register or the oddities involved, Medusa is someone or something who can bite to cause harm but won’t if you befriend them, first (a trust-building exercise for those once bitten, twice shy). They may return the favor, using their body and mind’s various means to help keep you alive—sex, of course, but also blood, sweat and tears, etc—by maintaining a healthy bond with nature; but you must stand with them against the state (whose ceremonial liberal tears shed to mask a bloodthirst and apathy to make fascists blush). It is our Song of Infinity to take up, then, because the state and workers (thus nature) are always at odds!

As such, workers help each other as animal, as alien, in whatever form is required (the xenomorph able to adopt any shape). There is no shame[29] in parenting (to mother or father) in ways that have us working as stewards to Nature, and we sing to our needs (and hers) from moment to aching moment; i.e., as the struggle goes on, donating to it as much as we can give as negotiated by all parties, mid-duress. All go towards a community we find and make for ourselves as exiled people disillusioned from nation-state origin myths (re: Zionism); i.e., by the state-as-walled-off from the natural world through a nuclear family unit that dates back to Ancient Rome. Whereas “Rome” shames anything outside of its own divisions, my partner Bay represents a neat antithesis alongside the xenomorph as a kind of Satanic, hauntological totem animal (next page, exhibit 47a3): stability amid polyamory in ways my past partners did not, while challenging Capitalism as inherently unstable while pushing inexorably towards epidemics, climate change, and ultimately state shift.

Sharing is caring and doing so with Bay—a self-identified therian who identifies with natural species (again, next page)—makes me feel good; i.e., like I’m making a difference regarding someone I care very much about. We met through feral sex, communicating like animals and Gothicists to cruise and flash our loins and minds, then breed something special (and unique) together as a series of saucy creations: a veritable raising of flags, a bottomless cumdump whose pool we both gathered at to drink from and contribute to (taking from Giger what was useful and leaving the rest)! Delicious!

The xenomorph, then, is the Numinous/ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., an avatar that speaks, as the Gothic does, to a multicultural and multigenerational force viewed classically through a white lens on the Aegis as “dark”; e.g., the settler-colonial rape of nature by white female colonists who, staring down their ancestor’s past atrocities, pearl-clutch with extreme prejudice during inheritance anxiety being reminded to them: “your empire is built on ceaseless predation.” It’s very medieval, wholesome and freeing because to look on it is to see the whole of the universe in an instant (re: Blake)—the perfection of a dark god closer to life and death as one, and doing as all demons do: giving us more than we bargained for to, suitably enough, set us free from state edicts (faced with that, Victor promptly crapped his pants and wanted to go back inside Plato’s cave; i.e., to betray his own liberation; e.g., like Cipher from The Matrix, insisting “ignorance is bliss”)!

(exhibit 47a3: Top-middle, source: Wikimedia; bottom-middle, source: Marta Rusek’s “7 Dragons We Love to Watch Year-Round,” 2016; artist, everything else: Bay. Dogs, like dragons, are defined by their multiple performances and audience interacting back and forth; e.g., the dragon Smaug[30]. A dog is a symbol of fidelity and, combined with the Chinese dragon, of good health and luck [a black dog is a Celtic symbol of death]. Yet, a dog that is beaten and abused will become unpredictable and violent. “I know what an angry dog will do but never a scared one,” Bay tells me.

In turn, this applies to those living with trauma and identifying with nature as being “inside-out,” wearing it on their sleeves. This is generally a consequence of trauma, but can become a conscious identity to communicate with others who share our cause. It’s also a message of a better world, one felt through bodily autonomy and psychomachic accuracy during ludo-Gothic BDSM as conveyed through one’s own body [and labor] as the exhibit; i.e., informed by never-living examples like Giger’s biomechanical xenomorph that, nevertheless, spring to life and give us fresh power during our own pedagogies powered by the restless dead..

Fueled as such, Bay isn’t my “Great Destroyer” at all, but my luck dragon—pure dog and loving and sweet, but when cornered and threatened by state dickwads, their body and tongue will—suddenly like the xenomorph’s spear-like tail and mouth-inside-a-mouth—expertly and instinctually transform into weapons: a Māori golem’s beautifully dark kiss of death controlling the situation, and whose function is dual insofar as it wags to its friends and strikes its enemies stone dead. “Brain stab! But not before we hypnotize you! Smooch, smooch, smooch [what my mother used to call ‘the kissy mommy monster’ as she blew us kids kisses and chased us, squealing with delight, around the house]!”

 

As you can imagine, this oxymoron is both useful during legitimate self-defense from actual abusers—a prey animal shifting between displays of fight, flight, freeze, flop or fawn—but also a potent and delightful, psychosexual means of play and performance; i.e., between cuties that help the two of us heal together while interrogating generational trauma [thus relieving stress] as lovers, friends, and companions, using our natural “toys” [or sex toys mirroring them] as serving a dual cryptonymic type: classic BDSM symbols of power and resistance black and white halves seeking to reunite, Skeksis-and-Mystic-style.

As de facto educators, though, we also can decide what to exhibit as a means of good sex education through Gothic poetics, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., what is safe and what isn’t through dialectical-material context, including what we like inserted into us and what objects of insertion we have to work with. The bashful and prudish might see our display as compromising and uncouth, except it isn’t insofar as we choose to reclaim the object of a hateful act by seeing it as liberating for us; re: “Art is love made public” and the xenomorph is basically Whitey’s idea of a pissed-off “lawn [space] jockey” come home to roost. But love is also a battlefield littered with Gothic potential that lives within us as shared with the external world: the horny horror story a song of our people to pass on for its Numinous effect!)

Regarding blindfolded love during the cryptonymy process, the xenomorph is blindly furious and erotic, but also speaks to an ongoing and confabulating amalgam: of statuesque, repressed bigotries (re: Radcliffe) frankly exposed inside recursive Gothic reinventions hauntologically celebrating genderqueer xenomorphic expression; re: the mysterious mother as monstrous-feminine, bound and gagged, yearning to be free, brandishing her obscene, penetrating tail and long phallic tongue as suffused with trauma, but also tough-love infusions of exquisite “torture” and gender trouble’s appreciative peril defying total control/obedience from colonizing forces: “Look upon your work and despair!” Thus are the wages of sin commodified and policed by the state!

By comparison, the power to hurt but not harm is BDSM (demon or otherwise) at its finest; i.e., the respecting of the sub by the dom, but also respecting the dom and sub in oneself and in others. Just as the mind, body and their historical-material markers are not discrete from each other or pure imagination, they rely on context to determine their half-real sex positivity or lack thereof in rape/”rape” as something to wrestle with and out of people during popularized dialogs; e.g., heavy metal revivals: prone to reanimate and decay!

(source: Bandcamp, 2024)

In short, it’s the usual Gothic tradition carrying Medusa into the future to liberate the oppressed as doubled by unironic state proponents; i.e., illustrating mutual consent through reclaimed devices like the xenomorph that once were (and still are) used to enslave them: “I’m in ‘danger’ and I like it.” Call it junk or pulp fiction, because that’s basically what it is; but its wicked semantic wreckage also is what people eat and enjoy as not automatically being tied to capital and profit. Instead, wicked communion with the Dark Mother (and her assorted Numinous spaces and personas) becomes an effective, time-tested means of containing and passing vital messages along. In short, we can reclaim our trash, too, and reanimate it to serve our needs when society becomes sick—junk food for the brain, microwaved chicken soup for the soul that isn’t some franchised corporate logo doubling as a cryptonym for widespread genocide and complete environmental destruction (e.g., McDonalds). Alien—like the monster that bears its name and lives in its titular, body-of-a-giant castle, is less concerned with quaint, cheap morality and more with exposing tough secrets through freezing as death-like and delicious: the sarcophagus (“eater of flesh”) and its hot allostatic load, palimpsestuously revived in chase of the Communist Numinous!

As we previously established, some Gothic outings fail to stick the landing. Alien does not; greater than the sum of its parts, its diffuse, abject commentary on monsters and motherhood, dreams and lullabies, strikes an excellent-if-nasty balance between the Ancient Romance and the ordinary novel, the real and the imagined, to highlight and isolate the mother as a historical familial-heroic unit complicated by generation trauma, mid-rememory; i.e., one that—as flesh (Ripley), circuitry (M.U.T.H.U.R. and her disembodied, sedating voice echoing the female radio workers of older American wars), and predatory combinations of those things (the xenomorph, but also Ripley preying on the Queen’s “bastard, illegitimate” children[31])—travels through the public imagination: to the living from the dead and back again. You not only can’t kill Medusa, but she never shuts up!

Such things speak cybernetically through trauma as undead, demonic, and chimeric/animalistic—all flowing across and through a series of texts all thinking about (monster) mothers; i.e., in ways that offer up/comment on Gothic poiesis (and taboo subjects like infanticide) across space and time: Freud’s 1922 “Medusa’s Head,” Otto Rank’s 1924 The Trauma of Birth, Scott’s 1979 Alien, Nintendo’s 1986 Metroid, Barbara Creed’s 1993 The Monstrous-Feminine, my 2021 “War Vaginas” and ultimately this book series, from 2023 onwards.

For all its violent posturing in heteronormative canon, then, the xenomorph’s fabrication and mystery of “found Antiquity” by Giger shares in this same scholarly lineage; i.e., its endless natural-material cycle of death and rebirth, embodying death-as-queer being something to face and puzzle over by others, but also proudly own, worship, and celebrate to reverse abjection by us from Radcliffe’s refrain as camped accordingly: as damsels, detectives and sex demons, inspiring them to do the same! “I have the weirdest boner right now!” speaks to “BDSM as ‘other’—but in space” (“some horrible dream about smothering[32]“): inviting rebellion by playing with rape in ways that evoke seriously awful things, then—as Shelley did over two centuries ago, and which Giger happily continues—lets us choose to make friends with the Creature… unless it’s the actual fash bad actor aping our own “alien mil spec fetish gear” pastiche (“trust but verify”)! Punch Nazis, kids!

As something GNC workers inherited, the xenomorph is our organism to decolonize since the 1970s; i.e., “perfect” for us because it’s not restricted to, or invested in, Freud and his dated, wacky psychosexual models seeing “chaos as female” (on par with Francis Bacon calling for the penetration of Nature’s womb a “worthy” goal of science). Because of this, the creature’s dereliction of “Antiquity” remains entirely unafraid to fuck with the likes of Freud or anyone else; i.e., doing so in order to better speak to the needs of queer people and their allies by camping Freud’s coke-addled ghost a bit more than Kristeva did (from Volume One);

Creed’s characterization of Medusa is post-Freudian to some extent. Again, Creed stresses the weapon-like power of the Aegis as a means of paralyzing men, but leaves much room for improvement (re: my thesis quote, exhibit 23a) insofar as Marxist, intersectional solidarity is concerned; i.e., seeking to explore cis women beyond their universal portrayal as victims in Western canon (source).

i.e., to win critical power through Gothic thrills that seem “empty” apart from scaring the fearful-fascinated (and hopelessly straight) middle class, but also give us Gothic-Communist revolutionaries a voice in the bargain: one to sue for peace but also, as we shall see, rebel against the state with. “You can’t challenge norms without angering folks,” says Beat. “Just gotta make sure the right people are getting angry”; i.e., the oppressed baring their fangs; re: “Thou called’est me a dog before thou had a cause / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs!” Medusa isn’t a little bitch; she’ll tear your face off and eat it for breakfast!

Sometimes threats displays are necessary to get your point across, Medusa using them to defend herself as the Gothic’s mysterious mother. In turn, rebellion (and cryptonymy as part of that) are required when society becomes sick (which it does when Capitalism routinely decays).

Then again, we’ve already discussed the concept of the home as sick per the unheimlich (another Freudian staple). Except in medieval thought, the house is also a metaphor of the mind and body as indiscrete—its rooms, halls, doors and windows—but also passed down as such, mise-en-abyme. Like a castle “in small,” it passes from one person to the next, each story’s castle-narrative piloted by a different hero blazing the same-old dualistic trail; i.e., the castle as a traveling “liminal hauntology of war” serving as data storage whose corruption, the ghost of the counterfeit, is something to bond with, not reject; re: by hugging Medusa as the data, a walking fetish golem speaking in Numinously demonic runes. It’s giving away state secrets and guarding colonized lands from colonizers (the gargoyle a classic guardian, similar to the Golem of Prague; i.e., the guardian of a dark church/forgotten city forbidden to trespassers… and leaving a trap less disguised as an S.O.S., and more the Indigenous luring the colonizer to their doom across the chronotope’s space and time; e.g., from the mining exhibition stumbling upon the old ones/shoggoth to the space truckers seeking out the Space Jockey and the xenomorphic cargo it hauled, once-upon-a-time; re: fire of the gods)!

In doing so, its ensuing and yawning entropy represents the hero’s mind and body while inside-outside the monster (the invasion of the Nostromo by the xenomorph turning the ship into the Derelict from earlier in the movie); i.e., the damsels and detectives confronting repressed external elements as, themselves, “ancient” and derelict demons: a disease also contracted through accident of birth, insofar as the thing that appears human (the resident and residence), but conveys occupation by something that isn’t what it should be and seems to say it; e.g., Howard the Duck slowly sitting up and saying to his petrified comrades, “I am not Howard anymore!”

In Gothic stories, this madness isn’t so much a purely psychological condition, but more a theatrical, dialectical-material one that accommodates a variety of sides to the human condition as ever unfolding across and into itself again; i.e., during the xenomorph’s biomechanical liminality as turning into a ghost version of itself across new encounters: the ghost castle, ghost ship, and ghost people. Their combination conveys itself in popular socio-material forms leaning into the sex demon’s reflexive exchange of said spirits; e.g., clothes, music, and various other dramatic devices (often romances but also comedies; re: Howard the Duck, 1986) that appear as regular social-sexual events; i.e., demons, the undead and animals as housed, for which a composite monster like the xenomorph makes up all three; re: the labyrinth, from Radcliffe onwards, as a classic cryptonymic storage site for such abominable otherings that speak worryingly to us about ourselves stamped with old repressed traumas that haunt the land—a process of endless re-exploration that never ends!

Per ergodic motion/castle-narrative as exemplified by novels, movies and videogames conducting the same basic safari—re: At the Mountains of Madness, Alien, and Metroidvania—the idea isn’t to escape the labyrinth at all, but to find radically transformative truths hidden inside the home as occupied by strange defenders; i.e., the xenomorph as concentric, sedimentary and parthenogenic per larger dialectical-material arguments about consent (with sex [and its universal alienation/fetishization] being a driving force—to liberate or enslave, mid-fetish). In written cultures, arguments are defined by what they leave behind as an extension of spoken words and lived realities. This happens like the human brain does, jumping around in segments using waypoints that avoid unicursal paths.

Like a mind in small, then, such places (and their doubles) relay complicated information, insofar as conflict is always part of the equation. They evoke the synapses firing in a masterful, inspired mind, yet is not paradoxically something for which we are always in control/without brain damage; i.e., chasing down private horrors, whose “secret sins” Walpole’s Mysterious Mother described as “[an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse.” But it can lead to fresh, astounding conclusions per cycle; i.e., whose powerful feelings joust back and forth[33] in acts of rememory concerning what is forgotten but can return as alien.

To it, each time is different, or can be, depending entirely on the visionaries involved and their states of mind when the thing is breathed once more into existence: Giger’s creature looks different each and every time, as do the damsels and detectives finding its “ancient” derelict and trembling before the horse’s mouth (a nightmare): “I saw a furry and swooned because I’m white and basic!”

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

Through conflict on the surface and within thresholds, the hero—be they damsels or walking suits of armor threatening to ravish them[34] during medieval evocations of courtly love—embodies the potential to serve the will of workers or the state. They aren’t something to get attached to, but change (shapeshift, like a demon) as required during class, culture and race war!

In short, we have to learn to evolve like the xenomorph does, which means admiring the very things that Ripley—a middle-class white woman with a relatively cushy job (within a neoliberal hauntology warning against what she would do to protect said job)—chose to abject and immediately attack; i.e., as an unironic TERF symbol acting as “a [state] survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse and delusions of morality” while attacking us “degenerates” as the dehumanized targets for her ancient warrior’s detective doggedness and wrath: the Karen who burned down her house—the labor camp built on the bones of dead lands—because she saw a demon, threw her lantern at it, and then tried to save her (admittedly awesome) cat (decisions, decisions…). Gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss (the company treating her like the madwoman in the attic, because she blew up their ship and said “the Devil made me do it”)!

To survive weird canonical nerds, we must learn from the same past according to the transfer of these historical-material markers; i.e., as carried forward into future duplicates aping the past imperfectly to capture its praxial realities. As Scott shows us, this echopraxis’ cryptomimesis needn’t be exact; indeed, it can critique itself—i.e., through self-sacrifice of a perceived invincible or righteous character (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Choosing the Slain, or Victimizing the Invincible Heroine, in Alien: Covenant“). We can use this to our advantage provided we know what to look for and what to change to say something about our world in our own defense (as monsters like the xenomorph). Heroines are people, but they’re also icons, thus manifest the potential for unironic calls to violence in canonical Gothic stories and interpretations; re: during witch hunts.

Seeing David get the better of the white women in that story—while making a zombie-demon dog who won’t heel—isn’t “all bad”; i.e., insofar as it represents some admittedly complicated developments regarding poetic worker liberations that challenge Capitalist Realism through Gothic Romance; re: from the Superstructure to the Base and vice versa, art informs, shapes and imitates life and death less as separate and more as fetishized and alien when reunited with as the Gothic does: “Gee, look what ‘I’ found—dibs!” (the disaster at Hadley’s Hope also starting with a colony family finding a Promethean space and trying to loot it for a finder’s fee, but also being sent out there on company orders through a chain of command going all the way back to Earth; i.e., which Cameron scapegoats a Wall Street yuppy with instead of Capitalism).

Our poetic transplants and their Black Veils must bear a similar influence through what we leave behind, albeit like Giger did; i.e., as having a postcolonial (and posthuman) potential that pushes towards post-scarcity in pre-capitalist “ancient” Romances. As a community we might not connect the dots this time, but those in the future might if given the same opportunity and lineage; i.e., as something to prepare for over centuries, from Walpole, to Lewis, to Scott, to me, to the next in line and the next…

We’ll get to David and Daniels, in part two. In part one, we’ll keep examining damsels and detectives of the Radcliffean sort (as closer in spirit to her “explained supernatural” trope), then segue back into those potentially magical demons they frequently have in their sights beyond Radcliffe’s stories (either looking at them with a magnifying glass to scrutinize and “catch,” or a rifle to fire bullets from into the monster). Weird attracts weird, and not all rebels or auteurs are polite or entirely sane, let it be said (I’m one for two there, I like to think). But it’s precisely the strange temples[35] they build to old forgotten gods, one whose giant bodies we currently turn to and wander around inside; i.e., following the ruinous, shadowy echo (and its funerary narrative of the crypt’s wicked and delightful curse of dark heavy knowledge) to our own tremendous conclusions. All are writ among the same stars.

“Like Communism,” I write, “a Gothic castle is always incomplete, in continuum, but seems to suggest its full potential as a powerful, unmappable suggestion each and every visit” (re: “A Song Written in Decay“). Yet, this is hardly cause for concern; i.e., as Walpole or Giger’s puzzles of “Antiquity” show us, that which is not dead (Communism) lives on—inside us but also eventually what exits and survives us after we die: beautiful graveyards to dance nightmarishly inside, their surreal, horny occupants waiting as if to ask, “Won’t you join us? The night is still young!”

(source: Aja Romano’s “Alien Creator and Surrealist Painter H.R. Giger Dies,” 2014)

Onwards to “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives (feat. Out of Sight, Nina Hartley, Velma, and Zeuhl)“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] The monster is so famous, I almost opted for it needing no introduction. But in the interest of totality and holistic appreciation, let’s cover our bases; re: Ridley Scott’s outer space creature feature showcases Giger’s almost fungal, mushroom-headed* adult monster from the latter’s 1975 Necronomicon series (which Dan O’Bannon introduced to Scott when pitching the monster aspect of the movie). But Giger’s work also came from/build on older forebears; e.g., from Goya’s fourteen “Black Paintings” and anti-war art (“The Disasters of War,” 1810-1820), Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein, De Sade, Radcliffe and Lewis, and further back to Walpole, Marlowe and the Golem of Prague myth, and earlier with Ovid and the Archaic Mother of the Ancient Greeks predating the Hellenistic period. Giger was building on what repeatedly had come before.

*Scott would use this idea of cordyceps/killer mushroom men in Alien: Covenant‘s Neomorphs, combining mushroom men chimerically with goblin sharks (and entering parasitically/rapaciously through the ears/nose with spores; re: forced alien entry and possession, then transformation).

(artist: H. R. Giger)

Furthermore, the monster is chimeric; re: while the adult was designed by Giger as a phallic monstrous-feminine being of revenge (above, made by a white necromancer using acid Communism to prophesy nature’s revenge against the West), O’Bannon and Shusett designed the facehugger/ovomorph and came up with the “rape reproductive” element (also borrowed from parasitoid wasps; re: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Caterpillar and the Wasp,” 2024).

Scott, himself, designed a variety of “Ridleygrams” that included the monster (obviously based on Giger’s prior design): to pimp a black whore against white colonist laborers (space truckers).

(artist: Ridley Scott; source: user xeno_alpha_07’s “Alien Unseen Part One: Ridleygrams” (2016): “During Alien‘s pre-production, Ridley Scott drew up a storyboard presentation of Alien for 20th Century Fox. Impressed with what Ridley had presented they doubled the budget from $4.5 million to $8.5 million. These storyboards are known as ‘Ridleygrams.’ This storyboard presentation contains scenes and FX shots that were later re-written or dropped due to budgetary reasons. Here we are going to take a look at some of these early scenes and concepts Ridley envisioned for Alien at this early stage. [… The above scene shows] even though Lambert was killed earlier in the story, Ridley had drawn another version of her death alongside Parker. Both crew members have resorted to wearing oxygen masks as the air was low due to the decompression previously. Hunting for the Alien, it suddenly steps behind Parker. Picking him up and killing him, Lambert tries to burn the Alien with a flamethrower. The Alien uses Parker’s body as a shield and walks through the flames.”)

You essentially had a “Medusa’s Raft” (of mostly white male) artists, romancing a ghost ship/shipwreck matelotage/necrobiome vis-à-vis the ghost of the counterfeit (settler-colonial abuse) furthering abjection (white workers vs black rape) to make lots of money (which it did):

(source: Strange Shapes’ “Alien Reviews from Yesteryear,” 2016)

[2] Outlined by Angela Carter’s older work, Raymond’s Transsexual Empire, and highlighted by Creed, in 1993, only to be critiqued by me, in 2023, onwards; re: “Cops and Victims, part one: the Riddle of Steel; or, Confronting Past Wrongs” (2024); i.e., a white Final Girl versus black queer rape with a demon BDSM signature (see: “Casting Ripley” photo, above).

[3] Our mysterious mother, Ripley, rapes nature by becoming a defender of heteronormativity from other orderings of maternal power as alien, insectoid. To that, she presents herself as “good” but really is the inhumane monster killing other demons for the state; i.e., by dehumanizing its political enemies as Satanic, fearsome, and criminal, hence doomed: a subjugated Amazon pimping Medusa right before the AIDS epidemic.

[4] “Xeno + morph.” Always some degree familiar—you’ll know this alien when you see it.

[5] “Unconscious.” As an an-Com, I seriously hate that word (after all, we need class consciousness). Informing them of it, it ceases to be unconscious and becomes deliberate. Hot take: It’s an “out,” and poor scholarship at that! Fuck Freud and camp Marx!

[6] Certainly with the height and passion, but not the raw animal sex appeal and smirking camp, that someone Sandahl Bergman lent Valeria in Conan the Barbarian (1981). Amazons come in many forms, but Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is thoroughly no-nonsense and mostly clothed until the end of the movie. She sees the xenomorph as animal, then triangulates and kills it and its race accordingly. Compared to Weaver’s tall, imposing she-bitch—who protects the small, meek, and white defenseless from black enemies: animals analogs for children who run and hide when threatened, going wherever they feel safest) and actual white children—Bergman’s snarky contributions to the body count notably duck Rob Howard’s tired Orientalism; i.e., by killing evil “snake cult” worshippers who, curiously enough are primarily white and led by a token black man (a vice character played wonderfully by James Earl Jones as having made a career out of doing so; re: Darth Vader).

[7] I.e., to please, regarding the fawning mechanism—often with steady and effusive praise. If the conditions are severe enough, they will encourage, if not the telling of outright falsehoods, then embellishments that seek to accomplish the same basic aim: conflict avoidance. The state, though, will lie to defend itself, to blend in, to infect its host workforce. Inside of it, we must disguise ourselves to avoid being attacked by its defenses; i.e., the pious vigil of nuns who, when push comes to shove, can be motivated to attack the state’s usual victims inside a decaying institution; e.g., the Nostromo as a nunnery company town whose hospital, work site and commons have all been projected into the imaginary past-future of outer space in decay. It’s the death of space-age glitz within a Neo-Gothic Romance dragged forward out of the imaginary past: an S.O.S. written in strange hieroglyphics… which incidentally appear throughout the movie; i.e., as part of the Nostromo’s corporate logos appropriating and imbricating ancient religious symbols (obscurantism) into a medievalized power structure at odds through division: a black castle and white castle speaking to the same settler-colonial project existing between them. Both operate, brick-by-brick, at the frontiers of company territory to where ancient/modern ideas (and functions) of castles overlap: the décor’s Numinous stamp!

[8] Re: Through medieval courtship not allowing “poor frail” women the right to theatrically do battle because rape, as a matter of total humiliation, suddenly becomes “possible” through such violence. But here’s a question to bake their noodles: If men are allowed to rape each other in sexualized forms of performative sparring and revenge, why can’t women get ravished in these stories if they like it (or anyone allowed to submit to their own holocaust*)? The paradox of rape certainly allows for it, but the moral outrage of white (male/token) moderates does not. And where there is outage, there is rape behind the superiority of moderacy as haunted by fascism segregating—among other marginalized groups—women (unless it needs a Dernhelm or two to maintain the white patriarchal ordering of things, above).

*The watching of other groups being “totally butchered” can be sex-positive, provided mutual consent is upheld and conveyed by the theatrical violence being shown. And even then, if you’re watching educational material speaking to historical bigotry or viewing unironic exploitative versions with irony—meaning that you’re trying to learn from them to prevent future abuse; e.g., honoring the memory of trans people by watching Boys Don’t Cry (1999) or African American slaves by watching Twelve Years a Slave (2013)—then doing so must be permitted; i.e., as a matter of perceptive education, not blind consumption: to relate to others through their experience as human by virtue of simply being human, not because of their appearance determining them as more or less valuable (and the performative reality of “black,” green or some other non-white color not being automatically racialized, but haunted by that, obviously complicating things). As always, such questions are determined on a case-by-case basis.

[9] Shielding itself from state women and children (damsels).

[10] E.g., my Hentai Foundry scraps from 2015 to 2021 becoming less and less appropriative and more and more appreciative/indicative of my conscious trans self playing with the same weapons of sex and force to wage active class war in favor of workers and nature, not the elite. Eventually this happened to such a degree that Hentai Foundry shadowbanned/refused to feature my work (from 2024 onwards).

[11] All designed from Cameron—first as “the Skraith” (next page), followed by multiple drafts of the Queen, then Avatar‘s “Thanator” (and African-American actress* voicing an Indigenous “Thundercat” [the Maze Gaze] during Cameron’s Pocahontas “leather stocking story” rehash) demonstrating a remarkable creative talent from Cameron (similar to Scott’s “Ridleygrams”) entirely wasted on universally bourgeois applications; re: he reinvents the problem, then passes himself off as white savior with his racist “white [and token black] Indian” movies and DIY submarine. He’s Victor Frankenstein without irony—is Christopher Columbus the white devil pākehā** building a giant effigial black monolith for his target audience (white/token people) to fear-fascinatedly rape by a white-functioning Athena!

*Tokenizing and impersonating other oppressed groups is not good stewardship!

**A Māori word used to describe non-Māori people, but generally in reference to white New Zealanders; it isn’t a slur any more than “gringo” is or “gaijin,” but white people don’t like to be “othered”—i.e., called “cis-het,” “white,” or otherwise not recognized as being of the in-group in some shape or form.

Like Alien before it and its own hauntology’s “Egyptology” lying in state, Cameron’s remediation is well-documented; i.e., Medusa was Cameron’s queen, too—one whose capture in clay was aided by his own team of white wizards (Stan Winston instead of Giger). So did Cameron collar Medusa just like Scott did, but went on to pointed a gun at her in the process: holocaust by bullet and trial by fire, fetishizing the process and making the Numinous “walk the plank” (a capitalist refrain), ad nauseam. They aren’t criticized for what they make, but celebrated for furthering the process of abjection through the Numinous/ghost of the counterfeit: quest, discover and dominate.

(source: Monster Legacy’s “Aliens, the Alien Queen,” 2015)

[12] A word of warning, Alien‘s symbol for hazard is, in our work, a symbol for Purina “Cat Chow” pointing out how the elite are the aliens alienating us; i.e., locking us in a box, and watching the hungry eat the fattened-up, for breakfast, onstage and off. This speaks to the duality (and black humor) of such things, mid-liminal-expression:

(source: Joe Blogs’ “Ron Cobb’s Semiotic Standards for Alien,” 2012)

In short, we can learn a lot from studying older artists’ derelict mysteries (trade secrets); i.e., not just how to make monsters, but to speak in code/inside jokes that switch/shake things up to our universal liberation, hence benefit. Few films are as universally celebrated for their artist craft as Alien—with Cameron paying his own tribute to not only try and one-up Scott in that department (and fail miserably ’cause he sucks), but also do his own spin on settler colonialism (the American way). We have to do better than both men, but also their legions of fans and imitators, mid-cryptomimesis.

