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

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

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

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

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

Sleeping Beauties: Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes

She’s a very kinky girl!

The kind you don’t take home to mother!

—Rick James; “Superfreak” from Street Songs (1981)

Picking up from where “Hollow Knight (opening and part one)” left off…

Knowledge is generally something that sleeps in a medieval space waiting to wake back up. Policed into silence until then, such awakenings are seldom perfect. But they are required to reclaim nature (and the monstrous-feminine) from their usual policing through the monomyth as imperfectly camped. For this section, we’ll consider how through development as coming from such imperfections; i.e., the evolution out of Hollow Knight as a Promethean Quest—one whose mysterious-maze housing of the whore-to-rape gradually lead me to articulate worker liberation through a palliative variant. Ultimately this variant become a sex-positive system of thought I called “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” one which workers must revive in light of the Radiance’s seemingly unavoidable doom being one of many that we can learn from and perform ourselves; i.e., witch and witch hunt part of the same police violence we must beautifully survive, rising from the ashes of to challenge profit as a matter of dogma built on raping the whore (controlling sex and force, terror and morphological expression per capital’s trifectas, monopolies, and assorted qualities). However false the king decrees her status as “sun,” the Radiance’s hubris is still speaking to her rape by him as having a power he cannot so easily extinguish. Consider this section—the capstone to my Metroidvania work after my PhD and what I esteem to be my crowning achievement—a royal love letter to such sleeping beauties topping us from below! Hail to the queen!

(source: Materia Collective)

We’ll start with my theories on ludo-Gothic BDSM and how they evolved into themselves through Hollow Knight specifically (and the concepts we already laid out in part one); then, we’ll articulate the camping of rape per the whore as normally policed, the manner in which the Radiance must experience time and time again like Prometheus: the stubborn ghost to hunt down by those taught to do so in monomythic language—get sword, rape whore, which whore must subvert during rape play reversing what is effectively police training in witch hunter language.

To that, capital rapes nature-as-monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of shelter (the home) and the alien (the intruder/foreign plot) by invading female-coded spaces (caves, portals, gateways, caverns “measureless to man,” etc) with male-coded implements of revenge (swords, lances, arrows, etc): reconquering male spaces having been reclaimed by nature as—you guessed it—something to rape all over again (often set to badass music; e.g., Witch Hazel’s 2024 “Ride On” a perpetuation of the same-old monomyth passing the sword down).

Or investigate; e.g., Alien‘s derelict, which we’ll explore in “Giger’s Xenomorph.” Either action is the point because it’s profitable, moving money through nature and conditioning the next generation to keep all of this up, which we fags (all monstrous-feminine, not GNC people alone) must camp to subvert and survive as alien beings routinely harvested by nature: the fall of the male sovereign and its colonial space as gone to pot, which must be reclaimed from nature all over again (and again, and again).

In turn, the cycle is dogmatized under capital per the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection: to invade nature, to bring her back for study—to weaponize, generally against itself, as stolen by a bunch of canonical fakes mobilizing the self-worth of young men (or token workers) stuck in the Man Box’ artificial wilderness: proving their worth by being the hero, thus the rapist, the exterminator and the cop/witch hunter canonizing a forever war between good and evil, civilization and nature ,as essentialized per Cartesian edicts’ moral geographies/manifest destinies.

The fact remains, capital is inherently self-destructive and built on endless conquest/futile revenge against nature. Even if the hero harvested everything from the land once, they must do it again and again because there must always be profit, which means surrendering power to a perceived enemy (re: “Hell coming home”). But even if they did it a hundred times over and poured the whole of the universe into a bottle, it still wouldn’t prevent nature’s return, thus keep the king alive. The revenge is always pointless, then, save to further itself as a seasonal, holiday matter of routine profit, war and rape unto nature as the Great Pumpkin to carve up after she returns again and again. It becomes a perpetual game of one-upmanship, of manly quests for such violence to then show off: “Revenge? I will show you revenge!”

Furthermore, the entire process alienates said king (and king’s men) from nature as something that otherwise would enrich his life, had he not devoted his entire existence to a cycle (or two) of capital. He’s simply a cog in the machine, a replaceable part. All of this becomes a self-report through the castle as a dead ringer/giveaway for past failures, which again are built into the system. Nature can simply turn the procedure back on itself to show the king his doom: that Capitalism isn’t good for the givers of state force because it makes them hopelessly dependent on doing so, which has its limits. Repeat the cycle as many times as you want—criminalize nature to whatever degree you desire—the king will always die, and nature will bounce back in some shape or form. You can’t kill Medusa, but kings (and their cops and castles) are a dime-a-dozen. Their death gives them away.

We’ll get to all that when we look at the Radiance, in just a moment. First, let’s look at the process she uses against the hero as something we can repeat ourselves, and which I was taught by her side of the Promethean Quest subverting the monomyth and its unironic rape spaces chattelizing nature-as-monstrous-feminine: ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Tokenization has pushed down at queerness, forcing me make “monstrous-feminine” a GNC category that older scholars didn’t to nearly the same degree. “Nature-as-female” has a biologically essential sound to it (as does older Gothic scholarship from the 1970s; e.g., “female Gothic” and older works, still: “woman is other”). So as we carry on with Hollow Knight, let’s keep considering it (nature) and its castled spaces as monstrous-feminine, like my PhD did; i.e., upending traditional binaries designed to control nature-as-monstrous-feminine inside a colonial binary in order to harness her power over and life and death for the state (the harvesting of nature-as-alien).

Simply put, the womb of nature has already been raped, making it dark and vengeful, but also something that is forced to conform to a binary prescribed to it by state mandates; further abuse must be stalled within such spaces as therapeutic and under attack by those who, caring not for the “therapy” of the colonizer (rape), camp it as already “mapped out.” Alfred Korzybski writes in Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933):

A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly […] If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must considered only as maps (source).

To look on maps, however unmappable (untraversable) they might seem, or however buried their secrets, we’re effectively looking at a system of rape expressed in royal Gothic language between land and lord—landlord over nature as alien, but also required to have something to lord over and seek revenge against (which conquest and profit require, always moving money through nature and back into capital’s coffers, post-rape; re, videogames as dogmatic tools of conquest through their maps educating these means: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains): telling boys (or token parties) where to go and who to rape with what. Such behavior is not only expected but instructed per the monomyth. Simply put, it is correct.

(source: tuppkam1)

More to the point, this is where queerness as dead-and-buried waits to wake up and dance once more; i.e., in the hallowed halls of our rapists—their chronotopes and maps haunted with the Radcliffean spirit of rape as burned into the maps’ secret chambers, but also on its surfaces.

Our flirting with history as undead is, itself, a revisitation of something I’ve returned to many times already (always for fun); i.e., a process of scholarship that, in the process of tracing old maps (of maps, of maps…), somewhat feels different and familiar with each confounding and delightful passage through itself (very much in the larger exploratory traditional of such spaces). Weird attracts weird multiple times in both directions; i.e., coming back to haunt us and we coming back to haunt it (with queer people drawn to the places where they can be themselves, thus feel most at home as a site of trauma to subvert, thus heal from).

I acknowledge as much in Volume Zero, describing a “life-long process [that] started when I was young and continued into adulthood” through a particular videogame I enjoyed playing at various points in my life as a means of critical thought that can, when harnessed, change the world outside of itself as reflected inside the text (from Volume Zero):

We have to learn from the past by transforming its canonical depictions to avoid repeating Capitalism’s unironic genocides.

This brings us not just to my adulthood but my postgraduate work on ludo-Gothic BDSM, which in 2017 was met with its own barriers. Working under David Calonne, I was only just learning about the Numinous vis-à-vis Rudolph Otto and H.P. Lovecraft and came across an article by Lilia Melani, “Otto on the Numinous” (2003), citing the Gothic as the quest for the Numinous: “It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for the mysterium tremendum” (source). Something about it appealed to my then-closeted kinkster as have previously been titillated by Cameron, Lovecraft and Nintendo (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write), but also the videogames I was playing at the time: Metroidvania[1] (shortly because I went overseas, my best friend Ginger recommended Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight to me, which I eventually made the topic of my master’s thesis (source).

Such a procedure was a life-long quest grappling with powerful forces, insofar as it concerns the performance of power in ostensibly disempowering stages that, through Gothic theatrics, become a safe place to explore rape trauma by surviving ghosts of itself:

Before the thesis proper, my essay “Notes on Power” discussed the paradox as being the performative nature of power doubled, including monsters but also their decaying lairs as monumental sites of immense, god-like power dressed up through the Gothic language of the imaginary past; the Metroidvania is a Gothic castle full of Gothic monsters, but also Gothic ghosts (echoes) of older and older castles reaching out from novels and cinema into videogames. Regardless of the medium, though, Clint Hockings’ adage, “Seek power and you will progress” (source: “Ludonarrative Dissonance,” 2007) means something altogether different depending how you define power as something to seek, including unequal arrangements thereof. As a child, teenager and woman, I sought it through the palliative Numinous in Gothic castles of the Neo-Gothic tradition carried over into videogames (which I learned about in reverse: videogames, followed by the Numinous/mysterium tremendum as introduced to me by Dr. David Calonne^[2]). Of these, I explored their Numinous territories in response to my own lived trauma and subsequent hypersexuality—i.e., as things I both related to the counterfeit with and sought to reclaim the counterfeit from as a tool to understand, thus improve myself and the world by reclaiming the castle as a site of interpretative Gothic play (of kinks, fetishes, and BDSM); i.e., this book that you’re reading right now is a “castle” to wander around inside: a safe space of exquisite “torture” to ask questions about your own latent desires and guilty thoughts regarding the “barbaric” exhibits within as putting the ghosts out from my past on display (the Gothic castle and its intense, “heavy weather” theatrics generally being a medieval metaphor for the mind, body and soul, but also its extreme, buried and/or conflicting emotions and desires: a figurative or sometimes literal plurality depending on the person exploring the castle) [source].

The quest is a meta one, then, its essential idea—of upsetting the monomyth and its harmful illusions using the Promethean Quest—pointedly being to search for the non-male Numinous inside female/feminine-coded spaces; i.e., an exit to Capitalist Realism (and trauma) hidden inside the infernal concentric pattern being reached not by the straight line of empire’s arrows and swords, but the ergodic, non-linear line of the maze among the city of paradoxes (the chronotope yielding fatal portraits echoing dynastic primacy and hereditary rites by personifying them, below).

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

As stated earlier during “Monsters, Magic and Myth,” Capitalism must be escaped within itself; i.e., through cryptonymy as a circuitous route to healing the structure by changing the system, starting in small. Tracking with this well-trod vein, I’ll furnish you with something of a tangent—a four-page sample from Volume Zero to refresh you on the complexities of the quest—then segue into Aguirre’s geometries per our current discussion of upsetting monomythic power using Gothic space to achieve rape play inside the nucleus:

Processing my troubled academic past, my reflections on Metroidvania as a tomb-like, ludo-Gothic space/torture dungeon have become thoroughly enmeshed in my own sexuality and gender-formation beyond what was heteronormatively assigned to me at birth; i.e., what was naturally assigned and what I had to reclaim through my own work’s seeking and expressing of power as something to find inside particular performative arrangements: the “ludo-Gothic BDSM” of the Gothic castle as a powerful “female-coded” space. Its palliative Numinous expresses C.S. Lewis’ so-called “problem of pain” (1940) through mutual consent; i.e., as a kind of ludic contract that promises paradoxical thrills through the aesthetics of harmful power but also unequal power exchange in the contractual sense as rich food for thought: it changes how we think about the world. As I write in “Revisiting My Masters’ Thesis on Metroidvania—Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space”:

Metroidvania players consent to the game by adopting a submissive position. Most people sexualize BDSM, but power is exchanged in any scenario, sexual or otherwise. This being said, Gothic power exchanges are often sexualized [in appearance]. Samus is vulnerable when denuded, her naked body exposed to the hostile alien menace (re: the end scene from Alien). Metroidvania conjure [up] dominance and submission through a player that winds up “on the hip” (an old expression that means “to be at a disadvantage”). Another way to think of it is, the player is the bottom, and they’re being topped by the game.

[artist: Sarah Kate Forstner’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (2017); source: Michael Uhall’s “A Specter, a Speaker: ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ (1968)”]

With any power exchange there’s always an element of ambiguity and danger (doubly so in Gothic stories). The participants have to trust one another. In this sense, I trust the Metroidvania not to hurt me, but the castle is always somewhat uncanny. I know the gameworld can’t hurt me because it’s a videogame; it can no more kill me than a dream, or C. S. Lewis’ mighty spirit:

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

Nevertheless, the paradox—of near-danger in videogames—mirrors the plight of the Neo-Gothic heroine. 18th century women read these stories to feel danger in a controlled sense, but they still submitted to its Numinous “perils.” By comparison, the Lovecraft junkie submits to cosmic nihilism[3], and the survival horror enthusiast seeks danger of a particular kind. So do Metroidvania players (source).

This power exchange through the palliative Numinous has always appealed to me amid Gothic aesthetics, spaces and cliché, fetishized thrills; i.e., inside castles when I have far less dominant power than one might think, but also more subby power in ways that feel asexually profound but never fully divorced from sexual peril’s aesthetics: the disempowered hero in a very Gothic sense, according to my unequal relationship to/negotiation with a female[4] “rapist” space that feels mightier than I am by virtue of the dungeon (rape) aesthetic, but also our power arrangement being stacked against me:

She’s mighty-mighty, just lettin’ it all hang out
She’s a brick house
That lady’s stacked and that’s a fact
Ain’t holding nothing back (source: The Commodores’ “Brick House,” 1977).

[Our resident lady, Lady Dimitrescu, is both tall as a matter of size difference, but also statuesque; i.e., “of the space-in-question” by virtue of the usual hyphenated interrogations of said space as like a person and vice versa: a bogeywoman to summon and put down, but also to pique particular submissive interests from the hero player—the rape fantasy.]

That’s the whole point. I seemingly “can’t win” because the space’s ergodic potential is fundamentally stronger than I am; but it still sits within that performance of unequal, harmful power as a paradox: the sub’s power through the pairing with a dominant whose power flows through them like heavy metal thunder. In that sense, I actually win and lose at the same time (what ludologists call a positive-sum zero-sum game: a win-win[5])! Replayability and endless backtracking amid dungeon aesthetics are a core part of the Metroidvania appeal: to feel mastered inside the ludic contract despite its inherent flexibility.

Furthermore, as I write in “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” (2021), this doesn’t just stay in the gameworld; for me, it translates to how I live and think about my life relative to my abuse as survived but also played within in Metroidvania safe spaces:

I have male friends, but most of my friends are women or trans people. Most of my partners have been trans or gender-fluid. The same goes for the women in media I relate to or am inspired by. For me, a powerful woman or female space is captivating and educational, especially the “mommy dom” and Metroidvania.

I’ve always felt attracted to female power—be it in teachers, heroines, or videogame characters. But female power is usually androgynous, having pre-conceptions about male power mixed in. I admire Joan of Arc and Elphaba, but also Ellen Ripley and Samus Aran: tomboyish girls, female knights. I especially love the Metroidvania—a chaotic, “female” stronghold to lose myself inside, but also the focus of my PhD work. There, I can explore myself sexually in relation to power and trauma. This is why I submit. When I do submit, I submit to “mommy doms.”

In a BDSM framework, the mommy dom is a powerful female figure, one with the power to punish and nurture inside a consensual framework [of exquisite “torture”]. Just remember that I’m a switch; I’m not submissive all the time. However, when I am, I submit consensually. It’s not for everyone, and it shouldn’t be. That isn’t the argument that sexist men make, though. For them, only women can or should submit. Men who submit are weak, or impossible. Clearly they’re not impossible, but homosexual composer Tchaikovsky’s words on submission (towards a young servant) were nonetheless treated as impossible—his amorous words furiously repressed by the Russian state: “My God, what an angelic creature and how I long to be his slave, his plaything, his property!” (source).

Obviously my connection to the imaginary Dark Mother is tied to my own abuse, and led me down a very dark road: frustrated with academia and dumped by Zeuhl for their decade-long secret flame, I dated online; I encountered Jadis through Gothic roleplay on Fetlife; we hit it off and I quickly moved in; they worked their magic, abusing me emotionally during the pandemic (source).

In Cartesian thought, nature is both wild and a reward to reap. This goes back not only to the genocidal origins of settler colonialism and Divine Right, but the Covenant of the Rainbow and classical Antiquity. Apart from the ability to openly commit lethal force against nature, then be lauded for it, the monomyth usually rewards the hero with getting the girl, afterwards. In short, there’s an exhibitionist, binarized violence to monomyth stories; i.e., presenting two basic forms of monstrous-feminine for the hero to be violent towards or around: the virgin and the whore. Common synonyms are the angel and devil, black and white, leather and lace, good and evil, wife and witch, damsel and demon, etc. Whatever they’re called, the virgin is classically innocent, passive and vulnerable; the whore is guilty, active and dangerous. Both receive punishment in canonical stories because both belong to nature as needing to be dominated and harvested, treated like property in theatrical ways.

Inside this theatre, the virgin sits on a pedestal, being “kept” prisoner (regardless of where she is) while the whore is chased; i.e., hunted down (usually to Hell or hellish areas) and cleansed like a witch is by self-righteous forces ordained by God, the king and the state, more broadly (which translates to capital’s usual operations looping in on themselves): a criminal and a monster. In either case, this synonymizes pleasure and harm in psychosexual forms doubling as capital punishment, mid-harvest; e.g., the succubus is chained and whipped, Medusa is beheaded, etc, while the damsel or the princess is locked up, needing to be rescued again (re: Persephone).

Both types reify the abuses regularly committed against women and nature-as-monstrous-feminine—with violence against the damsel being more of a domestic flavor and violence against the whore lending itself to matters of open war, moral panic and foreign policy (e.g., Red Scare). Both are useful to capital, in that both are invoked to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of shelter and the alien; i.e., nature is a whore; e.g., Beowulf, where Grendel’s mother invades the king’s home (first through her son, then going in herself to punish her son’s killers) to then be hounded to the underwater cave to be killed and presented as dead, allowing the hero to progress and law and order to return.

(artist: Kalinka Fox)

Something to keep in mind when looking at the Radiance, then, is how sex-positive dark mothers/mommy doms are de facto educators for good play using bad aesthetics: the girl to get by raping her for the Man and for capital dressed up in monomythic language. The ruin is a brothel and a warzone. Literally central to Promethean subversion of the monomyth, though, the whore generally waits at the center of the maze in order for the hero looking to progress to the epilogue of promised sex (and the next rape): to teach such children lessons besides the king’s.

Before they even meet, there’s the usual monomythic formula playing out. The hero is called to—generally by a male seer—then given a sword before venturing boldly into the space of doom (the home afflicted with hellish energies). It’s a military mission, a witch hunt that only “ends” when the hero rapes and slays the dragon, witch or Medusa at the end (their functions identical: the fascist/Communist scapegoat, a monstrous-feminine recipient of state force [revenge] by good or bad cops, including token vigilantes). Except there’s always another Medusa waiting for them in another castle, another rape to canonize or camp, another witch hunt to persecute/prosecute (there must, for profit needs to continue for as long as possible). The cats-and-dogs animus lingers, as does the undead matriarch’s hostility haunting the castle walls painted red with invisible blood after the wild goose chase: that of a rape survivor licking her wounds, but also blossoming into the world to stain its much-touted purity with fresh, decentralized uncertainty.

As such, the Medusa becomes something of a door-to-door saleswoman, teaching about rape through characteristic feelings that haunt the venue, post-survival, but also… enriching it? For instance, I didn’t even consider my abuse rape (rape ranking being a common rationalizing method of survivors) until I reflected on it through Gothic fictions like Resident Evil and Hollow Knight. Luckily I did, always comparing myself to the uncertainty I felt in Jadis’ presence; i.e., their toxic love (and furnished home) being like a Gothic castle, and I their Gothic captive.

In short, a dark mother can be played in bad faith, but also good; i.e., the cryptonymic umbra of the cosplayer aping Lady Dimitrescu with her eclipse-sized hat brim (the witch’s black halo, her body’s surface sexually charged with Promethean might, above). In defense of her dark womb as something to protect at all costs—re: freezing the hero as a rape prevention device—Mother Nature must become monstrous-feminine again, thus able to chill in stasis her patriarch-sent, state-ordained male (or token) killers working for the Man as a giant, seemingly inescapable force; i.e., the confronting of rape as popular and unchallenged in mythical, patriarch-centered stories; e.g., Daphne hounded by Zeus, turned into a tree to escape his ordinary rapacious advances. Rooting them in place among “an unweeded garden grown to seed,” a male space is a settler-colonial project on female-coded land reinvaded by a classification that feels female but really is GNC at large. This playing with death and power per ludo-Gothic BDSM has as much an architectural flavor as it does an overtly personified one, which brings us back to Aguirre.

Tying things to Aguirre’s geometries is the final room, or rather a room that conveys finality through the exhaustion of optimism in the face of an endless, yawning dead. As Aguirre writes in “Geometries of Terror”; re:

where the hero crosses a series of doors and spaces until he reaches a central chamber, there to witness the collapse of his hopes; [this infernal concentric pattern has] in Gothic one and the same function: to destabilize assumptions as to the physical, ontological or moral order of the cosmos [… It is like a Mandelbrot set:] finite, and yet from within we cannot reach its end; it is a labyrinth that delves “down” instead of pushing outwards. From the outside it looks simple enough: bounded, finite, closed; from the inside, however, it is inextricable. It is a very precise graphic replica of the Gothic space in The Italian […] Needless to say, the technique whereby physical or figurative space is endlessly fragmented and so seems both to repeat itself and to stall resolution is not restricted to The Italian: almost every major Gothic author (Walpole, Beckford, Lee, Lewis, Godwin, Mary Shelley, Maturin, Hogg) uses it in his or her own way. Nor does it die out with the metamorphosis of historical Gothic into other forms of fiction (source).

While Aguirre hints at videogames a fair bit (the piece is from 2008), I have obviously extended my research considerably to do nothing but explore the videogame’s partitioning of the Gothic’s hellish delights (from 2017 onwards) subverting traditional ideas of strength: confronting the Communist Numinous as haunted by equally enormous oppression (a giant prison for a giant queen).

To that, one does not simply get “raped” once, but over and over again as a matter of exquisite, paradoxically rapturous torture (“rape ironically”)! And if that seems odd, ask us why that might be! Ask the ghost why it was raped—not to get at the truth of what happened back then, but what is going on right now (cataloging history is fairly academic, but reenacting it says much more about current atrocities [with the ghost of the counterfeit] than former ones): marrying the language of sex and war as a matter of camp to bring out of the closet and into the wider world. Such things duel and coalesce in ways a medievalist not only wouldn’t mind, but indeed, would welcome and encourage. The keys to breaking Capitalist Realism lie in medieval theatrics “aping Chaucer, Shakespeare and Walpole,” etc; re: giants, and giant aspects of smaller beings.

(artist: Dream Pipe)

The Gothic has always been campy but invested in secret sins as out in the open (not quite incognito, not quite up front). From “ancient” Romance to ordinary novels, comedy to drama, artist and muse, seafaring adventure and earthbound sexual dungeon, there’s so many ways (and places) to “put it”; e.g., Sabs’ “Captain Turtledove and the Attack of the Terrible Octobussy,” 2024). So explore the taboos and cultural values of the imaginary past as rapacious (appropriative or not); don’t bury them (and their victims) because silence is genocide and genocide always leads to rape, to Rome, to bigger and bigger instances thereof. Ask why the whore is addicted to “rape,” then learn how to “rape” in quotes; listen to Medusa or Hippolyta whispering hungrily into your ear, “rape me!” (or “Take it like a good boy!”). Take the praise and debasement (whatever you both prefer, to whatever degree of aftercare you require); i.e., as a psychosexual, ludo-Gothic means of instruction whose BDSM (often through trial and error) synthesizes good praxis into the future: go big or go home (“rape” so often involves a dominant who looks and feels dominant[6]—the dragon lord or zombie master a fearsome monster-fucker [with a huge dick] that Medusa straight up craves. Mommy has needs).

So while kinky jouissance opens the eyes (so to speak), rape has a practical function: cryptonymy as a means of surviving the state’s usual beheadings (“the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads. Take it in what sense thou wilt[7]“). As a matter of survival and eventual liberation (the state survives by raping workers and nature per the process of abjection; e.g., white middle-class women exploiting cryptonyms to service profit; re: Radcliffe and her echoes), Medusa isn’t the only one who loves being “raped”; Persephone (the deity and me[8]) loves rape as something to camp, thus speak to abusive structures that try to otherwise shock you blind; e.g., the Metroidvania, per the monomythic heroic mechanisms, raping Medusa as a false flag: manifesting the unheimlich as her false castle, invading it and stabbing her in the “eyes” (the white, the pink, the brown—next page).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

A survivor of rape myself, I love writing about rape play both because I’ve gained an appreciation for calculated risk, but also because I have helped others work through such dialogs, too; i.e., manifesting through play and performance as a matter of cryptonymy (showing and hiding trauma) during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a revolutionary device: a pedagogy of the oppressed resisting police violence. While Metroidvania has conveniently allowed me to reenact these in gigantic, dualistic pathways (the castle’s big rape/rapist), any survivor of rape can act out their abuse through the Gothic, during oppositional praxis. Dialectically-materially this theatre invokes mechanisms the state will police through bad actors, players, and instructors: sex and force, but also terror and bodily expression that just as often, actualize/tokenize in highly Pavlovian ways. It’s all the same masks, costumes and mirrors; so remember that flow determines function, as far as the aesthetics of power and death reliably go.

For example, the player’s quest for power in Hollow Knight suitably ends in the darkness of immeasurable death spilling in all directions, trapping the hero in Hell; i.e., the emptying of Hell through a final zombie apocalypse that buries the rapist alive. To this, the heroic quest is Promethean, tied to a space that promises combat; the combat misleads the player by offering power as tinged with a self-imposed decay and malice that ultimately triumphs against the hero upon the story’s conclusion (turning them heel in the process, but to a grand, self-destructive and world-destroying degree; i.e., the fascist notion of the hero’s bondage to the cult of death and rape as venerated by the status quo: an unholy marriage of the hero’s sword to the monstrous-feminine brain. It’s big rape minus any irony at all (“You fight like a young man: eager to begin, quick to finish[9]!”): skull-fucking her Majesty-in-chains on par with Odysseus blinding the cyclops; i.e., she shows herself in all her glory only to be extinguished for it (or so it seems).

Simply put, there’s no way to win, no matter how many treasures acquired or enemies vanquished, because the hero is always a male rapist death fetish (a “killer doll”) working for the state; i.e., a reversal of Axiom Verge. Trace, the useful idiot, kills the king when lied to by the Great Fairy mommy doms (who are good doms despite their strict, imperfect approach); the knight (also an idiot) kills the gay fairy queen haunting the veil. When lied to by the straight king through the ghostly space around him, the hero (thus the player) becomes a bad dom in the process: Radcliffe’s demon lover!

To that, such forces are always in flux behind the scenes and out in the space as interwoven, liminal, anisotropic, concentric, etc; the crypt, as a site of secret sin, oozes said sin (like a ruptured eyeball) all over the status of the self-professed “brave.” It’s censorship with a knife (an oracle speaks with her eyes), profit projecting through rape as a matter thereof; i.e., police violence, repression serving the king as a poetic extension of the nuclear family under capital: protect daddy by raping the madwomen in the attic (classically a woman of color, in Jane Eyre). It’s not exactly subtle, but there remains a cloaked, uncertain element of subversion—some grey area to what might seem like a black-and-white scene.

Indeed, the game is effectively the opposite of Axiom Verge, the white king’s lost boys hulking out/turning black to rape the white queen—a military target—instead of the black queen dismembering the dark father to protect the son from a militarized scientist genociding the land. Furthermore, the extinguishing of the hero’s hopes is literally that of the eyes of the oracle; the eyes of the female Numinous (exhibit 40g) are put out, blinding our poor Cassandra/oracle while turning a blind eye to the darkness that continues in the wake of her execution: the self-destructive rememory—that is, the maddening recollection and attempted reassembly—of an exhaustive tally of imperial destruction, now leaking from the long-dead corpse of empire (which revives to unironically rape Medusa again and again and again). The hole, as usual, is stuffed in ouroborotic fashion by the lance, the sword, as instructed by the game; re: police training through police training grounds, the youthful martyr trading places with the old sentinel to stand watch inside the empty space—blood in, blood out.

Like Moby Dick, the Radiance is canonically the game’s white whale to chase, stab and harvest; i.e., for proponents of Ahab and capital to go overboard and underwater with, putting out their ancient animal enemy’s eyes: “to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!” It’s personal, a framed revenge for Ahab’s leg and his old man’s pride—all to render the whale into blubber and then oil.

Our resident Mothra is no different: something to kill to literally keep the lights on, but also restore the king’s good name against nature as daring to refuse the advance of his spearhead, his patriarch harpoon’s madness and obsession; i.e., all roads lead to Rome, to profit, to rape of nature-as-monstrous-feminine—a phallic sea monster in poetic forms, hailing from lands unknown as normally off-limits to man’s domain giving all the usual monomythic rewards as hellish, sumptuous: Neptune’s trove, its plunder dredged up and dragged back to land.

(exhibit 40h3: Artist: Bay. Nature is seen as the place that gives and takes away—a dark mother to fear and go into the territories thereof. In settler-colonial terms, such harvests are hauled monomythically back to the mother country in such stories, but also reduced to corporate fare sold on supermarket shelves. In Bay’s case, they are an Indigenous sex worker against Capitalism and for nature, doing much of their own cooking for their birthday [above]. But they still live in a place that was colonized [originally by the Dutch] and currently overseen by state-corporate influence.)

Whatever the dungeon, then, it’s a place of endless genderqueer potential (with gay themes present all throughout seafaring narratives, not just in outer space; i.e., matelotage; e.g., “Hey, sailor!” and “Any port in a storm!” etc) and value to harvest by enterprising landlubbers (the man of reason generally a seafarer from land who meets his end chasing the fire of the gods “out at sea”): the killing of the space whale. Whether for the bounty of food (which workers who aren’t against nature still must subsist on, above), pure dominion, or some combination under settler-colonial territories, Capitalism is Capitalism; i.e., relying on said animus in astronoetic narratives treating the whole thing as “heroic,” and for whom to the victor goes the spoils. In essence, the sea is badass and plentiful—a challenge to accept and overcome as historically tied to industry preying on nature from the land to the sea. Their deaths coincide, a hate crime against nature and a mind crime against the perpetrators forced to brave the waves for fat cats safe (and dry) on land (e.g., the invisible company executives, in Alien).

(artist: Michel Tole‘s “The Triumph of Venus and Galatea Over Moby Dick,” 2020)

Except, while she is seemingly hunted to extinction during a presumed war of extermination/tokenized exploitation thereof (similar to the sand worms and the power of the land, in Dune), the Radiance eventually returns for her revenge inside the used-up minds of the king’s loyal servants, who, infected with her influence—her testimony—must be isolated* from other knights and then killed to keep the king’s secret; i.e., while they are incarcerated inside the Black Egg. The madwoman lives rent-free in the attic of their traumatized brains: “art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?” they ask. “Can’t kill me, motherfuckers!” she replies.

*A tactic that real-life ants will do, when members of their nest are sick, except they carry the infected away from the nest to die. The Pale King has colonized everything, keeping the secret in-house to avoid it spreading (similar to Rian from The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, when the Skeksis convince other Gelfling that his mind is sick; i.e., so they won’t dream-fast with him and learn the truth).

This is effectively the subversion I’m talking about, here: the rapists’ comeuppance after doing what they were made to do against nature, in effect subverting state-sanctioned rape through the scene itself as something to act out at the center of the maze: by the Radiance having a role in said subversion as playfully veiled by the maze’s walls. The darkness seems to be the king’s will, but it also occupies her revenge afterwards, lending to an awkward and opaque duality. So, there’s a non-verbal element to what unfolds that’s even more subversive, arguably than, Axiom Verge, but also more contested. It is a rape we’re looking at, right? But the Radiance still wins. Can it be more than one thing at once?

Of course, this plays out as an act that is forgotten and concealed within its own artefacts; i.e., something to sing about as a far-off conquest to begin anew by fresh hearts and minds venturing into old dungeons and hunting down dragons like the days of old; e.g., Tolkien’s song of the dwarves, itself a fragment their culture: “and this is like a fragment of their song if it can be like their song without their music” (source) to

Far over misty mountains cold

To dungeons deep and caverns old

We must away ere break of day

To seek the pale enchanted to gold (ibid.)

to “our long-forgotten gold” to “our harps and gold” from unworthy pre-fascist usurpers (dragons) and abject anti-Semitic occupiers (orcs and goblins). The dwarves’ covetous memory becomes one of unbridled revenge, its call to war against nature sharpening to rekindle better times out of myth tied to artefacts that suggest it to start with: “He was witless and wandering, and had forgotten almost everything but the map and the key” (ibid.).

I’m not just someone who plays with rape through ludo-Gothic BDSM. I’m also a Tolkien scholar whose Gothic ludology was inspired by Tolkien’s work (mainly The Hobbit, but I digress). Far from being brainless in the current, neoliberal trend, games and the Gothic are classically a site for clever in-jokes regarding the same old material, in effect playing with it to camp it. As Tolkien speaks to the monomyth and secret things wrought with heroic violence, then, let’s take a few pages to unpack that and apply it to the Radiance’s death as camping such matters, herself (enjoyment is not endorsement); i.e., as something that subverts the usual monomythic abjection and reward (mercenary rape) per the Promethean Quest: raping the whore as the dragon to chase down and steal from (with Tolkien’s Smaug also being queer-coded and animalistic[10]). From there, we’ll wrap things up and proceed onto “The Monomyth,” part two!

To revive the memory of the king, Tolkien’s war-like dwarves (a whole mess of anti-Semitic clichés) embark on a goldrush through the usual business of burgling a stolen home back unto a mythology’s “timeless” ownership (echoes of Zionism): waging war against the monomyth’s usual enemies by unlikely heroes on a Journey thereof (Jewish-coded monsters and a closeted bachelor). In Tolkien’s opinion, only Tookish assholes have adventures, generally as a matter of conducting violence in dark, deep places while wishing for it: “to wear a sword instead of a walking stick” (ibid.). Like all these little quotes, the desire for adventure against the Numinous dragon is littered throughout Tolkien’s world: little things lead to big things, a covert military operation escalating to all-out war on all fronts (making Smaug this story’s Archduke Ferdinand, I suppose).

The home isn’t just guarded by the dragon, but by the dwarves’ secrecy towards the treasure pegging them as vice characters (“the fierce and jealous love of dwarves” amounting to “dragon sickness” later in the book). And in the interim, the map and key go hand-in-hand—as a matter of code that includes the map and its runes, hidden walls, moon letters, riddles, royal flattery and so on—as a business practice among them, an omerta of sorts. The treasure, already stolen through conquest, becomes a mystery unto itself, then; i.e., a trade secret in the usual medieval sort, one unlocked with the key that was, itself, secret: “the quest to the Lonely Mountain depended entirely on a single key and a secret door that the dragon didn’t know about. In fact, without the key, Bilbo wouldn’t have been able to get into the mountain” (source: A Hole in the Ground’s “The Strange History of Thror’s Key,” 2012).

Tolkien’s dwarves are a secretive bunch—homeless criminals with bling (“Thorin stroked the gold chain round his neck,” source) who do dark business in dark places (“Suddenly he found that the music and the singing had stopped, and they were all looking at him with eyes shining in the dark.” / “‘We like the dark,’ said all the dwarves. ‘Dark for dark business! There are many hours before dawn,'” ibid.). In short, they verge on being goblins themselves, operating through violence to take what’s theirs, the dragon a matter of calculus: “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him” (ibid.).

In turn, such careful planning is tied to the monomyth—a matter of returning to tradition—pointedly encouraging violence against Tolkien’s ideological enemies, all of it sold as Goldilocks Imperialism to middle-class children playing war and robbery[11] for fun (as a matter of fact, he wrote the book for his son):

“That would be no good,” said the wizard, “not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary). That is why I settled on burglary—especially when I remembered the existence of a Side-door. And here is our little Bilbo Baggins, the burglar, the chosen and selected burglar (ibid.).

As such, stealing isn’t just cool, but a righteous cycle of revenge ordained by the author playing god; e.g., world-building and dogma; i.e., to restore a fallen people and land to proper working order after a former collapse: the dragon haunting a fallen kingdom—a symbol of sickness not unlike Medusa’s eventual, required return.

In the interim, Smaug is far-off and legendary because of it, becoming something to plan around: a dungeon crawl (whose cartographic refrain arguably inspired every D&D campaign ever run, and every roleplaying videogame you could think of—per the monomyth as something to canonize). Their return is as inevitable as the weather or the night following the day, because Tolkien treats humans (and monstrous stand-ins for humans) as naturally greedy.

To this, The Hobbit is a morality play whose conspicuously medieval language (and stereotypes) rarefy greed as, having inflicted harm against the status quo, become something to meet with harm: the cycle of revenge repaid in kind. In short, Tolkien abstracts nature into a fascist allegory and scapegoat; i.e., a dragon to slay as one might a witch—all done in order to keep money moving through nature in service to profit. As part of the same “rape farm,” the shadow of the dragon is always felt; its giant bones lie at the bottom of the lake; its spirit lies heavy on the hearts of men, dwarves, elves, and goblins all fighting over the dragon’s mountainous pile of gold; its hoard becomes theirs, turning them into dragons.

To it, the final boss of Capitalism isn’t the dragon and its castle-like body as something to invade, mise-en-abyme (the mountain containing the dragon, which houses the return of war outside of dragon and mountain); it’s greed, itself, as a Pavlovian, destabilizing system of exchange and code—also known as capital. Unto it, the recipe is always one of revenge spiraling towards disaster as precisely what the elite want; per the Protestant ethic, war is holy in their eyes, inventing whatever enemies they want/need and essentializing them as “ancient” through a poetry (and cryptomimesis) conducive to war out of good lands into bad, “there and back again”: good races raping bad ones in and out of game-like replicas. It’s Imperialism with more steps, the centrist arbitration of value judgements coinciding with whether you’re on the right side of the fence (the West) or not; i.e., Orientalism’s double standards per moral teams through good-vs-evil, us-versus-them copaganda; e.g., fat bodies celebrated or condemned simply because of which team you’re on as a matter of shame, guilt, revenge, etc. You can see this with Tolkien’s Bombur compared to the Great Goblin of the Misty Mountains—a double standard that also plays out in real life between men like Sammo Hung and Steven Segal (Accented Cinema’s “Let’s Not Fat-shame Steven Seagal,” 2024). It’s vaudeville, which includes the hobbit killing spiders (which extends to their babies, next page, through an extermination war that marks spiders as “pure evil” being killed by tokenized forces).

(artist: the Brothers Hildebrandt)

The point in dredging up Tolkien, here, is the knight in Hollow Knight is really no different: promised by the game some kind of gilded spectacle (rewards are generally promised through tiny markers of themselves, Thror’s key made of silver); i.e., to plunder through rapine (the act of taking by force) from an undeserving party by deserving ones through a casus beli. In this case, the “dragon” is Hallownest’s monstrous-feminine queen, the Radiance, and your reward—as the games little, hobbit-sized hero—is to rape her and take her spectral crown for the former now-dead king. Not so different from a ring around one’s finger, no (either type signifying the transfer and legitimacy of power, which Bilbo is not immune to, below)?

The Radiance’s death—like Smaug’s—is an honor killing met with armed robbery, but also an exorcism of something hidden to the same extent as that pale enchanted gold, Thror’s key or even the dragon: a mountainous glimmer that blinds the hero and fills them with unquenchable bloodlust; i.e., drunk on glory and death, but also their own heroic brand as inherited from the home’s forged, mythological sense of ownership as rooted in secrecy in deception; e.g., Samus and Zebes, but also Bilbo’s hand in a larger race war that cumulates in Thorin’s Viking-style last stand against Erebor’s forces of darkness (arguably the author’s token Jew defending an imperialist stronghold from the “ancient,” essentialized enemies of Britain: “the enemy is weak and strong”): Thorin bashing Bilbo, calling him “descendent of rats” (code for “Jew” but also “thief”), whereupon Bilbo does everything he can to prove he’s of the good’s side (while also, it must be said, trying to prevent all-out war). Antagonize nature and put it to work as cheaply as possible (which is what the Battle of the Fire Armies [a world war predicated on racial conflict] illustrates); assimilate, gentrify and decay.

Except, the context is more different, in Hollow Knight. For one, the Radiance isn’t just a vice character comparable to gold and conquest, but a tragic character whose rape fantasy is one of reversal after you’ve raped her to death more than once; re: “the fourth ending destroys the Absolute Radiance, but turns the knight into an even greater monster that Hornet must fight on her own.” This happens while the sky weeps blood and tentacles[12] (such black shit may as well be blood given the cataclysmic atmosphere). During state shift, then, the female sun goes black, coming home to end the king’s Cartesian madness—his endless line of toy soldiers marching to their doom—by shattering the dollhouse and the heliocentric stance it has; i.e., built around a false, decaying king (the conspiratorial fascist) eaten, in the end, when the raped, hungry womb of nature goes “om nom nom!” It’s simply the planet defending itself.

In turn, the colossal misogyny on display is actually a revelation about instructed rape that, until the grand unveiling thereof, was merely whisper and allegation: the true villain was the hero all along (in other words, the total opposite of stories like The Hobbit)!

(artist: Ashen Hare)

After all’s raped and done, the Radiance remains the most endearing character (“She’s mighty-mighty”) in the game precisely because she’s raped, but is also the wonderous object of pursuit with a secret to tell that lingers in undead fashion, postmortem. She’s the tragically Icarian/Luciferian (and phallic), but also hidden heroine; i.e., Hollow Knight‘s fat lady signing passionately about her rape in Bluebeard’s castle/geometry of terror (the stage being the GNC performer’s classic arena to summon and voice their abuse, their insecurities, their passion—not for the elite, but for themselves as a dark god worthy of tribute).

Emblematic of the unironic monomyth and medieval Romance, the hero is the talent, the Radiance his merchandise to capture and police by a knight errant given license to do so by divine providence: a one-man army campaigning against the barbarians at the gate, nature herself coming home to turn said home into hostile alien territories. Through the usual fetishes and clichés of sports, combat, and theatre, the knight is the Man with No Name (the American Western generally endorsing cowboys and Indians, pushing Indigenous people to the margins and focusing on white pioneer women/saviors); i.e., a killer-doll, blank-state, masking-wearing mercenary/vigilante without a kingdom fighting for a dead patriarch (echoes of Xenophon, whose poetic incursions grandstand against nature, ultimately yielding repeated, cannibalistic excursions [death by exposure] into fatal territories in defense of empire and its doomed, fearful enterprise; i.e., a repeat of the forced march and last stand, a death spiral’s grist-for-the-mill yielding profit for the elite, fear of nature being the motivating drive; e.g., The Terror‘s Sir John: “Show this beast the might of the British empire!”).

His mission? To extinguish Medusa’s grail beacon—her Archaic Mother’s hysteria—as aided by all the king’s men (shades) playing “barber” (the classic function being a bloodletter to cure an imbalance of the humors, generally tied to “wandering womb”): to perform female circumcision (of her “phallic” components) by the heroic barbarian posturing as “of the West,” all while stabbing Medusa’s bloodshot eyes with their heroic knife dick (which includes tokenized forms; e.g., Samus vs Mother Brain; re: “War Vaginas,” 2021). The Call to Adventure is a mating call, then—the sort that knights are feared for doing unto state enemies in state-claimed lands: a room to clear, a plate to finish, moving money through nature through the same-old process of abjection.

Rape is rape, but the game playfully tests your resolve by treating it as your final reward before ignominiously burying you alive, in effect punishing you—the triumphant detective—like Lot’s wife: for looking into things (re: Segewick). Playtime is over, the ending feeling like a game over. And while everyone arguably feels differently about historical events, the events themselves are still historical-material facts that theatrically repeat through such feelings fueling the chronotope; i.e., as dissenting voices coming from the oppressed marrying to the legends, the architecture, the opposing side’s resistance to the buried truth. Silence speaks for itself, as do the things that corrupt the masonry to immeasurable degrees. Something seems wrong and asks you, the hero, to solve it, as monomyth heroes always do: through unironic violence. His nail, her flesh—it’s the same carpentry.

Like all Metroidvania, then (and, by extension, any Gothic castle), Hollow Knight taunts you, first; it dares you to penetrate its domain and hunt down its ancient, monstrous-feminine secrets, a resident Medusa doing its best to isolate you and piss you off (as James Rolfe famously put it, “You’re angry and you want to beat the Nintendo, but the sad fact is, no one cares but you”).

Like Athetos, the Radiance is that thing to get mad at, but also to worship as the dead giveaway with Numinous, castled qualities (“Look upon my wonder!”); i.e., the dynamic is inverted: Athetos is the state gaslighter making the tyrant’s plea as a man of reason having raped Medusa; the Radiance is appearing before the state servant to paralyze her would-be-rapist in awe. Similar to the Alien Queen from Aliens, the Radiance is meant to be held down and raped by the state as Medusa and Communism—but she wins anyways, punishing capital’s libido (the drive towards profit, raping nature) by cursing them posthumously with live burial and state shift; high voltage, she turns it all back on the hero, thus the player, through her zombie eyeballs felt throughout the space, paralyzing zombie tyrants through zombie soldiers (the Alien Queen, meanwhile, sneaks an egg on board Ripley’s ship, avenging her children by killing Newt, the colony brat, and Hicks, the de facto husband—it’s Frankenstein‘s marital destruction visited upon the cop)!

Until things come to light, the Radiance stares at you defiantly through the eyes of the king’s men[13], screaming out of their mouths like a xenoglossic virus (specifically cordyceps): the voice of the dead, the damned, the raped yawping “I am woman, hear me roar!” She’s a fungus, a banshee, Princess Toadstool from Hell chaining Mario up in a very particular way—through lust and shame, but also voyeuristic/exhibitionist violence camping a shared god space and bodies; i.e., literally bloodlust unto the whore as unable to fight back in a moment of extended, legendary vulnerability and betrayal relayed through the monomyth: as a call to violence against the whore—to “breed” her (a euphemism for rape, but also “rape”) through vulgar poetry of courtly love, of Red Scare lusting after the whore to shackle and shame but also sell her red hair and blood!

(artist: Mika Dawn)

To it, the Radiance is a prisoner the hero tracks down and rapes in her jail cell. She’s raped by her “protectors” playing good cop, bad cop (the husk-like knight filled white spirit and black void as something to weaponize against her), but also experiences the pain and death of those she inhabits. In short, she sees the world through the eyes of the other prisoners, feeling their pain as the hero puts them down (often attacking his enemies while they sleep, invading their dreams to duel their corpses—witness tampering, essentially). His perspective is always one of cleansing the land and its memories through these mediums “leaking hysteria” (e.g., the hollow knight’s cracked mask spilling into the Black Egg and out into the kingdom); she, to cry out through the land in tomb-like agony expressing genocide as unable to be contained, thus repressed. There’s a sadistic and masochistic element between the two, the Radiance provoking attacks that always highlight the hero’s vengeful, police-like function; i.e., something to see, then speculate about, in dialectical-material ways concerning what is happening—in short, what we’re looking at as a point of view unto itself, one tied to rape and war of the land by its self-appointed owners: cops.

While reverse abjection yields the usual rape plays that big mommies give to their good little pets (“love taps”), abjection translates to the Radiance being blinded by her captors. Frankly this is rape all by itself—but also the whispers and societal looking away from someone (culture death) whose smiting of the king’s memory is arguably being done to a rapist by its jilted victim operating through the space. It’s “Young Goodman Brown” or The Scarlet Letter (1850) committed without Hawthorne’s critical bite, his irony. But it still gives that away through the raping of the dead whore as a kind of dance partner the game makes the player (and the audience[14]) party to—to show what is normally repressed by acting out cop and victim. As such, the Radiance is both dead and not dead by playing dead through rape play that speaks to monomythic abjection, turning community isolation inside-out; i.e., subverting it as a matter of Gothic paradox through ludo-Gothic BDSM during the Promethean Quest’s geometries of counterterror. She doesn’t escape her prison by leaving it; she escapes by making it a space to communicate buried woes to a wider audience: the fact that she even exists at all.

Us women, you see, historically aren’t “just angry”; we generally have good reason, as do the men who cover it all up breaking our trust (they don’t trust us to keep quiet, afterwards). We don’t tend to rape men for denying us sex (excluding tokenized, Man-Box examples), but we do become detectives speaking to our survival of rape, the latter something that traumatizes us into silence (or, in Tolkien’s case and ours, secretive fictions littered with clues, stitched together across them in ways his “Tookish” side wasn’t exempt from doing when it fancied him). It’s not a trend for its own sake that bored middle-class people buy into (during the process of abjection); it’s a historical-material fact felt in echoes in and out of Gothic media (which Tolkien very much is as much as Hollow Knight is; re: Volume One, but quoted earlier in “Jadis’ Dollhouse“): rape victims are seldom believed, but appear holistically across generations in and out of fiction regarding such abuse—as castle-like people or people-like castles attesting to secret sins and buried guilt. We fags dance in the ruins to camp their mapped-out rapes, their cartography leading to us and our liberation through “rape”: camping the monomyth as monomythic copaganda, instructing nature as something to rape to move money through nature inside the castle space.

As such, rape victims are forced to be their own advocates, appealing to the public by virtue of what the middle class will pay attention to—the victims’ own rape and murder as something to reify and sell, per the ghost of the counterfeit. This can be Pavlovian—electrocuting the bitch to induce a panic response—but the same actions also constitute a theatrical performance that looks the same, and yet differs through context: the irony of acting out one’s death (“O happy dagger!”) through an ambiguous, at-times-unreliable buffer (the plot to Rashomon, in other words): a secret key and plan to a dungeon (re: Thror’s map, key and mountain, but also dragon, inside) that must be explored. It’s that or not saying anything at all, and look what that gets you (unironic rape, genocide).

They say that dead men tell no tales, then, but few things are as loud, brutal and difficult to ignore as rape (especially gang rape or witch hunts that gang up on a rape victim; re: The Scarlet Letter). As we explored with my rape, emotional damage can cut like a knife in ways that are more subtle and diffuse, but also prolonged and, at times, Numinous compared to an over-and-done-with physical incident. A survivor might out-and-out say “I was raped.” I did, but I actually led off with art of the event, first (exhibit 39a1b). There isn’t a superior method because rape victims are always treated like they deserved it or it didn’t happen.

Furthermore, the fact remains that art is a common way to express one’s abuse at the hands of privileged men (e.g., Elisabetta Sirani’s “Timoclea Killing Her Rapist” [exhibit 35b] or “Portia Wounding her Thigh”). Regardless of the method, many people not only won’t believe you, they’ll attack you (even if they’re victims of rape, too). Welcome to being raped! It doesn’t stop with the event itself, but—like Hawthorne’s infamous Scarlet Letter—becomes a brand to stamp survivors with and then police them as whores[15] to serve profit. It’s compelled prostitution, lashing whistleblowers; i.e., marginalized workers seeking equal rights, thus a chance to be heard, by acting out their abuse.

Applying these complexities to Hollow Knight, I can’t prove that the Pale King raped the Radiance “back then”; but I can do the same thing I did with Athetos and ask you to look at the results: everyone who serves under the king is a trained killer working to please daddy to genocidal extremes (e.g., the Soul Master draining the City of Tears of its lifeforce in pursuit of a cure, exhibit 40i). Fucker’s whole court is straight psychopaths; nobody’s that blind, and if he somehow was, he should be removed and the system overhauled. Fuck the king and fuck his reputation. As a matter of capital attached to Cartesian thought, the Shadow of Pygmalion and Cycle of Kings is precisely the problem.

Medusa’s certainly on board with camping capital; she’s a total freak, one whose ghost of the counterfeit (and thunder-clapping pussy fart) all but begs, “What ails you?” Any Gothic creator loves investigating her own death as tied to societal issues, which she plays out through undead fictions tied loosely to taboo truths; i.e., a black rose to pick for Queen Maeb and croon through folklore and urban legend, rock ‘n roll, the chronotope’s restless geometries!

I’m one such detective, but I’m hardly the first or the best. Even so, it all becomes something to remember by passing it along through oral and written forms that speak to lost, incredible things—rape and revenge, reclamation and release—sure enough, having a spatial quality to them:

Tell me the legends of long ago
When the kings and queens would dance
In the realm of the Black Rose
Play me the melodies I want to know
So I can teach my children, oh (Thin Lizzy’s “Black Rose,” 1979).

A kind of murder ballad, then, the Gothic-Romance-as-space like Hallownest is such flower—a whorish “Alraune” that, hardly as censored as O’Keefe, drinks vengefully the blood of slain virgins and the essence of lusty virginial men (remembering both on either side of rape).

(artist: James Fitzpatrick)

As such, the Medusa once again sits between the “ancient” and the ordinary as trapped on and off the canvas, in between the walls, calling from the heart of the castle’s deepest, darkest prison cell. Darkness visible, she’s Jennifer Kent’s Nightingale as singing her suffering sweetly to those who know the signs, the code. Her expression is forbidden and commodified by colonizer forces, but there’s always a wild poetic joy they cannot fully tame or seize for themselves: to see it again (to hear it again in music) makes my skin tingle oh-so-naughtily. Finding it gives me release, but can’t undo what was done.

Liberation is always, to some degree, chained by ghosts of a settler-colonial past whose rememory aches and bristles with scarcely-contained rage: “I’m not English, I’m Ireland! [switching to Gaelic] To the devil’s house with all English people, every mother’s son of them! May the pox disfigure them! May the plague consume them! Long live Ireland!” (source). Something tells me that if we could translate the Radiance’s screams, they’d sound fairly alike. Indeed, the weapon she visits upon the king is a plague. As such, the Gothic—not just Hollow Knight—is a coping mechanism of martyred catharsis; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a faux-medieval, concealed means of raising the dead of empire to let them speak, thus motivate a decaying hegemon to let go and change—to regenerate into something better than it previously was (treating the Radiance like a leper to lock up and abuse, mid-quarantine/segregation).

The larger mode uses stories like Hollow Knight to wrestle with unspeakable trauma in ways we can, to some extent, partially control and capture as psychosexually cathartic; i.e., the palliative Numinous expressed through Her Majesty’s sorry doom in godly (Promethean) forms: the castle, the goddess, the land of the black rose as raped by the king and all the king’s men (“Dayman, fighter of the night [wo]man!”) running a train (of draconian medieval succession, from father to son) on her corpse, censoring the rape for profit’s sake but proliferating it nonetheless through the space’s endless tourneys. Capital is built on rape as a matter of profit told in monomythic language hunting nature down; to show the rape by humanizing the whore (as Hollow Knight does) is to expose itself and give the game way in Promethean terms: the knight is hollow as a matter of power whose puppetry isn’t limited to the king at all, but also the queen.

Furthermore, peace cannot be attained in the interim, because such hidden abuses routinely yield disastrous socio-material effects whose ontological senescence manifests in the world itself as falling apart: state shift, climate change, and class consciousness all going hand in hand after much frustration (e.g., Charlie Day’s glorious refrain, “Why don’t I strap on my job helmet and squeeze down into a job cannon and fire off into Jobland where jobs grow on jobbies!”) to kick the king squarely in the bollocks. BOLLOCKS DESTROYED.

The paradox Hollow Knight exhibits lies in how it depicts rape; i.e., generally one of monstrous-feminine testimony (itself rather ironic, given the etymology[16] of that word): showing the world one’s rape in ways that cannot, like the space itself, be ignored. The Radiance’s pussy isn’t just a Chinese box pattern (aka the Russian doll, or concentric narrative); per Aguirre’s “Geometries,” which combines the Chinese box with the labyrinth and infernal concentric pattern to achieve an anisotropic effect (different effects in different directions), her fatal eye is a finger trap (“lips that grip”) that bites down on the rapist to trap them (a bit like Mars and Venus Aphrodite in Vulcan’s net), trapping the ordeal of rape for all to see: vagina dentata. It’s a trap, one where the ghost of the Radiance—literally an undead Numinous spirit plaguing the land—tops from below. From Hell as a place to inhabit and experience inside the kingdom, she cleverly baits the rapist (the knight) to expose their hidden rapacious side; i.e., one being a byproduct, similar to Lewis’ Matilda exposing Ambrosia for his Catholic passions: raping a corpse.

In the Radiance’s case, her appearance is the hypnotist’s stellar pussy flaring up to paralyze the knight in his tracks, jumping from one shell to another. But even if the current knight wins and she seemed banished for good without bringing forth the apocalypse (the third ending), the Radiance has still acted out her own death—her own swansong hijacking the prison intercom, its guards, to make them her playthings and her mouthpieces.

(artist: Heinrich Lossow)

From Chaucer’s Alisoun (“Thus, swyved was this carpenteris wyf”) to Ambrosio, to latter-day cops acting out courtly love as the knight in Hollow Knight does, classic villains not only appear righteous and good; they are outdone by their own lust as informed by carceral material conditions (a wife literally something to fuck under duress, but also take by force); rather than refrain from such theatrics, they become a useful way to express rape as going on right now. Per my PhD, Gothic maturity turns such things—normally a matter of spite—into a vulgar, transformative means of performance and play that interrogates power through trauma; i.e., as allowing one to have fun and expose abuse by acting such things out per calculated risk as built into the space and its motion (which is what ludo-Gothic BDSM aims to do). It denudes the king and his designs, disempowering them to give voice to the victim, empowered through her rape as “castrating” the patriarch and his bloodline; i.e., by matter of viewed scandal, per Black-Veil burlesque inside “the lovely room of death” (re: the center of the Radcliffean space generally being a site of explanation about rape)—a planned witness to a crime that, regardless of the lady’s hand in things, is still a crime committed by the knight as normally receiving state protection[17].

The catharsis to apocalyptic, come-and-see rape play like Hollow Knight roots in general, humorous, medieval-style exhibitionism and voyeurism the likes of Heinrich Lossow (above) or, later, Edward Hooper (whose own works inspired and speak to my consensual voyeurism, exhibit 39a1b). It becomes a codified, routine matter of brothel espionage and prostitute heroism—our resident whore baiting the creep, then outing him for the predator he is in service to the king (“The play’s the thing!”). Like lightning in a bottle, this poetic effect is still one of passion; i.e., what the Irish call a chuisle (“the pulse of my heart”)—something to tease like a clit, growing more sensitive between the world of the living and land of the dead (“undeath” being an orgasmic state of existence, of rapture) not exploiting rape but healing from it as a ghost of itself we summon to “ravish” us among the hallowed halls. The feelings intensify towards the vaginal center before the thrust, which mounts and explodes then like the castle itself, the hero and the whore dispersing and disappearing like a (wet) dream.

(source Tumblr post, Samurai Trooper fanzine: February 26th, 2021)

To it, playing with rape isn’t rape, but speaks to unironic forms that, unto themselves, have cathartic potential we can dance with to outperform in subversive, asexual ways; i.e., that can be harnessed to take power back from bourgeois elements pimping Medusa tied to a cultural fascination with the imaginary past (castle or occupant, including warriors and princesses, but also Amazonian hybrids of these, above). Again, they only have as much power as we give them, and through rape play can take it back as a matter of flowing such things back towards workers using Gothic space during ludo-Gothic BDSM. It’s a dangerous game regardless, so we might as well use what we got to take something of ours back from these pigs: “Come feel my hammer, little man!” As Mavis taught me (and for whom this section is dedicated), she absorbs power from those who generally don’t know the difference (men), waking up to describe what happened to Medusa classically in her sleep; i.e., when she was powerless and raped by the hero; e.g., like Theseus and the Minotaur (the former a cop to invade the home of the latter). Perseus hunted down the Medusa to “behead her”—to take her “maidenhead” and synonymize sex and force, but also replace consent with genuine harm. When camping these behaviors, there is always a vampiric exchange, which the space exemplifies in terrifying-yet-rapturous ways.

Except, in cases of genuine harm, it serves the whore to able to top from below to avoid or discourage harm and still take power back from one’s would-be abusers and their monomythic weapons. “Disempowerment” through the vice character is the classic means of subverting police violence by GNC folk—through theatre as a shared space, one that speaks to real-life examples. Actual predators project their own behaviors onto their victims, who they use DARVO to turn other members of the same marginalized community against the predator’s prey as a “threat” in order to prey on them; i.e., camouflage through aesthetics and argument, defined through dialectical-material engagement as a matter of canon vs camp, vice and virtue, behavior and cosmetics (through gender performance) going hand-and-hand with their biology, orientation, and politics, etc.

The Radiance’s bristles with phallic implements—her crown, legs and spiky projections to stab the hero to death with. Except. greatest power is her banshee-like voice, but also her scent as a kind of fairy glamor/magical perfume—one that turns her captors into her willing slaves, reversing the flow of power inside the prison while still visually playing the quest out. In turn, her announcement of rape is a subversive act, one never entirely divorced from genuine abuse by virtue of the player returning the system to working order by seeming laying her low—an act he does by clapping her in chains at the center of the maze: the scapegoat for the king’s crimes/madness already his prisoner.

(artist: Willow Wormwood)

Power and resistance occupy the same space, one whose dominant and submissive roles tend to either outright reverse, or maintain their appear while topping or bottoming changing as a matter of subtext that plays out through the same performance and aesthetics (re: bottoming from the top or vice versa). Keeping with the usual ambiguities—whose speculative qualities of play work off said ambiguities to speak to real life as not being cut and dry—such playtime speaks to the fact that we, in fact, aren’t knights and kings and queens and more than the Radiance is from planet Earth. And yet, we see her eagerly waiting at the door to greet her latest gentleman caller, not unlike a bored housewife playing the Duke of Burgundy (2014) out in real time—that naughty and eager desire to escape the prison-like qualities of middle-class existence, but also genuine abuse tied to the seemingly perfect existence of white American women in suburbia. The Radiance is something of a bored aging housewife, then, eagerly awaiting her next chance to give it to the knight, but also have her castle-space essayed into and ravished by him (the demon lover’s jizz running down her leg a lovely memory as fate comes knocking once more). She’s a freak because she likes to play to recover from trauma that sadly is all too common to women/monstrous-feminine at large; i.e., making such escapes something of a liminal, prison-like opera where liberation is—sadly and joyously—something to play at in order to reify (the story of our gay lives).

(artist: Shane Ballard)

Moreover, such calculated risk’s historical cruising can reduce to safer thrill-seeking that, all the same tends to get the old blood (and other fluids) pumping—in part, because you’re not always sure what’s going to happen or what someone is saying (e.g., body language, gags, and being restricted [for the sake of argument] to only making cute animal sounds), but all the same have a pretty good idea when working with someone you trust; i.e., who isn’t bad-faith, hence can actually follow commands (won’t bully/rape you and then stupidly fail up) and play the part of the dom or the sub regardless of aesthetic; e.g., the dragon master of the dark mommy dom using you the way that you want to be used, “raped,” what-have-you. That’s what makes it silly and fun, but also cathartic regarding actual abuse per the pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., speaking theatrically to repressed actions routinely committed against the usual criminalized parties (the monstrous-feminine as sex demons, foreigners, sodomites [vampires] and other such “degenerates”) during state crisis advertising rape epidemics against marginalized peoples inside domestic war zones, aka prisons (cops and victims, witch hunts scapegoating nature for capital’s regulation predation, but also its boom-and-bust design)!

The fact that it’s a videogame aside, there’s always a BDSM element of play to stories like Hollow Knight. Except terror is always part of the historical equation, the disguise-like context of said play—the psychosexual excitement of release and incarceration—offset by acquiring new playmates to bask in the dom’s Numinous glow. She’s definitely a strict dom, playing it straight and only surrendering in the game’s final moments.

But in “dying” for all to see, the Radiance has her revenge/generally gains the upper hand over servants like the knight (similar to Portia’s ring game); i.e., those who themselves have been historically conditioned by the prison to prey on her to begin with. As a matter of exchange, they become her playthings, hypnotized in ways police agents often are, albeit in ways the Radiance uses to reverse the usual flow of violence and give Her Majesty a modicum of control: setting herself free inside the oubliette (a kind of prison that means “to forget”) as infernal schoolhouse to unruly children. The signature of choice begins to suggest mutual consent in ways that, on their face, seem wholly nonconsensual. Indeed, rape is as much the emotional abuse of isolation waiting to be fucked as it is the penetration, itself. The Radiance is paradoxically free, then, while still in chains (at least for now)—liberated from the embarrassment of total silence and bondage abuse, learning to enjoy its subversive power as a profound means of de facto education/reclamation: topping her captors, dominatrix-style, or at least making them work for their reward, then turning the sweet taste of victory to ashes in their mouths. She’s teaching them a lesson, one rooted in the humiliation of play where resolution is always found amid theatrical, but also dialectical-material tension.

As Jadis taught me, power becomes a vital means of play and performance while being imprisoned in some shape or form. Such hypnosis, then, has a canonical, settler-colonial function to it—a “prison sex” mentality the Radiance breaks by turning imprisonment back, boomerang-style, on her abusers, forcing them to remember the person they’re guarding as having value. She does so by using the dogmatic, vampiric nature of the prison against its employees; i.e., using her terrifying voice to infectiously travel through the guards and architecture, draining them of their essence and short-circuiting their brains. It’s a queer, iconoclastic metaphor of disease not unlike Foucault’s panopticon, one she—a skilled and unscrupulous survivor locked in her cell—uses to her advantage to speak to past wrongs against nature (and herself as “of nature”) through ludo-Gothic BDSM: a “rape” epidemic. Like any good example of the exercise, it’s even set to music—a song and dance to play out for the umpteenth time (with Radcliffe’s vaguely cursed spaces of terror often having hauntingly enchanting and spooky “mood music,” setting the signature gloomy tone by playing atmospheric from undiscovered locations; i.e., that, like the Pied Piper or sirens, lead you to your indeterminate but certain rape/doom; e.g., Azathoth’s flutes from “Dreams in the Witch House” or the spooky guitar music from 1996’s Diablo 1 “Tristram theme,” etc):

(source: Materia Collective)

In other words, such abuse is generally tokenized, the queen stuck in her closeted, isolating position because she was ostensibly betrayed; i.e., forgotten by her clan (the seer in the Burial Grounds, above) and left to rot inside the mind of the people abusing her for the king: sending the hero to rape and destroy their matriarch as a matter of pro-state penance, unburdening themselves but also unable to live the guilt and fading to dust. Such preferential mistreatment translates to real life and the ways a witch hunt normally play out: turning society against those who aren’t normally believed by other members of the prison population.

For example, JDPlaysMoth accused me of abuse based on my testimony of older transmisogyny committed against me (source tweet, vanderWaardart: July 19th 2024), doing so after refusing to transvestigate my own partner because I didn’t take Jade at their word that Crow was a Nazi “fake trans” preying on “real trans people”:

Crow is racist, lied about being trans to me and you, is abusive, steals money, intentionally asks trans people they’re acquainted with if they can write fiction of them detransitioned, and lies about being single and friendless to get new partners. They also aren’t trans. They lie about being trans because they have a fetish for trans women. They also are a chronic narcissist who uses abuse to try and control people who want to help them (source).

and then adding, “If you want to know more, that’s fine, but I’m out of the situation, and this is just information” before running a smear campaign on me because they were “just trying to help” and I refused to listen. They then deadnamed/misgendered Crow, saying that they didn’t “want to transition, doesn’t want surgery, and as another partner of hers has confirmed, she only does it because she thinks it’ll make trans women like her more” (ibid.). Jade’s actions—cloak-like though they are—still speak for themselves.

Furthermore, all of this is done by Jade while swanning and showing off their outward appearance to their fans (source tweet: June 26th, 2024)—in short, while kissing up and punching down as a byproduct of their own lived abuse. Acknowledging that abuse is valid, but more important is understanding that Jade is presently an abuser weaponizing their own lived experiences against others. They’re the impostor in love with themselves, a mirror that reflects their false nature onto their victims in order to makes others feel threatened; doing so is meant to alienate Jade’s victims, presenting them as false, illegitimate outsiders Jade’s flash mob can string up in association with their usual inequity under police rule: the scapegoat, witch whore inside more earthly and less fantastical prisons. Fantastical or not, there’s always some orc to lynch, some whole to fill through revenge; re: the givers and receivers of state violence inside the state of exception, moving money through nature.

Free from scrutiny and indeed, venerated for having exposed a perceived menace through the usual bigotries leveled at the marginalized struggling for in-group status, Jade is the fascist ringleader free to feed on her victims with impunity! She’s a witch hunter played by the witch—a feeding frenzy conducted by those commonly dehumanized by systemic abuse seeking empowerment through said system; i.e., the policing of others through a matter of dogma, fear and revenge, abjecting members of the same community by triangulating against them for the state: robots policing robots, slaves policing slaves, those of nature policing those of nature as monstrous-feminine with monstrous-feminine. Orcs police orcs, rats police rats (or rodents in general, but I digress) as givers and receivers of state abuse (often fetishized, knife-dick-style, through badass-looking weapons, below—less Excalibur and more an evil, “Soulreaver[18]” version of the same device), dividing and conquering territorially (the essence of settler-colonialism) when capital dies and regenerates through said witch hunts as hazing rituals:

(source)

This includes fiction speaking to non-fiction as married to each other. As Silvia Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch, Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004):

Witch-hunting did not disappear from the repertoire of the bourgeoisie with the abolition of slavery. On the contrary, the global expansion of capitalism through colonization and Christianization ensured that this persecution would be planted in the body of colonized societies, and, in time, would be carried out by the subjugated communities in their own name and against their own members (source).

only to add elsewhere (cited in “Hot Allostatic Load”):

One lesson we can draw from the return of witch-hunting is that this form of persecution is no longer bound to a specific historic time. It has taken a life of its own, so that the same mechanisms can be applied to different societies whenever there are people in them that have to be ostracized and dehumanized. Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity (source).

In response, the author of “Allostatic” responds

The term witch hunt is thrown around a lot, but let’s look at what it really means. Witch hunts, as discussed by Silvia Federici, were responses to shifts in capital accumulation, as is slavery. To jury-rig the perpetually self-destructing machine of capitalism, huge amounts of violence are required to obtain captive labor (fem and non-white). The effect is to devalue our labor as much as possible, and to destroy the bonds between marginalized people (ibid.).

to argue for a cheapening of nature (re: Moore and Patel) through labor associated with it as recognized inside different marginalized populations conditioned to self-police, thus witch hunt in and out of fiction.

In response to both authors, I would include that capital tokenizes all labor (not just female and non-white) as sexualized, fetish, alien; i.e., something to gentrify and decay inside of itself, moving money through nature to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine (thus having masculine elements; e.g., phallic women). Feminism decays for these purposes, as do genderqueer movements, sex work, and Gothic poetics. Cops are also assassins, including vigilante ones recruited from the prison population expressed using such theatrics to embody by Man Box agents as “witch cops”; i.e., “prison sex” mentality selecting the whore and the cop to rape said whore who, regardless of sex or gender, is acting like the colonizer as something they have internalized and dressed up as. This includes whores acting as cops, “undercover” insofar as their tokenized police function is concealed by their marginalized origins worn on the outside in visibly fantastical forms: a robata romance, reduced to the nuts and bolts of class and culture betrayal. Rape is rape, betrayal is betrayal regardless of why you do it (e.g., “I was tired,” or “I was raped”)!

(artist: Monori Rogue)

All of this is Jade talking about themselves as projected onto their victims; people like Jade use DARVO, community isolation/obscurantism and police-grade hard-lining to bully their prey. In dialectical-material terms, it’s still Red Scare—pinkwashed by a predatory trans woman against another trans women (and trans man), pitting other GNC people (who often do sex work to survive) against Jade’s targets. Jade’s ugliness isn’t their outward appearance, but the predatory context of their actions. “Genuine transness,” then, becomes a matter of class action through culture as something to uphold, not betray through police violence (which is inherently fake). Such “boundaries for me, not for thee” predation is quite common in marginalized communities, essentially amounting to gang wars and tokenized policing instead of intersectional solidarity against all manners thereof.

Per the cryptonymy process, all of this self-reports and self-deceives, the complicit villain reduced to the useful idiot[18a] that gives themselves away by acting against their own kind inside the police state. Because they cannot monopolize the mirror as a cryptonymic device, we can use it to out and expose them through their own behaviors speaking for themselves: such traitors are cheap, worthless vampires that drain others for the state. Their value comes entirely from raping others, making them unironic leeches—parasitic hollow knights seeking their sorry prey like Slave Knight Gael blindly chasing the Blood of the Dark Soul until the end of time, or the king’s men walking into the Radiance’s willing clutches (a pathetic, pernicious, predatory quality we’ll explore even more in “The World is a Vampire” subchapter). This is a school for ants!

Ants are not known for their intelligence. Rather, such behaviors are taught through canon’s normal coded instructions denoting value by going to the center of the maze (the nucleus, which isn’t always the middle) to rape the witch, the dragon, the Medusa “just one more” time. Even if you make it to the Radiance’s cell—her home, as she preys on the hunters normally trying to house and harm her for the king—she is simply waiting for the killer with a variety of extensive and fatal weapons.

The Radiance own clever defiance is informed by police action as something to twist, making the experience more agonizing (and fun) for all parties involved. By camping the hero, she shows that to survive rape, we must camp its execution as endemic to capital, liberation being the continuous and mounting result of that on a cultural level that reclaims the Base and recultivates the Superstructure: through data that—like the Radiance’s cordyceps analog—freezes our abusers usefully in place. “Stay! Good boy!” Or, “Rape me! Good boy!” It denotes an inability for a superior side to exist, the state and workers locked in perpetual dispute. We want to expand our advantage to shrink the state (and its agents) to irrelevancy. This happens through the paradox of “disempowerment” to speak powerfully to our imprisonment under capital.

Furthermore, these disparities and harm play out between fiction and non-fiction, satire and canon, speaking to the same things being colonized and liberated to a holistic, half-real degree. This pedagogy of the oppressed is as much our bodies and their labor power as it is the Aegis a theatrical trampoline/mirror saying like an all-projecting panopticon, “Look, don’t touch!”

Either way, Medusa’s restless corpse and labyrinthine frontier fucks back through the space—using tricks that short circuit the usual heroic bullshit (“And your tricks won’t work at all!” as Lady Kayura [above] puts it) by reversing the usual flow of power that occurs in all caps: “FINISH HER!” Kiss, bite or slap, though, her vampire booty (and castle) is a vitalistic fetish whose charged surfaces and thresholds take power from the usual abusers in the usual genderqueer ways: rolling with the punches of courtly love as something to camp and subvert (the player telling the Radiance’s story by reaching and raping her per the game’s ludic contract: play Metroidvania, rape Medusa—again, it’s par for the course)!

(artist: TMFD)

Furthermore, sexual feelings don’t always go away after rape, but they do often get swept up in rape fantasies whose paradoxical fun remains tied to real-life abuse and power structures (so many divorced dads to out as creeps); that’s what Gothic fiction is!

Keeping with that, the player and the game’s ludic contract/geometries of rape play in Hollow Knight are ones where the game fucks the player after a perceived momentum shift from the assigned dominant (the knight) by the Medusa; i.e., topping from below, out of Hell, to haunt the player after the fact: exposing themselves as a witch hunter by completing a long series of “hits,” of which the Radiance is queen (a “power target”).

Such reversals of mastery are hardly a secret contained inside the gameworld; castles like Metroidvania advertise their raping of the player as a matter of power exchange similar to Radcliffe’s or Lewis’ readers; re (from “Our Ludic Masters”):

A person motivated by sex is hardly in control. Not to mention, the sex historically offered by Metroid is fraught with peril. The entire drive is illustrated by gameplay [space] conducive to speedrunning [rape] at a basic level. The same strategies employed by the best runners are executed by regular players. You play the game and begin to play it faster. In some sense, this “maze mastery” is involuntary. The player cannot help but play the game faster as they begin to re-remember the maze. The game exploits this, repeatedly leading the player towards self-destruction and domination.

These feelings are orgasmic, but differently than the Doom Slayer’s own attempts at conquest. They’re a Gothic orgasm, a kind of exquisite torture. I say “exquisite” because they occur within the realm of play. For Metroidvania, this jouissance is ludic (source).

But these, per the process of abjection, classically serve the state through the middle class doing the rape-in-question. There is always a psychosexual threat that motivates the player to be unironically violent with their avatar towards the monstrous-feminine (this includes Dracula in Castlevania, but more on that in the “Feeding” chapter); i.e., before the game eventually tops them (the warrior submitting to the game after a hard day’s work): rape Medusa, get pegged (the paradox to ludo-Gothic BDSM again being that no one is actually being harmed, onscreen).

All of this is standard-issue Amazonomachia. Per the Gothic Romance, though, the house is the monstrous-feminine, and it always wins by reminding players that the king—and by extension the man of reason—is dead, built on stolen land. But they think they’re not; they’re undead in service to the state as always hungry for more rape. It’s precisely this mechanism the Radiance uses to made herself and her abuse heard. She is the Numinous—something to acknowledge rape with (carceral violence through solidarity confinement, in her case) and play games that help us process our own abuses, in real life.