[13] Life and death can mean different things depending on context. For example, “money” literally equals “life” and its absence equals “death.” This is a deliberate paradox forced upon people by capitalists to destabilize them and make them worship American virtues that uphold Capitalism as eternal, thus slip into apathy and disdain for anything else; i.e., Capitalist Realism.

[14] Despite Medusa’s loud refusal to be a victim, as Creed argues, I argue how the state will do its best to reduce her to one anyways—to can(n)on fodder and token biznatch sucking on Freud’s wang (as Creed kind of does: “Oh, Freud, you scuzzy otter, you!”).

[15] Amanda Ripley died while Ellen Ripley was in hypersleep. Ripley seems to blame the monster for her missing out on her kid’s death; i.e., not the evil company despite it forcing her to truck year-round through space and its predatory Faustian contract making her investigate the ruins of a decayed colony/dark chapel. I think Ripley doesn’t blame Weyland-Yutani nearly as much because it’s easier to attack a person than a structure, but it’s still disturbing how quick she becomes their hitwoman in Cameron’s story (and how Scott doesn’t criticize that nearly enough; re: docking).

[16] Which, per settler-colonial exchanges like Vietnam, work through collective punishment; i.e., all civilians are enemies; e.g., all Gazans are Hamas. These conduce genocide on purpose.

[17] Re: through animalized violence against nature; e.g., vampires as “rats” to exterminate out of the medieval period’s sublimated dogma; i.e., these days with Zionism and second wave feminism run amok and other tokenism, “rat” is just vermin to exterminate by in-group and in-group tokens, the former keeping the latter “on leads.” As such, vampires are both cis gay men, trans people, anyone non-white or non-Christian (e.g., “bad” Jewish people; i.e., non-Zionists), witches, and so on; i.e., “useless eaters” the state punishes while saying, “How dare they eat our cheese!”

[18] Beat puts it best: “Few countries wear the scars of colonialism quite so proudly as the United States. Australia’s no slouch, mind, but the government at least likes to pretend that they’re ashamed of our worst crimes.”

[19] This kettling takes many different forms; i.e., birth trauma, raped by the state taking control away from them. Rape, then, is abstracted to displace accountability away from institutions and onto scapegoats (which is also rape); re: Ripley is the scapegoat. The xenomorph can take these disparate factors and weave them onto the same punching bag. As I write in Volume One,

To this, Cameron’s Ripley was always a TERF Amazon, a phallic woman playing Brutus putting “Caesar” [corruption] down by abjecting white fears of medieval human childbirth [and the hysteria and humiliation of state-compelled birth trauma—of placental blood, amniotic fluid, slime and involuntary shit] onto alien bodies, biology and compelled reproduction metaphors forced away from Western powers and onto the Archaic Mother as a settler-colonial scapegoat (source).

[20] I.e., Amazon subjugation is mimetic. As “hoakley” of the Electric Light Company writes; re:

Unfortunately, there’s confusion as to just what the Amazonomachy was. Some associate it with the ninth labour of Heracles, others with the battle between the Greeks and Amazon forces led by Penthesilea during the Trojan War, and others with the Attic War resulting in Theseus abducting Hippolyta as his wife. I’ll consider those in tomorrow’s article, but today look at a more general war resulting in the deaths of many Amazons when they were defeated by a substantial Greek army, possibly long before the war against Troy. A reasonably popular theme in painting, even to the present, its most practiced exponent was Peter Paul Rubens, who is attributed two paintings on this theme (source: “Amazons at War,” 2023).

[21] Revolutionary cryptonymy as necessary because, as Volume One writes,

So, while “Rome” absolutely gargles non-consenting balls, it’s completely inadequate for Gothic Communists to say that “‘Rome’ sucks and so do Capitalism, neoliberalism and fascism.” That won’t work. Not only is it stating the obvious, but far too many workers defend marriage, war and the state itself as sacred (source).

As such, Hippolyta and Medusa (or modern doubles/copies of them like Ripley and the xenomorph) are canonically sacred, insofar as the latter’s ancient matricide is sanctioned in the present by the former working for state forces, mid-copaganda.

[22] The female gendering of “dom”; I’m trans and confess I use them interchangeably. You can bill me.

[23] From Enter the Dragon (1973).

[24] “Irigaray ultimately states that Western culture itself is founded upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through her […] men are subjects (e.g., self-conscious, self-same entities) and women are “the other” of these subjects (e.g., the non-subjective, supporting matter). Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male” (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

[25] Sex workers are human, having to deal with material concerns affecting their mental health. It’s often forgotten through double standards that people who meet traditional beauty standards are just as much disadvantaged by meeting them as not; i.e., they “can’t” be depressed or have worries because “pretty privilege” or “life on easy mode.” Such bad-faith arguments present a so-called “baddy” as unfairly and untruthfully “high-maintenance”; i.e., slaves to their own beauty and conventionally chased down to be slated for the usual enslavement: compelled marriage. It’s a gift and a curse, one that such persons and their SOs (significant others) must negotiate, working together to make love (and its educational symbols) less compelled/dogmatic and more empathetic.

[26] Meaning “cosmopolitan,” or in settings that encourage “worldly learning” as a means of establishing important social-sexual bonds; i.e, crossing boundaries during adventures that, in my experience, lead to potentially life-long connections but also sexual escapades; e.g., Zeuhl: giving me blankets when I had none, leading to sex; sexting with me until I told them to come inside, whereupon they came in wearing a black dress but no panties and we fucked; and another time where they walked in right as I was cumming (masturbating with the door open). They broke my heart for incredibly selfish reasons, but changed my life for the better while exiting it: as a ghost that haunts this book. Me letting it stay is what I call “forgiveness” (though Zeuhl might object). And me making friends with Crow, Bay and Harmony Corrupted, among numerous other muses and sex workers (re: “Acknowledgements“), is what I call “the best revenge.” Fuck you, Zeuhl!

[27] Power stores in the ass, but also between those who own and respond to the ass; i.e., the ancient tradition of artists and muses, humans and animals; e.g., Harmony and I making an ode to their ass (re: “Haunting the Chapel: A Cum Tribute to Harmony Corrupted,” 2024) that, per someone like Keats, speaks to an imaginary ancient goddess of nature reviving old forgotten bonds with life and death as alienated from us by capital. Glimpsing their ass, this footnote leapt to mind…

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Whatever its form, the divine when glimpsed becomes something to live up to and quest for in future outings; i.e., like the Numinous—mighty and out of reach, but something immense and mysteriously tremendous to reconnect with, bringing us closer to a forgotten side of ourselves. This state of grace (what Rudolph Otto called torpor or “freezing” in the presence of the divine; i.e., the classic Gothic oscillation, trapped between a state of fight or flight, fear or fascination, dread and delight, etc) is difficult to reach, and falling short from it is disappointing and painful; e.g., my Clifford bag puppet in Mrs. Quilter’s third-grade classroom failing to turn into the actual Big Red Dog (I was traumatized). It is both deeply serious and absurd, something to relish and lampoon (“a deeply religious experience” accounted by someone profoundly unreligious, even back then). It’s also an idea to “get” and fuck with; i.e., as one desires, those being piloted by internal and external forces—less to escape life and more to find something transcendental inside our lives. It’s not like there’s a Heaven afterwards; these are things we live in now (operatically inside-outside danger discos).

Like a sudden thought to write down or fleeting burst of inspiration (a course that, like a spirit, flows through us, coming and going in an instant), such ideas become something to capture or lose (slipping away like a ruined orgasm). For something to be novel (fresh) requires capturing a sum beyond its parts in a given time period. The Romantics grasped towards nature as Sublime, and the Gothic seeking the Numinous as combined between nature and civilization as alien, exquisite—a vast, liminal, nebulous place to go and spend with mighty forces experienced uniquely there but, like a castle, is built and raised by us on Earth; i.e., across all media; e.g. Team Cherry’s City of Tears or Red Hook’s purple cosmic void as legitimate and effective as Kubla Khan’s “stately pleasure dome,” Radcliffe’s spectral castles or Scott’s Nostromo, etc. All came from dreams (or nightmares, per the Gothic) while awake—beyond the realms of death, of sleep, or any other barrier/membrane you could think/dream of.

And whereas gods exist in a place beyond humans, they’re still experienced through special mediums with one foot in both worlds: “walking castles,” fortresses in the flesh, but also artists who experience those bodies as fellow workers, artists, poets, and people, stacked without end. “The gods,” then, are not beings whose meaning is “set,” but reached for and decided by people together according to cultural standards enmeshed in larger artistic and social movements; i.e., current and borrowed from times that once were and could be, “back in the day”—an idea that springs from alter egos and secret identities, but also things wide out in the open for all to see. All constitute the weight of the universe whose proximity in an avatar of the divine overwhelms; i.e., makes us collapse, swoon, and yes, “die” (cum) to varying degrees.

Sex Positivity has been and is being written through these kind of surprise connections, each muse granting a thread to something bigger through their mind, body and soul as likewise connected to each other and things we make up ourselves—our combined pedagogy speaking to (and with) trauma, forbidden knowledge and power as, like the gods, profoundly unequal but shared if we let it. “I am a bearer, I am a dwelling!” Like Bay and my other muses/friends, meeting Harmony inspired me to create things I could have never imagined had I not met her first and basked in her magical (and tremendous) glow. It was like touching lightning or seeing color for the first time despite having done it many times before. “They’re all perfect.”

This book series, then, has seen many happy accidents, dares, risks, and chance delights, thus couldn’t have been written alone. This includes the indelible-if-unintentional contributions of those who broke my heart (e.g., Jadis’ immortal “put your mysterium tremendum in my Uncanny Valley!” and surprising helpful introducing of me to the Commodores’ “Brick House”). I owe it, then, to Jadis and all the cuties whose bodies and personalities inspire and move me in such predictable and unpredictable ways. Regarding all of them, I suppose there’s a medium in me, too: I see beauty and the gods in others, especially those Capitalism gentrifies and devalues for something where no gods live but immoral ones; i.e., greed; e.g., indifferent powerful doctors treating women like automatic mothers, thus automatic chattel who can be sacrificed spontaneously for the child as de facto property of the father, the hospital, the state as cancerous, terminal and yet still growing and devouring everything in sight.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

I might seem mad* in this brief ramble, but perhaps that’s just my humanity and “magic” that others have lost; i.e., the ability to see and relate to others as I have through careful education, hard work and an open, expanding mind? Devendra Varma likened it to a “Gothic flame” (from his 1957 book of the same name); without fuel, effort, and proper conditions, it can go out. My book is a castle, as I have said, but inside it a vigil I light to honor the gods I see in people like Harmony adding their castle to mine. They’re delicious, to be sure, but remain so much more than pieces of meat!

*Mad, as in a failure to partake of Capitalism “successfully” per its terrible, dog-eat-dog rules. Is this an accurate measure of my value? The Romantics “were poor all their lives but rich in spirit,” Laura George once told me. And while I like to stay grounded these days in material reality and tend to be leery of those poets who don’t quite as much, it can still be fun to swim around the self-same waters as they do/did. I certainly don’t want to discount these older giants (or at least their shoulders I’m currently standing on). So while the Romantics and Gothic forked into wildly different paths, they did so while grasping at the same thing: liberation. And monsters are a place whose intersecting modules let you draw your own conclusions as needed, on and on, in repetition through variation, to author your own special destinies. Forward through solidarity is the idea of Gothic Communism, of course, but infinity fueled by profound human contact becomes actionable; like Percy’s “Ozymandias,” boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. Dancing poetry trades arms with old turning ghosts out on the floor to varying degrees of structure and looseness. Per Scott, as we have seen, poetics and creation become a po(r)tent dialog to express the power of rebellion with; i.e, in an imaginary place of endless possibilities regressing to a binary pair of “what if?” that is neither here nor there. Creativity is a weapon when it becomes tied to a place where Capitalism was less strong than it is now, less capable of harm. “The mind is its own place”; so is inspiration, which—likened to a turbulent form—occupying mere moments, out from which we can change the world.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In the poetic tradition, though, Harmony’s ass does make me want to write a poem and this footnoted tangent is proof of that—a short, jumbled musing part of a larger castle showcasing what such exposure and inspiration can yield. It takes enormity and special perspective, but also inspiration to raise such spaces to be excellent. “I’m a Satanist,” I told Harmony. “So when I say you have the divine in you, it’s the weight and power of the universe.” To borrow from Archimedes, I might have added: “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the Earth.” To borrow from my own book (from Volume Zero): “Indeed, that power can also be ours if we dare to write things down—to intentionally make monsters that camp canon and Capitalism to liberate sex work, thus all work, through iconoclastic art’s deliberately campy ‘darkness visible'” (source). It’s a legacy we make and share as one!

[28] Re: “[The Gothic novel] is understandably regarded as thin in more ways than one, as a stagey manipulation of old and hollow stick-figures in which tired conventions from drama and romance are mixed in ways that emphasize their sheer antiquity and conventionality (source: Jerold Hogle’s “The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic,” 1994).

[29] Those who shame the care of others, including caring for those who cannot fend for themselves, have arguably never loved anyone, and certainly have been conditioned to treat the out-group as alien, thus deserving of state punishment (as undead, demonic, and animalistic).

[30] When I was writing Volume Zero, Bay joyfully described Smaug to me as a “sassy little bitch.” Rusek’s hot take prefers a different kind, no doubt informed by a different time and flavor of nostalgia:

No disrespect to Benedict Cumberbatch and his take on Tolkien’s dragon, but the original Smaug from the 1977 Rankin/Bass production of The Hobbit is a far more frightening villain to behold. CGI Smaug is just too slick and sophisticated, not to mention way too talkative. Animated Smaug is terrifying, thanks to the vocal talents of actor Richard Boone and the dragon’s cat-like appearance, complete with pointed ears and long, sharp fangs. He also doesn’t beat around the bush or bore his victims to death with long monologues. In the 1977 version, Smaug is an intimidating businessman who, having spent centuries acquiring wealth and real estate, realizes what’s at stake when a crafty hobbit comes barging into his lair and moves quickly to eliminate his competitor. Cutthroat business dragon trumps suave manicured dragon every time (source).

Maybe they’re a dog person (so Bay, to be honest)? A stance remains something to identity with and around performances as of “their time” but also something to inject a queer reading/appreciation into.

[31] I.e., displaced infanticide, the mother betraying her sacred Western role as validated during settler-colonial projects when performed against state enemies.

[32] Giger’s xenomorph and its Gothic surrealism is for De Sade what Mary Shelley was to her husband and Lord Byron; his Lovecraftian homage (the 1975 Necronomicon alluding to that author) camps Nazis and fascinating fascism—i.e., by swindling the bigotry out of things and replacing them with a “Goya” counterfeit that is oddly freaky and loveable. In turn, Scott’s Alien returns some of the stolen Victorian terror antics, but includes bondage (choking from the facehugger), discipline (chain of command, through the ship’s officers), sadism (a ton of murder and gore, but also tokophobic rape), and masochism—everything previously discussed, and live burial, to exquisitely “torture” the middle class’ inner freak, but really any freaks from all walks of life (and death)! To be queer is to be what the fascist will try to infiltrate and assimilate as formerly taken from the Third Reich’s rotting corpse (e.g., Berlin’s gay bars built on top of the ashes of Hirschfeld’s Sexology Institute). So embrace chaos and punch up against all traitors (e.g., Zeuhl—more on them, in a bit)!

[33] Re: Radcliffe’s productive observation, “the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them” (source). She preferred terror and its exquisite “tortures,” to be sure, but her gay adversary Lewis showed us that horror and freezing are equally potent (a concept we explored extensively ourselves in “Paralyzing Zombie Tyrants“). Why not both?

[34] The real hero of Paradise Lost is Satan; the real hero of Frankenstein, Faustus and Alien, etc, is the state-assigned monster resisting state control through chaotic replication: through threats of rape that wake works up to attack their policers dead.

[35] A Capitalist would build one to self-aggrandize; a Gothic Communist would do it to achieve post-scarcity by breaking Capitalist Realism.

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

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

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

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

Exploring the Derelict Past: the Demonic Trifecta of Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons; or Enjoying Yesterday’s Exquisite Torture on the Edge of the Civilized World

“But let me observe that all histories are against you—all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”

“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”

—Captain Harville and Anne Elliot, Persuasion (1817)

(source: RPF’s “Replica Props: “Movie Prop Restoration Evil Dead (2013) Necronomicon Book,” 2023)

Picking up where “Dark Shadows: The Origins of Demonic Persecution and Camp” left off…

Now that we’ve outlined occult demons both as a form of summoned, Faustian power exchange through givers of unequal, forbidden, and dark, generally torturous knowledge (re: trauma, especially rape trauma)—as well as recipients of state violence, the latter antagonizing nature as monstrous-feminine during canonical torture, elite revenge and the voyeurism of peril towards the colonized and the pimped—let’s further expand on the connection between these operative categories by studying how human workers are historically chattelized as “demonic.” We’ll do so from Radcliffe onwards; i.e., tied to sin in a sexual way that we can improve on by subverting Radcliffe’s demon BDSM with our own ludo-Gothic varieties (often on asexual terms, meaning the interrogation of psychosexual trauma that doesn’t require actual sex in exchange, but often discusses it as code).

Canon vs camp is a long game. To it we’ll consider not just demons, but also those who interact with demons; re: demons being investigated by warrior-detectives defending damsels as a more neo-conservative Gothic tradition that needn’t stay that way forever (as explored in Volumes Zero and One regarding Amazons). Until it changes, though, civilization and the West are generally seen as “on the cusp” of collapse—of confronting the abject on the edge of the civilized world; i.e., as a half-real place where its settler-colonial past is ongoing but disguised through a storytelling trifecta; re: the demonic trifecta of damsels, detectives and demons being “derelict,” simultaneously abandoned and lost during the cryptonymy process, then conveniently found again: touched by Antiquity as much a performance as a historical-material effect (re: the infernal concentric pattern’s endless doomsday and celebration living on borrowed time).

“If you want to critique power, you must go where it is”; this subchapter divides into multiple sections that outline the larger issues at play before exploring the history of the “tines” (of said trifecta) one at a time:

• “Radcliffe’s Refrain (reprise)” (included with this post): A quick rehash of the demonic trifecta vis-à-vis Ann Radcliffe’s pioneering of it.
• Part zero: “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons, part zero: Derelicts, Medusa and H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph; i.e., the Puzzle of ‘Antiquity'”: Outlines the idea of “derelicts”—be they damsels, detectives or sex demons—through Medusa/Giger’s xenomorph as involving all three.
• Part one: “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives” (feat. Out of Sight, Nina Hartley, Velma, and Zeuhl): Further explores damsels and detectives as classic Neo-Gothic devices, the oppositional praxis of which has survived well into the present; i.e., in pornographic language, like Nina Hartley, but also tamer/non-magical murder mysteries and echoes of Radcliffe (who conflated extramarital sex with rape and death) through Velma from Scooby Doo. We’ll examine the original character as a cis detective, but also my ex, Zeuhl; i.e., as someone I’m exposing: a good trans Velma demasking an evil one after surviving their abuse for years!
• Part two: “Demons and Dealing with Them; or Abandonment, Dark Worship and Vengeful Sacrifice When Dissecting Radcliffe” (feat. Ridley Scott’s The Terror and Alien: Covenant, , Ninja Scroll, The Dark Crystal, and Harmony Corrupted): Further explores demons in a similar fashion, but touches on additional ways these complicated beings needn’t be feared (through the process of abjection) but celebrated as Satanic liberators freeing our minds from Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and the settle-colonial status quo. Among his other work (namely The Terror), discusses Ridley Scott’s vengeful dissection of Radcliffe’s “spectre” in Alien: Covenant; i.e., as a dark matter of postcolonial revenge against James Cameron’s Aliens, then camps Scott by dissecting him and resurrecting Radcliffe as a dark whore of her former self (through several close-reads; e.g., with Harmony Corrupted, and about Ninja Scroll and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance)!
• “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress“: “Egon, you’ve earned it.” An afterword that gives Ann Radcliffe some long-awaited praise, and talks about the important of camping demonic sex work vis-à-vis her worthwhile contributions; i.e., with Japanese anime, cosplay, fan art, and more (e.g., Sailor Moon) during sex work as a revolutionary hermeneutic and applied synthesis.

(artist: Valentina Kryp)

In a nutshell, demons exist during liminal expression like all monsters do—in duality and opposition, mid-praxis. By comparison, subversive demons seek to liberate sex work through tools the state cannot monopolize for its own violence, terror and morphological expression; i.e., coordinates canonically aiding profit (thus rape), which iconoclasts happily camp. Generally they do so through some tricksy combination of pleasure and pain, tempting the usual Faustian exchanges and transformative discussions with a more radical context, thus approach (whose subsequent outcomes threaten good girls with bad behavior that the state will punish, above). Naughty though they are, demons must still be investigated, and generally by the curious.

Before we jump into part zero to unpack the xenomorph and Medusa, I want to touch on Radcliffean tropes for a bit (eleven pages)—doing so to better outline the variables that exist in both; i.e., as part of our chapter’s aforementioned trio: damsels, detectives and sex demons. If there’s an awesome mystery to solve, there’s an awesome detective to get to the bottom of things (generally Radcliffe resorted to “true crime” and “the explained supernatural” because she wasn’t allowed to play with magic). Some are silly and some are not, and Radcliffe’s fairly tame detectives went on to inspire much more violent (and scantily clad/dummy thicc) variants; we’ll try to outline that refrain, next, in a quick reprise!

Radcliffe’s Refrain (reprise)

Especially popular or remediated characters tend to get virally shared. Such sharing can be hard to regulate or track. In this case, we not only have detective pastiche, but Velma pastiche. Seriously, this foxy nerd is legion, but also a regular practitioner of the “explained supernatural” trope originally formalized by Ann Radcliffe. Defrauding the “supernatural” through spooky piracy is a common theme in Radcliffe’s works, or embattled marriages, false relatives and various ordinary things taken to performative extremes; e.g., the mother being sent to live in a nunnery for the rest of her days. To this, Radcliffe was following suit with Walpole, injecting the supernatural into ordinary events, getting at the truth of things through outrageous narratives that still, in the end, feel cliché and homely.

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

(source: Women’s Museum of California’s “The Mother of Gothic Literature,” 2017)

Celebrated for marrying the Romantic and its posturings of the Sublime and nature with a modest, enchanting Gothic, Ann Radcliffe was a rockstar of the early Gothic novel. Often called its “mother” and prone to crossing pens with queer troublemaker, Matthew Lewis, the curious irony with Radcliffe’s torturous demon lovers, as described by Cynthia Wolff (re: “The Radcliffean Model,” 1979), is how they weren’t magical behind her Black Veils. Yet, the banditti of the Great Enchantress did personify the same dark desires more spellbound (and queer) enchanters happily conjured up (re: Lewis). The Final Girl dodging mutilation mid-courtly love also stems from Radcliffe’s work, the Gothic heroine/damsel being the original scrapper who would evolve from detective to nep-conservative, peace-through-strength fighter by armoring her virtue from alien forces with brawn. It’s black-and-white, Cartesian to the core, and prudish to boot.

To that, whereas Shelley was a bred-to-the-bone radical who embraced the alien and fucked with it/wrote like a bereaved mother and whore, Radcliffe wrote like a virgin[1] who had no idea what loss or surviving open, punch-the-witch persecution was; i.e., like someone who was afraid of sex/never had it (she was married, but to my knowledge never had kids). Instead, it’s something to abject and attack/dissect, because sex = death and rape is around every corner. There’s a kernel of truth to her stories, but like all conservatives, Radcliffe completely misses the historical-material critique to perpetuate its symptoms through police force inventing enemies (re: black rape myths). She’s the fatal portrait of the Tories, her Gothic immature versus mature.

So if Shelley made demons, then Radcliffe investigated them (without whom there’d be no Scooby Doo [or drug-like Scooby “snacks”] without Radcliffe, or Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Alien, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw, or Murder, She Wrote); if Shelley single-handedly started science fiction, then Radcliffe’s novels—starting with The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), and going onto more successful stories like The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), canonized the detective story wedded to “respectable” and “successful” Neo-Gothic cliché (e.g., folie-à-deux, or mass hysteria, in The Italian):

Ann Radcliffe was a pioneer of the gothic literary genre. Her inspirations were The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole, often named the first gothic novel; The Old English Baron (1777) by Clara Reeve, and The Recess; Or, a Tale of Other Times (1783–1785) by Sophia Lee (Miles, 2004 4). By the time she published her successful novel, The Romance of the Forest in 1791, gothic fiction was considered “the trash of the circulating libraries” and a “cheap and tawdry form of entertainment” (Townshend 2014). However, Radcliffe was considered to be an exception, she was lauded by her contemporaries as “the Shakespeare of Romance writers” and as “a genius of no common stamp” (Miles, 1995 7; Barbauld, 1810 i). Radcliffe single-handedly changed the gothic novel; it was by her inclusion of original poetry as part of her novels and as epigraphs, as well as her elaborate descriptions of landscapes, that she elevated the form [emphasis, me, for its problematic nature]. Critics agreed that Radcliffe had moulded pre-existing literary components to refine a “new, powerful, and enchanting” genre of literature (Miles, 2004 4) [re: Victoria DeHart’s “The Enchanting Ann Radcliffe,” 2020].

Radcliffe didn’t make monsters; she exposed them—i.e., as false, solving mysteries to turn things back to normal. Her stories manufacture dilemmas whose middle-class solvings always benefit the status quo. For all her skill, she actually kind of sucks. She’s not “a nice old lady”; she’s an opportunist—one using police language to adopt an air of authority leading her audience around by the nose.

In a nutshell, then, Radcliffe wrote cop fiction with “haunted” houses, venerating private ownership/assimilation (secret princesses), and inventing state enemies through bogus propaganda stories: “White Middle-Class Lady Investigates Whoever Killed the Rich Landowner.” As a queer an-Com, I find her writing deeply unsexy because, in the absence of shock, she’s lecturing about morals in a PG-grade adventure story that has the same negative effects it would inspire, offstage. It says little of value, but value judges everything. Even the fucking trees have value (eat your heart out, Tolkien)! Even so, it’s still useful for putting a finger on the middle class’ pulse/desire to scapegoat their victims during Capitalist Realism.

Radcliffe the woman is far more mysterious (and conservative) than Shelley. Likewise, her legacy is far more problematic (and no less complex). For starters, Radcliffe took precautions to conceal her identity and wrote from absolute secrecy. She avoided scandal like the plague and wrote stories that maintained privatization, and she was indisputably a master of suspense and gaslighting her audience (who she loved to torture through the Black Veil “MacGuffin” nearly two centuries before Hitchcock stole it). Forget Scooby Doo—without Radcliffe, there would be no Clue, Agatha Christie, Poe, Hitchcock, Lovecraft, or Stranger Things, but also no Perfect Blue (above, 1997) or The Vanishing[2] (1998). There’d likewise be no J.K. Rowling (who, apart from Harry Potter, also writes bigoted detective stories), hence TERF stories, on and offstage, transvestigating aliens killing people and blending in (re: men in women’s spaces[3]). For better or worse, Radcliffe well-and-truly broke the mold/”made it,” in that respect, and heavy lies the crown. Suitably enough, she was also a huge xenophobe and opportunist, abandoning magic for enchantments of a more phenomenological sort: spells of mystery and perception. Perception is reality!

Simply put, Radcliffe and similar authors—from Dacre to Rowling—have all thrived on demon lovers and sexual torture to triangulate/tokenize sex and force (through the process of abjection policing the ghost of the counterfeit as something to commodify the raping of through the American and European middle classes). And Radcliffe “started it,” insofar as her School of Terror was the launchpad for a more troublesome series. Yes, she didn’t show abject horror on par with Lewis, Giger and Scott. Even so, her stories are full of damsels, detectives and sex demons; i.e., her detectives—which are always damsel-esque/virginal—doggedly investigate what damsels endure through sex demons as “all over the place”: torture, crime, death, rape, etc. And those—much like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) went on to become much more violent, silly and sexy over time: “Velma Dinkley and the Mystery of the Boner-Inducing Dump Truck!” “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a baddie with a fat bedonk must be in need of a good monster pounding.” Jinkies!

(source: DC Comics’ “Scooby Apocalypse,” 2020)

Except before we even begin talking about detectives and torture at length through the xenomorph as an “antique” doppelganger for Medusa, I wish to clarify two points and cover some history (three pages’ worth) that will come in handy moving forward—not just for this subchapter or volume, but really for the entire book series as it presently stands.

One, “torture” is a very broad term. It can hurt or harm, hence threaten through exhibitionism and voyeurism promoting ritualistic punishment that allots the submissive tremendous power (under the right circumstances); those that harm or disempower workers are bourgeois, designed to pacify victims by chattelizing them in demonic language. This basic distinction not only amounts to canonical torture vs iconoclastic torture, but Radcliffe’s blend of exquisite “torture” being immediately harmless but nonetheless problematic-yet-salvageable; i.e., bad play/coercive BDSM vs good play/sex-positive BDSM; e.g., unironic demon lovers like Ted Bundy or Count Monti exhibited by Radcliffe (and the American television networks) during criminal hauntology versus a demonic dom who is both trustworthy and actually wants to teach mutual consent through transgressive media.

We’ll explore the latter dichotomy much more in Volume Three. For now, just remember what we said about criminal hauntology in Volume One (exhibit 11b2, summarized but indented for clarity):

Criminal hauntology relishes in the commodified suffering of the buried; e.g., the gays as automatic criminals, perpetual fugitives/victims, and unironic closet monsters (the xenomorph being the combined forces-of-darkness black knight, dark torturer and cosmically queer rapist at the same time, exhibit 60d); conversely it gives sanctuary to canonical status-quo fugitives: the black or false penitent (the namesake of Radcliffe’s Italian).

Two, detectives are classically cops, including—in a sense—those who embellish them through relatively conservative fiction: the white woman’s murder mystery or noir about soft-to-hard-boiled, nosy dames with brains, brawn, and courage, but also the Gothic staples of a flashlight, threatened virtue, and (these days) various force equalizers (the Amazonian Persephone going back to Hell to attack state enemies). Cops defend property before people, and detectives of a female sort classically investigate rape as form of torture—effectively serving justice through an updated idea of the local constable or shire reeve as a manager of the estate; i.e., the person of material privilege doing the state’s work. Detectives further evolved into modern cops/sheriffs in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, becoming militarized (and tokenized, above) under the modern police state, courtesy of Pax Americana as informed by the likes of Radcliffe voicing the trend as a bank-making mystery women; re: through that of the white, cis-het, female weird canonical nerd, historically decaying feminism in defense of profit, capital and the status quo (re: Volume Zero, Radcliffe and the true crime genre as founded on the Neo-Gothic treatment of damsels, detectives and demons).

Regarding those points, some history (and an exhibit) to go with them exhibit 47a1, in a few pages): Before this crystallization, though, the idea spawned out of a hauntological engagement with an imaginary past that carried into the here-and-now by male and female authors of an emerging middle class: the Gothic novel as a medievalized property dispute investigated using darkly romantic abject language penned by persons other than aristocrats but not the working class; i.e., the home as both a medieval façade occupied by pre-fascist destroyers the likes of the black penitent, knight, priest or Italian count, and an uncanny chronotope pierced by the tried-and-true tradition of scholarship-turned-sleuthing of middle-class debutantes in the shoes of older imperiled maidens (Cartesian-dualism-in-disguise).

Detective monks, for example, were invented as a hauntological murder mystery centuries after the warrior monks of old (exhibit 48b); likewise, the female detective would go onto defend the state’s notion of property as a hauntological anomaly thereof: a piece of property/ass who suddenly could think because she’s had a middle-class education that, for all intents and purposes, was buoyed by the nation-state as a developing entity in its own right.

Partly the idea was to voice the concerns of the oppressed, but it was penned to pointedly voice those the state privileged over queer people, persons of color or religious minorities inside the state; i.e., the WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) author of pre-fascist and minority scapegoats, which basically is what Radcliffe was: a female novelist who far outpaced her husband’s income by writing fancy versions of the penny dreadful, then using the unprecedented “fuck you” money she made to retire from public life and live in relative comfort/seclusion. But, given her penchant for secrecy, this is largely speculation; re, DeHart:

In addition to being critically successful and popular, Radcliffe was England’s highest paid novelist during the 1790s. She earned £500 for Udolpho (1794) and for her final novel, the Italian (1797), she earned £800 (Miles, 2004 4). According to Robert Miles (2004), Radcliffe’s “nearest competitor” before 1797, was the playwright and novelist Frances Burney, who received £250 for Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress in 1782 (4).

Dale Townshend[4] and Angela Wright refer to Radcliffe’s disappearance after the publishing of The Italian as the “Radcliffean Interregnum” (13).

[…] The literary world could not comprehend that the highest paid and most popular novelist of the 1790s had stopped publishing new material. In 1800, rumours began to circulate that Ann Radcliffe had died; and by 1811, false reports stated that she was restrained within Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, driven “mad” by the “morbid exuberance of her [own] imagination” (Smith 155; Miles, 1995 25). There is no clear reason for Radcliffe’s disappearance, but scholars have offered different ideas; Townshend and Wright (2014) believe her interregnum may have been due to a combination of her frustration with the plethora of “Radcliffe imitators” in the market, and the mixed reviews she received for The Italian (13). Ann Radcliffe was also plagued with poor health in the last twelve years of her life (Norton, 1999 236) [source].

Personally, I think she sold her soul to the Devil, who told her to “just write about trees, dude” and eventually came to collect—dragging Radcliffe down to Hell to sodomize her just like she always wanted to write about but didn’t. Truth is stranger than fiction (you did always tell to write for myself and my audience, Dale, and it was good advice)…

In all seriousness, Radcliffe was a middle-class novelist of critical acclaim and financial success, who—after a relatively short career (eight years) writing about the English countryside “but with bandits” (a very British thing to do) and treating sex like a disease (also a very British thing to do)—retreated from the stage of writing and political activism altogether (a bit like Bilbo). She’s the kind of person you hear being accused of “terrorist literature” (re: Groom), only to look into it and learn that—in all actuality—Shelley was closer to the mark, and Radcliffe nowhere near as interesting or critically impactful as Frankenstein. Radcliffe’s Black Veil was famously a giant MacGuffin—a largely empty illusion between a lot of expert shadow play and pre-Victorian soap opera setting the stage for the invention of Gothic terrorism Crawford warned about (re: “The Invention of Gothic Terrorism,” 2013). More matter, less art, queen!

Clearly, Radcliffe is someone I have mixed feelings about. I admittedly enjoy her suspense and mood; her distinction of terror and horror in “On the Supernatural and Poetry” (1826) remains incredibly useful; and the use of poetic epigrams in her novels was something that inspired me (though I took as much inspiration from Lewis, in that respect). Even so, her contributions are all nuts-and-bolts devices and virgin/whore, us-versus-them dreck abused through capitalist fear and dogma she encouraged similar to Tolkien’s later racism; i.e., she summons immigrant threats, then marshals police agents to discover and exterminate them: as someone who—of the middle class—enjoys imperial heritance, but needs to whitewash her own colonial guilt (and fete a good wedding at the end, with dancing peasants who just love being ruled by freshly-unveiled princesses).

That being said, I’ve already torn her corpse a new asshole in Volume Zero, so I’ll spare everyone a sequel, here; i.e., in this refrain, I’ll refrain from dragging Radcliffe any more than I already have, because we’re ultimately going to be salvaging her work! Believe it or not, there’s a lot of good ideas inside, especially with demon BDSM (which evolved through my work into ludo-Gothic BDSM). Likewise, Radcliffe clearly has her place in the history books, and The Italian is pretty neat, overall, but she’s too high-minded/gutter-averse, and writes about trees to much. “Oh, wow! Another tree! Great[5]! Maybe we should do something about climate change instead of acting like they’ll last forever?”

Again, Radcliffe wasn’t a whore, she was a cop, thus a pimp. There’s certainly value in detection regarding domestic violence and material dispute, but anchoring it in a society that’s ultimately regressive isn’t activism; it’s conservatism, thus criminogenic. Despite the appearance of unreactivity, then, Radcliffe’s class character isn’t inert like helium, because white moderacy is always shadowed by a reactionary core: the exquisite “torture” of squirming during the abjection process and ghost of the counterfeit behind her Black Veil empty threats vanishing like dreams once exposed. It’s proto-fascism and -Red-Scare/Capitalist Realism in its infancy. To it, she’s the great ancestor of Margaret Thatcher(!): a xenomorph (shapeshifter) chicken hawk, having kids do her dirty work for her by becoming monsters to fight monsters and maintain state control (also, the makers of Stranger Things are Zionists and child abusers; re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Welcome to the Fun Palace,” 2024).

The fact remains, Radcliffe did give birth to monsters: witch-hunters-in-disguise! Through DARVO and obscurantism, her kids aren’t saving the day by getting those pirates; they’re privileged brats part of a larger scheme that creates and assigns criminality as something to imitate and exploit. And that’s a trend that Radcliffe inspired/self-reported on before running and hiding from criticism, ultimately being unable to confront or explain it because she can afford to disappear during moral panic (re: the French Revolution); that’s her legacy. It’s a little pathetic, but also underused in terms of what can be used to help workers, not titillate consumers who ultimately grow more violent in pursuit of “dreaded evils.” And that’s what we’re going to focus on, here: camping her canon, rape included! I’m excited!

As we do, remember how we’re expressing our position within a society sick with moral panic (versus raising awareness); i.e., as actually policed by official or vigilante forces. Compared to us, followers of Radcliffe see strangers to attack—i.e., assign positions within society to alienate and kettle—per the terrorist/counterterrorist refrain (she literally founded the Gothic School of Terror): the girl whose superpower is survival, modesty (damsels) and detection, first and foremost, but also in latter-day examples, transformation into Amazons (sex demons) to have revenge for the state/nuclear family against the monstrous-feminine during abject moral panic—the pimp’s revenge (often undercover)!

Cops are class traitors, and Radcliffe doesn’t prevent crime, she causes it by “making jobs” about making jobs (on and on). Luckily there isn’t a monopoly on these things, meaning the final function of the damsel, detective and sex demon isn’t to police the alien through force. We can reclaim it by camping Radcliffe’s canonical exquisite “torture.”

At times, her calculated risk/revenge even has the right idea (sexual tension and play through Gothic poetics) but she quit far too soon to master that aspect of it. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. We’ll build on said ignorance to salvage her wasted genius towards applied knowledge; i.e., ballooning its valuable aspects according to a system she helpfully adumbrated. The language of danger is useful (“Pull your team out, Gordon…”), ours and Shelley’s proletarian pirates challenging Radcliffe’s bourgeois ones. In short, there’s a solid material critique in her stories—one that inverts, easily enough, to serve workers!

We’ll consider camping Radcliffe, in the pages ahead, and will do so while keeping her privilege and ignorance in mind—but also her dazzling brilliance giving the game away (as Scott does, in Alien). Basically Radcliffe was a member of the imperial class, shamelessly pandering to their socio-materially constructed idea of class and place as under attack, post-colonization (re: paradise lost); and anything Edward Said wrote about Austen in Culture and Imperialism (1993) easily applies to Radcliffe and her own novels bougie sensibilities (which Austen also made fun of; re: Northanger Abbey). It’s Goldilocks Imperialism, enchanting Old Blighty with a straight white lady’s idea of “spectral enchantment” while belonging “to a slave-owning society.” She probably bought sugar on purpose (with abolitionists buying honey instead; re: to protest the Caribbean slave trade).

(artist: Claude Lorrain)

Needless to say, Radcliffe certainly had talent and respect; she was also gentrified and conservative (as were the people who respected her[6])—was, by my account, an entitled sellout who abandoned any notion of whistleblowing to spend the next nearly-three-decades years in total reclusion. But even when she did write, she merely used the true-crime twist to scapegoat (xenophobic) symptoms of the structure in crisis, not the structure itself as always in crisis; i.e., not only did she partake of the unironic “bury your gays” trope by having no earthly idea what sex-positive queerness was, but her happy endings, post-corruption, supported the status quo by ending or exposing isolated pockets of corruption which, itself, is a harmful centrist myth.

Since then, the conservative opinion remains that all women are still property not persons, with those who become more active being treated as “phallic women”; i.e., less the sexual zombie, demon or whore and more a subjugated Amazon who had to prove she wasn’t either of those things, nor a rogue huntress corrupting the nature of society concerning white women as a “protected” class: the jilted, furious seeker of ancient revenge (which, from the non-WASP perspective, is exactly what the xenomorph represents). This settling of old scores can be weaponized against women through the idea of virtue as well as vice—i.e., as Dacre’s Victoria arguably was—but also against the queer community as something whispered about and conflated with “true crime” alongside the usual suspects/scapegoats. We fags are evil Italian Counts, apparently (a precursor to Dracula), awash in sin and medieval court intrigue leading to sodomy and murder.

Simply put, it’s repressed, internalized bigotry and self-hatred, which the copaganda of the regressive Amazon attempts to destroy to prove her worth as a “good woman”; i.e., serving the Man by killing society’s scapegoats (through exposure): both its fascist elements (demon cops/black knights and crooked authority figures who betray the fact that the structure is corrupt, thus must be dealt with) but also the targets of moral panic at large—in short, what would become Marx’s spectres some forty-odd years after Radcliffe penned her final novel, and the Red Scare and similar states of panic that haunt the bourgeois character of the female thinker, warrior and superhero centuries after Radcliffe’s day in the sun: writing about damsels, detectives and demon lovers (which we’ll touch on here then explore in Volume Three when we examine TERFs and centrist media).

(exhibit 47a1: Detecting systemic trauma first requires something to detect and a detective to go about it, but historically involves various double standards and intersecting biases/privileges during liminal hauntologies [the sudden, seemingly magical and superstitious appearance of the Gothic castle]. Male detectives are renowned for their “superior” [sexist] intellect as a product of their male upbringing and socio-material advantages at being men, thus having access to better education. Female detectives from the Neo-Gothic period “won the lottery” of accidental birth, enjoying the [white, cis-het] role of princess trapped between their actual oppressors and those they fear as buried and scapegoated, but also conflated with: racial, queer and religious minorities. As things to continuously revive in the present, the rules of polite [meaning “heteronormative” enforcement] discourse would afford men certain advantages over women when exploring the perils of a Gothic castle, but both would be party to the larger scapegoating process: find the corrupt impostor and bury your gays to defend privatization.

For example, Ludovico from The Mysteries of Udolpho dispels the rumors of ghosts in the haunted room by staying in this supposedly “occupied” area with his sword. In the morning, he is gone. Ostensibly ghosts have spirited him away but in truth, pirates are to blame[!]. Yet, his dealings with them is cis-gendered, reflecting the dangers faced by men in such stories as commenting on the socio-material conditions of Radcliffe’s time: Ludovico would more than likely not have to worry about being raped like Emily St. Aubert would [the Case of the Super Straight Pirates[7]]. Moreover, in defense of her own agency, Emily would have to rely on him and his sword to keep the rapacious, ostensibly heterosexual but also ambiguously gay pirates at bay [women not really being allowed to investigate their own trauma, but especially not allowed to do battle with it; re: that’s what Amazons do]. But had she wielded the sword herself, she would have skewered her enemies with it, feminizing them like Dacre’s Victoria, in 1806.)

(artist: Emma Layne)

That’s the history of Radcliffe’s refrain. Let’s map its ongoing hauntological exploration of sex and danger (re: exposure of “virtue,” left, as something to “armor” through swooning and amnesia—Radcliffe basically telling her audience to “think of the [white] women and children!”); i.e., as something to consider relative to the xenomorph throughout the remainder of the module (and not just this subchapter), on the edge of the civilized world.

In terms of sex demons and demon poetics at large, artistic playfulness is the “magic circle” (re: Zimmerman): of proletarian praxis in that it’s “where the magic happens”; it occurs during liminal expressions of agency—i.e., in Gothic media, but also between reality and fiction through the subversion and transgression of various canonical rules and restrictions, during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Keeping this in mind, let’s look at some more historical “derelicts” of the demonic trifecta—damsels, detectives and sex demons as something traumatic to look on voyeuristically—in popular media at large, then bring this back around to Gothic expression as something to reinvent for our purposes.

We’ll do so in an assigned order instead of a chronological one, looking at

• damsels as demonized, ostensibly disempowered chattel. We’ll examine damsels in ’80s porn with Nina Hartley and Victoria Paris (exhibit 47b1a).
• detectives seeking power and knowledge while fearing harmful torture. We’ll examine different kinds of detectives, including Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight (1998); i.e., as a militarized detective stemming from older, more passive and “chaste” forms that survive in the present; e.g., Velma Dinkley (exhibit 48a) as inspired by Radcliffe’s classic formula, including nuns (exhibit 48b), but also more warlike detectives in different media types, such as Ellen Ripley (48c1) in cinema and Samus Aran (exhibit 40d1) in Metroidvania (whose respective, dangerous explorations of the Gothic castle present the closed space something to construct out of previously detected historical-material factors and warring xenophobic ideas: masculinity coming to rescue femininity, albeit grafted onto a female body that upholds the status quo and threatens to make her “rabid,” thus needing to be put down faster than her male counterparts would; i.e., she becomes the thing she’s told to kill).
• sex demons chattelized in semi-supernatural, semi-natural/animalistic forms that exist on the edge of the civilized world; i.e., animal demons from a wild, almost-primordial age. To that, we’ll be looking repeatedly at the xenomorph—through Ridley Scott’s reinvented, xenophilic forms of Gothic vision in the 1970s and 2010s (which we’ll also expand on even more in the next chapter when we look at “lycanthropes,” “furries” and other totem demons that continue to exist and mutate fabulously in the 21st century).

We’ll also examine schools of thought that evolved out of an emerging Gothic discourse, which Scott would draw upon in his own work, but also many other artists before and after Alien. This includes Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis investigating hidden, repressed aspects of their own society by using competing obvious narratives of demons, damsels and detectives inside their own derelict, ergodic stories of terror and horror media; i.e., a primarily white, middle-class corpus written by persons other than cis-het white men but now having expanded to other groups whose discourse wouldn’t manifest until much later on, but arguably has connections to both author’s vital “ancient” launchpads.

As we shall see, next, all of this came to a head with Alien, blending Radcliffean terror with Lewis-style horror to produce something altogether Numinous and splendid, thus wonderful at embodying the monstrous-feminine’s various class/cultural tensions; i.e., the xenomorph is dualistic—was as much Radcliffe as Shelley, and working inside a shared aesthetic at cross purposes!

Onwards to “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph; i.e., the Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Violence, for example, is Radcliffe’s way of talking about sex through extensive innuendo; i.e., in the language of men, but from a woman’s point of view seeing such things as “demonic. It’s both not what she’s talking about, and a paradoxical form of censorship that points to what she’s getting at through associate violence (duels/demonic courtship). It’s very virginal—like a comic book nerd who’s either never had sex, or is camping the sex she has had to disassociate through demonic shows of force: “I’m not having sexual desires,” Sampson might explain to Gregory (and by extension to us), in Romeo and Juliet (1597); “I’m cutting off the heads of the maids! Take in it what sense thou wilt!” (source). I genuinely can’t tell with Radcliffe and that’s the point; it gives her plausible deniability.

All the same, “demonic” clearly means the side of sexuality that women (for Radcliffe) can “only” experience through actual threat of rape. As such, Radcliffe’s knife-dick demon BDSM features black penitents who demonstrably evoke courtly love as the “only way” a girl can experience passion outside legal marriage (which happens after the novel ends): on the receiving end of a lance, carried off on horseback or tied to a tree. Distress and ravishing of the damsel is classic courtship language, which Radcliffe translates to the summoning of demons through her stories to excite her and her readership: wish fulfillment per a Western, abject division with alienated, fetishized things that, per the ghost of the counterfeit, further the abjection process.

On one hand, it’s code to dodge the censors; i.e., no different functionally than Mormon bubble porn or fruit emojis on social media exploited by the algorithm (as trans people are, for example). The more oppressive the system, the more restless and inventive the cryptonymy.

Radcliffe, for instance, unquestionably liked wilderness, castles, banditti and labyrinths (her search terms); these got her juices flowing. But they also contain/concern political attitudes (moral arguments), which said devices serve to camouflage in Radcliffe’s work. As such, concealment and concern go hand-in-hand; i.e., all the actual heroes who appear good in Radcliffe’s books despite their ferocity (or black outfit, below) are “white” and legitimized through revelation, and all the ones who are bad are delegitimated, Scooby-Doo-style when the mask is pulled off. So someone like Wesley in The Princess Bride, below, isn’t really the Dread Pirate Roberts who ravishes women; he’s the woman’s dutiful servant saying “as you wish” while he gives her exactly what she wants through mutual consent!

Except, that’s Rob Reiner adapting William Goldman’s 1972 novel, which camped Radcliffe. By comparison, Emily St. Aubert in Udolpho gives all her inherited wealth to Valencourt, despite him not “rescuing” her until the very end of the book, and even then only appearing as an afterthought—penniless and dog-faced—because he gambled* all his money away and gave the rest to a man sharing his jail cell!

*Doing so in Paris, “a sinful city” according to Radcliffe (and an act, Sam Hirst once explained to me, that is synonymous with whoring around with women of “looser morals” than the heroine).

It sounds like a joke, except it’s not; i.e., Udolpho isn’t satire because Emily never shuts up about how she feels, and boy-oh-boy are her feelings not ambiguous! Yes, she’s understandably pissed at first, but then not-so-understandably can’t stay at her “widdle Vawencawt” because—golly gee whizz—he totally helped that one guy in a pinch while making himself destitute! In short, she (and by extension, Radcliffe) enables him and he (and by extension, Radcliffe) snow jobs Emily to basically vouch for codependency in her by feeding his addiction (because that’s always healthy).

In turn, Valencourt is “heroic” not because he’s actually strong or smart or even terribly good, but because Radcliffe assigns that position to him and makes Emily a bit dim to make for the storybook ending her middle-class readership thirsted for (saying as much about these bored housewives’ actual marriages versus the ones they were clamoring for—a fact Jane Austen promptly and savagely parodied, in Northanger Abbey)! That’s called “pandering” and Radcliffe was great at it.

Per Wolff, the Radcliffean Model is flush with the virgin/whore and hero/demon lover argument, but it’s not ironic and—more to the point—conflates feminine desire with mutilative, unironic rape. Neo-conservative politics aside, the theatre’s prescriptive nature is completely unhealthy. Through demon lovers and Black Veils, Radcliffe wanted all of these things in ways she could explain away and prescribe while upholding the status quo; through ludo-Gothic BDSM, we can ditch the dogma and keep the demons (and vaso vagal threats), camping her stories with passionate rape scenarios to lean into the most ironic, exquisite elements of “torture” she offered!

[2] Which I’ve written about in regards to; re: “Gothic Themes in Perfect Blue” and “Gothic themes in The Vanishing / Spoorloos” (2020). Jadis loved both those movies, for what it’s worth.

[3] Said spaces classically written either anonymously by women—because women of the period weren’t encouraged to write novels; i.e., as a respectable/profitable enterprise—or by sexist women adopting the pen names of men. “Ann Radcliffe” was already a penname (her real name was Ann Ward); by comparison, the Brontë sisters (not their brother, who didn’t write much) used neutral-sounding pseudonyms under Queen Victoria’s reign (Aton, Currer and Ellis Bell, the OG enbies), and Jane Austen (who died several years before Queen Victoria was born in 1819), used “by a lady” for Sense and Sensibility (1811), followed with “by the author of Sense and Sensibility” for her other novels.

[4] One of my academic survivors for my master’s (the one who said, “Nicholas, I’m happy to be your supervisor but just so you know, I’ve never played a computer game in my life!”). Dale’s a nice enough bloke (as the Brits like to say), but also, I think he likes Radcliffe because he’s a bit like her—not a Tory or anything like that, but a stay-at-home cat dad:

(artist: Dale Townshend and Dickens the cat)

On top of that, he also wrote a really cool book on Matthew Lewis, Matthew Lewis: The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture (source tweet, DaleGothic96: May 14th, 2024), as well as Gothic Antiquity (source tweet, DaleGothic96: September 24th, 2019), which I’ve cited before in my own books (Dale’s specially is Neo-Gothic architecture in fiction, which per my master’s thesis, dovetails nicely with Metroidvania as ludo-Gothic):

(photographer: Dale Townshend)

and—while a bit of a ball-buster (the comments on my assignments were technically anonymous, but I could kind of tell it was him)—he also showed me kindness at school others sometimes didn’t. He also wasn’t weird about it when I came out, and used “Persephone” no problem at all. Thanks, Dale!

[5] Reminding me, once again, of Monty Python’s Dennis Moore endlessly giving the poor starving country folk stolen lupins.

[6] “Oh, wow! A woman who can write. A female Shakespeare!” Puh-lease, Radcliffe doesn’t have enough crossdressing or magic in her stories to be compared to Willie Shakes (now Lewis, on the other hand…)!

[7] Male queerness and queer theft of straight virtue being historically known to pirates through matelotage, a maritime practice between men that functioned like property ownership between male sailors not unlike a traditional, landbound wedding—a practice that Radcliffe wouldn’t have been in the dark about; i.e., “any port in a storm.”

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

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

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

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

Dark Shadows: The Origins of Demonic Persecution and Camp; or, Applying My Education (from School and Jadis) to Smile, Evil Dead and More

“I have seen the dark shadows moving in the woods and I have no doubt that whatever I have resurrected through this book is sure to come calling for me.”

—Doctor Raymond Knowby, Evil Dead (1981)

Picking up where “The Road to Hell; or, Summoning the Whore, Ourselves” left off…

Now that we’ve unmasked a double of my abuser similar to how Radcliffe would have done to the abusers of women (extended to other minorities beyond women), let’s apply this education to a couple of close-reads (I know, I know—I said I wouldn’t do any more of these, but we have to be able to apply the knowledge of the past to the present, somehow).

To that, demons look human because they are human and this can be good or bad not simply per a Cartesian binary but a dialectical-material one: demons for workers or the state as a matter of transformation and exchange, generally through the canonizing or camping of torture and rape (the subversion of what is supposedly preordained/-determined by almighty inhuman forces). The Road, for Bakhtin, is a place to encounter characters in a story’s advertisement of space and time; i.e., the Gothic chronotope one of pandemonium, thus infinite possibility and change. Demons are whores as things to expose. Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?

The idea is a road to Hell, summoned up less by the road being moved or changed, and more that upon it appears a magic man (or some other cosmic visitor beyond God’s grace bearing a similar level of power) to make our dreams (of a world beyond Capitalism) come true! It’s a Holy Grail of sorts, but a false one that, when consumed, canonically threats Instant Death (with Spielberg’s The Last Crusade [1989] continuing the same mix-and-match of Abrahamic—pointedly Jewish and Christian—dogmas to punch Nazis and Arabs by white saviors and Numinous trinkets with a Zionist flavor to them, above). But that doesn’t stop temptation from personifying and being tempting in ways that speak to class, culture and race war, now does it? Such has been the case since Paradise Lost, at least—a quality that couches rebellion within a sexy rebel that, in the hands of state proponents, adopts a likeness of rebellion they will use to police the whore and her revenge with to have the state’s instead; re: the pimp vs the whore.

Or as Ann Wilson sings about on the throbbing and urgent “Magic Man” (1975), Dreamboat Annie is Charon’s Canoe front-loaded with a sexy mystery—why do women run off with strange men on the road to Hell?

“Come on home, girl” Mama cried on the phone
“Too soon to lose my baby yet, my girl should be at home”
But try to understand, try to understand
Try, try, try to understand, he’s a magic man, Mama, ah
He’s a magic man[1] (source).

The short answer is power and rebellion from problems at home. Yet, temptation is painful because escape is a passion, and giving in before, during and after that point aches in more ways than one; i.e., vigor and physical longing (the dreaded blue balls/clit) versus more emotional kinds of loss that, for the young, they’ve never had/are experiencing for the first time as babes in the wilderness; i.e., less for those actually young and more from a lack of experience/glut of stunted growth, experience is the teacher of fools (speaking from experience, here).

Cis or not, a young woman’s viewpoint of forbidden desire, then, is classically more hysterical than a man’s (e.g., Black Sabbath’s “NIB,” 1970); but in truth, it’s the same argument, made with “vaginal/clitoral” feminine energies versus “phallic” masculine ones (which the Gothic/ GNC elements of Matthew Lewis challenge Radcliffe’s centralizing of the usual gender/colonial binary admonishing white cis female rebellion and demonizing everything else under the sun; i.e., anything outside the nuclear model is a whore, but virgins are whores waiting to happen by bumping into their evil twins).

(source: Lyriquediscorde’s “‘Magic Man’ by Heart,” 2018)

Now that we’ve gone over whores, abusers and Faust more generally—and have set the stage for doubling by demasking Jadis—here is the list of points we shall cover in “Summoning the Whore through Magic” as a matter of covering the basic history before synthesizing ourselves through poetry and close-read:

• Rehashing Radcliffe and the Process of Investigating Demons; or Summoning Today’s Whore (through Yesterday’s Magic)
• Origins of Faust; or, a Brief History of Demons and Their Torturous Summoning Rituals and Effects
• Pulling a Faust; or, Summoning Power, Active Impostors, Death Curses, and Radcliffe’s Exquisite “Torture” (feat. Smile, Jadis, Evil Dead, and more)
• Canonical Demonology and Torture: Summoning Racism and Other Bigotry
• The Evolution of Canonical Torture, cont. (feat. for-Profit Demons)
• Introducing the Demonic Trifecta
• The Difference between Canonical and Exquisite “Torture”
• A Note about Our Small Friends Also Tortured by Capital
• The Dangers (and Pleasures) of Demonic Camp

Furthermore, whereas “Making Demons” examined the Promethean Quest and composite, manmade demons, the rest of the “Summoning Demons” subchapter will focus on two things in two parts:

• summoned, supernatural demons and their numerous rituals of torture; i.e., the relationship of power exchange expressed in forbidden, occult forms
• the participants; i.e., the summoned demon, but also those who play their Faustian games of torture: the damsels and detectives as demonic vessels (sex demons) during demon BDSM working under a presumption of torture and guilt with or without irony

As such, we’ll outline the base idea of what summoned demons constitute during oppositional praxis, including their persecutorial role in canonical stories; i.e., by attacking demons as a mode of genderqueer expression. After that, we’ll examine how earlier Western[2] authors of demonic tales—namely Radcliffe and Lewis’ respective terror and horror classes of black penitents/sex demons/smooth criminals—were effectively explorers facing monsters, but especially the derelict “ancient” stories and infamous demons left curiously behind for others to find: to summon and pass things imperfectly along as demons do (almost a game of charades: “It’s right in from of you!” *wiggling intensifies*).

(artist: Sabrina Val)

Rehashing Radcliffe and the Process of Investigating Demons; or Summoning Today’s Whore (through Yesterday’s Magic)

Regarding all of yesterday’s demons, we’re effectively left with a series of older trials—of fire and pain, but also temptation (above)—those having completed them braving the death curses and threats of demon rape to uncover forbidden knowledge for new generations to uncover through our own means of summoning the past: learn enough to be dangerous, then make your own monsters during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s calculated risk (magic men or otherwise—with Radcliffe’s being more about the threat of rape than raw sex appeal or attraction; i.e., her Gothic heroines weren’t allowed to have sexual desires, but merely be preyed upon by men in black with hypnotic blue eyes threatening modesty with raw mutilative force: older highwaymen in disguise, solving “property disputes” [dowry] through force; e.g., Henry Fonda’s “Frank” a whorish tramp to conjure out of the imaginary past and thrill through the threat of rape in isolation, not married to sex appeal[3]).