To it, the same invulnerable quality to BDSM, the inability to get raped, applies in either direction. The Radiance can’t be killed any more than Medusa can, and in being raped she always takes the hero’s power as a matter of performance (to have him, and him her, back and forth, per the usual Beowulf-style kayfabe and momentum changes and stances: cops and victims): his sword is useless to him no matter where he plunges it (the brain, belly or box), because he will always corrupt, the kingly godhead and colony will always die, and the Medusa—well and truly broken in (and not under the spell of their rapists’ penises, like the owners of these penises are)—will always return, playfully reminding people camping her rape that she was actually raped by king and countrymen alike. That is her revenge!

“Some power!” Dr. Christine Neufeld once scoffed at the topos of the power of women. Except, all power is performative, Dr. Neufeld. Furthermore, history is canonically predicated on men raping women, workers and nature, the latter of which are monstrous-feminine by virtue of their expected role: taking it inside the prison. Indeed, the Radiance’s pussy—her stolen land—is raw and inflamed with irritation, decay and fungus, the febrile yeast infection entering her insectoid rapists’ ant brains. Hysteria becomes something of a defense mechanism; i.e., akin to the xenomorph’s acid for blood, but an STD to discourage the warrior’s invading her realm. It’s not unnatural, but nature defending itself from manmade incursions essentializing themselves as “natural” (re: Divine Right and Manifest Destiny), only to fall into disarray as their usual Cartesian progress is denuded and reversed to develop a Communist opposite invading the space (the fungus grows over time): “Let nature be your teacher!” as Wordsworth puts it[19]—your dominatrix discouraging canonical violence through bad (campy) echoes of itself!

The monomyth delivers rape disguised as “heroism,” showing the player how to act (rape the whore); the Promethean, iconoclastic gag—its bread and butter—is subverting this exchange, taking the rapists power to unmask and dethrone the sovereign through the player aping them, and that’s exactly what the Radiance and castle do. Having hijacked the prison, she lures the player to his doom at the middle of it, showing him the truth of the Pale King despite said king having given him, the knight, amnesia. Working through the gameworld, its unmappable qualities to trauma can never be fully explored, thus raped enough; something of the Radiance always stays out of reach, the Pale King always exposed as futile, impotent, and wretched. He has no clothes and thought he could conquer death, his primrose path the road to Hell paved with bad intent doing him in!

Instead, death becomes him as something to look on in horror (and perceptive zombie eyeballs), the Radiance jeering liminally behind her sanctuary’s Aegis, her dominatrix’ panopticon fucking back against weird canonical nerds. A fatal parting gift that comes back round and round, she rises from the grave—its ashes, dung and corpses—to become reborn in the death and decay as paradoxically what returns her to life; i.e., that she may haunt her abusers’ value (the swordsmen’s “swords”) tied completely to raping her for the Man. You can’t kill or fully imprison Medusa, and the state will die trying (unable to regenerate in the face of something more flexible and prone to adapt—the king’s a lightweight, in other words)!

(photographer: Dennis Lowe)

To it, Medusa can take all comers, fucking back hard against any who take a swing but especially Cartesian men of reason (and their theatrical disguises)! Such bullies are weak cowards, accustomed to state protection, whereas Medusa has built herself up through adversity. She is strong and her bullies are not, which means they will only fear her more when her reunion with them—rising up from the depths like a ghost ship, or a hellish castle descending astronoetically from the stars—suddenly threatens to expose their shameful and pathetic actions during the usual heroic tests, the bloodsport of a given witch hunt suddenly achieving proletarian results; re: like Macbeth—slave to the same Cycle of Kings—seeing the murdered Banquo while awake, to Ashley Williams’ being exposed as a stupid, egotistical, and enabled charlatan (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Valorizing the Idiot Hero,” 2020), to Castle Otranto’s mighty helmet crushing Manfred’s son to expose the entire Capitalocene. Such things are generally fabricated (above) to counteract state versions. Dragon or witch, fascist or Communist—all paradoxically occupy the same messy venue, the same shadow zone to sing our little hearts out. Power is always a performance.

Similar to Peter Weyland or Athetos, everything about the Pale King’s performance is deceitful and penetrative; e.g., the chair and crown of swords (next page), the lord’s many needles stabbing the world around it for a cure to death as simply being the cold hard truth: “A king has his reign and then he dies” (death being the Leveler of so-called great men of history—a theme we’ll look at next with Myth: the Fallen Lords).

Like all men of reason tied to cartesian thought, he becomes the ghost of rape seeking its revenge against nature having humbled him and his phallic, monumental posturing; and as we’ve hopefully established by now, revenge during the monomyth is always futile: Medusa’s power (sunshine or darkness, sword or spike) is bigger than any king’s, haunting the bad timeline to threaten new resurrection and growth towards Gothic Communism—all while our man of reason dies alone in his tomb-like throne room, his prison cell. This happens inside capital, regardless; the difference is dialectical-material context.

Sound familiar? The Radiance and Rusalki have that in common, too! They’re king-slayers, the thorny cunt that—once thrust into by the king’s lance—takes the lord’s power and kills his men like sacrifices that she exposes; i.e., not as philanthropists at all, but Charlie Day’s “full-on rapists.” Hoisted up on his own petard, the king is the sacrifice, capital reporting on itself as aided by the Radiance being raped as loudly as possible; i.e., our girl to get “gets got,” and she just won’t stop cumming (a true exhibitionist, walking the game’s tightrope just as the player does)! Regardless of exact intent, her rape exposes her rapist through emergent, psychosexual forms of play between hero and whore, hunter and witch; i.e., involving canonical rape (the monomyth) as something to camp, mid-torture: exquisite, half-veiled threats of calculated risk striking the king stone dead (the bully afraid of his own shadow, dying of fright). Instead of celebrating the whore as victim and nothing else, then, the Radiance beats him at his own game: “The king is dead; long live the king!” (or as David the android would say in Prometheus, “Mortal after all!”). Speaking the king’s language for workers, she invites the player to celebrate his demise, taking the whore’s side to spurn the tyrant’s shriveled corpse. Get that ass beat, old man!

This matters insofar as Capitalist Realism will incur the end of the world (the wrath of the gods) rather than imagine anything beyond Capitalism; re: the myopic, entitled delusion of a Quixotic idiot trapped in his dead dream of greatness. In turn, the banality of such evil’s looping threnodies is that those who know and have only care about one thing: holding onto power for as long as possible. Preventing state shift (cataclysm) was entirely possible in the king’s world, or Sudra, if only they would let go and spread power more evenly around. But they—like their earthly counterparts—would rather gas entire nations and send the ants marching off to their deaths if it meant they could only enjoy their usual glass of blood one more time. They’re not just complete and utter ghouls, but deeply cynical tyrants in suits who cannot make or enjoy anything except rape. They are the enemy of all things, both workers and nature; there’s not enough time in the world to express just how much they (and the state) suck (and how much fucking time they cry about it to the world, as Victor once did; i.e., DARVO and self-centeredness; e.g., Elon Musk insisting he is the victim, losing an heir instead of gaining a daughter[20]).

However imaginary such monsters and castles are, then, the DARVO-grade, victim-blaming language used to describe them (and the rape it causes) is very real. As a matter of returning to these embarrassing defeats, the hero travels deep inside worlds like Hallownest, confronting uncomfortable truths about the Cartesian rulers they serve; i.e., per monomythic exchanges baked into or otherwise tied to capital as having been displaced to make-belief spheres: there are no kings left, only bones that hunger for revenge, for closure, for awakening. The man of reason is a zombie, as is his good little soldier raping Medusa for him (the routine sacrifice made to keep Medusa in check, which doesn’t work). To bad he didn’t know she’s a necromancer camping the castle to lure the hero: “Come to mommy!”

This rebellious potential of the infernal concentric pattern is one that that we, as Gothic Communists, should welcome and capitalize on; i.e., when developing Capitalism away from patrilineal descent towards Communism as a monstrous-feminine dark womb, but it starts in the self-dug pit of kings and their used-up defenders: the mind space of the dead monarch (Zeus as braindead, creating things that rape nature’s “womb” as part of the world he tries and gloriously fails to dominate). The usual displaced intimations of capitalist instability (the process of abjection) becoming a death omen fir Gothic Communists to prevent, not bury and escape whenever capital rears its ugly head! They try to invoke Cartesian dualism; we drop a piano on their heads.

In short, all’s fair in love and class war. During it, we have to befriend the ghost of the counterfeit, talk to it and wake up (class and culture consciousness, emotional/Gothic intelligence), which means facing rape as a matter of profit recycling blinding apocalypses/rapes. If the legions of unburied death inside that wormy pit are any indication, we cannot afford to be blind:

(exhibit 40i: Intimations of genocide are commonplace before the final tragedy—e.g., the Soul Master’s charnel house, a secret resting place of his ghoulish experiments. To this the Abyss is a literal level in-game, commenting on mise-en-abyme as literal within ludo-Gothic, ergodic spaces: a “desert of the real,” abyss-like maze whose chronotope is chock-full of cryptonymic wreckage. Desiring to separate the spirit from the body as a weapon against hysteria, the Soul Master exemplifies Cartesian folly in the face of mature challenging male imperiums. More broadly the closed space is generally a site of trauma for the heroine looking at something nigh inexpressible: less a thing fully uncovered and more the protagonist being sent to a buried location where the unspeakable trauma can be found as too much to process [the protagonist being a genderless, monstrous-feminine variant of the Gothic hero/heroine in one uncanny ghost].

Unlike the rooms and tunnels, the presence of living death within them cannot be recorded on the knight’s trusty map; in other words, it cannot be openly acknowledged, let alone quantified by the cartographer as a cop, but is felt everywhere as something the dead walk you through in a liminal, architectural sense—both in the City of Tears, but also the entirety of Hallownest and in the parallel, concentric spaces of the ghosts and their sleeping minds [re: Aguirre’s “Geometries of Terror”]. Dreaming of trauma, these restless spirits are tied to the savaged land, both invaded by an ultimate killer [the player] who “avenges” them after absorbing their power in duels from beyond the grave. Taking their power for itself, the Pale King’s weapon uses them to root the Gorgon out, pinning all of the Kingdom’s federalist desolation [from the Soul Master and others] onto the Radiance as an ancient, monstrous-feminine scapegoat: Original Sin.)

Despite being presented as “female,” this irrational fear of looking at repressed trauma—and the coercive, duplicitous methods of engaging with it, in the blood-soaked, circular ruins—is actually heteronormative and patriarchal. Empire is inherently Cartesian, thus genocidal; forever haunted by the rapacious ghosts of kings and ancient Gorgons, but also their affiliate zombie hordes, its legions of dark, voiceless undead marking the general location, if not the exact manner in which these bodies were exploited by empire in the name of “progress” (following the leader). Rediscovery leads to further stabs at repression, but also redistribution through the paradox of terror, violence and anything else to serve workers thwarting state monopolies: the Aegis goes both ways, and fucks back through all the usual devices’ anisotropic (reversible) dualities, hyphenations, paradoxes, et al.

Let’s wrap everything up (four pages) before exiting the symposium and moving onto “Monomyth,” part two.

In The Hobbit, Bilbo is repeatedly concerned with the quest as a kind of suicide mission: will he make it back alive? The same applies to rape survivors, who generally aren’t the same when they “come back” from rape encounters; i.e., a part of them simply doesn’t, dying back at the crime scheme. But something new emerges, regardless, something strong in spite of that; e.g., the Radiance’s phallic elements thrusting and stabbing at the hero.

Liberation and exploitation, then, share the same spaces, the same terrifying bodies as castle-like and vice versa; re (from “the Origins of Ludo-Gothic BDSM as a Matter of Rememory”):

big power and trauma often lurk on the surface of gentler-looking (and smaller) bodies, their double operations showing and revealing different things useful to state or proletarian agency through Gothic reenactments of paradise lost; i.e., of shattered innocence, of childhood devastation confusing pleasure and harm through conflations of psychosexual pleasure-and-pain responses inviting the audience to consider an uneven pedagogy of the oppressed: look on those of us affected by rape and see how we cope with the trauma it forces us to live with (source).

Such rape-play, laugh-at-the-gods showmanship doesn’t just include the Radiance contained inside the hollow knight inside the castle grounds, as we have shown, but any monstrous-feminine, be they big and small, tall and short-stacked, young and old, kawaii and kowai, goblin and witch alike (or combinations; i.e., kids playing with dolls to achieve deeds worthy of remembrance; e.g., Hayao rocking Hugo at Evo 2024). All are criminals seeking liberation through what normally is policed: forbidden fruit to reclaim and deny our rapists using ludo-Gothic BDSM inside the state of exception and its persecution mania’s places and people, maps and monsters, etc.

We’re vampires, too, but we move power towards ourselves using what we got (re: Matteson): reversing abjection through our darkness visible; i.e., our Satanic camping not just of paradise (the castle or castle grounds), but its prophesied restoration through heroic violence cleverly upended during Promethean counterterrorist schemes topping from below.

Adversity isn’t just baked into capital, but class and culture war’s revenge against bourgeois forces’ notion of destiny through moral actions (witch hunts) and territories (maps, mazes). For the elite, then, the end of the world is when workers refuse to police themselves, but rather humanize each other using the same monstrous language’s stigmatic elements to organize labor action; e.g., orcs and goblins (medieval anti-Semitic symbols of greed similar to dwarves, but also eating children and raping women), dragons (medieval symbols of cruelty and power), witches (medieval symbols of children eaters), and other oppressed things clapping back, guerrilla-style, against state forces and their codified bigotries; i.e., with the very things the state cannot control, repress and ultimately abject: some combination of their monstrous-feminine bodies, their labor and genders, their sexualities’ sultry and inventive Gothic poetics, body language, and colorful swearwords, etc.

In rebel hands, these articles of desire, vice, struggle and sin collectively and joyously voice rebellion as a stubborn, intoxicatingly transgressive means of rocking out against false protectors: underdog agents of fortune—like immovable objects meeting an unstoppable force—reconciling fate by refusing to be dutiful pets while simultaneously rubbing their assigned owners’ noses in it. “Hell’s bells, Satan’s callin’ for you!”

(artist: Bottled Line Art)

So while it’s true that (re: our volume thesis)

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

we must remember that (re: our Metroidvania symposium theses)

the Gothic is predicated on fakery through the process of abjection attacking nature vis-à-vis the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., nature as alien/monstrous-feminine, colonized by the sovereign West through Cartesian thought. Historical materialism proliferates decay and deception through open secrets (casualties of empire, but also empire in decay expressed in medieval language; e.g., castles) that no one side can monopolize, but for which terror and obfuscation allow either side to partially conceal themselves with, using the cryptonymy process to operate in capital’s wake: to either defend the status quo while wearing its victims and symbols of oppression, or to undermine it through the same basic means (source).

and that’s

what the Promethean Quest effectively encapsulates and discourages, Medusa fucking back to reverse the flow of power and information the monomyth normally supplies in outright parental language, but also monomythic media exposed to middle-class children at a young age; i.e., standing in for absentee parents (videogames, for our purposes): the givers of Cartesian dogma, but also rebellious sentiment through Promethean allegory (the appearance of the black castle/fallen manmade paradise to begin with) [ibid.].

There is no monopoly on any of this, no set future relayed in the imaginary language of the past where Hell comes home. Capital rapes us, but we can always fuck back to reverse abjection; i.e., to take anything they have back from them through the same poetic allegories, illusory dialogs and medieval, at-times-crude (and fun) puns: where power is, and where trauma is interrogated through said power as exquisite “torture.”

As the Radiance shows, this happens through performance and play occurring for one side or the other in perpetual conflict—our existence, happiness and survival is a life-after-death threat display they will always fear/try to control through futile revenge and empty promises of power (the myth of the middle class, avenging their losses for the state by policing us, only to have their home collapse).

For us, then, “sleeping beauties” are when the witch wakes up to collectively fight class war through culture and race united with it; i.e., to raise a cumulative emotional/Gothic intelligence and awareness for all of these things during intersectional solidarity liberating sex workers through iconoclastic art—our castles in the flesh, but also our praxial necklaces and oppositional synthesis made by connecting the dots differently per outing (as this symposium has done, referencing my older works in ways that you can try yourselves). Sex Positivity is holistic, in that respect, summoning sluts to scare our foes; the enemy to Gothic Communism, workers and nature is the state and its police agents (token or otherwise) bastardizing our stolen power to police us with, keeping us oppressed and downtrodden, their pet-like sluts to shame and chattelize, raped without irony.

Ending on a curtain call to the symposium, let me conclude with an appropriate visual: the curtain, itself, as black. As such, either direction of power and knowledge as outlined above ties to the cryptonymy process (revolutionary or complicit) through a classic Gothic device: Radcliffe’s Black Veil, whose pulling back showcases the Medusa torturing herself (as the Radiance does, calling the hero to her) to achieve rapture of a palliative, generative sort. Such a charm school of Gothic hard knocks has elements of formal and informal training. Returning to Forbidden Planet from the start of the symposium, that film showcased a curious desire to look at the awesome mystery that was teased throughout the film, hidden behind a Black Veil that all but begs to be pulled aside: Medusa’s panties hiding her fearsome death cunt, her peach of torment hungering for fresh delicious peril.

For the Radiance, her lesson seems to say to us, “While I love you, [we] can never be free.” But there’s no place like home when restored to appreciate her survival and love for healthy psychosexual power exchange outing the original space and population as punitive, hypocritical, and undeserving (the vampire body and castle as having a shared vitalistic function). You don’t kill capital with it; you transform your enemy/cage into something that can’t rape you anymore—that won’t rape you no matter how compromising your position: mutual consent (established at a second-nature, societal level) makes that all but impossible! All that remains is the fantasy of “torture,” the ghost of agony (and nature) set free upon/with the thrusting Aegis! The moon is full, the prisoners breaking out to have their sweet revenge by teaching other workers, mid-exchange and mid-exhibitionism (of power and knowledge) to obey the hellish, queenly dominatrix topping from below. “Stare and tremble!” at all that speculative richness living deliciously!

(artist: Sephy Pink)

Tying that to Metroidvania and similar monstrous-feminine rape spaces, if Gothic canon monopolizes the Veil as an unironic threat (“Look and die!”) within formerly glorious spaces, then Gothic Communism‘s success lies is making Capitalism—literally the stuff of Gothic villains and their castles—inexorably fail to everyone’s benefit; i.e., to ironically subvert its canonical tools, thereby transforming the state (and the middle class) into something that doesn’t exploit workers, but still improves their material conditions through the Superstructure as modified: a world of infinite possibility except for the usual deceptions meant to conceal genocide behind monomythic tomb raiding—loot ‘n shoot, run ‘n gun, etc.

All heroes are monsters. Rather than flee/get away from such monsters per escapist, heteronormative fantasies that expose the cannibalistic nature of Capitalism (and its assorted cartographic refrains [either Tolkien or Cameron’s] populated with imaginary bugbears, below), we must play with power-as-marketed to subvert its settler-colonial (thus exploitative) character in Gothic ways; i.e., to humanize the ghost of the counterfeit by navigating the space of terror anisotropically—saying to our actual rapists (not the imaginary non-white ones, above), “We wouldn’t fuck you with a ten-foot pole!” (“once you go black…”):

(artist: Devilhs)

A large part in doing so is challenging the canonical, heteronormative past as something to dogmatically fall in love with (re: Dimitrescu, but really any Medusa as walking the tight rope; e.g., Lara Croft as yet-another-Amazon “white Indian” with a classist character we can camp and have fun with[21]); i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit as a kind of false, fatal memory that survives in the material world under Capitalist Realism (whose solution is always rape, because it can’t imagine anything better). This can merely be the echoes of a being or person that someone else has created years later—a narrative of a narrative of a narrative.

It’s certainly true that sex-positive art can remove the villain entirely in order to focus on sexual agency as something to appreciate during hauntological reinvention (as I have done with Ozymandias, exhibit 40a). However, the trope of the ignominious death under Numinous power remains a common teaching device inside the Gothic bag of tricks—not just the man-of-reason or “noble” king as we have just explored, but also the crime lord driven mad by their own abuse of systemic power until they go insane: to awaken from a sleep of death, returning home to destroy empire over and over again. We spit on their grave, basking in the sub drop of the palliative Numinous’ dream mushrooms, her pussy sunbeams.

Decay, of course, becomes something to leave behind and study. Better worlds are built on worse ones, deconstructing the former’s illusions anchoring us in place. Like Sudra or Hallownest, then, our funerary consignment is always part of a larger kingly crime site we can reclaim, camp and send back out against capital, leaving such tyrannies behind while decolonizing their homes. That’s what this subchapter is: my life’s work squeezed into a little over a hundred pages (technically 146, but who’s counting). It’s been real, but “so long, gay Bowser!”

There’s always a bourgeois double to the kinds of titanic rape iconoclasts revel in, when recording their own doom; i.e., actual rape always lies adjacent to psychosexual healing that, in the wrong hands, can lead to genuine exploitation. As curiously gigantic and rotting beings (re: Frankenstein), such tyrants revive in future stories begot from older castle commenting on a larger historical-material loop: intimating the Great Destroyer during the Imperial Boomerang’s homeward voyage (who always comes home, no matter how often you pass the buck). There’s a demonic, composite quality to tyrants we’ll return to in the Demon Module, when we look at Shelley’s novel; in part two of “The Monomyth,” though, we’ll specifically examine these revivals out-of-doors (versus closed space) through crime lords and Zombie Caesar!

Onto the opening and part one to “The Monomyth, part two: Criminals and Conquerors” (feat. The Crow and Steam Powered Giraffe)!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] As I write in “Mazes and Labyrinths“: “[Unlike survival horror,] ‘Metroidvania’ was effectively the combination of two IPs owned by different Japanese companies. So the term was never printed in any official capacity. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that ‘Metroidvania’ saw wider use in the indie market”: PC Gamer (“The Best Metroidvania on PC,” 2022), Engadget (“‘Metroidvania’ should actually be ‘Zeldavania,'” 2016), GamaSutra (“The undying allure of the Metroidvania,” 2015) Giant Bomb (“Metroidvania,” 2023), and Wired (“An Anime-Inspired Platformer That’s as Beautiful as It Is Mind-Bending,” 2015). Simply put, the genre exploded in popularity in the mid-2010s, becoming a smash indie success on Steam and continuing to be wildly popular to this day.

[2] Under whose independent tutelage (LING 499) at EMU, I wrote the paper, “Method in His Madness: Lovecraft, the Rock-and-Roll Iconoclast and Buoyant Lead Balloon” (2017), which inspired me to pursue the Numinous (as a subject of study) to the faraway, magical city Manchester, England.

[3] This idea was coined by a supremely bigoted white man—one whose tottering regressions towards fascism forever hang over the science-y heroes he constantly tortures in his stories; i.e., threatening them with insignificance in the face of mightier things:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little [speak for yourself, whitey]; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age (source: “The Call of Cthulhu,” 1928).

“Oh, no! I’m not the center of the universe?” I think old Lovecraft could have seriously done with some “flexibility training” insofar as acclimating himself to chaos, meaning there’s more to life than the myth of male power deflated. His empty outlook, in my opinion, is very much him projecting his own privileged shortcomings into the power vacuum of an impenetrable void (that isn’t, you should know by now, outer space). He’s basically Peter Weyland gazing solemnly into the abyss and seeing nothing because, for him, there is nothing worthwhile to acquire. It’s the trembling that he enjoys. He’s very much like a child afraid of the dark, whose prescribed unapproachability is a kind of “backtalking from the sub”: “You’re hideous, Cthulhu; now step on me.”

[4] The gendering of spaces is not usual; sailors would do it with ships, gendering them female as they cut through the equally female sea. A giant, hostile castle isn’t so odd, then—with Scott’s “space castle” (and its Gothic matelotage) sailing through the murky darkness like a ghost ship haunted by an older copy of itself.

[5] Versus a negative-sum game: a lose-lose; e.g., Capitalism (because the elite will lose in the end due to climate change).

[6] There’s plenty of exceptions to this; i.e., a whole can of worms (so to speak); e.g., femboys, whose curiously large dicks and slender bods (androdiversity) we have already examined in this series; e.g., exhibit 34a1b1b1 from Volume Two, part one:

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

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

The primer can only scratch the surface of such things; we will examine andro and gynodiversity even more in Volume Three (a sample):

(exhibit 91b2: Femboys demonstrate androdiversity with tremendous irony. For example, although undoubtedly there are plenty of femboys with smaller schlongs, plenty on the market advertise the slenderest of elfin bodies and the girthiest of members [contrary to heteronormative belief, big bodies—especially ones on inordinate amounts of synthetic testosterone—have shrinking genitals]; e.g., vacillating throbbers of cuties like Catboi Aoi, Rayray Sugarbutt, Olivia the Robin, Zay Zay, illiteracy4me, Hanyuu, Jaybaesun, etc.)

Simply put, Medusa isn’t strictly female (fuck off, TERFs); femboys and catboys (regardless of biological sex or gender in relation to that) are monstrous-feminine, too, thus fall into the same sodomy-style states of exception/critiques of capital. Secretly raped as open pornographic secrets, they become the secret weapons of rebellion through much the same cryptonymy reversing the flow of power—towards workers versus the state. So often porn chattelizes non-normative bodies (or honestly anything that isn’t a white, cis-het, Christian man); liberation is about reclaiming such things to serve our needs.

[7] From Romeo and Juliet, act one, scene one.

[8] I’d rather be raped and free, then still under my rapist’s “protection.”

[9] A throwaway line/role in an otherwise awful movie, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) at least gets the Nazi-Russian she-wolf right.

[10] For more examples of Tolkien’s animalistic language in relation to capital and greed, consider my essay on Tolkien’s Hobbit vis-à-vis Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: “‘Dragon Sickness’: The Problem of Greed” (2014).

[11] And, point in fact, dressing the heroes up as robbers, as rebels, where they’re policing the Good Lands of those pesky inhuman, blood-drinking and baby-eating goblins. Adventures like Tolkien’s conceal their bigotry through shadowy monsters that, often enough, are killed in plain sight; though tokenized (re: Jewish stereotypes and one gay wizard and hobbit), it’s still cops-and-robbers terrorism serving the state.

[12] Allusions not just to Lovecraft, but tentacle rape in reverse. Kinky!

[13] Normally the panopticon is a view piece for the king of his subjects through his subjects; i.e., a tower from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, specially a prison meant to house and monitor lepers (showing Foucault’s love for medieval comparisons). In short, workers in both texts are kept under lock and key per a constant state of surveillance—one they embody and report to the top on themselves (tattletales), even when said top ceases to exist. In the Radiance’s case, though, she has hijacked the hive, effectively seeing backwards through a collective disease that monitors and attacks the hero as the last knight/prison guard alive.

[14] I.e., through bread-and-circus kayfabe spectating rape.

[15] The policing is generally done through the state’s own victims triangulating against themselves through the mechanisms and language of domination under capital; i.e., of workers at large, but especially marginalized workers closer to the in-group than not. First and foremost, per Gothic canon, this is white middle-class straight women, who—while they are sex workers whether they like to admit it or not (the myth of the liberated second wave feminist, trading overt sex work for the role of the pimp)—will attack other marginalized groups doing sex work of a more openly extramarital sort: the virgin vs the whore. Often this has a racialized character to it, but also a transphobic one, too.

For example, as Porpentine writes in “Hot Allostatic Load” (2015):

I saw a queer black woman, struggling to survive by her art, falsely accused of rape by a white queer. The call-out post was extremely vague and loaded with strong words designed to elicit vigilante justice. Immediately, hundreds of other white queers jumped on the bandwagon. Many of them likely didn’t know either of the people involved.

Accusations of sexual menace are a key weapon used against marginalized people in feminist spaces, because it arouses people’s disgust like no other act—the threat of black skin on innocent white, of trans bone structures on ethereal cis skeletons. It’s as common for many of us as cat-calling or any other form of ubiquitous harassment that cis feminists talk about, except no one wants to talk about it. It’s a way for the dominant people in the group to take us aside and say, you are not welcome here, or do this thing you don’t want to do or I’ll ruin your life. But frequently it happens without any particular thesis, just as a general tool to keep us destabilized and vulnerable. Don’t forget who you really are in the unspoken hierarchy.

Mobbing uses these rumors to trade a vague suspicion for the actual reality of violence. It’s like turning the corner and watching someone on the street having their teeth kicked in by a mob who assures you that just before you appeared, this person had committed some mysterious act which justifies limitless brutality (source).

From my own experiences, some of my worst memories of abuse weren’t from cis-het white men, but other sex workers—especially white women pimping the venue as the exclusive sex workers, victims, cops (re: “Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023“); i.e., third and forth wave feminism in decay, working the lynch mob setting the example. This isn’t truth, but punishment enforcing a hierarchy built on lies to haze those who challenge the established order. That’s what cops do, including vigilante sex workers throwing stones in glass houses.

The sad fact is, rape victims go on to either keep being victimized, or become functional cops who rape others for the state in prison-like environments; i.e., an act they dress up as self-defense through DARVO behaviors (re: from earlier in this volume):

Rape, then, is historically a power fantasy to enact upon others against their will […] Except no power fantasy should ever come at other people’s expense. When it does, it leads to a routine failing of memory and willpower in the face of trauma, but also to the classic dice roll: cop or victim, during service towards profit through the usual monomythic, hero-grade rape  fantasies/demon BDSM operating like demon lovers historically do; i.e., as controlled opposition policing the usual victims by their assigned masters

Like with Jadis and myself, it’s always a dice roll.

Of course, there are double standards that play out through intersecting axes of oppression; e.g., racism and transphobia in Alien being abjected onto an intersex rape demon by the white woman seeing genocide and chattel slavery through an “ancient alien” fetish (more on this when we look at such tokenization in “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph“). Whatever the form, just remember our footnote from earlier about “preferential mistreatment”

capital extends the abuser’s privileges (the coercion trifecta: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss) to women and other marginalized groups provided they tokenize, hence betray their class, culture, and race interests in service to the elite; i.e., become cops […]. Like anything, the monstrous-feminine is susceptible to betrayal and decay; i.e., whose tokenized “onion” historically-materially fosters marginalized in-fighting as a matter of “prison sex” and fortress mentality: tokenized groups from increasing privilege (but less than those above them) kissing up and punching down towards groups more marginalized then they are. The global consequence is assimilation—of women, people of color or queer persons, Indigenous peoples, etc, acting like white, cis-het men as a matter of tokenized representation.

which is a concept we’ll unpack in Volume Three extensively when we look at current tokenization through TERFs and feminism-in-decay.

[16] Testimony something medieval men would given while using their testicles as collateral, but dates back further to Rome and beyond; i.e., to what Dr. Dario Maestripieri calls a “testicle ritual”:

In ancient Rome, two men taking an oath of allegiance held each other’s testicles, and men held their own testicles as a sign of truthfulness while bearing witness in a public forum. The Romans found a word to describe this practice but didn’t invent the practice itself. Other primates had already been doing this for millions of years. Two male baboons who cooperate with each other by forming aggressive alliances against other baboons frequently fondle each other’s genitalia. This behavior has nothing to do with sex but it’s a social ritual that primatologists call a “greeting.”

The behavior of ancient Romans and male baboons can be explained by the Handicap Principle, an evolutionary theory according to which the most effective way to obtain reliable information about a partner’s commitment in a relationship — whether a political alliance, a romantic relationship, or a business partnership — is to impose a cost on the partner and assess the partner’s willingness to pay it (source: “‘Testify’ Comes From the Latin Word for Testicle,” 2011).

Maestripieri further adds, “it’s important to remember that cooperative relationships between unrelated individuals are intrinsically unstable: One business partner may cooperate one moment and cheat in another, and one romantic partner may promise eternal commitment one day and end the relationship the next. Economists call this ‘the commitment problem'” (ibid.). Such instability is owed to Capitalism, whose murderous ups and downs portray quite vividly in operatic language like Hollow Knight‘s Gothic courtship rituals a circular raping of the queen (whose proposed vanity is just another form of Original Sin: “She asked for it, the siren!”).

[17] The state historically decides what is legal or not, the powers that be making rebellion illegal as a matter of preserving the status quo; i.e., we will always be criminal to them, any act of resistance or exposure (muckraking and whistleblowing) seen as violence against the state, which the state will always meet with automatic police force and illusions, under Capitalist Realism. In short, genocide is legal as a matter of enforcement, rebellion is illegal no matter what. But the ability to create stories that speak to these things in ways the state can’t—and furthermore, won’t if they think it serves them—police through brute force, is where Gothic poetics truly shines. Skilled theatrics and architecture can speak to state abuse, displaced and disguised through cryptonymy to serve rebellion, thus reverse abjection and liberate anything criminal. Liberation, my book series argues, begins with iconoclastic art, recultivating the Superstructure and Reclaiming the Base through proletarian praxis’ synthesis (thus catharsis).

[18] Silicon Knight’s 1996 allusion to Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (1871):

One, two! One, two! And through and through

      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

      He went galumphing back (source).

The hero is always a cop, the monster always its victim in service to profit. Sometimes, the state relies on victims to victimize themselves.

[18a] Bear in mind, such idiotic utility also applies to Leftists ceding ground to fascists; i.e., problems of representation versus activism; e.g., Jessie Gender—a white, middle-class content creator concerned more with success and respecting everyone’s viewpoints—actively defending the IDF from postcolonial critics of Zionism in the middle of a genocide (Bad Empanada Live’s “Jessie Gender Should Delete Her Zionist Propaganda Video Immediately,” 2024; timestamp: 9:09). Calling for nuance is one thing. Calling for nuance against a position that is actually simple in terms of who has power and who doesn’t (thus, who is the abuser in that situation) is intensely problematic—especially when the person doing it falls into the tokenized category of white moderate incentivized by profit. Betrayal is betrayal, Jessie, even if you’re polite about it (or funny and tokenized; re: Jordan Peele). Hope, even radical hope, becomes another neoliberal weapon the elite use to have polite rationalizers like yourself tone-police activists challenging genocide in ways you won’t.

[19] From “The Tables Turned” (1798).

[20] The Humanist Report’s “Elon Musk Tells Jordan Peterson His Transgender Daughter is ‘Dead’ to Him” (2024).

[21] Though problematic, heroes like Lara Croft or Samus Aran are useful vehicles when interrogating power and rape as things to play with; i.e., they store value and trauma as a matter of Amazon-style bread-and-circus (the state raping workers and nature through its own tokenized labor force—TERFs), but also social-sexual elements of human beauty and attractiveness that butt up against rape tied to profit: as something to investigate and explore through an avatar in neoliberal forms (videogames). Per Sarkeesian, we can walk in the shoes of such a raider trapped inside such mazes and labyrinths of abject circumstance without endorsing her settler-colonial character (the white woman fending off domestic rape of an abjected sort)! Videogames make for an excellent form of ludo-Gothic BDSM, insofar as you can’t get raped during them; re: the castle is the perfect dom, but also the perfect cryptonym that we can reclaim from the state and its usual profiteers (from Radcliffe onwards).

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

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

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

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

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

Metroidvania, part two: “Look upon my Works, ye Mighty”; or, the Infernal Concentric Pattern and Rape Play in Hollow Knight and Metroidvania at Large (opening)

“Vegeta, Vegeta! Remember that bug planet?” (source).

—Nappa, “Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Episode 9″ (2009)

Picking up from where “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge” left off…

Part zero of the “Metroidvania” symposium outlined the Freudian, parental character and dialectical-material elements to the Metroidvania, in effect exploring the Promethean reversal of said parentage (and power) relative to capital’s usual monomythic outings: Hell coming home, versus the hero leaving home to go into Hell. Part one considered such Ozymandian hubris and collapse by close-reading Axiom Verge (and its various parent texts—with Metroid, Alien, Forbidden Planet and At the Mountains of Madness reaching back to Frankenstein), exploring the rise and fall of its persons double-operating through cryptonymic deception to survive tyrannical elements (dead giveaways); i.e., overcoming a former great leader/de facto parent who succumbs to an indomitable monstrous-feminine power like those before him did, capital’s decay letting new iconoclastic stories take root inside the same venues: camping the medieval interplay to move power towards workers, nature, the Medusa (and her toothy tentacles, below), et al.

Part two now takes the spatial elements of a decaying gentry into consideration, examining the sleeping but restless tyrant’s castle in Hollow Knight as mysteriously fallen to ruin; i.e., records that partially survive, decaying in the presence of restless power as fought over by hidden forces during rape play (of a faux-medieval sort), and which regeneration through camouflage (the cryptonymy’s endless wreckage) whose base elements cannot be created or destroyed is the Promethean attempt to survive: what Capitalism ultimately is and what it sells—a mighty place occupied by dragons of some kind or another, which the centrist, corruptible hero must hunt down, face and cleanse.

In short, there’s a myth of greatness that’s forgotten itself, the urgency in finding the culprit—getting to the bottom of things, as it were—winding down inside a former paradise that’s clearly gone to pot (seemingly overnight, although it only feels that way because you’re visiting the ruins after the fact). Nature has won, but that doesn’t mean things are obvious. There’s just a ruin, one waiting for the knight to enter and explore.

Note: While both Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight were topics of study in my master’s thesis, Hollow Knight received more focus. This is my first time revisiting it since 2018, letting me really go wild. As a result, this is a longer section/close-read than the Axiom Verge close-read was, but stays fairly consistent in its pursuit and arrangement of the subject matter. Being something that grew into itself upon repeated reflection, we’ll talk about the history of my formulating ludo-Gothic BDSM as rape play (and furthermore what you can do with it as a subversive psychosexual device). Even so, everything stays tied to Hollow Knight (and Tolkien, simply to give a monomythic example that Hollow Knight camps). —Perse

“Metroidvania,” part two is divided in two:

• Part one, “Geometries in Terror; or, Traces of Aguirre and Bakhtin in Hollow Knight‘s Promethean Castle World” (including with this post): Outlines Bakhtin and Aguirre in relation to Team Cherry’s Numinous gameworld; i.e., its oddly homely and relaxing setting as something to explore and understand Gothically (through the chronotope and Promethean Quest) as both largely devoid of people while simultaneously being overridden with decay regenerating into different potential outcomes.
• Part two, “Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes“: Articulates Aguirre and Bakhtin’s ideas per my evolution of ludo-Gothic BDSM after my master’s thesis and into my graduate work, then considers the Promethean Quest as something that presents the whore as normally hunted by police forces, only to escape their subjugation and imprisonment by acting out her own rape; i.e., as Hollow Knight‘s final boss, the Radiance, does.

Geometries in Terror; or, Traces of Aguirre and Bakhtin in Hollow Knight‘s Promethean Castle World

The realm of sensibility, passion, fear provides a major theme in Gothic, but clearly this theme is not just a matter of cognitive import to characters and readers. Rather, it wills itself a perlocutionary act; it aims no less than at changing them and us […] This is where “form” directly determines “meaning,” and spatial coordinates elicit mental states (source).

—Manuel Aguirre, “Geometries of Terror” (2008)

Unlike the Promethean Quest, the monomyth traditionally aims to restore the land or castle; re: Tolkien or Cameron’s refrain, either an outdoor or indoor paradise, per the dialectic of shelter and the alien, canonically falling apart (versus Milton’s camping of the sylvan scene and its artificial wilderness). Restoration is to a former glory after Hell returns home (a metaphor for pirates, but also monstrous-feminine rivals to a patriarchal status quo—Mother Brain and her dragon captains, Ridley and Kraid, but also the Radiance and her minibosses standing in for nature, Communism, and fascism per Red Scare): “Hell,” Volume Zero argues, “is always a place that appears on Earth,” the monomyth hero a merciless exterminator cleaning house through Americanized police violence (us-versus-them—stab, shoot, punch enemies inside stages, levels, rooms and worlds) dressed up in the usual Gothic forms to move money through nature. Life cheapens, the cycle repeating to serve capital during all the usual decay and regeneration of the state threatened by imaginary enemies tied to nature. It’s a power fantasy that offers up false power and hope in all the usual neoliberal forms (videogames).

(artist: Fabian Pineda)

Just as Samus reexplores old things to dance with dragons, back-and-forth, part two of “Metroidvania” peeks once more into the other primary text from my master’s thesis, Hollow Knight. We shall revisit this cute, psychosexual and frightening bug world to explore my grad school and postgrad research into Metroidvania; i.e., as a matter of navigable space, by applying Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern to reverse abjection, such camp informing what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM as I devised it (a practice of rape-style roleplay that involves spaces and players inside those spaces, regardless of the media type). This isn’t so much to do with maps (mapping being a process of colonizing such spaces), but movement through space and its Gothic architecture and cosmetics yielding Promethean themes similar to the personable ones we looked at in part one with Axiom Verge; re, Bakhtin:

the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form as various parts of its architecture […] and in particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights. […] legends and traditions animate every corner of the castle and its environs through their constant reminders of past events.

This past is one of open-secret power and trauma as something to exchange in cryptonymic ways (re: dead giveaways—the dead both unable to speak, but doing so through the space) that operate per the Promethean Quest’s “disempowerment,” not the monomyth’s “empowerment,” to ultimately expel old harmful ideas (“My uncle’s work was do-do!”) and replace them with fresh, altered copies that transcend profit and rape; i.e., by piloting capital’s dying shell.

(artist: Niall Skinner)

Simply put, it’s good praxis, but also good camp; i.e., Hollow Knight is full of cute bugs that, all the same, rape and eat each other as part of a larger dying organism inside another and another to mimic (double) capital and, like a zombie, survive all over again in tiny little pieces of a larger persona: an obliteration of the self, the human, the kingdom, the castle, in dark fairytale language (re: Kerascoët’s and Fabien Vehlmann’s 2014 The Beautiful Darkness, showcasing a presumed raping and open rotting of Alice in medievalized forms [the dispersed homunculi], but also William Golding’s wild-child apologia, Lord of the Flies, 1954). In the Promethean style, it suggests that all this decay and growth occurs from fighting gods warring behind the scenes, less poisoning the Cartesian home and more exposing its self-destructive qualities that, like Athetos did to Sudra, rape nature as usual. We’re the byproduct of that, making us—in effect—rape babies of mad science (many children of the gods in classic myth being the byproduct of rape; e.g., Heracles or Merlin).

Childhood ruined, right? Maybe, but maybe not; the paradox of nature is that life and death occupy the same Gothic’ spaces condensation of old death and hauntological decrepitude inside nostalgic pictures of home—as a paradoxical safe space that speaks to endless inherited anxieties tied to capital; i.e., the kind regularly immortalized in different media forms, including music:

Here in this prison of my own making
Year after day I have grown
Into a hero, but there’s no worship
Where have they hidden my throne? (Deep Purple’s “Pictures of Home,” 1972).

Gothic spaces revel in that decay as something to play with in order to communicate less-than-pleasant realities tied up in such comfort foods as both silly and tragic: “Is this a school for ants?”

In turn, Hollow Knight‘s little animals houses are cute, rapacious (insofar as we anthropomorphize them in lieu of our own trauma under Capitalism) and—like the xenomorph (an egregore based on parasitoid wasps)—is very, very gay in terms of exploring trauma in small, in Gothic abstract but also duality, juxtaposition and contrast: the “ancient” Romance and the modern novel (re: Walpole). To this, the Gothic is written in the disintegration of power redistributing itself (the kingdom is property that the knight, a cop, seemingly defends). The more access you have to differing perspectives, then, the more holistic, faithful (loving) and truthful the representation (with Hollow Knight containing inside its hollow shell two warring sides reduced to spectres haunting the concentric necrobiome: Capitalism and Communism). “Gothic maturity intensifies conflict as a matter of entropy,” contributing to a Song of Infinity speaking to such grappling forces.

Furthermore, our little hero’s form follows function, one of many beetles crawling among the dung and the dead (re: genocide’s fertilizer), breathing into them fresh life (one dies, then like Walpole’s empty suits of armor, gets up and walks around once more inside the dollhouse, the puzzle, the crypt as both incomplete and simply needing to be played with). It’s both a lovely poetic cycle and historical statement speaking to the natural and man-made as—like Athetos’ fallen kingdom—staked and claimed by he who called it “first,” slowly being reclaimed by a patient, almighty queen: murder will out, the criminalized faeries coming out on top against the cops robbing and victimizing them—eventually! Some things are so big they take forever to die—to transform—into other things (this can be fascism, yet again, regressing to a former medieval; or it can be Communism, provided intersectional solidarity is maintained against profit).

Whatever we find out will happen through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of conceptualizing and navigating space to interrogate power. Per the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection (the West built on the lie of sovereignty), the motto of the Gothic might as well be, “Fake it till you make it.” So when I envisioned ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of scholarship and history that bucks Cartesian trends inside and outside of fictional worlds, I founded it on spaces mastering the player (re: “Our Ludic Masters“), but especially the Metroidvania. This, in turn, borrowed from Manuel Aguirre’s “Geometries of Terror”

[…the infernal concentric pattern has] in Gothic one and the same function: to destabilize assumptions as to the physical, ontological or moral order of the cosmos [… It is like a Mandelbrot set:] finite, and yet from within we cannot reach its end; it is a labyrinth that delves “down” instead of pushing outwards (source).

as something my supervisor, Paul Wake, recommended to me, and stuck with only to evolve into my work as it presently exists (which Paul refused to comment on or partake in because of its “contentious” nature—the words of an accommodated intellectual, if ever there were).

So while I had been flirting with these ideas in 2018 with my master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis,” said thesis was only the starting point; my understanding of them through a BDSM framework (whose holistic approach my British teachers hated/avoided like the plague) actually came years later in 2021 (again, “Our Ludic Masters“), of which I eventually formed ludo-Gothic BDSM to critique capital with, as a matter of Gothic Communism: a giant to challenge another giant, borrowing medieval thought to do so; e.g., Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver’s Travels, The Castle of Otranto, etc, which Hollow Knight plays on with its bug-sized ability to marry life and death, big and small (exaggeration is often seen as an increase in size, but the inverse is also true), with medieval poetics[1] and their reliably Numinous feelings attached to a palliative Gothic space that speaks psychosexually to capital’s abuses outside of itself felt inside of itself. Big feelings, big spaces, taboo yummy exchanges occur in between: a teacher of harsh truths and magical pleasures.

(artist: VG Yum)

To that, we’ll examine the source of my scholarly ideas as they started to lean in that direction with Hollow Knight—a game that truly took Bakhtin’s chronotope to heart: a castle space caught between reality and legend, insofar as time in the narrow sense of the word—that of the historical past—was thoroughly obsessed with hereditary rites and dynastic primacy as things to backtrack and endlessly explore (to do them as the Gothic lovingly does—backwards to go forwards); i.e., the dogma of Cartesian Revenge against nature (the Medusa, here, cast as the fearsome giantess Radiance—a Galatean force to challenge a Pygmalion fascist’s Apollonian status: “Praise the sun[2]!”) as bug-like in both directions: the insect as linked to death and decay, waste and nutrients (fertilizer) that, in the same breath, speaks to the brutality of Kafka-esque “insect politics”; mad science, queer love and irreversible transformation (on par with Cronenberg’s The Fly [1986] and Seth Brundle); cute and terrifying animals that illustrate Capitalism in small; and so on. All become something to reunite with, upending capital’s usual Cartesian, heteronormative, settler-colonial divisions and abuses: profit as rape dressed up.

(artist: Alaine Daigle)

Jadis was an entomologist and taught me to appreciate bugs, but we simply don’t have time to list and count such things. Keeping with space as something to explore, then, Hollow Knight—similar to Axiom Verge—puts multiple sentiments inside the dollish hero inside the doll house: the spirit of exploring different sides of the world as increasingly dark and hostile—not strictly to conquer it (though that is the hero’s built-in, monomythic purpose) but to appreciate and explore something that is dying and regenerating at the same time. It has, at times, an innocent, child-like, sing-song quality to it, but one whose fairytale world has (again, like Axiom Verge and all Metroidvania, more or less), two godly parents appealing to the child send by one to kill the other as a matter of capital: the Pale King and the Radiance. As we saw with Axiom Verge, sometimes the mother visibly wins during the final confrontation inside-outside the hero; here, the father “wins,” only to be bested by Mamma Bear anyways. Nature always wins.

As such, the Pale King is essentially a mad scientist by proxy waging a heteronormative proxy war against nature-as-monstrous-feminine (queer) and death; i.e., treating his people as disposable insects while slowly going mad inside his fallen castle, alienated from death and scapegoating Medusa for it. While funding others to conduct his awful experiments and conquer death as flooding his once-great city during state shift, the king and his men, but also the Radiance (the whore) are all alien dead of different sizes, classes (taxonomy and in Marxist terms) and positions (stances).

If you think about it, the senility of the king is not so different than Joe Biden currently losing his decrepit, overcooked mind on national television[3]; there’s always a real-world equivalent to a fictional one, and vice versa. The tyrant and their castle’s rise and fall stands in for Capitalism; i.e., its own historical-material gentrification and decay serving profit, per the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection. Decay and death simply denote change, whereupon the king’s cowardly refusal to change (and proliferation of violence inside the ruin) is simply him being stubborn and “bravely” running away from his problems, his secret sins: a “sundowning” King Lear refusing “to go to bed” and simply be worm food (thus release the secrets he’s been keeping inside himself and his monuments). There’s nothing preventing him from doing so other than his mind and belief in himself as a god. But the real sovereign is nature—the force he’s hijacked for his own purposes, forcing him to face the music through his death and that of his kingdom, his people, his legacy.

In turn, his entourage drags pathetically along with him, cravenly keeping the rose-colored memory of the king alive (thus burying his secrets alive) after he’s died; per the usual undeath and live burial, the labyrinth remains restless, those long-buried things equally stubborn as they crawl to the surface to—at times revoltingly—claw free and out from His Majesty’s rotting corpse. The hyperreality begins to fly apart, the sordid truth coming to light as a matter of rememory. The king has been gagging Medusa for so long, she’s a ghost, too (and maybe was never really alive; i.e., of the counterfeit). Relegated to the same spectral zone of Gothic performance and play, such revivals and reassemblies becomes poetic speculation, both half-real and imaginary to some extent.

Even so, such things remain vital as far as the pedagogy of the oppressed goes; i.e., as a matter of corroborating what historically is quite hard to prove in a court of law (which exists to uphold the status quo) but also of public opinion tied to capital[4]: rape and police abuse per the process of abjection.

The point of monomythic fantasy stories like Axion Verge and Hollow Knight is that eventually such things can’t be ignored, the victims of rape echoing a gossip-style chorus (re: the basics of oppositional synthesis being gossip/anger, monsters and camp) that builds and builds inside the usual kingly echo chambers speaking extratextually (a bad echo that speaks to the buried, ostensible truth of things). Either you believe rape victims while they’re alive, or the voice of them will rise from the alien grave to destroy the myopic legacy that you (and Capitalism) have worked so hard to build behind the usual heartless lies: the Pax Americana family as anchor but also dogma to hammer the witch, drown and rape her to death, burying the gay alive. As we shall see, systemic catharsis is at least, in part, cryptonymically bringing those atrocities to light; i.e., the hole as something to fill itself (a campiness we shall unpack through the Radiance’s own doing so): “Oh, god! You’re totally conquering my castle, right now!” Restless pussy of doom eats Excalibur and farts in Arthur’s face.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Apologetic, canonical illusions aside, rape play (and its cryptonymies) become a clever, ironic way of exploring history in our own daily lives; yes, it blurs the boundaries between pleasure and harm in the moment, but paradoxically never crosses over into genuine abuse—is only haunted by state atrocities while playing ironically with taboo subject matter as something to act out, thus raise awareness towards unironic forms (re: incest, murder, rape, etc). Conversely, the shock-and-awe of police abuse predicates through unironic enforcement, repressing play by making such things impossible to play with; the “rape” loses its quotes, the vampirism (exchange) going one way towards the state (and not both ways between workers)—all to flush bourgeois cheeks with stolen blood. The theft becomes an aphrodisiac for them and their defenders, a holy one to dress up in exceptionally good heraldry that decays over time: “Policemen are hiding behind the skirts of little girls. Their eyes have turned the color of frozen meat!” (Blue Öyster Cult’s “Joan Crawford,” 1981).

Amid the cheering of the self-appointed heroes lurks an uncomfortable quantum silence: that of the once-girl victims, Wicked, Bad, Naughty Zoot mischievously but also earnestly screaming on the surfaces and inside thresholds of such graveyard pastiche. Good or bad, such Gothic allusions and darkness-visible intimations of power (of allegations, of secret crimes) are a historical-material effect. They paradoxically never leave us, never stay dead; they become impossible to control, to police, to rape, because all deities reside within us (re: Blake), and it will take more than that to silence a god. As such, these stories are not “escapism”; not even Aguirre’s Mandelbrot can contain them, escaping the event horizon (and the knights buried alive there) to echo into the wider world like solar wind: the macaroni-stirring sound of a wet, squelching cunt. Medusa’s putting the silent scream on blast!

White or not, where there’s a castle, there’s a cop, a rape, a genocide (re: ACAB) as unfolding to conceal itself with the usual “medieval” vanishing points: feudalistic inheritance (“A hall to die in, and men to bury me!”). Said points need to be camped for workers to survive the abuse canonical workers (and extensions) regularly entail and repress: “Help, help! I’m being ‘repressed’ (code for ‘rape’)!” with or without quotes. Said quotes—and the dialectical-material scrutiny that comes with them during oppositional praxis—is the key to unlocking the door of praxial, thus cathartic, synthesis (which is illustrated, above, through added context: Harmony and I acting out a rape [specifically incest] for fun. Playful, silly sex [through calculated risk] is the best sex)! Belief, in turn, is illustrated through the context of action, through such poetics—the people, but also the spaces dressed up as “abusive” to speak to abuse in ways that grant closure and power while searching for secrets that, as the Gothic does, spill out everywhere.

To that, let’s go over some common (thus repetitive) elements to such spaces we can camp, then dive into Hollow Knight‘s own castle space.

To paraphrase Hawthorne, “Families are always rising and falling in America.” The same notion applies to Gothic counterfeits that speak to Capitalism-in-decay haunting its own canceled retro-futures; i.e., the rise and fall of a tyrant—his dynasty tied to a failing lineage whose own presumed greatness has long since been eclipsed by a restless labyrinth he cannot control, the illusions becoming see-through, tired, run-down (re: the desert of the real, the map of empire run bare). In effect, the castle as place—specifically a closed space to move through—becomes an ontological statement at war with itself: a psychomachy of different great powers rivaling and mirroring each other using the same contested puppetry and aesthetics for trials-by-combat and purification, but also liberation (not just clones, like with Trace, but the knight as an empty doll to pilot for different purposes, Trojan-Horse-style).

As such, the castle is an extension of the king and his systemic abuses as falling apart, promising the same reward to that one lucky knight who slays the dragon (the fairy queen). Inside it, the king’s undead men wrestle with Medusa, having internalized his dogma; also trapped inside, she rebels against said entourage through a revolutionary cryptonymy that shows and conceals her rape. In doing so, she subverts the monomyth, per the ghost of the counterfeit, to reverse abjection inside the king’s house of cards.

In turn, the decay conveys patriarchal revenge as foregone and futile, its message-in-a-bottle, trap-like iteration of the infernal concentric pattern something that—like Capitalism—goes ever on and on; i.e., rememory by virtue of recursive motion inside the Metroidvania space (to reshuffle the deck): castle-narrative, which occurs through reassembly of arrangements as a calculated risk to experience their history in motion, in small, as doubled, as mirrored. As the Rusalki show us, this can be to look at, but also look with; i.e., a one-sided mirror per the cryptonymy process: to confuse our enemies as potentially our friends, given the right push! “Watch and learn” becomes as much the context of the image—its covert, revolutionary cryptonymy (the double operation)—as it is the image, itself, and whatever likeness it purports at first glance/double take:

(artist: Gregory Manchess)

In Gothic stories, the nuclear family is a battleground of fear—a dead home of great-if-obscure power and alarm pushing past horrors (of rape, above) forwards again, into fresh tombs the living (usually the middle class) inherit from the dead. The subversive idea is to play with them, an ability that has existed since Otranto (a stage play warning of incest).

The Gothic castle, then, isn’t useless anymore than the past is. Imaginary or not, it becomes something to play with as a matter of preservation, interpretation and survival by its usual victims; i.e., “to play” in Gothic has an inherently sexual character through euphemism (“we played”), but also ludic descriptor vis-à-vis the means of sharing and interrogating power as a matter of history-in-the-making being an integral part of Gothic spaces. This always happens through play with those spaces, which generally has a cryptomimetic quality to its genesis, its hybridity and recursion: to pass along what has become forgotten as a commentary on its own forgetfulness (“They say this land was green and soft once, but the moment Haggard touched it, it became hard and grey!”) and navigating such spaces standing in for our own repressed abuse (and their degraded memories).

(artist: No Eye Yolk)

Like with Jadis’ dollhouse or Alien, kawaii or kowai (re: the postscript from “Meeting Medusa,” 2024), the area of play is a small (in this case, bug-sized) dream-like arena—of suddenly waking up as an adult, finding one’s former home viewed as nightmarishly imperfect, combative, and instructional (through the information on the walls around you, the heraldry and statues). This not only constitutes a naked regression towards childhood as flawed when viewed from an adult lens (requiring them to “armor up” to survive rape and murder promoted by the space); the parental figures become things to love and defend but also survive, feared for their dastardly lies and parasitoid, insect-like qualities (a childlike defense of the home as harmful, sick).

From Lord Manfred to Victor Frankenstein to that titular character from Mad Father (below), the king is a bad parent, but also a mad (scientist/conqueror) father who looks gigantic (from a child’s point of view) that harms his kids, then blames Medusa for it (“It’s your mother’s fault!”). Run as fast as you can and regress as much as you want, there is no escaping that abuse; like the chronotope, it only becomes a literal, historical part of the world—an installation that, like a secret renovation or occupant thereof, quietly invades your dreams bleeding into your waking moments. Per capital, the nuclear home is made to rape workers and nature by dividing the former into male and female variants with mythic-to-ordinary qualities seemingly breaking with convention only to endorse them all over again (on the state side of a dialectical-material struggle): Walpole’s campy rape castle a very genderqueer joke to lampoon the nuclear family and Western fabrications of superiority under capital now, regardless of what the old fag meant, two centuries ago (when capital was younger but still decaying by virtue of aesthetics)!

To that, abusive fathers aren’t scary only because they physically (b)eat their children, but because they rape the children’s mother as an extension of the child belonging to the same feudal owner holding onto power as folding in on itself: a foregone defeat, from one empire (of violence dressed up as Divine Right, but also reason, a cryptonymy for conquest) to the next. It becomes a war of dolls that extends into actual war as turning the child into the doll, the proverbial hollow knight haunted by both parents in a state of crisis, decay and moral panic leading paradoxically to a continuation of itself, mapped out through inward-facing conquests (the Mandelbrot) speaking to Capitalism’s boomerang effect.

In tokenized language (and per the incestuous histories of the castle), the king sends his next-in-line to fight a losing war in Hell against Medusa (during “the divorce”), to which the increasingly young child soldier grapples with a doll-like lack of memories and overabundance of mommy and daddy issues that, in totality, summarize the inner workings of capital/the monomyth; i.e., against nature-as-monstrous-feminine yielding ambiguous/ambivalent outcomes, but also appearances fighting as a matter of straight knights vs gay ones: canon and camp, capital vs Communism. Good to bad bleeds into the same mulch, grist for the mill as capital moves money (the knight) through nature (the space) and nature promptly resists the whole process. Built on a lie of a lie of a lie, playing Amazonian soldier (thus rapist) for the king as Prometheus, his children pay the price for his hubris: he’s a drain on them and the land around them, trying to keep himself and his legend/bloodline alive.

We’ll get to the Pale King and Radiance in a bit, talking about how the latter as a Promethean agent subverts the former as a monomythical agent (and even talk about Tolkien a little bit, in that respect). Now that we’ve covered some of the historical ideas fundamental when playing with/out Metroidvania space, let’s start with the city itself where the king’s presence is ultimately felt (the absentee father haunting the venue)…

Note: As we proceed, remember that this section is built on many older workers of  mine, including unreleased ones (re: Neoliberalism in Yesterdays’ Heroes) and things not included here (e.g., my Prometheus fan edit[5] or old YouTube essays like “Close-reading Gothic Theory in The Babadook,” 2018) that can still be felt in a continual nerdy love for the material and spirit thereof. Simply put, I’m a weird old queer medievalist that, like Walpole before me, likes to play with rape as a matter of telltale Gothic spaces. There will be fragments of many things coming together for new synthesis, new scholarship built on the past as my own and of a larger imaginary history that invites contradiction; i.e., as a matter of returning to old places to right old wrongs, through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s holistic ingredients, my formal and informal [de facto] education on such matters.

Consider this spate of play made in the spirit of fun, then; i.e., an inventive continuation of my Strawberry Hill being yet another tryst-like jaunt into the disinterred spaces of my sex-filled college days—all to dig up fresh wisdom as a cross-cultural, at-times silly exercise performed by a vulgar, campy whore (while Harmony and I are most recently attracted to each other for these reasons, the fact remains all of my lovers have enjoyed my Gothic nerdiness/randiness [and contributed to my work] in some capacity for those reasons). You might get lost, but that’s all part of the fun! —Perse

 

I want to start by stressing a previous point, mainly that a chronotope is a liminal space; re: designed to be moved through, but specifically to encounter time in Bakhtin’s “narrow sense of the word”: a marriage of the ordinary and legendary as a matter of architecture that speaks organically to the occupants’ states of mind as swept up in their dreadful inheritance. The trauma is written on the walls, but is still secretive (more on this when we look at Tolkien, towards the end of the section) and assembled and watched in secret (above) as a more-than-a-little nerdy act: the fake historian playing monastery scribe.

Part of the coin-flip’s secrecy and revelation, then, a Gothic space—a castle, generally—very much plays a vital role in the larger story’s moral, but also Gothic aesthetics that comment on said moral: a coverage that both comments and conceals, per cryptonymy as usual. It lies and tells the truth at the same time. It’s also a kind of rape game told in Gothic lingo—code, clichés, and bric-a-brac—as seemingly “empty” of substance:

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto of 1764 is still accepted as the “father of the Gothic novel,” yet most observers of this novelette see it, with some justice, as a curiously empty and insubstantial originator of the mode it appears to have spawned. It 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).

Hollow Knight is very literal, but also nature-themed, in this respect. Bakhtin likened the Gothic chronotope to an organism, its legends and realities of the historical past eliding as a kind of memory death; i.e., whose decay amounts to a collective and unequal struggle to remember what it was even all about. The experience is different per occupant depending on who, when and where they are. In Hollow Knight, the castle is an organism; there are many false knights, least of which is the avatar the player controls (who confronts a false knight mirroring his own emptiness and fake courage tied to a false king). All belong to the space housing them as animalistic, but also “fallen” as a matter of Gothic reinvention.

As I write in Volume One (speaking about Tolkien) “The paradox of the crumbling homestead (and its spoiled bloodline) is that familial decay is announced by its own crumbling markers of sovereignty within the chronotope” (source). I go on to add:

a creative desire to reinvent the past, one described by Mark Madoff in “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry” (1979) as follows:

A myth of gothic ancestry did not simply mean bad history. Those who perpetuated the myth obeyed a stronger call than that of accuracy to historical evidence. The ancestry in question was a product of fantasy to serve specific political purposes. Established as popular belief, the idea of gothic ancestry offered a way of revising the features of the past in order to satisfy the imaginative needs of the present. It floured in response to current anxieties and desires, taking its mythic substance from their objects, its appeal from their urgency. By translating such powerful motives into otherworldly terms, gothic myth permitted a close approach to otherwise forbidden themes (source).

Madoff concludes, “The idea of gothic ancestry endured because it was useful,” and I’m inclined to agree. Except I would extend this utility to Gothic Communism as something to fashion through the same myths of ancestry found in the usual haunts; i.e., mirroring the unspoken but still advertised material conditions of Pax Americana that Tolkien’s “empire where the sun never sets” was suspiciously covered in shadows and bathed in blood (source).

The same, we shall see, applies to the Pale King’s kingdom as swept up in its own magnificent decay. A site for play, in-game, Hallownest is, frankly, a FUBAR shithole. A colossal wreck in a very material sense, it’s crumbling and infected with a strange orange fungus and perpetual banditry (think Where the Red Fern Grows, but hostile to the boy and his dogs). Things are bad now, so they must have been good back then, right? …Right?

Again, we’ll get to that. For now, said collapse illustrates the Cycle of Kings leading towards Promethean hyperreality quite well. The king actually sucks, and everything is fake (with everything beyond or behind the kingdom a vast uninhabitable desert that feeds back into the little oasis). Many portions are physically littered with the giant bodies of false gods—”false” because they are dead, and “god” because they appear mighty even in death: empty and somehow full at the same time (re: darkness visible).

Similar to a knight, a beetle dies to leave its armor behind. In connection with the dead giants’ suits littered about the place (a theme borrowed from Alien‘s Space Jockey scene, though it goes all the way back to Otranto‘s giant suit of armor), the kingdom denotes a historical regression to an imaginary time before the order of the king: ancient chaos, the time of the Titans. The space itself is eponymously “hallowed,” or sacred, but also a graveyard imbued with mighty death and heavy time: the spirit of the dead Pale King and the lurking, angry presence of a female “hysteria” that is mightier than civilization, but also covered up by the endless male effigies and semantic wreckage gone to pot.

In ludic terms, the world is fairly standard Metroidvania the same way that Gothic cinemas are standard:

Critics have often remarked on the choice of the exotic, the foreign, the barbaric as the background for and source of Gothic thrills. In other words, the Gothic castle is the world of the Numinous. As David Durant notes, “the ruined castles and abbeys are graphic symbols of the disintegration of a stable civilization; their underground reaches are the hiding places for all those forces which cannot stand the light of day” (source: Audronė Raškauskienė writes in Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings, 2017).

As we’ll see with Tolkien in a bit, such massive photophobes are a puzzle that appeals to the same monomyth; i.e., as haunted per the ghost of the counterfeit as abject, sold to children taught to war, lie and rape through exploration sating natural and great curiosities: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Echoes of Ozymandias, then, promise that something big and mean (a mysterium tremendum, to borrow from Otto) killed these Numinous giants—and, by extension, laid low the mighty king—but the answer isn’t as clear as a dragon on a map (any more than it is in Alien, Axiom Verge, Forbidden Planet, At the Mountains of Madness, or Otranto). The short answer is war (among all of these works). Except, the narrative of the crypt, here, is always gargantuan and crowded, utterly loaded with moribund language covering things up, but also the presence of actual death as huge, building-sized, unheimlich (as intimated cryptomimetically across an imperfect, imitative series of Metroid-style Metroidvania such as King’s Field [1994] or the Dark Souls franchise, whose blacksmith/currency system made its way into Hollow Knight‘s maze-like graveyards).

Keeping with the Gothic, the Hollow Knight gameworld conveys Chris Baldrick’s “fearful sense of inheritance in a time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration” (source), which Caryn Coleman sums up as a definition of “Gothic” being “three things that inter-relate: 1) tyranny of the past 2) stifles the hopes of the present 3) within dead end physical incarnation” (source). In short, it makes for good BDSM, in the right hands, minds and spaces. As with Jadis, the memory of a dying bloodline becomes a means of salvation, of escape!

Per my conceptualization of the palliative Numinous, then, the Skeleton King’s tomb is something to bask in the rotting splendor of/rock out to, Castlevania-style as borrowing from older excessive models utilizing the Gothic chronotope as channeled into the future through constant bad echoes, spatial-temporal stamps (re: the Orientalism of the “black Egypt”; e.g., “The Black Reliquary” mod for The Darkest Dungeon) and tone-poem musical cues; e.g., Children of the Reptile’s “Halls of the Skeleton Lord,” 2017): “It is our time… regain what’s mine!” Big danger, big camp potential in the shadow of tremendous obscurity and cryptonymy (and all the usual hero-rapes-dungeon monomyth shenanigans). The Pale King extends that idea, except the king is dead and replaced with a rapturous avenger that survived him only to be imprisoned by his jailers inside the home converted into a tomb: the Black Egg and ritual sacrifice of boss keys[6] (themes of rot and cryptonymy tied to the space’s Freudian elements, thoroughly dating it): rape the dark womb of nature (the thing to map out a route to and eventually find a way inside—paradise as fallen, spurning the hero for their laborious, roundabout efforts, backtracking through the same maze).

Courtesy of a broader assemblage of palimpsests, Team Cherry’s Gothic ruin is also full of weapons and mad science, wherein it invites users to play among the ruins—to bask in their treachery and gloomth to find new significance and meaning among the graveyard as a reminder of tyrannical material conditions that haven’t gone anything (e.g., the post punk attitude under Thatcher’s neoliberalism). While the imagery of these giants is hollow—an illusion of power designed to affect the player—it can still attack the player. Piloting a hollow shell themselves, the player fights the false knight, who is the game’s first boss (the imposter in a stolen suit of armor evoking shared themes of parasitism and mimicry like the xenomorph in Alien, aka the eighth passenger). Over the course of the game, they fight many other shells, the skeletons of dead insects piloted by vengeful spirits leaking everywhere.

Eventually the player learns about their own monstrous origins: serving as a weapon meant to preserve the false power of the Pale King’s own vengeful ghost. As the Pale King dies, the memory of the city (the king’s giant, castled “body”) dies, but only partially. Instead of totally dead, it lingers in pieces, so many of which are dangerous or incomplete: the knight’s incomplete memory as the Pale King’s ultimate weapon[7]: the ghost of the counterfeit, which the knight—holding a shade inside itself—is.

Despite the concrete perseverance of the chronotope—its hauntology and cryptonyms—nothing in Hollow Knight is what it seems. On their own quest, the player re-remembers the past as something to discover in ways that invert the monomyth closer to the center of the puzzle. In doing so, they knock down walls, interrogate ghosts, and lay the dead to rest (the exorcism of Marxist spectres by a fascist ghost). But Team Cherry’s treatment of concentric space hides one ending behind another. The first ending is only a goal post that moves to the second and the third; and from there further trials emerge. Meant to display the hero as awesome, the pantheon of the gods is helmed by the ultimate foe, the Absolute Radiance. The ultimate version of this boss is hidden away inside the mind of a giant insect that is, itself, locked in a box; the box needs a key, and the key is squirrelled away on the opposite end of the kingdom. None of this is explained, and presents itself as a mystery to solve through equal parts wit and violence. Puzzles and combat serve as trials to the hero coming home; their return seems familiar, but in a hauntological manner (re: ghosts of Caesar). This isn’t Sudra or Zebes, but an uncanny resemblance cannot be denied.

And finally at dead center of it all, the horrible truth is revealed:

(exhibit 40h1: The game’s final, “ultimate ending” is the wish fulfillment of slaying the supreme female Numinous, opening her eyelids and blinding her petrifying gaze. And yet, per Capitalist Realism silencing the “madwoman in the attic” releases the agonizing shadow of a repressed, genocidal guilt, but also the looming spectre of fascism, back into the living world: the return of the zombie tyrant, their undead horde and all the chickens coming home to roost as brought about by the hero the entire time. The psychology of these fantasy lands might seem totally dislocated from our world, but is nevertheless bolstered by the real world as a parallel, liminal space told through the Gothic romance; i.e., as a kind of disguise that offers the player false, Promethean power. When Medusa is dead, Caesar will eat Rome; when he does, she—darkness visible, surviving amid decay as a kind of echo that never dies, but rather lives on as queers always do—will be smiling.

To that, once reframed on the global stage of planet Earth, colonial fears frequently manifest as vengeful ghosts in opposition to the Nazi zombie, but also the neoliberal powers that give rise to fascists, echoing Derrida’s Spectres of Marx; e.g., Ward Churchill’s thoughts on the September 11th counterattack into Iraq:

For instance, it may not have been [only] the ghosts of Iraqi children who made their appearance that day. It could as easily have been some or all of their butchered Palestinian cousins. […] One hears, too, the whispers of those lost on the Middle Passage, and of those whose very flesh was sold in the slave market outside the human kennel from whence Wall Street takes its name. […] The list is too long, too awful to go on. No matter what its eventual fate, America will have gotten off very, very cheap. The full measure of its guilt can never be fully balanced or atoned for (source: “Some People Push Back,” 2005).  

The more oppressed someone is, the more virulent and violent, but also seditious their pedagogy is framed by the status quo—impolite by centrists and a menace by reactionaries. Churchill is Native American; Fredrick Douglass was Black and Native American; Edward Said was Palestinian, etc.)

Hollow Knight’s gargantuan, shadowy outcome falls more on the Axiom Verge side of things than any pro-state outcome. It is Promethean, but with a Gothic twist—rape and live burial (which part two of this section shall explore the subversive elements to)! The churchly mise-en-abyme stretches into delicious, crumbling infinity through a smaller suggestion pool whose Numinous vibes can be enjoyed by persons of any political persuasion:

• The first ending traps the Radiance inside the protagonist, making them the next hollow knight (the concept of knights and insects denoting an insect politics approach to the cycle; i.e., an imprecise, unscientific series of “bug knights” covered in the hard outer shells of drone-like killers; e.g., Tarran Fiddler‘s evocation of Gwyn, Lord of Cinder [below] as a dung beetle on par with Team Cherry’s Dung Defender)

[exhibit 40h3, holding heaven in a wild flower]

• The second ending traps the knight and Hornet inside the same tomb together.
• The third ending destroys the Radiance and the knight, but spares Hornet.
• The fourth ending destroys the Absolute Radiance, but turns the knight into an even greater monster that Hornet must fight on her own.

All of these trials involve a melee weapon[8] told through a fatal quest for power and wisdom that stalls resolution as a symptom of capital abjected onto displaced, imaginary realms. To this, the heroic quest is tied to a monomythic space that promises combat; the combat misleads the player by offering power as tinged with decay and malice, that ultimately triumphs against the hero upon the story’s conclusion. There is no way to win, no matter how many power-ups are acquired, or how many upgrades the nail is given (which functions like a vampire’s fangs, stealing essence from the gameworld and its current, ghostly occupants to power the hero’s healing spells and magical attacks while simultaneously exorcizing the once-hallowed tomb of its unwelcome “guests”).

A similar, settler-colonial fatalism awaits Dark Souls players. Awash with gloomth, the hero’s quest traps them inside the world as part of a grander cycle; i.e., historical materialism and the return of fascism littered with small clues: the real-life Nazi SS (sun rune) and “Seig heil!” meaning “hail, victory!” but also “hail, the sun!” (the sun being a transcendental symbol of power in different imperial cultures; e.g., Ra and the Ancient Egyptians; Apollo in Greece; and the Shogunate and Shintoism [the fascist side of Buddhism] in Japan; etc) vis-à-vis Dark Souls‘ in-game phrase “Praise the Sun!” becoming code outside of it and back into it when the game space is colonized by weird canonical nerds.

This fascism in Dark Souls carries into a “death before dishonor” Gothic curse that mythically essentializes a rise and fall of sun-like greatness that thinks it will always return during fiery purification, warrior-Jesus rituals that worryingly ape the original problem; i.e., there is no god, just people killing each other on loop, mortifying their own flesh (and that of others) while shouting “Praise the Sun!” or “Deus Vult!” It’s a playground for them—a time in the sun during the dawn of the dead—but also a heroic death cult tied to profit; i.e., an excuse to rape, kill and otherwise harm others but also themselves as part of nature, mid-cataclysm. Except, there’s a limit to what the Earth will take, the soil souring when robbed of its nutrients; Medusa bides her time, but eventually pushes back, putting the predatory Patriarchy underground for good—proving as she does the illusory nature of state power (and its mimetic code) during state shift.

To that, Gwyn is a fallen strongman like the Pale King is, their kingdoms trapped in endless states of decay and dishonor around each ruler lying state; i.e., a fungal spectrality that never stops eating itself—is always restless, vengeful, doomed, blind, etc. The dishonor lingers, so the death lingers in a funeral pall, a Gothic curse of the castle and the land that an undead hero must lift by regaining their humanity inside the infernal concentric pattern. Per Aguirre, the monomyth begins and ends in Hell, upending Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces (1949). It becomes the tyrant’s plea, but one that Team Cherry (which came after Dark Souls) chooses to double with Medusa by virtue of troubling comparison: feeling sorry not for the king or his rapist undead soldiers, but a wronged queen visiting her revenge upon them in return!

The final conclusion is Ozymandias with amnesia. Inside the Painted World of Ariandel, the doomed quest of Slave Knight Gael is completed by the player-avatar, the Ashen One. At the end of the quest, the hero confronts Gael, who is inexplicably transformed. Sped up to the last syllable of recorded time, Gael and the hero fight inside an hourglass, surrounded by thunder, darkness and wind; but also sand.