In doing so, Gothic Communists can avoid rehabilitating actual abusers, while subverting the demonic ritual and “black penitent” (re: Radcliffe’s sexual deviant) further and further away from its sublimated, acceptable forms of rape, death and harm, etc. The pageantry is transgressive but salubrious; i.e., from spectacle, circus and ceremony as things less to stand on and more to contractually make the main attraction! Demons are showboats who love showing other people their asses: an “ass like a demon” denotes extreme temptation, thus police interest! We cum with our guns loaded, you dig? Our vaginas (and other holes) are happy and angry! Hysteria! Wandering womb! Bicycle face!

(artist: Sabrina Val)

Enshrined in carnival, demons are iconoclastically sex fiends, but still fiendishly sexual; i.e., raping ironically in ways haunted by superstitious and dogmatic fearmongering about sexuality in a post-penicillin world (for venereal purposes): learning from demons being hampered by a fear of making bad decisions and fucking up. Deals with them are to be feared less because of their immense size and more because of their predatory Faustian contracts (usually for souls or pounds of flesh or—with maidens—for their precious virtue), which have the uncanny ability to make humans look foolish; i.e., to trick and expose them as frauds! It’s not always because of raw intelligence—primal hunger can play a hand in things—but usually demons are intelligent enough and combine this with strength, sex appeal, talent, and appetite, etc, to make for feared opponents precisely because they’re your opponent (or your friend in disguise)!

Yes, demons seek conflict and trauma, but they also function as black mirrors to summon in times of protection and need; e.g., to keep our loved ones safe (the opposite of widow makers); i.e., “thirst” during “drought time,” personifying not just the Seven Deadly Sins, but neo-medieval scapegoats of these things: the royal givers of forbidden knowledge that the self—especially the persona of the West—has conveniently repressed to save face per the abjection process. Demons reverse abjection and revel in it, invading a party-like or otherwise social space of play to corrupt it; i.e., perhaps most famously in the opera ball scene, which—under capital—routinely combines with holiday-themed cycles of summon and banishment during liminal stages of demonic possession and release; e.g., the Halloween dance from Blood: the Last Vampire (2000), a story about a cop who hates her job (at least, she does in the film version) and similar to Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), warns of a shapeshifting menace drinking stolen blood among us that—when the membrane is thin—threatens to appear and haunt the usual harvests going on, year round! The joke, then, is on the detective; i.e., when she encounters actual supernatural demon lovers who aren’t explained away/can’t remove their monstrous elements like a theatre mask!

To this, demons actually “from Hell” are even more ominous than their manmade/theatrical counterparts; their dastardly (dis)agreements proceed them, inviting Faustian disaster (mutilation and bodily dismemberment) and mocking the outcomes—their suspicious, skulking and shady brokers, per Marlowe’s anti-Semitism, embodying stigma, scandal, vice, bias, and sin during hauntological persecution language (e.g., Dante and the medieval cardinal sins—lust, gluttony and wrath, etc), and various taboos, anxieties and neuroses. In short, demons are fallen from grace[4], dredged up to remind humans that they are, too (which translates dialectically-materially to workers vs the state).

As such, demons are classically (through a theocratic-to-secular Christian lens) seen as creepy-yet-intimidating (often on fire) things to defeat/purge that reflect an evil side of the hero[5]—someone or something unscrupulous, barbaric, uncompromising and insidiously wretched, cruel, revolting and lecherous, often revived in centrist stories to then vanquish/scapegoat by monomythic combat, but also games of chance and contests of the mind: you summon them for duels, deals and games of various kinds, but classically through sex and force (as with Beowulf and Grendel, translating per Tolkien into tooth-and-nail fights with orcs and goblins out of Old Norse and anti-Semitic myth into modern-day pogroms).

These kinds of demons are badass to yield bigger and better bounties (re: “looting Hell”), but also Radcliffean catharsis upon defeat and banishment back to Hell by righteous police forces (e.g., the Greater Demon from Dragon’s Crown, left). The deal, then, is a fight to the death, to the victor going the spoils (“render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s…”).

By extension, heroes even go to or encounter demons out in the wild, often during Crusades or rescue missions (re: Tolkien’s dwarves and Erebor); i.e., in a ruin or place of concentrated power and darkness (a kind of power); e.g., Oedipus and the Sphinx, or Siegfried rescuing Brunhilde in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Some demons are positively massive, yet ghostlike and ethereal despite their ferocity and size; just as many are as small as jackals or monkeys, as seductive as shadows, or as light as a feather. But all involve unequal, forbidden and dark exchange/dealings in some shape or form—power and knowledge (with Faust favoring fatal knowledge) commonly expressing anisotropic revenge; re: for the pimp or the whore, during ludo-Gothic BDSM! In part, a canonical superstition looms over the continued blending and regeneration, a guiding fascination/fear that moves the artist’s hand (exhibit 44a2/46a); the process becomes an incantation, one that speaks of the Devil, causing them to appear and “torture” the viewer (a BDSM house call, more or less: “Dial ‘M’ for Murder!”).

Far from being undesirable, this ritual and its rapturous outcome are entirely the point: to summon demons and experience whatever exquisitely “torturous” power they have to offer through excruciating pain (and/or illicit extramarital sex) as something to exchange, agonize over and reunite with, post-alienation by capital. It’s literally power exchange demonized, often with psychosexualized components. As Gothic Communists, we’ll be humanizing these ideas, doing so while thinking about power exchange in BDSM terms (social-sexual habits); i.e., that venerate and protect workers through the demonic trifecta’s performative roles of demon (the dom), detective (the switch) and damsel (the sub): as lifted from more classic examples like Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, or Rudolph Otto when making our own demons. Their stories/scholarships used demons to threaten damsels, which detectives police on both fronts (the virgin/whore). By comparison, creativity becomes our secret weapon; i.e., our revenge vs the state’s, either conjured up by the dark side of the Western paradigm, and which we fags/sex workers (and other minorities) simply call “home.”

Before we can do that, in “Exploring the Derelict Past,” we’ll have to understand the difference between canonical torture and exquisite “torture,”; i.e., having married the fear of inquisition (from the Middle Ages)—and then to Hammer of Witches and Gothic (the Renaissance)—onto increasingly hauntological Neo-Gothic revivals of these things for canonical versus campy forms. The Church classically forbid knowledge as canon/gnosis, whose uncovering was strictly prohibited yet explored by parties with privilege able to create their own demons; re: Radcliffe as the queen of exquisite “torture,” yet also allergic to magic spells, aiding the Protestant ethic.

However invented, we’ll unpack these spells, now, then consider their canonical function in demonology that Radcliffe tip-toed around, its evolution over time, the demonic trifecta as an investigation framing device, the basic difference between canonical and iconoclastic forms, canon’s harmful effects on nature at large, and finally the dangers of demonic camp when practiced by us; i.e., as something to keep in mind when exploring the derelict torturous past (and its magical demons), ourselves!

Origins of Faust; or, a Brief History of Demons and Their Torturous Summoning Rituals and Effects

A note about sexuality before we begin: Demons, like BDSM, don’t have to be sexual, though they often are; i.e., demons can be asexual—especially when tied to animals as pets or extensions of nature to learn from and relate to in sex-positive ways [which include asexuality on the same larger gradient]. Many demons are considered intelligent, but they don’t have to be (the knowledge they offer more of a relationship to nature as something to respect, including its boundaries and inability to consent). —Perse

(artist: Angelica Alzona)

As Foucault has shown, “power” can be an incredibly vague and broad measurement; as Shelley showed, demons can be made to quest for self-destructive fire/fire of the gods; but as Faust showed, the classic way is to summon them for knowledge, doing so categorically being dangerous and whose naked exposure to chaotic power often leads the know-it-all to get a new asshole (or three): when summoning someone stronger than them who likes fucking with them and ripping them apart (re: Lewis and Ambrosio). The act—of summoning demons for power—is equally broad, offering effectively whatever one’s heart desires: sexual favors, social advantage, material gain, and revenge, etc, from basic to so-called “final forms” (finality is a myth, concerning demons).

Whatever the case, it is primarily a Western, post-Roman (thus Christian) idea, and has evolved over time. Stephen Johnson writes how—from Biblical times, to the Renaissance, to the present—the tradition of summoning demons evolved according to a series of famous demonic texts (the titles and explanations paraphrased directly from Johnson’s 2022 blogpost, “How to Summon a Demon“):

• The Testament of Solomon (c. the 1st century CE and the high medieval period): In the testament, Solomon is given a magic ring that compels Beelzebub and his ilk to build Solomon’s Temple, bending these beings to his will.
• Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches (1478): Written by a Catholic clergyman named Heinrich Kramer, the author pointed the finger at heretics of the Catholic Church worshipping fake demons, while still being enslaved to as evil beings deserving of punishment. In short, it was a call to violence against the Church’s enemies for entirely invented
• De Praestigiis Daemonum (On the Tricks of Demons) and its appendix, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (False Monarchy of Demons): Both were written/collected in 1563 by physician Johan Weyer, who catalogued a hierarchy of 69 (nice) demons, including their summoning instructions. According to Johnson, Weyer saw the practice as entirely fake, seeking to expose the black magic as a delusional practice unworthy of capital punishment.
• Doctor Faustus (1590), which Johnson doesn’t mention, but theatrically concerns the summoning of demons and said rituals deleterious effects. There’s also the Golem of Prague (which presents demons as friendly to their makers, but which Marlowe’s anti-Semitic elements demonize in favor of Christian abjection)

Since then, demonic summoning and its perilous wish fulfillment have slowly drifted away from canon’s sex-coercive forms of torture porn and demonic persecution, and more towards whatever sex-positive minds can make up (deities from within our breasts, re: Blake).

Pulling a Faust; or, Summoning Power, Active Impostors, Death Curses, and Radcliffe’s Exquisite “Torture” (feat. Smile, Jadis, Evil Dead, and more)

Before we delve into precisely how, I want to make four basic distinctions that differentiate summoned demons from the undead and the manmade/astronoetic demons we’ve already examined (examining Smile, Jadis, and Evil Dead, as we do).

First, the summoning of power through the perversion of religious experiences. While all monsters are byproducts of Gothic language, demonic animation is somewhat unique compared to the undead we’ve already looked at. Whereas

• zombies and vampires function more as analogs for disease (one uncontrolled and the other invited inside)
• ghosts tend to haunt or loom inside language
• and composites are literally manmade, usually from the bodies of the dead or from inorganic materials during golemesque acts of mad science (they are also, as we have discussed, canonically abused by their creators)

demons are immortal, not undead, in a modular sense; furthermore, the summoned variety hail from Somewhere Else, often another non-Christian Pagan world or time (versus the natural class, which more often are activated or summoned by natural magics, but also spiritual/recreational drug-use). As such, supernatural demons generally offer forbidden, Promethean knowledge as keepers/embodiments thereof; i.e., secrets of things alienated from us and fetishized by the elite to compel their antagonized harvesting vis-à-vis mirror syndrome; e.g., a Numinous rapture, often a uniquely potent and forbidden sexual experience offered up by a sex demon’s queer alternative to the heteronormative order—for a price, of course (re: guilty pleasure/controlled opposition).

Like organized religion, the above rituals are largely made up or bastardized from older stories, meaning the boundaries surrounding knowledge are also made up; i.e., entirely conveyed through rituals of power exchange tied to occult expression, which becomes the very thing to forbid or allow depending on what it achieves. As usual, canon maintains the status quo by dehumanizing the monster through Faustian bargains. It achieves this through the demon’s relationship to “normal” humans, punishing the summoner unironically by having the demon reliably “trick or treat” them: blinding them, tearing their body apart, and stealing their Christian soul. Preventing alternatives to this canonically horrifying outcome is essential to maintaining a bourgeois Superstructure through demonic production and execution; i.e., by not attempting to humanize the demon as Shelley did (who was an atheist).

By comparison, iconoclasm humanizes the exchange (and breaks Capitalist Realism) by making demons and their offerings more exquisite and delicious, generally in ways that are empowering and xenophilic but normally denied by the status quo to the performing group; e.g., women playing with demons to carry out their own “rapes” during what are effectively controlled experiments. Faustian, like Promethean, means “self-destructive,” whereupon iconoclasm offers a death of the status quo according to workers who embrace a new kind of self through humanized demons (e.g., Richard Matteson’s I Am Legend, 1954).

Second, the active impostor. Capitalism is built on generational lies and theft, poorly divorced from past rudimentary forms from which those in the present inherit the world. The classic conundrum of a fearful inheritance and uncertain, conflicted ownership is called into question; i.e., by demons who love to torment the new tenants with fearful reminders of past barbarities, as well as present falsehoods: “Your bloodline is murderous and false.” As part of the general process, demons are far more active and sentient as impostors than ghosts are, able trick their human victims by literally changing shape and appearing and disappearing at will; ghosts, meanwhile, are frozen in time, tending to “deceive” through the cryptonymic nature of rumors, chronotopic legends and all-around human language (demonstrating traumatic [re]memory as die-hard but imperfect).

This being said, there is crossover. A demon has access to the supernatural plane, including spirits and xenoglossia, but also the ability to physically change its shape, gender and sex; re: Matthew Lewis’ Satan in The Monk and Broadmoor’s insistent of Lewis as precociously queer vis-à-vis Milton. The Devil—to deceive the deceiver[6] and ultimately destroy him—disguises himself as the masc-/male-presenting Rosario, followed by the femme-and-masculine, female Matilda: through a campy rendition of the canonical/iconoclastic shapeshifting power of angels and demons—with Matilda something of a detective in reverse, blowing the whistle on the Church and eventually leading to its open-secret prison’s glorious destruction (queer wish fulfillment).

And while this happens in a time before queer identity was a matter of public discourse (re: Foucault, relegated to the shadows of the cryptonymy process/disguise pastiche), the Devil does so to punish a hidden killer disguised as a holy man, in the panopticon (also Foucault): the incestuous, duplicitous and rapacious Ambrosio, whose eventual anti-Genesis deconstruction remains authored by a queer man that Coleridge, a famous straight critic, would conflate queerness—thus the growing rise of degeneracy or “dangerous confusion” in British culture—with demons tempting Faust. Such proto-fascism and its performatively insidious moral outrage is not so different, then, from the fear of the xenomorph as the dark dildo from outer space, nowadays (re: Leonard Maltin); i.e., queer displacement and abjection as something to finger-wag by liberal admonishment whitewashing reactionary politics. So it was then, so it is now.

Demons also conceal themselves using ghosts, which a demon doubles and “wears” like a “mask” (re: the wendigo “nihilism demon” in The Night House[7] [2019] impersonating the ghost of the dead husband, its doing so constituting mnemonic theft and weaponization of the heroine’s memories: the upside-down world loops concentrically in on itself, trapping the heroine in darkness with nowhere to go under the twin surveilling moons). Whereas ghosts are generally concerned with hidden curses that are inadvertently passed along through technology as preserving them (and their potential revenge or benediction), demons tend to be ceremoniously announced, mid-unheimlich/mise-en-abyme.

As such, they act as active, covert liars and administrators of punishment tied to the Numinous, “darkness visible,” and the mighty places/unknown pleasures lurking beyond canonical realms of normal human experience (thus Capitalist Realism): Hell, the underworld, a faraway land, etc, as forbidden sight; i.e., gleaned in those we think we know acting a bit weird (the nightmare anti-home/evil double, below). They are the Numinous come home to roost, during fatal homecoming and nostalgia—the black penitent/medieval backstabber and flagellant hungry for human souls, mid-apocalypse (forcing their hard kink onto captive participants); re: Marx’ “capital is dead labor feeding on living labor”—the general process trapped (as Castricano writes) in between parts of language!

Cryptomimesis isn’t just writing with ghosts, though (as Castricano determines about Derrida and his own Spectres), but as I argue, extends to demons; i.e., as a broader monster class, during ludo-Gothic BDSM threating rape stalking us: a lurking threat jeering “Me likey!” through bared animal teeth not quite of this earth! Gothic villainy is both old and new in its invented theatricalities (as Red Death from Venture Bros. [2003] expertly explains to a captive audience he’s tied to the railroad tracks[8]—tired of the same and oh-so-hungry for more! Some prefer cartoon laughter and sweeping monologues; others can kill with a look or a smile: a bald-faced liar isn’t the same thing as an outright lie (re: Banquo’s “agents of darkness bring us truths…”). “She is a very kinky girl,” the virgin and the whore trapped deliciously in one paradoxical place.

(exhibit 45d: The demon from Smile [2022] is a chronic abuser[9] who desires an audience, two-fold: to gaslight and gatekeep its prey [and to have them “watch and learn” during the counterfeit haunted by the ghost of trauma the middle class can stare at with equal parts fear and fascination]. It does the first by showing the heroine false copies/memories from her past [usually as faces that it “wears” like a mask]—all to gaslight her sense of reality as it closes the gap. The second, it achieves through the falseness of her actual lovers and friends, who it expertly alienates her from; i.e., when confronted with the slightest bit of pushback from her—and despite any connection to the heroine’s painful secret past [matriarchal trauma]—said friends are “fair weather” and lose faith in her immediately. They blame the victim because they can’t see the tormentor [re: DARVO and obscurantism]—in effect unwittingly becoming part of the same awful game [so often, good Samaritans overestimate their own goodness and ability to spot predators; i.e., they enjoy the perks of a system that punishes witness testimony by default, and which the demon will exploit to get what it wants by cherry-picking those with trauma].

Except, the torture also happens because the heroine’s friends see her trauma as fabricated, illegitimate, and hysterical, a priori—a fact the demon knows [through intuition as much as omniscience] and exploits for personal gain and satisfaction: something whore-like to abject regarding the maiden as normally modest, and forcing her, when push comes to shove, to solve her own murder before it’s too late! Weird attracts weird, and the demon—a proud harvester of unironic harm being its preferred pleasure—chooses the heroine, a victim of past rape, to be its next future victim. The fear is delicious to it, as is the panic and other emotions its bedlam raises: fakes don’t hold a candle to them, or rather the real thing doesn’t hold a candle to calculated risk evoking the Numinous! To camp rape is to regain control in the presence of debilitating conditions [sensations or otherwise].

“Then she should have died, hereafter.” Doing so appears random and Job-like, but is actually highly selective in its stochastic terrorism. In a nice twist, the movie presents the demon’s scheme as suitably both “pure magic” and “all in her head,” but really is giving the audience an effective metaphor of abuse; i.e., prolonged, untreated abuse bearing fruit—a breaking point, one leading to self-harm by the abuser telling the abused to commit suicide and they actually obey[10] [above, to please Master]: to kill oneself for the moth, hungry for the flame. It goes both ways, but remains anisotropic. The representation and its advocacy are always in between and out-of-joint, haunting the venue as half-real, inside-outside. “What if the Devil possesses me to kill myself?” speaks to the abjecting of colonial guilt onto fear of the outside, “the Devil made me do it” being codified in a very material sense of gaslighting—one that lives in stories like Smile, The Babadook and similar madwoman-in-the-attack-type stories threatening to take hold [the original being a Jane Eyre’s Bertha, a woman of color the white protagonist feared turning into]. Abjection is us versus them, hence the mother of apathy. We must smother such dogma in the crib of our own brains connected to outside factors.

“A mind is its own place,” and menticide isn’t objective. So unless you’ve been through Hell, it’s hard to know the invisible workings between victimizer and victim; i.e., if you haven’t met someone capable of putting you through that, which only happens when they turn their attention [and terrible implements] towards you: as some who has previously been marked by trauma [the paradox being how much of this happens before we are born or at least fully aware of ourselves].

Furthermore, not everyone knows they have “been marked,” at least not consciously at level they can easily parse; i.e., the facing of repressed trauma during live burial [and the dispossession of our faculties, mid-interment] being the Gothic master trope per generation—one whose discipline-and-punish panopticon admittedly has a hauntological, Freudian, psychosexual character orbiting inside and outside of people concerned with the decay of home across Western space and time; i.e., the more they deny the demon to keep up appearances, the more it can feed on the heroine, thus them: “Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death, / Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth, / Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open, / And in despite I’ll cram thee with more food” [source].

Romeo said this while robbing Juliet’s grave, but Juliet herself had already braved the horrors the crypt [which had already “come alive,” first in her mind, to pick her bones clean]. Such inherited confusions regarding the feeling of sarcophagy [eating of the flesh, specifically dead flesh] is an effective and productive metaphor to Marx’ dead labor feeding on living things: advertisements that, once consumed, turn us into cannibals that eat ourselves for the invisible state all around us.

Smile inverts the basic idea, denoting a giant rotten corpse [the state] that’s too big to fit inside the heroine’s mouth; i.e., a belly of the babe entered rapaciously by the beast through reverse and spontaneous revenge/rape pregnancy/forced feeding and similar invasive sensations [“Say ‘ahh…'”]—an imposturous wandering womb/walking “graveyard gut” speaking to Capitalist Realism gaslighting those who look beyond the Black Veil and tarring them simply as “mad.” It and similar stories present the demon as a faceless, sexless, and genderless anti-identity that feeds on the living in ways that invite poetic reversals and play. In turn, fascism is a death cult that revels in its own cannibalism, mid-obscurantism, and is historically something to slay [as Milius’ 1981 Conan does, putting Doom’s hedonistic cult to the sword[11]].

This orgasmic tendency also goes back to Radcliffe, who abjected such cannibalism as alien and opaque; i.e., hiding the state’s hand in things by framing the great demonic as a Black Veil, one that suddenly “appears” through the acknowledgement of a system already abjecting its abuses onto a displaced “other” object: the rectangular [as veils so often are] abstraction of trauma Radcliffe [and heroines modeled after hers] try to pass off as “just a bad dream,” a fake. So the gaslight continues…

Often this is abjected off onto foreign lands vis-à-vis 2001: A Space Odyssey and other stories, but it likewise exists at home as something to fall under the quotidian nihilistic spell thereof: the scapegoating and worshipping of domestic trauma during military urbanism! In my experience, people unexposed to such things will retreat and run from actual abuse like the plague, but stare and tremble at restless “censor bar” copies of such abuse during the cryptonymy process.

In Radcliffe’s case, they’ll also commodify it in ways consumers and critics will fetishize: the presence of unequal power and trauma, thus forbidden knowledge, as an infernal concentric pattern they’ll maintain to ensure they—a privileged member of the Imperial Core—can keep getting their jollies. With this facet of canonical Gothic, Jameson and I completely agree; re: “that boring and exhausted paradigm” [from Volume Zero]:

The quote is ubiquitous, but consider the opening page for Alex Link’s “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots” (2009) for a summary of it:

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.” Although surprising at first, this condemnation is strategic in that it establishes the Gothic as Jameson’s critical other; the Gothic becomes an object of ritual sacrifice, imbued with those qualities in Jameson’s argument which are most discomfiting. […] If one regards Postmodernism as telling a story about postmodernity, its plot, taken as a whole, is curiously Radcliffean, in that it routinely presents the reader with postmodern objects meant to inspire anxiety before explaining them away. Jameson’s dismissal of the Gothic, in other words, resembles nothing so much as a means of raising and exorcising an object of anxiety [source].

In other words, Jameson writes like Coleridge does—like a scared white boy but even more allergic to the Gothic mode, oddly emulating one of its most famous (and white) female authors [source]. 

The difference being, I also think we can camp what Radcliffe canonized to restore their proletarian energies; i.e., through a Gothic mode that is anything but redundant [science fiction beyond Shelley’s Gothic roots can and will gentrify and decay, Jameson]. In short, Jameson can’t monopolize what he tries to devalue, nor can Radcliffe, whose potential value we are reclaiming through devices like demon lovers and the Black Veil. They are formidable poetic instruments and have multiple uses beyond mere commodity or dismissal by those gatekeeping the venue and failing to vet their own elaborate strategies of misdirection; i.e., by exposing abusers and the presence of trauma as normally disguising and revealing itself during the cryptonymy process as equally liminal and dualistic.

To this, we must acclimate to the confusion, but also the Numinous powers of a collective past, which only reveals itself [regarding systems designed to hide themselves] upon repeated holistic study and reflection; re [from the Poetry Module]: 

To that, I’ll let you in on a little secret: The greatest irony of Jadis harming me [something we’ll go into more detail about during the undead module] is they accidentally gifted me with the appreciation of calculated risk. Scoured with invisible knives, I don’t view my scars as a “weakness” at all; I relish the feeling of proximity to the ghost of total power—of knowing that motherfucker took me to the edge but didn’t take everything from me: I escaped them and lived to do my greatest work in spite of their treachery! Like the halls of a cathedral, my lived torments and joys color this castled work, ornamenting its various passages with the power of a full life. I’ve known such terror that makes the various joys I experience now all the more sweet and delicious. I am visited by ghosts of my rapturous design, the empress of my fate, the queen of a universe shared with seraphs the likes of which I can hardly describe; “no coward soul is mine” [source: “Angry Mothers; or, Learning from Our Monstrous-Feminine Past,” 2024]. 

It’s historically easy to gender these vestiges of chaos—projecting them onto a particular scapegoat, thus reducing demon BDSM to an unironically violent and critically vacuous void; i.e., as Radcliffe and Freud do, but also Creed, to some extent: the homewrecker witch who tokenizes easily enough to have any kind of revenge at all. The reality is, we have to think about things in ways that highlight dialectical-material forces in dialectical-material language, thus don’t need further translation into that mode [with psychoanalysis famously “eating Marx” to conceal and bury him in 20th century academic mumbo-jumbo—as trying to stop people from using his theories more directly by coating them in buffers].

“When you gaze into the Abyss, the Abyss also gazes into you.” Except, such things are dualistic and always will be [all human language is dualistic]. This being said, genuine abusers look like anyone else, and point-in-fact, rely on such camouflage to harm others in bad faith; i.e., because they were harmed, once upon a time [congenital and comorbid criminogenesis, the dice roll of cop and victim a historical-material cycle]. The paradox is exploitation and liberation occupy the same actors, so we must tell them apart through dialectical-material scrutiny as a matter of playing with such things.

Grievous bodily injury aside, Smile is still a lesson; the demon’s lesson works through bad BDSM, using torture and the Uncanny Valley’s bad masks confusing predator and prey to impart that people are not gods, which Smile gleefully exposes by turning Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus [1942] inside-out: “You’re just like me. All it takes is a little push!” Or as Radcliffe writes, “What are bodily pains in comparison with the subtle, the exquisite tortures of the mind!” The demon is her titular Italian brought back to life and saying “Miss me?” with an awful psychosexual smirk:

To some extent, it remains something we can enjoy for its critical potential; i.e., during calculated risk, whose simulated weakness and strength both take place to sharpen our ability to tell the difference; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, taken outside the bedroom where it can raise concerns by “crying wolf.” Victims of abuse can’t think in black and white, because they live in the grey area of predation. Instead, they are drawn to what is familiar for them during the uncanny attack; re: the confusion of pleasure and pain, but also predator and prey as something we navigate having permanently been altered by an older demon touching us. Instead of viewing this abuse as strictly a curse according to our abuser’s logic, we can treat it as a gift and a curse that camps our own profound survival; i.e., in ways that translates to praxial synthesis, thus catharsis in opposition to bad actors trying to pimp us. The moment our holocaust becomes something to play with, we regain control!

To be frank, Smile frames the hubris of the heroine as thinking she can so easily face awful things and not be punished; i.e., that two seemingly unrelated events—the arrival of the demon and her facing her own demons at the old, abandoned homestead[12] [survivor’s guilt]—aren’t somehow connected to Capitalism. Instead, the story is more self-contained, playing with these devices to observe the more immediate psychological attack.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t take what they explore and apply it beyond where the filmmakers are willing to go; re: “There is no outside of the text,” thus no logical limit to impose on emergent play. We can always go further than Radcliffe dared, while appreciating the value in her arguments revived in stories like Smile: to watch a simulated rape [of the mind, first and foremost] to prevent actual harm in and out of media we subvert on the same Aegis—not as a one-way surface, but an anisotropic barrier we can cross over into their spaces and ours, there and back again; re: not the monomyth, but the Promethean Quest and Faustian bargain interrogating false power being corruptible, thus rewriteable. “It takes two to tango,” as they say, and inspiration comes as much from genuine harm as it does “surviving” copies of said harm. The canonical palimpsest is always a tyrant.

To it, this isn’t purgatory for one side to enjoy the spoils 

Trapped in purgatory
A lifeless object, alive
Awaiting reprisal
Death will be their acquittance
The sky is turning red
Return to power draws near
Fall into me, the sky’s crimson tears
Abolish the rules made of stone 

[…] Raining blood
From a lacerated sky
Bleeding its horror
Creating my structure
Now I shall reign in blood [Slayer’s “Raining Blood,” 1986]. 

but a place to build a new Hell on Earth for workers using the same convulsionnaires’ jouissance the bourgeoisie can’t exploit without end; i.e., their doing so meant to achieve singular harmful interpretations, mid-inkblot; re: the paradox of rape being no one is being harmed, and furthermore, that we can use this [and the whore’s] paradox to have the whore’s revenge against profit: to humanize ourselves as raped by “raping” ourselves for others to see. But revolution is always dualistic and liminal; i.e., we must look into those places’ of total disempowerment to liberate ourselves with; re: the way out of the labyrinth happens inside it as something to discover through found-document copies of itself.

As I write in “Out of this World, part one: What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why” [2024]: 

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 […] 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 (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 [source]. 

or more succinctly in “Modularity and Class”:  

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 [source]. 

so must we build and look upon that which subjugated workers dare not—viewing the Medusa with an open mind! So must we must break Capitalist Realism by facing the wax sculpture melting before us: ourselves and all our yesterdays, relaid in small and burning horrifyingly before us! We can stare and tremble, then learn from it to tremble perceptively in a dialectical-material lens that resurrects Marx as thoroughly gayer than he ever was, in life: our little pissed-off princess of the underworld. And if anyone rejects that, they’re not our friends; they’re cops. See how easy that is?

Despite what Radcliffe says about horror vs terror and the dreaded evil, then, Kristeva highlights the power of the abjection process; i.e., as something I argue further can be reversed in monstrous-feminine dialogs whose camp remains profoundly palliative-Numinous [thus delicious]: those touched by fire need stronger medicine, its procedure merely being to play with store-bought canon differently. And inside those dialogs, we can learn useful things about ourselves and Gothic poetics attached to the bigger picture, mise-en-abyme. It’s not fear and dogma, but critical engagement with our own fabrications camping the canon to enjoy its monopolized effects; i.e., if you want to critique power, you must not only go where it is, but become able to play with it without harming people in the present moment or incentivizing systemic harm in the future. So often people shelter and “armor” victims, like Radcliffe did; i.e., by isolating them and silencing their testimony behind a screen of performative pity. The reality is, we have survived unironic Hell to build something better while spiting our abusers; pity is useless to us—doubly so if it’s used to invalidate us and our testimony.

Yet, there is always risk to informed consent when executed, because we’re playing with things that not only hurt when examined, but challenge our fundamental understandings of power and how it dogmatically arranges and exchanges; i.e., which overwhelm us, and in which those still in Plato’s cave will attack to uphold bourgeois hegemonies, during us versus them. Those of weaker stomachs and minds are gargoyles who will eat us; i.e., the demon in Smile not just an outsider at all, but the masked vigilantism of the heroine’s own friends having turned their back on her—the using of their faces not just a disguise but reminder of their actual betrayals [the self-fulfilled prophecy]. 

Again, demons mix lies with truth, and manufacture disaster to achieve different outcomes. We do it to break Capitalist Realism, and cops do it to uphold said Realism: those who abuse our trust while we celebrate their accomplishments. And exposing this is often layered for our protection during the cryptonymy process. For example, I have invigilated Jadis’ abuse in my book series, from 2022 onwards, while simultaneously hiding them behind various layers of anonymity that I knew others could easily pull aside; i.e., like Radcliffe’s Black Viel. However dark mine have been, then, they haven’t prevented others from interacting with, thus investigating the truth behind, the censored versions; re: we did just that in “Showing Jadis’ Face,” but here it is again:

[source tweet, NicksMovInsight: May 6th, 2021]

This is Jadis without a mask, and yet is precisely the mask they wore when abusing me: a harmful double, and exactly the kind of impostor Smile is illustrating—a Great Destroyer that brings conflict behind tremendous obscurity while gaslighting their prey and even making them complicit in their own destruction!

Furthermore, Jadis looks human because they are human, but lacked humanity when abusing me as a conscious premediated choice. In the past, I’ve held back, shielding them ultimately for fear of reprisals. Even now I fear them, and fear saying too much in open accusation, and even now their face and voice haunts me still: “I can see him, with my waking eyes!” / “Then let us be rid of it, once and for all!” And the paradox of rescue is that the damsel is always in the dungeon, but learns to make it their own in ways that preclude total control from an abuser that is no longer physically in their life. Once sprung, we can’t escape the trap without chewing off a part of ourselves, and even then, a part of me still burns in Hell with Jadis: “You have heart! I’ll take that too!” It’s Hamlet levels of madness, but the play’s still the thing to catch the conscience of the king!

[model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Jadis. Jadis and I had agreed quite explicitly that they would provide for me in exchange for sex. In doing so, they initially used their grad school stipend to put a roof over my head, but didn’t put me on the lease. They purchased groceries regularly at first, and I cooked and prepared for them and had sex with them (an act I initially greatly enjoyed but later came to fear). Jadis showed me the many animals around campus, explaining the local wildlife in ways that presented them as some kind of guru; i.e., while the information they said was true, as far as I could tell, they began to bully me and use their expertise about that to treat me like a child—one they had successfully alienated from her entire family in one fell swoop and had total financial control over from that point forward.

I didn’t realize it, because Jadis would disguise it through acts of false deference; i.e., they would apologize profusely if something was indisputably their fault, it was also small accidents that weren’t really that big a deal to begin with; e.g., accidently bumping into me when they didn’t mean to: “Oh, I’m so, so sorry!” and proceed to pet me like they’d grievously harmed me by accident. The problem is, they’d act apologetic about those invented incidents, remorseful/victimized about their ex, and all-knowing about the animals, above, to gradually rescind their own responsibilities, per our agreement; re: providing for me.

The nuts-and-bolts were there, but they began to abuse and manipulate me for labor, including cooking and sex, but also emotional care. And in turn, they concealed everything behind things they were “giving” that weren’t even theirs; re: the animals. They acted like the whole world was theirs, and it was simultaneously very small (about the size of the UF campus we walked around, every night) and encompassed the whole of the world and all discussions about it. In short, they were conditioning me, walking me like a dog and introducing me to the Pavlovian carrot-and-stick approach they would then use to menticide me, and later use to manipulate me for sex, and anything else they wanted.

[artist: Jadis]

Overnight, Jadis traded the “nice mask” I was used to with a different mask: the angry dark mother. To be honest, Jadis was always kind of a bitch, but I trusted them and furthermore, had lots of love to give. Jadis had acquired the ability to appeal to other’s vanity/needs by surviving their mother, but I thought, “There’s no way they’d be exactly like their mother, right?” Except, they were always impatient or upset for reasons known only to them (they wouldn’t say why when asked about it) and would use that—in combination with verbal emotional abuse and manipulation—to make me long for the Good Cop who was suddenly nowhere to seen; re: diminishing returns following the initial and intense love-bombing phase made me put up with their abuse only to readily greet their “good side” like a savior to protect me from Bad Cop.

This was all in the middle of Covid, mind you, and—once Jadis’ father died [a process I helped clean up after[13]]—they turned off the tap and I saw myself out. Except, that didn’t happen until they had abused me a great deal [see: footnote]; i.e., Jadis couldn’t give something without causing harm in some shape or form. In short, they were a master of smoke and mirrors, but were a slave to their own illusions; i.e., they believed everyone was an enemy to bewitch and deceive for Jadis’ gain—and all to emulate those who were better at it than anyone else: while American liberals.

While demonic “capture” involves other people, then, it starts with us escaping the mind prison built around us by our abusers—individuals like Jadis, but also the bourgeoisie for whom they serve! So, yes, let us be rid of it; I’m tired of holding up Jadis’ mask. Then again, I won’t say their real name. It is dead to me, replaced by “Jadis” as something I can use to speak to the harm they caused in ways they can’t gaslight. They had me on my knees, but now I like it for reasons they can’t control; re: Metroidvania, danger disco, ludo-Gothic BDSM—the works!

To that, success is the best revenge, and I no longer need “my day in court.” I don’t because courtrooms can’t bring me the closure I’ve already made on my own—i.e., the justice of my surviving them isn’t to shame them; they don’t feel shame, so cornering them is pointless. Also, I don’t need a judge to tell me what “justice” is and when it has been served to my satisfaction [a badge is merely a cover to shield state thugs from accountability and criticism; judges are cops]. Instead, I will use what Jadis taught me in ways that extend to popular stories I can use to change Capitalism [which they loved, without question] into something beyond all abusers’ ability to control; i.e., their own speaking to abuse as a theatrical manner of demonic exchange that bleeds in and out of fictional counterparts we make: to camp “rape” by placing it in quotes, inserting all manner of comforting devices into the threshold.

[artist, left: pinkholi; right: Shexyo Art] 

For example, I like Amazons, dark mommy/gentle femme doms, and the monstrous-feminine because they simultaneously evoke my abusers and alienation, but also my desire to be free through friendlier variants than Jadis was capable of delivering—something my subsequent understandings of would eclipse anything Jadis could hope to imagine. They were basic because only a basic bitch harms other people for quick personal gain.

Such is Jadis—a Gothic villain of the cheapest order but one who admittedly knew their way around my head: wave treats in front of me [e.g., shoes, below] before wearing them “for” me during sex. Or so it seemed; in truth, they wore them for themselves, giving me a taste to ensnare me with, “hook, line, and sinker.” “It worked,” as the saying goes, “like a charm.” I didn’t just “gang alang” with them, mid-courtship, I proposed it!

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

This wasn’t just material objects through financial abuse, but the corporal side of things, too—sex, and specifically demon sex, with someone who was difficult to say no to; i.e., in part because they were attractive and badass, and my self-esteem was shattered after Zeuhl left me for their future husband [and kept other “side pieces” around except me, picking-and-choosing when they were poly and when they weren’t]. Jadis was hot, and had an amazing ass, strong body, tight pussy and incredible aesthetic, but also interest in my work, which they not only funded, but housed in the middle of Covid; i.e., by literally giving me a home and room of one’s own [which they admittedly shared with me until I moved my studio out into the living room—an act of defiance they openly resented and held against me]: where we could presumably make art together. “She actually talked me, man.” / “Get outta here!” An abused puppy is eager to please, and I’m a service top.

Zeuhl never supported my work, so I jumped at the chance. In truth, the opportunity felt too good to be true, but also too good to pass up [doubly impaired and doubly eager]—and it was productive; e.g., many of my old blog entries from 2020 and 2021 were written under Jadis’ sponsorship, supervision and at times secondary participation: “War Vaginas,” “Borrowed Robes,” “Mazes and Labyrinths” and “Why I Submit,” etc. We also recorded a short-lived 2020 podcast[14]; i.e., which formed the foundation for what ultimately became the Four Gs from Sex Positivity‘s final manifesto, later displaying as the paratextual documents seen in each volume/on my website.

Except, whereas Mary Wollstonecraft junior ran off with Percy Shelley and had children out of and in wedlock, Jadis and I [thankfully] never conceived actual babies; but they did help inspire what ultimately became my life’s work—i.e., by mostly showing me how not to do BDSM! That’s the joke, and my revenge: my rape baby love child was started by them and their bad-faith performance, but I made it my own to overcome what they gave me with what they gave me; i.e., the more they shit on me and disguised it, the more they unknowingly fertilized my body and my brain with the power to outlast them through my art: to use Athena’s Aegis to unmake harmful notions of motherhood [the Gothic chasing of parental protection through mates accidently mirroring our parents] with doubles of those [a trans woman’s second puberty/coming-of-age story in her thirties].

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

In short, Jadis had what I wanted—to fuck and to be [the Amazon/the Medusa]—but like Faust, gave me way more than I bargained for! Alas, I can’t show their naked body [the left image is to show their sexual intent without showing their naked body] or us having sex, but Jadis was built to administer and give punishment and pleasure; i.e., having an ass of the gods, while also being incredibly flexible/able to endure an absurd amount of pain. And they knew it, too—right in the middle of Covid, with them going through a divorce and me a rebound after Zeuhl, they had me right where they wanted me: in front of them! Besides smoke and mirrors, Jadis was a master of the carrot and stick, the mask and the mirror [and they had many masks to mirror whatever they wanted me to see]! Do I miss Jadis’ magic and cryptonymy? Of course I do; I’m just no longer its slave! I was the victim, not them [Jadis being past victim who victimized me, mid-DARVO and obscurantism]!

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

Furthermore, I’ll never say Jadis didn’t know what they wanted; they most certainly did, and I liked their confidence and appetite—i.e., it made me feel desired as “femme” in ways that were slowly starting to emerge. Little did I know I was in for a world of hurt—the surviving of said hurt sending me careening fortuitously into Cuwu [who, let it be said, cared for me far better than either Zeuhl or Jadis]! Healing hurts, and generally encompasses a fair amount of trial and error before we “stick the landing.” To that, Jadis was the whore TERF-and-SWERF [that was a Florida pun] who policed my work to contain said work. As such, I was “half-prepared” to resist and accept them; i.e., warts and all, the entire ordeal something I’ve already written about far more than I can, here! Needless to say, my time with Jadis certainly was [in]formative; i.e., regarding what Sex Positivity ultimately became! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Jadis [or up your ass for all I care]!

Closer to Jadis [and Radcliffe’s] school of hard knocks, Smile is less cuddly and cute when showing how this triangulation works; i.e., on public fears of mental illness as stigmatized, thus misunderstood, allowing the demon to invisibly manipulate both sides by pitting them against each other to get what it wants: a host it acquires by alienating and isolating the heroine from her inexperienced, judgmentally ableist friends. It’s a charm offensive, but a brute-force once; i.e., aftercare entirely absent from the equation, replaced with love-bombing and diminishing returns leading into rapid cycles of immense attention and total neglect.

To it, you never really know someone until you know what they want. Zeuhl, for example, was also cold, but only showed it after they got the money and sex from me they demonstrably craved[15]. By comparison, Jadis wanted to harm me; i.e., because it made them feel strong concurrent to their own personal-and-ongoing torment [the memories of their own abusive mother haunting them]. So harm me they did, then tossed me aside like trash. This is their story as it survives inside mine.

Beyond my exes, Smile wants to scare us, but the reasons why aren’t immediately clear. Rather, the demon smiles at its prey because it knows what she knows—that only she can see what’s happening. No one believes her despite her being a therapist [a lived, hysterical reality for female experts doubted by their often-male or sexiest female colleagues]. It’s drawn to, and preys on, her repressed trauma and tendency to fawn, but feeds as much off the active panic its deceptions cause her from second to second. To this, the demon is as skilled a liar as it is a serial killer—one that makes her friends see a “crazy” woman when she isn’t crazy. She only seems/feels crazy to her critics, who shout “Curses aren’t real!” Oh, honey, but they are; they are!

All war is based on deception; Jadis’ strength was a performance they used to get to me/use me until I could no longer be dominated. The moment I fought back, they dropped me like I was hot. Until then, they held everything over my head—doing so to the point that, once there was seemingly “nowhere else” to go, the implications felt simply “too dire”; i.e., to realize I could leave whenever I wanted, and I wanted to stay because I thought I could fix them and return to normal. Except things never were normal, and Jadis used that against me, too; they thought it was adorable and told me so—but now I know better and can hear what their simpering face really said: “You’re trying so hard, but you’re wrong!” Not Two Stupid Dogs [which the quote refers to] but one too-stupid dog that its handler was abusing on purpose! Some people harm their pets; i.e., different strokes for different folks.

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

Keeping with Hogle’s narrative of the crypt—re: “to stand on ashes of something not quite present”—Gothic curses remain partially imaginary but have physiological effects [tremors] felt through profound emotional disturbance; i.e., most notably evocations of total destructive power and obscurity [re: the mysterium tremendum[16]]. To this, Radcliffe was queen, and so was Jadis; i.e., a futile escape, the queen-in-question beckoning her caged prey to stop fighting and simply give in. They lived for it, coddling me like a child yet happy to punish me for any perceived flaw that they—Smaug on their hoarded pile of gold—could imagine. And for someone who was otherwise imaginarily braindead, Jadis had endless vision regarding the wrongs formerly committed against them; i.e., as avenged through me as their then-favorite scratching post. In doing so, they forgot the golden rule of all BDSM: “Hurt, not harm.”

For Jadis, any pain they caused wasn’t for genuine healing towards all parties, but something to fatten up and eat, ad infinitum. Jadis was a truly a glutton for punishment. Now, I summon them again; i.e., as the ghost of the whore who raped me, and one whose better half is the one I divided from its actual physical self; re: I buried one side and left it behind, but embraced the fiction of Jadis in ways that could assist in developing Gothic Communism: to summon “them,” like a demon, to “rape” me without harm. Just like Radcliffe! Well, sort of.

Of course, the idea is more fun than the reality—doubly so if you’ve survived trauma before; i.e., you want something Numinous you can play with, thus control to some degree of calculated risk. That’s what ludo-Gothic BDSM is all about, and it stems from Jadis and I, but also my life-long chasing of the Numinous based on older abuse from my childhood into my adult life. This isn’t quite “terror” as Radcliffe sold it, nor her idea of “horror” that she assigned posthumously to Matthew Lewis. It was both, and remains something I summon to ride out my own passions; i.e., coded into me by the material world: a woman having survived these storms [and their fabrications’ promised violence[17]] to say in response to my old captors, “My kingdom is as great as yours; you have no power over me!” I survived, and am “savin’ all my lovin’ for someone who’s lovin’ me!” Fucking oath, queen!

In turn, female/feminine sensitivity to transgenerational trauma and inheritance is conveyed as monstrous-feminine allegory through Smile. On one hand, its “inspiration porn” format fetishizes the struggle of the Gothic heroine; i.e., within the chronotope, enduring religious passion in the face of an alien menace [a cryptonym for historically male abusers]. Conversely, its culmination of the heroine’s fatal reunion with her ruinous childhood home [Freud’s unheimlich attached to the human face as “wrong” through the Uncanny Valley effect; e.g., Hannah Gadsby’s question: “Have you ever seen someone yawn with their teeth clenched?”] provides a startlingly frank critique of the Gothic inheritance fantasy as doomed. As something to deromanticize through a ghost of the counterfeit, the movie operates in defense of disabled people as legitimately oppressed by the status quo; i.e., Austen’s parody of Gothic audiences calling the respective horrors in The Mysteries of Udolpho or The Monk “deliciously dreadful.”

Like Catherine Morland, the heroine thinks she can win against an unstoppable curse and dies an ignominious death: a white reader buried alive inside her own mind because she self-isolates through Gothic fiction [lying to her one-and-only friend]. The happy ending is a lie; the trauma is not. For the status quo at large, “exquisite torture” is consumer entitlement; reclaiming one’s agency in the face of such apathy is a liminal consideration for disabled people identifying with the heroine as disabled, thus something to gawk at by non-disabled persons while she’s being tortured and killed. In other words, madness is a lived reality through how people treat you based on superstitions informed by stories of stories, of stories of stories, in praxial opposition.

So concludes another patchwork examination of my time spent with Jadis. Probably not the last, but for now it’s time for her to go back to bed! “Sleepy time, chonky one!” What’s that, you say? ”You shall never have the Necronomicon’? Oh, honey. But I’ve already written it several times over!”)

Third, the death curse (as already touched on, above); re: longevity and weapons (for revenge) are the most common trades when dealing demons and dark desire, classically leading to premature death due to human failing. With Faust, immortality is denied and the dealer with devils ripped to pieces.

As an underwritten part of the ritual, then, the demon can execute a death curse—less of a haunting and more the piloting of a fatal madness that survives inside a host victim’s mind until after their death. Postmortem, the host is robbed (of their soul and their life) and the pilot “passes” onto someone else; e.g., Pazuzu from The Exorcist (1973) or similar “imitator” demons that gleefully gaslight and isolate the victim while using their own cloned memories against them, but also the apathy of the victim’s friends and associates; re: Smile, The Dark and the Wicked (2020), or It Follows (above, 2014). Until death occurs, the attack of the demon is that of a mental “puppet master”—completely psychological and contained inside the mind of someone who sees what others cannot on account of being the demon’s “chosen” pet project, their source of childish delight and fun, their plaything for revenge. The cryptomimesis of these chains of media touch on systems of abuse and their traumas buried in the present space and time; i.e., home as alien (this extends to alien-invasion xenophobia; e.g., the “pod people” from Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

Ghosts are generally incorporeal and well-suited to the curse as a trigger mechanism, whereas demons can assume physical forms (or steal them) that hide a final “true form.” Physiology aside, the largest difference between a demon and a ghost is the demon’s emphasis on active mobility that not only can physically travel, but does so through rituals and bargains, not passive transference. Demons tend not to be limited to a space or container inside the space, while still treating the people they encounter as the vector like ghosts do. When the vector succumbs to the curse, demons exploit their death as part of a larger scheme of transference, like a con, ruse, or virus (e.g., AIDS). Yet even when death occurs, the victims “live on,” either inside the demon or as a physical “shield” for the demon to taunt the living with: during the liminal hauntology of war conveniently requiring medieval “medical” methods to debride the infected household of any Black Death in the flesh (Christian calls to violence, the mad scientist husband killing his possessed wife [the “weaker” sex] to “get” the demons before they get him): the killing of the Bride of Frankenstein!

Fourth, exquisite torture; i.e., the “tormenting” of the privileged. The idea, as we’ll see, comes from Radcliffe liking to be tortured by demons, but whose own proto-BDSM retained their harmful and exclusionary conservative elements. To it, demons cross over into the mortal plane; i.e., when summoned to torture the summoner before the summoner dies. Torture, however, can occur within boundaries of play during power exchange that don’t involve harming anyone; re: the sex-positive BDSM motto, “hurt, not harm,” preventing terminal domestic abuse by camping vaso vagal dogma (above).

This being said, Western canon primarily concerns itself with coercion, knife dicks and unironically threatening recipients whose manufactured harmful tortures become something to feel fascination towards. Generally it does so by inserting a feeling of xenophobic invasion (usually unto a pretty white maiden) according to a privileged position compounded by a displaced fear of the outside; i.e., not just the ghost of trauma, but a crafty and childlike, psychosexual demon of colonial guilt, rape victims, carceral violence/the sadomasochistic torture dungeon (from De Sade, onwards, but borrowed from chronotopes of the same Neo-Gothic corpus), etc.

Experienced by a privileged person/group playing around with things they know they shouldn’t, some demons evoke Hogle’s ghosts of the counterfeit; i.e., the initial admonishment as conservative at heart, evoking a psychological fear/fascination with looking at these traumas from afar—e.g., the ruins of Ca’n Dar, followed by Kandar Castle and Arthur’s Castle in the Evil Dead sequence (a counterexample being Giger’s derelict ship containing its own demon tied to the company’s corporate past being something to critique in neoliberal terms).

It’s also worth noting the hybrid nature of many demons during these tortures; e.g., in Evil Dead, you actually have demons that are ghostlike and zombielike—the disembodied ghost and its possession/self-mutilation of the host’s flesh that suddenly rots like a corpse, and the revelation of a final, otherworldly demonic “true form”; i.e., “fully” demon, shedding the disguise: the heteronormative “us” (whose bread-and-circus, “gore porn for white English people” dates back to Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, and whose “shooting demons in the face” revenge fantasy is the avenging of white people/tokens from dark, chaotic forces; i.e., the palimpsest of the Aliens-meets-Evil-Dead-II violence in Doom stemming from the far-further-back semi-blind pastiche of Shakespeare’s hyperbolically gory Titus Andronicus[18]as “dark comedy” in the basic sense of the definition: having a happy ending against the forces of darkness—the queen of the Goths, in Titus’ case).

Keeping these four differentiating factors in mind, let’s now consider several performative problems present within the canonical demon summoning ritual, then move on to how we can approach their material history as Gothic Communists; i.e., by looking at older derelicts that have humanized demons, but also demonized workers and chattel camping rape through exquisite “torture” (a sort of “demonic vibing”).

Canonical Demonology and Torture: Summoning Racism and Other Bigotry (feat. Evil Dead Rise)

The primary problem with canonical demonology is it is inherently hierarchical, racist (ethnocentric) and punitive; e.g., Evil Dead Rise (2023) showing a young mother go insane from wandering womb’s “placental” transference, absorbing herself and her family into a demonic legion reversal of Civilization (the same idea borrowed from the 2018 Color Out of Space and its mom-child tokophobic egregore). Such distractions cryptonymy is very Freudian and regressive, the white-functioning family destroyed by a pre-Western “primordial” quaking at the myth of the dark continent (and Archaic Mother) come pruriently home to roost!

Simply put, it’s not just DARVO/obscurantism but pearl-clutching—a haunted house replete with the usual bloody hysteria Kubrick couldn’t see past in his own cosmic-nihilist Shining focused on a single unhomely location: the angry house eating the family and turning them into savage cannibals that a tokenized white savior (the Amazon, in Rise‘s case) must send back to Hell before they rape and eat everyone; re: the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection furthered through military optimism, aka peace through strength, quelling tokophobic unrest (the fear of nation rebirth, in this case) on the home front: Creed’s murderous womb. “The axe forgets, the tree remembers”; so does our rememory play with the furious monstrous-feminine dead from all walks!

There’s a lot of medieval puns going on, here—a cycle of undead metaphors that speak ominously (through death omens) to a rising return of the living dead tied to a space’s buried crimes (the appearance of discovery of a found “lost” document), and said crimes coming alive through demonic possession; i.e., as an inquisition that gets to the truth of things through cruel-and-unusual torture. Demonic rituals are summoning rituals; during their canonical treatment, torture is expected from different participants: the demons, the sacrifice, the servants and the state (and other tropes; e.g., the Fool from Cabin in the Woods, 2011, walking through all of Radcliffe’s codifiers). It needn’t be outright execution, but barring non-lethal treatments like exorcism or incarceration, state decree tends to favor barbaric, destructive violence dealt to summoner and demon alike.

Evoking the medieval treatment of witches, the prescribed “treatment” for “possessed” individuals is the same: bodily dismemberment. Be this with firearms, power tools or incineration, the command from on high is improvised capital punishment in the modern age. This makes punishment of demonic practitioners a form of prescribed bullying administered from a position of supreme material advantage—formerly the Church, surviving through a Cartesian Protestant ethic.

The same could be said of the canonical demon’s unfair advantage over the victim, the latter forced to endure a bloodletting trial or test of wills exacted by a vengeful or sadistic god (the husband and his chainsaw, chopping her up like firewood/a golem). In short, demonic scheming and torture is the West’s generation of a perverse, deified bogeyman that feels alien compared to the holy Western faiths, including the Enlightenment as supreme but also “under attack” (re: the Protestant ethic in late-stage, neoliberal Capitalism). As such, the man of reason becomes justified in administering violence against state-invented enemies; i.e., given the mark of death/Cain by a witch-finder general telling him to kill.

A ritual isn’t just the interaction between the summoner and the summoned; it includes the state’s totalitarian perspective as something to force upon would-be viewers of demons on state grounds; re: the antagonizing of nature leading to its demonic revenge and the state quelling that through monomythic force.

For the audience looking in, though, the bargain and its extreme prejudicial handling are meant to be witnessed and discouraged, but also reinforced relative to the state as in control of its territories (re: Weber): the demon as dangerous thus deserving of punishment (said punishment extending to anyone foolish enough to make a pact with powerful outsiders during a foreign plot retrojecting the oppressed through chronotopic diaspora). The demon also becomes a displaced version of forbidden terror games to play and enjoy with others; i.e., forbidden/strange fruit.

As such, the torture of watching things denied to us (vigilante violence punching up or down) suddenly becomes acceptable; i.e., as ritualized forms of punishment and inheritance anxiety for those thinking about misbehaving when the apocalypse eventually comes back around, during a bust (especially in sexual matters, non-martial sex being treated as a death sentence): thought crimes, cloned into copies that pass the horror cryptomimetically along!

(exhibit 46a: Echoes of bicycle face, then, is the fearsome death face, from Ringu [1998]—the mouth open wide like the heroine from Smile [the idea popularized in part by Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) as the witness finds the dead body and sees its dead face, in the forest]. Similar to ahegao and caused by seeing that story’s version of the Medusa, Sadako Yamamura, coming into the body through the mouth via force-feeding/oral rape, the idea is taken to its logical extreme with films like Inside, Martyrs and Audition [2008 and 2009]; i.e., that derive a grotesque pleasure and special, metaphysical sense of “seeing” begot from extreme torture; re: Kristeva’s Powers of Horror [1981, the same year Evil Dead came out] outlining abjection as a process while speaking appreciatively to Lewis’ side of the Radcliffean rivalry. This being said, Death as something to worship makes sense, as nothing is stronger than it; i.e., empire is doomed to be devoured by Mother Nature as something to fear in hauntologized forms, said forms loaded hideously with older bigotries and misconceptions speaking to current ones under Capitalist Realism. Provided we can harness its regenerative power to develop Gothic Communism, then no harm, no foul! But state shift is a real and pressing concern.)

The same basic conditioning is told from the victim’s perspective in canonical narratives. Sometimes, the victim is slowly broken down until the demon gains access, or becomes doomed according to a fateful hour when absolute takeover is inevitable (re: Smile); other times, it happens quickly and without warning (a rule of thumb: the more build up, the bigger the impact). Whatever the case, the canonical plight is of unwanted entry into the victim’s mind, making them do terrible things they cannot stop or remember until they inexplicably die, face frozen in fear (with spontaneous death tied to guilt or shame being a regular cause-of-death in Gothic stories).

It makes for good drama insofar as a conflict is displayed (re: Faust), but among the esoteric gore is all-but-useless as a material critique outside of depicting torture in supernatural terms (which is still a clue about the material conditions of a given society according to its torture-porn diet). There’s certainly something to be said about the phenomenology of mental illness, through such strategies of misdirection; i.e., a fear of said illness, but also a likening of it with dark oracles who communicate, as demons do, through bodily torture; e.g., schizophrenia being as much a testament to self-harm as it is to harm others:

In canonical stories, though, a demonic sickness of the victim exploitatively mirrors psychological abuse as something to “glut,” subsisting prior to activation within a physical object or associate ritual that haunts the victim once exposed; e.g., the VHS tape, from Ringu or Evil Dead’s elusive Necronomicon being as much a nod to Peter Lavenda as Lovecraft; re: McKee’s correct notion of a

proto-orientalism, combined with historical illiteracy—or perhaps committed distrust of “history” as an elite conspiracy in itself—[that] has led to the mystification of antiquity as something incomprehensible, occult, or even satanic. This has opened the door for both outright fraudsters and what Laycock calls “moral entrepreneurs” to write their own chimerical histories, inserting the names of ancient places and deities into imagined struggles between cosmic good and evil. These faulty constructions of history depend on ignorance (source: “The Misappropriation of Ancient Texts,” 2015).

To it, fascism and its stupidity are a virus that travels through cryptomimesis inside the larger Gothic mode!

So while Walpole and Lewis’ rape castles are demonstrably places that feared the medieval period to allow for a critique of their present worlds, such spaces weren’t immune to colonization by entrepreneurs like Radcliffe. Though Radcliffe, herself, wouldn’t have touched magical demons with a stick, its dark canon was immensely overused in male authors like Sam Raimi—a man whose bastardizing of The Monk embodies the same kind of neo-conservative regressions that Radcliffe embodied; i.e., a pirate is a pirate, an orc an orc, and deserving of punishment whether as a ghost or demon. The punishment is not visibly associated with state forces, but instead becomes a form of dissociate victim-blaming pinned onto “outsider” scapegoats whose Indigenous grudges “suddenly appear” as if out of thin air. Such is the ghost of the counterfeit, furthering the abjection process vis-à-vis dark monoliths in small; e.g., a book that, when opened, springs from itself a variety of barbaric miniatures not unlike Walpole’s fatal portraits, but considerably more racist and misogynistic, etc: the manwoman in the cellar!