The concentricity doesn’t end there. The entire climax sits inside the mind of a sleeping princess called Filianore, herself trapped inside the painting. Crypts within crypts; more cryptonyms along and within the same gross narrative. After a long series of violent quests, the hero’s crusade comes to Filianore and is seemingly presented with hidden power. The egg she holds falls apart, and the hero is transported to the end of all things. Here, the “truth” of the cycle is foretold: Through a fatal, ceaseless drive to attain power and wisdom, Gael has consumed the blood of the Dark Soul, which the hero takes from him by force; i.e., two vampires fighting over diminishing returns in the bone-dry crypt of Capitalism feudalized. Its transmutation is all but useless to the victor.

Nor does Gael’s death “beat” the game; it merely offers the hero with arguably their greatest trial by combat. But the ending of the game remains; the soul of cinder remains, as does the endless, kaleidoscopic city looping in on itself. And whatever challenge the player seeks is coded through violent, dream-like exchanges inside the ringed city as a kind of circular ruin, haunted by the viral pathogen staining the aesthetic: a looping Promethean Quest for greater glory and satisfaction inside the collapse of the feudal-capital order and subsequent desert of the real, the hero fighting the simulacrum to replace them inside the viral chain behind the illusion of a healthy and prosperous Imperium that, like a zombie apocalypse, is strangely devoid of non-zombie life. All that remains are empty suits of armor piloted by unseen forces.

In Dark Souls’ case, it is the death knight cannibalizing his greatest foe as undead and gigantic: himself as risen and fallen. Any pretense of greatness (nobility) has long been forgotten, replaced with limitless, rusted barbarism. He’s the senile old man, the rabid cop inside the police state attacking other cops:

I’m of course referring to Lodran proper, and the proximity the hero faces through the combat itself. Told through Numinous chants, hideous threnodies and sorrowful dirges, the “call-and-response” of combat (The Game Theorists’ “The SECRET Rhythms of DARK SOULS!” 2017) is one with depictions of fatal portraits, black knights, demons, and giant suits of armor. These and many other icons weren’t simply ripped from Walpole’s famous novella; they have survived across the years as a reliable form of tremendous feelings—what, in videogames like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, evokes Percy Shelley’s bare and level sands beyond the ruins of Ozymandias through a “ludic sublime”: “a boundless expanse, suggestive of near-infinite possibilities for exploration and constituting a whole beyond” (source: Daniel Vella’s “No Mastery Without Mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime,” 2015). This sense of the beyond and the quest for power inside it collides in the here-and-now just as the Romantics did with the Gothicists of that period, smashing a sense of sanitized greatness against the feudal tyrant as darkly romanticized, to which Aguirre’s latter-day calling of the phenomenon “geometries of terror” was what Bakhtin once described as “chronotope,” specifically the Gothic story of a hundred-and-seventy or so years previous.

Vital to this general sensation of decay is a slipping grasp of the imagination in the face of awesome power (what C.S. Lewis attributed to a “shrinking” feeling before the Numinous). The key to the closeness of such feelings is the sword in the player’s hand. A closeness with death—as something to paradoxically embrace and revitalize, even if the quest never ends—is attained through combat with the fringes of the sublime, the Numinous, the Gothic tyrant as replicated, on and on and on, inside the narrative of the crypt. Upon its mise-en-abyme, a swordfighter (or some other melee-to-ranged combatant), is invariably going to lock arms with the fatal past; it is their life force, chasing what all warriors in the crypt chase: essence through the replication of conflict in a Gothic aesthetic. But the spellcaster is someone who needs distance and time to prepare a response.

So while the ranged combatant is viable within the game, the truest practitioners of combat (especially in PvP circles) establish dominance as a kind of “fencing” for sporting purposes: to “dunk” or “clown” on their adversity as the holiest of sports maneuvers—the show of force during the usual bread and circus[9] (exhibited between underdogs, bullies, golden boys and goons, babyfaces and heels, etc). This “fighter’s distance” is not simply the correct, prescribed distance to attack and defend from; it is the place where combatants feel most powerful, most alive during the dance with death. It’s certainly possible to avoid combat (Happy Hop, “Dark Souls Trilogy – No Hit Run, 2918) but leads to increasingly obsessive and absurd levels of one-upmanship: a warrior corpse that does not know that it is dead, still trapped in Hell as something to rape.

Such is capital, displaced. To that, Hollow Knight and the Soulsbourne series are Promethean insofar as they both illustrate a similar fascination with the warrior’s path as fated inside a warrior’s cave; i.e., with no recourse for escape from the ghost of empire as “striking back” being a matter of capital (moving money through nature). But some keys to power are far less shady and far more glorious: a hero dies but once, only to live on forever (we’ll explore this problematic immortality for the rest of the subchapter)! It’s a militarily optimistic escape from the concentric pattern’s abyss; i.e., via the usual monomyth’s deus ex machina raping nature.

In the hands of the military optimist (the cop), melee weapons are the key to power as “theirs” by defeating nature encroaching on civilization as male, manly and brave. This power includes two basic types: combating evil and feats of strength. Part of this power is the promise of never-ending glory. Traditional heroes are immortalized by slaying the great evil or performing the strongest deed, and this, in turn, has a profound bubble effect on how they are viewed afterwards. With combating evil, the melee weapon serves a vital role: a means of fighting up close, thus having a higher risk of death. Sacrifice in the face of a dangerous enemy is encouraged through a myth of invincibility (re: the berserk). And if the hero falls in combat, and the countless bodies are strewn around all him, there is no graveyard; the victorious dead are generally burned, hailed as righteous in the never-ending struggle against evil before entering Valhalla (or some equivalent warrior pantheon at the presumed center of the sun).

We’ve laid out the players, spaces and ideals of the Modern Prometheus and its Cartesian/astronoetic devices. Per Aguirre, I next want to examine how the Gothic likes to dissolve this glory in an infernal concentric pattern that overwhelms the hero as someone rather full of themselves, putting the ball in Hell’s court: a home court advantage that buckles the champion’s knees in the presence of Mother Nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., Creed’s notion of the ancient castrating mother inside a man cave that, prior to its clearing out by Beowulf, harbors an older female presence that haunts the space currently in decay after Beowulf the legend is replaced by the reality of old age, madness and death. Faced with the gorgon, the hero becomes eclipsed by an older power that dims the excellence of his male sovereign through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of rape play. Schadenfreude is orgasmic, but so is liberation when the patriarch-of-the-day is proven wrong—by showing him to be a rapacious brutalizer whose empire won’t last. Delicious!

(artist: Wildragon)

Courtesy of Clint Hockings, a common mantra of videogames is ludonarrative dissonance: “Seek power and you will progress” (source). Promethean stories fuck with that, BDSM-style, by fucking with the hero’s ability to progress, mastering them inside Zimmerman’s magic circle as something that isn’t clear-cut, and whose mastering of the player can yield different outcomes in the future; re, me, vis-à-vis Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy’s “Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots” (from the glossary):

In other words, the ludic contract is less a formal, rigid contract and more a negotiated compromise occurring between the two; i.e., where players have some sense of agency in deciding how they want to play the game even while adhering to its rules and, in effect, being mastered by it.

In Metroidvania, this mastery is theatrically conveyed between the player’s avatar and the persons and places he encounters as lying to him, but also dominating him to communicate difficult truths about heroism by reversing the monomyth (re: “Our Ludic Masters“); i.e., by giving him an embarrassing victory that seems to stall him in place, or undoes monomythic heroism altogether by subverting Cartesian ideas through the Promethean Quest, ipso facto.

Such campy instruction can frankly be a humbling experience, one whose ludo-Gothic BDSM speaks to the individualistic pride of Western canon that turns heroes into useful idiots but treats them like conquering emperors (so-called “made men/great men of history”). Such tutelage results in people who generally don’t like to be viewed as idiots, but also subs under a dominant’s power. But Medusa’s “exquisite torture” is paradoxically good instruction, insofar as it avoids the usual rapes committed in monomythic language pursuant to genocide under Cartesian paradigms (which is what neoliberalism [through videogames] is: the same old raping of nature-as-monstrous-feminine to serve profit. You have to short circuit the exchange inside of its usual spaces, with its usual instructions; re: The Merchant of Venice).

Also like an orgasm, then, “death” is overwhelming and not always entirely pleasant (delicate) or controlled; re: as the Rusalki show us, it can be thoroughly rough. Except, this isn’t simply the passage of time, nor an accident of the mode; overwhelming isn’t a failure to communicate, but a means of communicating that speaks to the cyclical truth of things and its effect on the human mind as tied to a generational space.

My expertise lies in the Metroidvania, so that is where our focus continues to lie; i.e., as we plumb the murky depths of the castle as a murderous womb that, stamped with “female/feminine” as a death sentence and curse by male brutalizers, seeks its revenge by humanizing those who might follow in Perseus’ footsteps; e.g., the more Trace follows in Athetos’ vengeful footsteps, the more he becomes vampiric, warlike, shooter—a fascist warrior seeking “greatness,” above—to which the same applies to the hollow knight filled “toe to top full of direst cruelty”: the middle class bred on such legends to reify them as an avatar’s conceptualization that bleeds into reality off of the page and into it (especially videogames, per Cameron’s refrain).

First, just as the Gothic overwhelms binaries and their boundaries, a Gothic space defies easy quantification to communicate difficult truths through questionable methods (again, parents lie to their kids—not to punish them, but teach them); i.e., meant to entrap and overwhelm the user to, through access to fatal knowledge and power, rip them apart. Sometimes this literally happens, but often its sensory and ontological (re: Trace the conqueror weaponized against his father by the battered housewife). In the Gothic-Communist tradition, though, it grants those already occupying a genocided position inside a settler colony’s state of exception a palliative, hauntological means of confronting and interrogating generational trauma; i.e., to reclaim monsters and their spaces, hence our power through ludo-Gothic BDSM: an end to the genocide behind the illusion making society sick and blind but still undead, unheimlich.

The ticket is the castle as a site of reclamation and forbidden operatic pleasure that, in unironic hands, is built to seriously torture those inside, pacifying them through fear of the outside/nature, of barbarism with the space, of decay and disintegration, etc. Get too close and one’s understanding of a perceived order of things is challenged, along with one’s sanity. Ironic “torture” exists in quotes, making an iconoclastic hauntology ethical through class and gender war as prosecuted in favor of workers to upset the status quo. To critique power, you must go where it is; i.e., the monomyth as something to subvert per the Metroidvania’s Promethean Quest, bathing in the Numinous as palliative (what Seth Brundle called “the plasma pool”). It’s a calculated risk that goes into Hell and stays there: Persephone, Satan’s wench, as becoming her own boss (she don’t need no man, especially a man of reason pimping her out, mid-witch-hunt)!

(artist: VG Yum)

Whereas Volume Zero has examined the palliative Numinous per the Metroidvania, and this section has already discussed the Metroidvania castle-narrative as something monstrous-feminine regarded fearfully by patriarchal colonizers (exhibits 40f/g), now we’re going to contribute to healing as scholars do: through contributions to knowledge banks that, when accessed, can assist in the subversion of, and deviation away from, Cartesian norms. You can’t kill these feelings through scapegoats (re: “Military Optimism“), only play with them in ways that synthesize catharsis by camping witch hunts.

In the interests of continued scholarship, then, I want to use the rest of the “Metroidvania” symposium to synthesize these points regarding castle-narrative and nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., as tied to ludo-Gothic BDSM as I have since defined and expressed it throughout this book series. We’ll briefly go over the whole process’ evolution, next, before exploring rape play in Hollow Knight and Metroidvania: as policing the whore during unironic witch hunts, which she must liberate herself from during the Promethean Quest—by camping her own death (and rape) in ironic ways!

Lovecraft (and offshoots of him) denote such conclusions as comparable to Slave Knight Gael at the end of the world: confronting the pure meaninglessness of the larger space and its mechanisms as asleep, waiting like Cthulhu does, to awaken. But this needn’t be something for Beowulf to punch, proving his manhood by raping death as monstrous-feminine (slapping the bear per settler-colonial rites of passage that aggrandize him through acts of futile revenge playing out the Roman fool’s logic: a warrior’s death as infinitely useful to Capitalism); it can be tremendously joyous and healing. Such catharsis generally occurs through rape play as camping one’s rape, as well as the system (and fatal, medieval-grade manliness) attached to said rape as one of the Medusa and nature getting back at their abusers. Until then, she sleeps, buried in the black heart of a rape space whose beautiful dragon only waits to wake up, emerge and turn the patriarch’s world upside down.

Onto Hollow Knight, part two, “Sleeping Beauties: Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Re: a confusion of the senses, selective absorption, magical assembly and a Song of Infinity. Hollow Knight does this all with Gothic architecture (the Promethean Quest), ludology and insects speaking to kingly decay (the state) as something to inherit then challenge or conform to profit as part of: “a stately pleasure dome” burst like a bubble, laid low by royal arrogance (again, a displaced metaphor for bourgeois forces).

[2] Re: Icarian grandeur as a matter of double standard. The king cannot stand being outshined, so he sends his soldiers to extinguish her glory as monomythically “unequal” to his.

[3] “He is mega cooked […] Any word you could come up with that denotes some form of cooking […] that’s what happened!” Kyle Kulinski puts it (“Breaking: Press Conference Disaster for Biden,” 2024).

[4] E.g., D’Angello Wallace’s “An Uncomfortable Conversation about Cody Ko” (2024). Such effects happen by virtue of the law and society until quite recently treating women as property. These monuments of Justice (and their societal extensions in everyday conversation and media) exude praxial inertia by virtue of serving profit, but also gender roles and sexuality, crime and punishment as historically-materially rigid. The elite don’t want them to change, so they abuse these structures to manipulate people into triangulating against the usual survivors: cops and victims.

[5] Persephone van der Waard’s “Maculate Conception: The Making of My Prometheus Fan Edit,” 2021).

[6] The usual heroic hitlist employed by white knights/white Indians like Samus Aran, which the knight to some degree emulates.

[7] A Gothic, Dracula-level twist imitated by Still Indigo’s medieval, (admittedly cis-)Sapphic Amazonomachia/fascist-flavored love story: “Scorched Earth” (2023)—an all-female Romeo and Juliet through the medieval language of the state, romanticized similar to a kettling of Queen Dany in Game of Thrones in that she doesn’t become the state’ bitch; she burns it all down through indiscriminate hysteria fanned by reactive abuse: the Patriarchy’s fulfilling of their own apologia by making a monstrous-feminine/rogue girl boss they can crucify.

[8] I.e., one generally overcompensating as a place or position—a vain, phallic monument—also does; e.g., “the emperor beetle stands in for my penis!” said the insecure man of reason, proudly and unironically reasoning his own place in the universe versus nature (and the monstrous-feminine’s own ability to “joust” back, mid-Amazonomachy).

[9] Conversely a proletarian allegory (which Star Wars is known for), will not simply bank on class sentiment, but foster it consciously. More franchised variants—the Lucas prequels—lack this allegory in favor of more campy (and dumb) theatrics, and others—like The Clone Wars (2008) or Andor (2022)—have it in spades, throwing their weight around insofar as class war is concerned..

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

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

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

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

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

Metroidvania, part one: Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge

“I’m going to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by Capitalism!” [dramatic pause, tries not to laugh] “…Space!” (source).

—Tim Curry as Premier Anatoly Cherdenko, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008)

Picking up from where “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Metroidvania (opening and part zero)” left off…

Part one takes the canonical histories we unpacked during part zero and inverts them per the iconoclastic ones we also outlined (and are contributing to, here). First, we surveyed Freud and Forbidden Planet, as well as At the Mountains of Madness, and Shelley’s Victor and the Creature in Frankenstein, as all part of the same Promethean Quest. After that, we

• highlighted several key points surrounding Promethean narratives in terms of the performative spaces associated with them: the hero is summoned to the ruinous, dormant land of the gods, where they learn about their shitty parents, and then fights for one side against the other before scuttling the space-in-question.
• looked at the history of scholarship (re: my graduate and postgraduate work) and the stories connected to that scholarship as haunting capital out of the imaginary past splintered into copies, of copies, of copies regarding nature vs civilization, Cartesian men vs Medusa.

Last but not least, we discussed irony as something that can be removed or added in one iteration versus the next, giving Metroid as an unironic example of the Capitalocene that Axiom Verge subverts in a lot of campy, very gay ways: Trace is Shelley’s Adam turned against Victor by Mother Nature—gay space faeries!

(artist: Dejano23)

Now that you have all of that, part one is our close-read of Axiom Verge, exploring how its Promethean story about trouble in paradise (a hellish pastoral ain’t no picnic) treats the mission as one ironically delivered to a clone of the ultimate foe; i.e., the player as inheriting the larger Promethean scheme having already been subverted by our resident gay faeries. The game doubles Metroid, but also its own characters and spaces pointing to Capitalism/the Capitalocene normally disguised by doomsday narratives that Samus would shoot without a second thought. We’ll explore this “double trouble,” now, commenting on different apocalypse qualities of it before ending on a cathartic, sex-positive note.

Following the basic pattern of the Promethean Quest, Trace wakes up naked and alone. Trapped in a world that is falling apart (or ready to fall apart), the faeries have called Trace from sleep to brief him; i.e., telling him where to go, what to do—his mission objectives, essentially. Over time, he walks around, not exactly alone insofar as there is life present, just not human life. The place is a ghost town, lonely and plaintiff as Satie’s “Paris,” not Beethoven’s (the latter crossing Napoleon’s name out of the Emperor Concerto[1]). Keeping with the Metroidvania tone poem, eventually the music picks up; Trace fights monsters, and learns he’s not only created by a mad scientist called Athetos (whose name means “without place”), but he’s begot from the other man!

(artist: Wildragon)

That’s not usual in Promethean narratives. The problem is, Athetos isn’t like Morbius; he’s a genocidal maniac abusing the fire of the gods to aggrandize himself! To it, Trace is effectively this story’s Creature with a twist—there’s a bit of the inhumane patriarch inside him, giving him a human appearance tied to someone and something truly heinous. As we shall see, this is where the trouble starts. But it’s also where addressing Capitalism (and its disguises) begins to take shape; i.e., the mighty Rusalki being the faeries that Trace is away with: troubling comparison (through doubles) leads to irony critiquing and subverting what’s effectively an ironic version of the Metroid-style Metroidvania.

Athetos, then, is this stories’ copy of Hamlet’s father’s ghost; i.e., the catalyst for revenge against Mother Nature. Untrained in combat, the “hero” is actually Trace, the unwitting doppelganger/useful idiot cloned from Athetos and used against him by the Rusalki (a bit like Skynet and the terminators, which the resistance reprograms); i.e., to not act like Samus and her violent, militarily optimistic salvos attacking the planet and its occupants: as simple pirates and dragons to slay.

In other words, Trace is a clone of himself as less warlike (and self-righteous). Both he and Athetos are strangers to Sudra, the game’s alien homeworld. The difference is that Athetos is entirely foreign to Sudra and trying to colonize its ruins (which are that way because of what he did to the Sudrans), while Trace feels alienated in Sudra on account of the memories inside him that were written before his birth on Sudra; i.e., to defend from his conqueror side (the creepy old man/mad scientist who rapes everything around him): he is filled with revenge, only to discover it was authored by his mothers, not his genocidal dad (the two ideas at war inside Trace’s head). Is it embarrassing? Eh, sure, but pride is the root of the problem—one the Rusalki have no bones about solving by lying to Trace and, sometimes, spanking him a bit. The world is corrupted by hideous creations they expect him to “mop up” on his way to the Wizard of Oz. It’s still something of a purge, but the “corruption” is manmade; i.e., one of fascist science, versus Metroid’s X parasite simply being tied to the land, itself, as wild: needing to be colonized inside the state of exception, a priori.

The Gothic generally puts “harm” next to harm as felt, like a ghost, across generations (the chronotope and its various ghosts). For the rest of part one, then, I want to focus on the complex, imperiled, BDSM-style interactions Trace has with the Rusalki, the game’s Frankensteinian war machines as primarily telepathic and spectral. Not only do they arm him with (stolen) weapons in the guerrilla style; their veiled, “torturous” instructions compel him towards rebellious violence using deliberately faulty intelligence to survive Cartesian genocide.

Throughout the story, the Rusalki keep Trace in the dark. Guilty as charged. But also, theirs is an act of Amazonian desperation, one whose drive to survive a human menace leads them to act increasingly human against the spectral highwayman. Beyond the same, fourth-dimensional walls of sleep, the Great Faeries[2] prod Trace awake, sending him knowingly into “danger”; i.e., when he dies, the so-called “old machines” revive him. But he retains his memories each time, until confronting Athetos’ variants finally forces him to come to his own conclusions about what he really is in relation to his father as a likeness he embodies: the conqueror mad scientist, the Nazi quack.

These troubling revelations only compound further when Trace encounters a pathogen that makes him hallucinate: a bioweapon released by Athetos to genocide the Sudrans, ravage the environment and trap the Rusalki in a sleep of death (a very eco-fascist maneuver). This fever dream is also a crossover vision, one that reverses the role between him and the monsters he’s systematically slaying. While the resurrection pods provide an uncertain “cure,” Trace retains memories of the dream that his Amazonian bosses cannot see. Instead, their drones carry him to safety.

(exhibit 40e: Artist: Wildragon. Axiom Verge is effectively a Promethean narrative of fighting fire with fire. Athetos uses bio-weapons to kill the Sudrans and trap the Rusalki; the Rusalki use cloning as a means of weaponizing a clone of Athetos against himself; and Athetos tries to convince Trace at the end of the game that the Rusalki are not to be trusted despite making Trace from Athetos’ body. Instead of Frankenstein‘s singular parent-versus-child narrative, Axiom Verge gives Trace a scientist male father and host of Amazonian, biomechanical female mothers who made him from mad science to fight mad science; both are fearsome, commenting on the tyrannical nature of mad science as always having a human face—i.e., Prometheus, bottom-left. It’s like a really fucked-up custody battle—one where the parents pit the child against either side while reminding it that it comes from them: the human side, but also the alien side lurking beneath the surface as fundamentally human relative to nature.)

When Trace comes to, he witnesses two Athetos variations. Both are effectively mush, but one nonetheless resembles Trace (above). Horrified, Trace shoots it dead (exhibit 40e). This spurs an argument between him and the Rusalki, who begrudgingly tell Trace his origins. Their deliberate omissions anger him. When he refuses to cooperate, the Rusalki “kill” him; he respawns, only to find himself being chided for his foolish rebellion.

As such, this torturous, shared phenomenology makes for a very different story than Doom‘s or Metroid’s heroic refrain (shoot the alien inside the fallen colony space). Rather than ignore or overlook death, Trace’s demise is a fundamental part of the story Thomas Happ wants to tell: you can’t shoot Medusa to death because she’s your dominatrix, a guardian of nature using you for those ends through stories inside stories, lies inside and upon lies. Per Plato, the nature of allegory is that it isn’t outside the cave (or the text, as Derrida would insist).

For instance, a player normally remembers “dying” but their avatar does not. Trace is not only aware of death; it teaches him some sorry truths:

• He is being controlled by giant, powerful entities.
• These entities are alien, god-like bio-machines, but also masters of war.
• As masters of war, they continually lie to him, telling him only what is needed to complete their military objectives.
• These objectives involve the killing of the hero’s older, “wiser” self, leaving the younger survivor in a constant state of ignorance and confusion.

His experience uncannily mirrors the mind of the player going through the same ordeal, raising troubling queries. Is Athetos the villain or the seemingly-made Creatures (robata) that he seeks dominion over?

To that, we’re left asking the same questions Shelley raised, except it’s through the Promethean myth as punted into outer space; i.e., in a move similar to Alien, Forbidden Planet and At the Mountains of Madness—transplanting the fire of the gods, versus having Victor make it, “homebrew.” The point isn’t who makes the technology but what is done with it. The Rusalki use it to protect themselves; Athetos, to kill everyone in a genocidal tantrum because the big ladies won’t let him into their womb space. He’s the incel tyrant nerd, ipso facto, and it’s completely ok to lie to him spectacularly (re: the splendide mendax) and his baby-like clones (which Trace is) if it means preserving themselves to spite his rapey hubris (the killer doll being something Hollow Knight plays with, albeit in reverse: the knight killing Medusa to avenge the king by raping his monstrous-feminine foil, the Radiance).

Though never fully clear, Trace’s cloudy vision becomes comparatively more lucid as time goes on. He finds a series of cryptic journals. Some are literally gibberish the player must decode using cyphers. Some are from the Sudrans; others from the Rusalki, even Athetos (who signs the documents “—Trace”). So many elements of language fail to communicate anything at all, forcing the player to search for the truth, memento mori. But all the same, a deliberately oblique story seemingly bars the way.

Not entirely. Even Athetos hints at the truth: “If I tell you too much, your captors will have to kill you.” The fact—that both sides are lying about a struggle between themselves to a curious third party—mirrors Shelley’s framed narrative in Frankenstein (1818) giving rise to homicidal rhetoric: “DEMON. ATHETOS SAY, KILL.” Danger, Will Robinson! Danger disco!

(exhibit 40f: Artist, left: Wildragon; right: Bernie Wrightson. Promethean arguments of revenge concern capital vs nature. In these dream-like spaces, spectres of Marx and spectres of Caesar and “Rome” aim to control the same “dolls” [citizens, workers]. In the case of Enlightenment dogma, the female presence of nature and chaos historically-materially stands “in the way” of male leaders, but also makes them anxious of a phallic, enraged monstrous-feminine Numinous/nation; i.e., the Amazons versus King Theseus, Queen Jadis versus Aslan, Mr. Rochester vs Bertha, Morgana versus Arthur or Medusa versus the Greeks, etc. In many instances, the striking of the king blind with forbidden, female-exclusive wisdom is the Gorgon’s best weapon; in Axiom Verge, the Rusalki are more a class of warrior gatekeepers using the same brutal methods to keep Athetos, thus Humanity through Capitalism, from advancing to a position where they could do greater harm to nature: through their cryptonymy as a matter of war masks, deceptions, and ultimately fighting back against male tyrants through those outward-facing half-deceptions.)

Axiom Verge and Frankenstein, despite being centuries apart, touch on the same basic concepts through an ambiguous framed narrative about demons (we’ll return to the “demonic” aspect in the Demon Module): memory and knowledge as compromised by Promethean struggles to “advance.” In Shelley’s novel, the pursuit of knowledge was guarded by Victor, but also the Creature stalking and methodically torturing him (emulating his creator in that respect: the scientific method). And driven to the ends of the Earth, a dying Victor relays with utter conviction that his man-made creation is a “demon” to be slain; but the same animus is projected onto Victor by the Creature. Their mutual audience is left to decide who is right, but a case can be made for either side. Clearly Victor is a villain, but the Creature cannot be wholly redeemed, either. There’s innocent blood on his hands, spilled in futile revenge against capital’s daddy.

The same dilemma is present in Axiom Verge. Athetos did not create the Rusalki; he merely attracted them through his own pursuit of forbidden knowledge by genocidal means. However, machines also don’t evolve like organics; they are made, generally in the pursuit of power or wisdom. Just as Victor pursued the Wisdom of the Ancients as a “natural philosopher,” Athetos’ scientific endeavors led him down a similar road. On it, both men encounter a biomechanical humanoid race, their mutual confrontation instigating a merciless fight to the death: Humanity versus itself in a process of abjection against nature; i.e., demonic persecution divided dualistically in two and set upon itself.

To this, the relationship between the past and the present is the exploration of science in ways that do not die, but simply wait to be found and resurrected once more. While this stymies progress, so does the fear of the process itself. The Sudrans (according to Athetos) feared their technology and refused to invoke it. Instead they worshipped it (thus the Rusalki and nature). Athetos despised this worship and released a disease to kill them all, thus gaining access to the Breach. Beyond lay the path to true power, true wisdom. With it, Athetos could make disease, war, famine and death “things of the past” (again, according to him). But the past was waiting for him in Amazonian forms. As an instrument of nature designed to protect itself in war-like ways, Athetos would have to defeat its avatars. In turn, the Rusalki (a kind of water fairy in Slavic lore) would have to dig deep, drawing on their own worst impulses to prevent a deeply flawed and predatory man (and, in effect, Capitalism which he embodies and enjoys always leading to genocide according to profit) from entering paradise: king wants, the gods deny passage and ascension.

(source: James Jordan’s “The Met’s Stream of Wagner’s Ring,” 2020)

Despite the Frankensteinian ambiguities, things have class character that we can determine through dialectical-material scrutiny. To that, let me remind you of the dualities at work, here, of which the differing factor is one of class-and-cultural character, not appearance. For example, such denial of paradise by the gods is a common Promethean theme, the fascist element of false rebels clamoring to return to paradise (the good graces of the elite) since Wagner’s 1857 Ring Cycle opera (a composer who was notably anti-Semitic[3]).  But not all gods are Nazis, either.

So while this was a theme alluded to in At the Mountains of Madness, followed by Scott’s Prometheus—and later more clearly in Alien: Covenant, with David playing “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla,” returning to a superior position[4] while simultaneously pointing out that gods are both fake and used to justify and achiever power to create new beings with (the xenomorph being a Satanic tool of rebellion, but more on that in the Demon Module)—Happ in 2014 was riffing off the same denials of entry and seeking of power by those who have and those who don’t: Athetos vs nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., the one “without place” being a king without a kingdom as a matter of capital under Cartesian thought raping nature as impressive, as big and fearsome, as having things to take (ultimately materials, but also power and forbidden knowledge as a social-material arrangement—the raw and nebulous essence of people, of class-to-race-to culture war, of Foucault’s bio-power, Francis Bacon the father of modern science [a palimpsest for Victor] appealing to rape nature, etc).

Actions (and social-material conditions) speak louder than words. But it’s equally important to remember the dialectical-material confusion between genuine proletarian rebel—which a character like Satan represents challenging God and canonical forces in Milton’s epic—and someone like Weyland or Athetos, who embody the usual entitlements of capital and who pitch murderous fits against nature when they don’t get what’s “theirs”; i.e., as a matter of Cartesian dogma. One is the middle-class white man, promised ascension and denied it by the bourgeoisie through abjection; the other—the Rusalki, the xenomorphs, the monstrous-feminine—are the usual recipients of state violence who are actually rebelling against systemic violence as a matter of abjection through police brutality (with Victor using the courts and flash mobs against the Creature). Pointing a finger at the Rusalki and saying “they have much” only to invade them is to, as the Cartesian paradigm always does, point the spear at nature/the monstrous-feminine: a false flag to rape it with.

To cut through the Red Scare confusion, then, let me also remind you that the fascist, she-wolf (vampire) visual elements to the Rusalki cross a shared aesthetic of power and death over with the Communist elements occupying the same shadow zone that both inhabit. There is no singular interpretation, save what capital tries to colonize Gothic territories with. So call the Rusalki “Valkyries” or “space vampires” if you like; I see them as Grendel’s giant mother—big-ass Commie faeries more versed at warmaking, mimicry and all-around survival as actual rebels (counterterrorists) than Athetos was, a state terrorist playing the rebel (something to bear in mind when we take these historical lessons and apply them to our own lives, in Volume Three; i.e., learning from the imaginary past as informed by a historical one as equally half-real—the chronotope). Thus, they are able to get back at the Cartesian, Übermensch mega-nerd this time (touché, as it were).

Scott does the same to Weyland with his own dark angels, the Engineers ambiguously angry at a man whose own stabs at godhood are promptly smacked down by David’s disembodied head (an act of destroying maker and creation in one fell swoop): godly bonk, smiting the godhead with his little head (David being Weyland’s resigned servant for most of the film). It’s divine judgment, a gavel swung from the wrath of gods that, fake or not, have the power to wipe Humanity out. It’s a kind of guilt trip, a literal journey through and towards past wrongs against the natural world in the name of weaponized science. No one ever said the punishers of the proud were always fascist or Communist; it frankly depends on the critical voice being used!

To this, our resident big girls in Axiom Verge ruthlessly manipulate Trace, the useful idiot, in defense of a Communist paradise from the billionaire Nazi; i.e., the womb of nature (and its secrets that Cartesian men desire) being part of a forever war between Earth’s men of reason and otherworldly Amazonian forces, one they’re just getting started with all over again (forming a pretty pattern in the game that speaks to real life; re: like Miss Crawford’s cards, in Mansfield Park (re: Nabakov) but in matters of war, not love[5]). It’s mad science in both ways, nature radically using the same wonderous technology (the fire of the gods) against a fascist agent who is distanced from Earthly Capitalism but still remains a part of it; i.e., by taking him from Earth and putting him on Sudra to begin with.

In turn, Gothic castles are saturated with rape as a matter of investigation and materialization, hunting the hunter to avenge the abused from different points of contention: workers or the state. Axiom Verge has Pax Americana playing out on Sudra; in absence of an American flag or corporate logo (e.g., the Weyland-Yutani corporate merger from Alien), it is here the faeries and Athetos do battle through the child of the future taken to the ruins of a once-happy world laid low by Capitalism. In other words, it’s hauntological in terms of space; i.e., caught between past and present space-time.

To give Athetos his rude awakening inside the chronotope, the Rusalki condition the innocent child figure; i.e., cloning Trace through the resurrection machines to betray Athetos, his fatherly likeness[6], who is likewise trying to abuse the power of resurrection to conquer space. The Rusalki aren’t just better parents than Athetos, but scientists, too! It’s poetic justice, for sure, but a brutal one; i.e., “taking candy from a baby” according to an army of such enfants terrible (as the Heavy from TF2 says, “What sick man sends babies to fight me?”). This happens fighting fire with Promethean fire, babies with babies, masks with masks, mirrors with mirrors (e.g., Trace mirrors his father’s appearance but his mothers’ quest), cake with cake (re: charming lies to put in one’s cake holes to motivate revenge; e.g., poison to pour in Hamlet’s father’s ear and, by extension, his paranoid son).

As such, the Rusalki are framed as gods of nature by people like Weyland or Athetos; i.e., Cartesian men of reason playing god to lord over nature and take from it whatever they want, as a matter of Capitalism destroying as a matter of profit: the fire thereof. Any counterterrorist defense—no matter how rude it seems to bored middle-class folk snacking on such stories—is entirely justified, in that respect.

This being said, the Red Scare elements to Scott’s story (which Happ borrows from, the Rusalki being Slavic female vampires) project the fascist elements of capital onto an ancient-alien civilization (similar to Lovecraft) before threatening “the Earth” (now Westernized from top to bottom) with genocide as a fear of collapse: “It’s carrying death!” There’s an element of pearl-clutching present, one that happens through abjection forcing the Engineers and Rusalki into the same theatrical space: the city of the gods, a portentous ruin that precedes their return as fascist or Communist to threaten capital with. This happens the same way that it did with Victor, two centuries ago: through visions and dreams, and of dark, gigantic bodies twisted by mad science (the difference being the Engineers became cops, the Rusalki, rebels).

Apart from godhood, the chief difference between gods is the harm caused during oppositional praxis; i.e., the Rusalki, in a dialectical-material sense, are reprogramming the child soldier, Trace, to kill its abusive father as having harmed all parties (removing them like obstacles): killing him is a mercy to everyone, but is, like everything else in the game, always “in between,” liminal (whose operatic spaces are where fags always are, always call home despite being treated as fantastical, as incorrect: the fairy closet a prison we reclaim through Gothic hauntology from Shelley onwards).

Moreover, these are big problems tied to big persons and places as passed down, like a castle, from father to son, but also mother to child (depending on which side of the fence one falls on). Eventually the Rusalki win, probably knowing that Athetos will seek revenge against Trace. Except, the patriarch is a ghost, and ghosts can’t actually hurt you (re: C.S. Lewis). Rather, the true horror for Trace is that he’s a pawn in a bigger game, one whose victories are seldom clean; but also, that it’s all a dream, thus not real in ways that can actually harm him (the Gothic paradox). The silver lining is that, while being used, he is destroying the tyrant to prevent genocide against nature in the future—of the faeries, the older queers, having more experience and materiel to wage war against god-like forces, weaponizing Athetos’ Creature against capital (and maybe helping him out of the closet, a bit): by waking Trace up while inside Capitalist Realism (re: Plato’s cave, which Sudra stands in for).

(artist: Wildragon)

Rest assured, Medusa’s head haunts Sudra as a victim of Cartesian hubris, one whose Galatean element of Numinous energies lead to a Titania-grade worship by our resident Nick Bottom[7]. Said worship—of technology as god-like—originally kept the Sudrans inside an Indigenous state of grace that Athetos destroyed out of spite (their former greatness something hinted at when Elsenova seemingly[8] kills Athetos). “They barely remembered who they were,” Athetos recalls (our story’s Pygmalion, making Trace in his image and falling in love with himself: as master of the universe); i.e., the warriors he wanted them to be. Rooted in the past, then, what seems an interminable catastrophe that shut the Breach and robbed the Sudrans of their lives was all thanks to Athetos, not the Rusalki—a genocide he blames on them to convince the son that daddy is right.

(source: Fandom)

Of course, the Rusalki remembered, but they had previously left Sudra behind for undisclosed reasons (on par with Lovecraft’s ancient aliens, or Ridley Scott’s derelict, etc, piloting “ancient” castles doubling as giants, as ships, as avatars). Athetos made them return, but from a specific place: “the greatest nation ever envisioned.” They return from a Communist place of post-scarcity threatened by manufactured Cartesian scarcities, Athetos’ keeping the evil king alive and twisting the Rusalki into war machines to protect themselves from his weaponizing of nature against itself. Mid-Amazonomachia, they fight to a standstill, the Rusalki losing their bodies (above), and Athetos, his ability to walk on land. The fight continues inside Trace’s mind while exploring the ruins his parents made; i.e., Athetos’ inversion of “female castration” per the faeries’ severed heads haunting his dreams according his desire for a young body to pilot. As such, Medusa’s head chases the ghost of the father to Trace’s subconscious. Psychomachy or Amazonomachy—all happen for the same territories hitherto described: capital vs commune.

As for the nation, itself, it’s precisely such a place that Athetos wants to enter and destroy—to install himself in its place (and take all the credit while preying vampirically upon it) after forcing the Rusalki to return and protect their babies, who now are all dead and converted into zombie cyborgs remade to serve Athetos’ growing revenge and hubris: his towering folly!

Athetos’ mounting regression has its own conservatism during futile revenge: a better place, a nostalgia, to which any sacrifice is justified against the rebels (and by extension, nature). Trace is the Omelas goat, but his death and/or corruption is not guaranteed. Nonetheless, the Rusalki are protecting their own boarders (and avenging their slain children) from the opposite direction as having sent genocide towards them in Cartesian ways: through scientists. Superior in form (or at least size), the giant water witches are nearly destroyed by the biomechanical agent  they call a Pattern-Mind, or “someone with the ability to manipulate matter.” Athetos integrates the fire of the gods into himself to keep prosecuting his mad war against his eternal enemies (next page, exhibit 40g1); in turn, he forces them to.

Hardly an accidental tourist, Athetos does so ruthlessly to carry himself forward through the plague-ravaged maze; i.e., even after his actual body has become too frail to move around. His policeman’s brutal and cold-blooded colonizing of the land and its legends must occur through Trace, who—removed from the Rusalki’s careful watch—could easily fall victim to his evil father’s reasoned arguments; i.e., the tyrant in love with his own image as tied to capital’s dominion over nature as a manmade ordeal: Sudra turned into a prison for the Rusalki to try and escape through their adopted son as someone to liberate the mind of from their unwanted husband’s advances.

As such, Athetos’ boundaries to enjoy and impose on others (negative freedom, aka freedom from consequence) is, itself, no accident, and one that travels and lingers in future repetitions whose memories are starting to degrade; i.e., the ghost of the king haunting the carceral space through Trace being the one actually walking through it (as a ghost of Athetos, sharing fragments of his father’s memories, which he must reassemble from the wreckage around him). Trace becomes, to some extent, the vain wreaker of Cartesian havoc, which the Rusalki must turn back—Aegis-style—against the original captain. Seeking his owed home, Athetos is always rationalizing genocide (and the requirement of an enemy to rape, mutilate and pillage through Cartesian thought) by using the son as his revenge-by-proxy against the Rusalki and nature: as having not only dared to disobey him, but having denied him what’s his by royal decree dressed up as “scientific reason.”

Liberation is holistic, requiring us to consider how all these stories-in-stories (and stories that borrow this and that) collectively fit together on all registers. Athetos’ inherited hierarchy of values attaches to a capitalistic worldview that always alienates him from nature, including his own children (manmade for not); i.e., as tools for him, the divorced dad, to use and cast aside as needed. He sucks, but so does the ideology that turned him into an emotionally-fragile-yet-somehow-unfeeling monster working for the state. For all his contradictions, then, the man of reason’s self-centered policing of nature—from Victor to Weyland to Athetos—remains remarkably constant: a tyrant who always returns seeking revenge against women and children, but also the natural world!

(exhibit 40g1: Artist, top-left: Wildragon. Resembling the skeletal Immorton Joe from Fury Road [which came out a year before Axiom Verge] but also, oddly, Jacques Derrida, Athetos is Happ’s “writing with ghosts” by evoking the heteronormative spirit [and cartographic tools of conquest, exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] of the old, Enlightenment tyrant/con man Wizard-of-Oz, Peter Weyland. As the vain owner of everything around him, Weyland becomes desperate to cheat death, yet only discovers the Leveler on his own Promethean Quest: “A king has his reign, and then he dies,” his daughter, Mary Vickers, explains to him[9]. “That is the natural order of things.”

In defiance of this natural order, Peter lives in a glass shell, but also lies and exploits everyone around him in order to become a god. His leech’s rejection from paradise comments on Humanity as “unworthy” but also the gods, in this case, as false: lying to him because he sucks. Neither the Engineers nor the Rusalki are seemingly any better—a comment Weyland’s posthuman child, David, will make when he plays god in a fashion similar to the Rusalki. Except the dark mothers are stewards to nature, which Athetos—like Weyland with David—wants to invade through his children as slaves to his will [the tyrant’s plea being that if only they let him inside, sickness and death will end—more Capitalist Realism, blaming the whore]. Again, Athetos can’t love anything; he can only harvest or manufacture it for his own self-serving ends, because he embodies Capitalism peeled back to its Cartesian spearhead: the good weapon thrust into nature’s womb to tame it “for mankind.” To it, everything is expendable, including his children [or those he infantilizes and cuts up into zombie war machines—workers].)

Axiom Verge‘s warring liminalities (the verge of war) constantly present a curious kind of weapon to the player/audience: written language, specifically lies used in good faith and bad, that, unto themselves, contain things pursuant to different secret quests (a theme we’ll examine in “Metroidvania,” part two, when we compare Tolkien’s Hobbit [and Thror’s key and map] to the heroic quest in Hollow Knight). These fragments/traces also decay over time across larger systemic operations left behind (re: similar to Morbius the philologist poring over the derelict Krell language in Forbidden Planet that he might decipher its author’s mysterious disappearance); i.e., cryptic journal fragments written by increasingly delusional, Saturnine tyrants and desperate slaves, assembled afterwards (re: the mechanical Amazons and both parent’s tablets) and translated by Trace as he converses with different ghostly pieces.

Keeping with the Promethean theme of futile revenge, these reassemblies remain indicative, Hamlet-style, to the home and mind being not only destroyed as part of the same unit (with Hamlet lead by his “father’s” ghost to kill his whole family on a hunch), and linked mid-decay[10] to the same basic upheaval across space-time: “Something is rotten in Denmark!”

For example, the Rusalki lie to Trace, BDSM-style, to preserve his humanity to an imperfect degree while killing Athetos (and by extension, Capitalism-as-astronoetic); i.e., instead of Medusa inside-outside Trace (a reversal of the monomyth and its bad parentage on both registers). Such labels are cryptonyms of a repressed struggle between different, mighty forces: “Rusalki” and “old machines” and “Sudra,” but also “Athetos” as codewords during an ongoing war thereof. Simply put, the entire gameworld is a lie.

This lie unfolds on several levels. As the player follows the coded exchange borrowed from Metroid, Axiom Verge is telling an altogether different story. The player arms themselves by moving around; the Rusalki furtively arm Trace. Every victory the player earns weakens Athetos, seemingly trapping Humanity on Earth by letting Pandora out of her box. For all their posturing as great machines, the Rusalki appear to gatekeep Humanity through equal savagery. They lie, kill, and steal. The whole nebulous tragedy plays out like a waiting game—one where Athetos’ zombie agents mindlessly guard the corridors with outwardly ugly bodies; Trace embodies the body and mind of the player as controlled by alien machines that (according to Athetos) hold Humanity captive; i.e., keeping them in a dream-like, infantile state from beyond the Breach, thus unable to colonize space.

But the real villain isn’t Medusa defending herself—our Communist Galatea challenging yet-another Cartesian Pygmalion in a centrist, decaying Cycle of Kings—it’s capital defending itself through mad science decaying into fascist forms that apologize through the usual tyrant’s pleas dressed up as “rational”; i.e., the rockstar, too-radical man of reason trying to pimp Medusa through Trace, asking his own son to rape his mother (and her peoples) for the father as the father (akin to Luke and Vader) until the end of time.

The ensuring dialog occurs on a precipice—the usual great calamity having indeterminably befallen a paradise in the past (or rather a liminal space leading to paradise): the queendom of the Rusalki and nature, of which they are its fearsome stewards. Laid low by a male invader having its former greatness something to hint at, said invader has twisted the entire world to serve him and Capitalism, which he represents. Now when he is conquered, the old man is uncloaked but still dangerous, reasoning with Trace (there is nothing reasonable about genocide, but that’s still what capital does: reasoning with itself through its labor force).

To this, the game is the monomyth in small, telling a story that critiques it by virtue of disempowering the hero through what he sees, but also the faeries whispering in the ear of the king’s lineage warning them of such heroism as bad faith. Eventually, it becomes a matter of equalization—not of might makes right, but skillful, guerrilla-style maneuvering through the application of force as part of a larger struggle of liberation and resistance winding the clock back.

(exhibit 40g2: Forget “First do no harm”; Athetos does nothing else. First, he releases the plague; then, he clones himself to survive outside his glass jar in order to finish off the resident queens, forcing them to fight fire with fire just to survive—the literally broadsides of their weapon-like bodies, but also through the kid, Trace, who must watch the destruction of his state of innocence tied to the home finally disintegrate [the music that plays here is suitably titled “Apocalypse“]. Forced to come home and realize his dad’s a Nazi and his mom’s a Communist whore, Trace the inheritor remains caught between them [the game summed up as a Promethean custody battle, one where two gods—one of capital, fascism and mad science; the other of nature, rebellion and the Medusa—fight over the hearts and minds of workers at large: their “children”]. Then, he watches Mom kill Dad, Medusa getting her body back before putting the aging vampire down in front of the boy like Old Yeller… if Old Yeller were a crazed Nazi scientist obsessed with conquering the universe [no one ever said the gods were subtle]!

The prodigal son’s arrival takes time. In the interim, he explores the war-torn world as a child might, the Rusalki queendom appearing to Trace: one, as if for the first time [re: “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct”] and two, corrupted by Nazi revenge [re: “If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends”]. Happ has reversed the position of the one making demands, the Creatures in a position of relative, unconquered advantage versus our fallen king having laid both parties low. He’s an abusive father having damaged the mother’s home, trying get at her through the children: Trace, the last, made from the bodies of the other dead kids. Brutal!

In turn, all mommy can do is try and survive along with the last surviving child; i.e., using her adopted son in reverse during the divorce from the alien dad, but ultimately seeking not to harm Trace: by teaching him that, yes, rebellion isn’t polite, and it’s ok to server bonds from your father if he’s a Nazi devouring his own lineage [re: Goya]. To that, the story has different morals playing out as a matter of dialectical-material argument: Shelley’s theatrical dialogs, mythic structure and aesthetic dualities [of power and death] warring inside framed narratives.

When the likeness of the father encounters the father’s first line of children, we see the first degrees of infiltration at work; i.e., force and total war, followed by assimilation; e.g., Skynet’s bare-bones terminators, followed by those with rubber skin, and ultimately “blood, hair, sweat—grown for the cyborgs.” As a matter of complicit vs revolutionary cryptonymy, the zombie children recognize the more refined and human Trace and see in their sibling an element of the mother, who they are supposed to destroy.

As such, the paradox of violence, terror and morphological expression is that Athetos cannot monopolize them; nor can he abuse technology in relation to nature as something to monopolize. In making Trace more human to blend in, Athetos makes a less-expendable child [an heir] who is able to see his mother’s side of things, sealing the wicked father [and Capitalism’s] fate. The battle with the flower tank [left] is simply a formality in that respect: exorcism to critique capital, not Communism!

Furthermore, if Athetos’ singular manufactured genocide against the Sudrans was cruel for an instant [which it wouldn’t have been, that many people dying hardly happening overnight, below], it was both an act of revenge for being unable to send “technological advancements” [with “progress” being a cryptonym for genocide] into space, and one informed by the countless genocides under Cartesian thought that predated Athetos on Earth [and feudalistic enterprises surviving inside Capitalism’s various fantasy worlds]: “Who’s the savage? Modern man!”

All bleed into this half-imaginary [dream-like] realm; i.e., one of the damned, where Trace—following in his father’s footsteps—climbs the mountain of unburied dead Athetos left in his wake. Trace climbs innocently towards paradise on the bones of daddy’s victims, only to run into older copies of the father’s twisted will, which his own seamless copy conceals [they literally compose him]. Regarding all of them, Athetos abused the technology of the Rusalki—in effect, the fire of the gods—to achieve godhood in a capitalist sense through those he created. Cannibalism and madness overlap into a sad tolerance for itself: echoing inside the same child’s head, mid-chronotope.

Shortly before Athetos’ death, he and Trace exchange words inside the old man’s robot womb, as much between a politician to a citizen [Caesar being a warlord and statesman] or corporate propagandist and consumer as it is between father and son. Except, there is no reasoning with such infantile, self-superior persons; they are simply wrong as a matter of basic human, animal and environmental rights [also, bear in mind, Athetos has been trying to kill Trace this entire time: “Athetos say kill”]. By recognizing that vicious entitled streak in Athetos, the Rusalki gatekeep him through the son, using him to buy time until they can swoop in and stake the fascist Dracula for good. They do so to keep capital [thus fascism and genocide hidden behind Cartesian arguments] out of the rest of the universe, returning Trace—heartbroken and confused—to a Sudran state of ignorance [the sleeping rebellion speaking to the allegory of Communism as hunted down and invaded by Capitalism].)

Meanwhile, the cruelty of the Rusalki only applies to any who wish to cross over into their “greatest nation,” keeping paradise “pure” by virtue of policing outsiders through themselves having no other choice. They’ve been hurt before, thus must stay on their toes (Cartesian men embody capital as a Cartesian, thus settler-colonial force)! Athetos gassing the Sudrans is him failing the test as a matter of impatience and bad faith; he was always a conqueror and the mask slipped (an act he later explains away to Trace, but only when Elsenova has him on the hip). To equivocate his deeds with that of the Rusalki is DARVO and obscurantism, two devices that reach back—as usual—to Shelley’s novel: “I’m not bad, just misunderstood! They’re the genocidal maniacs, the hairy wild things!” says the genocidal maniac.

(artist: Quinnvincible)

More to the point, it all stems from Capitalism as embodied by men like Victor as echoed by Weyland, Athetos, Trace, and anyone else (from Earth or not) attacking the monstrous-feminine (re: “wicked, bad, naughty Zoot” and her grail beacon). Beating everyone to the punch, Mary Shelley touched upon and critiqued capital as an operatic matter of oppositional, dualistic dialogs unfolding Gothically (as endless counterfeit “past,” echoes, ghosts) through framed narration (exhibit 40g2); i.e., stories inside stores across stories, which again, Axiom Verge ultimately is—Victor and the Creature extending to the rotting (fascist) Cartesian tyrant and rebellious, monstrous-feminine slave each playing a swan/siren song to lure Trace with: heroes in opposing, dialectical-material struggles experienced across history as half-real. It is one which Gothic expression—its cryptomimesis echoing trauma in between fragments with a medieval, earthly flavor (“hawk tua, spit on that thang[11]!”)—tells and retells such vast, opposing forces neatly enough (the young-at-heart getting it, the old and divorced-from-nature left not just scratching their heads, but attacking such youthful, slutty impudence to try and closet it once more: “Those kids and their pesky videogames[12]!”).

Shelley’s novel is several centuries older than Happ’s videogame (with Bakhtin, in the middle of them, introducing theories of the chronotope that Shelley perhaps intuitively grasped, but Happ had full access to). As such, hindsight is kind of 20/20. Rather, Gothic maturity intensifies conflict as a matter of entropy (whose perceptive zombie eyeballs parse the chaff that stirs up in the wake of such warring elements). All heroes are monsters, but canonical iterations always have the monomythic twat punching down against the monstrous-feminine Prometheus (re: not Victor). Pity the fool if these bitches decide to break bad (water nymphs or otherwise), freezing him in his tracks:

(source: Opera Australia, “The Ring Cycle,” 2023)

In Promethean fashion, then, our aforementioned themes of contested godhood remain present. That’s what creation is, both sides doing so at cross purposes (tyranny vs liberation, capital vs Communism). Compared to the Rusalki, then, Athetos executed those who were complacent under the rule of what he deemed “false gods” (re: to take what was theirs for himself and those like him). In rejecting them, Athetos not only incurs their motherly wrath (versus the Engineer’s paternal rage); he’s effectively playing god himself, but in a fascist sense. Or as Alex Holmes writes in “The Philosophy of Axiom Verge” (2019):

As we discussed at the start, axioms are not able to be proven. They are necessary to ground any rational system so that ideas within the system can be evaluated, but are never themselves provable even if it was empirical evidence that causes us to create a new system. […] So imagine Athetos’ frustration, his anger, when after an entire career of ridicule despite public notoriety, he finally achieves a functional way to demonstrate the usefulness of his [axioms: the] world of Sudra, existing in a state of liminality that enables one to breach into these other worlds. What he finds instead is a society that has abandoned this potential out of fear, precisely because it was dangerous […] Nothing could have been more slighting.

Still, committing total, biological genocide by weaponizing your own cells into a mutating virus just so he can say, “I told you so” to the nerds who bullied him is a little heavy handed [or a critique of fascist megalomania, perhaps]. The personal message to take away from this story: pursue your goals without being consumed by ego (source).

Notions of godhood and demonstrating “progress” aside, we’re left with unequal arrangements of power, the weak rebelling against the strong as parental (which, again, goes all the way back to Frankenstein—to appeal any argument to those under capital in easy-to-understand language: rebellion and critique, passed along as “corruption” from mother to child in opposition to patriarchal hubris, technology[13] and exploitation).

As we’ll see in the Demon Module, Weyland’s child, David, had a similar problem (“Who doesn’t want their parents dead?”), except he was never human. Even so, he loved “Ozymandias,” an 1818 poem about a mad king whose mad reach for power leaves behind a “colossal wreck.” No record of how it came to exist survives, or who Ozymandias really was. In continuation, this trend of civilization eating itself was exemplified in Scott’s other Alien movies, which, in turn, inspired Metroid and other Metroidvania like Axiom Verge (or crossovers); i.e., Promethean, inverted-monomythic stories about fathers conditioning their children to kill their mother as monstrous, making her an extension of nature dominated by Cartesian thought.

Characters in stories like Frankenstein represent more than just themselves. Axiom Verge is all at once a story about an evil father controlling his kid to kill his mother, but remains connected to all the others, in and out of fiction, speaking to The Modern Prometheus—less as a single work and more an ongoing theme, a mythic code that can be used by either side. The Gothic, through this myth, routinely predicts disaster by flinging the fatal, one-possible future into the fearsome past seeking revenge against nature-as-alien, as monstrous-feminine.

For example, as the clock winds back to the here-and-now for Trace, the faeries return him to a world where Pax Americana‘s presidents (and their abuse of mad science) bear a disturbing and frightening partial likeness to Athetos—Biden and Trump, but also America versus nature; i.e., as monstrous-feminine, as Communist, per anxious stories like Axiom Verge, The Dark Crystal, The Terminator and At the Mountains of Madness, but also confidently militaristic ones like Metroid, Aliens and Starship Troopers (whose ultimate solution is always nuclear war and planetary destruction—genocide).

To avert and avoid the crisis that happened in Sudra—a world that has already been destroyed by hidden powers decaying them—the righting of the ship must be done in our own place and time as part of the same larger Garden of the Forking Paths (which Sudra—and indeed, all Metroidvania—intimate inside themselves); i.e., as already mapped out and destroyed in likenesses of itself: the Rusalki having won, in the end, their world devastated similar to John Connor’s war-torn L.A. after the nuclear war in that film. Sudra’s genocide—its great decay—happens through power as obscured, but also buried into the world like a thorn, but also a radioactive bullet. It is a post-apocalypse vision, its doom given by the faeries (the oracles) to Trace as “chosen” by the gods—one that needs to be prevented in our world while already moving towards the same end game that befell Sudra; i.e., committed by the same powerful men of reason and the monomyth as something to camp through the Promethean myth: returning from Hell not with plunder but the predatory knowledge of one’s homeworld (under Capitalism) heading in a similar direction!

Fascist or Communist, the gods are hardly silent, then; they predominantly live inside-outside us, across media hybridizing fantasy and science, just as Shelley’s Gothic did, over two hundred years ago: on the walls of restless castles communicating time, devastation and revenge as a cryptonymic circle, looping in on itself through decay as something to recover power from, in order to regenerate out of the dead material. As we’ll see with Hollow Knight, Capitalism will take everything from the world; but no matter how destroyed a world appears, we’re not quite there yet.

That all probably sounds bleak, so let’s conclude part one by reflecting on the positive side to some of its parental creative themes—i.e., as a matter of praxial catharsis—before moving onto part two and Metroidvania space in decay and regrowth, rape and reclamation.

To this, the Gothic can seem like a bad dream stuck on loop (no one wants to be told “good luck” while reconciling with capital vs nature as fraught with mimicry and fabrication). Axiom Verge certainly feels this way. But it also shows that each time a story is told, the past grows, leaving behind artifacts that are increasingly begot from imagination (the cryptic writing crumbling to dust, the faeries moving in); i.e., as not only haunted by patriarchal ghosts, but spectral patriarchs anxious about the fragility of male power—its tendency to fragment into senility away from lucidity when threatened by nature and time categorized as an ancient, monstrous-feminine force: the Archaic Mother as an immortal, undead, and very pissed-off spectre of Marx. In short, such tyranny is fleeting and far from absolute. Writing decays, meaning canon does, too.

While memory is so often a casualty when such decay happens, it also lies in service to one side or the other when things, to some extent, regenerate inside the necrobiome’s fractal recursion (which Axiom Verge‘s jousting, Borges-style epistolary [ruins and mirrors] superbly demonstrates—the memories backtrack across the map, while the player more or less goes in a single, unicursal path); i.e., matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred and reshaped; e.g., like a flower tank echoing Eliot’s “Waste Land” (1922):

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain (source).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

This yields unto us an awesome power—that of the gods as genderqueer and monstrous-feminine, holding heaven in a wild flower that can regrow in the face of Cartesian domination’s own false gods!

As nature’s current guardians, we can harness such curse-like gifts to banish Cartesian dickheads (and their raping of nature) from the Breach, making them an awful thing of the legendary past (to learn from, as the future waiting to happen yet again)! Hauntologized, rebellion becomes the ultimate genderqueer playground, one where our reclaimed labor (and Gothic stories’ mise-en-abyme) can truly set us free! It plays with the decay (the fertilizer of genocide) to enrich our reckoning and return: Don’t fear the reaper! Fuck them!

I suppose it is all a bit neurodivergent, gay and bellicose! I’d also say excuse the drenched messiness and vertiginous, tangential repetition of this particular symposium, but that’s how divorces (and history) generally go (with Axiom Verge a war between gods and their children sharing the data—indeed, consciousness itself—as written down, but also cloned inside a shared, fought-over chronotope goopy darkness).

The fact remains, we want to make rebellion joyous by acknowledging our place in its splendid lies/dead giveaways. Queer people exist in a perpetual state of change, thus decay and rebirth as hinted at in Metroidvania tied to Cartesian abuses. Sooner or later you can’t afford to be passive (or non-violent); the joy comes from finding our voice (one that is generally marginalized and discounted by STEM-field-types and other state proponents monopolizing Gothic poetics for themselves—gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss). Concerning liberation through revolutionary cryptonymy, there’s simply too many things to address[14] all of them, ourselves—but at least you’ll be spoilt for choice!

(artist: Bay)

As something to grow into out of contested stories, queer people built ourselves out of old dead parts to defend nature and progress towards “the greatest nation” (Communism), not abuse and rape it like Athetos does with Trace (who looks human, but is actually a Frankenstein’s monster made from genocided corpses). The game lies to the player to expose Athetos lying to Trace, to us, to workers! This rebellious lying continues through our labor and games, our playing with Gothic poetics to kill Nazis in-text in order to challenge fascism (thus moderates and profit) extratextually. In turn, love and genderqueer catharsis bloom on that battlefield, resisting capital while trapped inside its hellish marriage to the land it poisons and steals from (camouflage goes both ways, as does sex, force/violence, bodily expression, masks, mirrors, etc)! Axiom Verge‘s notably decayed language, memory and world (all one-in-the-same data as “cards to play”) transform because they are used under disproportionate stress (asymmetrical warfare), yet stay flexible in regards to said stress in ways that Capitalism historically is not.

To play Axiom Verge, then, is to both play inside a settler colony that is dying and a dying land that is trying to reclaim itself (with both memories stored inside-outside the same avatar experiencing them). Capitalism (and by extension, its paragons) are brittle, frail, and prone to flaking and fragmentation, but also paranoid hostility because of their weakness as something to feel; re, what Chris Baldrick writes in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales:

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

As such, capital digs its own grave by making the land (and workers) unstable, who then emerge through the same player/play space to joyously overthrow Capitalism according to the very whirlwinds it cannot survive. All capital can try and do is wait Communism out until the world ends (as Athetos does in his sorry bubble), convincing itself it can somehow escape to other planets (e.g., Elon Musk in our world, and Weyland in Scott’s, etc).

Summarizing our symposium thesis argument through Axiom Verge, Happ showcases the popularity of the monomyth (re: Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces, 1949) and it’s “empowerment” (the knight rewarded with the damsel after slaying the dragon) as offset by the Promethean Quest’s “disempowerment” (the hero is cuckolded by the dragon, princess, Disney-style vice character, what-have-you); i.e., critiquing capital through the same spaces (and their abjection) in reverse: a fight to survive in spite of capital, camping the canonical medieval as it exists presently (e.g., Trace in a bikini, mothered by dragon fairy ladies).

Except, to merely call my developments “exciting” would betray the reality of discovering a fatal knowledge that is hard-won (as Promethean knowledge generally is): a) one’s home as displaced unto a territory that is discovered to be just that, but also one’s grave; and b) the home as built on genocide presenting itself as correct, righteous, all-knowing and so on (my father enjoyed universal acclaim simply for being my father). Faced with Athena’s Aegis, it’s not long before standard-issue military optimism exposes itself as the fool’s errand, tilting Quixotically at colossal, moribund windmills (dragons). Inside Trace, there’s a sense of Cartesian longing to dominate such things (taught to him by patriarchal forces in defense of Capitalism), but also submit to their power as weaker than a decayed greatness[15] starting to heal but still rotted (taught to him by matriarchal forces, in defense of Communism).

Even so, Elsenova’s dick is still bigger than his (giving an altogether different meaning to “size difference,” next page); she could crush Trace without a second thought! Indeed, she fucks back, the fabled Great Destroyer that every insecure patriarch fears: a spectre of Marx giving the fascist hypocrite a taste of their own medicine; i.e., by lying to his pupil, but also instructing him truthfully as a strict mommy dom, adopted parent/found family overcoming Cartesian family ties by camping them (“Whose mommy’s little destroyer? You are!”): a Satanic behemoth (what Mikhail Bulgakov would call “begemot,” the Satanic, hellcat servant [literally a giant talking cat] from his 1940 novel, The Master and Margarita).

Returned to working order as an act of waking up (the old gods return, “going woke” to challenge profit making workers broke[16]), Elsenova has evolved to brace herself against Athetos’ bullshit, literally taking up arms against him after emerging from her deathly chrysalid (from the corpse of empire). She does so, while Capitalism stays stuck in its inferior glass version (again, being too brittle to adapt and survive when Medusa topples it but also something of a sitting duck that becomes increasingly transparent during class war—a glass onion when workers rise up and break shit: they only have what power we give them). “Do you fear me?” she victoriously asks the hero, decked out in the clothes of gay class war while having the hero join her in a shared pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., one resisting police violence (with Athetos’ hallway zombies serving as cops that attack Trace for his rebellious signature). This happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM teaching a vital lesson: life and death as part of the same rotting and growing equation, among the corpses and the shit (“They don’t sing about how they all shit themselves; they don’t put that part in the songs!”).

(source)

As “Bad Dreams” showed us with zombies, rebellion and apocalypse can be incredibly scary (a force of nature whose hurricane shakes shit up—more on this when we look at the Radiance). But they also represent the potential to be something great that, until this point, has been stunted by Cartesian forces. In Gothic BDSM language, the Rusalki offer a palliative-Numinous balm to capital’s deleterious effects, but also an ontological statement extending rebellion in and out of imagination: both who I want to be, and the found family I replaced my absentee parents with—someone strong and capable, but beautiful in ways that reflect their own bionic, genderqueer survival, liberation and cathartic enrichment. Before it, Trace the useful-idiot lab rat simpers dumbly as part of a death cult—one whose revolutionary cryptonymy robs him of his ability to rape Medusa, encouraging him to glaze (dick-ride) her, instead:

(artist: Wildragon)

Sort of. This happens without harming Trace. Only his foolish pride—tied to the nuclear family and its Hamlet-style tendency to decay while moving endlessly through the map—is wounded (which will recover in service to things better than weird canonical nerds); i.e., the Rusalki reborn embody a threat display (not unlike Princess Mononoke’s wolf mother from that film: a girl raised by wolves versus a boy raised by faeries) that signals the hero to bask in her campy glory (also like the Radiance). Doing so breaks canon to save nature from its usual monomythic destroyers and dogma: “the castle [as] the perfect dom,” person and place oscillating between both categories through the same-old Gothic mise-en-abyme, fairytales and ghost stories’ cryptomimesis (re: “po-tay-toh,” po-tah-toh”).

Axiom Verge is a story about a divorce the father loses, but where worlds still collide for the child. Except, the story of evil or questionable, Hamlet-grade parentage wasn’t new when Happ made Axiom Verge or even when Shelley wrote Frankenstein, nor are evil fathers dominating their children somehow restricted to “pure fiction”; i.e., playing god to one’s battered kids, passing oneself off as “God”; e.g., Shang Tsung’s “Low Tier God Is a DEADBEAT Dad to a BIOLOGICAL Daughter,” 2024); re: Victor and his ilk being low-tier, bargain-bin, absentee dads to their own kids (biological or not) and to nature as something to respect, not rape and harvest (what the kids call “divorced dad energy”). That being said, history is a document forever rewriting itself (re: Marx), dipping in and out of fiction and non-fiction, lucidity and oblivion, as game-like using maps (re: me).

As Axiom Verge and Frankenstein show, it can go either way. What matters is how you play with its lingering (and, at times, incredibly confusing) poetic instructions (which this book is very much a defense of—to develop Gothic Communism in ways more inclusive than Percy Shelley’s own 1821 “Defence of Poetry“); i.e., to move power and understanding in one direction (the state) or the other (workers and nature as monstrous-feminine) whilst inside the midden.

In short, the crux of the larger argument is intended play vs emergent, cowards following the leader by doing what they’re told, the bravely gay bending the rules to survive by outplaying the cop inside the trash heap. We empower workers by camping canon; re: making it not just gay but gay as fuck; e.g., gay space dragons[17] (above), observed by ordinary-looking queer people—as being in the closet or pushed towards it on the verge of things (as I was, once upon a time): a nerdy pirate roped into various, spacefaring adventures (Gothic matelotage) on the wild seas of outrageous fortune.

Grand poetics aside, it’s incredibly germane because our closeted nerd, son-of-Caesar is, through the resurrection machines, both born in the Caesarean style (“from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”) and divorced from his father’s evil influence. Raised by the Amazonian wilderness, he becomes free to challenge the gods of capital to—however impertinently they might describe his actions—lay them on, allowing him to choose his own destiny as not set; i.e., as not monopolized by either side (rebellion is optional, as far as choices go, but so is submission). Instead, the Shelley-style ambiguity lingers as a matter of ongoing class and culture war during the Promethean Quest as an everyday event (Capitalism vs Communism)—one to navigate, interrogate and express the ambiguities thereof in abstract and in small: the fabulously gay camping of monomythic language and motion (castle-narrative) through the draconian opera; the infernal, inverted monomyth; the danger-disco Gothic castle, theatrics and cryptonymy (masks, mirrors, poetry and puppets, etc)! All become spells, but also dialogs to uphold or resist bourgeois arguments, hence illusions.

To that, if the princess is the Call to Adventure in monomythic stories (videogames or otherwise), then Elsenora is Trace’s princess playing parent to discourage the nuclear family model (re: campy themes of incest [so-called “Lolita syndrome” with irony, unlike Beauvoir raping her students] never being far off in Gothic spaces, any more than insanity or cannibalism are; re: Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and its double incest plot); but she’s not the only one: under the thirsty hero’s blood-red lab coat (vampire pirate “rizz”) is an equally sanguine bikini (crossdressing, in Western culture, dating back to Shakespeare, at least).

(artist: Wildragon)

To survive, then, is to preserve amid the chaos of capital destroying us, with queer forces—from Walpole to Happ—hijacking the language of war and sex through weird metaphors/medieval hybridity that speaks naturally to queer audiences rebelling against capital’s de facto, symbolic parentage; i.e., even if the authors of these stories weren’t actually gay! “Actually” is just an argument to deny us a voice through the same liminal mode of expression; what matters is function and flow using the same aesthetics—the same heroes and stories—interpreted by us (and our dance partners) through any manner of campy medieval rape play we want, parody or pastiche, to produce cathartic irony (which is what the Promethean Quest ultimately is: camping the monomyth-as-medieval in present times).

To that, Axiom Verge is actually pretty limited as a Metroidvania; i.e., the gameplay being linear in order to critique capital (say nothing of the clunky controls), versus non-linear to move money through nature, as Samus does (who controls excellently like the Big Bad Wolf: “Better to eat [nature] with!”). But as something to aesthetically interpret, its GNC potential for catharsis is virtually endless, making Happ’s odyssey one of my all-time favorite Gothic genderqueer stories (also, props to Wildragon for the amazing fanart); i.e., the ability to converse with gods in order to move mountains, thus liberate ourselves from capital’s Cartesian edicts: throwing us in chains and eating us, undressing us, making us seek out a big-sister or mommy-style Amazon to nurture us, but also embody our dark matriarchal revenge.

In other words, Axiom Verge is a story about the value of such monstrous mothers—not as TERFs uphold the status quo (re: Ripley and Samus) by triangulating against Communism in abject forms—but as protectors of the weak and vulnerable as prone to be robbed from by Cartesian dogma teaching them to both surrender their power to capital (re: “candy from a baby”) and punch down against labor as monstrous-feminine. To that, the Gothic is predicated on decay and deception through open secrets, laid bare like a sexy mommy to teach you naughty-naughty knowledge (the raw nudity or the unequal power arrangements of rape play—the charged surfaces, thresholds, etc): Eve challenging God, teaching other workers (male, female, or intersex) to do the same!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Such things might seem too bold and overly exposed. In truth, we rebels are often quite shy in person; on the canvas, though, we can be bold, protected by barriers through our cryptonymy! To expose such things without fear of actual harm (castration, as Freud would insist), alienation and eternal punishment (re: the gods’ fate for Prometheus)? That’s the best revenge of all: more happy relationships working through our mommy and daddy issues to leave better patterns/fractals, less Cartesian knobs like Athetos (re: “Pattern-Mind”) aping Victor Frankenstein and Hamlet’s dad (and their likenesses) to try and pass both themselves—and their mapped, automatic predation of nature—along.

Shelley dreamt of such catharsis, swinging for the fences by stamping seemingly inexpressible things (a tramp stamp) in ready accessible language (a parental drama with monsters[18] who look and act human); so can we, in and out of transformation and lucidity as part of a shared dream: annihilation and reformation—rebirth.

Per the infernal concentric pattern (up next)—and really just queer existence under heteronormative control, in general—the above things as they manifest in Axiom Verge and other Metroidvania go beyond simple closure, catharsis and resolution for monstrous-feminine entities. Thwarted by an overhanging tension, strain, and confusion—i.e., the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, flung from those you think are all powerful, but aren’t (even when you want them to be)—such things are made and expressed in grand Shakespearean emotions: the hope of a better world, one free of Cartesian trauma for all gay bitches, developed inside allusory dollish copies of itself, of itself, of itself as overwritten (and decaying as it does, like a VCR tape, coming out of it like Sadako Yamamura to achieve tangible socio-material effects).

We’ll continue exploring the Cartesian function of playing god during the “Forbidden Sight” section, in the Demon Module. For now, we’ve merely laid out the gendered actors and their parental, Promethean actions (creation that destroys monomythic structures). For the rest of the symposium, we shall more deeply examine the castled stages all of this unfurls on; i.e., the maze, the labyrinth, as a ruin of Civilization full of itself, but also a particular arrangement of unequal power-as-parental and Promethean, a continuation of the same colossal struggle: the chronotope as home to giants, Amazons, fallen warring gods (those of capital and Communism), and all manner of Gothic “tortures” (the state in crisis, for which anything goes).

To that, before we can synthesize castle-narrative and Communism’s triumphantly matriarchal homecoming—one that concludes a current chase of the palliative Numinous as monstrous-feminine during ludo-Gothic BDSM—we shall explore the Promethean role inside the colossal wreck, insofar as heroic progression (re: weapons and power) is concerned: Hallownest and the Promethean hero’s journey into their own tomb, in Hollow Knight!

Onto the opening and part one for “‘Look upon my Works, ye Mighty’; or, the Infernal Concentric Pattern and Rape Play in Hollow Knight“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] John Clubbe writes, in “Beethoven, Bryon and Bonaparte”:

On May 18, 1804, the French council of State declared Napoleon Emperor of the French. Upon hearing the news, an angry Beethoven crossed off the Eroica‘s first inscription to Bonaparte. (11) “So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man,” he cried out. […] At the top of the first page of the completed work Beethoven wrote the name of the First Consul, “Sinfonia Grande / Intitulata Bonaparte.” Beethoven later crossed out these words. Near the middle of the page, he wrote his own name, Louis van Beethoven. Below it, he wrote in pencil “Geschrieben / auf Bonaparte,” “written for Bonaparte.” These words he never erased. […] It is “Bonaparte” here, not “Napoleon,” because for Beethoven, as for Byron, there was a difference. “Bonaparte” meant for Byron and Beethoven the young conqueror of Italy, the dazzling leader who scuttled monarchies and symbolized liberal hopes for a new order (source).

[2] Advanced technology being indistinguishable magic, Clarke’s Law brings Shelley’s myths and magic back around; i.e., of the 21st century thrust into a fantasy space once more.

[3] Deryck V. Cooke writes,

That Wagner harboured anti-Semitic sentiments is both well-known and uncontested within the realm of musicological inquiry. The composer openly articulated his views in a number of publications, most notably Judaism in Music (Das Judentum in der Musik; 1850), in which he identified Jewish musicians as the ultimate source of what he perceived as substanceless music and misplaced values in the arts as a whole. What has remained a controversy, however, is the extent to which Wagner’s anti-Semitism informed his musical compositions.

On the one hand, many have contended that Wagner’s anti-Semitism was no more significant to his musical creation than was any other peculiarity of his personality. Indeed, the composer regularly found a scapegoat—such as the Jewish population—to account for his personal and musical misfortunes. Moreover, because Wagner lived during an era of widespread resentment toward Jews in Europe, it is not unusual that his dramatic works would contain anti-Semitic nuances (source: Britannica).

To what exact degree Wagner’s anti-Semitism affected his music is a matter of debate, but the fascist elements he presented (using pre-fascist, mythological language) have a class character to them similar to Milton or Ridley Scott, albeit in a conservative direction; re: the false rebel, versus Scott’s David having a Communist element to his radical counterterrorism.

[4] Something of a Valkyrie himself, camping the invincible heroine; re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Choosing the Slain, or Victimizing the Invincible Heroine, in Alien: Covenant” (2017).

[5] Granted, the ideas generally are combined for monstrous-feminine; i.e., love is a matter of survival through love and war as combined to various poetic degrees; re: the language of sex and war, dalliances, food, knowledge, and whatever else synonymize during a given exchange between two castled essays into the same contested territories.

[6] A mimetic effect seen with all tyrants, grooming their own kids by making their sons (or their obedient labor force at large) in the father’s statuesque image (re: Pygmalion); e.g., Dracula and Alucard, to which Victor failed in Frankenstein, trying euthanize his child afterwards. In Trace’s case, he looks exactly like his dad, to which the other man tries to salvage him through reason (replacing Robert Walton with the Creature as being one in the same, for Happ).