At first blush, the demonic possession might seem exclusively coercive—i.e., full of pointless mental torture and physical dismemberment, dislocated from material conditions, and only begetting further harmful torture, thus conditioning the damsel-like viewer or detective to submit to or perform their ordinary role within state-sanctioned violence afraid of a black planet (a mix of colonial vaudeville, vampirism, demonic possession and hag horror, above). But the simple fact is, iconoclastic demonology can summon demons to parse material conditions by asking the viewer to relate to the detective, damsel or demon in unusual, iconoclastic ways (the “inoculating” goal being to expose the madness behind the hidden traumas of Capitalism through these commonplace replicas, thus acclimating oneself to the mental-gymnastic blitz of canonical abusers; re: Jadis).

The iconoclastic idea, then, is to undo the bourgeois curse by its own invitation (“Join us!”); i.e., by using it to reverse abjection, hence employ a simple, age-old trick: convincing the world the Devil (a spectre of Marx) does exist. This happens through the repurposing of age-old clichés—by humanizing the demons themselves and how we play with them in duality by fabricating any to benefit us. Despite the supernatural guise, their psychological gimmicks are very human, but also a means of expressing the human condition in iconoclastic terms; i.e., beyond the torture ritual stuck in a nonstop death loop and more as something to paradoxically enjoy through the Gothic expression of exquisite “torture” through one’s imagination as literally happening before them: the xenophobic legends that fuel it being reclaimed.

This material history can be further humanized, of course; i.e., by examining older forms that future iconoclasts can make more xenophilic, thus in favor of workers. For example, regarding Radcliffe as the coiner of the basic phrase (from our thesis volume):

when Radcliffe wrote in The Italian, “What are bodily pains in comparison with the subtle, the exquisite tortures of the mind!” she is, according to Kim Ian Michasiw, treating the presence of sublime power as “as a signal to sigh and feel exalted” (source: “Ann Radcliffe and the Terrors of Power,” 1994). Simply put, there’s a dealing with power exchange being had that’s ironic, its symptoms of ritualized pain neatly divorced from actual damage but suitably demonic all the same. Even if Radcliffe would never stoop like Matthew Lewis to actually play with literal demons, she is still summoning her own “demons” to play with through rape pastiche: bandits, Italian counts, and pirates pretending to be ghosts (with the armed and confident Ludovico boldly investigating the “haunted” room because he doubts Emily St. Aubert’s testimony and represents the cliché, plucky energy of a male protagonist bent on facing evil, but also defeating it through raw, physical force)—i.e., violent liars that prey upon the imagination of susceptible maidens, threatening them with sexual violence. As a woman, she was making demons she shouldn’t play with that illustrated her own fears, but also privilege as someone fascinated with the barbaric, faraway past. As Cynthia Wolff points out, Radcliffe’s xenophilia and demon lovers are always partially murderous and mutilating in ways that regress towards the status quo: the demon lover as the white, cis-het woman’s thrill of rape that is ultimately replaced by the fairytale wedding. To be blunt, it’s basic and colonial (source).

Such are the canonical elements we’ve just discussed, and which we can camp ourselves through ludo-Gothic BDSM profaning Raimi and company’s canonical, dogmatic idea of such stories distracting from the obvious: the inheritance of empire as something that is always in decay and letting things slip cryptonymically through the cracks!

For the rest of this subchapter portion, then, I want to examine demonic summoning and its BDSM utility during such torturous rituals; i.e., as having evolved into established canonical, psychosexual forms of the occult that strictly punish workers; re: canonical torture as something for us to camp during our own derelicts’ elaborate strategies of misdirection (demonic gibberish eluding to freedom of expression developing Gothic Communism).

This camping is fraught with compromise; re: I also write, in Volume Zero, “If Sontag was vanilla, then Radcliffe was barely ice cream” (ibid.); i.e., stuck in a nigh-religious state of neo-medieval fascination and Numinously psychosexual “martyr-style” hard kink. So while demons are aliens, Radcliffe’s were largely non-magical home invaders festooned with medieval pageantry while she sat in “horny jail.” She played it safe, but still leaned in an oddly torturous direction (bored housewife syndrome[19]). You gotta start somewhere, right?

We’ll primarily examine the canonical side of demon rituals, here. Then, in “Exploring the Derelict Past,” we’ll consider exquisite “torture”: as a form of camp taken further than Radcliffe while still building on her classic ideas about forbidden sight that make for a solid foundation; i.e., canonical torture vs exquisite “torture” in the same poetic spheres’ ghost of the counterfeit and abjection process. Each speaks to the liminal, transient position of damsels and detectives subversively tracing the treatment of demons and the demonized/chattelized left behind; e.g., from 1980s pornography and its own damsel archetype to Radcliffe’s infamously white and intrusive Gothic heroines invading a given castle as “old dark residence.”

Curiosity kills the cat, but nosy little girls developing Communism are anything but the state’s idea of well-behaved; per Gothic canon infantilizing them, they must be watched because (and again, according to the state), they can easily hurt themselves when left unsupervised. At the very least, they might cause a scandal; e.g., making homemade porn in someone else’s bed[20]! So do we demons infiltrate and destroy Rome’s nuclear model from within, just like Mary Shelley (the nerdy slut) did before us:

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

As previously stated, our intent in doing so is to move beyond the usual psychoanalytical models and analysis by engaging with demons and their messy authorship/execution in dialectal-material terms; i.e., that don’t tokenize/triangulate or muddy the waters, assisting in the state’s subversion towards xenophilic anarchy during monster-fucking torture by exposing its psychological mechanisms through the demonic peril and associate power games meant to normally pacify workers.

Said pacification happens through canonical threats of force tied to stagnant material conditions, blindly expressed in demonic rituals of agony tied to bodily harm; i.e., bourgeois torture schemes. By comparison, sex positivity couches perception and power within demonic markers of trauma that aren’t complete bullshit—often BDSM, kink and rituals of abuse directed at the inexperienced (which Radcliffe arguably was, insofar as she felt comfortable expressing herself in “polite” society); re: ludo-Gothic BDSM as, like Evil Dead’s monster mom, having a bit of old Radcliffe in it.

Again, you gotta start somewhere, and Radcliffe’s nonsense—while rather misinformed—belonged to a larger conservative trend invested wholly in profit; i.e., one that, per the ghost of the counterfeit furthering abjection, evolved into itself while serving the profit motive in ways we can steer however we want. To that, let’s continue by looking at canonical torture serving profit beyond Radcliffe, who kept her demons fairly ordinary (re: Moers’ Female Gothic versus its Male double: boys play with magic, rape and death; girls are trapped between infantilized positions of emotional disturbance and nun-like chastity, mid-investigation)!

The Evolution of Canonical Torture, cont. (feat. for-Profit Demons)

Canonical torture is gibberish, like all demonology is, but it speaks to the material world as swept up in warring dialectical-material forces: the presumption of guilt for playing with magic spells (demon BDSM and psychosexual torture) for profit; re: church DARVO evolving into a lucrative latter-day canon “speaking of the Devil”:

(exhibit 46b: Artist, top left: Emanuela Lupacchino; top-right: Leonardo Da Vinci; mid-to-bottom right: Tom Sullivan; middle-left: Dustin Twilley. Apart from female bodies and acts of creation, canonical reanimation is often associated with black magic rituals as something to confront and destroy during monomyth us versus them. Frequently these are gibberish—a ghost-of-the-counterfeit “awe” by continually “speaking in tongues” amid demonic intimations thereof. The outcome—of their Promethean power and Faustian knowledge exchange—scapegoats sex-positive forms by attaching them to cataclysm, blindness, insanity and dismemberment; i.e., the parroting of ignorance through blind pastiche made by faithful children playing with dead things during Capitalist Realism. Often the flipping of the pages as quickly as the readers do makes the books involved impossible to replicate perfectly. So instead—and like Milton—new explorers regularly invent older derelicts within the same “ancient,” cryptomimetic lineage.

But replicate it certainly does; i.e., in a highly animated “sizzle reel” of visual, palimpsestual chaos. Not only did the original Evil Dead‘s sequels inspire increasingly more violent and warlike copies; those copies inspired the FPS genre as something whose monasterial creative heritage became sacred unto itself intertextually across mediums—i.e., the book scene from Army of Darkness [1993] was, itself, copied like a counterfeit, unholy Bible in the 1997 videogame, Blood‘s 2011 mod, “Death Wish.” The power of the book as part of the endless ritual of recreation is not just its fascination with the canonical barbaric past, but “cool points” you net when having one on your wall. The canonical text becomes trophy-like, be that hand-made, copy-and-pasted, or simulated [“State of Unreal Full Presentation,” 2023]: “Demons are cool, but shooting or smashing them in the face is even cooler!”

In keeping with Radcliffe, there is a classically “male” facet to medieval manuscripts and book-binding; i.e., medieval monks sat around making them, whereas nuns were largely known [and fetishized] for taking in stragglers off the road, to care for them in times of dire need: a burden of care that privileged men, letting them write and make art, versus women being the usual caregivers… and whose blood magic ties ominously to books “bound in human flesh and inked in human blood.” Said invented literature routinely abjects Catholic and Enlightenment abuses off onto a settler-colonial “other” that speaks both to the usual tokophobic nonsense; i.e., essentializing female biology as monstrous, but also blood libel, sodomy and witch hunter language that Raimi was repeatedly leaning on; re: the murderous, wandering cannibal womb as part of a bigger monstrous-feminine conspiracy about empire-ending fears: raining period blood [the torture of the female hero losing her hand have a fetishized quality to it versus the male tough-guy act].

It’s the usual Red Scare shenanigans—with Fede Alvarez [another Rodriguez horror sell-out from south of the border] deliberately having the tokenized midwife abort the genderqueer spawn of Satan with a chainsaw episiotomy [don’t Google that], only for it to end up being a caesarean delivering Rosemary’s baby [the spectre of Marx] unto her and the unsuspecting world above [render Caesar unto us]: “Hail, Satan!” indeed; it’s the crossing of the Rubicon [with Nazis and Communists again occupying the same kayfabe shadow zone]! Such hyphenations of sex and force, but also parent confusion, speak to purity arguments regarding white women policing and delivering “pure” babies for the state: debriding a rotten womb/unweeded garden grown to seed, and with gusto!

Furthermore, it’s quite common in canonical Gothic to marry tokophobia [and Freudian prescriptions of sex and force obscuring Marxist language] to unironic witch hunts; i.e., similar to Aliens‘ own anti-Communist mirror syndrome—with Cameron’s royal Ripley clone a subjugated Hippolyta punching the Alien Queen as his Nazi-Communist Medusa, doing so for domestic abuses abjected onto colonial targets framed as “black” and “ancient” discoveries—so, too, does Alvarez tap into the same Freudian anxiety language: to furiously punch down against nature, Amazonomachia-style, under monomythic neoliberalism [the monomyth being when you punch Medusa, instead of hugging her and surrendering your power unto her during the Promethean Quest and its dialectic of the alien].

To make matters worse—if that were even possible—everything happens while literally wrapping the “ancient” patchwork “frankenbook” in Black-Veil garbage bags, and then in torturous barbed wire like some kind of fucked-up present from Jack Skellington [and whereupon a curious white male nerd (and double for Doctor Knowby from the first film) finds, in the basement of a cabin in the woods, and must cut through using bolt cutters]: a framed narrative steeped in the occult, female genital mutilation/surgical addiction and unironic sadomasochism! What’s not good for the goose also isn’t good for the gander!

“History ends first in tragedy and then in farce.” But truth be told, it’s a dialectical-material cycle that doesn’t so much “end” as loop in on itself. And if revolutionary cryptonymy peels back the infernal concentric pattern’s onion-like layers to free Medusa, then complicit cryptonymy is a concentric gaslight to argue for Medusa’s continued, indefinite stay at the asylum: a rape without end, supervised by unscrupulous and knowing-better doctors [fighting back not with scalpels, but crowbars nail guns, chainsaws and—in Army of Darkness‘ case—kung fu and homemade explosives heralded by hilarious-if-blind camp (“Strange one!“) and admittedly awesome music; re: Quixote’s gonna Quixote, weird canonical nerds aping the legend of King Arthur [through a bad rendition of Cervantes and Mark Twain, but a faithful one of Aliens and Doom] to seek revenge against nature as monstrous-feminine under American neoliberalism—the biggest joke being they actually think they’re estranged from privilege]!

In keeping with the ghost of the counterfeit/abjection process, the dogma, here, is literally Satanic Panic; i.e., to punish the audience for looking while simultaneously preaching to the choir about the horrors of colonialism, which it blames on witches [re: Federici]: “She’s burning in Hell, you sick fuck!” Alvarez has the daughter of a white man say to him in a dirty basement, albeit after he straps her to a post and sets her on fire; i.e., it’s the point of admission—white moderates paying to see a black passion/rape not just of the girl, but of religion itself, then patting themselves on the back for not being either of the parties onscreen [or so they think]:

Gaslighters gonna gaslight, but it’s something we can study for our own reasons; i.e., to learn how they work and [re]present their arguments [the megachurch of Hollywood preaching to the choir]. To that, Evil Dead 2013 [and its[21] producers] let Alvarez revel in torching the nuclear family model; i.e., by speaking guiltily to the false preacher as a vice character would, only to exonerate the proceedings by torturing a young white girl [echoes of Salem] to death, Pentecostal-style[22]; i.e., kettling the accused/policing the virgin/whore, who—suddenly fed up—tells daddy how she really feels [after having killed her mother because women often police their children under Patriarchal abuse; re: Jadis] and to which he responds not by slapping her wrist or face, but shooting her evil dead; re: “suffer not a witch to live!”

It’s the same-old Shadow of Pygmalion; i.e., one that King and De Palma famously milked with Carrie [1976] years beforehand—a man from Maine, first imitated by a local Michigander and then by a director from Mexico also abusing Galatea [and likening demonic possession to drug use, speaking to the American War on Drugs poisoning his country]. By doing so, Alvarez is aping Raimi all the way back to Radcliffe—effectively saying to the audience, “See, see! She really was an evil demon who went mad and killed her mother!” It’s a “boundaries for me, not for thee” precursor to aborting Communism that would happen later in the movie; i.e., middle-class pearl-clutching defending Christendom and demonizing Free Love as Manson-esque: for the ghosts of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, deathly afraid of outsiders! All witch hunts have a bourgeois class character to them, pimping Galatea for their police state’s gated communities.

It’s also a foreigner assimilator’s fear-fascination with persecution mania, lionizing American fascism by “both-sidesing” genocide; i.e., by having the witch—a captive audience in a larger summoning ritual during reactive abuse—go mad: both tied to the stake, but also curiously immune to Baptist sermons of fire and brimstone! The accusers don’t just want her to break; they’re literally praying for it, and all to maintain their own place in the world—i.e., the punitive and white-supremacist, patriarchal hierarchy endorsing and reenacting a self-fulfilling prophecy that requires the Patriarch to put her down “for her own good”: “I love you, baby!” Antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine, then put her cheaply to work during “Holocaust by bullet.” Such are the disgusting refrains of so many in-house rapists and child abusers, poaching their own blood, mid-libel. Don’t worry, asshole; she’ll be back to haunt you and your kind! You can’t kill us, and Medusa never dies, but instead outlives her abusers and their twisted moral code!

That is only the beginning of our revenge, its culmination being to build a better world by bringing Hell to Earth and smashing Capitalist Realism: showing these lapdogs the error of their ways/unbridled hypocrisy while illustrating mutual consent in a gloriously an-Com society having subverted such dogma for good [capital being a system that relies on routine defilement to perpetuate itself for profit, and which we—endlessly tortured by said system—only grow stronger in united opposition]: the whore free to dictate their own destiny unfettered from state pimps [and their geek shows’ unironic chainsaw strap-ons]! She smiles as she burns because she sees what the elite cannot, and bravely says the quiet part out loud; i.e., in ways they cannot hope to censor with their money and status—the monstrous-feminine avenger castrating the pimp as a rapist she avenges the victims of, doing so with radical glee. Revenge is sweet! “Say ‘cheese’ and die, Sisyphus!” [with R.L. Stine capitalizing on the fatal portrait while selling it to kids; re: “Death by Snu-Snu,” 2024]. “Owo, what’s this!”

A girl can dream! Until then, we demon mommies can play with the past to transform it away from monomythic violence!)

Sexuality is a regular visitor (and casualty) during bad BDSM and demons can certainly be sexy when subverting said BDSM. Indeed, sex sells, but occurs historically under Capitalism as coercive sex; i.e., as a means of voyeuristically looking at sexualized workers being slowly (or not so slowly, above) euthanized, again and again, mutilated by demon-lovers-in-disguise (cops) policing the whore as she speaks to her own rape when summoned (running a train on Medusa’s corpse, one “phallic” daughter at a time). Religion is a sham run by charlatan pimps, which Max Powell put best in Peeping Tom (1960): “The kinds with girls on the front covers and no front covers on the girls.” We’ll get to that history more, in a moment.

For now, let’s focus on the summoning ritual mid-subversion as a form of shifting power exchange, gradually mutating canonical usage; i.e., the canonical “gargoyle” fixated on purely psychological fears (of the dark, but also things of the dark, which are rooted in real-world scapegoats) that slowly has become more and more “perceptive” by more and more marginalized authors sticking their toes into the psychosexual BDSM world: to escape canonical demonization and chattelization; re: the damsel as submissive/regressive, the detective as relatively dominant, and demons offering up emancipatory forms of power exchange, mid-duality (with ironic variants of the sub, switch and dom performed by us).

Obviously past attempts at doing so were far tamer (from a class war standpoint) than recent ones, but remained products of their own times; re: Radcliffe, as we shall see, was positioned to write the exact stories she wrote, while still engaging in BDSM antics bearing out a supernatural façade: the rights of women as more than passive sex objects, able to pursue and explore demonic sex. Whatever the author’s dialectical-material leanings, language and technology are paramount to achieving their end result. Indeed, the “incubator” is media itself as occupied, mid-altercation/-intervention.

Often an occult presence lives inside a piece of media that can harbor ghosts, but just as easily summon demons to overpower the viewer with. Doing so constitutes an exchange of power and knowledge in demonic fashion; i.e., through the performers that represent symbols of domination and fear as increasingly sublimated or subverted. However “occult” these may seem, their imaginary origins still apply to workers and chattel in the material world. Confronted with a “demon,” some will want to unironically punish it; others will see the demon as a mode of self-expression reverse-abjecting the actual torturer’s state-sanctioned bias: “Spank me, mommy!” Medusa is rape-proof as a means of self-defense and attack; i.e., as anti-predation guerrilla (asymmetrical/counterterror) warfare saying anisotropically to her attackers, “Look, don’t touch!”

(exhibit 46c: Artist: Frederico Escorsin. Medusa isn’t simply a metaphor for ancient female rage and forbidden wisdom; it symbolizes her power to reverse abject her own trauma through a ludo-Gothic BDSM hijacking of the entire creative process—i.e., sending said gaze and history of rape back at her attackers to chill them [and the profit motive] to stone; re: the whore’s revenge. Everyone loves the whore; and whereas demons are traditionally invented to serve ideological roles pursuing the profit motive through constant austerity and “vigilance,” female and/or non-white and GNC demons like the Gorgon canonize the exploitation of whores [female or not] by men [and their black-penitent double standards].

Carved from stone, Medusa is just as much a vengeful “Galatea” as she is a snake demon. By turning the [traditionally male/tokenized Man Box] gazer into stone, she traps them in a frozen state like Medusa herself once was, thereby protecting herself [and other potential/actual victims] by freezing the rapist in place. It’s not so much in a literal sense, but whose reactionary disgust gives away would-be abusers of “demonic” women and other state-appointed degenerates; e.g., black men and their BBCs; i.e., those selected for punishment because their mere open existence defies the status quo as paradoxically needing someone to rape. Her cursed existence suitably hyphenates mouth/fang and vagina/knife to hatch through birth trauma outside the womb [from Frankenstein‘s own extra-natal commentaries on development weaponizing Communism as such].)

A large part of this practice goes back to the death omen as something to envision through vague symbols of ambiguous danger and power. Death, in Gothic media, is generally something to gaze upon—a “darkness visible” whose paradox amounts to beholding that which “cannot” be seen.

A common canonical tactic is selective punishment: When gazed upon, the capture and release of the demon(s) as expressions of trauma through power exchange will famously “destroy” the viewer (exhibit 46c). This annihilation varies depending on the “power source,” but also the onlooker as a pair of eyes given to the audience by the author. Ghosts, for example, can trap humans in a similar state of frozen death, delivering trademark sensations of live burial. While demons like Medusa can also do this, the modern Promethean Quest involves a more transactional Faustian exchange; i.e., negotiated dealings in unequal, forbidden and dark exchange/radical transformation vis-à-vis power, knowledge and desire, but also bouts of informed consent/punishment (whereas Medusa was simply hunted down during collective punishment [a war crime] and beheaded without discussion, modern iterations of her demon are far more chatty before/after the torture begins).

As we have seen, negotiated appearances can be playful “tortures,” or serious trials/death curses. However, there’s always a misbehaving element to the ritual on both sides:

• moral panic—privileged, unwitting children playing with the occult, dating back to Radcliffe’s nosy heroines.
• persecution—dissidents more used to state violence who find themselves dealing with “demons” that are hardly divorced from the giving and receiving of normalized police abuse; e.g., the chav teens vs the police, from Attack the Block (a gutter ballet that also includes extraterrestrial demons, 2011).

Under these sheltered or besieged circumstances, the canonical Numinous becomes an especially effective “keep out” sign for the elite—the proverbial skull-and-crossbones preceding an angry divinity that exudes total, alien power (the Numinous) associated with capital authority/punishment and the state; i.e., the latter putting people to death to uphold profit through abject demon rituals having evolved: in constant praxial opposition with franker and braver testimonies occupying the same shadow zone. Regression is always a threat, but one that paradoxically must be faced by those who refuse to conform: we monsters (the state will never let us).

It becomes immensely important, then, to understand what threatens workers while experimenting with playful forms of “torture”; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM summoning and playing with older demons by consciously embodying them to become more sex-positive/Gothically mature than Radcliffe, Raimi and Alvarez were. This happens through the ritual itself as something to harness and control, not blindly worship as canon (Jade, the stalker of my partner Crow, for example, loved Evil Dead provided you didn’t critique it—any more than you’d critique police violence in Ghostbusters; i.e., its own hunting of the harvest through controlled opposition; re: “Cornholing the Corn Queen,” from Volume One).

Something as simple as a hand on one’s throat can denote a threat—one established through trust inside a “violent” ritual and its playful language of “torture” (re: “Healing from Rape,” also from Volume One). Playing with trauma is precisely the point, placing “violence” in quotes to provide a buffer between one’s lived trauma and said buffer’s power to stave off further violent acts; i.e., through an apotropaic, intersectionally solidarized pedagogy of the oppressed surviving in the shadow of police violence as alienating everyone differently. In this instance, the player and the audience are often one-in-the-same, demanding “torture,” or the playful threats of peril, which signify different things depending on who’s watching and who’s being tortured, etc, when healing from rape (re: Volume One).

Surviving rape and preventing it systemically are as much about overcoming shame, mid-play. The truth hurts, but it hurts so good (with Le Brock’s “walking womb” being as much a nod to Abel Ferrara’s 1981 Ms. 45, in John Hughes’ 1985 Weird Science (next page)—but also the same neo-conservative wish fulfillment of the Ancient Athenian Amazon [and latter-day femme fatales, 1800s-onwards[23]] being revived from old spare parts to thrill the nuclear model, but ultimately uphold it, below): teenage wet dream or coach for uncontrolled opposition? You be the judge, and make her in your own image (or vice versa, you in hers)!

The determining factor—of these tortures being “exquisite” or not, thus sex-positive or not—is the appreciative or appropriative nature of the torture itself taking place. Catharsis, in sex-positive forms, is achieved from revisiting trauma in playful, xenophilic forms, then healing from it by establishing a sense of agency over one’s own body and mind attached encouragingly to larger structures we alter first inside ourselves; re: liberation first happens inside a smaller labyrinth of the mind, before going out into larger labyrinths inside larger labyrinths, mise-en-abyme (with Plato’s cave being equally concentric): half-real liminalities occupied by demons as liminal beings trapped between fiction and non-fiction, onstage and off.

Gothic novels and their many threats present demons cryptonymically to detectives/damsels, but also rape play more broadly as something the reader can choose to vicariously confront. Simply put, demons symbolize rape by possessing their victims, exuding total control over them by forcing them to subject themselves to all manner of terrible things. Yet, the demons, trauma they intimate, and ritual itself can all be hijacked by the assigned submissive—a recipient “author” of pain who chooses their fate in relation to whatever they summon: “unspeakable” stories that threaten a lack of control—usually tied to violent, often sexual impulses, but also demonic personas’ calculated risk—as things that pass through the performer as inhabited by a presence they choose to let inside of themselves: the evil within becoming the evil everywhere, tramp-stamped for camp (say that ten times fast).

(exhibit 46d: Model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard. The thrill of false danger goes both ways—from dom to sub, but also as delivered by Dark Fathers and Mothers of gentle and strict forms to varying degrees; e.g., Radcliffe’s rapacious “demon lover” taken to supernatural, xenophilic extremes, by Bunny and myself—my art speaking to their ace public nudism, demonic aesthetics and love for exhibiting BDSM [especially the receiving of pain as something to give back to the audience]. It’s Bunny’s way of saying they love us. Right back atcha, babe!)

Similar to general BDSM roles, the line between damsels, detectives and demons is not wholly discrete, in ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Gothic counterculture—a concept we’ll unpack much more, during Volume Three). The power of the heroine to summon the demon, for example, frequently denotes a sexual interest or agency—an activity unto itself that, not too long ago, would have been entirely forbidden to women regardless of what they were summoning.

For example, though hardly overtly Satanic, the established rules of literature forbid Catherine Morland—and by extension, Jane Austen—from “summoning” Henry Tilney as an object of a lady’s desire. In doing so, Austen’s Northanger Abbey pushed female desire into verboten spheres, gleefully taking all the credit:

for, though Henry was now sincerely attached to her […] I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him [underlining by me] had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an [sic] heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own (source).

Though incredibly tame by modern standards, Austen’s parody of the Gothic (and Radcliffe) constitutes a cracked door that, when thrown wide, pushes society headlong into sex-positive realms! In short, Austen’s critique of Radcliffe inspired my own (see: Volume Zero).

Furthermore, replete with gender trouble, ironic power exchange and appreciative peril, BDSM rituals expanding on Austen (or Lewis) can become friendly through the demons, damsels, and detectives they display. Roles can be switched around, with traditionally submissive parties allowing themselves to exude agency within the Gothic mode no matter how monstrous-looking the participants are: choosing to sleep with whomever they summon, during rituals founded on mutual consent during unusual directions (and degrees) of power exchange. This extends to the demon, which can find themselves bound to the arrangement of fulfilling the sub’s desires. Goodness me! What scandalous dalliance and coquette!

As such, the demon is no longer a simple butcher of cis-het women, nor an occupier of their bodies against their will; the owners of those bodies subvert canonical demonology by acting as sex-positive vessels of demonic power—i.e., to give and receive “torture” that denies the canonical torturer exclusive access to helpless victims by making would-be victims the arbiters of forbidden knowledge: demonology as a harmless state of existence. As such, workers choose how they want to engage with demonic sex, dictating the course of whatever actions transpire. So do we put the kinds of psychotic torturers chasing the whore in Evil Dead out of their misery!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

For example, Bunny is asexual in person, but delights in presenting themselves in a sexual manner through iconoclastic artwork they sometimes make (thus negotiate) with others. Walking the line between slutty angel/devil, but also bratty virgin/whore (teasing but ultimately saying no to sex; i.e., as a form of power exchange that disempowers sexist catcalling men, first and foremost), Bunny’s awesomely paradoxically power lies in self-expression through demonic art; i.e., that allows Bunny (and their fat demonic ass, above) to perform within negotiated boundaries: as someone who funded my own work, and who I have repeatedly paid tribute towards, over the years! As such, we show separately and together how power is something you give and take to prevent rape, generally by putting “rape” in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM (thus Gothic Communism) as a joint-venture[24]. Always has been, my dudes!

Better still, said performance has the added consequence of startling canonical proponents—a kind of invitation to show their true colors to Bunny’s audience by acting upset (what the kids call “self-reporting”). There’s no “Faustian bargain” taking place, merely a revelation of who the real abusers are; i.e., between what I call “the demonic trifecta,” or damsels, detectives and demons exploring the derelict past for its torturous energies having revelatory potential, mid-cryptonymy! To form boundaries to force our abusers to cross them and be witnessed intentionally doing so.

Introducing the Demonic Trifecta

In this talismanic/apotropaic sense of class, culture and race warfare married to iconoclastic poetics divorced from canonical ones but stuck in the same cryptonymic room, demons and their BDSM constitute a specific kind of mental offering through Gothic poetics—of power and knowledge to the viewer as potentially one of three things, but more probably a liminal combination within the oppositional praxis of ritualized torture:

• damsels, or persons conditioned to be tortured (masochists) or disempowered (subs)
• detectives, which “walk the line,” often from a damsel-esque and/or regressive position, moving towards/away from a demonic position of power exchange (switches)
• demons, or persons conditioned to torture (sadists) or (dis)empower (doms)
• or imitations of these behaviors in the overall code that oscillate/reverse the ritualized threat and power exchange in some shape or form

We’ll keep examining this “demonic trifecta” of interrelated expression much more closely in “Exploring the Derelict Past” (and good play vs bad play in Volume Three). For now, just remember the trifecta is accompanied by vicarious threats of mental versus overt, physical torture, “punishing” the viewer through the protagonist for seeking power not offered to them by the state; i.e., being up to no good in a voyeuristic sense: damsels in distress (sexual desire and one’s conditioned association of it with mutilative force; re: Radcliffe).