[7] With the above illustration by Wildragon showing Trace prostrate before Ophelia, the name of Hamlet’s sister, who drowned (a fate shared by Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, “Judith*,” in A Room of One’s Own, 1929). In Jungian terms, allusions to water and darkness coincide with dreams that speak to patriarchal abuse through a pedagogy of the oppressed; e.g., Sadako Yamamura climbing out of a well to seek revenge against her death (and that of other monstrous-feminine) by men having killed and taken their essence—their life force—to begin with.

*As Woolf writes, “Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed” (source).

[8] The story has multiple interwoven timelines, interacting with one another not unlike Borges’ “Garden of the Forking Paths” or Cameron’s Terminator films: across space-time in decay as a matter of Gothic drama.

[9] Their conversation occurs shortly before he goes to meet his maker—with Scott’s Engineers being as vain, fascist and genocidal as Weyland is; i.e., zombie tyrants, themselves, being further along than he is. When Weyland dies asking them for help—when he’s forced to confront what he hopes to aspire to as being as cruel and heartless as himself—he realizes that’s all his life was: “There’s nothing…” It’s basically Scrooge seeing his fellow bankers piss and moan at his own funeral.

Keeping with Dickens, the irony’s so thick you could cut it with a knife. It’s quite brilliant, if you ask me, because it highlights the futility of such cruelty—that it, Capitalism, was all for naught. For precisely that reason, stories like Prometheus don’t sell nearly as well to American audiences as Cameron’s neoliberal Red Scare nonsense does (see: Persephone van der Waard’s “Outlier Love: Enjoying Prometheus/Covenant in the Shadow of Aliens,” 2019)!

[10] This decay reflects in the game’s visual style, which is suitably glitchy by way of remembering those old NES cartridges being prone to “glitch out” to begin with (similar to Forbidden Planet being in 4:3 aspect ratio and Frankenstein published on paper); in revisiting that, it becomes a kind of fatal nostalgia that speaks to Capitalism in decay through an indie-developed gameworld revisiting the Metroidvania of the past. Rather than break down, queerness emerges from decay to thrive in a very liminal way (a state of becoming something new that Capitalism fears from of old stories). The Gothic—and by extension queerness as Gothic (from Walpole and Lewis onwards)—is written in disintegration as a means of fresh building blocks assembling away from tyranny (afraid of its own death).

[11] The domain of women/monstrous-feminine is generally of compelled prostitution, shoved unceremoniously into the gutter by patriarchal forces pimping nature; i.e., the world’s oldest job—one that is both incumbent on rape, and baked into Cartesian thought as a pro-Capitalist creation myth the modern Promethean Quest camps by design. Simply put, it’s a lived reality that defines us as much by the things we reclaim (sex, labor and force, etc), mid-struggle.

[12] No different than the rise of terrorist literature making the Victorians afraid (re: Crawford).

[13] With technology (writing and written accounts, especially maps) leading to forgetting (re: Plato) as a matter of Lear-style genocide to reassemble (re: Morrison); i.e., as a matter of playing with old dead things in Promethean forms (re: me) as Shelley once did: through journals, the likes of which Axiom Verge presents to the player as written by multiple monarchal parents lying to him (see, also: Myst and its blue and red pages) in order to achieve sex-positive or sex-coercive end goals: deny or gain entry unto power through deception and force (the pussy and the penis divorced from biological essentialism [and gender from sex, per Judith Butler] but paradoxically “fencing” during the usual battle of the sexes being one over gender and labor tied to people’s bodies).

[14] I.e., to acknowledge and localize them, like a haunted house pointing to its own abuse; re: the restless labyrinth’s cryptonymy further complicated by the duality of Gothic poetics, during oppositional praxis.

[15] Such dark, BDSM cybernetics suggests a fascist element of greatness to these biomechanical Amazons, not unlike Lovecraft’s aliens from Mountains or the Chozo from Metroid (e.g., Raven Beak, from Metroid: Dread, as basically Caesar Chozo).

[16] Profit isn’t just rape, but labor and wage theft that endorses rape as an abject commodity and comorbidity (criminogenic effect) under capital’s monopolies, trifectas and qualities.

[17] Spoke Prince Lear of the unicorn, “Unicorn, sorceress, mermaid—no name you give her could surprise or frighten me. I love whom I love.”

[18] Contrary to what you might have been led to believe by capitalists, the villain of the story is not the Creature; it is the maker of the Creature and the system for which all belong. Like Athetos and Trace, Victor tries to internalize this mentality into his childlike slave (though, in Trace’s case, to get him to help the evil father seek revenge, versus Victor trying to kill the Creature); the slave refuses to obey the evil nerd, listening to a maternal presence that admittedly was rather absent in Shelley’s original novel. Given a mother to listen to who isn’t tokenized/completely passive, Trace has the chance to grow up and not repeat the mistakes that Athetos, the capitalist, did before him: the sins of the father linked to a genocidal system (of material conditions)/system of thought.

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

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

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

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

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

The Monomyth, part one: “She Fucks Back”; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics: the Man of Reason and Cartesian Hubris versus the Womb of Nature in Metroidvania

“We are now three months into the year of our Lord, 2023[1]. At this moment in our civilization, we are on the verge of terraforming planets undiscovered just a decade ago. We have identified the genetic chain of events behind 98% of cancers—a chain we have broken, effectively curing them. We can create cybernetic individuals who, in just a few short years, will be completely indistinguishable from us. Which leads to an obvious conclusion: We are the gods now.

“I haven’t been struck down. I take that to mean I’m right. We wield incredible power—the power to transform, to destroy and to create again. The question, of course, before us is, ‘What the hell are we supposed to do with this power?’ Or, more importantly, one should ask, ‘What are we allowed to do with this power?’ The answer to that, my friends, is nothing. Rules, restrictions, laws, ethical guidelines—all but forbidding us from moving forwards. Well, where were the ethics during the Arabian conflicts? Why are rules preventing us from feeding impoverished cultures? How is there a law which states, ‘If we build a man from wires and metal—a man who will never grow old, a man who will never feel the heat of a star or the cold of the moon—how is the creation of such an incredible individual considered unnatural?’

“The answer to all these questions is simple: These rules exist because the people who created them were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t. Well I am not afraid!

“For those of you who know me, you will be aware by now that my ambition is unlimited. You know that I will settle for nothing short of greatness, or I will die trying. For those of you who do not yet know me, allow me to introduce myself: My name is Peter Weyland. And if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to change the world” (source: American Rhetoric, Movie Speeches).

—Peter Weyland, Prometheus (2012)

Picking up from where “‘The Monomyth’ (opening and part zero)” left off…

Now that we’ve looked at the futile nature of undead revenge in Mandy and Lovecraft through the Promethean Quest, let’s consider zombie tyrants and those who fuck back against them! Focusing on Metroidvania, “Monomyth,” part one shall examine the man of reason and why he sucks, aka the spoiled rich-boy charlatan smugly playing God through astronoetic means (from Victor Frankenstein to the Wizard of Oz to Peter Weyland [above] to Elon Musk, crypto bros and weird canonical nerds inside the Man Box). Astronoetics are what Michael Uhall calls a celestial, intelligible presence (“Astronoetic Cinema,” 2019). Reframed by me slightly, it is the colonial gaze of Planet Earth in any imaginary scenario, which the Metroidvania commonly portrays as nature vs civilization. Given the common confusion surround the term, I might as well spare you any extra headaches by supplying its assorted definitions, in whole and advance[2] (from the glossary—originally from my early PhD research, “Mazes and Labyrinths“):

Metroidvania

A type of Gothic videogame, one involving the exploration of castles and other closed spaces in an ergodic framework; i.e., the struggle of investigating past trauma as expressed through the Gothic castle and its monstrous caverns (which is the author poetically hinting at systemic abuses in real life). Scott Sharkey insists he coined the term (source tweet: evilsharkey, 2023)—ostensibly in the early 2000s while working with Jeremy Parish for 1-Ups.com:

However, the term was probably being used before that in the late ’90s to casually describe the 1997 PSOne game, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; records of it being used can be found as early as 2001 (this Circle of the Moon Amazon review is from 2003). By 2006, though, Jeremy Parish had a personalized definition on his own blog, “GameSpite | Compendium of Old and Useless Information” (2012):

“Metroidvania” is a stupid word for a wonderful thing. It’s basically a really terrible neologism that describes a videogame genre which combines 2D side-scrolling action with free-roaming exploration and progressive skill and item collection to enable further, uh, progress. As in Metroid and Koji Igarashi-developed Castlevania games. Thus the name (source).

My own postgrad research (“Mazes and Labyrinths”) has expanded/narrowed the definition quite a bit:

Metroidvania are a location-based videogame genre that combines 2D, 2.5D, or 3D platforming [e.g., Dark Souls, 2009] and ranged/melee combat—usually in the 3rd person—inside a giant, closed space. This space communicates Gothic themes of various kinds; encourages exploration* depending on how non-linear the space is; includes progressive skill and item collection, mandatory boss keys, backtracking and variable gating mechanics (bosses, items, doors); and requires movement powerups in some shape or form, though these can be supplied through RPG elements as an optional alternative.

*Exploration pertains to the deliberate navigation of space beyond that of obvious, linear routes—to search for objects, objectives or secrets off the beaten path (source).

Also from “Mazes and Labyrinths”:

Mazes and Labyrinths: I treat space as essential when defining Metroidvania. Mazes and labyrinths are closed space; their contents exist within a closed structure, either a maze or a labyrinth. A classical labyrinth is a linear system with one set, unicursal path towards an end point; a maze is a non-linear system with multiple paths to an end point [classical texts often treated the words as interchangeable].

Metroidvania, etymology: As its most basic interpretation, Metroidvania is a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania, specifically “Metroid” + “-vania.” However, the term has no singular, universally-agreed-upon definition. Because I focus on space, my definitions—of the individual portmanteau components—are as follows:

“Metroid” =/= the franchise, Metroid; “Metroid” = that franchise’s unique treatment of closed space—the maze.

“-vania” =/= the franchise, Castlevania; “castlevania” equals that franchise’s unique treatment of closed space—the labyrinth.

At the same time, “Metroid,” or “metro” + “-oid” means “android city.” “Castlevania” or “castle” + “-vania” means “other castle,” “demon castle,” or “castle Dracula.” The portmanteau, “Metroidvania” ≈ “android city” + “demon castle” + “maze” + “labyrinth.”

Further Distinctions: There are further ways to identify if a Metroidvania space is a maze or not. As I explain in my 2019 YouTube video, “Metroidvania Series #2: Mazes and Labyrinths“:

What ultimately determines a Metroidvania’s maze-ness are three sequences: the start, the middle, and the end. The start is what I consider to be the collection of essential items—power-ups you’ll need to use for the entire game. Mid-game is the meat of the experience. The end sequence makes the win condition available to the player.

I mention item collection relative to these sequences because they are a core element of Metroidvania play, hence determine what kind of space the player is dealing with. In Metroid, for example, the Morph Ball, Bomb and Missiles are essential, and the player can acquire all of them rather quickly. Apart from those, however, there are few items you actually need to complete the game. One of them is Ice Beam, which is required to kill metroids, thus gain access to Mother Brain (the game’s end condition). Large portions of the game can be played without it, though. Like many Metroid power-ups, it is a mid-game collectible.

Item collection allows the player to leave the start and enter the middle. This section, I argue, determines whether or not a Metroidvania is a maze. If the majority of the game allows for sequence breaks, RBO (reverse boss order) and low-percent, then it is a maze; if not, it is a labyrinth. A Metroidvania can be either (source: the original script on Google Docs).

In terms of appearance, a Metroidvania’s audiovisual presentation can range from retro-future sci-fi to Neo-Gothic fantasy. Nevertheless, their spaces typically function as Gothic castles; replete with hauntological monsters, demons, and ghosts, they guide whatever action the hero must perform when navigating the world and dealing with its threats (ibid.)

In essence, when I mention “the womb of nature” and “astronoetics,” Metroidvania is what I’ll be focusing on for much of the symposium. So keep the above definitions in mind as best you can!

Except, Metroidvania also came into existence fairly late in the game; i.e., a form of neoliberal dogma 1986 onwards, one whose history—of finding lost power in the “ancient alien” ruins (and my scholarship attached to it) as predicting the fall of the West back on Earth—took centuries to formalize. First exemplified by Shelley’s Frankenstein, astronoetics crystalized in the realm of relatively current science fiction starting with Lovecraft’s sole novel, At the Mountains of Madness (1936): cosmic nihilism, or the idea of uncolonized space (nature) as indomitable, thus indifferent to Man as a colonial force per Reason raping Earth, then the stars! Other stories include Forbidden Planet and Alien, but also Hamlet, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Castle of Otranto. We’ll mention them all, here; i.e., while talking about Metroidvania as a critical device conducive towards and corollary to ludo-Gothic BDSM as defined by me, built on the above palimpsests; re (also from the glossary):

Ludo-Gothic BDSM

My combining of an older academic term, [Laurie Taylor’s] “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (theatre and rules). Commonly gleaned through Metroidvania as I envision it, but frankly performed in any kind of Gothic poetics—i.e., to playfully attain what I call “the palliative Numinous,” or the Gothic quest for self-destructive power as something to camp.

The follow-through, here, is that men of reason suck in these stories as a matter of playful critique, one whose hot-potato displacement—of capital passing the buck onto ancient, seemingly alien empires or allegorical, magically reassembled fantasy worlds—dates back to Walpole’s Otranto (for aesthetics, splendid lies, dead giveaways), following Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus, exploring the cynical nature of such tyrants to begin with: those who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing as hidden (along with their deep-seated insecurities) behind a perfidious veneer of reason, of the so-called knowing-better good father looking out for his children and the world by “just asking questions.”

In truth, such men can’t love anything but themselves and their own legacy as a matter of embodying Capitalism, which they do quite gladly. They’re literally the poster children of it, enjoying all of its benefits, including always appearing right, good, and correct, hence being able to arbitrate violence against anything that “isn’t”; i.e., by playing god, punching down against the state’s usual targets: nature, workers and the monstrous-feminine, forcing the latter to fuck back by punching up while receiving state harm as something to subvert during rape play (which ludo-Gothic BDSM boils down to) by using Athena’s Aegis inside Metroidvania.

The fact remains that men like Weyland rape nature all the time, but only double their efforts when they—like the system they personify—reliably starts to die (false power). In turn, the state and its men of reason will do anything to preserve themselves, weaponizing their own bloodline against nature, the latter having evolved to resist dominion (thus rape) through counterterrorism and asymmetrical warfare.

As these men begin to die, everything falls apart in one last-ditch effort to hold onto capitalistic godhood; i.e., choking on the very things they eat to remind them of their cruelty and their hubris (not per Freud’s id, but per Marx’s capital routinely projected into Gothic, Promethean language riffing on parental elements that Freud essentialized as a matter of the crystalized nuclear home): “Where’s the robot to pat you on the back, or the engineer? […] There you see, now, how all your so-called power counts for absolutely nothing? How your entire empire of destruction comes crashing down, all because of one. Little. Cherry!”

To such stupid and embarrassing tyrants, I now want to consider nature (and labor’s) indomitability through the monomyth when camped by the Promethean Quest as personally and spatially monstrous-feminine; i.e., going heroically into and staying inside Hell as researched according to my expertise: videogames as Gothic chronotopes connected to the Promethean Quest, per Metroidvania. Going beyond Shelley or Lovecraft and into Metroidvania, I’ll try to stay focused on their connected, monomythic histories that—while older than Cameron’s 1986 refrain, Aliens (which inspired the shooter genre, but also the Metroidvania)—nevertheless attach to capital presently as we inspect the Metroidvania space itself: as something to reify and move through across the centuries and media types (from novels to cinema to videogames; from outer space to European castles, and in between those things).

We’ll do so through several arguments I want to you to keep in mind. I say that because frankly there’s a lot to discuss, this symposium more an opportunity to raise issues for you to confront and grapple with yourselves; i.e., while showing you the cryptonymic, disguise-like qualities to such subversive query and rebellion when faced with Cartesian copycats looking to pacify our stewardship of nature (indented for emphasis):

Per Hogle, the Gothic is predicated on fakery through the process of abjection attacking nature vis-à-vis the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., nature as alien/monstrous-feminine, colonized by the sovereign West through Cartesian thought. Historical materialism proliferates decay and deception through open secrets (casualties of empire, but also empire in decay expressed in medieval language; e.g., castles) that no one side can monopolize, but for which terror and obfuscation allow either side to partially conceal themselves with, using the cryptonymy process to operate in capital’s wake: to either defend the status quo while wearing its victims and symbols of oppression, or to undermine it through the same basic means.

In short, anytime I say “camouflage” or “disguise,” this is basically what I’m talking about. Furthermore, Promethean space (usually castles) is part of this decay and deception under capital, for workers vs the state (often, as nature vs civilization); it’s something of a “dead giveaway” as person or place—both invented, and restlessly pointing into half-hidden atrocities and subterfuge materializing between opposing forces: on their charged surfaces and inside their dualistic thresholds, asking to be looked into “on the ashes of something not quite fully present.”

That being said, we’ll likewise look at the persons and parental themes involved when capital colonizes said spaces (the womb of nature projected into outer space, or frozen, uninhabitably barren/cold, desert-like territories comparable to outer space), then consider the ways in which all this colonization can be subverted/camped and reversed, power-wise; i.e., with Metroidvania persons and places; re: the dialectic of shelter and the alien enacted canonically through people (men of reason) and places (castles, including Metroidvania) to punch Medusa (indented for emphasis):

That’s what the Promethean Quest effectively encapsulates and discourages, Medusa fucking back to reverse the flow of power and information the monomyth normally supplies in outright parental language, but also monomythic media exposed to middle-class children at a young age; i.e., standing in for absentee parents (videogames, for our purposes): the givers of Cartesian dogma, but also rebellious sentiment through Promethean allegory (the appearance of the black castle/fallen manmade paradise to begin with).

Consider the above indented portions something of twin thesis statements for the rest of “The Monomyth,” part one—arguments, mid-symposium, that we’ll touch upon sporadically as we bounce between parent and palace, person and place; i.e., as parts of the same Promethean stories and their liminal expression conveyed through part one’s looser, conversational style: built to move through and intimate different legendary elements of real life, as the chronotope does.

To it, astronoetics are both a settler-colonial narrative voicing the usual things up for grabs (the nuclear family threatened by mad science in a frontier narrative, left), while also remaining a popular cautionary tale about displaced Cartesian overreach; i.e., by sucky men of science embodying Capitalism and its Gothic consequences and divisions (and whose Enlightenment-style enslaving of nature through retro-futurist language pushes nature-as-robata [slave] to fight back, posthuman-style), then carried forward into At the Mountains of Madness, then Forbidden Planet, then Alien, and finally into videogames but especially Metroidvania! The heroes are villains posturing as good, in these stories (often men of means—white-collar criminals [which men of reason essentially are] acting like blue-collar frontiersmen rebelling against capital, but point-in-fact serving it as usual to a mythological degree; i.e., technologically superior space cowboys)!

We’ll consider such a parental abjection of nature (and its reversal by monstrous-feminine agents) in Metroidvania based, more or less, on monomythic stories like Alien and Forbidden Planet as going all the way back to Frankenstein critiquing capital with Walpole’s prurient, medieval, nigh-raunchy-at-times elements (often via royalty and wealthy persons, which men of reason generally are): a vulgar (common) marriage of sex, terror and force, as the Gothic does, through imaginary conquest per Promethean critiques of the monomyth, of capital, of entitled Cartesian dickwads (we go high and low, Michelle Obama)!

There’s certainly an element of rape play to consider through these things. To clarify, though, our focus will be on Metroid-style (non-linear) spaces or offshoots per the man of reason (or token agent; e.g., Samus Aran as cowgirl and white savior/white Indian working for the Man) and Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern, not Castlevania or other videogames that seemingly obey the same basic idea[3] of the Hero’s Journey into and out of Hell; i.e., as a space to explore and conquer per the usual cartographic refrains (stab, punch and shoot the monster inside a given map). Here, we’ll just be focusing on the one that best illustrates spatially and theatrically what inspired my concept, ludo-Gothic BDSM, per “Our Ludic Masters” onwards (for the entire catalog of such spaces, refer to my earlier PhD research, “Mazes and Labyrinths“; also, “War Vaginas” provides some good examples of monstrous-feminine space, weapons and heroes).

(artist: Pepe-Navarro)

For our purposes moving forwards, Metroidvania (and its forebears) are defined by Amazonian movement (and battle) through closed space, often a dungeon or a castle of some kind as occupied by Numinous, Promethean power (the semi-abstract presence of rape and dominion fused into the architecture). In turn, any of them invoke the confrontation of difficult truths, which are the first step towards healing from capital’s abuses: nature as alienated from us by Cartesian elements, including death as uncomfortable to face but also rape and abuse relative to nature as normally dominated by patriarchal exterminators going into Hell (standing in for Earth as otherworldly doubles). Alienize, then rape behind the lies, the camouflage, the debris, the records; it’s well and truly Cartesian thought’s raison d’être!

For example, the metroids, above, are synonymous with the gameworld they inhabit, but also the Galactic Federation’s desire to colonize outer space as an older cycle of conquest bleeding into newer ones that ape the same basic pattern in and out of fiction. As such, Cartesian domination ranges spatio-temporally from the faux-Egyptian Chozo as nodding to Giger’s own dark pyramids, such cryptomimesis reaching all the way back to British Romanticism and Orientalism—by Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” following Napoleon’s raping of Egypt—and all the way forwards to the Federation’s girl boss, Samus, embodying her employer’s frontier vampirism. While all of these things point to real-world abuse committed by Cartesian forces policing nature—essentially conveyed in fictional, romantic language whose people and places mirror non-fictional atrocities—Samus does so through the metroid tied to her as the xenomorph was to Ripley and the Creature to Victor Frankenstein, etc; i.e., as weaponized for Cartesian, thus state hegemony in an astronoetic sense: the tokenization of the monstrous-feminine as increasingly xenomorphic in ways that feel ontologically ambiguous.

(artist: Hybrid Mink)

Per the Promethean Quest (which Metroid most certainly is), nature-as-technology becomes an unnatural predation on itself through the copying of such things via police interference (e.g., “the weapons division,” from Alien, which it looks like we’ll finally see with Alien: Romulus [my thoughts on the final trailer] when a team of robbers break into an overrun science facility run by humans in space, not humanoid space aliens on terra firma). It’s no coincidence, then, that Samus’ suit is generally a stand-in for the monsters she kills but also the state secrets (crimes of genocide) her employers pay her to commit for profit (which the franchise calls “peace in space[4]“); i.e., policing nature while wearing its dead as trophies, Artemis-style; e.g., the Phazon armor from Prime (2002), Dark Samus from Prime 2 (2004), or the SA-X from Fusion (2002), but also the Metroid suit from Dread (above 2021): the white Indian summoned as a neoconservative lullaby cannibalizing the very things that became emblematic of an ongoing war of extermination—one waged by Cartesian men of reason against the womb of nature as something abject to rape (a wild land where the Wild Things Are to make “wild rumpus” in for the state, for men of reason): by our resident TERF furthering abjection, Man-Box-style (the armored maiden punching “nature” as “cosmic rapist”). It’s so fearsome that trying to bond with it is generally seen as a fate worse than death (“Kill me!” from Aliens, being a not-so-subtle reversal of “Help me!” from Vincent Prince’s The Fly, 1958).

In other words, such things are an affront to nature (commonly portrayed as “bestiality”—the part-human, part-animal quality of so many ancient gods) as raped by Cartesian forces playing the tyrant and the white-Indian false-rebel; i.e., disguising the Capitalocene through monomythic likenesses that are passed down, only to be rejected by Promethean stories walking the tightrope. The quiet part is said out loud in Gothic fashion: dancing in the ruins as Promethean, having power hidden inside them, waiting to be found through play with “old” dead things left behind in some shape or form (capital relying on the monomyth’s unironic forms, “Hell” being the past as something to invade in the real world; i.e., the Global North invading the Global South as “past,” where Imperialism, thus genocide and rape, still occur). That’s simply how humans work; no sense in abolishing or poo-pooing such stories (re: Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism and Botting’s “Future Horror“).

(artist: Ayami Kojima)

Except, Promethean stories decay as a matter of function, tokenizing like all things do under capital. As such, it sucks to experience these kinds of abuses in ways that encourage assimilation and reactive violence (starting all the way back with Frankenstein). On the flipside, they become something to grow accustomed towards, thus can be weaponized once more against our abusers as thoroughly unused to seeing such things thrown back at them; i.e., to look on death but especially genocide, and see oneself and one’s belief system, held accountable: as alien, impotent, fallen from grace, the ivory tower and manliness (as they see it). As such, the primary vector for Cartesian downfall via the Promethean Quest is mad science, through which the monstrous-feminine is increasingly non-Vitruvian in its appearance (akin to Milton’s Satan dropping its angelic guise).

For example, while Victor’s Creature was more or less humanoid, Lovecraft’s novelized bogeyman, the amorphous shoggoth, was anything but. Even so, it remained monstrous-feminine in response to a Cartesian effort to conquer the world (abjected onto beings from outer space, of course); i.e., the Archaic Mother (the Medusa) as a fearsome bugbear haunting the inheritors of genocide (the Promethean ruin): the humans who saw it last. They were explorers themselves, feeling their own extinction anxieties peak regarding patriarchal conquest bounced back at them from a dead alien city occupied by rogue technology run amok; i.e., something Lovecraft described as a tunnel, a bottomless well: as fallible thus finite inside a living space built on genocide (re: Le Guinn’s Omelas).

However, instead of Shelley or Lovecraft (the former who we’ll obviously touch on, the latter whose work feels incredibly souless and bare), we’ll introduce all of these devices—the man of reason, the Promethean Quest, bad parentage, people and places, Amazons and Medusa—through cinema (a little bit( and videogames (a lot) as closer to neoliberalism’s remediation of such devices (corporations don’t write novels, at least not to anywhere near the same extent as they produce movies and videogames, because people have to be literate to consume them).

We’ll start with Forbidden Planet, a film that laid the cinematic groundwork, Freudian worship (and wizardly spectacle) for Alien, after which the Metroidvania put the Promethean Quest in the player’s hands (the avatar). From there, we’ll consider how this ludic potential manifests in ludo-Gothic BDSM vis-à-vis castles (and their occupants) in Metroidvania; i.e., a synthesizing of castle-narrative and monstrous-feminine potential to subvert Cartesian hegemony in defense of nature, thus workers and the world at large normally raped by the state and men of reason. In the Gothic, history is a castle whose pieces get up and move around; in short, they interact as the Gothic does, between the space and its legends tied imaginarily to real people and places decaying and regenerating to yield fresh synthesis over space-time. Contradiction is to be expected—is part of the process during the arguments that unfold literally dueling back and forth; i.e., from Otranto to Metroidvania, as the chaff and critique of capital stirring such things up.

For a bit of fun, we’ll actually look at two Metroidvania—indeed, the same two Metroidvania I did for my master’s thesis back in 2018, Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight:

• Part zero, “‘Men of Reason Suck’; or, Ghosts of Freud in Forbidden Planet, and the Gendered Components of Gothic Space (and Its History of Scholarship) as Tied to Capitalism in Disguise” (included in this post): Sets the table. Looks at the history of Gothic expression through people and places, looking at older theatrical works and mythic structures—i.e., about/disguising Capitalism as surviving in more modern examples like Forbidden Planet through which Metroidvania like Metroid operate—then catalogs that history of scholarship (my contributions, some of them) for you to consider and refer back to, when reading parts one and two (the close-reads).
• Part one, “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge“: Considers people first, places (and space) second; i.e., the seemingly Freudian, Amazonomachy-style astronoetics (colonial gaze of planet Earth) and parental themes from Frankenstein and Forbidden Planet, translating nicely into the Metroidvania space, of which we’ll consider through a dialectical-material sense pointed at Thomas Happ’s 2014 one-man-show, Axiom Verge.
• Part two, “‘Look upon my Works, ye Mighty’; or, the Infernal Concentric Pattern and Rape Play in Hollow Knight and Metroidvania at Large“: Considers space[5] first, people second; i.e., explores my grad school and postgrad research into Metroidvania, but especially Bakhtin’s chronotope and Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern in Hollow Knight as informing what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM: a means of rape play (whose performative, revolutionary nuances we’ll also unpack).

The sex-positive idea in doing so is to return not just to people and spaces, but headspaces that, since then, have produced important ideas; i.e., regarding Cartesian thought personified to conquer others behind a veneer of reason and benevolent parentage (re: “thinking beings,” per Cartesian dualism). Metroidvania and other Promethean spaces aren’t just places of exquisite torture (re: Radcliffe) per Bakhtin’s Gothic chronotope—or a Freudian playground that Barbara Creed made a career out of—but something vast and hauntological that yielded new GNC ideas of revolutionary play whose Promethean attack addresses old problems (rape, racism and genocide) stemming from Cartesian thought and its monomythic undead elements under neoliberal Capitalism and Capitalist Realism (re: Mandy and Lovecraft). The idea is to leave the racism of actual men like Lovecraft (and fictional ones like Frankenstein) behind when practicing ludo-Gothic BDSM, but keep the Numinous feelings for palliative reasons that actually predate him.

To that, this section specifically combines my postgrad research after writing my PhD (Volume Zero of Sex Positivity), making “She Fucks Back” a culmination of my life’s work on the subject; it’s my Metroidvania magnum opus and I’m very proud of it! “The Metroidvania castle, as far as I’m concerned, is the perfect dom,” I write in Volume Zero. This, as we shall see, is as much the byproduct of an interaction between myself and all that came before: the Medusa as communed with through space and occupant, past and present, scholar and consumer sitting somewhere in between all of them. No one ever said BDSM wasn’t iconic; lost in the Communist-Numinous potential of such fractals, our freaky big girl both struggles to break free, and is something of a rope bunny who digs the paradoxical bondage (of genuine liberation, to be clear) she ropes others into as well: Cartesian gonads acquired.

(artist: VG Yum)

Metroidvania, part zero: “Men of Reason Suck”; or, Ghosts of Freud in Forbidden Planet, and the Gendered Components of Gothic Space (and Its History of Scholarship) as Tied to Capitalism in Disguise

“Doc, is it a male or a female?” / “For me, sir, the question is totally without meaning!”

—”Cookie” to Doctor Ostro, and Robby the Robot’s reply, Forbidden Planet

The “Metroidvania” symposium is all about parents—good and bad—in monomythic stories, which the Promethean Quest reverses while using the same basic camouflage (Capitalism disguises itself as noble and good, but also doomed in an endless loop—playing the victim as mythologized, which Victor does). To that, the man of reason is an Enlightenment idea, from which settler colonialism (rape and genocide) sprang from Cartesian thought dominating nature for profit[6] (from Columbus’ earliest experiments, to Descartes and Francis Bacon’s revolution, onwards), and survived monomythically per Lovecraft and other space-centric follow-throughs of the 1818 original (Shelley loved her big open spaces, whereas Lovecraft leaned into giant alien ruins surrounded by said spaces—a derelict colony, in other words); i.e., as haunted by ghosts of genocide extending from a desolate planet Earth into outer space, both curiously forbidding and inviting like a Gothic castle: technophobia as corrupting the “natural order” of the nuclear family unit. Communist robots bad!

To it, I want to unpack all of that now, in part zero; i.e, by looking at various “ghosts” that haunt the whole Promethean enterprise: Freud and Forbidden Planet, but also Hamlet and other Shakespearean works (and Gothic scholarship) tied to Metroidvania concerning the same struggles between civilization and nature as gendered (whose trappings we’ll both want to escape, and use to our benefit). That way, you’ll be nice and prepared when we get to the close-readings of Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight, in parts one and two!

As Shelley’s Frankenstein demonstrates, the quest for forbidden knowledge is built on the past development of Capitalism during the Enlightenment; i.e., historically a settler-colonial ordeal that abjures past-and-future attempts at post-scarcity—one whose prophesied chickens in 1818 have been coming home to roost for centuries. For those inside the Imperial Core (thus under the protection of its barriers including Capitalist Realism), these threats of long overdue reprisals classically manifest in and of the mind attached to derelict ruins: what Dr. Ostro in Forbidden Planet calls “Monsters from the Id.” They’re dark, ominous and Freudian—an event horizon per person and place pointing to former crimes they have inherited against nature, then try to rationalize away (such obfuscation, as Radcliffe shows with her castles and protracted suspense, is ultimately a skill one can master for different reasons).

It’s all very theatrical (with Shelley arguably camping the Byronic hero through Victor Frankenstein); to that, if you’re wondering why I didn’t just stick with Lovecraft because he’s the logical palimpsest, I frankly think Walter Pidgeon’s Morbius in Forbidden Planet is far more theatrical (the movie being a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 1611), but still has the suitably Gothic spaces, sexuality[7] and awesome alien presence (of nature seeking revenge) infringing on the nuclear family unit that came to define Metroidvania out of older forms of similar castles: novels and stage plays.

In short, the movie’s man-of-reason monomyth, per the angry space dad punishing his disobedient daughter (similar to Egeus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, invoking the right of Ancient Athens), translates better into what Axiom Verge eventually leaned into—vis-à-vis Shelley’s original novel and ironic themes of bad parentage critiquing capital—than what Lovecraft did to not critique capital (whose story has no children, but also appears to lack the performative irony that Morbius and Trace [the hero of Axiom Verge] try to communicate in protest[8] of settler colonialism through astronoetic language): a psychomachy between two (or more) sides of a divided man of reason/mad scientist, the man-in-question still somewhat humane (thus redeemable) despite his tragic-hero hubris (we’ll get to unlikeable men of reason when we close-read Axiom Verge, trust me). He’s a recluse, not a billionaire, his head stuck in his books while he tries to understand genocide as a symptom of capital pushed to the furthest reaches of outer space (and which Ostro blames on the id, Freud’s “subconscious primitive,” not Captialism; i.e., a Frankensteinian return to tradition and superstition by the man calling himself a “doctor” chastising the movie’s rebel figure).

More to the point, the monomyth is tied to bad parents as a theatrical device; i.e., one of bad instruction, for which Morbius wants to punish his daughter for running away with the soldiers. To this, Morbius’ magnetic rise and fall mirrors the Krell before him: an ancient, “great and noble” alien race that stands in for Lovecraft’s aliens before Planet and the Chozo after it. At the height of their civilization, the Krell are attacked by their own brutal past as brought back to life through technology pulling it, Metis-style, out of the their minds. In Gothic terms, this extends to the space for which all tyrants belong to and inherit as part of a larger structure the Gothic speaks to in monomythic language; re, capital (from Volume Two, part two’s thesis): “Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature.”

From the Krell to the Chozo, the Promethean Quest effectively reverses this predation—and the monomyth’s usual flow of power—by showing the audience what Cartesian men are really like; i.e., by recontextualizing genocide: vampiric sires who have their vampire castles, separating along with them from nature and Earth as something that, littered with the remains of older examples, comes home to roost in person and place. Again, it’s a colony whose fruits of genocide are poisonous.

Except, whether from Dr. Ostro or Barbara Creed, we’re really not keen on Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring dialectical-material scrutiny. But we can regard the problem of Freud’s ghost—specifically the essay, “Medusa’s Head” (1926)—as something that speaks to current historical-material tensions felt in present struggles: Medusa’s killing by brave men of reason scared to death of the things they want to control as archaic, older than them and civilization. All of this ties up in monomythic language, which survives in dialectical-material forms that aren’t incumbent on psychoanalysis at all; they’re stories that communicate themes about competing socio-material forces, using the Promethean Quest as shorthand.

This includes movies like Forbidden Planet, of course, but also the Metroidvania that drew inspiration from them and their palimpsestuous forebears to varying degrees; e.g., Athetos and Trace, but also Mother Brain and Samus (and other character from that franchise who abuse said technology against Samus—like Raven Beak, above), M.U.T.H.U.R. and Ripley, HAL 9000 and Dave, etc, as inspired by Shelley’s original novel (effectively the benchmark for the Promethean Quest as a critical device towards capital in all its forms). We shall now outline and survey these parental Freudian devices, while avoiding Freud’s quack, canonical obsessions essentializing the nuclear family unit.

As such, we’ll continue examining how the man of reason functions per the Promethean myth against nature, albeit continuing briefly with Morbius (exhibit 40b) instead of Victor (who we’re reversing for the Demon Module) before quickly segueing into Metroidvania that feature much less sympathetic characters than him. We’ll start with Axiom Verge (exhibit 6b2), then look into Metroid (exhibit 40d1), whose Amazonian histories we’ll tie into Trace and his own ghostly tyrant, Athetos (not just a mad scientist, but a brain in a jar[9]), during the close-read in part one:

(source: Fandom)

As Morbius shows us (exhibit 40b, next page), the main consequence—of attempting to revive the monstrous-feminine for anything other than pro-state means—is death. Though certainly powerful, reverse abjection also invites state violence against its performers. Historically scapegoated as “mad,” reverse abjection is often framed as a “female” delivery mode that regularly bears fatal consequences against anything monstrous-feminine (not just female): self-destruction, insofar as the self is predominantly male, straight, European. By comparison, abjection—despite being entirely menticidal through state-coerced violence—is not only seen as life-saving and normal in canonical narratives, but rationally as male. Indeed, we can see both sides of the process in Forbidden Planet, when man-of-reason Doctor Morbius warns the military men about looking directly into the planetary reactor on Altair-4: “Remember to gaze only into the reflector, gentlemen; man does not behold the Gorgon and live!” Morbius is effectively playing god, here, warning the soldiers like Lot’s wife.

Yet, as is the plight of power and parentage in science fiction since Frankenstein, the rational man of science also fears mad science; i.e., a Promethean Quest where the hero tries to control its chaotic power for himself only to be punished for it. To that, Morbius keeps the wonders of the Krell tucked away from the soldiers and scientists on Earth, fearing their abuse of weaponized science.

Eventually Morbius is forced to confront the invisible, monstrous side of himself that has been terminally enlarged by the Great Machine (a “brain boost,” which the movie discourages; i.e., wanting people to literally be dumber and not “play god” by investigating genocide outside of canonical, Freudian explanations). Forced to look upon his “Gorgon,” the ghostly (and famously invisible) Monster from the Id, Morbius inexplicably dies (seemingly of shame by threatening his own bloodline—a common fate for many fathers in neo-Gothic novels): he’s the movie’s scapegoat, attacking the soldiers for their active “conquest of space[10]” (again, as something to subjugate, to subdue, to colonize).

(exhibit 40b: The psychomachy of Morbius, meaning “mind battle.” The idea stems from older forms of storytelling including the Elizabethan play. A common rendition of it is the angel and the devil on one’s shoulders; another is the Amazonomachy or “Amazon battle,” frequently depicted in classical Greek art—literally a battle of the sexes, with the Amazons being demonized for challenging the status quo as mythological conquerors that emasculate men. Dressed in black, Morbius realizes he’s the vampire dad feeding on his own daughter [the argument made by the solider, of course]: “My evil self is at that door and I have no power to stop it!” Per the film, he’s the vampire, not the state, and they take his findings on the Krell with them after blowing Morbius’ castle up with the planet [a trope that Alien and Metroid would repeat]. It’s capital punishment, Red-Scare-in-disguise.)

Morbius is a detective puzzling over the ruins of a great, seemingly abandoned civilization he has effectively inherited. Devoid of life, all he can do is use the language and bits of technology left behind, leading to a slow, inexorable confrontation with a dark, primitive and ultimately “female” aspect to what the movie, per Freud, attributes to his psyche; i.e., “unlocked” by the wonderous technology of these truant aliens.

Except, the same basic scapegoating—of nature as monstrous-feminine magically causing the downfall of patriarchal civilization—is present in many Promethean narratives; e.g., At the Mountains of Madness and the nebulous, dark shapelessness of its shoggoth imitators (a weaponized biology build to attack rebelling slaves) living in the ruins of a former civilization returning to nature, but also the female Rusalki from Axiom Verge, the intersex xenomorph from Alien (and the Alien Queen from Aliens), or the queenly Radiance from Hollow Knight, Mother Brain, etc. They aren’t simply female, but monstrous-feminine tied to nature rebelling with technology they turn against the patriarch; i.e., as the technology (the robata, the worker-slave) that refuses to obey the profit motive.

Though founded on military conquests behind Enlightenment obfuscation, it’s important to remember the privileged stupidity of the man of reason; i.e., his incompetence. Good or bad, for capital or against it, we’re not talking about Heinlein’s Competent Man; i.e., exhibiting military optimism (a neoconservative return to force) in order to maintain peace, thus recolonize old territories threatened by collapse. Instead, Victor Frankenstein and Morbius are both know-it-alls and thoroughly incompetent men tied to violent structures (which Morbius, to his credit, abjures), but still have the superiority complex and desire to kill as inherited from the same basic ideological structure they abandon for their own scholarly pursuits (with Victor being a “natural philosopher” and Morbius being a philologist, or expert of ancient written languages). There’s a Promethean element, insofar as power is found, not bargained for—a fatal magic for which Morbius isn’t just the story’s Prospero (the wizard from The Tempest seeking revenge against those who wronged him) but its Prometheus challenging state power in ways that movies’ soldiers (and Victor in Shelley’s book) want to salvage for Capitalism.

To that, Frankenstein—and indeed, the Modern Prometheus in connection to the monomyth critiquing capital—is about resisting bad parents playing god for or against the state; i.e., something we’ll explore now, when the man of reason falls prey to embarrassing hubris while grappling with Medusa using his wits (which often devise weapons of a nigh-wizardly sort); re: Icarus (the person) escaping the labyrinth (the space to explore) to crash into the sea after flying too close to the sun, to the gods and their Promethean fire. Generally without weapons, himself, there is always a military presence tucked away in the wreckage (or seeking it out).

Furthermore, through the Metis-style parentage of the Promethean Quest, Victor and Morbius externalize internalized portions of their own selves informed by their socio-material conditions, which they at first deny, then recognize as “other” and proceed to attack (the recipient of these abuses seeking revenge against the colonizer—a topic for the Demon Module). It’s a psychomachy made-flesh, one fought between the wizard’s swollen ego, and the ghost of the counterfeit piloted by the spirit of the colonized into stories like Frankenstein, Forbidden Planet and Metroidvania: to look on oneself as a dark reflection of empire-as-dead by virtue of nature turning technology against the patriarch that one embodies (the plot to Axiom Verge, in particular)!

(artist: Joaquin Rodriguez)

In propaganda terms, this is called “the useful idiot.” Poor Mobius is sacrificed by the movie and gaslit by the soldiers. Victor, meanwhile, is so dumb, so colossally arrogant, that he thinks he not only invented the problem, but that he’s the one to solve it—in essence, that the universe revolves around him. Morbius is more likeable, and even anti-establishment, but still works within the same narrative devices informed by his material surroundings—in short, the castle he inherits.

To that, dated psychoanalysis pits a self-centered rationalization of the benign male scientist as forced to confront an oft-female but always monstrous-feminine aspect of the psyche—a fearsome, at-times-invisible bugbear doubling as black mirror pushing genocide towards the hero; i.e., someone tied to the rational, good, civilized self. The thought process becomes something to inherit, its evils meant to be overcome or slain through force while classically ignoring the Marxist elements: the material conditions. As Gothic Communists, we’re attaching the process of abjection to socio-material elements; i.e., capitalist dogma; e.g., Cartesian thought and capital, which are exposed in the process (to pay attention to “the man behind the curtain,” as he stands in front of it, deifying himself for all to see). Victor and Morbius’ parents are not shown in their stories. As we’ll see with Trace in Axiom Verge, though, the useful idiot can either be manipulated by patriarchal or matriarchal forces, Athetos or the Rusalki; i.e., seemingly on opposite ends of the Cartesian spectrum, but both decaying inside a forever war’s damned, closed-space territory.

As we shall also see when we look at Frankenstein later in the volume, Promethean narratives like Forbidden Planet often present the hero as flawed, but ultimately noble and representing “progress” as delayed (“Your father’s name will shine again!”). In historical-material terms, however, “progress” (through the state) is inherently genocidal, abjecting the slaughter of anyone like Morbius who stands against the elite, the latter capitalizing on monomythic technology as a poetic means of exchange. Facing that reality is traumatic, but also something of a partial surprise, given these giant ruins seldom spell things out; they have to be sifted through, leading to some nasty surprises hidden inside (the movie is effectively a giant strawman/gaslight, putting the argument for Morbius’ death on his own shoulders; i.e., by virtue of him playing god as forbidden by God and God’s rules throughout the galaxy—the elite: “Don’t do Communism, kids! That includes making ambiguously gay robots [the servant trope] and investigating genocide!”).

If all this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because the cautionary tale of “curiosity kills the cat” was highlighted repeatedly by Mary Shelley’s ur-text, Frankenstein, bleeding into present-day works (from novels, to cinema, to Metroidvania). While scientific curiosity is specifically something Victor Frankenstein warns against after giving birth to his own creation (and which Morbius, shocked to death, advocates by destroying the titular forbidden planet), he ultimately bemoans his own station and rejects the ancient Medusa’s rage; i.e., as a byproduct of concealed, but also embodied genocide attached to Enlightenment thought: the zombie-like children of these men-of-reason as warlike (Morbius’ Robby is patently designed to follow commands and not kill “rational, thinking beings”; i.e., Asimov’s first law of robotics).

As we’ll see, though, the children of a given parent convey different qualities about the creator and their beliefs. Morbius is basically a Communist, so he uses the power of the gods (again, finding it in a faraway magical place) to make a machine—Robby the Robot—that, in turn, can make anything it wants (the Philosopher’s Stone); Victor, by comparison, is a cunt, so he makes something he can dominate and abuse for the state. The violent “offspring” from At the Mountains of Madness likewise serve a shapeshifting military role that is rejected by the hero (who runs away as fast as he can); the Rusalki from Axiom Verge, were made by something faraway and magical, too, survived by the resurrection machines that, once Athetos finds them, he promptly begins to abuse. The Rusalki (and similar Amazons, below) are monstrous-feminized; i.e., in the traditional sense of “repressed” and “chaotic,” reduced to naughty little girls standing in the way of male progress, of daddy playing god (which, per Freud, Morbius’ id serves to enact the same female, irrational side of himself that God—male, all-wise and all-powerful—will always punish for being like a girl: curious and inquisitive as a means of understanding and ultimately befriending nature).

(artist: Devilhs)

The idea is both older and newer than Forbidden Planet, surviving in various stories that came after it. This brings us to Metroidvania, whereupon games like Metroid and Axiom Verge present the Promethean Quest as the fatal discovery that one’s actual or de facto parents suck royal ass, and that one’s home is ultimately doomed because of it (founded on nature as raped by science); i.e., there’s a couple basic ideas about Metroidvania that come from Forbidden Planet, At the Mountains of Madness, and ultimately from Frankenstein (and to a lesser extent, The Tempest):

• a hero is summoned from earthly spaces by the gods to break the stalemate between nature and civilization
• they learn about their infernal, godly parentage (raised by wolves, bird people, or mad scientists, etc); i.e., that they’re Persephone come home; or Alucard, son of Dracula; etc
• the land of the gods is destroyed afterwards; e.g., blowing up a planet, sinking an island, or closing a gate that leads to such places; i.e., destroying evidence and witnesses, but also keeping monomythic mementos (souvenirs) while treating the larger event as dream-like similar to A Midsummer Night’s Dream—something to suggest and dismiss

Science and technology become mythical, even magical, but still comment on our world now in relation to technology and Capitalism “back then” as inherently illusory, manipulative and unstable.

A Promethean story revolves around the child as coming of age while inheriting the past through such discoveries: hell (and the gods, fascism and nature) coming home Their parents are away, asleep or otherwise, and the child (often grown up, like Morbius and Victor, but also Samus, below) must explore the hellish home (the unheimlich) to put the wrong things right. In doing so, the home wakes up, putting the child in danger while teaching them about their doomed past (often through heraldry and statues, below). The past, then, becomes something to inherit and destroy with whatever’s on hand, scuttling the castle, the boat, the giant (or some combination of these things) as having the means to self-destruct built in; e.g., the switch in Morbius’ lab or the Nostromo’s scuttle mechanism, etc.

(artist: MirroredR)

That’s the basic message, mind you. Inside a given Metroidvania, however, the scuttling happens in service to one parent or the other—the father or the mother, which translates to Cartesian powers or powers of nature as monstrous-feminine: Pygmalion vs Galatea, Zeus vs Medusa (or some such Archaic Mother), Victor vs Frankenstein, capital vs nature. To it, we always start and end with the same gladiatorial metaphor for capital canonically recruiting soldiers to its cause; i.e., as something to iconoclastically reverse through its monomythic people and places—its dramas, in other words.

Pertaining to said parentage expressed in monomythic language per the Promethean Quest, I’d like to pause things before we proceed onto Axiom Verge, in part—to unpack some of these concepts in relation to the historical-material struggle between masculine and feminine forces inside Metroidvania; i.e., that my scholarship has struggle to synthesize over time, interweaving during Promethean narratives that feature the zombie tyrant as a man-of-reason, but also the Amazon and Medusa as beings to subjugate and rape, ad infinitum, under his endless lies.

A note about ambiguity and dialectical-material scrutiny as we proceed into Metroidvania: The Gothic is generally ambiguous as a point of practice; the Promethean Quest camping the monomyth leads to repeating cycles (and fractal recursion) that—at least from a visual standpoint—become increasingly ambiguous dialogs about who is good and who is not. This extends from Shelley’s originators, Victor and the Creature in singular human form, onto Happ’s Trace as copied from Athetos for him (the father) and his enemies the Rusalki (the mothers) to debate with (thus the player/audience); i.e., about the ethics of Capitalism, of genocide, of progress. Similar to Shelley’s novel (and any Promethean work), there’s a strong mythological and dramatic flavor to Axiom Verge or Metroid, making either a wrestler’s opera whose dialogs about the transfer of power become much easier to parse (concerning class character); i.e., by virtue of dialectical-material scrutiny and of action (re: flow determines function, insofar as flowing power towards workers is ethical, sex-positive, and iconoclastic, whereas flowing power towards the state is not). —Perse

As my expertise, here, comes from studying Metroidvania as Gothic chronotopes that came after Forbidden Planet, we’ll look at different examples from my graduate and postgraduate work concerned with Metroid and Axiom Verge (and their palimpsests); i.e., in the rest of part zero of the symposium, followed by close-reads of Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight, in parts one and two. All parts also include older research of mine about Gothic stories—including sections of writing from my discontinued book, Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes (2021)—and the idea of synthesizing fresh growth and healing amid settler-colonial decay remains a common theme. Here in part zero, we’ve already introduced Forbidden Planet and the core rudiments of the Promethean drama. We’ll want to consider some of their unironic elements in Metroid, followed by Axiom Verge doing its best to satirize to these Promethean theatrics.

All the while, I’ll try my best to synthesize points already made in this volume with that of Volume Zero—namely that all roads lead to Rome as a space of nature colonized by Cartesian forces; i.e., a dark, vengeful womb that, in defense of itself, terrifies its attackers and nurtures its defenders through counterterrorist means: a palliative Numinous that isn’t strictly “female” per Beauvoir’s “woman is other,” but nature as monstrous-feminine food for Cartesian forces preying on it long after Rome “fell” (it merely transformed into kingdoms, then nation-states, then capital and corporations). Simply put, parents lie and often pit their children against each other during the divorce; i.e., in terms of Cartesian agents vs agents of nature as monstrous-feminine; e.g., Athetos and the Rusalki, with Trace stuck in the middle (exhibit 6b2, next page).

More to the point, this can be subverted through such characters compared to older variants (re: Samus and Mother Brain), but doing so takes work, and illustrates complicated labor exchanges that cheerfully encourage the Young-At-Heart; i.e., to play with monsters, dolls, faeries, and rape during ludo-Gothic BDSM. If you’re queer, Metroidvania are the places to find out[11] (from Volume One):

Volume One invites the reader to consider investigating power and trauma through theory and praxis as things to synthesize and express; i.e., through active, informed, collective participation; e.g., through shared exhibits like the one below. Said exhibit was created between Roxie Rusalka and myself, with Roxie being informed of my project ahead of time and agreeing to take part. It was deliberate/planned, and took time, money and work to pull off, but also mutual/informed consent:

(exhibit 6b2: Model and artist: Roxie Rusalka and Persephone van der Waard. Instruction occurs through the interrogation of trauma, wherein power is perceived and performed; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM/general Gothic poetics and simplified theories that incorporate a fair amount of former worker history pushing towards liberation. Said history is typically “lost” under state operations and must be repeatedly reclaimed through a liminal pedagogy—the act of reimagining systemic abuse received by workers from state forces. This reclamation very much includes monsters that are historically regarded as treacherous to status-quo agents, but especially regarding men under the Cartesian model; e.g., the nymph or siren as a regular emasculator of traditional stations of male agency and authority. To that, Roxie’s handle, “Rusalka,” refers to a type of Slavic water siren, which Roxie suggested I use as inspiration for depicting her in my book. Seeing as I already recognized the mythology from Thomas Happ’s 2014 Metroidvania, I drew Roxie as a Rusalki from Axiom Verge to instruct viewers with.

My and Roxie’s pedagogy of the oppressed, then, constitutes something that you might recognize from elsewhere; i.e., as having threatened male figures and institutions from earlier hauntologies: the Rusalki from Axiom Verge serving as titanic war machines who—in the style of a framed narrative ripped from Frankenstein—instruct and dominate Trace as an avatar/unwitting extension of the game’s chief male antagonist, Athetos. None of this is strictly “new” insofar as it has already appeared in fiction in some shape or form, but its present resurrection constitutes unique elements amid ongoing struggles.

The game’s narrative installs a psychomachic, psychosexual dialog between all parties, established through play and felt through various positions of ignorance, knowledge and power imbalance. The women of the game are its primary instructors, and teach Trace from a place of darkness: the hellish wellspring of oblivion imparting fatal wisdom and traumatic rememory as much through pain, unequal power exchange and outright lies/subterfuge as they do through open communication. The takeaway isn’t that Amazonian women are inherently treacherous, but survivors of immense trauma working with potential allies who, at times, have no idea who they’re serving: Trace embodies Athetos, whose desire to conquer space/the universe through the colonial gaze of planet Earth [astronoetics] is initiated, embodied and explored through a position of ignorance; i.e., one that thrives through ergodic, monomythic motion and the Shadow of Pygmalion/the Cycle of Kings as something to routinely bring about at the cost of all things.

[artist: Wildragon]

Within this overarching structure, canon classically challenges the ancient female as an Archaic Mother to behead; to reverse this is to foster a counterfeit of Athena’s Aegis that freezes state potential in its tracks: [monstrous-feminine] power as something to behold and learn from through the death of an internalized bigotry and desire to conquer that is often, at first blush, framed as “self-defense,” “progress,” and “empowerment.”)

The reality between such Promethean stories as half-real (reversing power, thus capital, between fantasy and real life) is that sex workers are lumped in with Medusa as some giant being for men of reason to rape and destroy for profit; i.e., labor-as-abject having to lie to survive against a system that lies to further itself: by insisting that Medusa is the threat (the Promethean Quest is a quest of self-destruction, but also self-deception). Wars are messy to begin with; inherited, their dogmatic confusions only compound—vast and overwhelming (as castles generally are) but also pacifying. Such castled instruction, then, is half-real; i.e., in between the text and the world it illustrates (seemingly ex nihilo, however abstract), hence must occur in a liminal sense, as “caught between” two places. We don’t want our students (other workers, regardless of age) to mark us with their flashlight eyes, then kill us as capital prefers; but we’re forced to speak to them as objects trying to rehumanize ourselves out of Gothic fiction into Gothic non-fiction:

(artist: Deuza-art)

All of this Amazonomachy-style cryptonymy relates to the grim harvests we alluded to at the start of the chapter and which we discussed in Volume One: a peach to carve up, which must become an Aegis to paralyse our conquers with; e.g., Trace hypnotized by the Rusalki’s Numinous “enormity” (their awesome power often coming from their eyes, or their voice as told through their eyes: the Radiance’s flashing gaze, or Mother Brain’s terrific rainbow beam paralyzing Samus the invader to then try to eat[12] her). This cannibalism is what Capitalist Realism ultimately tries to hide in its cycle of monomythic violence, and what we want to face, expose and transform using our own Promethean stories’ dark mommy doms as, to some extent, already dead (above). Ours must reflect genocide, projecting it back onto the colonizers trying to displace their own anxieties and misdeeds onto “elsewhere” (the land of the gods).

Again, we’ll get to that. First, let’s lay out the territories, gendered narrative devices, and Gothic theories pertaining to architecture and space that I have contributed to in the past and continue to do so into the present; re: by revisiting my older work on Metroid and Metroidvania for the rest of part zero, then specifically Axiom Verge in part one and Hollow Knight in part two; i.e., Medusa (and her womb) or Medusa’s enemies (men of reason and the cops who serve them) as commonly portrayed in these stories. From there, we’ll sally forth into other exciting zones (open battle, in part two of “The Monomyth”); as we do, always remember the root function such fictions, as ludo-Gothic BDSM, have: calculated risk.

Per the calculated risk, the paradox of danger inside the Metroidvania equals that of the castle lifted from older fictions (and their castles): danger as a performance of thrilling “peril” that can be survived even when the protagonist “buys the farm” (avatar death). The Gothic castle, as I put in Volume Zero, is still “the perfect dom,” because true rape is more or less impossible inside a consensual theatre of imprisonment where the player cannot die (excluding serious medical conditions the game and its data can somehow affect):

The idea is to liberate ourselves with fairly negotiated, thus cathartic, dungeon fantasies that camp canon through counterterrorist theatre to whatever degree feels correct to us; e.g., me in a haunted castle, wandering through the dark, menacing halls while wearing a sexy dress (and nothing under it, my bare body molested by the breeze and the fabric): a hopelessly vulnerable Gothic heroine feeling pretty and desired, hungrily and desperately interrogating the musical, cobwebbed gloomth^[13] while scarcely having anything between me and certain “doom.” As usual, the Gothic paradox allows for intense, oxymoronic dualities to coexist at the same time in the same space (e.g., “sad cum” or “gloomth” or similar and confused degrees of “verklempt” during the castle’s psychosexual, emotional “storm”). Simply put, I want to feel naked and exposed, thus paradoxically most alive in ways that I have negotiated through the contract between me and the media I’m working with (wherein the Metroidvania castle, as far as I’m concerned, is the perfect dom); i.e., while being “hunted” and covered in rebellious “kick me” symbols and clothing that advertises my true self^[14] as naked, colorful and dark, as if to tease the viewer in the shadows to try something (source).

In my master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis,” I acknowledge this ergodic motion (that is, motion accomplished through non-trivial effort; re: Aarseth) as something of a natural procedure responding to Metroidvania; i.e., as a kind of maze to discover and then navigate, as the legendary land of the gods: “Metroidvania spaces are so conducive to speedrunning as to make avoiding it an arduous task” (source). In doing so, players improve over time because that’s how playing videogames works; i.e., we’re being taught by the game but also pick up the game as something to master in return; e.g., I struggled to beat Mega Man V for the original, brick-sized Gameboy under nine hours, the first time, but afterwards could beat it under two. Mastery goes both ways.

With ludo-Gothic BDSM, the same idea applies to more than just ludology or Gothic architecture, but the complex (and inherited) emotions and BDSM interactions associated with the Neo-Gothic, retro-future hallways and rooms being braved during Cameron’s refrain (the shooter but also the Metroidvania closed space). We can best these in-game trials (and their famous, ubiquitous tortures) in traditionally masculine or feminine ways (the male or female Neo-Gothic hero; e.g., Emily St. Aubert or Ludovico, from The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), but still yield fresh, GNC interpretations that challenge capital, profit, rape, and genocide.

In doing so, however, players must always respect such devices, lest they conceal or further genocide outside of themselves; i.e., as something to perform and “discover” by inadvertently fostering heteronormativity as a Cartesian byproduct well at home in Metroidvania that players carry into their waking moments: the land of the gods coming home during the Imperial Boomerang and its subsequent moral panic and apocalypse!

(exhibit 40c: Artist, far-top-left: Paulo Henrique Marcondes; mid-top-left: concept art for Samus Returns, 2017; right: Caspar David Friedrich; everything else: Wildragon. Unlike Samus, who is a tall, strong girl boss in a suit of space armor, Trace is a callow, physically awkward nerd with a gun [re: a spoof of Cameron’s Amazonian shooter]. Moreover, he is continuously dwarfed by his alien surroundings—much like the British Romantic facing the fog of an increasingly alien world beyond civilization, except it’s a patently human cruelty projected into outer space; re: astronoetics.)

Metroidvania, then, are the multimedia continuation of a larger historical-material cycle—one of dark, imprecise, dialectical-material reflection about Cartesian forces and their monstrous-feminine victims. Home to the Capitalocene, such things are impossibly large in scope and scale, strangely difficult to put one’s finger on and yet seemingly everywhere all at once. They move but stay put.

For instance, I note in “Lost in Necropolis” that terrible abuse struggles to map itself, but survives through the player as the next in line:

Across Gothic media, there remains an excessive quality of time that cannot be mapped, or expressed in clear terms. Instead, it pools inside the space. The returning hero is doomed to face the past again and again, a series of doubles. They can subvert old tyrannies by seizing control, but remain trapped or exiled, themselves. For example, Samus is nomadic, without a home; so is Ellen Ripley from Aliens or Victoria, from Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806). Men experience it is as well, in terms of motion as gendered, but also said motion contested, within a given arc and across all of them. The Knight a wandering warrior, destroyed upon his return; Mather Lewis’ Ambrosio dies an ignominious death. For any hero, it is not simply a call to arms, but a rite of passage wherein the hero constantly infers whatever lies in store for them whilst inside; yet, it is always hidden, revealed too late: they were the destroyer all along. This can be of the space, others, or themselves, and there is no escape from that. One cannot avoid death, or concerns about death relative to growth established through motion; it and Other doubles collect within the space as historical byproducts of motion (source).

In short, the monomythic process is always left behind inside the current castle as echoing older castles (and heroes) tied to Capitalism and its woes across space-time (and its Gothic abstractions).

In turn, this articulation of concealment concerns Enlightenment thought as camouflage, which my PhD and subsequent books would build on (re: “Canonical Essentialism“)—that cartography is a tool of Cartesian domination felt in and across Metroidvania narratives, one operating in service of cataloging conquest in BDSM language; i.e., of the former ruin’s occupation and its past trauma’s reabsorption into empire as a corruption of rewritten memories where power is notably unequal and transferred continually as such (master and slave, dominant and submissive, savior and destroyer).

(source: Hans Staats’ “Mastering Nature: War Gothic and the Monstrous Anthropocene,” 2016)

To it, Gothic castles in Metroidvania are built to be moved through, thus both conceal and catalog Cartesian dogma as a map of itself; i.e., a liminal space, specifically a grave, that was, is, and will be conquered by the mighty ghost of the past again. Classically said ghost is a giant suit of armor that interrupts the husbandry of said dominion; i.e., the giant helmet in Otranto crushing Lord Manfred’s son to death, Looney-Tunes-style, on the very first page:

Shocked with these lamentable sounds, and dreading he knew not what, he advanced hastily—but what a sight for a father’s eyes!—he beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers (source).

Except the ontological uncertainty of the living dead (a zombie), and the suit of armor as animate-inanimate, is a byproduct of a constantly revived medieval working at cross purposes; i.e., one where the organic-inorganic—or bio-mechanical nature of a concentric, mise-en-abyme (the space and occupant as equally castle-like)—yields future liminalities that collectively denote not just the Anthropocene, but the Capitalocene as endlessly swept up in Gothic recursion.

For example, said cryptomimesis conjures up as “castle” that contains, per the Modern Prometheus, the tell-tale xenomorph; i.e., as an abyss-walker ghost haunted by its older counterfeit self (a bit like Hamlet, below) as trapped inside a Gothic castle: a ghost of the counterfeit. Both homely and inhospitable, it remains the usual place to dance and play with such beings during demon BDSM (as the boss music, “Trace Rising,” lovingly shows). Where there’s a castle, there’s a rape, but a ghostly ongoing and vague one linked to Capitalism raping nature under the (dis)guise of divine providence further the process of abjection—one that points to Enlightenment virtues claiming to have moved past such barbarism; i.e., a displaced symbol of current systemic atrocities dressed up as “past” (re: Punter).

For all its “recent” sci-fi trappings, then, Metroidvania are ghost stories much in the same way Shelley’s novel borrowed from Hamlet before it (and Paradise Lost, but I digress); i.e., a hauntological, canceled-future dance party going back to the future of a past moment in imaginary space-time: civilization as conquered by nature as returning from the grave to seek revenge against Cartesian forces several generations removed.

The Gothic castle, then, is the home of fabrication and paradox since Horace Walpole (at least), but one whose place of endless possibilities both resist quantification (colonization) and beg to be played for GNC, postcolonial purposes during Promethean stories (found power and knowledge); i.e., the ghosts of the dead resisting mapping and cataloging only to reappear in the contested burial site, phasing in and out of existence as written regarding great trauma tied to the usual abuses of capital against nature: to terrify people with visions of Hell as attached to the haunted castle grounds! As Hamlet’s father’s ghost puts it:

I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine (source).

As we’ll see when looking at Metroid and Axiom Verge, such dialogs are part-in-parcel with Metroidvania.

For example, just as Hamlet talks with his father’s ghost to uncover and participate in revenge (above)—effectively a mad quest linked to his ancestral home as unjustly occupied by imposturous forces—Axiom Verge takes the same basic idea and marries it to Victor’s Promethean dialogs with the Creature; i.e., Trace talking to Athetos through his creations, who want to kill the son for the father because Trace is being led toward Athetos by the faeries (making him the princess inside the castle attacked by the paranoid old man, below): as a matter of self-destructive power tied to the land of the gods as ancestral/soaked in the blood of mutual revenge (this isn’t a “both sides” issue—Cartesian thought is wrong in this case—but both sides still overlap in terms of their shared actions as disguise-like, but also derelict allegories; e.g., “I’m not a revolutionary! I’m just a gay Gothic scholar telling stories!” We kick up chaff to raise issues, but also cloud ourselves in the inky gloom).

Likewise, Metroid depicts Samus as conversing with ghosts, too; i.e., those of fallen gods (the Chozo) belonging to part of the same kind of abandoned homestead she is destined to inherit, investigate, and like Prince Hamlet, ultimately destroy and pass on! History is a game of inheritance built on individual histories disguising one side or the other using the same aesthetics of power and death.

A castle in a Gothic story, then, is a highly specific (and aesthetic) arrangement of space and time, on whose narratives concerning power and death, nature and civilization, are told through motion responding as a story unto itself (a story in a story responding back and forth). As a fundamental part of the Gothic chronotope, Bakhtin refers to the ongoing relationship—i.e., between the space, its historical past/undead trauma, and the people moving inside of it—as follows; re:

Toward the end of the seventeenth century in England, a new territory for novelistic events is constituted and reinforced in the so-called “Gothic” or “black” novel—the castle (first used in this meaning by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto, and later in Radcliffe, Monk Lewis and others). The castle is saturated through and through with a time that is historical in the narrow sense of the word, that is, the time of the historical past […] the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form as various parts of its architecture […] and in particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights. […] legends and traditions animate every corner of the castle and its environs through their constant reminders of past events. It is this quality that gives rise to the specific kind of narrative inherent in castles and that is then worked out in Gothic novels.

In turn, I would call this “castle-narrative” regarding Metroidvania for my masters’ thesis. More to the point, I would and will continue to argue that the Radcliffean “closed space” is unmappable as a claustrophobic, “event horizon” (re, Hogle: “a vanishing point”)—a liminal space that requires non-trivial effort to explore; i.e., of trauma tied to the human body and mind expressed in monstrous language (re: castle-like bodies and vice versa, per “Castles in the Flesh“) contained within that the player can sense the enormity of (Capitalism and Communism) as visualized to a woefully small degree: a dark forest (the classic precursor to Hell from Dante’s Inferno and its numerous allusions in later canon) can be giant, but one can only see a small portion of it.

(artist: Missuscrim)

Under Capitalism, Medusa is a tyrant as much as Dracula is; i.e., something to reassemble like Osiris out of disembodied pieces, then abject all over again. Whatever the tyrant, and from doll to dollhouse, such Medusas’ revenge constitute a memento mori that speaks when played with—to Capitalism as a hyperobject that has evolved into itself and is experienced, post hoc, through a narrative of itself, ipso facto; i.e., the narrative of the crypt as filled with paradoxical elements, often viewed in small as a matter of abstraction that translates into more accessible-inaccessible language for the middle class to explore, mid-abjection and monomyth-as-Mandelbrot: labyrinths and mazes that, like Radcliffe’s Gothic castles, denote a cryptonymic, dream-like presence of rape, one that a) suitably phases between person and place (the nuclear family house and home, but also homebodies), and b) can be entered and interrogated, power-wise, by exploring itself and its Gothic decay (and regeneration) in suitably nightmarish ways during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

For example, the paradox of darkness is that it is highly visible; re: Milton’s darkness visible playing out through the chronotopes of Walpole and other Gothic auteurs’ shared shadow zone into their present-day simulacra (cryptomimetically echoing past forms). To this, the Gothic castle is equally enormous and “occupied” by a presence tied to the self as material-but-questionable, related to a tyrant in uncertain ways: one’s history in connection to former occupiers of the space brought to the fore, capital or Communist.

Metroidvania and recursive motion going hand-in-hand is not an idea I coined, but I have taken it further than someone like Paul Martin did towards older Metroid and Castlevania games. Indeed, on the cusp of speedrunning and Twitch’s emergence in 2011, Martin dismisses them:

One such typical journey occurs near the beginning of the game. This takes us, due to various locked doors and impassable gaps, from the alchemy laboratory in the lower left quadrant of the castle to the master librarian, seller of keys, in the upper right, and back. We encounter this kind of recursive movement throughout the game and these movements are executed alongside the recursions of the game’s plot. The recursive movement outlined is by no means unique to [Symphony of the Night]. Many games involve this pattern as a core element of their gameplay. Most obviously, this gameplay pattern, in which a character must go back and forth through a maze which opens itself up as the character collects equipment and becomes more powerful, is present in the early Metroid games. However, I am not arguing here that the pattern is anything more than a videogame convention but rather that when this convention is seen in combination with the specific story and characters that we encounter in SotN it takes on an expressive role that the convention does not necessarily have in other games (source: “Ambivalence and Recursion in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night“).

Unlike Martin, I consider the Metroidvania as something beyond “a mere videogame convention.” Instead, its danger-disco tunnels and rooms wind and confuse the protagonist to symbolize the difficulty of recollection when faced with mind-numbing trauma as a Cartesian symptom, but nevertheless remains infused with a nebulous, funerary doom leaping across mediums that challenges the Capitalocene as such; i.e., Hogle’s narrative of the crypt, or “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present.” It would become “castle-narrative” as first recognized in my thesis work (re: “Lost in Necropolis“), which would extend to ludo-Gothic BDSM as evolving into itself (re: “Into the Toy Chest” and “Jadis’ Dollhouse,” etc). Now—given Metroidvania is my bread and butter—I want to stress the kinds of ironies that also phase in and out of existence (like the moon, whose lunacy paraphrases capital’s waxing and waning).

For one, such spaces like Sudra in Axiom Verge and Zebes in Metroid are desolate and oddly alive, a proliferate necrobiome replete with history as a work-in-progress, insofar as empire is trapped in decay but looking to clean house and wipe the slate clean (through Samus, by killing Mother Brain). To that, Gothic castles have—since Walpole, Lewis and Radcliffe—assembled from dreams informed by history as half-real, decaying and regenerating back into itself; i.e., coming up brick-by-brick as both gassy and made up, while somehow wholly solid and confirmed regarding capital: death omens where we—both as host, guest and prisoner—feel most alive, have the most power while appearing powerless, playing amid the hauntological language of war as married to the aesthetic/cryptonymy of power and death under Capitalism. Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, our ludic masters are the castles making us surrender unto them, to beg to our captors, “Take me, I’m yours! But don’t hold back!” It’s ontologically uncertain, thus not set as a space of play that, unlike Zimmerman’s magic circle, isn’t so neatly drawn.

Just as Gothic castles, in any media, are built on the endless potential of theatrical violence, Gothic fantasy is all about fantasizing about death and rape through these castled theatrics; i.e., as things to endorse or subvert in cartoonish, dated language; e.g., the Western’s saloon fight or Gothic heroine’s castle crawl (and other hybrids). Per the calculated risk and palliative Numinous, it’s generally more fun to fantasize through these make-believe arenas according to forbidden desire and earnestly whimsical attempts to heal from abuse than it is to actually subject oneself to dead-serious, unironic torture.

Yes, the camp is entirely brutal, at times, but it’s still camp provided irony and play are present (re: Walpole, Lewis); i.e., as something heroic and monstrous (usually a combination of the two) to conjure up and play with in the usual liminal territories thereof (re: doubles, offering conflict on the surface of themselves and inside thresholds to move through). Hero or heroine, movie or videogame, the protagonist is always between a monstrous state of salvation and damnation linked to abstractions of capital’s horrors come home; they are never strictly free, but encased in a claustrophobic (closed-space) world that paradoxically feels more alive because of it:

(artist: Wildragon)

Similar to novels and cinema, Metroidvania castles are more than their bricks or motion inside of itself. Amid this decayed hyperreality (the map of empire as reassembled, but failing to restore the empire to its former glory), the monomyth hero reanimates to explore the disastrous maze or labyrinth to its logical center tied to extratextual elements. By moving through the old castle to try and remember what happened, they confront its lost histories, but also its total, ergodic histories linked to the external world; i.e., the sum of history the space contains and intimates through effort.

My master’s thesis concluded that this process is fundamentally unmappable, try as speedrunners might when moving endlessly through the Metroidvania in pursuit of their own histories inside the ruin. In continuation, I write in “Mazes and Labyrinths” how there’s simply too many ways to navigate the maze, too many ways to communicate power and its resisting as things to materialize, embody or abjure:

“Mazes and Labyrinths” is corollary to my past research on how FPS empower players; it explores how Metroidvania and survival horror disempower players trapped inside their respective gameworlds. They offset the player’s strength, generally to tell a perilous story. This peril stems from varying lapses of power due to a hero’s position—who they are and where they exist within a space (source).

To that, the endless, concentric wreckage is effectively a reoccurring form of historical-material amnesia and rememory at odds, the unironic hero operating on a path of rememory towards individuation through abjection, thus genocide (the Jungian concept of psychological maturity whereupon a young man slays the mother as a developmental roadblock; i.e., the creation of sexual difference, as predicated on the slaying of the mother, but especially the Dark Mother).

By extension, this haunts capital’s abstractions (Gothic castles); i.e., as a process of generating wealth through play without irony/critical awareness, even with seemingly emergent forms that, in truth, limit their critical potential to have races for their own sake. To that, no matter how fast speedrunners go (e.g., MonStahLer’s “[WR] Hollow Knight Speedrun – 112% APB in 2:59:24,” 2023) the story is more or less told, the protagonist’s lack of memory phenomenologically mirrored by the player relearning the space as part of the next in line—on a routine path of conquest, linked to a Gothic chronotope as the hyperreal site of “civilized” development: inside a giant graveyard that is recorded for the next generation to find, on and on.

As part of this castle-narrative, then, memory is always decaying and must be reestablished by recursive (endless) motion; i.e., through the space, making the one who remembers a more efficient and effective killer picking up arms and knowledge. Irony helps subvert canonical potential along these tracks, but violence is almost always the thing to subvert; i.e., slaying the “monster” in the middle of maze: the dragon master or dark queen.

(artist: Gutter Tongue)

Usually a powerful woman/chaos dragon at first blush—or the ghost of a male tyrant—in truth, the greatest monster is actually the hero looking back at an older version of themselves: the history of the conquered and conqueror sharing the same surface, the same black mirror/reverse abjection (what my friend Ginger lovingly calls “Gothic cringe”).

It’s less about a direct bloodline and more a tenuously feudal, vague connection established in relation to the gameworld intimating capital’s horrors and our relation to said horrors; as something whose repeated conquerings teach the player to be increasingly violent during Capitalism’s whispered decay and rise again. Threatened by it, the player regresses to a feudalistic state; i.e., the black knight, the zombie tyrant, the giant ghost (the Numinous) of Caesar returning from Hell. Their sense of self is thrown into question, all while becoming the ultimate thief and killing machine—a “great destructor” that steals and destroys everything (a bit like a crusader in service of the state colonizing its own territories again). There’s plenty of room for irony but it isn’t automatic among the ceremonies and spaces thereof.

(artist: Adam Hughes)

Furthermore, any revelations about capital through the Promethean Quest are hidden—tucked away behind the pomp and circumstance; i.e., the castle grounds, fractals and artifacts, but also the thrill of the hunt, its unironic victory and the (often) beautiful, body of a humanoid, Amazonian princess. No longer the hidden reward of a hidden system[15] inside a space that cannot communicate its ultimate horrors[16] upon a single completion, she’s out in the open. Like exercise, she takes multiple attempts to progress to the highest point (and the best armor, which is often no armor except her birthday suit). From there, our oft-female Icarus can fall the farthest, often further into delusion; e.g., Samus thinks she’s the hero and that her unironic actions will bring about “true peace in space!” In neoliberal terms, this concept is called false hope; I call it “military optimism”:

Just as Alien evolved into Aliens, the Metroid franchise has become increasingly triumphant over time. Abjuring the Promethean myth, it instead offers military optimism—the idea that seemingly unstoppable enemies can be defeated with patience and, more importantly, military resources; the more victories, the more resources there are to use (even if these are little more than looted plunder in the grand scheme).

Samus repeatedly embarks on the Promethean Quest. Over time, this quest has become less cautionary and more professional. The Promethean past isn’t something to fear or avoid; it’s something to shoot. This attitude removes the quest’s cautionary elements, especially where the military is concerned. This creates a franchise much more fixated on Samus as a neutral figure with military ties. Rather than fight them, she does their bidding and is celebrated for it (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021).

(exhibit 40d1: Artist, top-farthest-left: Rainarc Rhapsody; top-far-left: Gutter Tongue; bottom-left: Pajarona; top-middle: Phobos Romulus; bottom-middle: unknown, source; bottom-right: Azto Dio. Samus is forever between two worlds: nature and civilization, but also the living and the dead. Undead and demonic, she is composed of various pieces stolen from places raided for empire, becoming forever haunted by these crimes as a colonial survivor chasing dragons [while also having “native” blood inside her from older colonizers, the Chozo, as ostensibly closer to nature but in reality were imperial, themselves]. The white Indian pimped out, she personifies the Western fear of feudal inheritance common in Gothic stories, all at once a knight, golem, giant, tyrant, damsel, demon, detective and military pinup girl [all concepts we’ll continue unpacking throughout the book] as part of a larger sequence, structure: Capitalism and Cartesian thought. Originally a comic-book character with zero identity to speak of, Samus has gone through various revisions that try to distinguish her from the legions of cookie-cutter women in sci-fi pastiche, while simultaneously making her nearly indistinguishable from them.

In the queer tradition, an argument could be made that Samus [and by extension, the audience] is looking at older, heteronormative models—less of themselves exclusively and more of their bloodline as inherently violent, but also tied to the historical-material world as a dangerous, instructional memory shaping workers into state-sanctioned killers; i.e., the Gothic castle as a cursed, familial space, but also an undead, monomythic recruiting ground. As a queer person, transition generally involves moving away from the colonial binary and its heteronormative violence according to a cis-het double or bogeyperson; but doing so requires challenging one’s “own” historical portrait through the Promethean space that contains it in various chronotopic markers; i.e., Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination personified, in hero terms: the physically capable body as castle-like and naked.)

(exhibit 40d2: Artist: Teke. The more queer someone is, the more they retreat from cis-het, “heroic” renditions of themselves. Fearful of the violence those variations perform in service to the state, the most fearsome thing for us gays is that we might be cis-het, which Gothic spaces will intimate through their historical-material reminders of the feudalistic bloodline as fundamentally cis-het: kings, queens, princesses, and sanctioned incest/rape; but also zombie scapegoats, be those fallen kings, madwomen in the attic or mad scientists. By wanting to escape from heteronormative, Cartesian models tied to our own childhoods, queer people want to escape the socio-material prescription of canonical monsters that serve as performatively heroic or villainous roles through a false sense of self. The proletarian goal of the black mirror is to reverse abject these and bring our true selves to the fore, altering the socio-material world in the process.)

Confronting the monster inside this final vault, Metroid communicates a common Metroidvania trope: assimilation; i.e., the hero as biomechanically abject, their weapons generally a part of their bodies as extensions begot of the space they’ve inherited/are stealing from in service to empire and the Imperial Boomerang. Triumphant Metroidvania like Super Metroid don’t reflect terribly hard on the hypocritical violence these weapons commit, then, nor the liminality of their dynastic power exchange and hereditary rites; instead, the game routinely grants Samus a mission to complete for Big Brother and she does it as a physically impressive specimen trained in the art of war—a “space knight” who kills dragons, plundering their hoards in the process, before destroying the site of plunder without irony. It becomes a planet-wide cycle of death, one whose succession glorifies genocidal violence in all the Cartesian ways: serve the Man, punch Medusa.

Despite being female, Samus lacks the capacity to safeguard nature; she’s always blowing it up! Canon frames her as the lost daughter returning home to work out her wild energies, reclaiming the bride as someone to disrobe after she’s “played house” as a token cop regressing to the dutiful sex pot. But because she is, herself, part god, she is always out of reach—is always property for the elite to dangle in front of weird canonical nerds lusting after their own avatar as lost to them; i.e., as alien; re: fire of the gods; e.g., “Fire of unknown origin took my baby way” (Blue Öyster Cult’s “Fire of Unknown Origin,” 1981):

Death comes sweeping through the hallway, like a lady’s dress
Death comes driving down the highway, in its Sunday best

A fire of unknown origin took my baby away
A fire of unknown origin took my baby away

Swept to ruin off my wavelength, swallowed her up
[…]

Death comes driving, I can’t do nothing
Death goes
There must be something, there must be something that remains (source: Genius).

It’s the usual quest of revenge/promise of sex per the Prometheus Quest tokenized for capital, profit and rape—of nature as alien, monstrous-feminine.

Under Metroid, we’re left with the usual quest of revenge against nature; i.e., the promise of sex per the Prometheus Quest tokenized for capital, profit and rape—of nature as alien, monstrous-feminine.

(artist: Viktria)

Except, Nintendo’s lack of irony brings us right to Axiom Verge: the fires of capital raped Medusa! It’s a game whose lovely genderqueer (and pro-nature, above) Promethean ironies we’ll unpack, next; i.e., whose close-read occurs contrary to the ghostly (Gothic) histories of capital we’ve unpacked for you here!

Onto  “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] The movie was made in 2012, speaking to a time on the verge of reality (as science fiction generally does) whose preface year has already come and gone. This isn’t a far-off place that Scott was speaking to, with Prometheus, but the here-and-now dressed up as “Gothic.” In turn, Weyland isn’t some impossible figure relegated to pure make-believe. He’s a venture capitalist enjoying the luxuries of Cartesian domination, holding the world hostage between his thumb and forefinger.

[2] My master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (2018) was docked quite a few points simply because I didn’t quickly or accurately define Metroidvania to my graduate supervisors (one, Dale Townshend, saying he’d never played “a computer game in [his] life”) or to my guest reader (also from MMU, though I forget his name). The guest reader in particular pointed out feeling confused because I hadn’t explicitly mentioned Metroidvania until about twenty pages in!

[3] To this, the monomyth concept isn’t unique to Metroidvania, and is expressed in other videogames like Zelda (the open-to-closed space), Mega Man or Contra (the run ‘n gun), Resident Evil (the survival horror), System Shock (the action-adventure), Doom (the FPS), and Mario (the platformer). However, none of them are Gothic as a matter of space that illustrates Aguirre’s inversion of the Hero’s Journey through said space, hence don’t automatically apply to ludo-Gothic BDSM as having been founded on maze-like Gothic spaces (and their monstrous-feminine occupants, within, punching up against Cartesian men).

[4] As the opening to Super Metroid explains, “The last metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace.”

[5] Although maps are a huge part of the Metroidvania world as a matter of conquest, this has largely already been covered in Volume Zero, my PhD (re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains). Instead, we’ll be focusing on aesthetics—the motion, appearance and thematic elements that emerge through the exploration of map-like spaces in Metroidvania.

[6] Generation of wealth in or outside of imperial sectors was classically done through conquest, not profit through capital and privatization; i.e., rapine, often through the stealing of gold and other valuable things by force. These things could be mined from the Earth and smelted, but again, this took a labor force (usually serfs or chattel slaves). Trade and things existed but were beholden to the same technological limitations.

Over time, though, capital developed through Capitalism’s ability to increasingly exploit the land through people the state could attack; i.e., not what it could steal from them in a pinch, but occupy and enslave according to the privatization of labor (factories and workers) pitted against an enemy linked to nature as abject: framed as being against civilization because nature was suddenly alien, monstrous-feminine. Doing so combined centuries of dogma, imperial nostalgia (for Rome), and recent scientific advancements granting the state the ability to pit one legitimate population against an illegitimate one with industrialized materiel (moral territories). In short, the state could do Imperialism on repeat, moving money through nature (with advanced weapons technologies) to achieve profit in pursuit of infinite growth per the regular rise and fall of Capitalism’s boom-and-bust mechanism.

Through the monomyth, the canonical Gothic has abjected this procedure to displaced older times, digging said “past” up in ways the state can use as middle-class propaganda; i.e., to remain vigilant lest “our” empire fall, too. The conquest element never really went away, then. It just became privatized, but also industrious/sacred (the Protestant work ethic) and hidden away behind capitalistic illusions that romanticize Cartesian thought as “tragic,” but ultimately something to debate, thus apologize for (and continue to authorize state violence with during Pax Americana under Capitalist Realism). The Promethean Quest challenges all of this by framing the usual benefactors as dickwads, hence the state and its Cartesian dogma.

[7] I.e., fighting over the damsel who, however insignificant she might seem, indicates the larger capitalist enterprise: space as female under frontier Capitalism (the final frontier), but also monstrous-feminine.

So while Zack Welker writes dismissively in “The Lack of Female Importance in Forbidden Planet” (2017)

In Forbidden Planet, one can see that there is only one woman throughout the film. Now, usually one would think since she’s the only female in the film she must have some significance. But that is not the case here. In this film, Altaira (the only female) is treated as an object and a distraction (source).

the fact remains, she is the sole focus, and—more to the point—a heteronormative ritual of pursuit that disguises the ubiquitous Cartesian presence of the soldiers and why Morbius dislikes them so much: the colonization of outer space as seen through their unflattering, predatory behavior towards his young horny daughter.

To it, you could just as easily swap the princess out with the Peking duck from The Pink Panther Strikes Again (“My duck, I must have you!”); the principles of consumption, of propriety and vice (the virgin/whore) vs nature as something to dominate are still going to be at work in such stories (with Gothic canon being obsessed with emulating older morality plays regarding women and the home as beset by wild forces). The movie is Capitalism in small (and the Capitalocene—a dead, mostly lifeless planet; i.e., the absentee Mother), but also Capitalism-in-disguise as borrowed from older Gothic stories under Capitalist Realism: the ending of “other” empires and “their” worlds.

[8] You could argue Lovecraft protests settler colonialism by historicizing its collapse, but he does it self-centeredly and abjectly towards colonized worlds as attacked by barbarians from within (the Caesar conspiracy also abused by Hilter in the 1920s); i.e., as Victor Frankenstein does, so busy “doing science” that he has no time to relate to other people (including his wife, who dies because he’s rearing the fight the monster and forgets about her).

By comparison, Morbius certainly isn’t perfect, but he really doesn’t like soldiers or colonialism. To be sure, he does so to a fault (“the scurry and strife of humankind” sounding somewhat bitter), but the romantic elements have a lot more personality than Lovecraft; i.e., which, in my mind, help make up the usual bleeding heart of the Gothic Romance. Morbius is misunderstood and tragic; Lovecraft is a craven, homophobic bigot with zero pulse. As we’ll see, so is Athetos, sp paranoid of his own son that he tells his “children” (the variations) to kill Trace (the call coming from inside the house, as it were): “DEMON. ATHETOS SAY, KILL.”

[9] A cheeky nod to Tithonus:

Tithonus, in Greek legend, son of Laomedon, king of Troy, and of Strymo, daughter of the river Scamander. Eos (Aurora) fell in love with Tithonus and took him to Ethiopia, where she bore Emathion and Memnon. According to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, when Eos asked Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life, the god consented. But Eos forgot to ask also for eternal youth, so her husband grew old and withered (source: Britannica)

More to the point, men of reason (and the states attached to them) are always trying to cheat death by colonizing nature as monstrous-feminine.

[10] Which the narrator of the film openly describes their mission as, at the start of the movie.

[11] Generally the discovery happens as a matter of empathy towards various characters, onstage, the page or the screen; i.e., who do you side with—the old creepy scientist guy or the big gay faeries trying to survive in between fiction and reality? No one ever said being queer was easy! But it is fun! The key to escape, lovelies, is liberation, and that happens inside the text as half-real, between reality and imagination as negotiating power for workers or the state! Don’t fight the ghost of the counterfeit to further abjection; dance with it, and all your dreams will—if not for you, then your children or your children’s children (the future, in other words)—come true!

[12] The duality of monsters and their theatrics lets Communists occupy Samus; i.e., as a vehicle for proletarian (thus subversive) aims. But it doesn’t change the fact that her intended function is a token cop committing genocide for the state by colonizing the old ruin: a subjugated Amazon abjecting its maternal tyrant as both an infernal perversion of nature through mad science (the brain in a jar/glass womb) and the monstrous-feminine enemy of state forces during monomythic forays in to Hell. Per the cryptonymy process, Mother Brains completes the double operation by pushing visions of state abuse onto Samus, who rejects them by beheading Mother Brain. Their status as enemies is naturalized per Capitalism Realism under neoliberal dogma (videogames).

[13] Gloomth (from my PhD) “being the gloom and warmth attributed to Horace Walpole’s gothic villa, and by extension his novel”:

As Dale Townshend writes in Gothic Antiquity:

Rejecting Mann’s suggestions of a Gothic garden at Strawberry Hill, Walpole claims that “Gothic is merely architecture,” and resides in the “satisfaction” that one derives from “imprinting the gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals on one’s house.” The letter proceeds to illustrate the “venerable barbarism” of the Gothic style through another telling description of the Paraclete: “my house is so monastic,” Walpole claims, “that I have a little hall decked with long saints in lean arched windows and with taper columns, which we call the Paraclete, in memory of Eloisa’s cloister.” It is thus through the oxymoronic categories of “venerable gloom,” “venerable barbarism,” and “gloomth”—a compound word formed of “gloom” and “warmth”—that Walpole was able to negotiate the discursive impasse at the heart of eighteenth-century perceptions of Gothic architecture: though undoubtedly an example of Evelyn’s and Wren’s “monkish piles” or Middleton’s “nurseries of superstition,” the ecclesiastical Gothic could be retrieved as “venerable barbarism” when it was enlisted in the service of modern Protestant domesticity (source).

For Walpole, gloomth was a carefully cultivated hauntological expression—of the civilized and barbaric—into something beautiful and unique. Later, his own villa inspired him to write what is arguably considered to be the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (source).

[14] As my true self, I didn’t have to change who I was to fit in, and I could wear whatever I wanted to be myself in the process—if only onstage or on the canvas at first, to slowly acclimate myself to the idea that I wasn’t “asking for it” while paradoxically invoking these inherited anxieties onstage; nor was I a threat to society as I saw it—i.e., I wasn’t a fraudulent “man-in-a-dress” worming my way into “real women’s” spaces (classic impostor syndrome); I was a real woman, and my art and medievalist education slowly bonded more and more to become a way of tangibly presenting that idea to the world.

[15] “Beyond communities that reward speed, fast players are rewarded by Metroidvania when using the same items. Samus, in Metroid, will remove her armor at the end, but only if the game is beaten fast enough” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Always More: A History of Gothic Motion from the Metroidvania Speedrunner,” 2019).

[16] “To play the game is to invade it, the hero’s body built to receive items that help them destroy the gameworld, but also themselves. They respond to the castle and its grim historical markers; over time, they are conditioned along a system of movement that can be taught, mastered through motion. By entering the heart of the castle, the hero confronts the past, but also becomes the answer to its riddle: the ultimate monster is merely an older, ‘forgotten’ version of themselves” (ibid.).

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Dreams, part three: the Monomyth and Cycle of Kings; or, “Perceptive Zombie Eyeballs”: Paralyzing Zombie Tyrants with Reverse Abjection (and Other Gothic Theories)

“And now I, Skeletor, am Master of the Universe!”

—Skeletor, Masters of the Universe (1987)

(exhibit 40a1a1: Frank Langella camps up the skeleton lord with the performance of a lifetime, doing so in a doomed production that barely got finished—and all to make his child [who loved the He-Man toys and cartoons[1]] happy. Similar to Dracula, Skeletor’s top priority is moody Shakespearean theatrics that steal the show from the boring male stoic: a queer death clown hamming it up as best he can. But his appetite knows no bounds, driving the story to repeat itself through a trademark, ghoulish hunger emblematic of the monomyth-as-zombie.)

Picking up from where “Escaping Jadis” left off…

Per the process of abjection, the middle class canonize the raping of nature, treating it as monstrous-feminine through the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., as something to punch, doing so in monomythic language that moves money through nature (repeating the grim harvest). As such, the undead become things to do battle with in some shape or form, as monomythic. Be that doll or dollhouse, castle or tyrant, they reify in magical, poetic forms that never quite existed, but whose rapacious, faux-medieval histories increasingly exist between reality and imagination, onstage and off: childhood as something to revisit in service to profit. The monomyth is the zombie “Bad Dreams,” part three will be looking at.

For all the usual size difference (next page) and Numinous elements, such things are canonically summoned to ultimately conquer by returning things to order—but not before teasing Radcliffe’s naughty-naughty demon lovers unto a ready-and-waiting (classically white female) readership: “rape” as a theatrical, highly creative means of playing with such mechanisms of desire as historical-material byproducts of genuine exploitation. It’s a disco, a monster party that hyphenates castle and occupant as divided into various binaries that must then be rejoined during Gothic Communism; i.e., abjuring rape through bad, Lewis-style echoes of itself, camping the nuclear-family-as-castle (the tyrannical husband as site of rape forecast by his oversized house) normally prone to the concealment of genocide (thus rape). If there’s a castle, there’s cryptonymy as a matter of rape, of genocide, of police abuse, etc.

To reclaim the cryptonymy process, we must camp it. To that, Persephone (the deity or me) likes being “raped”; i.e., as a campy means of Gothic play that challenges state edicts through paradoxical attractions thwarting abjection. “Don’t fear the reaper“; dance in the ruins, because big castle equals big “rape,” pointing ever and always to capital under Pax Americana (the state) as the true and ultimate rapist.

(artist: Sabine Esmeray)

So far, parts one and two of “Bad Dreams” have focused on the apocalypse; i.e., in accordance with the Imperial Boomerang and worker rememory as a forgotten humanizing process: the return of the living dead to devour the present inside itself, regarding the “mingling” of far-off places and interpersonal relationships across space-time. Part three shall now consider the monomyth and its tyrants extending the historical-material framework backwards and forwards.

The usual dualities persist, of course, involving canon as something to parry and iconoclastically subvert inside the usual grandiose stories—of the state-as-undead vs undead workers. One fundamentally searches for “victory” as a matter of total, blind revenge (“an eye for an eye”) against nature and death as a natural event, going the way of Caesar as a ghost thereof. The other offers “blindness” as paradoxically more perceptive; i.e., it becomes a question of zombie eyeballs that, far from being the kinds of “blank parody” that uphold capital (re: Jameson), freeze the cycles of return inside the same theatres, performances, and “rapes.” Placed in quotes, these offer a playful means of yielding more empathetic ways of looking at the world, having already been divided for conquest by capital: as undead, which in turn, freeze the mechanisms of capital—its tyrants forever coming home to roost—in place.

For the next six pages, we’ll go over some basic historical points about camping rape to challenge the monomyth with; then, we’ll provide the subchapter synopsis per section (with links).

To that, there’s far too many devices at play during the monomyth to focus simply on one of them. Instead, I want to combine the previous ideas (and to a lesser extent, ludo-Gothic BDSM[2]) while focusing on the poetic history of reversing abjection (and Athena’s Aegis): as a matter of monomythic theatre that also includes chronotopes (castles), revolutionary cryptonymy and emancipatory hauntologies (spectres of Marx).

Our aim is to catalog different poetic devices (e.g., the chronotope during the liminal hauntology of war as a cryptonymic feature to subvert state revivals with) that have already chilled the process of abjection and its kings, accounting for their ongoing creative histories’ complex (class-to-culture war) matter of interplay touching on the usual ultimatums: of undead heroes constantly coming home to roost under capital; i.e., as a matter of historical materialism being a half-real enterprise, one whose legendary returns—of the old, undead kings or nightly emperors—normally operate as a matter of prophecy integral to the canonical monomyth: “all our yesterdays” making the elite bank, inside the Torment Nexus raping workers and nature till the cows come home.

Such hellish recursions and regression always yield some kind of damned patriarchal wraith inside the Cycle of Kings, all while Cartesian thought preys on nature-as-food and monstrous-feminine[3] through police forces and bread-and-circus-style distractions; i.e., raping nature behind the usual half-veils. The world becomes an oyster to pry apart, a peach to slice. In turn, pro-state workers pacify through menticide, the eyes growing empathetically blind, the brain increasingly dead and the body increasingly numb to state tortures. Following this, state servants (and victims that give or receive state harm) sight the usual portals for destruction as sown into the land, the flesh, the work as things to personify and reap (thus rape) all over again.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Camping said rape is always a juggling act, and arbitration is always, to some degree, a random ordeal. For one, said history and its ritualized “solving” (through monomythic violence) discuss/argue a matter of return in imaginary territories that thrust upon the actual as altered through iconoclastic performance; i.e., a subversion of rape through a pedagogy of the oppressed that lies entirely in how you look at and with it, during liminal expression—zombie eyeballs as blind or perceptive regarding the state’s resurrecting of undead torments set on new territories: inside old, colonized lands, bodies (and parts of bodies) or any other representations of the colonized at large! The normalized outcome, then, is unironic exploitation: the land and its inhabitants becoming the usual peach to harvest (above), raping Medusa (from any angle, the front or the back) by the same old hauntological copies of Caesar/fascism, whose eyes are blind inside neoliberal treatments of those spectres[4]! Camping said rape is a planetary struggle, then, one whose reclamation is performed in small through our bodies and labor during the dialectic of the alien; i.e., as something to see, but also see with between stories: “We have been raped (and lied to) over and over again.”

In doing so onstage, such calculated risks showcase liberation as liminal offstage as well; i.e., something to conceptualize through abstractions of rape that yield sex-positive lessons informed by older histories we’re acting out once more: possible worlds starting as imaginary sites that threaten change as a furious ordeal, a death rattle that refuses to stop, but breathes into dead things fresh, impossible life! “Come and see. Let the scales fall from your eyes.”

(exhibit 40a1a2a: Model and artist, top-middle: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard. Harmony and I camp rape, leaning into the raping of nature as something to subvert through ourselves and our labor. Its materials work towards revolution; i.e., as a matter of rape play the world can learn from for the better! Trauma is acknowledged, but then stalled in future iterations by freezing the usual harvesters of nature by humanizing the victim [the harvest] and expressing the rapist as the monster who cannot stand the exposed reality to their crimes. “Rape” becomes a story to put into quotes, telling per piece what happened, once-upon-a-time, but also how it can change through later retellings of itself that yield new poetic histories build upon older ones [re: Lewis’ bad echoes].

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

For Harmony and myself, medievalism becomes a forward-facing regression, one whose 21st century Neo-Gothic yields cryptonymy as a revolutionary device: showing and hiding to challenge manufactured scarcity as the usual historical-material effect. “Rape,” then, becomes a paradoxical means of retelling our own destruction; i.e., as a taboo voice for psychosexual healing from police violence, developing good praxis through a pedagogy of the oppressed, one whose poetic excursions into a given “castle” synthesize new, oft-substantial forms thereof. All occur if to say to the audience, “Open wide!” with that fat zombie ass: “Rape me. ‘Fuck me in the ass if you love Jesus!'” Such theatrical sodomies unto Medusa is not actually ass rape, but touch on the Numinous terror such threats might normally supply to victims like her by the state; i.e., yet-another-thing to achieve liberation with using ludo-Gothic BDSM, exposing our abuse while playing with bad copies of it on the edge, so to speak, of our seats [to achieve systemic catharsis]: the mystery of a Numinous destroyer ravishing Medusa, the latter pushing the “rape me” button to call upon her strong-thighed lancer.

Any Gothicist should live through their vocations, we doing our gold-star  best to escape the text as a mere instrument of capital, thus Capitalist Realism [e.g., The Modern Martial Artist perpetually trapped inside the boxing ring as a source for profit, not critique[5]]. In doing so, the usual confusion of the senses, selective absorption, and magical assembly give rise to a Song of Infinity whose Aegis becomes something to stare into but also with; i.e., in both directions, reconciling old pains as a matter of fresh history through unspeakable things. These, in turn, become undeniably tangible during the rememory process: Milton’s darkness visible an enormous, thundering and shapely mise-en-abyme that becomes the data to yield, time and time again! Its delicious corruptions sit adjacent to harm, camping our survival while honoring those who didn’t as commodified by the state. When illustrating mutual consent, then, linguo-material elements of ambiguity always endure, and whose skillful, intuitive [second-nature] parsing must be raised across society’s understanding of the imaginary past—its rape a new Wisdom of the Ancients to learn and learn from.

This isn’t always the wail of the banshee in total agony absent of pleasure or brains [the madwoman in the attic], but something of a curious mixture of the two that seeks to challenge profit, thus rape, as historically administered by the state: through half-veiled threats of the tyrant coming back around. Like “Rome,” “Caesar” is the end of history as something to reinvent in so many doubles of the original, so many counterfeits furthering the process of abjection in service to a scared middle class. We find catharsis camping those, Persephone-style, to grow rebellious again; i.e., as princesses who have been raped, thus find our power where it normally resides: within fiction speaking to non-fiction. “We’re living in Gothic times.”

To critique power thus reclaim it, you must go where it is; reclamation is always, to some degree, a matter of rape play through Gothic poetics making arguments for liberation using violent aesthetics; e.g., the castle: a half-real chronotope to walk around inside, and one whose buried, dialectical-material aspects of power [rape under Capitalism rarefied cryptonymically as “castle” or “knight”] become monomythically dream-like. Once dispersed, such particles discharge to float around, bouncing back and forth like Walpole’s animated curios. Inadequacy and disempowerment become, as usual, a means of empowerment during ludo-Gothic BDSM: topping from below, like Milton’s Satan. “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light!” Or maybe the darkness is more fun [such play is often a byproduct of emergent play as intended by the text’s composers, architects to the structure as something to explore in ways they cannot predict, thus police].)

Like any zombie, the problem of state predation is one of canon-induced “bad sight”; i.e., a fundamental question of dream-like resurrection, one where sight becomes faulty by monomythical illusions that encourage police violence as a matter of regulating sex, terror and force, morphological expression, etc. Such monopolies always promise the tyrant’s return to resurrect itself—of seeing the thing upon which to feed and transfer power towards the state as a matter of canon: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” It’s all a lie, tribute boiling down to protection rackets by the imperium preying on the local benefactors (the middle-class nightmare of state collapse): orderly disposal per settler colonialism’s war of extermination turned in on itself.

(source: Bungie)

Luckily for us, such problems concern the reversing of abjection (and other Gothic theories) through zombie eyeballs that—far from divorcing themselves from their blind brethren—must engage with them in order to break the myopia of Capitalist Realism: a blindness the state normally relies on, which for workers constitutes a kind of reawakening through the undead as taking Hell back. Our “rape” onstage becomes something to consume, waking workers up to far-off realities that can be felt easily enough at home, mid-cryptonymy. There is always a castle to interrogate, a tyrant to dethrone, a queen to crown herself through the poetic catharsis of “rape,” of speaking out; the secret lies in what we consume as a matter of playing with rape to transform it: camping canon as a matter of profit, of rape, of the state’s usual flowing of power in the usual directions (always up, with lulls through decay raking profit back into the state’s troves, post-regeneration: a war chest)!

As shall hopefully become obvious, the methods to reversing abjection use Gothic theory as a matter of history-in-the-making party to a forever process: camping the monomyth. Older poetics like Milton or Blake (with Harmony reading Songs of Innocence and Experience, next page) continue to seize upon these thresholds to open the doors of perception; i.e., as a matter of zombie eyeballs, where said doors have become increasingly pacifying as a matter of Capitalist Realism. This means we must camp our own rapes as the old poets did, but under conditions that have developed for the worse in ways they only predicted using the language of their times borrowed from older and older poets.

To that, the Wisdom of the Ancients is a continuation of that thieving poetic trend, one that borrows liberally from the past as yielding different kinds of undead for different purposes; i.e., using the same old histories and historical elements once transformed, including the human body (and its social-sexual labor) as the almighty authors of such things! There’s an element of raw, naked bravery to such rebellion—an assistant to an artist going hand-in-hand towards a better future built on past “rapes” (as much as rapes without the quotes); the courage lies in facing its exposure, clapping back to challenge state tyranny in canonical poetic histories, the latter fatally doubling our Aegises—i.e., in the mirror state as one of endless conflict: between each mask, costume or veil as looking back and forth. It’s how we roll, bitches!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Medusa cannot be killed, any more than the state can—only driven to submission in either direction inside the usual shadow zones (until state shift, that is). The camping (and regained perception) of zombies (and their eyeballs), then, has a long history to it, one we shall now catalog and (to a lesser extent) camp in this subchapter (this emphasis will shift, in Volume Three) regarding monomythic zombies (and because we’re talking about tyrants, castles).

As such, we’re essentially talking about Gothic theatre, including kayfabe, as a matter of performative, imaginary history to look at/with (marrying the language of war and death, rape and love, food and refuse, etc); i.e., reviving fascist leaders that point to older instances of the same monomyth revivals elsewhere before and after the Third Reich; e.g., M. Bison (next page) being yet-another Nazi king zombie merged with Melmoth the Wandering Jew as the very backstabber Germany’s fascists warned against: themselves projected onto their victims, mid-Red-Scare. Per canon, this undead element of capital becomes something to revive, Frankenstein-style; i.e., in service to profit, vis-à-vis pre-fascist, fascist, and post-fascist forms inside neoliberal markets (videogames)!

(source: StreetFighter.com)

In turn, this cannibalism’s cycle of conquest loops in on itself, becoming something ouroborotic to expose like a black mirror. This happens less through overt comedy/camp (or “true camp,” per Jean Claude Van Damme and the truly amazing 1994 movie) and more through serious theatre with the power to camp canon in subtler ways; i.e., whose performances of death and disaster seem cyclically harmful, but actually have the subversive, non-harmful power to paralyze, thus pause and eventually transform, Cartesian dogma (and its tokenized elements): into actual stewards of nature, of workers, of either as monstrous-feminine food that Capitalism, once frozen, can no longer eat.

This being said, horror is a serial affair and introduces or removes irony per entry even without numbers. The zombie genre is certainly known for its comedies and spoofs—every tired genre is, requiring comedy to inject life into dead things; i.e., from Matthew Lewis onwards; e.g., Shaun of the Dead and Dead-Alive[6] (1992). Part zero (included in this post) briefly examines Mandy (2018) as monomythic pastiche par excellence (with elements of camp) married to Lovecraftian homophobia, futile revenge and substance abuse. The remainder of the subchapter examines the function of sight as a Promethean, reverse-abjecting factor in against three zombie monomyth tyrant types in three primary texts over two parts

• Part one covers the Cartesian hero/man-of-reason in Forbidden Planet and its Metroidvania[7] offshoots (all stemming from Frankenstein): the decayed man of reason versus the Archaic Mother during movement through the hauntological castle; i.e., castle-narratives.
• Part two features the crime lord in The Crow (1994) and the Caesar-style warlord/fascist cult of death, in Myth: the Fallen Lords.

(artist: Els)

After those, part three concludes the entire section; i.e., discussing how Capitalism is the great zombie, one that through its endless undead wars and decayed power fantasies haunting Capitalist Realism! Regardless of what form the tyrant takes when we freeze them in place, it’s always an undead extravaganza, a monomyth monster party to make the old mattress squeak as postcolonial (fucking to metal, to disco, to rock ‘n roll, as turbulent, taboo, “rapacious” and fun); i.e., decolonizing the Gothic through seasons in the abyss that challenge profit using our own “beauteous orbs” (next page), but really anything that gives off the Medusa’s trademark “big” vibes: undead and monstrous-feminine in ways that resist censorship, but also transgress[8] it in all the usual places of monomythic rape. As I write in Volume Zero:

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

Per the monomyth, a hero is classically incentivized by rape as the prize—to boldly go into “Hell” as place on Earth, then execute the state’s will; i.e., settler-colonial violence dressed up as “past”; e.g., a carrot-like princess in exchange for killing Medusa (the monstrous-feminine) to, per Cartesian thought, prey on nature-as-food but also themselves. Regardless of the giver or recipient, all present an opportunity to move money through nature.

But even if all capitalists were dead as a matter of proposal, the warzone and its derelict ordinance would still remain: the Gothic castle as an undead mind prison. Stuck cannibalizing itself, we’ll pointedly examine this curiosity with Metroidvania, but also open battlefields when looking at different monomythic undead (the crime lord, and warlords aping Zombie Caesar). Whatever the form, wherever the field (open or closed space), such actions are generally guided by inheritance anxiety feeling the fears of self-made extinction; i.e., insofar as the buffer of settler-colonial walls and projections (of ample “treasure,” below) become false (thus fruitless) harvests that, suitably grim, cannot fully conceal or disguise the state’s usual operations.

In short, Medusa must always “pay rent,” but the “cake” (the waifu, next page, or wheyfu, below[9]) is always a lie: the illusory promise of marital sex. Such dreams are woefully common under Capitalism, insofar as capital foists the conditions necessarily for wanting them (the manufacture trifecta) onto workers; i.e., as a matter of Gothic history in service to the state, scaring you with cataclysm, then offering the cure: a mommy equipped with the god-like goods to even out such nightmares (whatever the audience wants those to be, but generally under a Male, heteronormative/tokenized gaze).

Although reversing abjection is our goal when camping the monomyth, it cannot happen without revolutionary cryptonymy. So let’s unpack that concept a little more (about six pages) before moving onto Mandy and part zero.

(artist, left: Zaloran; right: Romantic Rose)

Canonical rewards promise big things to weird canonical nerds as a matter of cryptonymy (from Dark Soul’s “Amazing Chest Ahead” with Princess Gwynevere, left, to Resident Evil Village‘s Lady Dimitrescu announced by her own fabulous “home,” exhibit 49). The problem is, they—like Gwynevere’s huge, melon-sized knockers (synonymized with crops, but also treasure as a phallic container’s “soccer goal” of sorts: chest, booty or box, etc, as belonging to a chattelized virgin/whore)—are cruel, intentionally misleading illusions that trap the ravenous hero-as-undead[10] inside an infernal concentric pattern (oscillating between the woman as castle, or vice versa); i.e., where they’re always eating dead things (the princess is a sex object of courtly pursuit for the hero’s massive “lance,” a sacrifice but also an illusion, a ghost).

As such, the narrative of the crypt is literally an illusion inside an illusion, per Hogle’s acknowledgment of Radcliffe’s concentric enchantments in Udolpho (re: “The Restless Labyrinth”): “a crypt that is, in fact, only an illusion of a crypt,” one whose “double operation of revealing to conceal” speaks to the heart of classic Gothic stories. There’s always a princess in another castle—a big-ass fake “castle.” The devil is in the details, but also on their surface as frankly discussing things (through medievalized poetics) that capital has alienated us from: sex and rape as tied to and expressed with our labor and our bodies.

More to the point, such fantastic de rigeur is always dualistic, but canonically raised by persons cognitively estranged from reality (accommodated intellectuals) who project/abject their fictions onto real atrocities dressed up; e.g., Radcliffe; i.e., to say the quiet part in a theatrical, dissident, and wackily “medieval” loudness: the ghost of the counterfeit as “thicc,” buxom, zaftig. Doing so was (and is), in the Humanist tradition, speaking truth (or something resembling its opposite that inverts easily enough) through bizarre creative activities: gigantic, corporal-to-architectural abstraction. The map of said pattern is hyperreal but still conducts genocide as part of capital through Pavlovian, thus blind, monomythic eyes—the hero’s and what they’re looking at (from tits to ass, castle to landscape).

State conditioning, then, is very much like a broken bone that has healed wrongly. Insofar as state education amounts to physical, mental and emotional abuse (rape, menticide), monomythic dogma calls fearfully upon state soldiers to defend, thus police, a pearly castle fallen upon hard times (re: ACAB—castles and cops) during capital’s usual cycles of gentrification and decay to serve profit. It’s a vampiric function that feeds on all parties—an Omelas, or city of happiness, that becomes abominable even when the total hapless victim is reduced to a single person; i.e., happiness at the expense of others, which is what settler colonialism ultimately is. To fix the problem, you generally have to break what’s in place on the surface of itself: a dark, operatic reflection that exposes the tyrant in self-destructive ways that, contrary to popular thought (and state monomyths), can then be rewritten. The harvest is humanized through orchards that cut themselves up as adjacent to rape and exploitation—with irony as a cryptonymic matter of camping medieval poetics!

First, we show the tyrant that their destiny is not invincibility through infinite conquest, but the same doom that all men share as one where nature and death overcome them and their fatal bloodline. In turn, the reflection of the hero and castle as fatal is projected ignominiously back onto the audience; i.e., rendering them the dupe, a sacrifice to kill once-feral to apologize for (and hide) the overarching structure: a black knight returning from Hell, a Zombie Caesar’s ghost of “Rome” to try and revive, fail, then behead in an endless series thereof. Per ancient warrior culture, the taking of the head constitutes the taking of one’s adversary by force—oneself; for Medusa, this signifies “castration” as a crude cryptonymic metaphor that places the power of the man at his head, except he has two: the enemy is weak and strong!

(source: Snapchipper’s “Myth II: Soulblighter – Intro (AI Upscaled),” 2020).

Speaking of two, and keeping things in line with the metaphor of sight (and taking a leaf from Sophocles), we have to dig out the eyes of the would-be hero (us) and replace them with undead eyes that can actually see through cryptonymy’s fatal illusion while inside Plato’s cave. Except the surgery isn’t a literal operation on our eyes, but the very thing which causes our eyes, both figurative and literal, to see “badly” in relation to the world around us: the monomyth, and its usual benefactors and agents, as things to freeze, thus liberate ourselves from as conditioning devices; i.e., revolutionary cryptonymy challenging profit to garner post-scarcity as a matter of sentiment, first and foremost: hearts and minds.

This sea change happens by adopting a pre-capitalist frankness using “ancient” medieval language like Athena’s Aegis (the power of the Medusa—her fat ass, but also her cryptonymic cover to operate behind and with). Such cryptonymy challenges Cartesian thought and Capitalist Realism’s usual seeing and hiding of the world; i.e., the hellish place to conquer and rape: a disco-style monster party to escape exploitation through calculated risk subverting genocide. You want it to slap, to fuck, to hurt after it heals as a matter of emulation to our still-aching scars.

Castle or cop, ACAB. Person or place, then, the monomyth is baked into capital’s cycles of crisis and return, one whose inevitable decay brings Imperialism home to empire as something to whisper of, then profit in service to Capitalist Realism; i.e., profit as rape, but specifically undead rape, when castle and conqueror emerge from Hell and go back where it all began (exposing paradise as inverted, its mendacious pastoral a gruesome and fallen cite of rape and abuse, built on genocide from the start).

As we’ll see through the rest of the subchapter, then, there’s an element not just of hubris, but Icarian grandeur to such heroes; i.e., a rise-and-fall cycle of gentrification and decay to giant-like Caesars, but also their fortresses as they fend off imaginary barbarians (and big ladies) to eventually return from Hell as fascist undead conquerors (slaves to death as a hauntological matter of capital that hijacks their corpses); i.e., the Imperial Boomerang during the Cycle of Kings, whose rapists of “Rome” emerge as kayfabe-style heels during the liminal hauntology of war to bring Imperialism (conqueror and castle) home to a weakened empire. In turn, Capitalist Realism abuses the ghost of the counterfeit (the ritual sacrifice of Medusa as matter of the undead patriarch’s petty revenge) to try and maintain the structure, whose sorry game of “follow the leader” must be subsequently camped through Galatean forces; i.e., with perceptive zombie eyeballs employing an aesthetic of power and death—anything tied to or extending from their bodies and labor as exploited by the state’s usual exceptions, abuses, and jurisdictions (re: cops, castles, tokens).

(artist: VG Yum)

There’s great jouissance, not nihilism, in the restless labyrinth. But, as always is the case when reversing abjection, revolutionary cryptonymy’s subversion of the monomyth, martyr and Medusa cannot pass without exposing some inconvenient and uncomfortable truths; i.e., about the home and hero, namely those behind the map of empire as decayed, but also an instrument of our own demise routinely dressed up as heroism-made-gigantic. You have to freeze the process by showing it as it really is through liminal expression, confronting death then cutting off its head; i.e., freezing can cause rape but also prevent it (and other abuses/elements of risk) when applied correctly against the usual villains. Whatever their flavor/outward appearance, a zombie warlord is functionally no different than a mad scientist, god king or slum lord. All operate through revenge as a matter of capital raping Medusa per the dialectic of shelter/the alien. Their unhoused discomfort, then, is our liberation, the clown queen set free to “rape” the world (transing your kids, making the frogs gay and so on) by dismantling its rapacious, stately elements.

Except, that’s only half the battle. The question remains, what is done with the giant’s head afterwards? The classic approach is nothing. In Myth: the Fallen Lords, for example, Balor embodies the Leveler (a symbol of death in medieval thought); once severed, his head is hurled into the Great Devoid, constituting a deliberate and unstable act of forgetting and sacrifice—i.e., a volcano akin to Mount Doom, whose expensive, monomythic band-aid sits on a mortal wound that only leads the Leveler to one day return. We must not only cut the head off, but prevent its inevitable return by breaking the historical-material cycle of growing such heads to begin with; i.e., remaking war-as-undead, the liminal hauntology thereof per the monomyth hero starting off innocent, only to become corrupted inside Hell through a franchise that, itself, sees many rebirths along the same track; e.g., Contra: Operation Galuga[11] (2024).

In terms of sight, this postcolonial reckoning must occur using a powerful-but-Gothic healing process: facing the settler-colonial trauma that these legends’ undead cryptonymies (their castles) orbit around and announce through warlike hunger and hauntological decay run amok. Trapped between the past and present, it becomes as much something to see with as look at, and has many poetic and cryptonymic iterations: blindfolds to see with as a matter of complicated power exchange per the cryptonymy process.

As we proceed, then, remember two things: that healing hurts—is a continuation that we consciously contribute towards—and pain isn’t bad, including the hero’s ignominious death provided it leads to systemic healing. Except the Hero’s Journey classically doesn’t. As such, the Promethean Quest unites with Medusa as thoroughly un-Cartesian by using her Aegis (through the Metroidvania and similar stories) to transform the very illusions at work, breaking Capitalist Realism to bits, thus helping workers imagine a better world inside the ruin (re: the caterpillar and the wasp).

As we shall see, this requires surrendering harmful illusions of power through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a palliative-Numinous affair—a date with a Dark Mother (mommy dom, below) generally invoked in everyday people speaking of such a reunion through their own art’s fruitful angles, ample body parts and dark dimensions: someone to woo and wow us while mastering and molesting us (consensually)—to fuck our brains out and say, “There, there!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

“Death,” then, isn’t something to fear because, when done right, it announces the beginning of a wonderful friendship: a monstress “mommy” as mistress, muse and mentor leading us towards something better than the routine, essentialized, and habitual rape of nature-as-alien; but, as a blindfolded[12] person, speaks to a revelation through cryptonymy as concealed and exposed—i.e., by the mother as one of a monstrous-feminine force, sitting her cushy bum on a dark secret that can set us free beyond the Imperium’s blinding sights: “Mommy’s got a secret, but what?”

Whatever that is, the mother-in-question grapples with rape and death as things to playfully learn from and pass vital information along special conduits; i.e., ostensibly dated and blind, but in truth more perceptive through ludo-Gothic BDSM as “past.”

As a matter of canonical enchantments, it’s a place for the usual monomythic plunderers and white-to-black knights to come back from: Hell, from which to rape empire back at home again, and again, and again. By comparison, Medusa loves to be “raped” in order to make herself (and the paradoxical visions associated with her) more perceptive regarding the returning abusers. As poetic lens and argument, she’s the ultimate whore, packing power of a suitably awesome variety and scale to camp rape, mid-calculated-risk; i.e., as normally a matter of police violence serving capital by raping the whore sans irony! The greatest myth of Prometheus, then, is that the gods are gods at all, and that they have the power to contend with Medusa when she gets mad.

To this, there’s an architectural flavor we’ve discussed already (re: “Castles in the Flesh,” 2024) and will do so more when reexamining Metroidvania, in part two. Per Rudolph Otto, Manuel Aguirre and myself, these travelers frequently yield as a mysterium tremendum that merges resident and residence: a flying castle, vis-à-vis Dracula’s or the Nostromo, sailing oddly through outer space. To it, all the usual principles of cryptonymy (and its application, mid-castle-narrative) apply—to look at Medusa’s severed head—abstract and mixed-metaphor but still undeniably to-the-point—and suddenly “get it”: her vanity one of survival to spite her abusers (normally stabbing and shooting her as a matter of cartographic endeavors in service to profit; re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain).

Except the city of death, when summoned by us, isn’t banished temporarily back to the great void of public memory. When explored and gotten to the bottom of, its monomyth can heal in ways that—while embarrassing and painful (“pride cometh before the fall”)—successfully prevent it and the state’s return, thus their raping of us; i.e., by permanently altering the settler-colonial conditions that bring such reunions about during Capitalist Realism: the return of Caesar and Medusa, the latter exposing the former as rapist and for which she has her revenge.

Doing so effectively ends said Realism by breaking the spell for good, yet the symbols remain, as do their sex-positive function through a learned act of reunion with trauma—again, what Toni Morrison would call “rememory”—that gathers us together to stand, brick-by-brick, against genocidal forces; i.e., by routinely performing ludo-Gothic BDSM as a counterterrorist, educational, iconoclastic means of worker defense against state trifectas, monopolies, canon, what-have-you.

Call the idea Satanic apostacy and the means to advocate for the devil as punished by the state—us. The fact remains, our mission operates at cross purposes with theirs—their mission and objectives of disguise, concealment and lies versus ours; the difference is, they’re shady and mendacious by virtue of what they dishonestly project onto us to better their own image while harming us. Except, just as monsters are anisotropic (flow determines function), cryptonymy is a revelation that conceals, but per Gothic irony allows us to hide within Capitalism’s daily operations while subverting their function with some degree of stealth and underestimation (that of the blind cripple)—a cloaked revolution achieved with Gothic poetics in opposition to the state; i.e., through a splendid mendax, a beautiful liar both a devil and undead, oft-animalized being that challenges the usual pro-state arrangements’ direction of power and force (might makes right).

The state, on the other hand, relies on complicit concealment through these same poetics, using their cryptonymy to blind us to the actual threat, and one which we must generally glean and prevent through a series of concentric illusions while blindfolded. Trussed up, the vision of the Oracle isn’t reliant entirely on organs of pure sight, which are easily deceived, but the power of seeing through harmful illusions with undead empathy (and eyeballs/vision) as cultivated inside medicinal double: a second-nature, collective intuition embodying Gothic Communism through ludo-Gothic BDSM (and various devices: the Black Veil, demon lover and palliative Numinous, etc) to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness, reversing abjection now until the sun burns out.

 

(artist: the Maestro Noob)

Granted, that is our revenge. Capital is a means of profit tied to the monomyth as futile in preventing rape, because it requires it to perpetuate itself through revenge as doomed: raping Medusa until she snaps.

We’ll explore that madness next, with Mandy!

The Monomyth, part zero: Mandy, Homophobia and the Problem of Futile Revenge (feat. H.P. Lovecraft)

“So, what you huntin’?”

“Jesus freaks.”

“…I didn’t know they were in season, man.”

“Yeah, well… […] They lit her on FIRE! They were weirdo, hippie-types, whole bunch of ’em. And then there was some muscle – it didn’t make any sense. There were bikers, and gnarly psychos, and… crazy evil.”

—Caruthers and Red Miller, Mandy

Whereas zombies and the apocalypse have a predominantly dream-like function that struggles to recollect history under a presence of repressed trauma and death, abjection and reverse abjection more broadly are defined by sight; i.e., according to what is being viewed and how the viewer views themselves in relation to what they are looking at and with. In this case, both are affected by the delivery system—a black mirror or Aegis, in Gothic language—as a tool of rape; i.e., one committed by the middle class through their own bad dreams/rape play in service to the state: the monomyth raping Medusa (and the dragon lord, Nazi destroyer) to gatekeep workers inside canceled-future, neoliberal illusions. By extension, capital’s built-in entropy makes these decay—flying into particles that, pre-ejection, still vibrate menacingly (a death rattle). It’s a mood, a tone poem we can hijack.

Abjection, then, is to throw off that which the self is not, maintaining this Cartesian binary by continually rejecting the cast-off elements’ radiation (charged particles); Promethean narratives patently reverse this process (re: Aguirre), dooming the hero by patently revealing their own monstrous nature to them. This happens through a subversion of Campbell’s dubious monomyth; i.e., the infernal concentric pattern and the extinction of the hero’s hopes, dreams, possessions, etc, as bound at the hip to the fantastic spaces that reify them. It’s important, then, to acknowledge ourselves as both undead and spiraling down a path of self-destruction supplied to us by design; i.e., Capitalist Realism as built out of old bricks (or quasi-edible garbage, below). So, too, is our paradoxical liberation, our zombie eyeballs learning to become perceptive once more through less perceptive, unhealthy forms of undeath normally hungering for revenge like a bad drug. Gotta start somewhere. For us, that’s Mandy and H.P. Lovecraft:

Directed by Paul Cosmatos, I’m choosing Mandy because it a) makes fun of the heroic quest as a futile act of undead revenge, while b) crystalizing it inside a timeless nostalgia common to more serious (unironic) iterations; i.e., Lovecraft as a deeply homophobic man. We’ll start with Mandy by outlining its drug-like quest for revenge; i.e., as fueled by the kinds of us-versus-them fears that Lovecraft played with having gone onto inform and characterize Mandy‘s camp (and end with a small postscript/reminder about feeding and holistic expression).

To that, Mandy is campy to an extent, but showcases a bitter heteronormative truth: the hero of the classic monomyth is always a monster on a formulaic quest of revenge, one for which there is no return (and which queerness is dressed up as the psychosexual, monstrous-feminine catalyst). Sold and fed to us like cheap food (e.g., “Cheddar Goblin,” above—the secret star of the show as haunting Capitalism through its usual anti-Semitic conspiracies reduced to cheap, amazingly absurd, Camus-style gags), it’s a sure-fire descent into Hell, catalyzed by the presence of go-to heroes; grandiose, arguably gay villains; and helpless, doomed damsels.

(exhibit 40a1a2a: Artist, bottom-middle: Romantic Rose; bottom-right [source]: Patrick Zircher, Christian Rosado and Al Barrionuevo. In the presence of calamity as felt, we invent heroes to perform, thus achieve, catharsis. All at once completely trashy and deranged extravagance—of the senses, on par with Rimbaud; although we’ve called this device “confusion” instead of “derangement,” the eye-popping idea is identical—Mandy plays with nostalgia to highlight unconformable truths about our world; i.e., as projected onto an outlandish, fantasy one: not the princess being a slut [which the villain simultaneously craves and hates, Jim-Morrison-style], but that she arguably never existed [meaning her husband is trapped in a lie of revenge he cannot escape/drives him to endlessly commit further acts of undead violence towards new enemies]! Except, Mandy’s paradoxical haunting isn’t just a nation-creation myth birthing the wrathful tyrant, her bereaved, insane husband; it speaks to the usual disassociation and derealization of any rape victim, to which their significant others often feel alienated from [re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, with Cuwu and I working through such membranes vis-à-vis Gothic stories to find, however futile it might seem, similarity amid difference]: the family man seeking revenge against a queer, degenerate enemy for the death of his wife.

There’s an eerie-yet-beautiful unreality to the entire production, then, one that feels all in Cage’s head and poured out of said head into the world for us to occupy as well. Here, we see Persephone as the warrior through Cage, her denuded maidenesque precisely the kind of undead covering that Segewick describes in “Imagery of the Surface” [1981] as “the sexual function of veils” [source]. It’s something to look at and reveal/revel in sexual trauma as simultaneously hidden by a nostalgic, cartoon version of itself referred to backwards [with 1981’s Heavy Metal being a clear influence]. Mandy becomes something for Cage to seek but can never have [the only ones actually having sex in the movie are the Barker-style sex demons, Radcliffe’s demon lover with a new coat of paint on top of more coats]: the chaste knight’s great reward.

[artist: Romantic Rose] 

The modesty of the Neo-Gothic’s original, middle-class conservatism always teases the hero as “on the cusp” [the man, ready to penetrate, the woman ready to receive him]. Except, the Gothic communicates power on its surfaces to a mythical, androgynous degree that subverts just as easily. To that, a princess of the nocturnal, Persephone sort [which Mandy very much is] always features whore-like and virgin-esque qualities: something to look at. It’s not a position of weakness.

Rather, the princess’ intense sexual energies are charged, fruit-like, and swollen with a massive, giantess, phallic woman’s power that belies any seemingly delicate or small characteristics [e.g., Rose, above, her face hidden by fleshy softness as something to seek, but also asexually respect as a matter of cryptonymy’s usual barriers: to look and see the beauteous orbs[13] without touching them]. Said power is half-real, consuming the hero, Red, and speaking endlessly to Mandy’s abuse as that of a lived experience common to so many women/monstrous-feminine in and out of fiction.

Something of a Schrödinger’s “cat,” she phases in and out of existence, but feels utterly tangible and close to the hero; i.e., as a matter of flowing power anisotropically towards workers, the duality of the Gothic’s shadow zone using the same wardrobe—the medieval aesthetics, wacky performances, and playing with power [and sex] as a bad, thoroughly ace-level joke on purpose [from Chaucer’s Miller to Kevin Smith’s somewhat more obscure Pillow Pants addressing and manifesting the same basic concerns about sex and religion]: as something to transfer accordingly. It’s “almost holy”—a bad religion haunting the cathedral as remade into a joke of a thing that never quite existed [from Rome to the Goths to the medieval period to Walpole, on and on; re: Baldrick].

 In the Gothic, then, existence itself is always strained/a matter of endless struggle, and struggle is fraught with oscillation in and out of itself—what is, what could be, what has happened threatening the viewer all once through troubling comparison; they’re always on the cusp of something great, yearning to penetrate that greatness, but also daring to embody it: as something to explore and express because it cannot be penetrated. Ostensibly headless like Medusa, Rose’s whorish performance—when contained behind such revolutionary barriers by virtue of context—becomes impenetrable, but simultaneously able to express past harm [and future salvation] as a matter of paradoxical agency protected inside the illusory realm of fatal nostalgia, of calculated risk. So does Mandy.

To it, safety and “danger” [with or without quotes] are all part of the exhibit, the context; i.e., as something to play with on any register and showcase in totality [to illustrate mutual consent]: nothing is stronger than the submissive as having fostered mutual consent as a matter of social-sexual boundaries, of recultivating the Superstructure on all levels, but also reclaiming our bodies and labor for liberation as thoroughly Gothic-Communist. It’s what this book is all about!)

Thoroughly inundated in heady drugs and emphera—from the hag’s infernal, witch’s-brew eye drops and wasp “cherry on top” piercing Mandy’s neck; Cage’s bottomless whiskey and coke; the entire crucifixion scene and its sense of martyred rapture before and after Mandy dies; sodomy, gimp outfits and spiked blood spilled during thrill-kill BDSM; and the Black Skull’s bad LSD stored in mason jars like moonshine (a gift from the Chemist to Sand, who uses the drugs to motivate the Skulls to work for him as “muscle,” and which Cage later takes to become a Skull, in effect replacing them)—torture and illicit drug use permeate the entire film.

Cage, then, is the movie’s mule, failing sobriety mid-gang-war to climb to the top of the heap (said war suggested by the demon bikers, alluding to actual American highway gangs like the Hell’s Angels, routinely exporting hard drugs across state lines to become something of a neoliberal boogeyman when failing state illusions coincided more and more with the collapse that accompanied them). It’s the usual monomyth power fantasy (revenge-killing an evil ruler’s cronies, eventually dethroning the tyrant and replacing him) literally fueled by drugs.

It’s campy to some extent because the quest unravels inside of itself (and the mind of its unstable, vampiric hero); i.e., as a kind of madness integral to its continuation. The more Cage takes, the crazier (and bloodthirstier) he gets, reality flying apart until he becomes yet another tyrant. In the end, the constant torture and drugs bake the hero’s brain, leaving the viewer with the lingering, uneasy feeling that Mandy may have never been real. Instead, Cage basically smiles at the gods (as only Cage can), capitalists having trapped him in a drug-fueled, Sisyphean-style quest for revenge (which the monomyth essentially is: chasing Persephone as the princess in another castle, however virginal or whorish she appears).

Except, for all Mandy‘s posturing about final victory within fatal nostalgia, the monomyth remains as addictively harmful to the world (and workers) as that hellish goblin macaroni—a fact the movie delights in and stresses for its entire run time: heroism is a drug built on revenge to serve profit, a holy grail to chase ever onwards into the oblivion of late-stage Capitalism. Saying nothing of his endless body count, then, Cage is the movie’s central victim—a shell of a man hopelessly trapped inside the movie’s painfully consistent tightrope/recipe of paranoia; i.e., a bad batch on purpose, its product carefully cultivated through perceived loss as a driving force that catalyzes nonstop genocide. Instead of sheer delusion for its own sake, we’re given criminal indulgence inside a Lovecraftian homophobia gelling to the sort of fatal nostalgia Mandy returns to capitalize on; i.e., abjecting queer people as capital’s usual victims under Satanic panic. His drug is literally blood—the spilled blood of the innocent gays dressed up as sexual deviants crushed under Christofascist dogma.

In fact, as I write about Mandy in my 2018 review of the film, its procedure is so widespread, toxic and deadpan that many people replicate and parody the same basic code without seeing the homophobic elements; e.g., me (the review is quite germane to our continued examination of the Cycle of Kings and monomyth as things to critique, so I’d like to include a fair chunk of it to make my point: I didn’t notice the homophobia because I was in the closet when I wrote it):

Mandy is a fantasy tale of revenge that forces Cage into a largely mute role. The actor’s somewhat constrained delivery assists the narrative versus hijacking it; the story is at once a fairy tale and a Western, with horror themes: an old gunslinger working a menial job must return to a life of violence after his wife is killed. To do so, he must also return to drinking and meeting with old, bellicose friends. His bloody quest is two-fold, the villain tucked away in a tower, guarded by parallel agents who swear fealty to no one and delight in mayhem. They cannot be killed; Cage encounters them, first, only to learn what they are, later. These skirmishes feel parallel to the villain, Jeremiah Sand. The bikers push Cage towards Sand, similar to how Eric Draven is led towards Top Dollar by T-Bird and his pals.

The events onscreen are pastiche, understated (much how George Lucas retooled Flash Gordon and Akira Kurosawa for a new generation, with Star Wars). I recognized the nods to Mad Max, except the chase is through a black forest, not a desert, and with a Suburban, not a V8. The weapons are a crossbow with two bolts, and an ax straight out of Star Trek, Conan the Barbarian (1981) or Krull (1983). There’s even a slow, deliberate forging sequence John Milius might have used, in Conan. What’s important is that the story works as a fantasy and a Western and a revenge film, separately and together. Much of this has to do with the visuals, music and dialogue, which exist “as is,” unfolding in ways that allow us to sit back and watch. We remain uncertain as to where exactly it’s going even if the general idea is more or less straightforward. It feels familiar but fresh—a new combination of old parts that succeeds on multiple levels. The dialogue is both lite and abundant. It unfolds like a conversation, not as exposition.

During his quest, Cage goes from person to person, often meeting these individuals once and once only. They feel like part of the world, one that lives and breathes. We need not know who they are; we need only see what wisdom (or arms) they impart. It is what Bakhtin refers to as the Road, wherein the motif of meeting is employed. On it, Cage meets many different people, but in a larger world the movie can only suggest [amounting to a cult of drugs, Cage hijacking its supply from the Chemist to, in short, trip harder than Sand does]. Any sense of rapport or animosity is understated. All that matters is the quest. We’re simply along for the ride. The villain, Sand, monologues much how Little Bill, Top Dollar or Thulsa Doom do; their dialogue is to be heard in the moment, not pieced into a larger puzzle. It is an act of villainy to be viewed, not a mystery to solve. They are hypnotic, not cryptic.

We learn Sand is ruthless, not only a villain, but transparently so [in short, he’s a total dumbass; e.g., “Do you like the Carpenters? (I’m) like them, but better!”]. This same transparency applies to the heroes and side characters. Cage is implacable: his lover was killed; he’ll settle the score any way he can. He largely speaks through action, through facial expression (Cage’s strong suit). More often than not, he’s covered in blood, his nose rimmed with rings of dusty cocaine. He drinks, he cries; there’s little need for him to spell it out. We’ve seen it, firsthand, and he’s often alone. When he’s in the company of others, they know who he is. Bill Duke inquiries, but only just (Cage’s explanation is one of the movie’s funnier moments). Then Cage sets forth, armed to the teeth.

These stories involve terrible loss and resurrection, working in tandem. Cage’s darkest moment is fairly early on. Mandy is killed; Cage is strung up with barbed wire, wearing a halo of “thorns” like Jesus except as a gag. Sand even pierces Cage’s side with a spear. From the brink, Cage comes back to put the wrong things right. If this sounds familiar, it is. In The Crow, Eric Draven is killed before the movie even starts, his death revealed in flashback; when he revives, he is largely unstoppable… until Top Dollar injures Eric’s crow companion (“Lemme give you an impression: ‘Caw! Caw! Bang, fuck, I’m dead!'”). In Conan, the hero’s mother and family are killed; he is made a slave. Failing to kill Thulsa Doom, he is crucified. After being brought back from the dead, Conan must endure the death of his lover at Thulsa Doom’s hand. Continually driven, Conan finally kills his nemesis for good. Bereavement serves to strengthen the hero unto final victory [except there is no victory because his loved one is forever dead; all that remains is revenge, glory and hollow victory].

The point at which the lover is murdered can vary further still. In Unforgiven, William Munny’s wife dies of natural causes, with William standing over her grave during the opening prologue. Recruited for a hit, William is pummeled by Little Bill (not even his target). Later, William returns to kill Bill, but only after the other man kills William’s friend. Another hero—Max, from Mad Max—only kills Toe-Cutter and his minions after they kill his wife and child: there is no moment where Max is beaten, himself. He handily bests the Night-Rider, early on; Toe-Cutter and his men die just as easily. In the “sequel,” Max’s family is already gone. He is fed upon by Lord Humongous, whose army destroys Max’ car. Nursed back to health, he survives and, returned to full strength, deals with his enemies in a final, protracted chase sequence. In Mandy’s case, there is no stopping Cage once Mandy is killed. And that’s the point: he can kill as many of the demon bikers as he wants; they’ll laugh and tell him Mandy is “still burning” in hell [translation: still fucking sex demons instead of her husband]. How can one defeat someone with violence, if violence and dying are what they love? It’s a clever twist. Even if the movie is simply a variation of old parts, it’s done well. [He’s Achilles deprived of Patroclus, killing until everything is dead, including himself as “undead.”]

Cage’s reintegration to violence is gradual. Initially he and Mandy enjoy their pastoral home, announced by sparkling Disney font. Cage is almost gentle. Then, Sand’s toady summons the bikers, parallel to Cage’s own, inner killer. Driven to avenge his wife, his bloodlust mounts through constant battle. The bikers are less defeated so much as escaped from. Cage careens his Suburban off one, kneeling in the middle of the road. They capture him, relish in seeing the old killer (a biker, like them) regress. Covered in blood, he pounds whiskey and blow to see things through. By fighting actual demons, Cage confronts his own. Sand’s cohorts are all but obliterated, bested one by one. Some put up a fight. Some do not. Cage kills them all, insatiable death-dealer that he is.

The variations continue. Sand isn’t as scrappy as Top Dollar. The latter would lay traps and fight as dirty as possible; Sand uses the power of voice and little else. Unforgiven featured no seduction; Little Bill was simply overconfident, backed by a crew that outnumbered William many times over. In Conan, Thulsa Doom’s host fell at the battle of the mounds; all he had left was his voice. Like Doom, Sand’s men are reduced well before. His voice cannot stop Cage from crushing him to ignominious death (wonderful gore effects). Cage leaves, but not before burning the cultist’s temple to the ground, as Conan did with Thulsa Doom’s. There is no princess to rescue, this time around; the villain is dead, as is Cage’s bride. With nothing left to achieve, our hero rides off into the sunset, presumably onto other adventures (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Mandy (2018): Review,” 2019).

This all seems rather formulaic, right? The problem replicating the monomyth to camp it with “Nazi death sex” is that said code has a lot of poorly disguised homophobia to it; i.e., it doesn’t try to distinguish the queer from the Nazi; e.g., Sand as a serial killer whose sexuality is essentialized as queer by virtue of it being a disorder. He’s defined as violent and cruelty—lashing out the moment Mandy rejects his penis by sight. She laughs at him; he burns her alive.

The problem is, all of this is queer-coded in ways that don’t camp the 1980s. For example, when Sand is cornered, he begs Red to spare his life (“I’ll suck your dick, man!”)… only to shift back to the psychosexual tyrant butting heads with the straight man. Sand isn’t just a false preacher but a destroyer of women who uses his disposable flock to get what he wants. Why? Because he’s secretly gay!

At least, that’s how it’s coded, sadly. That’s precisely the sort of cliché, hateful bigotry that informs Mandy‘s camp, depriving the narrative of irony the likes of which Matthew Lewis wouldn’t have sacrificed on the altar. Simply put, commodifying struggle is generally done by straight men or tokenized elements, of which Lewis wasn’t. This makes Mandy’s camp something of a dated, backwards, and ultimately regressive character. As such, it furthers the process of abjection, raping the monstrous-feminine in service to capital, business-as-usual: the straight man’s revenge.

We’ll get to some of the origins of Mandy‘s homophobia when we look at Lovecraft, in just a moment. First, let’s examine the churchly structures the film raises (then razes); i.e., as a matter of scapegoating capital’s assigned victim: the monstrous-feminine (which is what being queer under Capitalism essentially is—anything that a white cis-het Christian person[14] isn’t). Someone decided to do that, but in doing so, like a church, was built on top of older things.

To that, Mandy is a film about the monomyth that disguises Satanic panic (code for “homosexuality” and by extension, queerness at large) as fear of the poor against the Good Husband as bad once-upon-a-time and Mandy alive once-upon-a-time (again, she’s reduced to a casus beli, the hero’s false flag when seeking out new fortunes, Conan-style); deprived and incensed of his good, nuclear home (minus the kids), Red seeks “reasonable vengeance” against an imaginary foe for the greatest taboo: the drug-addled hillbilly’s capture, rape and murder of the helpless damsel, becoming a demonic caricature of the free love movement (with evangelist ties). It’s the monomyth married to Wes Craven’s The Last House of the Left (1972) and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) but with a hauntological stamp neither picture had; i.e., neither here nor there, but in between.

(exhibit 40a2: In the Church of Death, Nic Cage becomes a god through revenge. He beheads Sand’s Medusa-esque witch—like Conan beheading the perfidious snake god, Thulsa Doom—then crushes the head of the final snake [the blind eyes popping ignominiously and rapturously from their sockets—the martyr’s fate]. Very orgasmic in the crushing of the godhead, the joke seems to be, “It’s funny because Sand is gay!” As such, Mandy conflates sex and violence as “interwoven” in the medieval pastiche as homoerotic. In destroying Sand as the “poser” dark religion, though, Cage’s hero also replaces him as the next-in-line: the “true” dark god [through might makes right] whose fiery effigy imitates yet-another-sacrifice consigned to the endless, hungry blaze; i.e., within the text, but also across a series of similar imitations whose grand pattern the director is clearly aware of and challenging full-bore: through rape play with less irony than I would like. Cage becomes fixated with Mandy just like Sand did, becomes yet-another-demon biker strongman sodomizing whomever to stress his own fallen conqueror status: as reprobate. He’s an undead reaver stuck in a dream of futile heroic revenge [against imaginary endless enemies] that never ends. Like the Black Skulls, he only derives pleasure from raping others, revenge being a drug that he needs more and more of. In short, he’s an addict who thinks he’s a god, one tied to a death cult [the monomyth] centered around his dead “wife.” It’s Capitalism in small.)

All the while, Nic Cage is Zombie Jesus demanding his pound of flesh, but also “Hamlet” haunted by his wife’s false “ghost.” A king without a castle, a bride, a home, the crux of the Christ-like drama sits close to Dante’s Inferno as a rapturous cycle of torture; i.e., the futility of revenge trapped amid the Gothic fever dream as a burnt offering. “Blood for blood” is the executioner’s motto of the demon bikers[15] (the “Black Skulls” effectively a sodomic leather daddy cult tied to “bad” LSD [a little nod to Jacob’s Ladder and the CIA’s enforcing of homicidal “bad trips” onto American soldiers]: one to give false explanation to a seemingly supernatural threat that is, in fact, domestic abuse and homophobia when all’s said and done). Except, no blood sacrifice can bring the princess back. The hero’s panoply of great deeds only serve to bury him alive inside the inferno—all while turning him into what he used to be: a slave to his own cocaine-and drink-fueled vices.

Suitably enabled, Red kills Sand, a plural and ridiculous man who bites off more than he can chew by threatening the strong family man. Yet so has Red, descending into the Mandelbrot as Great Destroyer after burying the gay (dressed up as a homicidal Jesus freak, no less). There is no reprieve for being the hero, only madness and death everlasting (which the Black Skulls are drawn towards: “You have a death wish.”). Red becomes trapped in fragments of his own past brought imperfectly back to life, placing himself at the center of a story whose princess is, suitably enough, in another castle; she’s a grail beacon, divorced from Red pursuant to the nuclear family model as forever devastated by sexual deviancy and evil queens, avenging itself through the ritualistic “suicide by cop” of said queens (“failing upwards” while punching down). As such, Red is the black knight—a dragon without a princess, Lord Dracula—but remembers her as that once-upon-a-time that’s notably the title and truant. How Gothic.

(exhibit 40a3a: The story revolves around the ghost of Mandy per the infernal concentric pattern. These men are effectively doomed per their monomythic search for power and revenge, Sand’s being his envy of the straight man’s wife [a similar covetousness seen in David Fincher’s Se7en, exhibit 43b]. The queer elements feel dated in much the same way except they weren’t made in the ’80s; they regressed to them to tell an old, very tired joke: the priest is a rapist because he’s gay [and not because of the system he belongs to; re; Lewis, The Monk]. Under heteronormative thought, to be gay is to be false, to be murderous with bad intent as a matter of straight projection onto capital’s monstrous-feminine scapegoats threatening state-sanctioned brides.)

Mandy is, on one level then, a neo-conservative Viking’s boast about drunk Beowulf slaying demons and degenerates while reveling in the antiquated fetishes and gay-hating clichés, but it still narrowly reverses abjection regarding the heroic quest as reprobate: Mandy the girl is murdered to progress the hero’s story but his story is still eternal damnation once the gay man is six feet under (the Gibson-level Catholic martyrdom is also there, delighting at Cage’s masochistic exploits; but Cage’s irrefutable drive towards complete insanity makes the outcome much more of a mixed bag/acquired taste—I love it, but I’m a weirdo who appreciates queer history as tied up in self-flagellation/torture porn).

In the same vein, the primer has already covered reversing abjection; i.e., by merely proposing the (re)humanization of the zombie (and their assorted parts) inside the nightmare as “awake,” thus perceptive to traumas that are normally repressed by the state. To take this idea further is to actively reverse Cartesian dualism by reflecting on war and rape as a necromantic process similar to Mandy‘s; i.e., trapped in a zombifying death loop according to historical-material effects systemically produced by Capitalism (what Lovecraft, the Cartesian ‘fraidy cat, touched upon with his infamously gibberish, death cultist chant, Cthulhu fhtagn).

Of course, this includes its neoliberal forms; i.e., that prop abjection up as something to scare the public with over time, replicating itself not just through zombies, but many canonical monster types: vampires, ghosts, composites, and demons of various kinds (and combinations). This include the gigantic, xenophobic sort worshipped as dark gods by a curious-if-ignorant middle class; i.e., shamelessly and shamefully enthralled by the ghost of the counterfeit raping Medusa for capital to avenge the American dream (and nuclear family unit) as proper fucked. Capital decays; punch the fag as “Nazi.”

To that, Mandy is basically a mean-spirited Hero’s Journey about rape and revenge, one set to dated, hauntologically vice-like representations of queer sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. It all feels like it’s happened before, too—our heroine causally reading about her own death in a cheap, dime store novel that speaks to the conditions outside of itself that, sure enough, walk up to the counter to size her up. Sand’s sacrifice something of a Catherine Morland, she feels dead, herself, emerging from the waters to approach Cage, who—clearly the story’s unreliable narrator—might be dreaming in the middle of a drug-fueled bender! The story is his attempt to remember after Mandy is dead and gone. Abjection kills Medusa, then teases the audience with her corpse to justify fascist violence (revenge built around a lie with a kernel of truth):

(exhibit 40a3b: “To the last syllable of recorded time” or “Never shake your gory locks at me,” Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” leaps to mind. There’s plenty of Jungian archetypes to observe, Mandy something of a good witch, her face scarred [and rocking something of a David Bowie vibe with her asymmetrical pupils]. This isn’t the stuff of total fiction [any more than those elements/stories are]: “I looked at him and he was dead,” my grandmother recalled, seeing my mom’s golden retriever, Prince, in his doghouse. “He wasn’t dead, but he was. And a day later, he died.” Turns out, he’d been poisoned by a jealous lover, seeking revenge against my then-teenage mother for breaking up with him because his dick didn’t work. Revenge is often petty.)

Moreover, this process of abjection reaches backwards—through fatal, monomythic nostalgia—to highlight sexually conservative authors belonging to a larger canonical (thus homophobic) trend: blame the fag by abjecting them from straight power structures (e.g., the Church) by suggesting that’s “just how we are”: like the evil-rapey hillbillies from Deliverance (1972).

To that, let’s quickly unpack some homophobic elements that Mandy weaves into its camping of the monomyth: its demon church yet another example of religion laid low by degenerate forces that, when irony is absent, becomes another “bury your gays” trope per said monomyth.

Of the aforementioned canonical trend, I could say “Radcliffe,” but we needn’t go that far back. I would rather stick to who was probably on the director’s mind when telling his story. For example, something akin to Stephen King’s literature briefly appears onscreen for a quick second (exhibit 40a3b, above), but I think the ’80s zeitgeist for which King dominated orbits around the pulpy fictions of older bigoted men like Lovecraft having already furthered said process towards King (and Mandy’s director looking back at such slashers with fondness); i.e.,  through the ghost of the counterfeit as something to pulp, then paywall.

Simply put, it’s the Shadow of Pygmalion per the Cycle of Kings upholding capital during middle class Gothic poetics (what I also call “white cis-het guy disease”). It’s hard not to shake the feelings of paranoia, psychosexuality and downright homophobia that permeate Mandy having come from strangely awful authors like Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a man who apparently fucked[16], oddly enough, but whose own steadfast views on love were warped with staunchly homophobic attitudes on par with the Cenobite rip-offs (no shame in it) that Mandy pointedly showcases; e.g., the knife dick scene (next page), whereupon subversion is largely a matter of context (the appreciative irony of Gothic counterculture something we’ll devote much of Volume Three to):

(exhibit 40a3c: The home invasion scene, where the old helpless couple has been sodomized[17] by the demon bikers from Hell. This is both a shameless nod to Satanic panic, and an apt feeling for what it’s like to be queer in the historical period of the 1980s. Mandy’s chronotope jams it all into the same theatrical space, to which a part of me wants to groan and agree with Jameson’s “boring and exhausted paradigm” barb about the Gothic, but also to embrace the psychosexual theatre as a great bit of campy fun. Indeed, the Titus-Andronicus levels of violence marry sex to war as something of a psychomachy that treats the home as a system in which “Red” and his other personalities duke it out. Out comes the knife dick, a rearing fang/greedy mouth struggling to sate itself [through all the usual hyphenations] even after a fresh kill and trying to “mate” with Cage. Both men are addicts, cruising and “forking” like vampires [an old gay metaphor we’ll explore in another chapter].

Rather than hate the fascist elements, though, I want to observe and understand why they exist/continue to revive in ways GNC people can use to our advantage; i.e., as part of an old problem to queer expression through the Gothic mode [and, by extension, real life]: alienation under homonormativity extending to all manner of queer forms. Matthew Lewis touched on this, but it’s something you can see well into the present as stuck grappling with dated conceptualizations of queerness we must reclaim.

This happens per a larger ongoing conversation between generations and personalities over space and time. The below comment, for example

It doesn’t matter to our oppressors that you don’t do drugs or have casual sex. You can have a white picket fence with 2.5 kids and a golden retriever and go to church every Sunday. But don’t forget – we’re still just faggots [source tweet, turnintoabat: June 12th, 2024].

when visually citing [several copy-and-pasted screenshots; reassembled, above] and writing in response to an older Tumblr post

That’s the part you don’t seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn’t even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died. […]

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It’s revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don’t challenge them too much, or it’s conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we’ve got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That’s it. Either it’s all of us or it’s none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don’t agree with it but we’ll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us [source Tumblr post, Vaspider: June 21st, 2022].