Nevertheless, physical and mental attacks are performative—are made by and towards extensions of people told through the performance. These needn’t be abusive or physical (exhibit 46c); excluding live performance art or BDSM acts, the torture taking place is not overtly happening to the audience in a physical sense; it’s occurring physiologically through the thrilling act of watching the “threat” of torture, including its ironic, exquisite forms: again, ludo-Gothic BDSM places “torture” in quotes to denote an iconoclastic liminal quality during the battle for liberation (reclaiming the Superstructure from a bourgeois Wisdom of the Ancients).

We’ll explore how mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and appreciative peril perform ironically in relation to canonical BDSM, in Volume Three. Ironic or not, I currently intend to examine how a torturous approach/outcome—be it sex-positive or sex-coercive—occurs relative to “the past” as something to demonize, but also perform and/or relate to as an art form; i.e., as a paradoxical means of exchanging unequal, forbidden and dark/fatal power and knowledge during “torture” haunted by torture, onstage and off.

(artist: Gustave Doré)

As a vicarious detective or damsel, the audience can see more than the demon of the ritual, its servants, or the so-called “sacrifice,” but also the hero solving the case or surviving its Miltonic peril as a sub, dom, or switch; the audience can also see the story from the demon’s iconoclastic point of view—i.e., the damsel or detective as demonic, but also the demon as humanized: a damsel-esque or detective-esque demon, but also a heroic role on par with the Romantic, proworker interpretation of Milton’s Satan from Paradise Lost that Percy (thus Mary) Shelley had; re, Nafi’s assertion: “According to Shelley, it was a mistake to think that Satan was intended by Milton as the popular personification of evil. This argument is still very much alive and valid today” (source). From the Shelleys to me, I wholeheartedly agree!

Neither Radcliffe nor Austen bothered with humanizing demons and their Faustian torture, but Lewis was more forthcoming by having the Devil attack heteronormative men of power in a remarkably genderqueer manner (re: Broadmoor’s “Camping the Canon” having the little devil change genders on a whim, but also its size; i.e., the smaller Matilda containing the big Devil piloting the smaller actor inside concentric veneers). Even so, Lewis still displaced the critique by pitting it against Catholic men of faith, but all the same made their dismemberment by the Devil’s claws something to absolutely relish (when I first read The Monk back in grad school, I was so excited by the horrifying ending that I woke Zeuhl up to tell them, scaring them senseless in the process; they not only forgave me, but read The Monk and loved it, too).

And frankly why not? As givers of pain, demons often receive pain themselves by becoming targets of righteous violence dressed up as “ironic” in bad faith; i.e., the sort that traditionally requires banishment from holy men or modest women, but also deputized civilians acting militantly towards an assigned target; re: moral panics, which now more than ever ties to military optimism (e.g., id Studio’s Doom aping Evil Dead without irony from 1993 to 1996 to 2016 to 2020 to 2025’s latest upcoming installment, onwards[25]): time and time again, a neo-conservative attitude directed at states enemies through tried-and-true tactics. To camp Radcliffe is to camp that and its Man-Box detectives; i.e., their policing the whore’s illegitimate Nazi-Communist (thus reprobate) existence, onstage and off.

As iconoclasts looking to liberate sex work (thus all work) from capital during Gothic Communism, we summon and play with demons, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., their hideous torture’s unknown pleasures loaded with monstrous-feminine cliché. As we do, our focus steadily remains on the proletarian element—less about “pure” psychoanalysis, thus psychological models’ fear or damage divorced from material critiques (a basic fear of the dark, for example), and more about the humanoid aspects within these areas that indicate older ways of seeing the natural-material world that are normally forbidden to us during state revenge arguments pimping whores for fear of revenge: exhibits of people (and animals) as things to intake through art, but also engorge oneself with according to what one prefers to work with and consume, demon-wise. Demons, then, are the torturous “past” revived, which makes their oft-Numinous backgrounds the consumption of pain, itself; i.e., as “religious” according to whatever the demon on the canvas is composed of, mid-engagement: flesh, stone, oil, for materials, and for methods, to suck, fuck, eat, infect, haunt, or some combination thereof.

This being said, the appearance—of canonical and iconoclastic forms—is the same, mid-dialectic, requiring dialectical-material scrutiny to parse them as they play out; i.e., doing so to tell the difference between ironic, campy damsels, detectives and sex demons versus their canonical versions. Let’s go over that (and examine the dangers of canon vs camp that affect us and animals chasing forbidden sight), then transition into “Exploring the Derelict Past.”

(artist: Heinrich Lossow)

The Difference between Canonical and Exquisite “Torture”

The primary difference between canonical and iconoclastic detectives/damsels is the iconoclastic act of choosing to be “tortured” by the “past” in ways that patently threaten psychosexual violence by camping the canon (re: Broadmoor)—namely the humanized, sex-positive elements of a demon. Investigated by detectives or “suffered” by damsels, this fatal knowledge can empower those normally exploited by Capitalism in demonic language: women, but also animals (the “Call of the Wild” chapter will examine how demonic animals—e.g., werewolves, insect demons [xenomorphs] and other “totems”—canonically operate as a source of demonic persecution, thus something to liberate from canonical phobias, mid-“rape”).

A large part of the female detective or damsel is sight in relation to the mind as traumatized by denied, forbidden vision; re: forbidden sight, hence darkness visible. One of the most famous Gothic models is, once again, Ann Radcliffe’s terror/horror binary from “On the Supernatural in Poetry”; i.e., her calling card as a means of viewing evil in relation to its exquisitely “torturous” mental effects on the audience; re:

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them […] and where lies the great difference between horror and terror but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil? (source).

To that, Radcliffe broke the capitalist mold, her best-selling stories absolutely concerned with demons and sex as things to see and experience; she just chose to hide them behind an explained supernatural—gentler ghosts as beings to demonically reanimate and expose her audience to. For her, it was explicitly improper to show but entirely acceptable to imagine rape behind the Black Veil. She would consider it wholly beneath her to ask for power in a masculine sense, much preferring a submissive position instead of a dominant one. Different strokes.

Before moving onto “Exploring the Derelict Past” and a prolonged examination of the demonic trifecta—re: of sex worker damsels/detectives and their own Promethean Quests/Faustian bargains (for the if-not-fatal-then-certainly-difficult knowledge offered by demons)—we will need to examine animals; i.e., as they tie into the kinds of worker exploitations that canonical demons represent, keeping workers horny and/or afraid, thus distracted by intimations of nature as dark, brutal and fearsome, but also inhuman, chattelized and vengeful (an idea we’ll very briefly introduce here, then unpack during the “Call of the Wild” chapter).

To that, demons in Gothic stories aren’t simply “ancient” and “derelict,” hence already-fake rediscoveries of the past as “dug up” (found footage or ancient artifact), but of course being far more recently designed regarding things mankind has dominated for thousands of years: nature as alien, criminal chattel pimped by modernity (the Enlightenment).

Lucky for us, language and imagination resist standardization[26]—have resisted standardization in the past; i.e., through the language of parody speaking to laughter as a nervous response/the best medicine; e.g., this woman falling by accident, farting because of it and laughing like a maniac (RM Video’s “Woman Trips and Farts in Front of Doorbell Camera,” 2023): an at-times-absurd (re: Camus) “rememory” attempt to hold onto the past as something to preserve from state-sanctioned genocide while farting in their faces (not only do girls fart during sex, but fart “rape” back at their rapists, then laugh at the moral outrage that ensues). These iterations can—like my cat coming to me through the dark doorway and vaguely-but-cutely asking for food—suddenly appear and demand to be fed, feeding us in exchange as we engage back and forth; i.e., with the past as a constant already-visitor. Nature is monstrous-feminine, but also smol. “Why have you forsaken me?”

The basic idea of Sex Positivity is to learn from material history as demonic, including chattelized/domesticated animals, their wild/stigmatized counterparts, and the chimeric ways all fit into demonization during oppositional praxis. Relative to these animals, iconoclasts want reconstruct past events/attempts at creative instructional insight better than those before us did: to try and reclaim what is lost in opposition to those in power by “feeding” their imaginations with monstrous things that combat blindness—a collective, organic response to the material world that helps working people “see” the material forces at work; i.e., in ways that holistically describe the inherent complexities and contradictions that emerge over time: demons as humanized instead of chattelized, returning our attention to the abuse afflicting humans and non-human animals the world over. Where they eat animals, they also eat people (re: the Omelas refrain); and nothing is sacred but universal liberation, vis-à-vis basic human, animal and environmental rights.

A Note about Our Small Friends Also Tortured by Capital

The human world certainly has the power to do good stewardship—has done so many times already. As Gaia Vince puts it:

Human culture is so powerful that it not only shapes us as individuals, but has remade the natural world too. As Dawkins points out, cows, pigs, dogs and roses are among the socially contrived inventions humans have made over the past millennia – none exists naturally. We have made these species to fulfil a human need (source: “Eugenics Would Not Work in Humans”).

In short, just as animals do not benefit from Capitalism and its search for profit, neither do humans according to Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:

The social struggles over nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives that attend the Capitalocene’s poultry bones amount to a case for why the most iconic symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone but the Chicken McNugget. / All this is forgotten in the act of dipping the chicken-and-soy product into a plastic pot of barbeque sauce. Yet the fossilized trace of a trillion birds will outlast—and mark the passage of—the humans who made them. That’s why we present the story of humans, nature, and the system that changed the planet as a short history of the modern world: as an antidote to forgetting (source).

Humans are taught not simply to eat animals, but demonize them in relation to themselves as frequently interwoven with animals as demon-chattel. Indeed, “to demonize” denotes punishment and cannibalization of a particular group by the state as it does to worship the neoliberal spear (worker/owner division, infinite growth and efficient profit) and the other qualities of capital/tools of the state!

What was once worshipped or respected before the rise of nation-states and the Enlightenment, then, has gone on to be harnessed, consumed and replicated as cheaply as possible by dead labor (the state) eating nature as “a finite web of life” prone to state shift when pushed too far. Just as demons are unnatural and tied to cheap, easy pleasure, so too are animals and (as we shall see in a moment) sex workers treated like animals—literally molded into a specific useful body type to be consumed in Capitalism’s pursuit of infinite profit. It’s literally all they care about, happy to bring about irreversible climate change if it means they can have their fix one more time (Doom Eternal 5, or whatever): “Some men [the bourgeoisie] aren’t looking for anything logical; some men just want to watch the world burn.” That’s what capital is, turning itself and its surroundings into a perpetual furnace/abattoir!

(exhibit 46e1: Artists: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard. A part of the demonic equation, here are various wild animals I encountered in Florida—minus the sushi boat, mid-right; and Jadis’ pet tarantula, Redrum, far-top-left; i.e., pets aren’t food until they are, the difference decided arbitrarily by profit in the Imperial Core.

The collage is part of an exhibit that discusses the consumption of animals under Capitalism, but also how people are systemically divided from them and nature, but also the harm that humans cause as a species throughout the Capitalocene; i.e., Richard Adam’s basic premise in his lengthy [and violent, admittedly anthropomorphic] Watership Down [1972]: “Death follows humans wherever they go.” All animals can do is run and hide [meanwhile, those treated like or compared to chattel by the state—such as persons of color or Jewish people—also run and hide, but can fight back directly and indirectly through various animalized disguises [more on this, in Volume Three]; e.g., the prey animal as something to blend with predator animals: a wolf persona with a “bunny” attitude, exhibit 65; the monstrous “broodmare,” exhibit 87a; or the Amazon mommy dom as animalistically strong and closer to nature, 102a3; etc].

To explain the sushi boat’s inclusion, then, I wanted to do my part in showing there’s no ethical consumption under Capitalism, even for me; the sushi boat is what Capitalism has turned the animal into, but also me as a human being: I eat nature in ways that are mass-produced. The animal[s] are useful for food, but also profit, whereas humans endlessly consume in ways that are useful to the elite, who consume the world for profit by demonizing its habitants and nature to chattelize them in different demonic ways. Ideally nature—both flora, fauna and the environment—should be something to preserve and help thrive as stewards thereof, not consume. In the words of Steve Irwin:

What good is a fast car, a flashy house, and a gold-plated dunny to me? Absolutely no good at all. I’ve been put on this planet to protect wildlife and wilderness areas, which in essence is gonna help humanity. I wanna have the purest oceans. I wanna be able to drink water straight out of that creek. I wanna stop the ozone layer. I wanna save the world. And you know money? Money is great. I can’t get enough money. And you know what I’m gonna do with it? I’m gonna buy wilderness areas with it. Every single cent I get goes straight into conservation. And guess what Charles, I don’t give a rip whose money it is mate. I’ll use it, and I’ll spend it on buying land [source: a 2004 interview with 60 Minutes].

As Bay denotes, however, the idea isn’t so much preservation of pre-owned land by white benefactors holding onto said land; it’s land back to the dispossessed. Nature keeps Humanity alive, to which even a neoliberal façade like Captain Planet [1990] hints at the truth through its own “bad future” narrative: “No, you fools! Without these trees, we will all die!” [source: “Two Futures Part II,” 1991].)

(exhibit 46e2: Model, top-left: Jessica Luna; artist, bottom-left: Banana Warmer; right: Marcelo Ventura. Captain Planet places the idea of “rescuing” Humanity by “saving” the planet [a damsel, not a whore] in the hands of middle class, white and tokenized/nationalized teenagers [vlogbrother’s “Why Environmentalists Hate Captain Planet,” 2019]: “The power is yours!” According to Second Thought, the neoliberal idea of personal responsibility through AstroTurf environmental activism socializes the effort through a false solution, recycling and reducing the so-called “carbon footprint,” instead of focusing on the source of the problem: the elite and their carbon production through mass production and a refusal to move towards universal degrowth and away from infinite growth, efficient profit and war [“Your ‘Carbon Footprint’ Is A Scam,” 2022]. Despite nature being framed as something to conquer in demonic language, no amount of guns can stop the climate changes on Earth induced by Humanity’s economy of rape and war versus nature. And furthermore, no amount of eco-fascism will stop total starvation/mass extinction when the planetary ecosystem collapses. Humans aren’t the virus, capital and Capitalist Realism are. The brainchild of evil white men from Columbus onwards, those are the opposite of good stewardship.)

Food and animals are, in many ways, analogous to worker demonization and exploitation, offering up their own knowledge and power as demonic sources thereof. Not all knowledge and power is palliative; sometimes, the demonic effect is Promethean/Faustian, wracking the recipient with madness and guilt (reverse abjection). For one, animals have become synonymous with private property under Capitalism, generally as food to eat, labor to exploit, or pacifying tools that keep workers calm as they’re being exploited (e.g., cats are definitely therapy animals). Anything not useful is—like Marx asserts of owning purely through usage and usage alone[27]—stupidly destroyed to our own detriment: a brainless “mulch,” horribly ground together for the elite’s heteronormative chase of profit on a global scale (which Marx failed to adequately critique, meaning we must camp his ghost, like Weber did, and make him gayer than he actually was; re: “Making Marx Gay“). Food and animals can be revived as iconoclastic art that reunites humans with nature—a witch’s familiar or little guardian-of-the-underworld that constitutes a social-asexual bond to express an open mind with, in linguo-material terms. Not all demons are sexualized, especially their natural inspirations (though there is a sexual component to anthromorphs, which “Call of the Wild” will get into).

So make a Gothic cake (or trans-inclusive vagina cupcakes like Debra Massing), but also become closer to nature outside humans by learning to see other animals as inherently valuable, too. Give your pet a cute little outfit; gamely push for more ethical (vegan) food production to combat unethical consumption under Capitalism (thus the Anthropocene as endemic to Capitalism and food production, the Chicken McNugget as abhorrent a cryptonym as a can of Coke). Try to no longer abject what is a normally relegated to slaughterhouses, instead understanding and appreciating the animals being mass produced and sacrificed under capital’s factories of death—with manufactured scarcity and food waste being cruel not just to starving people but the animals being killed. What affects them will affect us; i.e., without an ecosystem, the world will collapse and so will we, the smallest animals the most valuable (e.g., mankind is nothing compared to the little honeybees that pollinate “his” crops).

Waste not, want not. Love what you eat and where it comes from in defense of nature from the state. We are part of that equation, Cartesian thought and Capitalist Realism be damned! We not only can survive degrowth; degrowth must happen if we are to survive! Anyone who says otherwise or drags their heels is a cop—e.g., Taylor Sheridan’s protagonist for his 2024 Landman being not just an unapologetic shill for Big Oil, but written to maintain the deeply conservative attitudes that go along with Big-Oil hegemony and its ensuing industry and destruction; i.e., they can’t see anything beyond themselves, so they assist in ways that pointedly benefit them as demonstrably not poor (the bougie couple living in a boom town that treats the entire world like Midland Texas):

Capitalism wastes much, cultivated by powerful people hopelessly alienated from workers and the planet, who only see numbers on a screen and worship the nostalgia of their own awful belief system turned into seductive dramas of a “better time” that never was (the canceled future).

As Sheridan shows, their materials shape our way of thinking as being reduced to dead commodities that defend the system to the death: the endless series of trademarked, copywritten brands of plastic-wrapped and pulverized undead/demon/animal commodities. He completely sucks, apologizing for billionaire men and their privileged wives fucking everyone else over thanks to apologists like Sheridan (who Billybob obviously represents). Hillbillies can gentrify and decay like anyone else—a historical-material fact that goes back to the antebellum South, but haunts it, America and the rest of the world through expertly made copaganda like Landman, post-Jim-Crow and Lost Cause: “Won’t someone please think of the white man and his white family?” Like, fuck you, Sheridan, and your stupid white supremacist view of the world acting as “stewards” for everyone else while raping us stone dead (also, Mad Men [2007] sucks, and so does John Hamm):

In keeping with Shelley’s technological singularity, the posthuman nightmare extends to animals being replaced with artificial versions; i.e., digital images (a bit like the owl from Blade Runner), or little “tick-tock” variants that conspicuously perform labor better than their comfortably organic, living counterparts. Animals, including humans, have become more robotic in ways capital tries to enslave (missing the point of Shelley’s technophobia to copy it in bad faith).

To it, anyone banking on Humanity magically reaching a Utopian future with the robot maid from The Jetsons (1962) is taking a huge gamble; i.e., they’re banking on Capitalism actually investing in such measures, which it historically couldn’t care less about—would rather cue the fake, canned laughter from The Jetsons, a “zombie” capitalist model of the American nuclear family The Simpsons only temporarily escaped from (re: Charlie Sweatpants’ “Zombie Simpsons” [2012] being a concept we’ll explore even more at the end of Chapter One, in Volume Three). It’s all sanitized—naked and laid bare yet horribly controlled, familial, sacred: “No, it’s the children and the animals who are wrong!”

This goes both ways. Workers think the image is real while also never meeting an animal and being alienated from its pain; i.e., why it slowly went extinct. They become stupid, blind, imperiled to encounter the same fate at an accelerated rate (of rape). Consigned to a lifeless world without chonkers, who—like a witch’s familiar or natural demons more broadly—were a small bond to nature that disappears as nature disappears; i.e., because of Capitalism, not Communism (though Marxist-Leninism’s fighting of the West was incredibly harmful and led to great amounts of lasting and heteronormative environmental damage: re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Leaving the Closet; or, a Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love,” 2024). When that bond literally disappears, the animals are replaced with robots (or the C4 imposters from Caddyshack, 1980); i.e., to slowly but steadily become a metal-and-concrete “food desert,” and one where Capitalism (and its proponents; re: Sheridan) transform the landscape, people and language to “get us and our little dogs too.”

This bourgeois gaslight of the Wicked Witch invokes flying monkeys in another sense: Frankenstein abominations stitched from dead parts, made by a false, bad-faith witch (“and you are only a caricature of a witch”). Furthermore, through such persons, we’re left with bad, manmade copies of worker action that become a bad person-made copy as Capitalism tries to recruit “tokens” from different marginalized groups; i.e., into the same destructive mindset, whose division “murders to dissect,” leading to an entire society of stupid know-it-alls who can tell you all the pieces of something while it is dead, but can’t understand it while it is alive within a larger functioning whole (re: Jadis)—language, animals, people, places, objects as an assemblage.

Let’s conclude with a few cautionary points about camping demonic expression (of the Faustian sort), then move onto “Exploring the Demonic Past”!

The Dangers (and Pleasures) of Demonic Camp

Camp is all about risk and reward; i.e., it bears repeating that camp is dangerous; re: Scott’s own magical regressions, in Alien, providing a retro-future “taming of the shrew.” Demons of a more magical sort, then, are treated as oracles to police; i.e., expected to speak when prodded, then punched for it, regardless of the answer (to maintain the status quo against nature as monstrous-feminine). The public understanding of demonic art and the animal world in relation to workers, then, becomes something to constantly demonstrate and promote; i.e., one which—through different individual responses to it as a living, plastic (organic, malleable) thing—collectively fosters sex positivity as a countercultural, artistic, emotionally/Gothically intelligent and empathetic movement. When examined in hindsight, this parallel movement indicates an ongoing iconoclastic presence—a counteractive, opposing creative force whose various demonic members can transform the material world. The toll is a heavy one, if only because those loaded with Promethean knowledge are outed not simply as insane, but as demonic, “possessed” whistleblowers: Mephistopheles temping Faust!

Apart from demons, I want practitioners of Gothic Communism to employ a commune of Gothic egregores (a cryptomimetic group of ghosts as literal “ghost stories,” the pun being that each tells a different story about the same event in the material world; e.g., Rashomon, above, 1950). These, in turn, tie to our main theories (the Four Gs) as needed, mid-synthesis; i.e., to commune with the reimagined past as useful towards liberating ourselves from sex worker abuse, hence the entire planet. This forbidden sight (and its breaking of Capitalist Realism) starts in how we see popular media and people in relation to one another under the same brutal system; it includes making monsters ourselves (our camp seizing the means of production and reuniting with our alienized labor). Gothic Communism, then, is a process of detection made by inquiring minds who playfully expand their imagination with monstrous-feminine language; i.e., by using it as a kind of “educated guess” about the world. So does the detective grow informed by things, which the elite confidently describe as “mere lies”: using them to detect things that are normally forbidden to the everyday observer by state cryptonymy!

This makes Gothic Communists detectives of the beleaguered, under-attack sort—whose constant, vigilante mode of engagement with their ambivalent surroundings “ask” questions from moment to moment; i.e., in their damsel-to-whore heads that overwhelm them, the prose slowing things down to a phenomenological crawl during the mask party as a socio-ludic metaphor (the danger disco) populated with devil-in-disguise (whose disguise pastiche goes both ways, during oppositional praxis); e.g., the Tech-Noir “danger disco” scene from The Terminator playing in literal slow-motion.

Face-to-face with someone potentially dangerous, time stands still to extend the drama of whether or not the heroine and audience actually are in danger—both from the mask-wearing lothario, but also to capture the sheer intensity of going outside one’s comfort zone by “summoning” demons to begin with (often wearing masks that we’re waiting to see if they’ll take off to prove their authentic or inauthentic nature; or, in the case of the terminator or serial killers, is their actual face as an authentic infiltrator)! That’s the beauty and danger of camp!

It bears repeating, then, how Radcliffe’s demons weren’t even magical, but more the highway banditti in a mask or the false preacher courting the damsel in bad faith. Simultaneously gifted and cursed with “forbidden” knowledge—i.e., as something to teach and learn through subversive art, golems and sex dolls—the ballroom blackguard raises questions that, when asked by a sensitive soul, might save your life, but also drive you wild in parallel calculated risk!

If only for catharsis and survival, wouldn’t anyone wish to learn that kind of skill? To place “torture” in quotes, we offer our bodies to be ravished in ways that, per Radcliffe’s fictions (onto raunchier ones then and now), we might expose state hypocrisies with and push towards a happier world among the shadows; i.e., a pedagogy of the oppressed relating to shared trauma as uneven but nevertheless the “glue” (so to speak, below) that holds us together in times of crisis; e.g., rape play during ludo-Gothic BDSM teaching us how not to harm others while acting out cathartic consent-non-consent fantasies! To do a ritual and have the Dark-Souls-style font grace the screen afterwards: DEMON SLAIN (which Metroidvania like Dark Souls ripped off from survival horror like Resident Evil, but I digress). Beaten like clay and mashed into Pygmalion’s wet dream, we Galatean whores acquire the taste for torture, then camp it through our own strange appetites; that’s what essence exchange is! “Releasing ‘demons’!”

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; font generated by Rezuaq’s “FromSoftware Image Macro Creator,” 2022)

Per the settler-colonial model, the state canonically frames such campy things as alien and dark at home and abroad; i.e., as demonic essence “exchange” (sex and public nudism) opens up, its parallel channels subvert state promises of punishment and torture, and which—camp or not—always (re)unite us with alien things to some degree: ourselves and nature, which we belong to. Deities (demons) don’t just reside in our breast, Blake; we are demons! Let us consciously be of the Devil’s party and workshop, camping the canon to tear capital apart like Satan did to Faust offstage (or Ambrosio onstage)! Let that be our revenge, one worker at a time!

In turn, we golems and demon dolls acquire and consolidate power through exchanges that keep us doll-like, but animate-inanimate during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., to be “raped” in ways we like—used, passed around, “raw dogged” like cum dumpsters incubating hellish delight and half-real revolutionary sentiment (“make me” vs “unmake me” being acts of play to reconcile unironic forms). The beauty of the golem, then, is that it cannot be destroyed or wholly corrupted to one side. If the state has the infinite, diabolical capacity to rape and destroy everything pursuant to profit against nature-as-alien, then monstrous-feminine camp likewise has the limitless power to forge new destinies away from profit; i.e., through their labor value as bottomless, their bodies and identities as plastic.

As such, the golem’s demonically regenerative and posthuman power lies in the state damaging the clay to assert its own fabricated “sovereignty” per nation creation myths that effectively demonize the clay to rape it inside the state of exception; i.e., limitless cruelty per moral panics and police violence endemic to a territory by state assignment; e.g., Israel vs Palestine, with the state minority invading a larger population to assert settler-colonial (thus false) claims of the other’s land, which they then proceed to back up with repurposed[28] anti-Semitic lies and force (Bad Empanada’s “October 7th: The Real History,” 2024).

In short, “home” becomes a free-fire zone for the colonizer to police the native group, who are themselves systematically caged and exterminated like vermin to an arbitrary assigning of who is and isn’t “native” (with the hopes that this labor force can be regenerated and exploited elsewhere for much the same reasons); i.e., the clay as expendable unto infinite growth, efficient profit and worker/owner division. Privatization forces state perception as “reality” onto menticided worker brains, but reality (and perception) are thoroughly plastic, as are rape, death and captive fantasies. They have to be or the state could not even begin to exert its control over workers, let alone install Capitalist Realism raping the whore (thus the slave) out of ethnocentric revenge.

Luckily for us, this parasitism goes both ways; i.e., performance and play inside liminal colonized territories on and offstage relay Gothic castles (and demons) that anisotropically reverse the flow of power by switching terror and counterterror using ludo-Gothic BDSM! It’s a good baseline to challenge state paucities of empathy antagonizing nature. To raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural (and race) awareness, we fuck your minds, seeding them (and the Superstructure’s Wisdom of the Ancients) with new proletarian potential! Divorced from dogma, anything becomes possible, and jouissance reigns supreme. We unchain the night, unleashing Hell as our delicious thing to scare normies (those without nuance) with! Our best revenge is torturing you with the idea of our collective freedom: a world where workers have agency over their own bodies and labor tied to nature as a whole, and one where we can see and imagine more beauty unto the world around us that we don’t have to dominate, but live in harmony with as stewards. That is our revenge!

So come inside; make yourselves at home (or paint the outer walls with fresh coats of “paint”)! As such, extreme trauma calls for fantasies that address past forms of state coercion and abuse that, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, can recontextualize demonology in reverse. “Rape” enters quotes, highlighting state atrocities by demonstrating mutual consent and worker action towards catharsis: our daily habits constituting dialectical behavioral therapy through networks not founded on state fear and dogma demonizing nature to destroy it. Instead, we demons hook up to exchange robust, exquisitely “torturous” essence, thereby exposing the state as the instrument for all our yesterday’s greatest calamities!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; font generated by Rezuaq’s “FromSoftware Image Macro Creator,” 2022)

Such stages are liminal, shared with police forces fencing over a dualistic Numinous: Communist and palliative vs state dogma (e.g., queerphobia during Satanic Panic). And those in power discourage such inquiries and knowledge, wanting workers to fear and avoid demonic rituals and educators that undermine the status quo through their own mask-wearing practices (which we’ll delve into during Volume Three, Chapters Four and Five). Human curiosity is still difficult to entirely suppress, but the state canonically encourages these demonic investigations; i.e., to happen within a particular ghost of the counterfeit; re: the demonic trifecta of exquisite “torture.” Here, oppositional forms of demonic expression collect as “derelict”—seemingly abandoned, yet presented by their makers as “haunted,” silly or foreboding in ways that invite inspections unwelcome by the elite. To arrive at the truth, the derelict past must not be repeatedly explored, alone, but repeatedly reimagined by iconoclastic workers across space and time camping canonical torture with “exquisite.”

That’s the answer (not modernity and a better gun, magic pill[29] or another billionaire—ABAB): how we relate to and respect each other as a collective whole, not something to divide on a hierarchy of value (racial or otherwise); i.e., the Cartesian approach that leads to fascism and genocide, time and time again, but also conceals as it happens in all its forms right now. State illusions don’t work on those consciously of Hell (always in pain, but always in touch with the larger world capital is pimping in reactionary-to-moderate forms of predation: those who don’t know what pigs they are).

We’ve already outlined the basic procedure; re: the demonic trifecta of damsels, detectives and sex demons that Radcliffe canonized. Next, we’ll explore how to camp it at length by salvaging Radcliffe’s work (and her descendants; e.g., H.R. Giger), in “Exploring the Derelict Past”!