Fucking oath, sisters! Exceptions lead to genocide, of which the queer is a regular casualty [and which they internalize bigotry as a matter of dogma-through-osmosis]. Capital is profit is us-versus-them is tokenism the likes of which becomes nostalgic, displaced, holy under stories like Mandy. Never forget, we’re living in Gothic times, cuties. We’re the aliens Red would kill to avenge his dead wife. Expressing the liminal nature of queerness-as-reprobate through criminal hauntology is certainly part of reclaiming our power under state duress [thus police violence]! This all but requires intersectional solidarity.)

As a dubious contributor to a larger queer pathos, Lovecraft only added to the stigmas and violent hero logic that Mandy plays with/adheres to (a scourge for the hero to purge). I think you get the point. He’s something of a spectre haunting such fictions’ revenges against queer aliens, a giant dick still fucking us fags over in the fictions that survived him: inventing worlds that explained his awful, American-Nazi bigotry (colonizing fantasy for those purposes—i.e., nobody is more scared, violent or Quixotic than a Nazi; they make everything up, are essentially weird canonical nerds who use LARPer-style DARVO/obscurantism to invent entire escapist, thoroughly callow worldviews to attack their boogey persons with, then call it “reason” [with a weird bent, in Lovecraft’s case]. It’s criminally insane, but also massively homophobic).

(artist: Matthew Childers)

To that, Mandy’s revenge is as much against stupid cartoons of gay people as it is the religious poors. In keeping with Lovecraft’s codified mythos, though (the Great Old Ones), such enormities like Mandy’s curiously homophobic, psychosexual church of death have since turned into a substantial-if-problematic conveyor of ghastly merchandise; i.e., one that skirts the line between canon and camp per the process of abjection by a closeted-to-homonormative middle class (something Matthew Lewis arguably did, but being far more GNC [out of the closet] and sex-positive in his camp than straight men tend to be):

Lovecraft had many faults, as a person and an author. David Barnett writes, “So why do we continue to fete Lovecraft instead of burying him quietly away?” It’s a perfectly reasonable question; in the world of the university-appointed canonical author and the celebration of the politically-correct and the culturally-diverse, Lovecraft shouldn’t exist. But “‘Tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed” and possessing things “rank and gross in nature,” Lovecraft flourishes. To this, Barnett cites Elizabeth Bear [who] freely admits that Lovecraft’s views are “revolting,” but she writes, “Lovecraft is successful because authors are read, beloved, and remembered, not for what they do wrong, but for what they do right, and what Lovecraft does right is so incredibly effective” (Persephone van der Waard’s “Method in His Madness,” 2017).

In short, “does right” within dialectical materialism is canonical propaganda dressed up as “gay” counterculture, to which Lovecraft offered a special blend of “rock and roll” fear and dogma to manipulate the wider public with: BDSM Nazis (a trend we’ll explore more when we look at the Countess from The Crimson Court [exhibit 41h] in the vampire subchapter).

By extension, Mandy is homophobic because the monomyth (and its futile revenge) are homophobic, making it stuck somewhat in the harmful, regressive past the likes of which an utter ghoul like Lovecraft ruled.

This isn’t too surprising. Profit is founded on division and rape, causing queerness to decay into bad cartoons of itself (of which the monomyth essentially is). Profit is heteronormative, thus homonormative: queerness tokenizing to help capital rape the queer as an extension of nature, thus capital’s assigned prey by design decaying into its expected role, mid-paradigm. The fag becomes the Nazi sans irony.

Furthermore, fascism and Communism as “queer aliens” exist in the same shadow zone, one that Sontag touched with “Fascinating Fascism” back in 1974. Except, it’s much older than that; i.e., has built up through centuries of genuine, heartfelt xenophobia/Cartesian superiority that leads to the Cycle of Kings as waiting to “wake up” not as the tyrant does over and over against the forces of good, but something worse that overshadows both (Cthulhu is both the zombie tyrant and the great Promethean disaster of Capitalism haunting its endless, hauntological hyperrealities) during monomyth pastiche; i.e, the same taboo naughty things Lovecraft played with as a bigot might:

[From] The Eldritch Influence—The Life, Vision, and Phenomenon of H.P. Lovecraft, I’ll paraphrase Neil Gaiman, who being interviewed, essentially says,

Lovecraft is rock and roll. There is nobody else like him, then or now. Looking at H.G. Welles or Jules Verne, they did not give you a worldview. H.G. Welles wrote much scarier horror short stories than Lovecraft, and they are forgotten. Welles is a man, who, in his day experienced much more success—his works were filmed, and so on—but also a man who has nothing near the number of people reading his works on a daily basis, now. On some kind of primal level, Lovecraft has people believing (ibid.).

“Belief” speaks to myth—particular fascist myth—as something to capitalize on, during Pax Americana as conducive to fascism (thus rape) per bourgeois socio-material conditions. Lovecraft isn’t touching to anything “primal” (which would essentialize it), more than he’s hitting a fascist nerve tied to present structures that people are memorializing through his abject stories; it’s hero worship upholding the usual Cartesian nonsense (tut, tut, Gaiman).

Such is basically a long way of saying that queerness gentrifies and decays into heteronormative cartoons of itself, while also camping courtly love by making it gay in easily recognizable forms: a queer iconography that is alien, tentacle, from the stars (what Lovecraft lovingly calls “the unknown.” Bitch, please. Men like you always think you own the universe, always abject [thus fear] women/the monstrous-feminine). To Lovecraft (and so many drafting similar stories), we’re the unspeakable “thing that should not be” as a matter of abject dogma. But it’s patently absurd because anal sex (and other forms of queer love besides sex, such as emotional attraction) aren’t that scary unless you’re a stupid, hateful bigot like Lovecraft who thinks he’s smarter than he is; he’s not, he’s just a massive cunt (a pattern that will continue into other Cartesian men of reason, like Victor Frankenstein).

Such distinctions are seldom neat because exploitation and liberation exist in the same spaces of performance and play. Instead, it’s important to recognize them so we can camp them back with irony. Mandy doesn’t always have that, any more than Tim Curry and Rocky Horror did, fifty years ago (conservative straight people love that movie; i.e., by laughing at the fags’ expense—a clown in the king’s court)! I like both movies, but often prefer something a bit more friendly to queerness-as-alien (e.g., Nimona, exhibit 56d2). But stories like Mandy do speak to a time of transition leaving the closet. To avoid going back into it, we’ll have to ultimately leave that nostalgia behind, but can remember and recall it as a matter of history moving towards universal liberation out of heteronormative bondage.

(artist: Michael Whelan)

The simple fact is, not everyone wants to indulge in the reality that we fags are viewed not just as false, but as abject pieces of shit that practice sodomy as “unnatural” to “proper society.” To them, we’re literally scum, the likes of which Cage kills without a second thought and which Lovecraft relegated to the position of fearsome alien. We are awesomely powerful, but abject is abject and it needs irony to work… which Lovecraft’s stories don’t have.

Subverting canonical simulacra, then, is an act of conscious rebellion and playful interpretation of unironic bigotries; i.e., challenging Lovecraft and his ilk’s heteronormative monopoly on queer sex demons (from Barker to Cosmatos) in monomythic stories—burning their churches down while camping them as a matter of inserting irony where irony is absent. It’s something akin to fighting fire with fire to avoid the kinds of heteronormative undead revenge and blind sight that Mandy to some degree showcases: the martyred, idiotic hero/Roman fool stuck in a dogmatic hell of his own making (and turning Persephone into a ghost, frozen in time). It requires the informed examination of Gothic poetics as something to learn from and teach with inside our own mirror-like creations and what we, as workers, leave behind: “Look on our works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Except our rock and roll is a cycle of counter pulp fiction—of constant, dark reinvention and dreamlike rememory of undead monsters and demons, but also symbols of sex, status and power relative to these things. In short, it needs rockstars (a concept we’ll return to, again and again throughout the book, but cementing the notion as revolutionary praxis in Volume Three, Chapter Five) and vivid implements of power—monarchs and spaces—that don’t uphold the status-quo proliferation of unironic rape as Lovecraft did:

(exhibit 40a4: Artist, bottom-left: Frank Frazetta; bottom-left: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Bonaparte Before the Sphinx”; middle-left and top-right: Blxxd Bunny. Model and artist, middle-right: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard. Sight is something that can go both ways—is anisotropic, but also able to gaze upon persons and places that go hand-in-hand; e.g., zombies in hauntological “graveyards.” This chiasmus also applies to the beholders of strange sights, who not only can see into potential worlds, but reflect those worlds back at canonical proponents in ways that freeze these viewers in their tracks. This needn’t be the classic Archaic Mother’s abject rage, but forms of social-[a]-sexual joy that are just as likely to petrify sex-coercive individuals. These can be from literal mirrors or cameras, or illustrations that “mirror” former artistic reflections on a hauntological past: Bonaparte doing his best to emulate Caesar or Alexander the Great by invading 19th century Egypt and gazing at the same colossal wreck backwards.)

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Instead, gazing upon these awesome beauties is to both look into an imaginary past that never was, currently is, and could be again in the future: a Promethean knowledge that destroys workers and the world so it may transform them (versus the Faustian bargain capitalists rely on, locking things in place). The Broadway ticket lies in facing things that terrify the usual actors of the monomyth: the Cartesian male as a mad scientist and/or warrior-detective conqueror bent on destruction. Their subsequent change-of-heart must happen inside a monstrous-feminine space that “castrates” them; i.e., takes away their sinister, undead desire (thus addiction) to rape the womb of nature for the umpteenth time. Depriving them of the means to prey on the vulnerable in service to profit, we can end Capitalist Realism (thus Capitalism) through a nightmarish ludo-Gothic BDSM fantasy that, when synthesized, informs reality as an ongoing exchange between the two.

Except, the ghost of the counterfeit only disarms the middle class of their bourgeois tendencies when abjection is reversed and all bigotries are actually confronted (through the usual monstrous aesthetics, abstractions, abbreviations) to challenge profit (not just homophobia, because homosexuality decays, too); i.e., regarding a group—the white, middle-class nuclear family and its members (example, above: “You’re scared of this? You kids must be from the suburbs!”)—that is normally threatened by, or at least afraid of, abject forces and normally relies on harmful counterfeit notions of state sovereignty relaid in such fictions (from Walpole onwards): the Promethean Quest inverting the unstoppable, mendacious and vengeful (thus frail, fallible, fearful, false) conqueror’s monomyth as normally extending and defending said group and its token outliers from evil forces (men with claws for hands, velociraptors, killer sharks, etc): “Don’t fuck with the lords of Hell!” “Don’t fuck with the babysitter!” However monstrous either side appears from a poetic standpoint, saber-rattling is saber-rattling.

During the dialectic of shelter and the alien, places and people engage to canonically further the process of abjection, punching the alien, the monstrous-feminine Medusa, per the ghost of the counterfeit (the spectre of genocide, of rebellion). Babysitter or badass, that’s basically what these assorted protectors are—some codified aspect of the nuclear family defending itself as a form of assimilation/replication (e.g., Elizabeth Shue, Sigourney Weaver or Jamie Lee Curtis, as “mother”) or avenging its destruction (e.g., Red, from Mandy, as “father,” etc)—but when tied to capital, they take on a false, predatory and incredibly xenophobic function: the white Indian, the exclusive victim against the wild, non-white world converging menacingly on women and children during societal decay and threatening them as such. Canon-wise, a woman may go wild, but only to protect the nuclear family from such slashers by being “the natural caregiver” (upholding said unit lest she become the irredeemable whore). Babysitting is dangerous!

Mandy is such a Quest, Red’s vampiric, strung-out, crossfading (drunk and high) fall from grace built on homophobic, undead nostalgia like Lovecraft’s after Red’s family is destroyed; i.e., trapping him in the monomyth’s endlessly dependent quest for revenge serving profit while illustrating its most harmful effects. Keeping Lovecraft in mind (though apart from him, the STEM fields are generally patriarchal and homophobic), part one shall examine the Promethean Quest through mad science; i.e., by examining it in Forbidden Planet, followed by the synthesizing of castle-narrative with the Metroidvania quest for the palliative Numinous (Otto’s mysterium tremendum) less as “female” and more as monstrous-feminine more broadly—a Gothic-Communist Numinous scaring evil male nerds acting like scared bullies (similar to sailors fearing mermaids; i.e., girls and gay people have cooties; re: Lovecraft hated the sea as chthonic, monstrous-feminine)!

*The original, unused title for Halloween (1978) was The Babysitter Murders.

Postscript

A small note/postscript before we proceed: this subchapter isn’t, as you’ve probably noticed, strictly about zombies. In fact, there’s really not much difference between the different undead, or even demons and undead (and animals); i.e., poetic exchange being holistic, dualistic, and socio-material, etc. Feeding is a form of exchange, but it isn’t strictly negative on its own (e.g., giving and receiving vitality through sex, vis-à-vis John Donne’s “Flea,” to regain lost knowledge/avoid alienation in modern times); instead, capital’s proponents (re: Lovecraft) make it that way as a matter of historical-material consequence: feeding to serve profit by being unable to stop during abjection—of fearing what you prey on, to ultimately exterminate it.

Red, for example, cannot stop taking power and never gives any back, his revenge built on shaky grounds (re: dead wife = false flag and creation myth) that invite future violence by a thoroughly alienized figure serving state interests. He cannot move on, taking more and more endlessly into the future while becoming frozen in time. An ironic lack of resolution makes him the next-in-line; i.e., to die when he kills someone else and the people who love them start looking for revenge. It’s Capitalism-in-action, expressed in small through blank parody (re: Jameson).

Dramatic theatrics aside, monsters embody poetic expression, which links to material factors and vice versa: the flow of power and knowledge (wealth, labor and anything else), whose function ultimately remains anisotropic; i.e., determined by the direction of that flow towards workers or the state.

Even if this seems theoretically confusing and visually ambiguous, the clue lies in the healthiness of the exchange, the vitality given and received, whatever the form. Capitalists take and never give back, inventing all manner of silly reasons/arguments for doing so; i.e., raping the monstrous-feminine through the process of abjection in monstrous language. We reify the same arguments to prevent harm in the future, reversing abjection and sparing the monstrous-feminine from profit as a matter of rape already survived; re (from “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis,” which sums all of this up, and to which I giving here again as to not have to repeat myself, moving forwards):

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

monsters aren’t just threats (“Alright you primitive screwheads! Listen up!”); they’re poetic lenses that concern power as something to paradoxically shift away from state forces, mid-struggle. They are, like power more broadly, something to interrogate by going where they are through performance and play. This concerns war and rape, decay and feeding, transformation and fatal knowledge. All exchange per various human tissues as poetic material—from brains, to flesh, to blood, to cum, and others things we won’t touch on as much (e.g., shit).

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

I wouldn’t stress all this monomorphic playfulness, holism, salubrious irony and duality of exchange (all aspects of Gothic Communism that challenge capital’s singular, binarized alienation of things) if it wasn’t important. But it’s literally the thesis argument of this particular volume half. So please bear it in mind as we continue discussing the monomyth (and castles and conquerors); i.e., as poetically modular and intersecting extensions of the same basic principles, of which the undead factor a great deal into ludo-Gothic BDSM/castle-narrative (which will come up, next) but also aren’t separate from demons, nature and monstrous-feminine things at large.

From novels to movies to videogames, then, capital has their fakeries to further abjection by feeding on the monstrous-feminine abusing the ghost of the counterfeit to serve profit with; we reverse all of that using the same tools, to which—visibly undead and/or demonic—all function more or less the same: challenge profit’s recursive predation. From specialist research to casual hobbyist, all are chosen through preference for (and fondness towards) their individual histories, in this respect; i.e., to communicate trauma and contribute knowledge, feeding and transformation unto these histories: a tireless, back-to-the-drawing-board joy experienced through active play to better understand the world, thus pierce any and all bourgeois illusions. Vampire (demon) castle, zombie Caesar giant, mad scientist ghost puppet? Po-tay-to, po-tah-to, it’s all from Idaho!

Onto “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Metroidvania (opening and part zero)“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] “A lot of people talk to me about Skeletor, which is one of my favorite parts. They always say, ‘Did you feel like you were slumming?’ And I say, absolutely not. My son was four years old. And I wanted him to see his father as Skeletor. And I loved playing it. It’s really one of my favorite parts, still” (source: Jenelle Riley’s “Frank Langella on Trial of the Chicago 7, Being Skeletor and His Legacy,” 2020).

[2] As previously stated, ludo-Gothic BDSM was something I coined after writing the majority of Volume Two, part two. It would be difficult to insert the idea into all of these pages without completely transforming their main purpose (cataloging poetic histories). So the term—a violent souvenir from my time with Jadis—will haunt these pages after the fact (or before the fact, if you consider I was always drawn to weird traumatic things); i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM will come up intermittently from here on out—will be on my mind as I proofread these older portions of the primer again—but won’t be forcefully integrated into these older historical writings beyond the degree I already have in “Bad Dreams,” parts two and part one (and the “Playing with Dead Things” chapter written for Volume Two, part one and its initial release).

Much of the primer from here on out, then, focuses on the history of poetics, not their poetic application (though we will try to include aspects of that as we move through the rest of the modules).

[3] From Volume One:

Cartesian abuses that treat nature not simply as female, but monstrous-feminine food that harms Indigenous peoples, racial minorities and GNC people (so-called “incorrect” or “non-men” of the white, cis-het European sort) to varying degrees of settler-colonial genocide: by cheapening their lives, their bodies, their labor to serve the profit motive (source).

[4] E.g., Tulpa from The Ronin Warriors (exhibit 41a) literally being a ghost of the Shogunate, which the show treats as something to exorcise in defense of capital in neoliberal Japan; i.e., Capitalist Realism.

[5] Which can eventually shift from canon to outright conspiracy as dancing between commodity and camp; i.e., a potential means of grift; e.g., the “birds aren’t real” movement (Vice, 2022), or flat-earth. Dogma, it generally goes, is applied to the masses by those who usually know better.

[6] Aka, Braindead. While certainly a hilarious movie (“Step aside, sonny. I kickass FOR THE LORD!” *organ music plays*), Peter Jackson’s penchant for slapstick black comedy is haunted by the usual ghost of the counterfeit, insofar as he remains unapologetic and afraid of the usual things amid a settler-colonial islander’s fortress mentality.

[7] Metroidvania is a topic from Volume Zero we’ll revisit repeatedly in part two of “Monomyth”: regarding the Numinous as monstrous-feminine, whose ghostly echo on maps-of-conquest involve Metroidvania as a cryptomimetic process (whose ghostly maps we’ll also reconsider in the “Seeing Dead People” subchapter).

[8] This book, for example, is basically impossible to advertise on official platforms; i.e., by virtue of its naked critical nature, but also bared-and-exposed approach to rape play challenging profit as normally raping the monstrous-feminine behind cryptonyms. We take those back and show them what they are.

[9] Medieval language and power fantasies are all fine and well to confront our troubles with, provided they don’t become a means of escape that, all too often, has tokenized potential; e.g., orc-style Amazons having an added racialized element to their traitorous status; re: Jadis and their bad BDSM, Amazon-style raping of me being emblematic of the same dualities we must struggle to reclaim in art. The subjugated Hippolyta sits on a herbo waifu’s tightrope, her greenface a kind of vaudeville when played or produced in bad faith (not that the artist below is, but simply that liberation and exploitation always and forever occupy the same poetic spaces).

(artist: M4rjinn)

[10] The hero in Dark Souls is undead, acknowledged as such by the princess herself: “O chosen Undead. I am Gwynevere. Daughter of Lord Gwyn; and Queen of Sunlight. Since the day Father his form did obscureth, I have await’d thee.” It’s a grail beacon made to force the hero to fight two of the games strongest guardians, only to realize the cake is a lie.

[11] In the neoliberal tradition, fatal nostalgia covers up genocide as a historical-material loop. This includes videogame copaganda like the Contra franchise as made “back in the day” and in the current moment: during problematic revivals banking on nostalgia, mid-genocide, to keep up appearances. This illusory procedure is a creative one, generally assisted by various fans in love with the imaginary colonial past; e.g., RichaadEB, who writes glowingly in his own cover video, “Contra: Operation Galuga – Alien Slayer” (2024):

Yo!! So last year I was approached by WayForward and Konami about the prospect of covering a few classic tunes from Contra for NES – the reason being that they wanted to include them in the REMAKE of Contra that they just released today. You can actually hear this cover in-game, which is extremely cool!! Very honored to contribute in some small way to a notable and beloved franchise like this (source).

It’s fatal nostalgia wedding rock ‘n roll to neoliberal shadow wars and theatre: a canonical battle anthem tied, as usual, to profit per white, cis-het men (and the middle class at large) as the usual benefactors, provided they learn the songs, but also the “prison sex” mentality behind them; re (from “Transforming Our Zombie Selves“): “Whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies, falsehoods, and double standards.” Anything emergent/creative is roped into serving profit.

[12] Blindfolds can appear “blind” (a one-way mirror) but also be blind yet do extraordinary things; e.g., beating Mario 64 by collecting all 120 stars blindfolded (Bubzia’s “BLINDFOLDED 120 Star Speedrun of Super Mario 64 World Record,” 2023). This takes practice, devotion, normalization strategies (to reduce random events to replicable actions). While speedrunners are generally white cis-het men stuck in-text as refusing to apply their invention out-of-text yet gentrifying the profession, there’s potential to reverse this abjection and contribute to the same meta histories through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a holistic polity of expression; e.g., myself and my work solidarized with Harmony as I invigilate them talking about cryptonymy in regards to Dark Souls, but also something we can utilize in our own practices parallel, and often in relation to, all of these other things, but reversing the flow of power, mid-performance, towards workers. If you want to critique power, go where it is. Everything exists in duality—of the seemingly limitless abilities of the human imagination’s invention, memory (testified by the wearing of the blindfold, but also anything done while wearing it) and application—for or against the state to varying degrees, mid-liminal-expression; i.e., under the camera eye as something to fear and embrace to varying degrees of enthusiasm and reticence, voyeurism and exhibitionism.

[13] I want to go on a bit of a tangent, here, but one concerning tokenization vs subversion, which is germane: Just as Mandy camps the monomyth, Lewis camped Immaculate Conception in The Monk, turning the Madonna into a devil-in-disguise that tempts the rapey monk, Ambrosio; i.e., as part of the same oppressive system the devil is exposing in the book, and for which Lewis, a gay man, is using to comment on gay life in then-modern-day England. The difference between him and Cosmatos is irony in service to GNC peoples; i.e., as part of universal liberation through intersectional solidarity illustrating mutual consent (and informed labor exchanges raising class-cultural consciousness and emotional/Gothic intelligence) with iconoclastic art; re: synthesizing praxis, thus catharsis, on an individual-to-systemic level per ludo-Gothic BDSM (reclaim the Base, recultivate the Superstructure).

To that, we fags camp canon for own survival against the state pimping us (re: Broadmoor), not because we’re bored middle-class straight people obsessed with abject things; i.e., you can’t coercively fetishize a particular out-group and all it a day! Furthermore, the same asexual*power of the Gothic that Lewis used in good faith (the ability to speak about sexual things as a matter of violent, pornographic art) lets any whore camp her own abuse; i.e., through Gothic poetics, becoming a form of half-veiled activism passed off as “fake” (revolutionary cryptonymy in practice). It’s quite common for this to happen while working with those who aren’t going to harm you: gay people. We’re not the sex demons Cosmatos puts on a dark pedestal.

*Ace expression isn’t always a byproduct of trauma, but those who are traumatized generally fall into cop/victim and sexual/asexual. We’ll explore the neurodivergent/congenital side of aceness in Volume Three, part one.

Simply put, while reactive abuse does happen, fags more broadly aren’t the universal, alien (us-versus-them) bogeypersons capital depicts us as (we’re sex demons who sometimes self-destruct, but still aren’t the kind who tend to harm women and children; that’s your husbands, boyfriends, community leaders, etc, who actually have the privilege [and power] to abuse people they’ve been given control over). Instead, we’re relatively safe/aren’t going to automatically fly off the handle and berate someone else at the slightest inconvenience (tokenization being an exception of course, below); i.e., as a matter of capital and heteronormative dogma; e.g., during a difficult production, while we wait for things to fall into place. That’s just how working with others goes: setbacks happen, but the planets eventually align. And if they don’t, that’s no reason to attack others provided everyone’s acting in good faith. Things happen; you don’t use that as an excuse to endlessly take from the parties that are historically at a disadvantage!

By comparison, patience generally isn’t a virtue for straight men (or those normalizing to act, thus function* like straight men) because the state: conditions and expects them to abuse and control, thus rape women/anyone else, who isn’t them (the monstrous-feminine), then throw blame onto others to obscure the reality of capital working by design; i.e., moral panic; e.g., Satanic panic, Red Scare, Yellow Menace, etc, as monopolizing sex, force (violence), terror and morphological expression, etc, as a matter of compelled labor and artistic expression (canon). All is done to serve and maintain profit as settler-colonial, heteronormative, Cartesian, hence rapacious. As my PhD argued, Capitalism sexualizes everything around men as pimps and police, who their victims either serve or emulate.

*I.e., as tied to the nuclear family unit/somehow upholding it as status-quo; e.g., homonormativity, like all normativities, emulating heteronormativity from a marginalized position, playing the part of the dutiful servant or fearsome outsider/predator, etc (the subversion of these, onstage, is entirely possible, but that takes irony and awareness, which token agents lack).

To be blunt, all these effects/divisions are historical-material; i.e., a looping matter of social conditions (dogma) predicated on material conditions and vice versa (re: Marx)—of the state treating white cis-het Christian men as it has and always will: as the most privileged group, whose privileges peel off like union layers, but whose basic function is universal. Rape, profit, repeat. All are pimps to police other workers towards this aim, but especially anything monstrous-feminine as things to rape for profit (often in “efficient,” messy forms). In turn, said victims are a spectrum existing on descending rungs of selective punishment, relative privilege and marginalized convenience/entitlement (“Haven’t I suffered enough?”); re, a concept I call “preferential mistreatment” (from Volume One*):

…heteronormativity leads to [double standards]. Female servitude under Capitalism is different to male servitude, the latter of which tends to receive preferential mistreatment as the universal clientele. Both are raped under Capitalism, but differently through Man Box culture. Women (or beings forced to act and appear as women) are raped through figurative and literal labor theft and wage slavery—sold to male clients like useful animals or chattel slaves, but also as highly cultivated products that “beastly” men are likewise conditioned to rape, kill, or otherwise eat like gruel: […] Intersectionality extends this relationship to overlapping axes of oppression within the same basic pedagogy (and its complicated traumas) as perpetually contested under state mechanisms; e.g., people of color or GNC persons as corrupt, monstrous-feminine and correct-incorrect. An oppressed pedagogy will account for these complexities, synthesizing them in practical ways, including parody and irony as an unfolding, ambiguous proposition; a state pedagogy (and its own means of instruction) will not (source).

*See also, the glossary definitions for tokenism and white (cis-het, Christian male) fragility (accessible in my available volumes).

That’s where tokenism and Man Box come in. As Volume Three shall explore (which focuses entirely on tokenism vs good praxis), capital extends the abuser’s privileges (the coercion trifecta: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss) to women and other marginalized groups provided they tokenize, hence betray their class, culture, and race interests in service to the elite; i.e., become cops (often with a Gothic flavor in pop culture; re: weird canonical nerds acting like “minority police/witch cops,” something we’ll unpack in Volume Three). Like anything, the monstrous-feminine is susceptible to betrayal and decay; i.e., whose tokenized “onion” historically-materially fosters marginalized in-fighting as a matter of “prison sex” and fortress mentality: tokenized groups from increasing privilege (but less than those above them) kissing up and punching down towards groups more marginalized then they are. The global consequence is assimilation—of women, people of color or queer persons, Indigenous peoples, etc, acting like white, cis-het men as a matter of tokenized representation.

[14] Originally just men, but extending to women as members of a growing middle class; re: the decay of feminism punching down against queer minorities (as Radcliffe did to Lewis). As we’ll see, this also extends to gay Nazis and punks, etc.

[15] I.e., Faust, but gayer (the love that dare not speak its name). The pleasure and pain of Mandy‘s monsters exist in the same place as a trademark of ’70s BDSM, wherein trauma and catharsis but also resistance and power occupy the same territory using the same language. The liminality sits between realism and folklore; violence, hard kinks, drugs and heavy metal (as a bizarre “don’t do drugs, kids!” narrative that still celebrates the whole practice); the Numinous and the ordinary as a site of abject exploitation/forbidden fruit tied to fatal penance, flagellation and circuitous trials by fire. Reverence and dark worship, then, laud the ghost of the counterfeit as penned in, but also a liminal space to move around inside; i.e., the blurring of the line between pulp fiction and daily life as trapped in how Steve Huey describes Megadeth’s Peace Sells: “The lines between hell and earth are blurred throughout…” (source, Allmusic). It’s The Cell or Jacob’s Ladder as darkly indulgent, a kind of aberrant, haunted-house escape into total oblivion—the guilty pleasure of the privileged going to the dark gods.

[16] I love that Lovecraft.com is like, “But wait, he fucked women!”

The facts that Lovecraft had little success with women and had many male friends have led people to believe that he was a homosexual. However, it must be remembered that he was married (briefly) and his wife described him as an “adequately excellent lover” (Sonia H. Davis, “Memories of Lovecraft: I,” The Arkham Collector, No. 4, Winter 1969) [source].

God help me, the stupid shit people choose to remember in order to memorialize assholes! So, gay people can’t fuck, apparently? Annoyed inferences aside, it’s also rather telling of homophobia on the writers of this myth bust. Beards are a thing. Moreover, it’s just as common to call someone “asexual” to avoid calling them homosexual:

[…] But, this is not to say that his heterosexual inclinations were especially strong, either. Lovecraft, like many intellectuals, focused his attentions and efforts on mental, rather than physical, pursuits, and simply didn’t have very strong sexual interests at all [ibid.].

This “they’re not gay, they’re…” trend has haunted the Gothic since its inception and before; i.e., extending from Shakespeare (who was married with kids, but still probably gay anyways) to Walpole (not married, no kids, also probably gay by modern standards); re:

Was Walpole gay? Is Strawberry Hill the manifestation of a gay aesthetic? The questions linger, even though searching for something akin to a modern homosexual identity is fruitless. Homosexual acts were criminal— sodomy was a capital offense—but virile men were known to take lovers of both sexes, while effeminate manners were seen as a Frenchified heterosexual weakness. Walpole’s biographers have often considered him effeminate and asexual, or at most passively homosexual (source: Amanda Vickery’s “Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill,” 2010).

[17] A nod to the Nightstalker killer, Richard Ramirez, who would home invade the elderly middle class, then rape and murder them. He leaned into abject “Satanic” theatrics, and killers like him were generally framed as “gay” similar to Ed Gein, but also fictional counterparts like Hannibal Lecter, Count Dracula, Mr. Hyde, and countless others. It’s the process of abjection scapegoating queer people [which historically would have been homosexual men recognized as citizens in England and elsewhere*] while apologizing for capital’s raping workers and nature at home and abroad.

*More on this when we look at vampires and Foucault’s A History of Sexuality.

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

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

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

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

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

The Rememory of Personal Trauma, part two: Escaping Jadis; or, Running up that Hill (feat. Stranger Things, Majora’s Mask, and Wuthering Heights)

“You’re not really here!”

“Oh, but I am, Max! I am!”

—Max and Vecna, Stranger Things (2022)

Picking up from where “Meeting Jadis, part two” left off…

Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. In this sense, we are indebted from the lessons of former abusers, insofar as we can learn from the harm they caused: how to survive and be better than them. This means liberating ourselves and others by subverting the abuse we survived; it means camping our own rape as something to play with and out in dollish, theatrical ways. Part one explored my attraction to Jadis through our mutual weirdness and trauma as doll-like. Living through their abuse eventually led to my forming of new scholarship; i.e., my coining of the academic term, “ludo-Gothic BDSM.” But to reremember Jadis, first I would have to survive them, and that was easier said than done. As Robert Burns once described, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” It was in his poem, “To a Mouse” (1785). In similar fashion, Burns’ lines were on my mind as I prepared my escape from Jadis: I was the mouse under their power and couldn’t simply disassociate to get through it[1]. Escape would not be easy, but an uphill climb made by a doll with her strings cut.

We’ve already talked about uphill battles, of course, and poor Sisyphus endlessly pushing the rock uphill. The rememory of personal trauma, we’ll see, is more akin to a Christly passion. Part of the difficulty wasn’t because I was under Jadis’ control so much as I felt like it; i.e., their doll to do with as they saw fit. To that, no one is immune from conditioning. Even when it starts to break, you can still feel its effects on you. Once my escape was materially and mentally prepared, though—and once I reclaimed my devices from Jadis to the extent that I could, back then—I confronted them.

To be clear, this wasn’t done without some trepidation; i.e., abuse tends to intensify drastically when the victim tries to escape (re: extinction bursts), insofar as their presence normally reinforces an abuser’s addictive possessiveness. I didn’t attack Jadis, though; I gradually hinted at their abuse, partly because I was scared out of my mind, dreading what would inevitably transpire once the cat was out of the bag. My fears were not unfounded; once I said the words, “I think your behavior is abusive,” Jadis threw me out on the spot. I had my friends on call when it happened, so Jadis could defend themselves from my “aspersions.” I told Jadis so; they literally hid in the shadows and whispered accusations at me—that I had “weaponized” my friends against them (the DARVO tactic: Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim, Offender).

To Jadis’ “credit,” they released me from bondage and didn’t physically harm me. But they also never spoke to me again. After a seventeen-hour car ride to Cuwu’s (we rode in relative silence despite me trying to break the ice), Jadis accused me of burning the bridge (“nuking it from orbit” were their exact words) before driving away. I haven’t heard from them since.

Note: I originally wrote this section over a year ago, and am revisiting it now as I prepare to finalize its release. Primarily I’m including notes about ludo-Gothic BDSM as it evolved on these earlier reflections to what ultimately amounted to my scholarship’s formative years. —Perse 6/25/2024

This might seem open and shut, except then I had to deal with Jadis’ ghost haunting me. “Leaving Jadis” is my attempt not to deny and bury that ghost, but turn it into something different; i.e., that takes their lingering hold on me and turns it into an object lesson: something to help me and the world heal from the forces that turned Jadis into yet-another-tool for the state.

As such, this book was originally written to commemorate my escape from Florida and eventual healing from what Jadis did to me—a kind of monstrous rebuttal where I humanize monsters (and monstrous toys) through my own work; re: my formulation of what eventually would become ludo-Gothic BDSM. And yet, this rebellious healing is a slow, time-consuming process—not just this book and figuring out my past through it, draft-after-draft, but building up to its inception before I’d written a single page or drawn a single image (not including older works that I’ve since renovated for the book).

(exhibit 39a1a: Models, top: Mom and Persephone van der Waard; bottom-left: Uncle Dave. Artist, top and bottom-left: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right: Cuwu.)

To this, my usual creative outlets evolved into a deep healing process—to deal with what had happened in Florida, but also to cope with several other developments afterwards: Directly after Florida, I rebounded with Cuwu, which promptly fell apart after six months. During that time, Uncle Dave suddenly died, killed by a heart attack (re: Volume One). Dealing with both events, everything was constantly interacting back and forth inside of and around me, so I decided to double these traumas with my own sex-positive creations; I drew Dave’s portrait and another picture for my mother (a hauntological, liminal space, inspired by Edward Hooper’s “Night Hawks,” 1942) who had already lost her fiancé to Covid six months prior (I came out, two days later[2]). Built up inside of me after Florida, the inspiration was less like a spark bursting out of thin air and more like a dam breaking under pressure.

Said deluge happened after watching season four, episode four of Stranger Things. I related to Max’ own predicament (exhibit 39a1b) under the knife-fingered spell of the villain; my empathy during their moment on the cross touched me through a shared connection with trauma and due to my own psychosexual urges tied to said trauma—i.e., seeking the palliative Numinous by envisioning myself in Max’ Christ-like shoes.

After watching her barely escape, I positively bawled. Doing so gave me the desire to live; moreover, I felt inspired to “release” my own trauma by giving voice to a larger historical-material struggle: liberation. Expressed through Gothic poetics as a matter of oppositional praxis, I drafted an egregore; i.e., whose dialectical-material presence denotes a recursive, dualistic sense of old traumas tied to present, centuries-old structures: capital as made for profit, thus the raping of nature as monstrous-feminine on all registers. I envisioned the subverting of capital as universal to all workers affected by it, hence for the young and old of any sex, gender, religion or inclination to return to and play with—to confront rape itself, but also to consciously make that informed choice (thus consent) when dragged down by such forces themselves.

The moment the episode ended, I went downstairs and instantly drew a picture of Jadis and myself: a great black shape lording over a princess in a white dress (exhibit 39a1b, next page). This creation had spawned from an attachment to past abuses from my own family circle, but also my own life as filled with markers of parallel trauma: the echoes of Cambodia, Nanking or Nazi-occupied Holland, intimated by videogame “zombie” violence marking the state of exception. It all felt connected because I—more than usual—felt connected to the world around me, for better or for ill. That’s how radical empathy works! Except, now I realize that I had—like said world—been raped as well.

For the rest of this section, I shall exhibit Jadis’ abuse of me in ways I hopefully can convey to you a) through other stories, and b) through exhibits of Jadis that partially censor identifying factors; i.e., with their face scratched out of the photo to keep them—along with their codename—as anonymous as I can do at a glance. Originally, I wrote of them behind their codename while conveying them as a simple black shape (next page), but have since decided I wanted to convey them a little more corporally (exhibit 39a2b) than a fatal portrait or Nick Castle homage.

To be absolutely clear, records of Jadis can still be found in my broader material histories. I will not take the time needed to entirely expunge them, partly because Jadis isn’t worth effort, but also because I want proof of their abuses and their actual existence—including the love they coerced from me—to remain after I am gone, without provoking them overtly while I am still alive. That’s their immortality as far as I’m concerned. As such, this book would not exist without their abuse of me, nor ludo-Gothic BDSM as a scholarly idea; i.e., that became entirely devoted towards avoiding similar abuses in the future! —Perse

(exhibit 39a1b: Fatal portrait, top-left: Jadis, whose “beautiful” memory I will replace with the truth of what they were—an abused person who went on to abuse others; artist, top-right: Persephone van der Waard, who came out a month after illustrating her abuser’s true form and her own: “Somebody new, I’m not that chained-up little person still in love with you” [Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” 1978].)

A common Gothic trope, then, is the restoration of sentiment through the material world: the collapse of the Gothic castle like a nightmare, the transgenerational curse of its perceived, mighty undeath swept away like a bad dream and repealed with a benign counterpart (which Hogle would posit is, itself, a mere counterfeit that serves the material interests of the elite; i.e., the Cycle of Kings [more on this idea in the “Monomyth” subchapter] exemplified through the whitewashing of the regal home—the castle itself and its surroundings haunted by what is normally abjected). However, these stories more broadly denote a continuous healing process—of oneself and the sick home (or land around it) as part of the socio-material world that occurs through the pain of existence unnaturally affecting a natural process: the fusion of memories, artistic ideas and trauma together in nightmarishly beautiful ways. As such, I had intimately studied them already in my own graduate work, writing about Hollow Knight‘s poisoned land, but also poisoned memories per the rememory process; in turn, my postgraduate work involved my surviving of rape as something to study and camp more than once.

Pregnant with these sensations under Jadis’ “care,” I dutifully wrote the story down after they threw me out (Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022”). I did so at the time in order to get it straight in my own head, but also communicate my exodus in language I thought others would understand (rape is alien to many people, but Gothic stories less so); then, after Florida, I drew Jadis despite knowing the image would chill my blood at every viewing.

I had put off doing so for months, afraid of the agonizing “birthing” process but also of its dreadful completion. Eventually I could no longer keep them inside me and released their abuse onto the canvas (and later these book volumes). My aim was not to vent or self-torture, but bravely educate and inform future would-be-victims in language that speaks to them and their own assorted traumas and socio-material experiences. This book and its artwork are a logical continuation of that vital trend, as is ludo-Gothic BDSM a rememory-style means of revisiting such events; i.e., to recreate them in a variety of increasingly playful forms.

To that, these rather sober historical exhibits form the starting point for the subversion of martyrdom, which ludo-Gothic BDSM speaks to: as practitioner of it who became more and more playful, regarding the overall process.

What comes next is a passion of mine, in the religious, Numinous sense of that word; i.e., the “rough stuff” we alluded to in “Monsters, Magic and Myth” (2024), from Volume Two, part one. Tread lightly but also know that this book, for all its heavy weather, is still a safe space.

That being said, writing about these experiences and illustrating them, then editing and proofreading them again and again, I’ve had to go back repeatedly to a very dark place and dig up these bones; and it’s weird, because a part of me loves it—i.e., the thrill, the profound sense of annihilation and live burial, post-disinterment; it’s a madness that touches you and never lets go, haunts you for the rest of your life.

But I lived to educate you as matter of pride in my work. So if I ever feel small and weak, if I ever break down and cry because of it, I can remind myself that I survived; I didn’t break, I didn’t give in; I fought back and I lived. Whatever sickness drove Jadis to hurt me, I didn’t let it get me, too. And whatever money their father left behind for them, and all the material things that come and go for them as a result, I will rest easy knowing none of it can possibly fill the void in their heart, the sheer inability for them to relate healthily to others. Destroying things is easy and over in a heartbeat. Healing from trauma takes constant work; it takes courage the likes of which a villain like Jadis could never hope to match. —Perse

(exhibit 39a2a: For all its self-indulgent and fatal, carceral nostalgia, Max’s thrilling liberation from Vecna is Stranger Things‘ crowning achievement. Yes, it occurs from a Red-Scare, cis perspective that, as always, gives BDSM a bad name; the analog for trauma and abuse is both profound and applicable to any situation thereof. Ignoring but re-remembering the xenophobic nature of Vecna as the cartoon killer of white, cis-het, American children, the reality is that Max is an imperfect stand-in for any victim under capital: the plight of the heroine needn’t be gendered at all, but merely the portrayal of someone without power being gaslit by an invisible killer from the shadows. While Vecna is male—coded similarly to Malcolm MacDowell’s Alex from A Clockwork Orange [1971] just “Singing in the Rain” as he goes about his gruesome work—the reality is “killers” needn’t be so overtly rapacious in a physical or male sense.

The truth is, abuse but especially rape takes many forms and can use the same psychosexual language of unstable/unequal power as a dialogue between them; i.e., the victim and the audience relating back and forth, but also the predator and prey or multiples of each: the mark of trauma that communicates nonverbally[3] but also is told through widespread forms of psychosexuality tied up in demonic, Christian-torturous imagery popularized by Dante and revived in other mediums [e.g., Jacob’s Ladder or Tool music videos, exhibit 43a]. It becomes a paradoxical chase of the nurturing force as powerful and god-like, but also the aesthetic darkness as speaking to you in potentially harmful ways. When touched by a massive trauma that scars you, then, catharsis is paradoxically swept up in bad copies of the original abuse. You’re drawn to its dark intensity and gravity to face your fears, but also transform them and your trauma as something to hopefully camp and transform.

Simply put, it’s a prey mechanism and at times an intensely maladaptive one that brings new targets to an abuser hunting its prey [we’re taught not to self-conceptualize as animals; except we are animals, and few things are as intensely animal or ancient as fight, flight, fawn or freeze]. Prey fear predation but also seek protection through likenesses thereof that won’t harm them; i.e., less checking under the bed for monsters and instead inviting one inside to keep a former victim safe. The paradox of psychosexuality is the victim’s erotic desires often become pluralized, a strong urge from emotional scarring potentially leading them to conflate sex and harm through these maladaptive behaviors.
For example, my mommy kink is the seeking of a protector other than men [who have abused me all my life]: “Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children.” Indeed, my supposed rescuer was Jadis, who having conversations with me that my family could not see [thought I told them plenty] spirited me away to Florida. There, they worked their magic, doing their best to awe me with a shared psychosexual connection; i.e., drawn to my trauma and my seeking of the palliative Numinous as useful to their abusive machinations.

At the time, I thought Jadis a victim like me who was abused in ways that would bring us together to each other’s benefit. But as a harmful demonic persona, they were victim who had been operating as an abuser for years, one who forsook me in my time of need and pushed me to madness and suicide ideation:

Father, into your hands
Why have you forsaken me?
In your eyes forsaken me
In your thoughts forsaken me
In your heart forsaken me [System of a Down’s “Chop Suey,” 2001].

Like God unto Jesus, Jadis became my destroyer [their mother acting like a man, in that respect, hence them playing the TERF whose tokenism would go on to inform Sex Positivity‘s entire critical voice[4]]. They tried to sever all bonds of friendship and family I had, so there would be only them. They would fret and strut about the house in fetish gear and knife heels, hypnotizing me as their prey. And my friends and family either did not know, felt unable to reach me/powerless to intervene, or some combination of these inadequacies [and in Cuwu’s case, they rescued me only to prey on me, themselves].

Likewise, Max’s friends paw desperately at her body as her eyes roll into her skull and she falls upward; i.e., less like a balloon sailing away from them and more like Christ on the cross severed from gravity itself. The killer had targeted her for her trauma and worked from the shadows, hunting her without her knowledge until finally making himself known.

[artist: Theremin Trees; source: “‘Unconsciously’ Seeking Abusers? | bogus therapy,” 2022]

While the show treats Vecna’s reveal as strictly torturous[5], the truth is, killers aren’t just two-faced, but many-faced. First, they generally approach you with two basic masks: a dark side and a light side, and doubly imposturous, they oscillate between them to confuse you while also often having several on at once [concentric veneers] and borrowing from a vast store of expressions [above]. They tell you lies to keep you close, intimating cheap rewards and brutal punishment as if to say, “Stay here with me; it’s the only choice you have.”

To that, Vecna doubles Max, offering her a Faustian choice, a psychosexual martyrdom similar to Owen from The Night House. Like Beth from that film, Max is jostled by her friends to reject this fantasy at the critical moment. As such, she recovers and runs away from the killer whose spells are, themselves, mere illusions; i.e., unable to harm her to the degree that he’s suggesting: that he somehow has total power over her. The socio-material truth is more complex; i.e, those with power over you always have the capacity to commit real violence and harm, but the method to evoke this as a means of rooting you in place until they can have their way is fallible. In short, they cannot monopolize you anymore than capital can at large.

To this, Netflix’ overall metaphor for Numinous destruction is apt, the psychomachy suitably operatic as Kate Bush’s infamously spectral voice swoons and sighs some forty years after its debut. Max frees herself, suddenly able to move, and she desperately makes her escape. Running through the dark forest of her mind, the thunder of the music drives her onward while the dark wizard’s spell swirls chaos all around. But her prey-like desire to be free drives her on, until finally the spell breaks and she falls back to Earth, reunited with her friends and leaving the thin-skinned, fragile and lonely predator isolated and alone. “I’m still here,” she says, having chosen to live instead of give into Vecna’s devilish offer [a Faustian bargain that conflates genuine love with non-consensual, harmful pain; re: false power as self-destructive].

For all Stranger Things‘ Gothic panache, the concept is hardly unique to strictly Gothic language. For example, when regarding my own childhood trauma as exacted my father and step father, a particular film speaks to that abuse; i.e., to a similar degree to Stranger Things‘ own psychosexual narrative—with similarly abusive, thus unequal power exchange and subsequent outlets of escape, without the overtly monstrous visuals: one of my mother’s favorite films that we used to rent on VHS, Immortal Beloved [1994]:

In the film, Beethoven stands on the stage, old and deaf thus unable to hear his own music; he hears it in his mind, the Ninth [1824] supplied to us as he might have heard it. He remembers every single note while likewise envisioning his drunken father coming home at night; unable to comfort himself with drink or non-consenting women, he mounts the stairs like a shadow, pursing his own son with phallic intent [the father’s club extending seemingly out from his crotch, suggesting a psychosexual nature to this abuse: raping his son to control and dominate him, no doubt in response to criminogenic abuses capital visited on the father and father’s father, etc].

As I have bourne witness to, there is no difference between a man climbing such steps and a demon in the eyes of a child; Beethoven expects the fiend, waiting almost patiently while gazing out the window at the stars, longing to be free under them instead of imprisoned within his father’s fallen home.

Seemingly at random, Beethoven takes a chance: He climbs out the window and hides in the shadow of the roof while his father screams his name. Then, he climbs down the storm drain and runs for it. He runs like his life depends on it, sprinting through the forest, between the trees, with the twinkling stars looking down from on high. And reaching a secluded lake, he disrobes and climbs inside the paternal waters, floating in the womb-like darkness of a Maternal Sublime[6]. Revived in 1994, Beethoven’s Ninth, in 1824, echoes Coleridge’s sentient from 1818; re: “…the Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I am filled with devotion and with awe; I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible impression left, is, ‘that I am nothing!'” [source].

Like Max, Beethoven was freed from his father’s abuse, but is forever haunted by him, the power of music as a cathartic, creative force keeping the devils seemingly outside the cathedral at bay [in truth, they are everywhere, and not all of them mean workers harm (re: Spectres of Marx), but I digress]. The same concept applies to my art [and ludo-Gothic BDSM] as a poetic, scholarly extension of myself, but also the abuse and friendships I’ve had throughout the years; the latter saved me from former.)

Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, praxial synthesis and catharsis are a matter of calculated risk while returning theatrically to old traumas during the rememory process. Except, returns to childhood-as-harmful are always traumatic. For the abuser, they become manna from Heaven: a tool to leverage against their unhappy victims the way they, too, once experienced; i.e., the mask of the destroyer and savior something to swap in and out, and which to survive Jadis I had to learn to do the same in opposition (which led to my developing of cryptonymy as a revolutionary countermeasure).

To be thorough, here are some more examples of Jadis’ abuse I’ve decided to document and include. —Perse, 6/23/2023

(exhibit 39a2b: Models: Jadis, all, and Tim, top-right; photographer: Persephone van der Waard. Jadis liked to control their prey through treats. In short, if I was good, I got fed. Or, as I write in “Setting the Record Straight Again; Accounting My Ex’s Abuse of Me to Another Victim, August 30th, 2022” [2024]:

Jadis always had all of the material power. They signed off on everything. And eventually it became toxic to me. I stopped wanting to have sex with them, but also to have breakfast with them. And they, in turn, stopped offering me any semblance of agency. I couldn’t decide where we ate or where to buy groceries. Hell, they almost didn’t buy me those books when the three of us went to that giant used bookstore. But they were perfectly happy spending hundreds of dollars on cute sexy clothes for me to wear because they liked me in them (but also didn’t want me wearing them all the time, and kept all of these articles when I moved out). In short, they not only treated me like a pet, but a doll they could objectify in ways they found sexy by dressing me up in expensive clothes they paid for, but also owned. Nothing was a true gift with Jadis (except for my phone, which they let me keep, and a couple of old Metallica t-shirts) [source].

The books-in-question, but also photos of a trip of ours to the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. The treats, then, extended car rides; i.e., to where they wanted to go [the museum was pretty awesome, to be fair]:

 

[artists: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard]

Clothes Jadis bought for me [and took back after I stood up to them, including the pink kitty collar]:

[artist: Persephone van der Waard] 

Everything Jadis did had a purpose, specifically to threaten and control; i.e., as something they could give and take away if I was bad. Jadis took after their mother, in that respect, but also the music they listened to under their mother’s abusive roof; re: Tool’s “Stinkfist“:

Show me that you love me and that we belong together
Relax, turn around and take my hand

I can help you change
Tired moments into pleasure
Say the word and we’ll be
Well upon our way [source: Genius]. 

This became something I noticed over time, but especially at the end. I was always bad and Jadis, like a goodly parent, was always correct; or, as I write in “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022” [where I refer to them under a different alias, “Jack”]:

I spent our entire relationship trying to make things work, doing my best to communicate and prevent toxicity. I stayed by Jack’s side during their rocky grad school tenure, but also their father’s illness and eventual death. I cooked, cleaned, and made love to them. I made art for them. I did everything I could to make things work, including talking to my friends about what I could do to become a better partner for Jack. I worried until my heart was sick.

In the end, I was Jack’s live-in cock, a conjugal cook and maid. I did everything to please them; they “rewarded” me with constant emotional abuse and neglect. This torment worked at a glacial pace. Jack love-bombed me early on, then slowly turned off the tap. I rationalized this any way that I could: When their [masters’] research dried up, I blamed their fruitless workload, not them; when their ex refused to talk to them, I blamed their lack of closure, not them; when their father died before they could have the fabled heart-to-heart, I blamed their arrested development, not them.

Jack had derided me on various past occasions. In particular, they criticized my academic expertise and research on neoliberalism and the Gothic, but refused to read my work. I was simply “wrong” in their eyes. No matter how hard I tried, they refused to talk with me at all. While I eventually gave up, I always felt like Jack despised me for my political beliefs from there on out. The walls went up and stayed up, isolating me from them [source].

Isolation and DARVO were two of Jadis’ favorite weapons, using them to triangulate me against Tim and, I presume, the other way around:

When Jack and I first met, they were going through a divorce. Their ex—I’ll call them Tim—was someone Jack constantly complained about, calling Tim an irresponsible man-baby. They said I was so much better than Tim, so much more helpful and fun to be around. But Jack was also estranged from Tim and wanted my help in patching things up. They wanted closure.

This seemed simple enough to me. So I decided to help. If Tim was really so bad to Jack (when all Jack had done was try to care and provide for them—again, according to Jack), I figured a simple apology from Tim was in order. Eventually Tim apologized to Jack and things began to improve between them. They talked more often and even signed the marriage dissolution papers. Hell, we even had a threesome [to mark the occasion]. I wanted to help make things between all three of us [better]. I wanted a polycule.

Time passed. Jack and I were preparing to move. Being of a poly mind, I suggested that Tim move in with us. He seemed fun, a totally new person. I asked Jack and they agreed. So I made plans to facilitate Tim’s insertion into our new living arrangement. The polycule was becoming a reality.

This entire time, though, it never occurred to me that Jack had been lying about Tim. So later, when Jack started accusing me of being irresponsible and “a bad person, unlike Tim,” I asked Tim for his side of the story. Tim called Jack an abuser. But here we were, all under the same roof. It felt strange because Jack had no excuse to be playing these kinds of games. But here they were, playing them anyway.

Now that I am away from them, I sincerely believe Jack wanted me gone, thus allowing them to abuse Tim—a person they’d abused in the past (for nearly a decade)—with impunity. Recently divorced from Tim, Jack needn’t worry about any legal repercussions; their name was on the lease, they had their father’s inheritance, and they could leverage the fact that Tim needed their help against them in any dispute. All they had to do was wear me down [ibid.].

[artist: Tim]

In the end, Tim was a victim, too [Jadis making you think the only way you could have anything in life—including self-expression—was under their control, their domination]. Sometime after I left, Tim and I spoke about all of this, but eventually the talks stopped. I don’t know what ultimately happened to them, but I hope they’re safe).

Please note, I really haven’t touched this subchapter too much, in order to preserve its accuracy and immediacy at the time of writing it, but will simply say that returning to it is like going back into Hell; i.e., feeling the dark seduction of Jadis as a master manipulator working me over with their masks, their weight, their power as seemingly greater than mine.

As always, I think of Jadis like a black shape, haunting me. I know it’s just a corpse from my past, but that it (and its trauma) will never truly die. All I can do is face it vocally as a sex-positive lesson for others to learn from, dissecting my past as much a corpse of myself and my trauma living ever on: something to return to, while reifying ludo-Gothic BDSM as something that ultimately came afterwards—is always coming after a return to the past as something to reassemble and convey in serious-to-silly forms: things to play with and relate to as people do.

Even now, though, the venue remains haunted; i.e., I feel beckoned as much by likenesses of Jadis, but also myself as confused by virtue of the kinds of attacks they levied at me with their Aegis, their masks. “I’m not a bad person,” Jadis told me, underestimating their own cruelty while insisting all the while that I was the one victimizing them. It’s hard, then, not to look at the dark shape and see myself on it: owned by someone who took me for all I was worth and never let me go. It hurts, but the wound has healed; these paradoxical feelings remain, as if to spite my progress. Jadis was my Weathertop, stabbing me with a Morgul blade (wrought in the city of their past abuse, which they turned against me: as yet another threat for them to police).

(artist: Keith Macmillan; source: Kory Grow’s “‘That Evil Kind of Feeling’: The Inside Story of Black Sabbath’s Iconic Cover Art,” 2020)

In short, Jadis’ spell worked as a false promise of protection, the usual Man Box nonsense relayed in a TERF form. Through Jadis, this has become something for me to reify and revisit as a theatrical, doll-like device; i.e., to reclaim through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a perpetual work-in-progress: the black knight—the lurking threat of parental, spousal, and/or community abuse—attached to police violence defending profit through weird nerds failing up. All become something to recognize in small; e.g., the trembling and vulnerable side of myself, playing with dolls I pulled out from within: to place in front of me, thus better control and camp Jadis’ raping of me.

I’m not plural—I don’t front as such when triggered—but I can still recognize the scholarly and practical value in such protectors, and in conjuring out dark abusers in theatrical forms; e.g., John Kimble vs the abusive mother and father, Sarah Conor vs the abusive cop, and so on; i.e., someone to see me freeze, look at the dark abuser (who often looks perfectly normal, on the outside), then take me aside and say, “It’s ok, I got this” before confronting the destroyer in suitably theatrical fashion (through Cameron’s mirror test, below, was used to capitalize on audience fears of police brutality at the time):

In the absence of actual protectors, we create our own, psychosexually recontextualizing trauma (often through an asexual, dollish interrogation of rape) as something that generally lives inside and around us. It’s simply how humans operate. In revisiting this section to polish it, then, ludo-Gothic BDSM has become the theory for such operations put to practice long before I knew concretely how to express it. Although again, it already had started to with my postgrad Metroidvania work[7] as built on older fabrications reversing abjection; i.e., on older instances of survived abuse as something to camp as a matter of capital looping in on itself. Time is a circle, of which our abusers come back around in ways we can control: by making them into dolls (and dollhouses) that are very much haunted by the echoes of trauma. With Jadis, I’ve made them into something to play with—unable to rape me ever again but teasing me with the pain of such passions threatened by such destroyers-in-small.

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

They weren’t always small, and generally had a variety of tools to leverage against me (e.g., sex, left). For example, my exit letter was written at the height of Jadis’ abuse—where I had become a frightened, pretty bauble on par with Haggard’s unicorns (when we watched The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, one of Jadis’ favorite lines came from the Hunter: “You have heart; I’ll take that, too!”). Inside the letter, I likened my home life through the toy-like language of children—as what I had to work with, but also because it made sense. In short, speaking through toys and games was comforting because I could play with them to solve the puzzle of Jadis raping me; i.e., to Majora’s Mask (1998) because it felt like being threatened with the moon night after night. Eventually the only way to escape was to summon the moon and expose the monster, breaking the spell they had over me:

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

Like Link, I could not escape by playing the song. Every time [Jadis] 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 step 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 [Jadis] 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 [their ex], 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 (re: “My Ex’s Abuse of Me“).

As said letter proves, but also the artwork and writing that came later, putting myself in my own shoes from an outsider’s perspective and reimagining my own trauma (as a Gothic heroine, exhibit 39a1b) was central to me understanding what had already happened and what was going to happen. At the time, I really wasn’t sure how it was all going to play out. Nevertheless, the more I creatively processed my trauma, the more that imaginary hindsight slowly became Gothic insight and emotional intelligence, but also undead-demonic release through the wearing of my own mask and acting things out.

Unbeknownst to me, this had also conveyed the mask-like “brave faces” that I wore for Jadis, secretly (or perhaps not so secretly) frightened of them; and they for me, in treachery and bad faith. Indeed, masks are vital to survival, but also swept up in cathartic and harmful Gothic dramas concerned with parasitic imposters (Jadis, in full control, pulling me around on the dance floor): the Amazon as a protector of children that, like our childhood bugbears, also follows us forward as something to summon up again—to be our Medusa when we feel small and scared in the face of things that remind us of (and indeed act out) our past abusers.

While we’ll explore the concept of performative (and cryptonymic) masks more, in Volume Three (especially concentric veneers as something to destroy our enemies’ through our own survival maneuvers), here is a quick example below of me reifying my survival as dollish:

(exhibit 39a3: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. Revana is my alter ego, a “mask/costume” warrior mommy the likes of which I always wanted to keep me safe [my mother, through no fault of her own, could not]. I drew this the same day I drew Jadis as my Great Destroyer [exhibit 39a1b]. The idea was to show the plurality of trauma as divided by my feminine side having different qualities to it; i.e., that I could embody as separate from myself—both desiring to be strong yet still wanting to be a trans-woman princess. That is what Revana means to me: a warrior and protector Amazon who can step up and throw down when someone sees my soft, feminine side and wants to take advantage as I regress; i.e., the female/trans femme hero out of popular stories I grew up with and dined on after I was fully grown; e.g., Eowyn from LotR or Sarah Connor from T2, but also Mercedes from Pan’s Labyrinth [2006] saying to Vidal: “Don’t touch the girl, motherfucker! You won’t be the first pig I’ve gutted!”)

The cathartic effect of such rememory was almost orgasmic, feeling strangely good through my tremendous tears laid on the canvas, the page—not because I was a glutton for punishment, but because I reveled in my own profound survival. I had wanted to escape punishment by facing whatever Jadis had in store, but also was trying to understand it while steadily moving forward onto better things. Also, I learned ways to recognize abusers attracted to, and feeding off, my trauma, which would come in handy with future partners; e.g., Cuwu’s draconian shenanigans, but also having the arsenal for bullshit after that, like bigoted female sex workers trying to bully/pimp me (re: “Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023”), which we’ll discuss in Volume Three.

Contrary to canonical exhibitions thereof, subversive Amazons like Revana denote something we can use to feel capable, without turning into Charlotte Dacre’s Victoria from Zofloya or Ellen Ripley killing Communists for the state (re: James Cameron’s white-savior billionaire Marxism). Even so, they are undead, and constitute a painful revisiting of one’s personal trauma in order to face and reform it into a better lesson: that I had some hand in my own abuse. Here at the end of things—as I turn Jadis into a doll (to make them easier to handle) that I and others can play with to camp our own survival of rape—I shall be honest and confess my hand in my own rape.

Before I start, a couple things to bear in mind: One, per the zombie and its apocalypse as a kind of demon lover come home to, this is ultimately what ludo-Gothic BDSM and good rape play were founded on: the survival of rape as something to keep playing with, raising healthier Gothic castles built on former tyrants who, as they cannot be escaped (silence regarding them leads to rape returning home), become part of the castle-narrative; i.e., the thing we can play with inside to avoid rape in the future whenever, wherever and however it occurs.

To that, Jadis has become—as I alluded to, a moment ago—my haunted house; i.e., a dark place of play whose spirit of playing with the half-real past means facing said past (and my hand in it) as always coming back around: to scoop us into the halls of older histories the future learns from (until it also becomes past); re, “Baby, You’re a Haunted House“:

And your heart will stay forever
When your last remains are few
In the dark, we dance together
And I’d like to be waiting with you (source: Genius).

It would be a lie to say that I didn’t and don’t love part of Jadis still: the likeness of them that I can fashion, then play with to heal from the original’s dreadful abusing of me (which was also doll, in bad faith). Except, it’s less about who they were and more who they could have been, if things were different. I was raped, and not just by Jadis; but Jadis was the one who did it despite everything I did to make them happy. A part of me knew that, and it took time for me to escape the trap I had knowingly, on some level, entered of my own accord.

The best revenge for me, then, wasn’t letting them know that they could have had all the sex they wanted, or good food, or whatever else I could have given, because the only thing they enjoyed was preying on me exactly the way they did. Instead, my success—my escape, if you want to call it that—is having survived them to turn them into a sex-positive lesson that will make such police-like antics of theirs a thing of the barbaric past. The survival of police violence is generally “cops or victims” as a matter of survivors becoming either moving forward. If we build a place where people can play with rape as an educational device geared towards rememory as a healing process, confrontations with the past become honestly cathartic; i.e., by changing the state through society as veering away from its usual dogmas and hand in things.

And that is ultimately what I’ve done with Jadis: turning them not just into a playground, but a harmless likeness of what they were that spells out their raping of me and my hand in that; i.e., while seeing them as someone human that, for all the harm they exacted upon me, I will always love that gentler side of them—the side that, as much as it pains me to tell you all, died/retreated deep inside them the moment their father left his parting gift: the widower’s gold. In that moment, Jadis made the choice (as much as anyone can make choices with the past forever weighing on them): to become the destroyer sans irony once and for all.

To find some semblance of victory over their humiliating raping of me and throwing me aside, I have taken us both in totality to leave you, dear readers, with something to learn from as a matter of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as hammered into me by Jadis, belonging to part of a larger cycle of abuse—one tied to the land and its memories projected onto any kind of media you could dream of. I don’t wish to romance abuse, here—not to celebrate toxic love, but learn from the harm Jadis caused me, that befell me as something I have since returned to and acknowledged in dollish form; i.e., preserving its dark memory to behold for all time: an alien that I loved, but one who never really bonded with me through the experience; i.e., as one that always held me at arm’s length—never to let me heal each of us from the trauma that touched us both: “He shall never know how I love him […] because he is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” (source: Wuthering Heights, 1847).

(artist: unknown)

Weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma. I don’t wish to hide the fact that I loved and made allowances for my abuser because I most certainly did (and still am always reminded of that, through these rememories of them). Nor do I wish to change them, after the fact. That only happens when they decide to (and until then, they simply take and take, having no reason to change). To my most antagonistic abuser (the most Hurtful Abuser Award actually goes to Zeuhl, oddly enough), I merely wish to leave some parting words as we begin our segue into the sorts of monomythical forms you were doubtless inspired by when brutalizing me:

Jadis,

I don’t know where you are now, and I suspect Fate has given you no reason to change (capital not only creates people like yourself—victims who go onto gatekeep others—it incentivizes you to keep at it and perpetuate the cycle in service to profit). But if there is any good left in you at all, know that I saw that and did my best to capture it; i.e., as hopelessly fused with your dark side as the side that sadly won. But in winning as it seemingly did, you sent me away to learn from your lessons. Even if you never meant them to teach me anything, the crux of understanding lies on the student being able to learn anyways; i.e., as a matter of emergent play relative to the devices at hand. You couldn’t, but I could and did. Thank you for that.

I loved you as much as I could, my orc queen. Yes, I feared you and still very much do. Yet all the same, I adored the idea of what I saw in you: as something that could be better with only the right touch. Since I was mistaken about you, as a person, in that respect, I’ve since erected its Heathcliffean likeness here for others to learn from, including my own folly standing before. The paradox is that in escaping your person, I’ve found that you’ll always, to some extent, be with me. So I’ve made that part of you into something toy-like for which ludo-Gothic BDSM is possible.

You’re the doll to play with, my love—the dollhouse stripped of its harmful capacity but not its ghastly echo. You vibe to the ghosts of older tyrants you clearly seek to emulate; I, to the spectres of a Marx I’ve made—like you—quite a bit gayer than their historical figures could ever really be. However futile it might be, then, I would only ask that you do better towards others in the future, to try and match the spirit of play my little idea encompasses: as having a little bit of you inside it.

Farewell, my bug-loving black knight; you were a cunt, but I loved you enough to try and change you. Failing that, you have become my darkest object lesson, my Heathcliff on the moor that, whenever I look upon you, never fails to chill my blood and send me falling upwards, sailing far and wide on my own Numinous adventures. When I question the wisdom of reifying you as a matter of instruction, I sometimes pause regarding that quest, thinking of Charlotte Brontë’s wayward sister, Emily, making her own monument to such a being:

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master […] The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur — power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot [source: Nava Atlas’ “Charlotte Brontë is Preface to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,” 2014].

“No coward soul is mine,” said the girl, herself. And I was never one to shy away from nightmares. Had that been true, I would have never met you, my destroyer. The rest, as they say, is history—the kind of curiously pretty flowers with dark stems, which I’ve laid on your grave to remember what was best of you married to the worst of it, too (forgiveness comes at recognizing both, and my own hand in things). I’d say I’m laying you to rest, but the dead never stay dead, do they?

Himmelhoch jauchzend, zu(m) Tode betrübt[8],

—Persephone van der Waard

With that out of the way, lovelies, I wish to conclude this subchapter with some closing points (about ten pages, seven of which are exhibits). These won’t be terribly organized—will merely be arranged as I originally compiled them: as a manner of afterthoughts. Keep these in mind as we go from the rememory of my personal life’s traumas into the sorta of monomythical forms Jadis was emulating: camping rape as something to revisit a “childhood” that never quite happened, but sits between imagination and history as half-real and chronotopic, but also fun (re: Walpole); i.e., a dollhouse to go and camp rape as a matter of rememory concerning personal trauma as undead. To that, Jadis is my favorite toy to illustrate rape, but also one I don’t like to use often. In fact, I may never use them again. All the same, this is my home—has become my life as a matter of healing a broken place into a matter of balance with those things lying in the graveyard of my soul—but I shall, a sad and wiser woman, move onto greener pastures held inside the same castle grounds: “Never did I wanna be here again / And I don’t remember why I came” (Godsmack’s “Voodoo,” 1998). —Perse

Despite being my attempt to make these understandings public, sharing my childhood and post-childhood mistreatment with the world through Sex Positivity wasn’t always the obvious route precisely because it happened over time and in ways that horribly confused me. This remains true when summoning the ghost of the thing that harmed me, doing so to comment on the harm it caused being tied up in another earnest truth: that such things can be incredibly exciting and cathartic when harm is removed from them, but also per a means of catharsis that confronts the mind of a hostage; i.e., someone living in fear of the thing exciting all manner of emotions/psychosexual predicaments.

Anyone who says that such monsters aren’t, to some degree, exciting has never been through it. I’m not invoking that here to stress the escapist qualities of a hostage stuck in the hauntological past of their own rape; I’m doing to it emphasize that escaping the prison is a vital means of transforming it through likenesses of the very bait that led us into our captors’ hands. This involves a great deal of confusion, insofar as trauma warps our approach towards, and perception of, what excitement even is.

For example, one of the worst[9] effects Jadis had on me was being made to hate sex, specifically feeling ashamed of needing to cope with my own trauma: having sex with them. I didn’t think such a thing could be possible, so I blamed myself instead. Sex can certainly be good under the right conditions—and much of the sex with Jadis was amazing. It was like fucking a demon. Not only were they physically strong and built like a tank—able to take whatever I dished out while asking for more—but they demanded everything from me, their eyes turning black as they ordered me to go deeper and harder to fill them up.

Being into BDSM, Jadis also had the equipment; e.g., a throat collar that hooked to ankle shackles, rendering Jadis completely helpless (a human pretzel for me to fuck). They also had the body for it. Despite being a big girl (their weight tended to range from 240-270 pounds), they had unusually flexible hips and could put their legs behind their head without stretching. Once the shackles were in place, their legs pulled back and exposed their pussy to me, which they expected me to raw-dog like a good little girl. In that sense, they were like a vampire: able to command me with their eyes while being physically “helpless” (in truth, they had all the financial control, which undoubtedly gave their gaze and actions further weight against a woman who physically had no material agency and had been abused in the past).

(exhibit 39b: Source (AI “art”), top right: Xenodochium; artist, top-middle and -right: Isutoshi; bottom-middle and -right: Low-Polydragon. For an idea of what Jadis was like, the top-left image was their body-type; the bottom-left/top-middle and -right image were their initial effects on me, comedy[10] included; and the bottom-middle and -right images were a close approximation of the phenomenological experience of their increasingly baleful, demonic gaze.)

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t relish these rituals (and serving their chonky overseer) at first; Jadis tried harder in the beginning to impress me by actually being good in bed. I also think they were seeking a feeling of power in relation to their own abuse suffered at the hands of their narcissistic mother (again, swapping out a variety of masks to confuse me with; e.g., like Shang Tsung wearing the masks of his victims to act the hero with: “All these souls and you still don’t have one of your own!”). However, the context between us was reactively abusive and became more exploitative over time. Not only I am hypersexual and gravitate towards sex when stressed or scared; I’m also eager to please, meaning I would have sex with Jadis just to calm them down (they were constantly hyperviligent and said as much); i.e., to stop them from glowering at me with their pitch-black eyes. Simply put, I wanted to be a good girl that Jadis regarded with love, not hate—especially during sex!

Jadis’ arc was complex, as was mine and my scholarship in relationship to them. Long before I penned ludo-Gothic BDSM in a crystalized, doll-like form, they love-bombed me, pulling me close to them as quickly as they could; I participated, wanting to go to Florida (the reasons why having already been stated, here and during the manifesto). As time went on, Jadis not only abused me; they slowly pulled away and raped me from afar. Their estranged father had died roughly a month after Jadis turned 35, leaving them with a considerable amount of “fuck you” money and capital (dividends).

It was not a clean process. His ruined trailer had to be gutted, sorting the decades’ worth of old, dusty records hoarded inside. Much of that “homecoming” was left to me, as Jadis piled everything inside our duplex before hiding themselves away (retreating from their childhood instead of facing it). As my book has expanded, I have given voice to this oddity and others besides; re: about Jadis’ ex, Tim, who we were living with towards the end. Like sex, though, the build-up takes preparation, time and repeated execution to yield the best results (and is generally better with music, costumes and other “spices” that evoke feelings, memories and various other “spell-like,” hard-to-explain-but-easy-to-feel phenomena).

Since July 22nd, 2022, the feverish pitch of writing this book—night after night, assembling the dreamlike “bricks” of paragraphs and images frantically plucked from the void—has become an ongoing attempt to heal and educate, breaking the cycle of systemic exploitation for all workers under Capitalism. As I hope the primer has illustrated up to this point, proletarian praxis starts with excavating the past as already created; i.e., from our zombie-like dreams of war and violence about older material variants, which gradually yield a more guided analysis of posterior reassemblies. Begot from older traumatic memories—e.g., Jadis in Florida, grad school, my remaining uncle, my stepfather, my father, the stories of the past I have consumed at each of these points from different literary traditions with the same goal—all were Marx’ nightmare (of the dead generations) made material in and from my flesh.

As trauma lives inside me and around me, I have become like the zombie: a being that houses and expresses systemic trauma from childhood onwards (emulating Jonathan Harker’s journal that I, as child, used to read with voyeuristic delight; i.e., seeing my trauma and struggles in others, but also monster sex as something that I discovered was desirable to me from an early age). Accepting this role has opened my eyes; the point of this book, then, is to open your eyes, too. By yielding sex-positive expressions of trauma in the material world, you can expose the wider public to a Gothic imagination that liberates all workers from the state-corporate spell of neoliberal, hauntological brain death: Gothic-fueled class-to-cultural consciousness.

Of course, you might not live to see it, and it might show you how the world and those you care about aren’t so rosy as you’ve been led to believe (re: Jadis); but it can be part of something better that materially survives and aids your future family and friends after you die—but also while you live to smaller, incremental degrees through your own creative successes and social-sexual habits: “To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition” (source: Emerson’s “What Is Success?” 1908). Sometimes, that means digging up a zombie or two, laying a flower or two on the cold graves kept warm by the buzzing bumble bee butts, getting at the blossoms laid there:

(source, Facebook post, Gardening Soul: August 21st, 2021)

Convicting Capitalism is redemptive in this respect. Like Jadis’ awesome power over me, it wasn’t infinite but seemed that way. If it was, then surely any case for fighting back would be pointless. Such as it happened, I did fight back; I escaped Jadis and made my way back home, the bad dream less ending in totally and more me finding agency among the trauma in and around me by creating ludo-Gothic BDSM after surviving Jadis; i.e., as a means of understanding the world in ways that could shape and change it through future friends I would make as a result; e.g., Bay and Harmony as drawn to my work for these reasons: having something in common as sluts and weird nerds touched by death, but still alive and able to talk constructively and creatively about it—to toy with it in a productive manner conducive to developing Gothic Communism. Ours is an outpouring of raped zombies, vampires and ghosts coming forward to testify against capital!

We have now concluded the meat of the original zombie apocalypse section and its discussions about humanizing zombies and sex toys; i.e., reversing abjection through the rememory of personal trauma (childhood abuse) by returning to Gothic spaces (the zombie house, returning without moving) and playing with them: to interrogate power in order to challenge profit and Capitalism Realism (versus the usual fatal nostalgia in neoliberal refrains; e.g., Metroidvania).

(artist: William Blake)

Before we move onto ghosts and other forms of undead, though, I want to bridge the gap between dreams and sight (something of a poetic goal of the original manuscript I want to preserve here, in finalizing it). I want to include a part three to “Bad Dreams” concerning people similar to Jadis, but on a different poetic scale. To that, we’ll be examining the larger-than-life as a legendary sort; i.e., the undead tyrant as something to see in dream-like spaces that take our criticisms of capital to a common place of remediation—the monomyth, and the various, ghostly echoes of Caesar as someone who douchebags nowadays are still trying to revive, millennia after his infamous demise[11]. Such overlords are commonly shown as ghosts (e.g., Hamlet’s father’s), but we’ll be sticking to more corporal forms: Zombie Caesars (next page): “With Caesar dead, Rome had moved from one crisis to the next,” writes hoakley in “A History of Rome in Paintings” (2020). This includes Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire” alluding to that tradition all dead generations weighing on our brains; i.e., that cyclical, historical-material matter of tragedy and farce we must rescue from itself: through ludo-Gothic BDSM as camping such spectres and supplanting them with far gayer forms than the usual heteronormative, Cartesian idiots bother to try (always scapegoating Medusa instead of Caesar)!

Keeping with the original poetic flavor of the Humanities primer and its assorted key phrases I only partially stuck to while editing and expanding on things, we’ll explore “sight” as a critical poetic trope in the “Seeing Dead People” subchapter (when we examine the undead’s universal feeding mechanism beyond just zombies), and the notion of reviving the zombie future more fully at the end of the primer (and volume).

Here, though, I want to introduce both ideas—to flirt with them a little through another concept we’ll explore constantly throughout the rest of the book: reverse abjection as a process vital to Gothic Communism. Its subversion of zombie enterprises remains important, but especially the chronotope of undead war and its “fallen lords,” whose tyrannical, dynastic power exchange spawns endless zombie tyrants—e.g., generals, skeleton kings, masters of the universe, and ghostly “fathers,” etc—that help spread a blinding “false” vision of imaginary history.

To subvert Capitalist Realism, this history (and its fearful inheritance/failed memory of the decaying nation-state) must be challenged; those who cannot face, thus play and learn from history (and its Wisdom of the Ancients) are doomed to repeat it—i.e., as a matter of hauntology per the shadow of “Rome,” of “Caesar,” of “Pygmalion,” etc (from Volume One):

Canonical Rome absolutely sucks ass/is not to be trusted. For one, Rome is, by modern standards, hauntologized (utterly fake; re: the ghost of the counterfeit). The original lasted for centuries in various forms, but was effectively a city-state; nation-states, by comparison, emerged during the Renaissance formation of national identities, followed by the Enlightenment’s settler colonialism appealing to the pre-fascist (Neo-Gothic) hauntology of “Rome” as unified post-fascism—one nation, one army under “God,” or some other vertical bourgeois authority (secular or religious) that endures after the “defeat of the Nazi” (the details of their death have been greatly exaggerated; Nazis were copying American fascism, which is alive and well). Nation-states normalize Imperialism, thus genocide, rape, war and worker exploitation through canonical Gothic praxis. They compel sexual reproduction through heteronormative, amatonormative, Afronormative, and queernormative lenses, etc—are built on a settler-colonial binary that yields an imperial, dimorphic flavor in everyday language: good vs evil, black vs white, us vs them, “the creation of sexual difference” by Luce Irigaray and so on.

For our purposes, this binary is remediated within the Gothic mode to communicate Western glory as something to synthesize through pro-state propaganda as coercion personified: the fetishization of war, deception, rape and death linked to the hauntology of the state apparatus as a lionized conveyor of traditional Western virtues (source).

As we shall see with the monomyth, these virtues manifest in the zombie tyrant; i.e., as a likeness of Caesar being largely one of mythology that, while largely invented, still dovetails unto fascist goals in service to capital (and tokenism) nonetheless: through neoliberal media, but especially movies and videogames, as having exploded in that era. They become undead as a matter of history in the Gothic sense of the world—in ways that further the process of abjection to maintain Capitalist Realism through castles and tyrants (castle-narrative, vis-à-vis Bakhtin’s chronotope: dynastic primacy and hereditary rites) as monstrous, poetic, useful to the state as preserving itself through them and giving the game away as a matter of cryptonymy (the scapegoat and the symptom to a larger problem): Caesar’s ghost haunts capital as decaying towards a former time of invented greatest.

As we shall see, Capitalism is a Big Zombie that foists its own charge of cannibalism onto its victims, which it then polices through tokenization as a matter of criminogenic conditions: divide and conquer amongst empire eating itself, when the chickens come home to roost!

Concerning “ludo-Gothic BDSM”/medieval poetics after this point: Ludo-Gothic BDSM as I coined it remains utterly central to my work; i.e., having traced its evolution to where it presently exists, I’ve since tried very hard to mention different instructional points for you to consider moving forwards; e.g., dolls and rape play in the “Bad Dreams” chapter, so far, as well as the “Another Castle, Another Princess”/”Playing with Dead Things” chapter before that (in Volume Two, part one). Per the cryptonymy and hauntology processes—i.e., informing abjection as something to forward or reverse inside various spaces, including chronotopes like the Metroidvania—ludo-Gothic BDSM takes on many different shapes and sizes. Keeping all of this in mind, ludo-Gothic BDSM will still come up quite a bit; i.e., throughout the rest of the Undead Module and the entirety of the Demons Module.

(artist: Lil Wolfy 69)

As for the five medieval poetic terms from Volume Two, part one (selective absorption, magical assembly, Gothic maturity, confusion of the senses, and the Song of Infinity), they won’t come up very often. Simply put, you won’t need to know them to learn the rest of the primer’s historical elements, but you can take and use them yourselves when engaging with the history inside; i.e., by applying my more recent poetically instructional arguments to older monstrous histories, said arguments being founded on the principles of sex positivity and Gothic Communism that I’ve championed since the start of this project, nearly two years ago (and based on older research feeding into the present): the liberation of sex workers through iconoclastic art. However you want to synthesize that outcome, you’ll have plenty of toys with play with!

Last but not least, here are several additional exhibits to give you a taste of what we’ll explore in “Bad Dreams,” part three. —Perse

(exhibit 39c1: Top-left: Balor, the central villain from Bungie’s Myth: the Fallen Lords, 1997; bottom-left: Anubis, from The Ronin Warriors; top-right, artist: Michael Broussard, of the villainous Engineers from Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, 2012.

Neoliberalism crams fascism, Communism and queerness into the same poetic space. This being said, a common thread for all these canonical examples is decayed hauntology tied to the zombie tyrant, often a giant wearing armor and a helmet [e.g., Hamlet’s father’s beavered, medieval helm]. Balor is a kind of fascist, “Zombie Caesar” [zombie Nazis being a whole zombie sub-genre] that rises from the grave to destroy the degenerate West as its former “greatest champion.” He’s an action figure.

Removing his helmet, the greatest horror is that Balor is not rotted at all. Instead, his outward appearance is entirely human and he follows his own maxims to their logical conclusion: slay the enemy as a matter of coming home to empire. The same goes for Scott’s Engineers, their nightmarish armor concealing a worryingly human appearance. Not only were Scott’s story and monsters partially modeled after Lovecraft’s take on the Promethean quest, At the Mountains of Madness; both stories borrowed liberally from Shelley’s 1818 palimpsest, Frankenstein. Yet, Scott inverts the scheme somewhat, having the marbled, statuesque appearance of the classical-looking Engineers become gradually warped by a mad science buried deep in the cold reaches of outer space [versus Antarctica in Lovecraft or Shelley’s books]. Slowly the Promethean knowledge turns these false gods “mad,” technophobically represented by their bodies as darkly cybernetic—almost stitched together like Victor’s manmade Creature.

Apart from their bodies, both Balor and the Engineers have canonical zombie eyes, utterly blinded by an endless pursuit of “progress” that brings the Imperial Boomerang back home out of an uncertain past stitched crudely together [the more undead something is, the more “stuck” it is in a traumatized, corpse-like body; the more demonic, the more something can change its shape]. Anubis, meanwhile, serves an undead emperor out of an equally nebulous former time, bringing the warring states period into a Westernized, 1980s Japan: the return of the Shogunate again. Yet, the shock at realizing Anubis is human offers the protagonist fighting him hope: “You’re a man, a human being like us!”

For Anubis, though, the revelation is painful, his helmet being cut from around his head, revealing a surprisingly pretty face and girlish, red, long-flowing hair. The process of reverse abjection opens his eyes, turning him away from war and his undead master and placing him on a path of peace. Unfortunately he dies, as does Balor and the Engineers; regardless of their stations on the battlefield, the state reduces all of them to undead fodder.)

(exhibit 39c2: Dragon Ball has an absurd premise that is easily camped [dbzking541’s “The Funniest DBZ Dub I Have Ever Seen,” 2016]. Its canon still rolls The Modern Prometheus into The Iliad, presenting the zombie tyrant king as trapped between father-and-son according to man-made, unnatural husbandries: the Divine Right of Kings and the imperial relationship of master and slave, but also the cruelty of a bully patriarch-god towards his bizarre, man-made children: the archaic male baby as a killer child for state forces stemming from Beowulf into the present through hauntological regeneration; i.e., as undead/composite but also able to change its shape like Cú Chulainn’s ríastrad, aka “warp spasm”; or Milton’s Lucifer gradually shedding his angelic form to turn into a variety of animals—a demon, in other words.
The result, in this case, is canonical [unlike Milton]: a father-mother with delusions of grandeur, but also his child as an infantile slave with daddy issues rising to become a great warrior renowned for his inherited, informed cruelty [which would play out in real life with Reinhard Heydrich being known as “the young, evil god of death”; source: Behind the Bastards, 2023]. Just as the Nazi, the Communist and the queer are crammed together in the same shadow zone of centrist monomyths, the likes of Cell and Broly [above] are unthinking, childlike slaves taught to seek revenge by an absentee father figure: the scientist and the rival warlord seeking revenge. There is no mother in their lives and they are immediately and incredibly fragile creations desperately seeking fulfillment through patricidal revenge, but also combat against a cycle of warriors who are equally flawed.

In other words, the show’s much ado about nothing is built within and around a shonen-level crisis of masculinity for said crisis: to show and prove their strength for their fathers [“Look what I can do!”]. Even if they kill or otherwise hate their fathers, these lost boys are useless without them and driven by the taught seeking of bloodshed to appease their inherited idea of vampiric superhumanity. Deprived of the parent, “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct” becomes, “If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends” [source]. Except the negotiation is made to a captive audience under duress, themselves trained to kill and fight as “less” genocidal variants of the Great Destroyer’s cataclysmic, hellish tantrums: Broly either killing his father in a self-destructive fit of rage or misled by Freiza to rise up out of Hell’s green fire like a loving and dutiful demonic son.

I originally decided when I wrote, “Dragon Ball Super: Broly – Is it Gothic?” that the film wasn’t Gothic, but I feel like I was overlooking the liminality of its situation:

Broly is a highly-weaponized survivor, not unlike older, murderous, Gothic villains. However, the similarities mostly stop there. He is not a slasher like Victor Frankenstein’s Creature was, or his various counterparts. While the Creature was physically hideous, Broly is, for all intents and purposes, handsome (a throwback to the likes of ‎Robert E. Howard’s titular Conan the Barbarian). The Creature was brilliant; while not an idiot, Broly isn’t a rocket scientist, either. There is parental strife, though. Remnants of the father are passed down the same bloodline, signified by the collar around Broly’s neck. Broly isn’t allowed to be himself, any more than Vegeta was under the yolk of Freiza. Is this like Frankenstein’s monster, or the xenomorph? Not quite. Unlike them, Broly isn’t simply made; he’s raised by his father to be violent. Except Paragus’ quest largely fails: Broly isn’t violent; his monstrous side is. And therein lies a clear divide. Broly is only a monster when driven to grief, when his father is killed. Furthermore, his own drama stems not from the bad parentage read about in Frankenstein (1818). Unlike the Creature, Broly is not begot from Promethean science, nor is he driven by petty revenge. He’s naturally strong, loves his father no matter what, and remains totally innocent post-abuse (thanks to amnesia)—effectively the opposite of the Creature [source].

I don’t think it’s a question of opposites altogether, though—with the Creature being similarly trapped by bad parentage to be violent according to his father as both his worst enemy and the one person he believed who could bring him salvation [even if it meant destroying him, a mistake that proved fatal for all those involved]. There are differences, but these variants aren’t mutually exclusive; they are agglutinative. Whether Broly kills Paragus outright or avenges him, Paragus was still a terrible father who—like Cus D’Amato with Mike Tyson—trained his son to do one thing: to fight for a perfidious, Faustian father figure’s benefit [or like Peter Weyland or Victor Frankenstein, created a robotic/cyborg slave entity to do his bidding]. This is bad parentage any way you slice it; i.e., “I’m your father, boy, and you’ll do as you’re told!”

 

[Artist, far-mid-left: Imbisibol; bottom-mid-left: Tonami Kanji]

The ghost of the tyrannical father is trapped somewhere in time, threatening like Skynet’s Herculean T-800/T-1000 to rip into the present out of another destroyed past-future: one possible future as a hauntological death omen. Amid this Gothic pastiche, the dead future is full of the imprecise echoes of the Modern Prometheus: test-tube babies, brains in jars, cyborgs, genetically engineered Supermen, children weaponized accidently or deliberately for or against their fathers by said fathers, and “retroactive abortions” of the animate-inanimate golem; i.e., the killing of the child by the father, Abraham-style, before he can grow old enough to seek revenge when coming home.

The idea of the archaic baby is quite popular in Toriyama’s work, but also seen in the work of similar Japanese artists riffing within the same East-meets-West mythic structure; i.e., Shigesato Itoi’s Giygas [exhibit 60e2], but also Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune’s Dr. Light/Wily as a conflation of the evil/grey-area/good German scientist [Operation Paperclips’ Wernher von Braun, Oppenheimer and Alfred Einstein, etc] as a pre-fascist/Catholicized scapegoat and anti-Semitic trope [note the purple and red, above, but also the cartoon skull codpiece] whose monstrous-feminine super soldier is both the vengeful ghost of the fascist child and that of Jewish revenge [re: “If you prick us do we not bleed? … And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?”] smashed together during the crossing space-time fabrics of half-real geopolitics: Protoman and Zero both being children of Cain as much as Sigma, our Zombie Caesar/Dracula [with his own flowing red cape] is; and Cell being an uncanny cross between the human and the insect, but also the goblin and the vampire as—like the xenomorph before him—a time-traveling, shape-shifting, undead menace composed of many different stigmas and biases, but also worship of non-Western/non-heteronormative power and resistance.

Just as with the Creature and Victor, the haunting by Marx is incessant; i.e., of Broly by Paragus or Cell by Dr. Gero’s “obey me!” mentality and Red Ribbon stigma [Toriyama’s neoliberal framing of anything “Red” as villainous to Japan’s post-Occupation emulation, above]. By extension, Red Scare is incessant, the son a pile of offal turned into Achilles [with a similar emotional temperament] or even Alucard by Lord Dracula in Netflix’ 2017 Castlevania. In turn, the father is symbolized through a gender-swap for a popular image of undeath normally reserved for Medusa, but also the dragon lord when slain: the disembodied head that can still talk into the “son’s” ear [placed in quotes due to the unnatural, unreliable relationship between the two; i.e., “I am your father!” as the tyrant’s plea made famous in the 20th century by Luke from Vader. It’s the Shadow of Pygmalion lurking within the shonen variant of the Cycle of Kings].

[artist, left and right: Bernie Wrightson]

In Frankenstein, the story is a murder-suicide, enacted by the zombie son shambling towards the father-mother in an act of childhood revenge the double-parent first dreams about before sculpting his child [re: Zeus pulling Metis from his forehead]. Alucard, by comparison, does not want to kill his father, Dracula, who had sex with Alucard’s mom to have a, by and large, natural birth tainted by blood libel and pre-fascist coding. But the reckoning felt during the fatal return to his childhood home [something he does repeatedly throughout the franchise] is always traumatic to Alucard. It’s also [as we shall see next and in the Demon Module] dangerous: sometimes the house wins.)

Onto “‘The Monomyth’ (opening and part zero)“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Mavis explained it frankly and well (from Volume One):

Mavis is someone I haven’t mentioned until now, but will mention more throughout this book. They have had countless experiences with rape (dissociation makes you forget or “block out” the trauma, which makes it hard to remember). According to Mavis, rape is awful, but it’s also over quick and you can dissociate (something that plurality allows for); also, according to Mavis, they’d rather experience rape than prolonged mental abuse, the latter which can go on for years like a war of menticidal attrition—including threats of rape amid diminishing returns of genuine care after the initial “love-bombing” phase (say nothing of the historical-material variants if you’re living in someone’s family estate, or equally bad, being shamed, neglected or ignored by what Melissa McEwan calls “rape apologia” or “rape ranking” amid rape culture, 2013).

Speaking from my own experiences, it’s the kind of thing you can’t block out. Over time, this abuse can be “buried alive”—hidden in plain sight all around a “cursed” location littered with markers of power, but also illusions-of-illusions (crypt narrative) of normality that broadcast imprecise ambivalence. It’s precisely these iffy phenomenological disturbances and partial disconnections/connections that one relates to in continuum; i.e., being a part of the space-in-question, the broken home that is nevertheless one’s poisoned wellspring and haunted library of nostalgic storybooks. Trauma lives in the body but also the chronotope as something the body absorbs things from—the haunted house as returned to, feeling uncannily familiar and alien, but also already-occupied by something close-at hand during uncertain, liminal, feudalized ownership […]: the fear of inheritance; i.e., Walpole’s idea of a “secret sin; [an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse” from The Mysterious Mother (1768). Except incest isn’t a “pure myth” relegated to Gothic fiction, but precisely the kind of thing experienced by Mavis, Cuwu and people like them (who extrafamilial predators will mark as having survived, and try to exploit them in the future; i.e., trauma lives inside you, but also follows you like a curse) [source].

As such, I couldn’t disassociate from Jadis’ emotional abuse because it, unlike physical and sexual abuse, is interactive by design (to such a degree as Jadis could torture me without being inside the room); i.e., emotional requires a victim to respond to something from the abuser as supplied to them linguo-materially. But as we’ll, I was able to rely on the stories of the past (Gothic novels and my education about them) to navigate my own abuse in much the same way.

[2] Persephone van der Waard’s “Coming out as Trans”: August 7th, 2022.

[3] Re: Trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird. Jadis saw in me what I didn’t see in myself: a dupe who they—someone I loved—would unironically prey upon using my vices to hypocritically enslave me while saying they weren’t about that. It was disastrously potent and effective, just the right mix of pleasure and pain, isolation and abused trust.

[4] The first chapters (what became Volume Three) concerned TERF-style abuses that expanded to other forms of tokenism and Man Box thinking under Capitalism; re: “prison sex” mentalities.

[5] His mutilated, black-and-red body and fetish outfit evokes H.R. Giger’s xenomorph; his torture chamber evokes Stan Winston’s atmospheric processor from Alien—i.e., in a psychosexual, domestically xenophobic manner akin to Satanic panic from the 1980s and Catholic-to-anti-Catholic dogma across the centuries.

[6] We don’t have to ascribe gender towards a desire for protection, but in Beethoven’s case, the film’s director is patently noting the absentee mother in relation to Beethoven’s broken home and domineering father. In my case, my father was never around and I turned to my mother for succor in the darkness of the night; likewise, I found the night to be immensely comforting as a small child, teenager and adult, going for nightly strolls surrounded by the whispering trees, moon and stars. In the words of Blue Öyster Cult, “I love the night”; i.e., a little trans vampire who felt safer in the shadows of the forest where I could hide, not indoors where my father could claim me.

[7] Re: “Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space.” More on this when we talk about Metroidvania per the monomyth; i.e., as a matter of scholarly history I have since contributed to many times since.

[8] From Goethe’s Egmont (1788), translating to “Rejoicing to heaven, grieving to death” or “heavenly joy, deadly sorrow” (source). It’s a mood.

[9] Another abuse I really hated was being told not to quote things or make connections to different, seemingly unrelated things. Jadis hated that and constantly chided and scolded me for wanting to share my Humanities education with them, quotes included. I can hear them now, whining, “What does that have to do with anything!” I have since covered this entire book in quotes as a big “fuck you” to them. “Suck it, Trebek!”

[10] Slut Girl is a surprisingly funny-yet-biting satire of ’90s Japanese office culture. In the 2003 book, Manga: The Complete Guide, Derek Guder writes, “The storylines are played up for comedic payoff, and you can’t help but laugh [as] the characters’ facial expressions liven up otherwise boring sex scenes.” Other critics like Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog praise the expressive translation of the English edition, and describe Sayoko in “Eroticism for the Masses” [2002] as a “tsuya/yoen” woman, a complex figure with “voluptuous charm” and “bewitching beauty” who deals with sexual assault by weaponizing her slutty charms against her historical attackers. Perper and Cornog describe Slut Girl as being a satire on modern life, especially the role of women in the workplace, and a “long-enduring glass ceiling.”

[11] The Romans loved their numerals, but these extended into a numbered ordering of the universe under the cartographic language of conquest, per Cartesian thought; i.e., a returning to the stillness of “antiquity” as something the Enlightenment couldn’t account for in its brutalizing of the world. We’re left, then, with numerical extensions of the prime mover as the patriarch, the skeleton king in the same Cycle thereof: the ghost of “Rome,” the Shadow of Pygmalion. Per the narrative of the crypt and its infernal concentric pattern (more on this when we look at Metroidvania), it’s history stuck on loop; i.e., in material pursuit of glory as undead, eating itself. Except, time is a circle; when it comes back around, its might ghosts will there, waiting for us. We’ll examine those next, in part three!

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

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

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

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

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

The Rememory of Personal Trauma, part one: Meeting Jadis; or, Playing with Dolls

“You really do have a beautiful body…”

—Jadis, complimenting me on Fetlife (2019)

Picking up from where “Bad Dreams, part two: Transforming Our Zombie Selves (opening and part zero)” left off…

Whereas part zero of “Personal Trauma” considered ludo-Gothic BDSM’s base mechanics—what it is, the process of exchange it achieves using Gothic poetics, and finally its dialectical-material qualities bucking the “pure psychoanalytic” side of Gothic scholarship (sorry, Barbara Creed, but Freud sucks)—part one shall now consider my meeting Jadis, but also how they liked to play with dolls as much as I did; i.e., as something to inspect and continue learning from, after the fact. I’ve had to divide it in two again because of its size, but will give the entire list, here, before we start.

Keeping with the sorts of devices this chapter has introduced so far into itself—zombies, apocalypses, trauma and rememory—we’ll explore various things about dolls and how to play with them.

Part one of “Meeting Jadis” (included in this post) will explore how dolls

• are often infused with trauma as taken and assembled from different players but also points in time
• poetically engaged with through modular elements ranging not just from undead, but demonic, animalistic and beyond(!)

Part two will consider

• the Gothic (monstrous) relationship between dolls, space-time and foreign-to-familiar evocations of either regarding undead sentiment as a coercive or liberatory device (feat. Alien and The Night House)
• the balancing of a paradox of cuteness that can be used to help or hinder workers depending on who’s using them and how
• the means to subvert a canonical absence of irony, mid-play (taking the opportunity to look at various cartoons with doll-like themes in them; e.g., Steven Universe, 2013 and Scott Pilgrim, 2010)

From stories like Hellraiser to The Night House, dolls classically evoke an out-of-the-closet sense of manipulation and control (Clive Barker being a gay man writing in the ’80s) tied to state abuse as undead; e.g., the lament configuration, above; i.e., enacted at an individual level between players of a given contract. The potential to camp is there, but it always sits next to genocide as a Faustian/Promethean matter of profit. That is, capital predicates on rape as a means of profit to deceive and destroy workers, generally through themselves. To that, doll-like disempowerment is a historically common sensation among women, or things otherwise treated as monstrous-feminine, thus harvested by capital in-between history as real and fabricated; i.e., like the heroine in The Night House, or really any Gothic story. The problem lies in those who, once abused, often go on to abuse others while acting abused themselves long after abuse unto them has become a thing of the past.

Furthermore, as we’ve already explored, you can’t really camp a holocaust as a matter of fact; it happened and it’s no laughing matter. All the same, holocausts are a matter of the past coming back around, which in a hauntological sense we are never fully beholden to or free of. As such, we camp our own survival (thus rape) within these structures and their historical-material loop, which is where dolls, rape play (and yes, Jadis) ultimately come in: as a matter of playing with and performing trauma as something to reify and interrogate on all the usual operatic stages coming out of the Gothic past; re: from Shakespeare to Lewis to us and our own idiosyncratic approaches!

So while we’re talking about rape, here, we’re doing so as much to camp how such things are normally handled. Things will get serious, to be sure, but all the same dolls are fun to play with—silly at times, but also an effective demonstration of what it takes, labor-wise, to exercise rememory through them:

(exhibit 37e1: Model: Harmony Corrupted; artists: Lydia, Persephone van der Waard and Jim32. Rebellion is quite literally a craft, one that involves dolls—or likenesses of people, which dolls essentially are—in some shape or form; e.g., action figures/athletes, but also sex dolls [or things akin to either expressed through sex work]. Whatever the exact type, dolls are homunculi; i.e., generally a smaller instance of a larger reference. More to the point, they take work to realize: planning and drafts, a model, and one or more artists working together to accomplish a shared vision’s theatrical production. The main idea is mine, in this case, but it’s still accomplished through teamwork that contributes to the primary demonstration of said idea and goal; i.e., universal worker liberation through iconoclastic art using Gothic media; re: illustrating mutual consent through informed labor exchanges that challenge Capitalist Realism.

To that, Revana is very much my character by design [as is Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, whose symbol I designed, next page]. She’s someone I can have stand in for myself, given that I cannot afford gender-affirming surgeries. Even so, she has been drawn by many different artists over the years. In this case, my usual paper doll approach became something to instruct others with; e.g., my friend, Lydia, illustrating a Drow character I later completed on my own and borrowed its wardrobe to dress Revana, Macbeth-style, in borrowed robes [above]. This isn’t someone forced to wear clothes made to objectify her against her will [re: “Borrowed Robes“]; she’s an extension of me, and Lydia helped with that. So did Jim32 and Harmony. All the world’s a stage and we, upon it, had and continue to have a part to play [from Volume Two, part one]:

I’ve often been accused by trans misogynists of devising this book as a wicked scheme: to “just” get laid. First off, while I love getting laid, surely there are far easier ways to have sex than writing a four-volume book series based on ten-plus years of research! Such persons seriously miss the point, then; i.e., my revisiting of old strategies of reflection to bond with new cuties I can teach important lessons (and they me) while we relate back and forth (which making art and having sex both consist of and combine).

The point in doing so is to build on something that liberates all parties, targeting the Superstructure with Gothic poetics mastered by a community of awakened workers building in perpetuity (always out of breath with more to say). This requires trust in good faith, not deception (which my critics seemed to have projected onto me regarding their own humanistic shortcomings): the valuing of that which Capitalism normally cheapens in pursuit of profit.

To this, a director is precisely fuck-all without a muse to blow up, and a model often needs a platform to work their magic. As such, Sex Positivity was and always will be a group effort, its total collective statement on/with artwork and sex work entirely impossible if not for all my muses, models, partners (currently friendly or antagonistic) and friends (sexual or platonic) working in concert. Nor is ours the first. Like the patchwork group of (mostly cis-het male) art nerds who made Alien, celebrating the monstrous-feminine in Gothic panache, my cuties and I don’t own each other while raising temples to our own dark gods. Instead, we’ve worked together to contribute to a diverse, inclusive labor of love that we can all feel proud of; i.e., a dark progeny begot from enthusiastic, heartfelt teamwork [source]. 

As we shall see, rebellions are fought by whores in the streets—the misfits of society that society normally exploits, in hauntological forms; re, Marx’ “Eighteenth Brumaire”: “And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language” [source]. Revana, then, was very much founded on older historical events and people—specifically the French Revolution and Joan of Arc—to weaponize these ghosts’ cryptomimesis in service to a possible world galvanized by their imperfect resurrections; i.e., unto labor and nature as normally enslaved by capital and Capitalist Realism canonizing these bugbears [so fearsome, rawr]:

[model and artist: Romantic Rose and Persephone van der Waard] 

Any information commonly spreads through the vector of sex; i.e., as something captivating to perform, hence occur at least partially through asexual, Gothic treatments of sexuality [force]: as a means of play but also code. A given cryptonymy shows and hides, but can be counted on as reliably magnetic to most audiences [even ace people]. To that, the elite are ok with rebellion as long as it stays in the past as something they can control; i.e., as dead, dogmatic, inert. But we, through our own games and BDSM-style performances, can smuggle the revolutionary past back into the present for workers; i.e., as doll-like undead; e.g., Harmony and I fomenting rebellion inside her pussy as a stand-in for the Romanovs’ doomed palace during a consent-non-consent ritual harboring a general attitude about figures like the Romanovs.

Even so, there remains a child-like element of fun and games to our wild playtime, saying “Off with their heads!” as I creampie Harmony to consummate an imaginary execution; or as Harmony puts it, “Humor makes for the best sex!” The trick, I think, is combining humor with genuine rebellious sentiment as a matter of grim historical violence; re: Matthew Lewis’ camping of canon in The Monk. As such, Gothic-Communist liberation is always made by camping old dead things/symbols that continue to live on trapped between the past and the present; e.g., mascots and political cartoons; i.e., so-called “graffiti-style” activism using the human body as a literal billboard. For workers—who are sexualized to varying degrees under capital, not just prostitutes—the camping process requires rememory to work; i.e., by including things normally left out that have to be tracked down and included after their initial omission.

More to the point, such voices come in handy when dealing with living abusers posing as friends; e.g., Jadis. As such, these abusers also have an accidental role in capital’s transformation away from itself; i.e., when their victims escape to camp whatever needs camping to help develop Gothic Communism. Indeed, Jadis’ abuse of me was instrumental in demonstrating what not to do when performing BDSM in good faith.)

To that, trauma is like a doll and its clothes: something to reassemble per rememory out of smaller zombie fragments to a larger undead whole that, often enough, operate modularly (on their own) as a matter of varying amounts of intersection. Dolls store trauma and pain, but also express it in a variety of ways that, as I shall demonstrate, articulate BDSM’s usual power exchanges through handy abstractions.

More on that, in a moment. For now, the reassembly is often as toys, but also toy collectors. My own preference—of exploring Gothicized trauma within my artistic output and daily life—both led Jadis to me, then helped me escape them through such means. In short, just as their room in Florida was full of colorful and alien sex toys (next page), I was to be the finest addition to their collection. Jadis was a proud neoliberal—the token witch over the rainbow seeing profit as holy and, by extension, rape and various endorsements of it through Gothic media inside the neoliberal period; e.g., Tool as rather rapey and yet, all the same, a starting point to my journey I can revisit to understand what I survived, postmortem: “This may hurt a little, but it’s something you’ll get used to.”

(artist: Adam Jones)

“Stinkfist” might sound esoteric and disturbing (and that’s the point). Then again, paradoxes allow for two (or more) things to be true at once, and frankly Tool wrote a baller song about something bad that I can enjoy and critique (re: “Facing Death” from Volume Two, part one, 2024). Furthermore, you gotta start somewhere, and Jadis gave out plenty of object lessons to weave into better things; i.e., by me, using my Aegis to subvert their poisonous worldview, hopefully inspiring other victims of rape to come forward regarding Capitalism’s usual monopolies, trifectas and ever-present Realism.

That being said, my rememory and subversion of Jadis initially required escaping their doll-like hold on me to begin with, which we shall now articulate as a historical matter—one of deep personal trauma enmeshed with my scholarship built on said trauma: the starting point of ludo-Gothic BDSM as eventually growing into itself. Turns out, escaping Jadis (and their raping of me) also means escaping the ghost of them as worryingly haunting me, afterwards; i.e.,  making me feel like a zombie, doll, what-have-you as still under their power long after I returned home—both as a larger house but also the smaller dollhouse whose earlier approach I calibrated from older pioneered forms and their speculative richness (re: Metroidvania, Gothic novels, the Labyrinth of Crete, etc).

We’ll discuss my escape from Jadis in part two of this subchapter. “Meeting Jadis” will predominantly talk about how I met them while going over some different qualities to dolls; i.e., how the two of us, as BDSM practitioners, used such devices to relate to each other during rape play as a complicated means of psychosexual healing.

However bad this play ultimately was (Jadis monopolized it to sate themselves by abusing me, removing the healing element in favor of mere predation), it would—like Cuwu after Jadis—still help to form the basis for what ludo-Gothic BDSM eventually turned into: dos and don’ts. Jadis and their toys predominantly consisted of the latter type, but they still weren’t completely stupid insofar as pleasure went:

I can help you change
Tired moments into pleasure
Say the word and we’ll be
Well upon our way (source: Genius).

There was something alien and powerful about them—a genuine terror they couldn’t fake by virtue of what they had survived. It colored the sex, intimating something awful that threatened to break loose at all times. True enough, it reflected in their masochistic, visually-intimidating sex toys:

(artist: Jadis)

“Meeting Jadis,” part one: Some General Points about Dolls and Playing with Them

[Cuwu] liked to be fucked in their sleep, a rather common form of consent-non-consent that is regularly discussed between even your more vanilla sex partners; i.e., “Sure you can fuck me before work. Just no anal and don’t cum in my hair!” The idea, as usual, is a test of trust and established boundaries where one proves one’s loyalty and trustworthiness by obeying the sub when no commands can actively be given. It’s worth noting that such behaviors are often popularized in vampire narratives, but also sex dolls and other motionless, “as dead” doll entities fetishized as naked and helpless, usually female sacrifices—during sex-positive scenarios, of course, but also in unironic demon sex scenarios enacted by fearful-fascinated white people enthralled during the ghost of the counterfeit […] In sex-positive cases, the reclamation of control during calculated-risk experiments is generally conducted by lying still and inviting someone to inflict pleasurable pain, tickling and/or erogenous sensations on you while in a traditional feminine, passive/theatrical compromising position (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (2023)

There are many parts to dolls insofar as they represent us and how to play with ourselves and our trauma as undead—so many I’ve had to divide “Meeting Jadis” in two. To reiterate, part one of “Meeting Jadis” will explore how dolls

• are often infused with trauma as taken and assembled from different players but also points in time
• poetically engaged with through modular elements ranging not just from undead, but demonic, animalistic and beyond(!)

Dolls generally invoke a sense of nudity and paralysis; i.e., Gothic stories and live burial as a metaphor for psychosexual abuse but also liberation through the same devices. Prior to actually meeting Jadis and being teleported to their lair for later use (a seventeen-hour car ride, more like), I had been roleplaying Gothic scenarios on Fetlife to cope with Zeuhl leaving me (after using me for money and sex). Having already gone through numerous stints online, I felt thrilled but wanted more. I stayed “on the market,” happy to share myself with the world. “Put yourself out there,” my sister-in-law said. So I did, advertising Gothic roleplays on Fetlife, Kik and Reddit (taking Zeuhl’s advice, for better or worse).

Through sheer chance, Jadis found my advertisement on Fetlife in April 2019; they liked what they saw—savoring my roleplays but my naked body more. We were both weird, too, drawn by each other’s trauma in ways that manifested in the media we played with—in short, our pedagogy of the oppressed as toy-like, taboo, and nocturnal: “The sun can be fun, but I live to see those rays slip away!” This mutual attraction quickly led to Jadis confessing to me about how they saw me: “This guy’s weird as hell—I like it!” (to be honest, they were, too—eventually saying they wanted to give me their skeleton after they died, so I could put the bones into a sex doll and fuck it).

I was flattered, honestly. We were both trying something new, seeking a fresh start (and in the middle of Covid, no less). Right from said start, they wanted my sweet femboy ass (I was in the closet, at the time); I wanted their delicious orc cunt. So perhaps it wasn’t the newest approach, but it certainly clicked fast enough!

“Orc,” in this case, wasn’t even so much a figure of speech as it was a theatrical preference we both already had. The word, as popularized by Tolkien’s stories, originates from Beowulf, but also from the Old English word for demon: orc. Since Lord of the Rings, the orc has become synonymous with a kind of physically powerful, dark-skinned aggressor (a merger between the anti-Semitic goblin of medieval Europe and the racist flavor of the American zombie) to scare children (and adults) with. Jadis liked to present themselves as monstrous in this sense, but sexed up in ways that orcs (especially female orcs) often are in American kayfabe/monomythical stories under neoliberalism—videogames, but also tabletop games at large (which Tolkien helped inspire per his cartographic refrains; re: Volume Zero):

(exhibit 37e2: Artist: Bayard Wu. Wu’s art showcases the kinds of tough, savagely capable orc women that Jadis preferred. A maxim of theirs was that “heroic” women weren’t allowed to be ugly, so Jadis especially enjoyed seeing female characters that were either too tall, wide and/or brutish to meet conventional beauty standards; i.e., women of color outside of the West, closer to nature, the jungle, rape and death [the “voodoo” of the pre-colonial “zombie”]. “Strength,” for Jadis, was meted out through appropriative perceptions of tomboy force delivered by capable-looking female bodies of given races [an idea we’ll return to later in the book, when we talk about TERFs and popular media, in Volume Three]: monster girls who spat, farted, fucked and took spoils of war as sexual prizes [re: Jadis used to fart when they came during sex, which is cuter than it sounds]. In terms of our bedroom games, the consent-non-consent that Jadis and I engaged in frequently had me playing the femboy “war bride,” taken prisoner by the strong and capable war chief through captive/captor-style rape fantasies. “I’m keepin’ this one!” Jadis would playfully grunt while I topped them.

And honestly? We had a blast in that department; the abuse occurred when the captive fantasy became reality and I lost the ability to consent to it inside or outside the bedroom. Both of us became undead, in my eyes, albeit with them as the abuser and me as their disempowered, doll-like victim: the master and the slave.)

Jadis loved such things, extending the aesthetic to themselves; they frequently enhanced their wide, sturdy frame with tight black corsets and topped their crown with plastic demon horns. They also had jutting front teeth that looked somewhat tusk-like (their “orc teeth,” they called them). I loved this about them, which undoubtedly influenced my ability to give them the benefit of the doubt early on. It’d be incredibly easy to blame the disaster that followed on lust—”love is blind” and all that—but I certainly didn’t think so at the time. I felt prepared, ready to enjoy a non-abusive relationship for once. In truth, it’d be more accurate to say I was half-prepared—eyes open and educated, but still prone to manipulation by a skilled abuser who had their own baggage from childhood weighing on them.

First, I trusted Jadis not to actively deceive me, the two of us negotiating a BDSM agreement in advance: they would work and take care of me; I would cook, clean and fuck their brains out. We were very clear about that. Granted, it wasn’t foolproof, but no plan is. Furthermore, while there’s risk to any relationship, I certainly never consented to being abused (the two activities are mutually exclusive; i.e., you can’t consent to rape unless you camp it)!

Regardless, their breaking of our agreement didn’t make sense to me, as it would require me falling in love with someone who meant me harm. I admit, a part of me turned a blind eye when Jadis showed early warning signs; they talked the talk, but occasionally got a little too angry about small disagreements (reminding me of their abusive mother[1], insofar as their own survival mechanisms had become not just maladaptive, but predatory). These foreshadowed bigger fights in the days ahead—and the raping of me that would accompany these—but I wanted it to work so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I did so assuming that Jadis would meet my conviction with equal effort: as a team. And why not? We had an agreement and that, at least to me, was sacred.

(artist: Ezokz)

Second, I felt like someone who had learned from my own abusive past. I was already a veteran of traumatic events when Jadis and I met. Not only had I studied romanticized variants of trauma for my master’s degree (re: Metroidvania and the Gothic castle as calculated risk); I created them as an aspiring artist using erotic visual elements inspired from the kinds of artists and media I enjoyed (e.g., Mass Effect, above): pieces that help us, like dolls, reconnect to lost, forbidden things—often erotic pleasure, but also pain as indistinguishable from pleasure that verges on the harmful[2] in BDSM scenarios. Jadis liked this about me; i.e., that I was an erotic artist but also open-minded. It felt especially flattering because, apart from Zeuhl, I wasn’t used to compliments about myself and my curiosity towards taboo subjects like fetishes/sex dolls and torture. This was especially true regarding my artwork, which I always struggled with. The ego boost—especially from someone so powerful-looking and BDSM-inclined (the black knight)—well-and-truly hypnotized me.

All the same, this particular coping mechanism stemmed from an abusive past before Jadis entered the picture. I had survived a great number of difficult experiences besides my stepfather (who admittedly was the worst of the bunch): the abuses of a second uncle (more on him in a moment), grad school, Zeuhl leaving me for their future husband, and my brothers (who once duct-taped me to a flagpole during a thunderstorm, stuffed a sock in my mouth, and left me there for my mother to come and rescue). I was also bullied by other children, primarily neighborhood boys who quickly recognized my being different from them: femme, highly imaginative, prone to writing and keen to avoid violence if I could help it (though I did get into fights in the seventh grade; i.e., acting out while my stepfather was abusing me).

Regardless, Gothic stories—and their ambiguous, liminal ways of presenting traumatic experiences in highly sexual ways—have always resonated quite strongly with my own complex abuse. Art, for me, was the best way of expressing that abuse—something the following pages will try to illustrate in relation to Jadis and myself through dolls; i.e., they and their trauma as kept-in-check through BDSM, which lulled me into a false sense of security. I thought they used their artwork, toys and rape play as a means of recovery from past harm—quite the opposite; they used it to prey on me, but all the same, my escape from them required the same devices reclaimed by me (an ongoing process)!

Again, we’ll get to that, in part two. Following the forecast of escape, though, let’s articulate my own artwork and survived abuse as a) intertwined in ways that I would eventually rely upon to liberate myself; i.e., not a foreclosure, but a release from torment while still, even now, happening inside the dollhouse as a matter of acclimating to trauma: as something we can never fully escape from. This methodology and its acceptance took time to evolve, and as always, tends to point back to childhood; i.e., as something to return to and understand by reifying healthier forms.

In other words, dolls—similar to heroes—don’t just store cultural values or taboos (re: Volume Two, part one); they store trauma as something to interrogate, mid-play. We’ve set the table to unpack the idea; let’s do so now, then consider some modular qualities to dolls that often come into play when investigating trauma during calculated risk.

Although I was a sexually precocious child, my art hasn’t always been sexual or monstrous. Rather, it was a place for me to go when things got bad, but even this was inconsistent. Despite being abusive, for example, Dad was never really around when I was small; it was his family who abused me the most. Not only did they gaslight me and neglect my version of things; they blamed my mother for seeking divorce, calling her a “homewrecker” despite her refusal to cheat on a notoriously unfaithful husband (who slept with just about wife in town). Equally traumatic, the judge of the custody battle had mandated supervised visitations with my father that I thoroughly detested. They only made me a captive audience to my father’s side, who tried incessantly to convince me that Dad “was still my father” despite omitting his abuse of me during these talks.

To cope with my father and the subsequent divorce, I drew comics inspired by Bill Waterson and Jim Davis. These strips weren’t monstrous, nor did they accurately reflect my lived experiences; their style was basic and childlike. By the time my stepfather appeared, however, my creations had become far more detailed, erotic and subversive. I loved witches and Amazons and started making powerful, sexy characters like Glenn, Ileana or Revana (exhibit 37g1, below).

Originally inspired by Tolkien, Robert Howard and Lovecraft, but far more genderqueer than any of those men, these trans expressions of my trauma have only expanded over time—within my own work and when collaborating with other artists. Moreover, they were a monstrous-feminine, Amazonian extension of myself as having survived trauma that was also Amazonian; i.e., becoming transformed by the ordeal as zombie-like, but acquiring agency while acknowledging my trauma in doll-like ways. The more I reflected on Jadis and my other abusers, the more I changed through my artwork’s future dolls concerned with healing from past events:

(exhibit 37f: Artist, left: Sensaux; right: Persephone van der Waard. Virago the cyborg. Gothic stories—and their ambiguous, liminal ways of presenting experience—resonated quite strongly with my own complex abuse, but also my manner of processing said abuse through Gothic poetics; i.e., dolls.. I’ve always loved cyberpunk and its left-leaning queer elements for these purposes, effectively a retro-future stage filled with all manner of posthuman monsters and decaying things; i.e., in relation to the material world as controlled by the undefeatable powerful, but also the xenophilic ability to rebel against these powers by harnessing that creative potential for ourselves. That’s what Virago, for me, is all about. She’s someone I’d happily play as or with! Also, unlike Samus, she always saves the animals!)

(exhibit 37g1: Artist, top-left, bottom-left and bottom-middle: drawings of Revana, by Persephone van der Waard; top-middle: a collab of Revana, lines and base colors by Dcoda and background/final render by Persephone van der Waard; top-left: a collab of Revana, lines and colors by Adagadegelo and background/final render by Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right: Persephone van der Waard. All of these revisited drawings feature older characters from my teenage years, made visibly more colorful, queer and iconoclastic than they already were. Revana is my avatar [essentially a kind of doll, especially in videogames], specifically an expression of the person I’ve always to be: French, red-haired and shapely. The identity and its expression have evolved over time, of course, but this evolution has moved increasingly in a trans/gender-non-conforming [thus xenophilic] direction since my coming out of the closet. It’s what feels correct to me now and in hindsight, because it helps me process my own “undead” trauma. She’s literally a sex doll to embody all of that, but also play with it.)

My art was one of the first things Jadis noticed about me, their enjoyment of my portrayal of strong women making me a target to their sexual advances and later their abusing of me as their unwilling sex doll. Yet, these same, toy-like qualities had inadvertently “inoculated” me from Jadis. I did not know it, but I had slowly acquired the uncanny ability to understand Gothic media through my own life, whose stories and complicated, monstrous symbols I not only felt attracted to, but would be facing again, in future Gothic forms.

So when Jadis set their sights upon me, I wasn’t completely powerless, but I did (and do) handle trauma and abuse a particular way that makes me something of “an open book.” Simply put, I fawned, a people pleaser who—faced with unaddressed trauma in someone else—defaulted to appeasing my latest in a series of idols: through sex as a means of relating to such things as never truly closed-off.

For example, just as I admired and sided with Ripley hiding from the monster in Alien, a part of me loved the monster and found it strangely beautiful. Loaded with a holistic appreciation for two kinds of victims, I always thought of the company as the true villain: the one exploiting Ripley and the monster at the same time. This being said, it took me a very long time to articulate the dialectical-material framework regarding the corporate exploitation of workers, and even then was only able to by first identifying with the monster in a liminal, humanizing manner (which we will explore deeper in the primer when we look at demons).

This underlying desire speaks to Gothic Communism’s larger goal as I have increasingly envisioned it: wanting workers to reclaim our power by a) mastering our emotions through Gothic poetics, and b) surviving Capitalism in ways that can teach the world to escape and survive through the same outlets; i.e., our trauma as something to historically-materially examine, but also recreate in highly subversive ways that reduce alienation and exploitation through campy doubles thereof: dolls, which reclaim trauma by camping it (often rape) as a matter of ludo-Gothic BDSM.

As such, any desire I felt to reshape the material world—while living with Jadis during Covid—was already shaped by past abuse I had suffered at the hands of family members living in the same world. In fact, much of the abuse wasn’t even rooted in my father’s side; it actually came from my mother’s.

We’ve discussed some of this in Volume One, but there’s an element I have yet to mention. Mom was the eldest of three siblings, Dave being the youngest and the middle child—Mom’s other brother (who I’ll call Iago)—being the source of a great deal of trauma after I was an adult. In the 2010s, Iago bankrupted the family business and blamed it entirely on all of us. I didn’t know it at the time, but Iago’s abuse had slowly turned me Communist (a process that materialized through my second bid at university and my graduate/postgraduate work). Though I am always painfully honest with new partners, I didn’t mention Iago’s abuse to Jadis when we met. Partly I was still figuring it out; frankly I also thought worker rights were a universal concern and Jadis would simply “get it,” should the conversation ever come up. Alas, they did not share my sympathies (though the extent to which they and I disagreed only became clear after I was living in Florida for many months).

(exhibit 37g2a: Artists: Leo and Diane Dillion. Queen Jadis is C.S. Lewis’ strict mommy dom from The Magician’s Nephew [1955]. She’s, in her own sense, like a killer doll [and cautionary pre-fascist tale against matriarchal authority by Lewis]. Relegated to the desolate city of Charn after the Deplorable Word is spoken, our giantess queen is frozen in her seat. Completely by accident, the children heroes of the story bring her back to life, where—once again animate and mobile—Jadis immediately begins to move around and make trouble. Fun fact: Jadis is the name I gave both to my ex in Florida, but also the golden orbweaver spider living outside our home [to which I realize that I have compared my ex, Jadis, to a spider more than once].)

Truth be told, Jadis was a self-confessed neoliberal who actually worshipped the likes of J. K. Rowling or Bill Gates; i.e., to such a point that critiquing either person led to Jadis resenting me more and more (with them liking to pull rank, reminding me that they knew more about such things than I did—not because they studied them more, but because they had money and wanted me to automatically agree with them “or else”).

Granted, this didn’t seem to matter as much at first or even announce itself. Indeed, when Jadis and I crossed paths, they had access to all of me, thus all of my trauma and all of my interests (doll-like or not). We didn’t talk about politics; we talked about sex, often through toys. Jadis knew I was an erotic artist and patroned me for my work; I was intrigued by their BDSM know-how and extensive sex toy collection, which seemed so monstrous yet so colorful. Most important to me was how Jadis seemed to appreciate that I was into them and they very much wanted to fuck, but I wasn’t careful enough before agreeing to their insidious offers of “protection.” Simply put, I rebounded, to such a perilous degree that I ignored several red flags while being their slutty girlfriend:

(exhibit 37g2b:artist: EXGA. Our roles of power exchange included Jadis topping me from the bottom and me bottoming them from the top. They prized me for my big soft princess butt, and I prized them for their big soft orc body. There was a shared sense of whose turn it was to be the object of pursuit, the dominator and the “victim.” And by God, it was fun!)

It’s not so mysterious; I was poor and Jadis had means, but I had a big booty they liked in ways that let me gender conform less. Anyone acting like these aren’t potent (and common) means of negotiation is alienated from such means, methods and opportunities: “rape” and monstrous, doll-like sex (above) as a profound, monstrous-feminine dialog to work things out using what we got, and Jadis and I had plenty that fit together well/temporarily held our undivided attention: the orc chiefess and her (at the time) twink war bride.

At first, it melted into a sweet puddle, then an illusion that kept me trapped, but the feelings of genuine harmful imprisonment (and complaints) came later. Not only did I desperately want adventure by going to Florida as my mother once did; my grandparents gave me away to Jadis trusting Jadis to care for their grandchild as one would a bride. I had gotten my wish and was off see to a new world! Alas, once I was living under Jadis’ roof, things quickly changed. My imaginative responses—so useful to interpreting my own trauma—only blushed at Jadis’ numerous threats, making me an easy target for lengthier unironic tortures.

All the same, these tortures occurred through toy-like aspects of zombies that we shall now reclaim in hindsight, per ludo-Gothic BDSM. That is, the presence of cathartic play and ironic “tortures” can yield a variety of sex-positive rememories. These include the dildo, but also the doll of two basic kinds: the doll-like immobile persona (the Kafka-esque “Odradek”) and the golem-esque mobile variant (the performer of/with the animated-inanimate); as well as the undead/demonic flavor of such a being—e.g., Victor’s Creature from Frankenstein. Such examples are often tied to hypercanonical fiction like the Wizard of Oz under Pax Americana, so I’ve provided an example of each for your consideration: the monster cock/doll piece, the undead/demonic doll as a performance, and the blank object as sex-doll fetish being something to take apart as a victim might their own troubled condition; i.e., doing so to find release through disassembly and annihilation as not always having irony but certainly allowing for it.

We’ll explore these now, then move onto the anisotropic qualities, cuteness and ludic complexity of such devices, in part two. However, before these exhibits even unfold, please bear in mind several things:

First, that the doll evokes the language of “death’s counterfeit,” such as a drugged or magical sleep but also sleep sex (exhibit 11b2) as something to ply with using mixed metaphors that have a vampiric vibe if not outright coding: the feeding on the “victim’s” essence—including their sexual energies but also their sanity and health—by “traumatizing” them as they literally sleep (or pretend to; i.e., to avoid getting harmed or—in ironic cases—to play along during “somno”; re: Cuwu). Rape play is complicated, and generally concerns catharsis and trauma occupying the same spaces of play as a rememory-style means of return in order to heal versus escaping through predation dressed up as “healing.”

Second, as Jadis was doll-like and loved toys—especially toys of an undead/monstrous variety like we previously alluded to—they were largely what caught my interest and they mine, thus are things we must reclaim from their abuse of me in hindsight; i.e., in future doll-like, undead houses and excursions that piqued their interest (and taste buds) to begin with:

(exhibit 38a: Artist, top-left: SXXY; top-right: unknown, source; bottom-left: Real Sex Love Doll; bottom-right: unknown. First, the dildo/monster cock as undead/demonic but also fabricated like a doll’s would be. Xenophilic cocks take many different forms, generally as anthropomorphic cocks that humanize the owner but also present them as sexual potent to unequal degrees; i.e., stronger than the person they’re topping and fearsome in their appearance. It’s rape play, which can play out in sex-coercive or sex-positive forms [we’ll unpack these even more in Volume Three, when we discuss subverting Demon BDSM and bad play in countercultural Gothic performance art].)

(exhibit 38b1: Model and artist: Venusinaries and Persephone van der Waard. Second, the immobile/mobile effigy wherein the performer acts as an undead doll; i.e., that which was alive, then dead, then alive again [or somewhere in between].

Rape is like a bad dream imparting awful instruction and exchange. Whereas canonical zombies personify the state of exception, mid-harvest, as decayed by still abusing the monstrous-feminine inside contested territories thereof, iconoclastic iterations can humanize the zombie; i.e., as doll-like to varying sex-positive degrees: a feeling of rotten flesh/trauma-in-flesh whose “necrophilic/necrophagic” roleplay works as giver or receiver [the zombie, vampire, and/or ghost as Destroyer or “victim” to varying degrees of cannibalistic topping and catching that can subvert traditional delivery routes and destinations of power]! It has a tremendously popular [and populous] theatrical history to it; i.e., camping the Nazi; e.g., Kain’s barb from Blood Omen: “But I am dead!” which he gives out before beheading his enemy and declaring him dead [source: Game Cinematics’ “Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen – Story (All Cutscenes),” 2017; timestamp: 16:10]. Checkmate, as they say.

[source, right: ibid.; left, bottom: Capsule Computers]

More to the point, such rapacious, psychosexual theatre exposes privileged workers with their own expendability during state crisis; i.e., in ways that, just as often, yield funny internalized debates; e.g., Team Four Stars’ Piccolo deciding whether he should block Nappa’s attack or pick Gohan up and throw him out of the way or not, until our resident green alien pays the price for his silly hesitation [“Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Episode 9,” 2009; timestamp: 3:59]. Conversely there are benefits to not dodging should one choose and provided the context is right for it; i.e., someone feeling undead in ways that seek out a healthy form of ludo-Gothic BDSM/psychosexual kayfabe: when someone “throws it” at you.

In short and in truth, death and rape are extremely funny if you camp them through rememory as something you’ve actually survived [and death, rape and monsters go together with theatre like pussies and cocks, swords and sheaths, etc]! Furthermore, “rape” can be healing as well—can paradoxically feel good with the right demon lover taking you to that extra special edge, mid-calculated risk. To that, though, beware anyone monopolizing it for the state! Whatever the arrangement of the undead dynamic of giving/receiving pain and eating essence, they help us confront our own mortality as something to fearfully embrace the human side of trauma; i.e., that workers are made out of flesh and blood, organs that can be harvested and weaponized, mid-apocalypse.

Cops and victims. As I demonstrate following my own rape, rebellious zombies start to seek out rape with varying degrees of irony as something to camp canon with, versus Man Box agents classically doing it to rape women sans irony and calling it “art”:

The “sweet spot,” I think, is to maintain a steady resistance towards the state’s coercions without defanging the critical power of the zombie, itself [or any doll, for that matter]. However, liminalities can intersect, swinging the performance away from straight-up exploitation and more towards a kind of playful “slut reclamation,” carefully projected onto the zombie persona as a mutually consensual “necrophilia”; i.e., with bodies that aren’t dead, but perceived as dead to express their present struggles under the status quo; e.g., Rosemary’s Baby [above]. There’s a presence of rape that speaks to the usual abusers against the usual victims having appetites that, in times of heightened control, become confused but also monstrous as a matter of duality-in-action.

As such, iconoclastic “necrophilia” [sex with “dolls”] pointedly reverses the process of abjection in defense of workers reclaiming their ability to express mutual consent through Gothic language: surviving rape; i.e., the inanimate as reanimated to convey the performer’s pedagogy of the oppressed through undead, made-up markers of trauma [or class envy/revenge from the bigoted, conservative mindset] staining the surface of their doll-like persona green [or some-such color]. Dolls, like actors, can be painted, to which “greenface” sits adjacent to blackface as a racial symbol [vaudeville] but one allows for different forms of “black” [as in, “non-white” vis-à-vis the colony binary] during apocalyptic discourse. Although race is generally involved under settler-colonialism, these go beyond race alone; i.e., stigma, bias, envy and so on; e.g., non-English, low-class, foreign, unmarried, homosexual, and stigma animal [the Drow, exhibit 41b]. Painted and clothed, dolls store trauma as a means of expressing its usual giving and receiving during state crisis, decay and moral panic: a witch hunt, which is basically what The Wizard of Oz is, below.)

(exhibit 38b2: Artist, bottom-left: Cherry-Gig; right: J. Scott Campbell. Third, the immobile/mobile effigy whereupon the performer is a demonic doll; i.e., one whose existence is thrown into question by virtue of having never been alive on the earthly plane [Kafka’s “Odradek” from “The Cares of a Family Man,” 1914, being a famous/generative example] but instead animated or summoned by magic, or made by mad science.

However, there is crossover with certain kinds of undead; i.e., the ghost in its most viral, inhuman forms and the composite as a kind of reanimated golem made from inanimate things, including human tissue, animal parts, and various inorganic or at least non-animal things [straw, above]. Unlike dolls in general, sex dolls play with notions of dehumanization and control in sexualized spheres: the thing you can dress, manipulate, destroy or fuck.

For example, Ti West’s 2022 Pearl portrays a phallic woman at least partially conditioned to seek coercive control with an immobile partner—i.e., as an Elektra-esque virago railing against her patriarchal mother [a matriarch acting like a man in the absence of the heroine’s paralyzed father]. Conditioned thus, Pearl rapes a double of her own comatose father in a cornfield [evocations of the strawman effigy of the Pagan harvest]. Yet, the sex doll in ritualistic terms represents a submitting of one’s agency within a negotiated inequality between one human by themselves, or two in cahoots; i.e., the sub was never alive, thus cannot be harmed, or is alive but trusts the other party to not harm them while both are seeking catharsis through the fetishized embodiment, or wearing of, various shells. These can be the virgin/whore or damsel/demon as things to wear, thus interrogate the feeling of ontological “claustrophobia” while being trapped inside and forced to act a particular way for one’s ritualized captor. The critique becomes a meta commentary performed in real-time, between the fiction and the rules of a theatrical magic circle: where the “rape” game takes place.

[artist: Blxxd Bunny]

Keeping this flexible theatricality in mind, Bunny’s “scarecrow” sex doll is aesthetically and performatively similar to Pearl’s dance partner as never-having-been-alive, minus the abject harm and xenophobia Pearl the puppeteer intimates [evoking the miracle of Christ’s resurrection and Milton’s narcissistic Eve kissing her own reflection]. The general process, then—while potentially connected to real-life trauma [rape while the victim is asleep, a common historical occurrence for women]—isn’t an automatic extension of it as a premeditation towards harming others in the future; for Bunny it’s a healing ritual, in which they can explore the mechanisms of control within a single-person, consent-non-consent ritual: the sleeping “boyfriend” being toyed with by a curious “doll,” both of them “Barbie-like” in different ways.

In other words, the immobile doll was never alive like a corpse was or a taxidermized animal, thus has not been reduced to a permanent lobotomized state by the dominant; it’s no different than a dildo in that respect. Bunny’s particular theatre of nudism invokes such a persona within a stuffed “scarecrow” for them—a doll-like cutie, themselves [their body sculpted and lovely like a doll’s]—to play within, applying voyeuristic peril and giddy exhibitionism as floating around inside the general meta of the screen: the nerdy debutante converging with the whore/demon archetype as “letting her hair down” for the viewer of the exchange to look upon with curiosity and delight.

Simply put, it’s a peep show but it needn’t be divorced from actual jouissance for the performer! Bunny is ace, but absolutely loves their work [and plays with more than just literal dolls].)

(exhibit 38b3: Fourth, the actual sex doll object, divorced from undeath/demonic magic but used to convey the aesthetics of either type. Whether immobile or mobile, the theatrical exhibition of doll theatre takes physical work, but also “lights, camera, action!” It’s hard work to direct a body physically and without harm, but also to manipulate a literal, never-alive doll physically [or to act like one under the hot camera lights; e.g., the Technicolor stage lights for The Wizard of Oz or Peeping Tom, etc]. Personally I always liked the idea of exhibiting these things in a similar sense to those movies, but also my friend Bunny’s adventures. Although my expertise lies more in directing a model long-distance, the vampire cloak draped over my sex doll [Jessamine, above] has been worn by real people that I’ve fucked and filmed: Cuwu and Jadis, in particular.

For me, control as a “service top” is the optimal approach; i.e., to subvert the idea of the dominator as forceful, proving myself as thoroughly unlike my abusive father or exes while still enjoying the volunteer “sacrifice” offering all of themselves to me—for a moment, not forever!

Unlike the cliché sacrifice, then, no harm is taking place. This can apply to literal sex dolls designed for sex [with stuffed pillows or replicas meant for companionship] but also sexual partners whose surface image is sexualized to serve a doll-like function inside an ironic BDSM scheme; i.e., meant to heal one-or-both parties through a complicated, informed “dance.” Within this dance as ludo-Gothic BDSM, the image of the Pagan/witch priestess [and other aspects of prestige, power and vulnerability, etc] can be worn upon the body of the doll or the naked, exposed, dollish likeness of a person: the magical “scarecrow” coming alive and dancing with the girl in the cornfield [again, evoking the Pagan harvest and older magics as not intrinsically harmful, but certainly coded as “evil” under state influence].)

At first, Jadis and I vibed through dolls, and all seemed fine; I accepted them for their toys and they accepted me for mine (eagerly asking me to fuck my own sex doll as they used their own toys on themselves). However, the longer I lived with Jadis, the more unironically monstrous (and doll-like)we both felt in my esteem—they the master and I their pathetic slave. Jadis’ torturous abuses not only became harder to ignore; they occurred inside a liminal position wrought with fetishized violence—i.e., they were my first experience with emotional violence of a sexualized flavor in my own life: rape. It felt weirdly uncanny—familiar but alien in ways I easily recognized from second-hand accounts or popular stories, but also second-guessed at every turn: “Am I being raped?”

Faced with that abominable question, I started to feel undead in relation to what I conceived the undead to be, albeit in confused ways: dissected and studied, fascinating odd sensations of division and confrontation expressed in some of my favorite childhood stories. It was the only thing I had to compare my abuse to.

This stresses another key aspect to dolls: feeling undead as a nostalgic means of playing with personal trauma through the rememory process; i.e., in ways that abusers manipulate, but which we can reclaim through our own arguments, using ludo-Gothic BDSM (egregores, simulacra, homunculi, etc, of course being poetic lenses, but play constituting its own argumentation for or against workers facing trauma: as something to play with). I’d like to unpack these undead feelings and practices, next, then proceed through the rest of our list about dolls and their undead ludic qualities; re: playing with dolls something I employed to eventually escape Jadis’ physical clutches.

Onto “‘Meeting Jadis,’ part two: One Foot out the Door; or, Playing with Dolls to Express One’s Feeling Undead (feat. Alien, The Night House, Steven Universe and more)“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] To deflect my observations, Jadis would always cry if I mentioned their mother but especially if I compared Jadis to their mother. Their tears always had the desired effect, too: back off, change the subject. They would cry and I would lose heart.

[2] Under such conditions, “power” can very quickly find itself in quotes; i.e., false power as either a matter of predation on obedience by a predatory actor (with BDSM classically inverted to send power away from workers, which ludo-Gothic BDSM aims to reverse through the same elements of play and poetic devices being anisotropically played with; re: reversing abjection).

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Dreams, part two: Transforming Our Zombie Selves (and Our War-like, Rapacious Toys) by Reflecting on the Wider World through the Rememory of Personal Trauma (feat. Jadis)

My room is full of toys and things
But filled with nothing new
Just me and Clare alone in this
Enchanted, placid room

—Coburn Pharr; “Never, Never Land,” on Annihilator’s Never, Never Land (1990)

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Picking up from where “‘The Roots of Trauma, part two: Healing through ‘Rape’” left off…

As we concluded at the end of part one, the zombie isn’t merely a braindead, rotting corpse or literal infection; it’s an undead presence that rises from the grave to traumatically feed inside an expanded state of exception within the home (the Imperial Core): during rape play as something to camp profit with (catharsis always being a matter of return to painful things). While this process is anisotropic, it canonically denotes continuous state violence (often sanctioned theft, rape and murder but also division; e.g., the Middle-Passage diaspora and Jim Crow segregation) towards or from particular groups over time: animals, people of color, and Pagans, versus qualities of these groups fed into fearful colonizer attitudes that are guilty of, or feeling guilty about, former colonial acts, but also current xenophobic abuse happening regularly under the same-old system—what LukHash might call, in the spirit of “Ozymandias,” a “Museum of Failed Efforts” (2019); i.e., a dollhouse to play around inside. As we shall see with Jadis (who this subchapter is entirely dedicated to), such places are made from old abusive symbols; i.e., of personal trauma, which ludo-Gothic BDSM camps through rememory in order to subvert their historical freight as normally being dogmatic, thus menticidal.

From Volume Two, part one, I write, “Capital relies on dogma as something to internalize and serve profit on all registers—on and offstage, at home and abroad, by white male predators” (source). This extends to token agents (women acting like men, fags acting like straight people, etc), which is precisely what Jadis is and how they acted towards me. Moreover, harmful mentalities like theirs are informed by popular media such as videogames, which victims escape into only to be bombarded with the very ideas that drive their abusers at home and abroad. The effect is often one of recruitment (cops or victims). I continue,

Regarding videogames as a neoliberal form of dogma, from the early ’80s to the end of the Cold War and beyond, you went from public entertainment devices (arcades) that had a bunch of mostly young male clients cycling through them like a pimped-out sex worker… to the 1983 Atari Crash and subsequent 1985 smash-hit success of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. encouraging the widespread sale of videogames in the Gothic’s usual haunt: among the middle class. Except this time, the elite wanted in through ways that didn’t exist during the Neo-Gothic revival: televisions as personal property that could funnel in their burgeoning ideology through the disguise of (expensive and highly recursive) games.

From the early days of Space Invaders (1978), Pac-Man (1980) or Donkey Kong (1981) to Mario, then (about seven years—twelve, if you start from 1973 when the elite began their first experiments with neoliberalism in South America), the usual place of neoliberal business and indoctrination transitioned from single arcade machines to larger amounts of money (from quarters to hundreds of dollars) per customer in each household (where there is more money to be had, and seasonally at that); i.e., a Stepford Wife, purchased for paychecks, not pocket change, and ready to implement the business model into the first generation of what would become the New World Order under neoliberal Capitalism: a world of us-versus-them enforced by neoliberal, monomythic copaganda’s harmful simulations of Amazonomachia to maintain the status quo at a socio-material level; re: the shadows of a new republic’s man-cave walls.

In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual (ibid.).

Whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies, falsehoods, and double standards; e.g., speedrunning as white, male and cis-het extending to streaming platform Kick’s Nazi pedophile problem, but also streamers like Dr. Disrespect[1] protected by the system like black penitents in an Ann Radcliffe novel (more on streamers when we look at weird canonical nerds like Caleb Hart, Ian Kochinski and Man Box culture, in Volume Three). Due to the euthanasia effect, token agents enjoy similar-if-temporary protections for as long as capital holds up to the degree that they will be permitted; e.g., J.K. Rowling or Hilary Clinton; i.e., two TERF Jadis respected for being powerful women in a man’s world, yet utterly refused to criticize them for their transphobic beliefs and hawkish attitudes (all tokens are closeted to some degree). In doing so, Jadis became the first TERF (and SWERF) I experienced, first-hand.

When you’re playing with rape, then (as we shall be doing with Jadis, post hoc), you must remember you’re playing with power as something to revisit and alter for workers’ benefits, aggregating on their behalf while facing the system aggregating self-righteously against you; i.e., the state employing DARVO and obfuscation in defense of profit, but also literally killing the whistleblower (e.g., Boeing; Second Thought’s “We All Know It’s Happening,” 2024) while saying “thinking of the women and children.” Token enforcers like Jadis will literally do such things in small; re: on people like me, who they segregation and brutalize through bad BDSM.

Simply put, profit defends itself, thus rape, through violence and lies, but also masks, costumes, performative roles, etc; i.e., per my PhD’s thesis statement, Capitalism sexualizes everything—doing so by tokenizing outwards through a rightwards radicalization that polices and harvests labor through nature-as-monstrous-feminine. In turn, those touched by trauma tend to advertise it (that “goth” look) as something to play with. This includes playing with our abusers through our own cryptonymy—our masks and costumes, boundaries and barriers, our ludo-Gothic BDSM!

Volume Three shall discuss the praxis of this—of the appreciative irony of Gothic counterculture during demon BDSM (which, in hindsight, is more-or-less synonymous with ludo-Gothic forms). Part two of “Bad Dreams” will now consider returning nakedly to such sites of exchange relative to childhood abuse chasing us into the future; i.e., to achieve a paradoxical state of undead healing and rememory through ourselves as toy-like, and our toys as like us: oscillating between alive and unalive in ways that only humans and ludo-Gothic BDSM can. Eventually we can reach a post-scarcity world, but in the interim, trauma will remain; keeping with paradoxes, we must evoke the threat during liminal expression, or the healing process generally won’t work (what Gothic poetics like to refer to as “facing one’s past”). For me, that means evoking Jadis as someone who genuinely excited me:

(artist: Jadis)

Note: This section will be rather intense, insofar as it explores some of the most painful moments of my adult life. But such honesty is important; it’s just not easy to recollect without echoes of pain, of trauma—a frisson, if you will. It also, in this case, involves someone very real and with means (daddy’s “fuck you” money).

To that, I’m choosing to out my abuser to the degree that I’m currently comfortable. I don’t want to show their face any more than I have (re: their portrait, painted by me). The above photo merely demonstrates their being a real person; i.e., someone who raped me in the past per my generalized, expanded definition of the word (re: someone who disempowered me with the specific intent to cause extensive and prolonged emotional, psychosexual harm). I would ask my readers to leave Jadis alone—not for their sake, but mine; litigation is the luxury of those with money, which I do not have, and while what I saw is true, much of it would be difficult-if-not-impossible to prove in a court of law (as rape generally is). Instead, I will let this book speak for me, chronicling what I survived as the Gothic does: as a castle-narrative to explore as composed of space and time (re: the chronotope). —Perse

(exhibit 37c1a: Source; a Fetlife conversation between Jadis and I, when we first met. It merely establishes our similar taste in media—that we met shortly after I put up a forum post looking for Gothic roleplayers on the site. It was during the middle of the Pandemic, and they were going through a divorce [which they only finalized after we were living together—more on that in a bit]. Intrigued by my advertisement, they responded. We didn’t end up roleplaying much. Instead, we sexted for five weeks straight, after which I moved in with them. Shortly after that, they started abusing me for sex, but also cooking, cleaning and general housework; i.e., women’s work as a means of all of the above.)

The opening to this subchapter—part zero, “Jadis’ Dollhouse” (included in this post)—covers some basic points about personal trauma and rememory as a liminal, radicalizing process. After that, we two further subdivisions concern myself as the test subject for what ultimately crystalized into ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., my further radicalization while surviving Jadis (who, traumatized themselves, certainly advertised their penchant for doll-like fictions, above):

• Part one, “Meeting Jadis“: Explores how Jadis and I met—indeed, were attracted by our mutual weirdness and trauma—and related to each other through toys that were equally sexy and weird. Divides in two halves, which explore further ludo-Gothic qualities to dolls useful during BDSM, which I had to reclaim from Jadis to eventually escape them and write this book with/about.
• Part two, “Escaping Jadis“: Articulates my escape from my abuser, detailing the tremendous feelings I felt at the time (and which shaped my scholarly and artistic work afterwards, including ludo-Gothic BDSM).

In short, ludo-Gothic BDSM happened through painful reflection regarding my childhood, but also its consequences relaid in Gothic language, theory and experience; i.e., writing these portions about Jadis and I, thinking about them, then writing the three books that came after but which I published before the Jadis elements, which I’m returning to now (as a Gothic heroine would: starting with letters that lead me back to a site of decayed abuse inside my mind, my dreams, my work as haunted by Jadis).

All this being said, I couldn’t have formulated my arguments without trying to find love, getting hurt, and struggling to heal afterwards by assembling and weighing everything as a profound and complicated object lesson. Things come home to roost as ghosts of themselves, and generally overlap with redoublings thereof; i.e., Harmony’s “castle” vs Jadis’ as facing off when I go back to a shared chronotope: writing the Jadis pages before meeting Harmony to then mutually act out these scenes again to regain power for us both. As such, these specific passages (and much of the rest of the Monster Modules) will seem somewhat dated compared to the opening chapter and everything we’ve previously examined having come afterwards.

Except, that’s precisely the point: a revival, for which I return to older passages to better understand how I conceived ideas I might otherwise take for granted. We’re literally conducting rememory by looking at my recollections of/reflections on the past as aged, undead; i.e., of a previous zombie moment in time to dig up and play with again through holistic expression: as a matter of recursive revisitation and regeneration, always falling apart and out-of-point but coming together by virtue of transformation into something better. Said moments aren’t something I want to change, here, but stick to; i.e., as things to play out by letting you (as much as me) play with it yourselves, relatively unaltered: the ghost of my past abuse, whispering of Jadis’ abuse of me, post-seduction (with songs like Emily Portman’s 2010 “Two Sisters,” below):

And yonder sits my sister the queen
Oleander yolling
She drownèd me in the cold, cold stream
Down in the waters rolling (source: Genius).

Changing them too much, and in effect their tune, kind of defeats the point, I would think. There will be revisions and at times playful, even cheeky editions to make things more bearable than they might be completely unfiltered, just not substantial ones that transform/camp anything to an unrecognizable degree. This is my rape we’re talking about and I don’t want to disguise that. Instead, I’ll let the things that befell me haunt you amid my usual academic architecture and earthly variables reenacting older dooms than mine tied to the same system. That smaller princess Jadis tortured under the guise of martyred virtue? Like all the dead, she’s still there in the dark, waiting for you…

Before we get to Jadis and my ghost inside the dollhouse, though, let’s go over some of these broad-but-important ideas I mentioned that make up said house (and its dolls)…

The Rememory of Personal Trauma, part zero: Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse, the Birthplace of Ludo-Gothic BDSM; Some Points about Dolls

“Welcome home, Michael!”

—Laurie Strode, to Michael Myers, Halloween (2018)

I met Jadis in April 2019, several years into my postgraduate work. While their abuse certainly catalyzed my creating of ludo-Gothic BDSM, the process was admittedly already underway by the time we crossed paths. Yes, the word first appeared after our separation—in Volume Zero, October 8th, 2023—but I had already been flirting with the idea for nearly several years[2] before meeting Jadis (my grad work started in 2017 and I published my master’s thesis, December 2018); not to mention, I had conceptualized the giving of rings and collars as a kind of fantastical BDSM in my own fiction writing as early as high school, which was influenced by Tolkien (from Volume One):

• Madoff concludes, “The idea of gothic ancestry endured because it was useful,” and I’m inclined to agree. Except I would extend this utility to Gothic Communism as something to fashion through the same myths of ancestry found in the usual haunts; i.e., mirroring the unspoken but still advertised material conditions of Pax Americana that Tolkien’s “empire where the sun never sets” was suspiciously covered in shadows and bathed in blood. To touch on those, you often have to go somewhere else when formulating your own critiques (the monsters, psychosexual predicaments, and lairs of various kinds). This can seem purely ahistorical, but generally the goals of any historical play (re: Shakespeare) or historical Gothic novel (re: Bakhtin’s chronotope) utilizes some degree of invention and informative chaos (re: Aguirre’s geometries of terror) amid the displacement and disassociation: crafting your own histories and bloodlines that reverse the process of abjection in a very Gothic way—through the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the fake blood of Gothic horror for sex-positive reasons made in the spirit of fun, but also interrogating trauma by camping it. / This doesn’t take an Oxford scholar. For example, my older brother once invented his own Eastern European leader for a third-grade assignment and called him “Mr. Kazakhstan” while using a picture of Stalin; despite how this would have been right around the fall of the Soviet Union, my brother’s teacher didn’t recognize the photo and gave him an A+ (angering my mother to no end). Keeping in line with the same family tradition, and informed by my mother’s bringing of Russian and Eastern European history home to us kids, I wrote my own fantasy story in the early 2000s where an incestuous tyrant called Bane (the name comes from Weaponlord, 1995, not Batman) forces his half-sister, Sigourney, and half-brothers to wear magic rings that keep them bound to the family castle. When Sigourney cuts off her finger and tries to run, her half-brother forces her to wear a collar instead [below]. Over time, she gives birth to Bane’s rape child: an incredibly intelligent/latently powerful witch named Alyona. Alyona is kind and book-smart— with her non-rapey uncles and her pet ravens there for her as friends (and also Ileana, who trains Alyona to harness her dormant powers to escape Bane’s clutches). Eventually Alyona goes on to defeat her own father-uncle and save her family from certain destruction (with their help, as she cannot defeat him alone) [source, pg. 273-274].