Onwards to “Exploring the Derelict Past (opening and ‘Radcliffe’s Refrain’)“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Lyriquediscorde writes,

In an interview (and also in the VH-1 special I mentioned) Ann revealed that the “Magic Man” was her then-boyfriend, band manager Michael Fisher, and that part of the song was an autobiographical telling of the beginnings of their relationship. (from Wikipedia) Michael was originally Heart’s guitarist. Ann followed Michael to Canada during the Vietnam War years so he wouldn’t get drafted. In 1974, Nancy joined the band later and Michael then became the band’s manager and sound engineer (ibid.).

Ideally we learn from real life when playing with demons; re: during calculated risk, learning from trauma in safer Radcliffean forms that we can respond to and mimic while synthesizing praxis ourselves; i.e., while going beyond the concerns of cis-het white women like Ann and Nancy Wilson while, in the same breath, listening to and learning from their own stories of survival: “missing white girl” syndrome.  Others are tired of selective triage favoring the biggest marginalized voice; i.e., we have to think of all workers, not just white women and children (Dreamboat Annie—more like “Are you okay, Annie?” amirite?)!

[2] While Junji Ito and similar supernatural, military-themed demons from Japan and neighboring countries’ Yokai and oni are frankly terrifying and abject par excellence, we won’t cover them, here (though may return to them in future close-reads).

[3] Fonda played a villain in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)—out-of-character for him (source: Andrew McGowan’s “This Classic Western Turned a Beloved Hollywood Hero into a Vicious Monster,” 2024). Across from him, Charles Bronson (a real piece of work, known for his Deathwish revenge films) is the Gothic hero also transplanted to the Western retro-future that, however alien it seems to us, Fonda’s villain calls home (already a dead genre by the time Leone directed those and his operatic “spaghetti Western” “Man with No name” trilogy): white knight, black knight; good cop, bad cop; etc. Zeuhl and I watched it and Leone’s trilogy on the couch. We fucked in between movies (“as thick as a door,” comrade), and I loved the trilogy. Once Upon a Time was so boring I fell asleep—but Morricone’s music (reused for satirical effect in Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs, 1989) was great.

Like Radcliffe (the Gothic version of Jane Austen, the latter author mocking the former), the Western is deeply aware of material struggles, but places them square-and-solely in the hands of white people; e.g., Max Mad: Fury Road’s (2015) white savior problem turning white women into white Indians punching up against sexist white men. This argument starts with Radcliffe’s hero/demon lover tropes, exemplified by the likes of Ludovico vs the evil Count Monti, from The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); i.e., a pirate narrative that puts the lady-in-question in between a struggle over “booty.” It’s frankly the kind of thing Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1623) Act 4, Scene 6 alludes to when Hamlet is captured by pirates, and what William Goldman’s 1973 The Princess Bride makes fun of, with the Dread Pirate Roberts (a man-in-black to excite the ladies with).

In Gothic, rape is vicarious. Radcliffe knew the fairytale tropes well, and played around with men and women wearing white and/or black—her stories having their own kidnappings and adventure; i.e., usually in the periphery and told to the women afterwards to protect their virtue, less they swoon: a damsel in distress is a horny damsel in distress (the confusion of pleasure and pain, mid-vaso-vagal response, aka “the deer in highlights”).

(source: Adam Frost and Zhenia Vasiliev’s “How to Tell You’re Reading a Gothic Novel – in Pictures,” 2014)

It’s vital, then, to try and remember that Radcliffe’s stories weren’t just hypercanonical, but neo-conservative and borrowing from older stories already done to death by the time she started mining them for parts; e.g., the trope of the old ruin that might have banditti in it (the old medieval residence haunted by trauma and Scooby-Doo-style impostors, but more violence); i.e., Radcliffe’s contributions to Gothic being the idea of a female hero, presenting women as naturally curious but needing to be armored by vaso vagal syncope responses (re: swooning, above) and total-to-partial amnesia* while exploring the Gothic castle, lest any “close” encounters turn her into a whore (synonymous with criminal and corpse)!

*Her stories are generally found documents written after the adventure is over with; i.e., a bildungsroman (coming-of-age story) and epistolary novel, similar to Frankenstein or Dracula [1897]: the novel-of-letters veering away from the novel-of-manners Austen would lionize, after the Gothic craze had begun to die out (she wrote Northanger Abbey [a Gothic parody] in 1803 but would publish her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, in 1811).

In true canonical Gothic, Radcliffe was a charlatan pimp (madame, or female brothel owner) whose haunted whore houses upheld status-quo norms in subjugative demon language—with her whores (always non-magical and male) belonging to illegitimate neo-medieval feuds and bloodlines; e.g. the Black Knight, banditti, or false preacher being functionally no different than the witch, goblin or vampire: something to summon, exhibit, and banish to the closet, frontier or brothel again through dream-like monomythic force (encouraged, in part, because she was a woman and subject to fiercer criticism than Matthew Lewis was (re: Groom); i.e., despite being a gay man, he could “go stealth”/rely on his privilege as an MP but also the time’s in which he lived having no overtly scientific homophobic language (outside of sodomy as a legal term borrowed from medieval times) to dodge queer persecution (though he was still facing it; re: Broadmoor).

To that, and in times of powerlessness and boredom, who doesn’t want their life to unfurl with the awesome power of demons and their dark desire and revenge? Just exercise enough caution when using them that you don’t “pull a Radcliffe”; I’ve been kettled by enough token whores to know the difference. Moreover, per virgin/whore, such binaries also apply to men/male parties antagonized by capital, and really any sex, gender or identity you could think of. Capital gentrifies and decays all in service to profit, effectively starting with Radcliffe—a warmonger and proto TERF—hiding behind the veneer of white feminine virtue: the whispers of the middle class and a succubus for the elite to pacify the rising middle class with (especially its female population: “By 1800, 45% of women in England could read. […] This created a demand for a new type of literature. Radcliffe filled this demand by writing a novel women could actually relate to because they saw themselves in the heroine; source: Tufts Libraries Omeka, 2017).

In trying to legitimatize the middle class through Neo-Gothic fakeries, Radcliffe punched down against a variety of groups abjected off into a “black sphere,” including Lewis and his ilk. This includes actual systemic abuse decaying into itself, but also racialized/religious minorities and sex workers treated, by and large, as one-in-the-same. That means a woman of “loose morals” (e.g., a succubus, witch or vampire) is treated with a similar degree of fear and prejudice that a black knight is—especially if she’s a monster queen! Radcliffe, as we shall see, was a cop and a coward/recluse.

[4] I should add that “grace” and Heaven are Christian ideas; i.e., of afterlife and reward for good behavior that, under Capitalism, translates to a Protestant, aka Puritan work ethic. Work to is holy and deserving of rewards in the afterlife, versus Judaism, which doesn’t have any Hell to speak of; i.e., nothing to threaten its practitioners while the same way that Christians do (to my knowledge, anyways). Similar to golems, Jewish treatment of demons is classically neutral (versus Zionism, which Christianizes Judaism to adopt a white, Western approach to the religion, which—apart from alienating non-Western ethnic groups and orthodoxies within the larger culture not attached classically to a nation-state body/settler-colonial project—also demonizes Arabs for Christians).

[5] Or their ward; e.g., the maidenly princess possessed by the spirit of the whore begging to be stabbed, mid-combat: Dragon’s Crown‘s [2013] vampire supping on maidens, turning them wicked and requiring the hero execute them. The police violence is the main attraction to a given witch hunt, any outward beauty regarding the whore (and token cop) is just icing on the cake. Such lies are often sugar-coated all the same, sweetening the (sex)pot: to beguile with honey as much as raw strength or brains (and to have himbos and herbos underestimate the whore-in-question; i.e., the Western myth that sexy = dumb but also incapable of fighting back).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

[6] In Gothic, truth and falsehood are not separate, but go hand-in-hand (often paradoxically at the same time); in Communism, development is a matter of war in terms of class, culture, and race. As Sun Tzu put it, “all war is based on deception,” Gothic Communism combines paradox and deception, during oppositional praxis, to synthesize deceiving our opponents, the elite, while pressing our demands and advantage. That’s the fundamental difference between Lewis and Radcliffe, and why one was radical and the other a moderate conservative.

This includes their monstrous output; i.e. what they made and summoned during the cryptonymy and abjection processes; re: power is often something to perform as a matter of disguise through poetic argument: costumes, masks and roles, but also inversions of what is normally concealed inside us turned inside-out (and vice versa; e.g., armor as skin): existing in holistic, liminal, anisotropic, ergodic, concentric duality. Such is the whore’s lot, thus the demon having its revenge. We dictate our terms not in the neat, clean binaries of civil discourse, but in daily life’s modern chaos; i.e., as fought in/with the dark, uncertain, medieval territories of risk and excitement threatening radical change pushing towards future development and true self-absorbed by state argument trapping nature in older brothels with borders.

Developing Communism through Gothic poetics—re: by liberating sex work with iconoclastic art—demands as much a waiting game, then; i.e., one that implores gentle patience (discipline) amid overwhelming anxiety (simulated weakness) as overt aggression (simulated strength) forged within pacts of hellish impudence (calculated risk). All have a part to play from moment to moment, a Faustian exchange as much a statement of rest and repose as reaping and revenge, while still weaving elaborate deceptions that aid us through darkness visible. Yes, there’s torture, assassins and death by Snu-Snu dreaming of revenge and changing the status quo in relatable forms (e.g., Princess Ileana’s death scene or the Bride spitting on Frankenstein’s monster from Creature Commandos [2025] riffing on Shelley’s infamous Quest); it relies on creativity as a guerrilla, counterterrorist device to offset state monopolies (and other tools).

(artist: Kay Marie)

[7] Demons constitute a kind of “aggressive haunting” whose rememory process involves survived abuse as much as activism. I’ve already written about this per The Night House and my own abuse: re: “One Foot out the Door; or, Playing with Dolls to Express One’s Feeling Undead” (2024).

[8] The bad BDSM, here, being performed by Clancy-motherfucking-Brown, a man who since 1986 at least (with The Highlander‘s Kurgan), has been making a meal out of classic kayfabe tropes surviving into the 20th century and beyond: “We’ve come to be the rulers of you all!”

[9] When I see the Smile demon, I see Jadis, smiling at me from the dark, telling me I’m worthless. But the reality is, their entire sense of self operates through bad BDSM and unironic harm/exploitation—without which, their life has zero meaning: addicted to abuse to feel strong by having total power over others (for more on this topic, refer to “Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse” and the other “Jadis” sections, from “Transforming Our Zombie Selves“). As their victim, the novelty quickly wore off (re: “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022“); but for Jadis, my misery became the center of their entire universe. “All [their] thought [was] bent on it.”

[10] “That is power!” as Thulsa Doom would say to Conan; i.e., “power” (for abusers) means the ability to get people to self-harm for your pleasure. It’s a very cult-like mentality and dates back to the oldest forms of organized religion and government (city-states prior to nation-states and corporations): high-control, vertically-arranged forms of power where those at the top use structural advantage to alienate and cannibalize members of the perceived in-group with; i.e., to suggest someone is of the out-group, then eat them alive and have the others watch: “You could be next!”

[11] A bit of a crude, kayfabe, Hawthornean knock on the 1960s Flower Children of the Free Love movement (and the Civil Rights movement—with Conan, a white superman, assassinating the black leader of a rebel faction associated with a paganized stigma animal, the snake, to rescue the white king’s wayward daughter in the process). Howard wrote for the same Weird Magazine that Lovecraft did, and both men were incredibly bigoted/prone to abjecting the flaws of their cultures off onto the monsters in their work. If such work has been camped over the years, it’s because the entire monomyth—and by extension, Nazis and Commies—are incredibly campable as a matter of cryptonymy.

[12] As seemingly random as the falling helmet in Otranto (the falling sky) versus the heroine in that story running away from Lord Manfred. It’s a tangible abstraction we can use think about less-tangible things (the Capitalocene).

[13] I mean “clean up” quite literally in this case: Jadis’ father left behind a trailer that was filthy from years of him smoking cigarettes and slowly drinking himself to death—a disaster area we spent weeks cleaning up ourselves because Jadis didn’t want to trouble the landlady about it. I did it for Jadis, but the entire process was thoroughly degrading and oddly Herculean; i.e., the Florida heat meant we could only work for part of a given day then have to go home, and we kept taking hour-long drives from Gainesville and Jacksonville and back again to tackle a mess that the landlady didn’t help with but kept poking us to do it so she could flip the place and resume making money (the old leach; where’s Raskolnikov when you need him>). There were seemingly endless pile of garbage and filth that hand to be gagged and hauled to the side of the road, and years of odds-and-ends horded among all of that, which had to be separated and divided into carloads we took back, one day at a time, then organized further at home: thirty years’ worth of paystubs and mementos, which I handled on my own while Jadis grieved if their bedroom.

And while I understand that part of it, and did back then, it likewise became an excuse that pushed the majority of the labor onto me for other events unrelated to their father’s death; i.e., Jadis would flip the bill and drive the rental truck, and I was the proverbial strong back paid in pennies; e.g., a tactic Jadis would use on me and Tim—their ex, moving in with us when Jadis bought a new car largely without consulting me, but also a new condo paid a year in advance, in cash (about $60,000 for both purchases, which was about 2/3s of the lump currency their father left them, not including the $800 a month in dividends from his stock portfolio)—when we had to clean out the place we were currently living at because it, too, was filthy with black mold from mismanagement by the property managers and lease signer putting up with it. Like father, like daughter!

Like before, we took at least a week driving back and forth (this time in a shiny new car) to Jadis’ new place (this time with my name on the lease); i.e., slowly moving things back and forth during hour-long drives, and ending the trip with a final afternoon renting a moving truck to handle the big stuff, then a final clean and dinner with Tim. Jadis even made us clean out the broken dishwasher filled with years’ worth of unspeakable gunk and mold, effectively polishing a turd (the machine was well-and-truly broken) just so the place would look spotless for the landlord’s property manager. Same place, different mess, and Jadis used us for labor to appease the owner class and respect said owners’ passive income (and enjoyed watching me get angry about it in front of Tim—a process called triangulation).

In turn, if I complained—which I did, especially about that fucking dishwasher—then Jadis would remind me that I wasn’t on the lease and they were assuming all the risk (even though I had asked repeatedly during our relationship to be put on said lease), despite me reminding them that I still lived in apartment with them, thus was subject to the same violations Jadis was both apologizing for and grumbling about to me as their captive audience. If they complained, it was ok, but if I did it, it was tantamount to “treason” and something they would punish by pulling away their love and support. Furthermore, we still didn’t get our security deposit and Jadis quietly paid the property manager when said manager wrote to us, saying the mold was our fault and charging us for the inevitably professional cleaning (which I said they would do when protesting the extended cleaning Jadis was putting us through)!

Keep in mind, I had already repeatedly asked Jadis to give me more involvement regarding the financial decisions between us—meaning with their father’s money becoming something we both could have a say in, as romantic partners living under the same roof—but they reneged on that promise after I helped with their father’s place and the move to the nicer neighborhood; i.e., after I had helped patch things up with Tim and he had moved in with us and everything was settled and organized (which I did all of, Jadis allergic to organizing anything and preferring to literally let things pile up). At that point, Jadis told me that my earlier efforts in helping manage money and groceries and various expenses (and emotional support regarding Tim) actually weren’t appreciated, and that Jadis hadn’t actually meant any of that when they said it (while putting down Tim back then, only to say Tim was good and I wasn’t, later on). They stopped having sex with me and started to say where we bought our food and what, taking away any agency I formerly had and pushing me out of the relationship altogether.

Of course, sex was just something Jadis used to mollify me—i.e., “have sex with mommy to calm them down,” which I did because I was afraid of their anger and the fact that I wasn’t on the lease in the middle of Covid. Needless to say, by the end of it, Jadis’ hand was played; i.e., “the fire’s in their eyes their [intentions were] pretty clear” so I made like Michael Jackson and beat it (off to Cuwu’s, who helped me get to my mother’s, but not before fucking my brains out).

Note: This is only one example of the everyday kinds of stupid, manipulative bullshit I dealt with from Jadis throughout our entire relationship. If you want the full rundown, refer to “Setting the Record Straight Again; Accounting My Ex’s Abuse of Me to Another Victim_August 30th, 2022” for an exhaustive list of anything and everything Jadis did to mess with my head. Basically Jadis is living proof of Angela Carter’s (admittedly problematic statement) that “any free woman in an unfree society will always be a monster” (vis-à-vis De Sade as someone she defended); i.e., like Portia from The Merchant of Venice manipulating everyone around her, except Jadis targeted vulnerable marginalized parties weaker than themselves—in a nutshell, aping the colonizer to have an imaginary revenge “against” her evil mom/absentee dad; re: Karen Newman writing in “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice” (1987):

Here Portia is the gift-giver, and it is worth remembering Mauss’s description of gift-giving in the New Guinea highlands in which an aspiring “Big Man” gives more than can be reciprocated and in so doing wins prestige and power. Portia gives more than Bassanio can ever reciprocate, first to him, then to Antonio, and finally to Venice itself in her actions in the trial which allow the city to preserve both its law and its precious Christian citizen. In giving more than can be reciprocated, Portia short-circuits the system of exchange and the male bonds it creates, winning her husband away from the arms of Antonio.

Contemporary conduct books and advice about choosing a wife illustrate the dangers of marriage to a woman of higher social status or of greater wealth. Though by law such a marriage makes the husband master of his wife and her goods, in practice contemporary sources suggest unequal marriages often resulted in domination by the wife. Some writers and Puritan divines even claimed that women purposely married younger men, men of lower rank or of less wealth, so as to rule them (source).

This is exactly the kinds of power abuse I, a trans woman, endured under Jadis’ “care,” and the sort that I reference in my own books; e.g., from my Tolkien essay, “Concerning Rings, BDSM and Vampires; or the State’s False Gifts, Power Exchange, and Crumbling Homesteads Told through Tolkien’s Nature-Themed Stories” (2024) from Volume One. In short, I had written about such abuse for years, and though Jadis wasn’t going to abuse me because they deceived me while appearing good and just. Lord Sauron, anyone? —Perse

[14] Originally called “Goth Nick and Goth Chick” (a name I admittedly came up with while Jadis was randomly driving us around Gainesville), which after seven episodes we eventually renamed to “Dreadful Discourse.” I designed the posters for it, and produced everything myself. Jadis sat in, and I tried to come up with cool ideas to talk about, but I had too much to say and them too little, and eventually things stalled and stopped:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard; source: YouTube)

[15] For a good summary of Zeuhl’s bullshit, refer to my footnote on them in “The Eyeball Zone; or, Relating to the Gothic as Commies Do” (2024). Such things are seldom purely “bad,” but exist somewhere in the confusing and dangerous (thus exciting) middle.

[16] “Put your mysterium tremendum in my Uncanny Valley!” Jadis would say, during sex. A lady they were not (and I loved that about them)! Abusers work with fractions, being deliberately 70/30, or 60/40 good/bad before revising that arrangement to lead their prey around by the nose. If such things are mutually agreed upon, that’s one thing. But Jadis’ bargains were always Faustian, thus mendaciously predatory.

[17] The enormity and suddenness of such storms I likened, with Jadis, to the moon from Majora’s Mask, which I escaped by refusing to play along with Jadis’ bullshit; re (from “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022):

I liken it to Majora’s Mask. In that game, the villain, Majora, curses the moon to fly into Hyrule. While the player can return the moon to its original position using a magic song, the residents of Hyrule are still trapped inside a cruel time loop. Faced with their impending doom, they stew in their own fear.  The world around them slowly falls apart—not just once, but over and over and over again. It degrades their sense of reality until nothing but madness remains.

Majora uses this madness to control the Hyrulians through fear, distorting their very perception of reality. This mind-prison is what Link ultimately escapes. The paradox, here, is the method: He doesn’t escape by playing the song and stopping the moon. He escapes by exposing the tyrant controlling the moon to begin with.

Like Link, I could not escape by playing the song. Every time Jack threatened me with anger or Instant Breakup, they were abstracting the consequences of my actions so much that I felt like the floor was eggshells: Any wrong strep might send me hurling into the void. I felt the shadow of the falling moon in their words. A glance, a heavy sigh, a tapping of the foot, a laborious roll of the eyes. They had mastered me. I thought love through win out, that Jack would change if only I played the song enough. But as our living conditions improved, my happiness worsened. They began to reject me, doting on Tim, instead.

I felt trapped. If I confronted them, they would throw the moon at me. If the moon came, I would play the song to save myself. And the whole cycle would repeat. So now I hid from the falling moon and became what they wanted me to be: their little artist boy. I did not please them, but they seemed oddly content with this arrangement. I knew it wouldn’t last, but I couldn’t say for sure when it would end. Terror was everywhere and madness reigned within me.

[…] After we returned home, I was sitting at my studio, a computer on a table facing the door. Jack was leaving the house and glowered at me. They were clearly bothered. So I asked them if they were ok. They said they were fine and asked me if *I* was fine. I hesitated and realized my time had come: I would summon the moon. I would invoke Jack’s wrath (source).

The sad reality of rape is how part of it, and the madness associated with it, always stays with the victim—and even more complicated, the feelings exposed to said victim aren’t strictly “bad”; i.e., if they’re able to control their feelings through play. This isn’t natural, but taught, and sometimes lessons teach best hard. My ludo-Gothic BDSM was wrought through harmful heat and pressure.

For example, I loved the Radcliffean feelings of powerlessness in Alien, which had drawn me to Jadis, and whose dominion over me I would resurrect in “perceptive,” healthy forms that would open not just my eyes and my mind, but those of other victims healing from rape, too. Nothing is more frightening to bullies than a woman who has built herself back up—who holds the storm in her hands, the Aegis pushing state abuse towards the guilty parties not once, but as a matter of fractal recursion! Each one becomes a witness to ask why she does (or doesn’t) smile: Lewis’ Bleeding Nun!

To heal from rape, you must camp it by drawing lines in the sand, but doing so by no means precludes intensity. Indeed, that’s the best part! “‘Rape’ me, you bastard!” This might sound alien to many, but it’s something anyone can understand; i.e., like anyone who might play Majora’s Mask, a videogame that Nintendo gloriously sold to children. Except, it’s not a “slippery slope” if the methodology is made to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness (the whole point of ludo-Gothic BDSM); and sooner or later, the victim becomes a “victim” who learns their own limits/finds cuties to play with who won’t harm them (remember your aftercare, babes). Pick your poison, mine is dark mommy doms, and frankly I’m spoilt for choice!

[18] Or Hamlet’s father’s ghost, saying “I’ve seen shit, my son!” before motivating Hamlet to kill his whole family! Fun!

[19] And if you think she’s the only one, watch Cameron’s Titanic (1997)—a box office smash about a giant boat and love triangle where a white middle-class woman tortures an immigrant to death because, in Cameron’s words, “the script needed it.” And millions of like-minded housewives agreed, loving the film for its extended torture scene (and because Rose lets Jack go even though she says she won’t)! The reveal at the end is “And I would gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!” but “I remember when I was young and loved him…” Render unto Caesar…

[20] The above image being my great uncle’s antique bed, which Cuwu and I fucked in after a trip on the road. Doing so wasn’t automatically vindictive on our part; but when I learned that my uncle was mistreating his adopted trans son, Cuwu and I sought revenge—fucking on my uncle’s guest bed: “You have to be quiet or the Master will hear! Now fuck me harder!” Calculated risk isn’t just an act, and half-real, it sits on and offstage during ludo-Gothic BDSM making demons during love!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

[21] The original funded out-of-pocket by a wealthy patron, knowing the movie had a rape scene with a tree in it, but also nonstop torture and the fetishized mutilation of women (and Gothic Romance tropes; e.g., the gravedigging scene). It’s paradoxically the most openly torturous film, but also my favorite (alongside Alvarez’ 2013 revisit) because it demonstrably has satire during the torture; Army of Darkness is much more blindly celebratory of such things/the male hero as Quixotic (re: “Valorizing the Idiot Hero“). Exploitation and liberation occupy the same space over time.

[22] And despite being a Satanic atheist (re: “I, Satanist; Atheist: A Gothicist’s Thoughts on Atheism, Religion, and Sex,” 2021), I have some experience with Baptists in real life; i.e., my twin brother once dated the daughter of a Baptist minister, wherein we spent an entire Thanksgiving at her sister’s house. The family had us over—the husband basically a blue-collar man like Ashley Williams, and his wife the usual kind of victim (female, white) that suffers under such bondage—the lot of them only too happy to tell us we weren’t welcome. For instance, the sister told Hans, my twin, that she prayed to Jesus every night that he might kill Hans and liberate her sibling from “living in sin”/prevent a marriage she didn’t approve of. And one of her daughters—a little girl in a white angelic gown with long brown hair—walked up to me, and seeing me with long hair said, without missing a beat: “You’re going to Hell.” Never underestimate the power of dogma, babes—specifically its uncanny ability to encourage young women to submit as often as rebel (essentially an inversion of Hawthorne’s Pearl, from The Scarlet Letter). Also, double standard: Jesus had no hair, you little fuck!

[23] Again, Lewis’ Matilda castrated Ambrosio to critique the status quo, the rockstar priest being ripped apart, the evil prioress beaten to a pulp, and the abbey burned to the ground. Jo-Jo humor and total fakery aside, Lewis was much more biting in his critique than Radcliffe and their mutual imitators were; i.e., he set the whore free to punish men, then let her stay free (Matilda survives at the end, being the genderqueer Devil-in-disguise). Slay, queen!

[24] With Bunny supporting me after I was getting dogpiled by cis and GNC sex workers on Twitter (re: “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023“), telling me:

I’m so sorry this is all happening, you’re handling it all with grace and I’m so proud of you for standing up for yourself. It sucks that being online comes with so much miscommunication that makes it easier for people to accuse others of things that they misunderstood or failed to mention beforehand. You’re a wonderful person! Some people just aren’t as comfortable as they pretend to be initially and they won’t say anything until it’s too late and that’s ENTIRELY on them, not you. Especially when it comes to people CONTINUING to say that you’re a wonderful person and that they support you and everything you stand for speaks VOLUMES about who you are as a person especially when they feel like you’ve “made them uncomfortable” by trying your best to communicate professionally.

In other words, Bunny got back and “gotchu, babe.” They’re a colossal sweetie, so much so that I’ve painted them for years (they were my first cover model, too—August 20th, 2023), but also defended them in kind when they were bullied. Revolution is a two-way street in more ways than one; i.e., workers punch up against the elite and help each other up when the elite’s proponents push us down (“And why do we fall, Master Bruce?”): “Dayman, fighter of the Nightman, she’s a master of karate and friendship!”

[25] All cops are bad, including those who make them; re: “impunity is the apex of privilege,” but also pandering and willful ignorance; i.e., id Studios making the exact kinds of loud, cruel and dumb, “die by the sword” revenge power fantasies that white moderate-to-reactionary straight men drool over while punching down (I’m speaking from experience, here; re: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” also dealing with the bigotry of the shooter community present in Doom). As fascism rises, state actors threaten their base to torture them with the idea of “total loss”; i.e., the ability to even play fancy computer games becoming canon vis-à-vis the target audience’s usual privileges. So does the middle class abject the usual victims of state copaganda in-game as something to defend out-of-game; re: Gamergate revived, making the ludic Gothic respectable again during eco-fascism. They become false rebels, turning Satan into a Spartan cop punching his evil half, onstage and off.

[26] Which linguistically alludes to genocide through the coerced usage happening through force, including assimilated peoples who were killed by the state regardless if they followed the rules or not; i.e., the colonial binary’s double standard under genocide described facetiously as relocation, “progress,” or other settler-colonial cryptonyms.

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

[28] As Bad Empanada argues in “The New Anti-Semitism: The Arab Global Conspiracy” (2025) and which I agree with, a priori, in my own “On ‘Anti-Semitism’ versus ‘Antisemitism’” (2024); i.e., the pursuit of forbidden knowledge is a dualistic, dialectical-material arrangement of “legitimacy” and “illegitimacy” as things to assign in pursuit of other things that lead us away from state-fueled hauntological positions of ignorance.

That being said, Bad Empanada certainly isn’t perfect—and frankly has said some really stupid and problematic things that have seriously pissed me off (while also just being flat-out wrong about these things; re: “There’s no such thing as ‘sex doctors,’ Jesus Christ” and “those who talk about sex like it’s their main interest should be dealt with. Make it illegal again*”)—but he and I are in complete agreement about one thing: that anti-Semitic conspiracy and myth can be used to affect more than Jewish people while presenting Jewish people as total victims in bad faith; i.e., with him saying this vis-à-vis Arabs, and me saying it vis-à-vis other Holocaust survivors (than Jewish people) like the Dutch, but also queer people, witches (of any gender or sex), or people of color besides just Arabs.

*See: “Understanding Vampires: ‘What Is (Problematic) Love?’; or, Positions of Relative Ignorance to Relative Clarity,” 2024).

In short all oppressed groups can be oppressed in the same flexible and imbricating persecution networks and unify to recognize that against a common foe: the elite, but also their tokenized lapdogs acting like only certain people can be oppressed, and furthermore that some special people can be so essentially oppressed, they can do no wrong (re: Jews and Zionism). Jews’ feelings are valid, but only until they knowingly facilitate worker division, thus genocide. The same goes for any marginalized group and normativity said group might endorse, when push comes to shove; i.e., whether through desperation and/or convenience, betrayal is betrayal, and we must come together to see all parties oppressed differently under capital liberated as one. We must or we will not survive. State shift will see to that, because capital is incompatible with life.

[29] With force-feeding being tantamount to rape; e.g., “Red solo cup, you fill me up…” (Toby Keith’s “Red Solo Cup,” 2011); i.e., putting something through our various holes/penetrating us and going into our bodies without our consent to knowingly cause us harm for profit—ending hunger strikes, for example (an ancient form of carceral protest), but also invasive surgeries and mad medicine (a concept comparable to mad science, and one we don’t have time to explore here, but is one my book series touches on elsewhere; e.g., exhibit 1a1a1h6b1 from Volume Zero).