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

• In my case, my poetic division, displacement and disassociation amounted to Alyona as something I materially created in a barbaric, pointedly antiquated offshoot of my family home informed by Tolkien’s imaginary one: a castle filled with psychosexual counterfeits talking about my abuse as arranged chronotopically around me; i.e., Bakhtin’s dynastic primacy and hereditary rites speaking in the usual fatal portraits, suits of armor and coats of arms, but animated by the endless legends occupying the same space through its past-and-present inhabitants [ibid., pg. 276].
• Yes, Tolkien was a philologist (an expert in ancient written languages) and Beowulf aficionado—basically an old, dusty scholar who was well-versed in the Scandinavian legends of dragons, war and plunder. As such, he undoubtedly appeared as totally lacking in the language of women, ethnic minorities (the East is a dark place for him) and gay people. And yet similar to Milton, he had his devilish moments, and similar to my crafting of Alyona, there existed a tremendously secret, divided self waiting inside Tolkien’s own psychomachic dialogs about his own dissenting opinions; i.e., the shadowy spaces of a deeply troubled man who, as we’ve already established, was at least publicly allergic both to the Gothic and allegory as a theatrical device […] as classical symbols of status and power exchange. Rings are given and worn; the Ringwraiths (and their rings) are smaller abstractions of the Faustian bargain manifest through the wearing of Sauron’s rings as harmful symbols of power but also power exchange as having a torturous effect on one’s ability to relate to others; e.g., of Frodo to Sam. The magic becomes a metaphor, a kind of BDSM shorthand—re: not just our hobbits, but also similar acts of gift-giving that famously involve the ring as a kind of contract that is worn, generally in a variety of roleplays (which, for Tolkien, were primarily chaste in their execution—excluding the raw, lethal force of dead orcs, of course) [ibid., pg. 279].
• If I made Alyona and my own gay-penned torture castle to interrogate a Gothic living situation through BDSM theatrics (and in response to Tolkien as someone to camp), then I don’t think it’s really much of a stretch to see Tolkien doing the same to canonize the Gothic; i.e., his borrowed bestiary gnawing at the back of his own mind about the imperfections of the heteronormative West and its own imperfect bloodline. Except for him, the abstraction of the Ring was something to offer up during a ritualized sacrifice that, once invoked (using a volcano, no less), defeats fascism once and for all, letting things “return to normal” after the glory of Gondor’s white castle is restored through the same-old monomyth purifying the blood through a trial by fire into Hell (versus already functioning normally through the endless cycle of war and false hope under Tolkien’s brand of Capitalist Realism apologizing for nation-states) [ibid., pg.282].

Given their proficiency in BDSM, though, I doubt the idea would have come to fruition as it did without Jadis’ “help.”

Given that time is a circle and not a straight line, though, I want to add that isolating any first-mover is kind of arbitrary. Beyond my childhood/formative years, Zeuhl put me on a collision course with Jadis, and Jadis sent me towards Cuwu, Bay and Harmony (among others), bringing us to this exact moment in time. Instead of pinning it all on Jadis, then, the entire subchapter seeks to considers Jadis’ site of abuse as something to raise and rebuild in small; i.e., during the rememory process concerned my personal abuse as something to resurrect and play with by returning home to face the music again: as a matter of playtime.

To that, part zero of “Personal Trauma” outlines Jadis as someone to summon during liminal expression, specifically ludo-Gothic BDSM as coming home to its own origins. To that, the ensuing dollhouse has been made to safely invigilate my unironic Great Destroyer and learn from what they did to me; i.e., their harm as emblematic of capital’s business-as-usual, its seasonal rapes of nature through past victims commercialized in various ways (re: Pagans and Halloween). All become a kind of cultural zombie to transform away from systemic harm by reflecting on my personal trauma. As something to join with a broader pedagogy of the oppressed, doing so challenges rape as a matter of profit under capital. Rape equals profit through Capitalism, and Jadis raped me to profit in all the usual ways that capital does—playing with my emotions like a doll they could slowly break.

(source: Ray Morse’s “Blumhouse Surprises CinemaCon with Terrifying Halloween Trailer, 2018)

Whatever the register and scale, the trick to subverting rape and its trauma during ludo-Gothic BDSM is, of course, irony. We summon the destroyer less as Michael Myers (and his killer’s doll-like mask) and any legitimate capacity to inflict harm, but instead as something that could never actually destroy us. In doing so, the summoning speaks to the Imperial Boomerang’s proverbial “chickens” coming home to roost; i.e., the grim harvest reifying through a toothless destroyer persona felt during calculated risk, a death ritual. Imagine, for fun, a Mr. Stay Puft, that unlike Ghostbusters, actually speaks to the sorts of abuses Michael’s fatal nostalgia intimates—a remake, to use the industry term, of a reckoning tied to the monstrous-feminine coming to collect.

Amongst all of that complicated forgery are two basic things: the ghost of the counterfeit as something to either abject/alienate or dance with, thus humanize and understand, but also the awesome means to break Capitalist Realism; i.e., Hamlet’s play to “catch the conscience of the king!”

Child or not, ask someone to remember past abuse, and they will invariably create a home with a monster inside; i.e., something unheimlich (alien) that, despite its foreign element, actually belongs there: as a matter of unaddressed abuse on a systemic level bleeding into the rememory of daily life under said system relaid through personal experience. While this includes the miniature, Volume Zero already examined the kind of anti-Semitic counterfeits on display in stories like Hereditary as aping older and older ones in defense, to some extent, of capital (re: Rosemary’s Baby but also much further back, to Hammer of Witches).

Per our castle-narrative’s usual mise-en-abyme, then, we’re left with the dollhouse as a particular kind of Gothic poiesis I want to utilize and stress when bringing Jadis back to life: a location, but specifically a recursive, anisotropic, concentric ordeal tied to a likeness of the home as cryptomimetically invaded by its own history that can, per the Gothic, get up and move around, but also be reinvented, mid-loop. It’s zombie-like, to be sure, but also ghostly and vampiric as well; i.e., an undead recreation of Capitalism-in-small as hopelessly imbricated with us and our own fragmented, painful memories: embroiled in the chronotope’s messy assemblage bouncing back and forth on the same hellish mirror’s black glass. Simply put, rememory’s a bitch, but it and its doll-like devices aren’t monopolized by anyone.

As previously stated, part zero of this subchapter covers some basic points about personal trauma and rememory as a radicalizing process using dolls; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as my attempts to not only heal myself-as-undead from Jadis’ abuse, but heal, thus transform the world from those like Jadis and the criminogenic factors that give rise to such tragedies past, present and future; i.e., normally dressed up as “play” in bad faith. To kill Jadis’ power and by extension capital’s, though, we’ll have to summon them home to such places, using dolls and BDSM: to kill their potential to rise inside/outside ourselves and bring rise to abuse that oscillates, in a half-real sense, between the imaginary and the real, the person and the place.

Sp why dolls and BDSM? In terms of a thesis argument, dolls are central to the rememory process as undead, which involves feeding and BDSM. And as we’ve established (from my modular thesis):

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

In turn, rememory uses Gothic poetics that, when played with in irony forms, summon up old memories tried to games of power and exchange  that we can use after the fact; i.e., to reclaim our power as taken from us through state-sanctioned forms and byproducts (which domestic abuse fundamentally is: the policing of property through copaganda [and other criminogenic conditions/dogma] to maintain the nuclear family as part of a settler colony project).

For example, when Jadis and I first roleplayed online, we played over text to see if we were even sexually compatible before doing roleplays. The scenario was a simple hook up, me coming to them. I knocked and they answered; they asked what I’d like to drink. Playing along, I replied, “A root beer!” After they “got” me one from the imaginary fridge, we made small talk and then had sex (sexting and exchanging photos). Turns out, we were very compatible (we sexted for five weeks straight, after which they came to collect me). However, as a token of their appreciation of the original opening scene, Jadis also brought an actual bottle of root beer with them to Michigan when they came to take me to Florida.

To be honest, it’s frankly a cute memory and one I had forgotten until tonight when taking notes for these revisions. Unfortunately Jadis tacitly rescinded the agreements they had with me, but only after I was in Florida (all of my immediate family live in Michigan); i.e., abusing the doll-like mechanics of Gothic poetics and BDSM by treating me like a doll they could abuse by virtue of the unequal side of our relationship: the material factors. But those sorry details don’t make the root beer memory any less touching to me; it was before the rapes took place, and frankly provides a cute, bittersweet reminder of what lowered my defenses to start with. Surviving all of the above (with anecdotes to spare), I’ll be recollecting such events for the rest of the subchapter, but want to comment on various oddities for those who survive as I did.

To that, sex workers post-survival are generally left feeling alienated by their labor as something they want to repurpose to their advantage; i.e., wanting to get down to business (a special set of skills) but not get jerked around by future partners, FWBs, fuck buddies, what-have-you: to be good at handling “joysticks” but using them to steer the owner (and us holding them) towards something we both want. In terms of that, sex workers generally have to be our own pimps, requiring some inventiveness to achieve liberation while working out in the world, trying to survive; i.e., making up the rules of what is exchanged for what, tit for proverbial tat; e.g., cheeseburgers for sex, or cuddles for slow walks on the beach. It really doesn’t matter what, provided the rules are clearly expressed and help deviate the proceedings away from the usual historical outcomes the state is built to achieve: rape.

Or so it would seem. As we’ll see with Jadis, rapists come to you with smiles, but often betray themselves by always feeling a bit off (red flags): punishers presenting as benevolent, but in masks/costumes that quickly slip to show their true colors.

To that, another player can still harm you despite seeming to be compatible and down to fuck, but also after establishing a social-(a)sexual agreement that isn’t a marriage contract: “I work, you fuck me.” That’s basically what Jadis and I agreed to, which seemed fair on its face (we’ll get to the particulars between Jadis and I, in part one of the subchapter). Indeed, a sex worker relies on such agreements because those, combined with their trade (of sex exchanged for different things), are a common skill we rely on as sacred; i.e., tantamount to our survival as sex workers.

The whole thing sounds simple enough in theory—to fuck someone every day provided the person plays by the rules we both establish and doesn’t harm us in the bargain—but we’re also doing it knowing such contracts are built on trust in the face of regular historical abuses; i.e., performed by bad actors doing what capital always does: profit as a matter of rape per settler-colonial (Cartesian, heteronormative) models of power exchange. The two go hand-in-hand under capital, Capitalism being the dominant socio-economic force on planet Earth. As we go back into the world with the post-abuse skills we’ve gained to forge new destinies, post-abuse, it can feel a bit like Sarah Connor’s “dark highway at night; to be in uncharted territory making up history as we go along.” We want to liberate ourselves using what we got, but as the old saying goes, “Once bitten, twice shy!” It becomes a prison, a holding cell, one shared with ghosts of old lovers, dead and gone:

The name of the game, then, is determining compatibility alongside intent while establishing the rules between individual players seeking to encourage the valuing of nature and basic human rights across all aspects of society (until they become second-nature, recultivating the Superstructure). This ultimately takes someone (or multiple people[2a]) for us to work with; i.e., as a matter of playing house/with dolls through BDSM, but also experimentation and ultimately rememory through them for the interrogation and negotiation of power and trauma as undead. Arbitrating a product (sex and other labor types) that has infinite value, we play to remember the fun bits (re: Jadis’ root beer) and the painful ones (re: Jadis being happier raping me than respecting our agreements). These, in turn, occur within calculated risk as a safe space/dialog on things that are funny and fucked up, yielding Austenian ironies (“a truth universally acknowledged”); i.e., we’re told how things should be, then learn that they actually can be whatever we want them to be, mid-play.

For example, my friend Mavis discovered this, one night, when dealing with an obscene phone caller named Marty back in the day. One night in the ’80s, the landline ringing woke Mavis up (there was no Internet or cell phones back then, except car phones for rich people). They got up and answered it. “What are you wearing?” the voice on the other end asked. “Oh, I’m naked!” Mavis replied. The caller paused, clearly surprised. “Really?” they asked, to which Mavis replied, “Yup!” It was a completely random event, but one that Mavis—a sex worker earlier in their life but now involved with an unfaithful, abusive man—was able to regain some feeling of agency doing (and combating boredom): acting like a “doll”; i.e., a hot piece of ass someone couldn’t control unless Mavis wanted them to. The telephone call was something of a buffer, in that respect (similar to “flashing” on the Internet, per revolutionary cryptonymy’s acts of showing and hiding things to assist in worker liberation).

(source: Wikimedia)

Before we proceed onto my personal trauma with Jadis as something I reclaimed through dolls as an undead rememory device, I want to give a broad, generalized note about dolls as a matter of practice (ourselves as doll-like); i.e., one that that applies to the rest of the subchapter and its place in the Undead Module (indented for emphasis):

The interrogation of trauma is often regressive, especially with hindsight and know-how to better highlight that fact. For example, the transformation of my undead self through the rememory of personal trauma with Jadis concerns dolls; i.e., how they factored into ludo-Gothic BDSM as evolving into itself. Except, there’s a catch: dolls aren’t explicitly undead. In fact, they aren’t explicitly anything. A doll is a “blank monster,” insofar as it can be, undead, demonic, and/or animalistic/anthropomorphic.

Furthermore, while our focus here will be interrogating and negotiating trauma, this occurs through BDSM, which is primarily a demonic characteristic; likewise, my relationship to Jadis was one of dolls that were often undead, demonic and nature-themed to varying degrees. Simply put, they had trauma, liked BDSM, and were an entomologist who worked in pest control. So I was exposed to all of the things that went into what eventually became Gothic Communism, its modules and, by extension, ludo-Gothic BDSM!

Even so, the emphasis of this subchapter is still the rememory of personal trauma (an undead characteristic) through BDSM, which the undead can still do, albeit by feeding in a vitalistic sense; i.e., passing knowledge and/or power through the metaphorical exchange of various kinds of essence. In other words, they tend to exchange knowledge and/or power through feeding and instinctual behaviors that tie/contribute to trauma versus bartering in any kind of way that seems outwardly intelligent or divorced from unthinking appetites.

Of course, there is the nature of the Faustian bargain, which generally has a predatory component to it that could be considered feeding with a bit of poetic leeway (to feast on one’s soul, versus owning it). But these kinds of poetic distinctions won’t really matter in the following subchapter—save to clarify that I’m mostly talking about dolls, which again can be assigned any monstrous quality you want. I merely want to mention some of these exceptions now to account for the incongruous elements this subchapter will invariably yield when parsed; i.e., regarding the holistic nature of its examination into my history with Jadis and our combined monstrous poetics informing liberation as a poetic ordeal, thus coming equipped with poetic exceptions; e.g., The Night House being concerned with trauma and ghosts, only to gradually shift focus away from the undead towards a sex demon[2b] obsessed with psychosexual domination.

Despite these incongruities, I will try to emphasize all of my examples in this subchapter through an undead lens; i.e., even when they are predominantly demonic according to my definitions. This can go either way with dolls (and especially with BDSM through dolls). Keeping with the Undead Module, though, we’ll still be considering their undead potential, first and foremost. There will doubtless also be lingering issues and questions we won’t be able to answer here about demons, and this subchapter is holistic and idiosyncratic enough (re: proto-ludo-Gothic BDSM and dolls) that it probably deserves its own module (or a spot somewhere in the Poetry Module). Except, I’ve since organized it as a deliberate segue between “The Imperial Boomerang” and “The Monomyth” subchapters; it’s not going anywhere.

Given the subchapter’s taking down roots, then, I’ll be focusing on formative trauma while keeping the doll subchapter in the Undead Module. Rest assured, demons will get their time in the sun, later in the volume!

Another way to look at dolls is they’re fun. Simply put, I like them; fetishes are generally doll-like, reducing things to an abstract means of play that nonetheless concerns the ritualistic summoning of trauma, like a voodoo doll, into something ultimately unable to cause harm: “Show us on the doll, where they touched you.” Simply put, dolls are useful when telling things that might otherwise be too difficult (or dangerous) to say or act out.

More to the point, dolls are fun play with—to dress up and fuck/otherwise engage with less by literal means, alone, and more in relation to other people as a kind of theatre that invokes objectification as an ontological statement one occupies and moves through. In doing so, these various Russian dolls speak to the human condition as alienized under capital as a settler-colonial structure over space-time; re: Harmony and I engaging among such spirits like a kind of interactive data bouncing between us and our various devices, mid-castle-narrative; i.e., me fucking of my doll as we do consent-non-consent, but also while thinking about stories that would seem to theatrically point to hidden realities for us to wonder and laugh about versus feeling fearful towards:

Let’s proceed. Before we get to Jadis in parts one and two, I want to go over ludo-Gothic BDSM—what it is, followed by its process of exchange using Gothic poetics, and finally its dialectical-material qualities bucking the Gothic’s psychoanalytic side of things.

First, a reiteration of the concept at large, based on what we’ve covered so far and will continue to explore (indented for emphasis):

Capital is as old as zombies, and zombies, acting, shelter and prostitution (“dolls”) are far older still. But under capital and its powerful illusions, they allow us to regress and play with power to release anxiety and dispel abjection; i.e., through castled clichés during calculated risk; e.g., fucking the queen, the mistress, the sire’s daughter and, in effect, “doing one’s duty” as a matter of Gothic innuendo/euphemism (which generally combine food, death, war and rape into mixed metaphors; e.g., “to cook one’s goose” or “butter one’s biscuit”) and cutesy anachronisms regarding the hushed medieval reality of incestuous procreation.

This “ludo-Gothic BDSM” plays with rape by encapsulating its lived realities in general; e.g., with a wife who can’t consent, the servant put to heel, the vengeful or covetous man, etc, as a historical-material means of living in the castle/storming it as a theatrical, fourth-dimensional, half-real matter of apocalypse. However in-between, though, such liminalities are always informed by earlier forms of rape and warfare evoked during fascism in the present space and time; i.e., to a hauntological time period I’ve called “pre-fascism,” or essentially the medieval period as a matter of discourse that loops in on itself, mise-en-abyme, as “ancient.” Despite the quotes, though, this discourse is as old as our aforementioned zombies, rape, acting and prostitution, including a Quixotic effect Plato would describe as being “in the cave.”

That’s essentially what abjection is, you see, what zombies are as a matter thereof—only incomprehensible horrors by virtue of emotional/Gothic unintelligence, immaturity and deflated class/cultural awareness (which include racial factors) becoming a mind prison, a menticide that serves profit through unironic violence. When the voices of the dead return, said prison leads those trammeled by state illusions (canonical Gothic Romances) to cut off Medusa’s head: to silence her and nature as monstrous-feminine, then keep harvesting them. Sex—though specifically sex with monsters through general kink activities that practice boundary-forming and consent as an asexual exchange—is the best place to start as far as reversing abjection goes (along with the other main Gothic theories per our iconoclastic doubles, synthetic oppositional groupings and creative successes achieving the basics: anger/gossip, monsters and camp); it’s what ludo-Gothic BDSM is all about!

Per the Wisdom of the Ancients, or cultural understanding of the imaginary past, we summon said “past” as counterfeit (apocalypse) to better understand it, but also transform it to suit our needs; i.e., playing with it to dispel its canonical power in favor worker power that humanizes the zombie as person, house, toy and childhood, but also rape and war as “dead,” in quotes!

In exploring ludo-Gothic BDSM through Jadis, we’ll be starting with my zombie-like childhood, toys and relationships as doll-like. As this subchapter segues into the next, though, we’ll be moving onto older forms of undead that, like history itself, are constantly being played with through the monomyth, hence dragged forward out from a hauntological shadow zone felt during these kinds of performative games: the Cycle of Kings per various tyrants and imposing old guys; i.e., great men of history expressed as spectres of “Caesar” (or Marx) to attain a Numinous effect.

More on that after we’ve dealt with Jadis. After all, they taught me how to abuse BDSM, which I have since tried very hard to subvert. But I must abstract their return to do so; i.e., as a demonic, doll-like place to acquire forbidden knowledge, but also an undead place to feed and recover from trauma as forever a part of me: to go to and die inside, but also bring back the dead as fascist or anti-fascist to varying degrees. Something is always given and received. In turn, this might raise some purely philosophical questions, such as, “Can a doll be dead if it was never truly alive?”

While admittedly fun to think about, I want to encourage you to play with these things as a matter of theatrical application; i.e., that make you more emotionally and Gothically intelligent, thus sex positive, mid-synthesis. As you apply yourselves to play through ludo-Gothic BDSM, it should become second-nature; i.e., a if-not-simple-then-at-least-practical means of cultivating good social-sexual habits that contribute to daily activism: as a lingual, societal and material means of engagement between workers and the world, including its half-real past.

To that, while part two of “Personal Trauma” specifically investigates the reclaiming of dolls and doll-like zombie pieces (exhibit 38a-38b4), a dollhouse is really no different in practice than a Gothic castle (or some such place; re: the danger disco). Such revivals are ultimately necessary if we are to learn from the past, thus escape its routine, historical-material abuse under state myopias. This rememory happens in more ways than one—to literally be buried inside, but also to confront wild, reclaimed-by-nature, overcome-with-decay aspects about it that are less rosy than we care to admit upon reinspection as adults.

Bear in mind, doing so isn’t meant to trap us in stasis, but to invoke live burial, hence undeath, as a feeling that puts us in touch with the world around us supplying the clues; i.e., as between a living and dead position that best reflects our lived trauma as something a) we survived, and b) that survives the dead. Live burial, then, is a kind of forward-facing regression, one whose death therapy grants an apocalypse unto itself. As such, Jadis’ dollhouse is an undead structure I made of their likeness; i.e., as a kind of rape play to yield better future outcomes according to a cannibalistic[3] legacy that yields routine Gothic confusions and demises, but also rebirths, resurrections, returns.

Inside the following pages, these effects play out in deliciously recursive, painfully erotic forms: entombed through hubris as something to theatrically deal “death” unto ourselves and those who would harm us. Once inside the dollhouse (or Metroidvania, below), schadenfreude (and other complex sensations linked to generational trauma) reliably emerge to—given the right amount of attention and care—become suitably palliative during rape play as cathartic; i.e., a safe space to avoid actual harm inside as having happened during past attempts having already gone back to a given childhood home haunted by past invasions coming back, back, back; e.g., the Terminator to 1984, Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Aulin into different fatal portraits (specially from Portrait of Ruin, left), and the heroine from Smile (2022). Each time, it’s the corpse of empire displaced into a legendary ruin populated with imaginary monsters, imposters, damsels, knights, etc, as collectively speaking to real atrocities; i.e., that secret spell we’ve been chasing.

(source Tumblr post, Castlevania Gallery: May 22nd, 2016)

Per the process of abjection, the canonical goal is always to kill the past as undead, hence save the future for different in-groups afraid of zombies. But they can’t monopolize the procedure (or its violence) inside the state of exception. Whether for witches, witch hunters, or one disguised as the other (undercover cops/rebels), it’s like a washing machine stuck on spin cycle; i.e., always spinning with us inside it, trying to get clean in the same soapy water as haunted by various inescapable ghosts (of the counterfeit, of Caesar or Marx). Well past a healthy saturation point, there’s simply no avoiding the ambiguity that comes from prolonged contact with such things as alien, and censorship is pointless/conducive to genocide; we can only play with such things transparently to try and achieve a better outcome: by going in circles to achieve transformation.

These are clearly complicated feelings with complicated histories of play occurring over time using Gothic poetics. So it’s important to release them into society as a matter of de facto education, not profit for the sake of making the middle class horny and anxious without concern for the consequences (the white director/vice character problem). Whatever you create or grapple with yourselves, do so responsibly and in ways that invigilate your id-like extensions to an informed, prepared audience.

To that, I’ll just give just our earlier rule of thumb: residence or resident, “whatever a monster’s shape (size difference) or modular class (undead, demonic, animalistic), if it challenges the profit motive, it’s probably sex-positive; i.e., doesn’t instruct through unironic sexual coercion and rape” when evoking the master/slave (the heel and babyface, in kayfabe[4] circles), destroyer/sacrifice or abusive parent/child (the narcissistic mother or rapacious father): the dos and don’ts of toxic love, essentially! It can be a real treat to do “one’s duty” not as a dreaded task, at all, but an act of mutually consensual fun; i.e., one had between, for all intents and purposes, equals by matter of exchange during ludo-Gothic BDSM: between two consent parties playing the zombie and the summoner (to varying degrees, double standards, fetishes and clichés, etc)!

(artist: Evul)

Now that we’ve outlined ludo-Gothic BDSM as a historical-material process, let’s unpack its ability to exchange; i.e., as part of the ludo-Gothic process, whose toys and play are a BDSM means of exchange concerning trauma (and power) as something to confront during calculated risk.

There’s sex-positive and sex-coercive instances of this, hence good and bad play/acting/education during BDSM. For sex-coercive forms, the vector needn’t be strictly “rotten” in its appearance, though—just repressed through transgenerational violence that makes one feel undead, thus raped; i.e., belonging to the abused group and its devastated history directly or sitting adjacent to them from a fearful vantage point, a point of entry into the vector of exchange as traumatic; e.g., white women made to fear non-white men (especially African American men) as universal rapists “eating” them, but really any type of destroyer that can be fetishized to worship the dragon as something adopted to favor white men as the preferred dominator (e.g., serial killers and feudal lords, but also dragon masters, below). Through ludo-Gothic BDSM as an ironic process, then, “rape” becomes something to play with in ways that don’t assist/defend the nuclear family model; i.e., despite classically being used as guilty pleasure by conservative agents capitalizing on the ghost of the counterfeit.

In this respect, randomly threatening Princess Peach with Bowser’s monster cock (exhibit 37c1b, below) can easily make our point, provided its apocalyptic revelation comments on state trauma as repressed in zombie-like fashion; i.e., lobotomized, but also enforced during nightmarish, hauntological conditions of us-versus-them peril. Faced with the king’s “scepter,” a recoiling Peach can feel the creeping return of a barbaric, tyrannical past that never really left; i.e., the constant rape of white, Western women by their husbands as repressed, but also evoked per rememory by observing and performing xenophiles alike through a particularly nostalgic performance of unequal power exchange set to traditional markers thereof: the medieval despot as a kind of undead daddy dom, a reaper that doesn’t take the harvest for all its worth.

Except, this only becomes ludo-Gothic BDSM, thus cathartic, through revolutionary cryptonymy as visually fearsome, but coded paradoxically and ironically for maximum safety by players: to generate nerves that calm us, in spaces that actually allow for it. “Yeah, baby! Butter my biscuit! And I ain’t talkin’ ’bout love! Mommy wants to fuck and she got it bad!”

(exhibit 37c1b: Artist, left: Toxxy Kiss; right: unknown. The devil is in the details; the dragon as a kind of demon lover is, from a classical standpoint, a medieval, masculine rarefaction of greed, cruelty and evil: the fierce dominant, death-dealing performer famously associated with feudal tyrants of an especially legendary cruelty—i.e., the now-vampiric personas associated with the order of the dragon, namely Dracula, the Impaler [and older “draconian” leaders not explicitly tied to the dragon symbol; e.g., Genghis Khan] but also the Nazi as something to camp in oft-ambiguous ways: pointing hauntologically to such grim histories.

To that, the phrase “monster cock” promises several things all at once: a dick of unusual size, used by its fearsome, “undead” owner to commit performative acts of psychosexual violence [the bloodthirsty invader] associated with a barbaric past revived in the present. All become repressed under Capitalism, demanding reunion through various sex-positive BDSM rituals whose rememory struggles to forget and remember what has become lost; e.g., Peach—despite being small, dainty and fair—discovering that she enjoys the ritualized “peril” of the Koopa King’s “arsenal,” his huge zombie-king cock spreading her open; i.e., his Numinous boner running a train on her temple. Beyond the ghost of the counterfeit trapping the damsel between abject terror and rapt fascination, her sticky reunion with Bowser as a perceived “master” should strive to push beyond mere teasing and use good-faith xenophilia to transmute the heteronormative order [the spiked cock ring subverting the master’s collar as a servile hound’s anti-predation variant].

After all, the zombie, for persons of privilege, is a ravenous symbol of guilt that climbs out of a buried past—either a tyrant of the status quo or victims of said tyrant’s genocide. To proceed onto better times, the privileged must use ludo-Gothic BDSM to face the half-hidden violence that continues against oppressed groups; i.e., by subverting the repressed horrors of Capitalism once uncovered in sex-positive-albeit-transgressive subversions; e.g., Peach’s “rape.”)

While time is always moving forwards, its historical-material elements come back around again. Memory is finite under the best of circumstances, then (with current beneficiaries under Capitalism unable to remember the abuses of their forefathers); the closer to death and trauma one is (which one always is under capital’s socio-material conditions), the less reliable memory is (e.g., the failing memory of slaves, but also that of tyrants and Western histories under fascism, which we’ll explore in “Bad Dreams,” part three). Under repressed, invented conditions like these, the state’s constant bloodletting occurs through a plethora of playful devices that imperil memory with undead intimations of trauma, most notably weapons as both historical commentaries and eye-catching onstage since ancient times (sword are shiny and reflect light, but they’re also sharp and promote danger and excitement in traditionally “phallic” ways).

Per the dialectic of the alien (and the harvest, for that matter), guns and knives (and other devices to police sex and force with) abstract and dislocate state violence as fetishized, applying it directly to zombie targets by zombie attackers of various kinds; i.e., people as the crop, pareidolically rendering themselves unto profit as something felt across different aspects of itself, mid-reaping:

Sex toys, on the other hand, can fetishize the targets themselves, primarily their genitals as xenophilic instruments of performative “violence” that resemble such abuse (often as sports-like; i.e., what queer parlance refers to as “pitchers” and “catchers”). Attributed to fearsome bodies, the zombie dildo or sleeve can present as traditionally masculine and feminine, but also dark, savage and animalistic. Often an indication of gross, indecent, even vengeful appetite from beyond the grave, it can just as easily be a living likeness of things that are so commonly farmed under capital for their labor value; i.e., as something to exploit in ways that cheapen whatever’s “on tap”—flesh, but also symbolic, theatrical elements that express such things in animalistic forms: a monopoly on monsters milked, thus drained of their worth for the elite, and which we must reclaim together using what we got!

Regardless of the exact form taken, xenophilic examples subvert canonical doubles and their monopolies, which pointedly demonize the exchange as xenophobic; i.e., by inviting fascist reprisals that dehumanize the so-called “walking dead” through provocations of unironic, fear-inducing violence: “the enemy is both weak and strong” according to whatever fetishized harm they inflict or endure. The point of xenophobic necrophilia isn’t to heal, but harm in highly rapacious ways (e.g., the myth of the black male rapist, exhibit 52e). Subverting that requires either humanizing the thing being exploited, or otherwise featuring it as something to treat humanely!

For example, Bovine Harlot (next page) exemplifies humanizing the harvest through a common device: anthropomorphism (something the “Call of the Wild” chapter will explore at length, during the Demon Module). As a theatrical matter of the human and the cow anthropomorphically intertwined, these are “ancient” myths insofar as their original historical function (from a Western standpoint) is effectively being camped through a modern identity (of the minotaur) through sex-and-gender conversing on such things; i.e., during the playful, theatrical struggle for liberation from heteronormativity under state paradigms (e.g., the nuclear family unit). Liberators like Bovine pointedly employ these hybrids for the benefit of workers and nature: as normally preyed upon by the elite (who put meat on the table to feed their enforcers and slaves with, thus continue the process as a matter of dogma)!

(exhibit 37c2: Model and artist: Bovine Harlot and Persephone van der Waard. Beasts of burden are commodified as chattel animals whose bodies are eugenically controlled and offered up to rape in order to serve profit; e.g., steers are injected with steroids to increase their body mass, thus meat production, while dairy cows are accommodated within an industry built around farming them for their milk. Sex workers are no different, insofar as the industries around them seek to control their bodies as things to exploit and fetishize per all the usual methods. Poetry is a part of that, but especially Gothic forms that merge the human and the animal to express genocide as a cross-species ordeal, but also a morphologically dogmatic one; i.e., per the settler-colonial treatment of anything deemed “too big” to be white within the binary.

Simply put, fat bodies—especially female bodies [the BBW]—are both shamed and chased for their value as descriptively deviating away from traditional, European beauty standards. This regular exploitation of corporal variation reflects in parallel media, becoming something to abject and pimp, but also half-jokingly hunt down, mid-rebellion, for those very reasons; e.g., Diablo 2‘s secret cow level, Earth Worm Jim‘s own parody of the animal, and Monthy Python’s cow catapult method [the last example echoing historical approaches to castle defense; i.e., by using your dead livestock as a desperate means of anti-predation]: when the cows come home [a natural-paganized reckoning on par with Michael Myers and the holiday for which he belongs, but also the Blob or Godzilla]!

Like any monster under capital, reclamation of the cow occurs through owning such things ourselves; i.e., as a GNC act that challenges profit to liberate fat bodies [female or otherwise] through monstrous-feminine acts of self-expression that humanize the harvest; e.g., as Bovine Harlot and I do, operating in conjunction towards universal liberation as a common goal with a common foe, the latter of which monopolizes each of us differently.

As things to challenge, such monopolies extend to the mythological side of things, or has a mythological, essentializing function, insofar as the entire process becomes essentialized once installed; i.e., something to worship according to how it is ordered to serve profit through a particular Cartesian arrangement of man and animal that has evolved into a neoliberal form—the monomyth—and which reflects the usual harvesting of nature as monstrous-feminine dating back to Antiquity into the present; e.g., King Minos’ and his labyrinth occupied by the Minotaur as a reflection of people treated like animals, but also animalistic beings [human or not] being treated inhumanely by patriarchal forces having evolved to serve capital. Within capital, they become our Aegis to reclaim and do with as we wish! To take back our milk and jokingly but lovingly share it among all [“Aw, yeah! Gimme that thick, creamy ‘milk!’]: to save ourselves not for marriage, but our friends extramaritally to challenge the nuclear family unit [and all that entails].

In short, wherever and whenever a cow is present, we can take and weaponize it against profit during rape play/ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as a direct challenge to all the things that normally result when profit goes unchallenged [so-called “peace,” generally conveyed as “law and order” by executed by cops and vigilantes defending state property as a structure]. The challenge lies in reclaiming the cow’s symbolic power and labor value through the media we encounter and consume. In doing so, we [and the cow] can serve an iconoclastic purpose; i.e., illustrating mutual consent during ludo-Gothic BDSM, which occurs through an informed, negotiated labor exchange: one that works within the very things the elite, as unironic butchers, cannot exclusively control and weaponize against us; e.g., the leather shield and shield rod from Symphony of the Night buffering Alucard to help him through the castle under the protection of the humble cow.

Except, the same half-real idea also applies to us synthesizing praxis through things akin to the Metroidvania—its mazes and labyrinths, but also its monsters and randy in-jokes, which cows, for whatever reason, often are; i.e., so-called “barnyard humor” echoing Chaucer’s randy and down-to-earth Miller from his infamously crass story of the same name, “The Miller’s Tale” [c. 1386]:

[artist: Jodie Troutman]

Troutman writes,

Absalom, Alison’s stalker, shows up in the dead of night while she and Nick are making whoopee. It’s so dark outside that Absalom can’t see a thing, which makes you wonder how he made it to their house in the first place. Anyway, he rolls up to Alison’s window and proclaims that he’s there on a mission of love.

Naturally, Alison tells him to stick it. More specifically, she tells him to run like hell, ’cause if he hangs around much longer, she’s gonna stone him. One imagines that in the days before restraining orders, women just kept buckets of rocks next to their window in case of emergencies like this. Absalom says that he’s not going anywhere until he gets a goodbye kiss, so Alison decides to play a bit of a joke on her would-be suitor.

While the poor sap puckers up in the darkness, Alison sticks her naked ass out the window instead of her lips. More specifically, Chaucer notes that “at the wyndow out she putte hir hole,” which is funnier than anything I could ever write myself. One thing leads to another and Absalom smooches her arse – and not just one of the bare cheeks, mind you. Chaucer notes that Absalom knew something was amiss, “for wel he wiste a womman hath no berd. He felte a thyng al rough and long yherd.” Loosely translated, when Absalom when in for the kiss, he felt quite a lot of hair. Yeee-ep.

And while you might think that making out with a woman’s ass crack is about as far as this story is willing to go, you’re sadly mistaken – things only get stranger from here [source].

[artist: Jodie Troutman] 

I’ll admit, this hasn’t been the classiest week in Lit Brick history. But you know what? It’s not my fault. It’s Chaucer’s fault. If someone published something like “The Miller’s Tale” today, even in context with the rest of The Canterbury Tales, it’d be dismissed as garbage. It’s ridiculously filthy and makes almost no sense. That said, I adore it for those very reasons. Seriously, this story is filled with words you still can’t say on network television, yet it was published over six hundred years ago. Ah, the things our society chooses to care about.

Anyway, the rest of the story: after kissing Alison’s ass, Absalom is out for revenge, so he visits a smithy and borrows a hot iron. He promptly returns to the house, where Nick is taking a leak. Deciding that it’d be even more hilarious if he could get Absalom to kiss his ass, Nick spreads ’em out the window. Sadly, instead of a kiss, he gets a hot iron in the butt. This shock apparently triggers a fart so mighty that it sounds like thunder. Talk about your killer gas. The foul stench knocks Absalom out, and all this ruckus finally wakes up the Carpenter, still hiding in the trees.

The Carpenter, assuming that the thunder-clap of Nick’s ass was the sound of the Almighty raining down doom, cuts his tub free from the tree… and promptly plunges several feet to the ground, knocking his lights out. Shortly thereafter, the townsfolk show up and decide that the Carpenter is clearly mad (and honestly, that might be the first sane decision anyone has made this entire story). Thus, with her husband committed, her stalker poisoned, and her lover screaming bloody murder about his burning bum, Alison is – to translate Chaucer into Modern English – f**ked.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the most revered works of literature in the English language. There are some days I love humanity [source].

[source, Facebook post, Heavy Metal Magazine: September 12th, 2020]

Indeed, it’s almost like people with Humanities educations either inside or at least closer to the medieval world [or of the same mentality nowadays, left] inherited its crude, honest attitudes about nature, sex, death, and bodily functions! Whatever the exact venue, then, ludo-Gothic BDSM isn’t just about literal cows, but places where cows [or beings treated like cows—AFAB people] both actual and magical can be found; i.e., at a castle with equally legendary and earthly components; re: something akin to Geoffery’s Chaucer’s infamously wacky story as carried forwards into the equally wacky Neo-Gothic several centuries down the road; e.g., Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver putting out the Lilliputian fire by peeing on it, or Walpole’s Lord Manfred seeing his son get crushed by a giant falling helmet only to try and marry the bride at the altar! Medievalists tend to be pornographic, hence are not really known for their tact.)

Through dogma’s habitual predation, collective repression is illustrated by the devastation of a given calamity present within the physical world; e.g., the cow as a victim of capital; i.e., cryptonymy and the narrative of the crypt denoting trauma attached to such seemingly innocent symbols. While societal memory is a regular casualty to the powers that be, surviving markers of trauma assist in the clawing of a collective, intersectional suffering back towards the surface.

Despite being white, pure and obedient, for example, Peach from earlier (or any Gothic heroine, really) is on the receiving end of a very monstrous-looking cock; the commonplace nature of this kind of domination fantasy denotes a larger relationship at work, but also a specific imbalance of power exchange disseminated throughout the material world. Thanks to globalization and U.S. hegemony across the globe, the repressed abuses such predicaments intimate occur behind the closed doors of powerful men who own the means of production; sometimes, all you can do is tell your story in between the lines of a financially incentivized performance, subverting the established aims through covert, imaginary means (revolutionary cryptonymy being a tactic we’ll explore throughout the remainder of the book).

Before we continue onto my traumas with Jadis, though, I want to quickly (re)stress Gothic Communism’s dialectical-material aspects through ludo-Gothic BDSM as bucking pure psychoanalysis. Our approach relies far less on psychological models that claim to reliably measure and predict abuse in the socio-material world (which they really don’t) and more how memories of trauma are stored in linguo-material things that people respond to socially in predictably fearful ways; i.e., not according to some vague collective unconscious, but collective biases, fight-or-flight mechanisms, and the subversion of (or submission to) canonical norms that exist as part of the socio-material world (the Base and Superstructure).

To change its material conditions, though, you first must change how zombies are perceived (which includes who’s actually[5] doing the eating and who’s being eaten, above) through your own experiences: social conditions that shape and maintain material ones (re: Marx) and vice versa as things to camp (re: me). Coded as sites of trauma through linguo-material instruction, this includes a zombie’s genitals, as well as any intersecting memories of personal and collective traumas expressed in various BDSM rituals we can reclaim to transform the zombie piecemeal.

Furthermore, completed with erotic or at least fetishized zombie components, black and white bodies are hybridized (often with non-human colors, such as green) to express colonial fears in Cartesian language, but also decay resulting from its enactment over space and time. Cartesian dualism, then, not only treats nature as alien; it erases the collective memories of the exploited by fabricating its own undead enforcers to assail state victims with. Under these lived conditions, safety amid perceived danger becomes the audience’s number-one concern (exhibit 37d, next page).

In Gothic stories, a desire to explore childhood trauma through conspicuously adult sex and graveyards is annoyingly linked to psychoanalytical models (which tend to be outdated in sexually dimorphic ways); re, our companion glossary definition for Eve Segewick’s notion of live burial:

The Gothic master-trope, live burial—as marked by Eve Segewick in her introduction to The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986)—is expressed in the language of live burial as an endless metaphor for the buried libido within concentric structures as something to punish “digging into” (which includes investigating the false family’s incestuous/abjectly monstrous bloodline; source). To move beyond psychoanalytic models and into dialectical-material territories, I would describe live burial as incentivized by power structures in ways that threaten abuse (often death, incarceration or rape) to those who go looking into hereditary and dynastic power structures, especially their psychosexual abuse and worker exploitation: the fate of the horny detective, but also the whistleblower.

Yet, divorcing a BDSM ritual from academic psychoanalysis doesn’t change the fact that many people experience sexual trauma as something that survives the initial event. Enduring through displaced material reminders, individual trauma as Gothicized can damage memory but also repair it.

The same is true of collective trauma. When trauma is collectively repressed on a societal level, the systemic eradication of slave/worker histories are survived by different cryptonyms—corpses but also their fragments as a kind of code tied to repressed trauma. Just as the zombie is an erased history that fails to disappear entirely because the bodies always remain, the struggle is two-fold: remembering those who were destroyed and what made them become forgotten afterward, while also healing from trauma through ludo-Gothic BDSM by subverting the canonical zombie as a call to violence against the oppressed during a given apocalypse and its painful revelation.

(exhibit 37d: Model and artist: Persephone van der Waard [the model abused me during this transmisogyny incident[6], so won’t be credited, here]. When the dead already walk the earth, you can supply the graveyard ritual with whatever forms best communicate the state’s necro-erotic abuses as a lived experience. Not only can this vary per individual; a common concern for all workers is proximity to, and protection from, harm. In the absence of reliable, stable histories, safety amid danger becomes paramount; i.e., to relax the worried viewer but also to highlight any potential threats when seeking out comfort as a form of rememory that confronts the zombie-like horrors of the ongoing past always returning in Gothicized narratives: ludo-Gothic BDSM as, like Chaucer centuries, of an often-animalized, transformative variety.)

When humanized, the zombie’s rememory becomes one to consider favorably in the absence of canonical bias. That is, it becomes a dogged survivor whose rebellion—of open communication about trauma—helps them reassemble state abuses that seek to erase memory as a collective history before Capitalism came into existence. By openly embodying these abuses, the zombie organizes a transformation through pieces of itself; i.e., xenophilic action organized against the state. As such, the rememory of total trauma becomes eclectic, undead and incongruous, populating the graveyard with whatever “zombies” (dolls) are needed to make their point and achieve catharsis through transformation.

By returning to a replicate site of trauma, then, a dollmaker is also an architecture—one who can playfully assemble and conduct a cathartic BDSM ritual that playfully addresses trauma where it lives: within the body as effected by trigger mechanisms supplied by a dialectical-material struggle the world over. Executed under more favorable, ethical conditions, these xenophilic rituals can supply the recipient of pain with the ability to consent, gaining agency under gestures of theatrical peril (“rape”) with allies and assistants that help them process trauma in past, present and future forms.

Despite Gothic Communism’s playful, xenophilic nature, confronting the zombie is always traumatic to some extent. Not only can the triggering nature of rememory not be avoided; the social-sexual interactions that occur before, during and after these rituals aren’t completely risk-free (the idea being risk reduction under capital’s risk-adverse conditions).

For one, blind spots can make the consumer biased, but also primed for further abuse. Consider the cliché of the well-read horror fan—the suburban teenager who studiously reads about monsters all their life, only to be fooled by a “real” example. The deception occurs not from an inability to recognize the symbols, but from a social component delivered by an active deceiver presenting them in bad faith. The idea, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, is to have them appear within boundaries of play that help survivors process their trauma while restoring a sense of agency under negotiated peril. This isn’t “looking for trouble,” but it does call for a dance partner that fits the bill.

As we’ll see with Jadis and myself (which the above paragraph was essentially talking about), auditions are an imperfect process, opening the door for further abuse if one is careless, unlucky or both (e.g., like the Takashi Miike movie, its spider-like avenger[7] catching an unhappy abuser in her web). Yet, just as trauma and its symbols can “brand” a former victim to become habitually preyed upon in spider-like fashion, the same psychosexual language and rituals can mercifully be inverted, helping survivors escape future abusers by reflecting on past trauma in present forms; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as a means of transforming the zombie. Again, I want to explore said practice as I coined it—through lived trauma as something to reflect on, reassemble and play with, after the fact, inside Jadis’ dollhouse.

Speaking of which, now that we’ve gone over ludo-Gothic BDSM—it’s base mechanics of exchange, but also its historical-material and dialectical-material elements—a I think we can finally enter the house-in-question. We’ll do so in two further subdivisions that will—like Stoker’s famous novel—feel more epistolary than some parts of my book do: journal entries chronicling my meeting and escaping of Jadis. They were someone who fed and clothed me, but also who held me prisoner and tortured me every day for nearly two years: “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,’ generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit.” In short, they raped me—something I have hesitated to say for the effect that it has on me, when leaving my lips:

(artists: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard)

In facing this sad truth, Jadis’ abuse becomes like the doll: something to play with in order to regain control over a historically disempowering force, but also a BDSM device that speaks through said play as harder to deny than through mere words alone (written or otherwise). Jadis abused me emotionally in ways I’ve struggled to express since escaping them—in part because when I am stressed, I can still hear their creepy doll-like voice whispering to me from the safety of the shadows: “You’re a bad person. You’re so wrong! It’s all your fault!” I loved Jadis for their pain, for I had pain, too; but much to my chagrin, they used it to trap me and, like a fat patient spider, calmly and coldly prey on my frozen body.

To heal from Jadis, I shall now make them into something that I can control—not to bend the truth, but to tell my side of things as completely as I can, and per the medieval-adjacent ideas like ludo-Gothic BDSM that I’ve developed in light of what my abuser did to me. They raped me and let me go, insisting they were good and I was not. Abusers either kill their victims (usually the male approach), or use literal or figurative poison to kill any part of them that might speak out (the proverbial “woman’s weapon”). I think Jadis was counting on the latter to silence me, so it’s only fitting if my testimony makes them anxious once it comes out! While something of an attempt to forgive them (though more of an attempt to take their power over me and weaponize it against the state by transforming my zombie state into something instruction for others to learn from), I won’t lose sleep if my ghastly accounts haunt them; a rapist, but especially an impenitent one (remorse was never your strong suit. Jadis), should never know peace. So reap the whirlwind, honey!

(artist: Carlos Agraz)

Note: The paradox of pain is it makes us feel alive; i.e., per the ancient graveyard function of women and monstrous-feminine entities (e.g., oracles, witchdoctors, priestesses, etc) taking the dead into themselves to pass along. For that reason, I have dreaded returning to these sections, which are meant to be painful to capture the truth of what I experienced, but also per my arguments feel Numinous to me; i.e., sitting with the saint, as I generally do during the grieving process—in this case, myself. It becomes pushed-and-pulled between the desire to know and forget, to hurt and heal, as confused between pleasure and pain, safety and harm, per survival mechanisms, but also responses that are profoundly psychosexual/cathartic. Like graves slashed into the earth, it becomes a marker for trauma as healed into a kind of beautiful scar—of flowers blooming ‘neath the headstones. —Perse

Onto “Meeting Jadis (opening and part one)“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Hasan Abi’s “Kick Is Falling Apart” (2024) and “Why Dr. Disrespect Was Banned,” (2023).

[2] I.e., my first writings of it appeared in “Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space” (2021):

Remember what I said about consent? In this manner, the Metroidvania players consent to the game by adopting a submissive position. Most people sexualize BDSM, but power is exchanged in any scenario, sexual or otherwise. This being said, Gothic power exchanges are often sexualized. Samus is vulnerable when denuded, her naked body exposed to the hostile alien menace (re: the end scene from Alien). Metroidvania conjure dominance and submission through a player that winds up “on the hip” (an old expression that means “to be at a disadvantage”). Another way to think of it is, the player is the bottom, and they’re being topped by the game (source).

Scott Sharkey loved the idea:

[2a] E.g., Tim, Jadis’ ex, living with us under the same roof. I suggested the idea to Jadis while the three of us went out for pizza. After they signed the paperwork, annulling their marriage (after me pestering them to do so for over a year), we went back to Tim’s mother’s, walking past her to Tim’s bedroom (each of us waving hello before shutting the door). Once inside, I suggested we fool around, as we had planned. Soon, I had Jadis on their back, spreading their legs and fucking their pussy while Tim watched. As I got close to orgasm, both of them had to tell me to keep it down and not fuck Jadis quite so hard because—in the heat of the moment (Jadis’ pussy felt really tight and I loved doing it front of their ex)—I’d completely forgotten that Tim’s mom was in the living room! Opps.

[2b] Comparable with Barker’s Cenobites, which themselves have undead components; i.e., on par with medieval flagellants who, mortifying their flesh, also sold their souls. This, suitably enough, adheres to body transformation as torturous in ways that yield an undead aesthetic. The same goes for Vecna and the xenomorph as following a similar undead flagellant motif (and Giger’s monster having postcolonial, monstrous-feminine and chimeric elements). To that, monsters in general both a) tend to function as a matter of poetic expression/continuous evolution, whereupon definitions tend to come later (if at all); and b) tend to have interchangeable uses amid the modular components. It’s all about how you look at it and apply it as a matter of poetics, consumption and criticism (re: monsters are poetics lens that can humanize those inside the state of exception).

[3] Re: The People under the Stairs, which literally involves a cannibal Nazi BDSM “family” that, for all intents and purposes, extends to the house as ravenous—a people and a place that kidnaps and eats children (white or non-white) in a once-gentrified neighborhood that has now decayed to alienate them as Dracula is from his imaginary homeland. While Nazis and Communists generally occupy the same performative shadow zone, here the film feels anti-fascist due to its positive inclusive message about race; i.e., of finding ways to expose predators and heal from generational trauma as linked to a specific site of neighborhood abuse—an urban legend!

[4] Which classically concerns overcoming manufactured adversity tied to profit, versus expressing equality as the so-called “fair fight.” Capital doesn’t fight fair (e.g., videogames: canonical metas serve profit in a half-real sense; i.e., speedrunners and competitive fighters [especially white/tokenized examples] don’t bite the hand that feeds, thus are historically poor activists)!

[5] Such dated, monstrous stereotypes are used, as DARVO always is, to defend predators with the privilege to point the finger at their victims while enjoying the state’s protection: white people! This double standard applies to witch hunters of actual witches, but also zombies, vampires and other undead serving the same basic function during moral panics. A family like the one from Wes Craven’s aforementioned People under the Stairs, above, represent a stranded form of American fascism critiquing the nuclear family as such; i.e., one that lingers in a redlined neighborhood that, mid-economic crisis, is both facing neoliberal collapse (this was the ’90s) while also trying to heal from white people having always had a cannibalistic streak: eating slaves (which extends to anyone they think is beneath them). They’re an open secret, an urban legend akin to Dracula having traveled without moving to reveal themselves as painfully out-of-touch (and joint) with the present space and time: butchers.

In short, while Craven runs a bit hot/cold, it’s a bit wackier and campier than the abjected, far-off racism of The Serpent in the Rainbow (1988) or the straight-up torture porn of The Last House on the Left (a 1972 echo of the Sharon Tate murders, no doubt: fear of poor people at large as a murderous cult, which the middle-class family in the movie kills out of revenge—with a chainsaw).

[6] Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023.”

[7] In case you’re wondering, Jadis loved the villain from the film—loved spiders and humanoid forms of insectoid/arachnid predation as a metaphor, as far as I could tell (based on my own experience) for toxic love (they also loved Tim Curry’s musical number from Fern Gully [1992] by that very name). Intent matters less than their conflations with vice character and abuse happened onstage and off: as effectively no different, insofar they loved themselves and punched down at me to aggrandize themselves, sans irony.

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

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

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

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

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

The Roots of Trauma, part two: Healing through “Rape,” or the Origins of Ludo-Gothic BDSM as a Matter of Rememory (feat. Harmony Corrupted and Cuwu)

There’s actually a social, therapeutic component to Gothic Communism that relates to our Gothic-Marxist tenets and four main Gothic theories; i.e., as things to interrogate and negotiate in our own lives. / The idea actually comes from dialectical behavioral therapy models introduced to me by [Cuwu]. DBT is designed specifically to prevent self-destructive behavior at a societal level; Gothic Communism as I’ve conceived it applies this to sex workers, preventing destructive behaviors against them from other workers who are loyal to the state. It achieves this by combining dialectical-material analysis of Gothic stories with four Gothic literary theories (the Gothic being largely concerned with sex in popular monstrous media) to achieve a Gothic hybrid of traditionally Marxist goals—all in service of furthering sex positivity through well-educated, emotionally and Gothically intelligent sex workers who can “live deliciously” as a form of proletarian praxis from moment to moment (source).

—Persephone van der Waard’s “Healing from Rape,” from Sex Positivity, Volume One (2024)

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Picking up from where “‘Bad Dreams, part three: Rememory, or the Roots of Trauma’ (opening and ‘Roots’ part one)“! left off…

Now that we’ve covered the mythic groundwork of rememory (and its complex history of tokenization and resistance among different minority groups), I want to conclude the first subchapter of “Bad Dreams,” “Survival,” by applying it to myself as having lived the rememory process at different stages; i.e., through my dreams and consumption of media about abject things homing in on what has become buried, thus something to reassemble using rememory dug up as such: rape as painful, including the facing of it as a memory that is, to some degree, imaginary/real and asleep/awake. Hyphenating these as the Gothic does presents a uniquely therapeutic, BDSM-style opportunity to learn from the past as an artifact thereof we can dissect and subvert during rape play putting “rape” in quotes; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM, as I eventually envisioned the term, being something that continues to affect us and our friends even once they’ve left our lives, but remain as zombie-like ghosts of themselves; e.g., Cuwu, next page, but also us, above. Come and gone, their own survival on canvas testifies tragically-yet-beautifully to someone comely that, all the same, both lived with profound trauma and passed it along to me in various shapes and forms.

Before we get to Cuwu, rape play and ludo-Gothic BDSM, here’s a trigger warning and some useful definitions (from “A Note about Rape/Rape Play,” 2024):

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

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

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

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

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

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

I won’t have time to unpack the above ideas again, so please just try to keep them in mind as we proceed.

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

Returning to the matter at hand, Cuwu was entirely instrumental in shaping my current understanding of rape play and developing ludo-Gothic BDSM. More on them in a bit, when we conclude the subchapter with several examples of rape play performed between me and my friends as the bedrock for ludo-Gothic BDSM. In the interim, consider how the committing of rape is rightly criminalized but hardly anathema in the ways it proliferates; likewise, consider how having open, earnest discussions about rape—including theatrical ones—are also shameful and taboo in ways that are repressed through more outlandish fictions built on historical abuse (from Volume One): “The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them” (source). That being said, these still grant warning signs pointing to a maintenance of the status quo by commonly marginalized groups; e.g., white women and the standard post hoc canonizing of Original Sin, through a single character like Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction (1994) saying “rape me” to that story’s male patsy while trying to get him to murder her ex-boyfriend (who she stole from).

The reality is, “rape” as something to put into quotes involves invocations of rape during rememories that are overt; e.g., Harmony saying, “rape me” to me during consent-non-consent rituals (exhibit 37b1a) in order to have fun together while living with the trauma of past abuse minus the capacity to cause harm; i.e., “hurt, not harm” (a common BDSM mantra) being a regular simulation of actual harm during calculated risk to introduce paradoxical, exquisitely “torturous” feelings of the Numinous in good faith: clarity in controlled confusion, recontextualizing trauma in a safe space that feels dangerous. It’s the Gothic in a nutshell, but one that from Radcliffe to me, took a very long time to evolve into itself.

Even so, these subversions still occur using a shared, dialectical-material aesthetic of power and death (which we’ll see with convulsionnaires, has a history of theatrical, Christ-like mutilation—of martyrdom; exhibit 37a2b). As such, exploitation and liberation exist inside the same shadowy theatrical spaces, which generally combine messy elements of performance and play that interrogate power as a means of negotiate; i.e., amid thresholds and on surfaces, using Gothic doubles during liminal expression across different media to achieve praxial synthesis and catharsis.

To that, we’ll be returning to trauma as a process of psychosexual investigation that veers away from harm as normally buried; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as I coined it, which generally includes rape play as something I hammered out while personally relying on the help of friends: to teach me ways to heal from lateral instances of police abuse by developing a shared pedagogy of the oppressed. We’ve already written about this (re: Cuwu, in Volume One), so shall proceed by considering a broader traumatic lineage in my life, but also the larger-than-life stories of undead figures haunting me; i.e., my various abusers, including Jadis and Cuwu, but also monomythic echoes of those abusers that, to some degree color the experience: as both informed and describing the seminal, recursive tragedies and farce (re: Marx) whose enslavement and liberation unfold in ghostly forms echoing across space and time in ways that, unlike ghosts, pointedly refer to trauma using actual human bodies (and their abuse)—in short, like zombies do.

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

Trauma breeds strange fruit, strange appetites. For the moment (and into the next subchapter), we’ll quickly consider this paradox through ludo-Gothic BDSM as enacted through my life (and again, segue into grander stories when we consider the monomyth, after that); i.e., as intertwined with that of others come and gone/dreamt up, but also my real-life friends and our mutual attempts to return to the home as sick: the dead as lonely and furious, being heard through how they feed, but also ourselves relating to them as currently surviving the burden of such things felt at all times. As such, we’ll consider the trauma of rape/power abuse as something returned to and healed from by facing such decay in joyous, campy ways; e.g., Harmony and I, but also Cuwu and I before that (which segues into Jadis and I as something I’m still learning to face and live with, thus heal from; i.e., the subject of the next subchapter and where the process of rememory using ludo-Gothic BDSM shall well-and-truly be put to the test: as something of the prototypical example reached through a backwards dissection of my former self remembered again).

For me, the rememory of the state’s rape and war through unironic police violence is winding and complex, as is healing from it. This includes my paternal grandfather’s frank and unromantic, yet-still-somehow-cheeky stories about the Nazi occupation in Holland, but also my high-school fascination with infamously brutal war atrocities like Cambodia, the Rape of Nanking or Vietnam; i.e., any that belie the treacherously mendacious nature of American exceptionalism during more recent, or at least repressed conflicts in the Middle East (with Zionism predating all of these as a 19th century relic, one built on Biblical/Crusade-style falsehoods well into the present day’s current reenactment of: through Gaza and its neighboring lands policed by Christo-fascist forces and token Jews).

In turn, these artifacts further combined inside my mind with my stepfather’s abuse of me in relation to The Last of Us, the latter being something I ultimately wrote extensively about after a wild dream haunted by actual war abuse. The entire assemblage—at least for me—formed a complex, messy mixture of trauma and legend; i.e., like a Gothic castle, something to bravely and playfully navigate and reflect upon regarding the undead as historical-material, in nature (for a vintage, diegetic example, consider the novel Frankenstein, which opens with a chimeric fever dream that torments the privileged Victor as a matter of foreshadowing his own doom); like a bad dream, you’re not sure if they’re real, but feel utterly convinced they’re coming from somewhere.

Marking a domestic curse, zombies of any kind are less from a faraway place of entirely invented dreams, ex nihilo, and emerge more through apt comparisons to Imperialism occurring at home in partially fabricated ways; i.e., like a dream, haunting the mind through the ghastly figure inserting itself cryptomimetically where it shouldn’t belong but does: the Gothic castle (the chronotope) aesthetically pointing to trauma at home as tied to old power structures lurking there still.

(artist: Kelly Jean)

While the unwelcome nightmare is the infamous composer of many-a-Gothic-novel, Gothic dreams aren’t wholly paralyzed or lucid; they always pertain to a fleeting idea of not being entirely in control of how trauma manifests, which it does through socio-material reminders of abuse wherever it occurs or lies adjacent to. Because abuse is more than the immediate violence taking place (re: criminogenic conditions), the suggestion of it through “zombies” becomes a potential extension of violence—i.e., a mental assault that promises vague, all-encompassing punishment to a captive audience. This includes the zombie within the dream as a kind of imperfect revelation—a rememory of something already repressed but struggling to express itself through the same haunted venue/tired symbols stitched together. In the case of hauntings, the primary difference between a zombie and a ghost is one being alive but treated as dead; the other may have never lived at all (although, this goes both ways; e.g., Frankenstein being made up, but still pointing to setter-colonial atrocities experienced in dream-like, conversational forms: the novel of letters).

Such dreams are never made from whole cloth. In this case, Gothic Communism treats partial agency differently than canon; its ludo-Gothic BDSM fosters sex positivity within a proletarian Gothic imagination that consciously subverts the bourgeois forces normally attacking workers with and within their own dreams as experienced while awake. Counteracting the elite’s xenophobic offensive requires highlighting the disabling effect a person’s mind can have on the owner by tracing the material origins of the dream back to the prime, covert orchestrator. As zombie-like threats of violence are repeated but simultaneously denied by the defendant, they start to come across as eerily unreal—like you’re dreaming while you’re awake, unsure of what’s real or who you can trust. Including your friends but also yourself, your perception of reality becomes doubtful, but also dangerous. You start to fear everyone, feeling undead as a matter of zombification, of trepanation attacking the brain.

Except, liberation also involves the same feelings inverted to achieve a sex-positive outcome; i.e., loving yourself as undead to win a xenophilic means of escape: wearing your trauma on your sleeve—nakedly.

(artist: Lit Silium)

Bear in mind, it’s not a nostalgic past to retreat into and pour salt on old wounds, but one whose limited challenging of the states of yore (thus now) grows into a maelstrom; i.e., building a better tomorrow with a reclaimed Wisdom of the Ancients as an anti-predation device. This requires confronting damage in our own lives’ childhoods tied to past devastation, ever backwards and forwards: “Suffer the little children unto me!” as a performance to collect and reassemble like the bones of a composite skeleton; i.e., from a valley of dry bones to pick and choose from.

For example, when I was a teenager, my stepfather—who was always killing[1] small animals around our home—once threatened to beat me. Deciding to hold off “for fear of child abuse” (whatever that meant), he sent me to bed and told me to wait for when he would come, later in the night. He never did and I fell asleep, plagued with terror dreams. When I woke, I was more afraid of him than ever, my heightened imagination running wild. Though I didn’t realize it, my mind had been turned against me. However, once I started to imagine escaping my stepfather, my dreams became lucid; I felt less “trapped” and more in control, motivated by said fear to get the hell out. Slowly but surely I made plans to escape, eventually leaving my stepfather’s home.

That was over twenty years ago and I only now realize what was really going on: my imagination had set me free, but had also been turned against me by an abuser who recognized my highly imaginative personality. Sadly they would not be the last. While Jadis also had a penchant for it, both abusers had been working within the grounds of a fertile mind sown with foundational fears: childhood as abject in a coming-of-age yarn—to be of age is to be exposed to the reality (and fiction) of rape and its various repressed desires, feelings of paranoia and other extreme emotions, fulfilled wishes, intimations of death, captivity and revenge, etc! To escape, we must acclimate ourselves to them as a BDSM means of Gothic play that, often enough, has a dream-like nature to it:

(exhibit 37a1: Artist: Matthew Peak, whose masculine, male rapist invades the mind of the dreaming young woman, reaching for her ostensible virginity with rapacious “knife dildo” fingers. These hyperbolic, psychosexual threats of actual rape are the 1980s version of the Radcliffean demon lover clutching the woman to trap her in a bad fantasy that puts actual rape somewhere in the venue. Rape is about power abuse and social-sexual control; i.e., including one’s body, emotions and labor but also one’s intelligence regarding these things and of state power [and xenophobia] as something to resist. To escape, one must become lucid enough to fight back; to help others do the same, the lesson of survival must be conveyed in poetic, xenophilic language that people can relate to and understand over time—carefully explained to them in exhibits like this one prepared and presented by emotionally and Gothically intelligent worker-artists. Through the state, fearing sex is normal by virtue of its fearsome reputation, but this, too, must be reclaimed. We are not chattel to rape, be that our minds, emotions, or bodies; we might be undead, but we deserve love. If that includes administering pain then so be it, but it should never be depicted at queer people’s expense in the fearful eyes of cis women seeing us as “rapist” [or other token groups triangulating against whomever].)

Though trauma makes up the weighty base of our existence, nightmares can also help the mind process trauma; i.e., by returning to childhood forms and their fatal nostalgia as always, in some sense, dead. Be it real, imagined, or reimagined, trauma’s investigation generally happens inside a familial space littered with undead pieces; re: the Gothic castle. This ghoulish pastiche depicts a sneaking sense of conflict during cryptomimesis (the imitation and echo of trauma) through ludo-Gothic BDSM rituals; i.e., bondage, domination, sadism and masochism as a psychosexual means of calculated risk meant to assist in the rememory process to avoid fascism, tokenism and betrayal-as-usual (class, race and culture).

To that, feeling undead and trapped needn’t be a strict negative while simultaneously addressing the global and generational traumas of the present world’s complicated space and time; i.e., a place to occupy and perform within as the archetypal damsel in a castle might, but also the whore and demon playing detective, mid-peril: during a staged, palliative ordeal about the same whispered terms on the same shared surfaces at odds with themselves. Like a murdered soul rising to Heaven (or a corpse breaking fresh ground), things get heavy and light.

(exhibit 37a2a: Model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard. Monsters speak to trauma as something to confront since and from childhood; or again, from Volume Zero:

performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios); a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other and vice versa [source].

As such, my own contributions overlap with Harmony’s, the two of us working in harmony through a Gothic poetry very much about making it sexual again, but also sex-positive in ways that Radcliffe [and her own venerated castle’s praxial inertia] were not; i.e., not her unironic mutilative sex fantasies, but an asexual investigation of sex adjacent to harm that explores said harm during outrageous fantasies, operatic performances, and castle-like spaces of moribund sex linked to lost childhood innocence: Harmony as under attack, but having anti-predation qualities that present her as fearsomely undead in ways not exclusive to zombies [e.g., snakes baring their fangs as to discourage stepping on them]. For now, we’ll quickly sample that here, then explore it at the end of the subchapter [and deeper in the module].

To that, I chose to depict Harmony as a vampire, not a zombie, but the basic ideas of giving/receiving pain and feeding on essence are shared between either type as for or against the state; i.e., Harmony baring her fangs in a pareidolic threat/anti-predation display when chased to her home and attacked there [zombies effectively doing the same]. Inside history as ever writing itself on and offstage, sexually active “scarlet” women undoubtedly would have been hectored and harassed during witch hunts blaming them as “homewreckers”; i.e., as something to mark with an incongruous symbol while apologizing for male abusers conforming to the heteronormative model [nuclear families, church structures, and so on]. Whereas someone like Hawthorne used a scarlet letter to mark Hester Prynne, I use period blood and the mating press [as well as an implied spreader bar] but also a cute pink paw print on the usual site of fixation per the Male Gaze as something to fuck with: the panties.

[model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard]

As such, any scapegoat outlier must canonically be staked by knife-dicks mistreating them as demon lovers in a demon-lover fashion: rape the whore—her pre-existing holes, but also potential new ones during traumatic penetration. A common mating strategy in the insect world—re: Gwen Pearson’s “stabby cock dagger“—but also religion and Catholic martyrdom expressed in decayed sites of older religious superstitions amid new prostitutions thereof, we’re subsequently teased with “rape” of a particular kind while fielding capital’s usual insect politics: sacred torture; i.e., a kind of Spanish-Inquisition-style torture camp/rapturous expression of pleasurable pain amid “torture” as something to tease in iconoclastic artwork.

This very much includes sex work that camps crucifixion, ossuaries and the like [shoving the stake in things other than the ankles and wrists, in effect turning the coffin nail into a dildo while retaining a punitive, vampiric aesthetic speaking to state rape]. In such places/moments, we see the beautiful, doll-like “corpse” impossibly able to feel pain per the usual tortures normally reserved for living beings [through forced penitence or kneeling on stone, but also impalement and prolonged incarceration] made into a very-odd jouissance reversing “from beyond the grave” into the usual talking skulls [“boners”] held in the hands of certified-freak weirdos: “Alas, poor Yorick, I fucked him, Horatio!”

The vampirism, here, is—like the zombie—a pointed camping of Christian dogma as undead, but also rapaciously prurient in ways we can vibe with, when camped: “Rock me, sexy Jesus!” See the stabbed pussy slick with slippery blood? Is it menses? Maybe! Like Juliet sweating in the sepulcher after waking from the apothecary’s potion, it’s deliberately cliché, thrilling and serious-silly all at once; i.e., when she fucks herself with her lover’s knife dick, suitably commenting on the feelings of those forced to “come of age” too soon [with Juliet’s official age being fourteen—too young by Shakespeare’s standards[2]]:

Yea, noise? Then I’ll be brief. O, happy dagger,
This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die [source]. 

Romeo and Juliet is literally a tomb romance, both a stress valve and pun-heavy joke about emo virgins told with a straight face by a gay man. In short, the Bard expects the audience to get the gist and subsequently play along! The same iconoclastic idea extends to the infamous monsters [and their BDSM activities] that evolved based on it, including zombies and vampires as dialogic matters of grave robbing and defilement made with a nod and a wink to the audience [and later, the camera]. In a sense, then, ludo-Gothic BDSM borrows backwards to move towards post-scarcity as something Shakespeare would have possibly viewed, per Thomas Moore, as “utopian.” Then again, per his own wild fantasies, perhaps not.

Nowadays, though, the usual medieval paradoxes and abject fear-fascinations abound in order to explain decay not just behind but inside state illusions. Mouths and penises hyphenate, as do fascists and Communists, male-female, safe-dangerous, predator-prey, invasive-indigenous, cowboy-Indian, ally-alien, love-lust, protect-kill, mother-fucker, homely-unhomely, and so on. Specifically Nazi predator and Jewish blood libel [the rodent-like, enlarged teeth and nose; e.g., Max Shrek’s Count Orlock from Nosferatu, 1922] combine weirdly through outright Zionism versus Nazi camp as a) being cryptonymy for or against the state, and b) integrating through psychosexual theatre as undead; i.e., haunting the red and the black with various conflicting and competing histories: the eating-raping of women and babies in equally weird, sodomic-pedophilic ways. It’s canonically very xenophobic and gentrified, but decays along the usual routes that can be reclaimed by both sides [workers or the state] trying to survive as Capitalism decays like usual: in the proverbial “graveyard” as a place to have sex as a manner of medieval hyphenation that combines such activities with death, food, war and rape, etc; i.e., to relieve stress by recovering and reproducing as the undead do. Capitalism reproduces through rape; so do we, albeit in quotes.

The same idea, then, of course applies to a fascist cartoon baring its fangs when hunted down, which speaks to tokenization as a kind of barbarism to put down [re: the euthanasia effect]. For example, feminism-in-decay always runs the risk of regressing into state forms of the same basic scapegoat that are then used and discarded as needed; re: TERFs. Even so, there is no monopoly on penetrative, undead violence, the female/queer vampire meeting state “fangs” [stakes] with her own teeth to bite and drain her enemies with: Harmony’s, given bite and shaped by me [the master and apprentice something to reverse at times]. Exploitation and liberation, then, not only exist in the same place on the same surfaces, but use the same “straws” to transfer power in different directions: towards workers or the state through either’s representatives as vampiric! It’s a combination of sex/death face, but also funny face and the face as mask-like; e.g., animal and/or death masks worn and removed as needed! The rub lies in how such things cannot be so easily removed [as a mask presumably is] when the state begins to die and feed on itself. Yet, survival very much involves doing so.)

Per the liminal hauntology of war, we’ve already examined the familial, chronotopic elements of state trauma during the manifesto (and touched upon lost childhood, here, when looking at zombie apocalypses and vampires, above); the Gothic imagination more broadly processes trauma both hidden and visible as reimagined by workers living in a historical-material world: as inherited from childhood forwards. All the while, the Gothic production of emancipatory nightmares has been hidden, privatized and sold back to us in coercive forms by the state.

Inside the zombie apocalypse as a canonical fever dream, the elite’s bad BDSM tells us how to think, but also how to feel afraid of, and react towards, zombies and war as fetishized, heteronormative and commonplace among the undead in general (re: the vampire, above, having more in common with the zombie than not, when push comes to shove). Manufactured nightmares like The Last of Us, then, work suspiciously like my stepfather’s cycle of abuse loading my nightmares with the potential to submit or rebel; i.e., with canonical threats of punishment from those in power, who control the flow of information (thus power) with escalating waves of violence leveled against historically privileged, but also infantilized groups: “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”

To some extent, this includes me (a white trans woman) as needing to subvert these outcomes to serve labor as GNC; i.e., with ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the undead as entities openly raped by the state to begin with (which they then deny to our faces). All the while, I cannot stress enough how having our nightmares constantly produced for us by the state’s BDSM (zombies or otherwise) has alienated workers from our own minds and how they work; i.e., relative to the socio-material world as something we can shape through the same rapacious archetypes. Meanwhile, the elite devise and abuse canon to plant systemic fears into the Gothic imagination from an early age, observing patiently while canon shapes the world (and its socio-material conditions through Gothic poetics) as they desire; i.e., through childhood indoctrination built on false hope/power as monomythic: a hero to rape the undead when Hell comes home to empire.

We’ll unpack that dark return more in the monomyth subchapter. For now, though, just remember that monsters like zombies and vampires commonly signify childhood as a place of elite authorship, one made to imprison labor with; i.e., inside pacified workers’ terrified brains, the former conditioning the latter to see and identify undead things they should attack, not embrace as human by virtue of systemic abuse they experience from childhood onwards. Forever looming over them in displaced, faraway forms, these emerge from the imaginary past as echoing on and offstage in the present space and time; i.e., like a spaceship, but also a traveling Gothic castle occupied with some kind of Great Destroyer that reflects colonial atrocities back onto the middle class: to scare them stupid all over again when the nightmare “returns.”

Except, it never really left. For example, Chrono Trigger‘s Lavos is an ostensibly celestial reaper being hounded by the usual middling kids to the center of the usual black onions; i.e., the castle grounds, layers of the fortress, suit of armor and body inside as all being concentric, anisotropic, and more to the point, recursive ontological statements of the same basic being/process at different moments of exploration: the castle-like body or body-like castle tied to a canonical mise-en-abyme abjecting Capitalism’s cannibalistic device, profit, onto a traveling nightmare that, once assembled through a canonical rememory of the imaginary past, must be invaded and killed for the state. Except, it’s a bread-and-circus ruse, one whose regular bait-and-switch swaps profit for the usual spectres of Marx as haunting space and time more broadly!

(source: Casey Foot’s “Chrono Trigger: What Is Lavos?” 2022)

Such Red Scare nonsense is the elite “getting them while they’re young”; i.e., as cradle snatchers and graverobbers executing a de facto bad parentage. From cradle to grave, they want us to forget our ability to control our own nightmares and their transformative power onstage and off: during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s palliative-Numinous rape play as a proletarian venture made to reclaim monsters from the usual neoliberal illusions! As a matter of gargoyles and menticide (re: Volume One), the elite (and their Superstructure) achieve poetic dominance by making us perpetually scared during the liminal hauntology of war and its apocalypse: the return of the home as undead, meaning bodies and house through a stupefying grim harvest—consume, obey and destroy!

On some level, Big Bads like Lavos reflect Imperialism-as-undead: something workers inherit and contend with—canonically by striking the mirror held up to us by the elite, the middle class punching the ghost of the counterfeit per the process of abjection. It’s up to us to challenge said destiny with our own Aegis; i.e., to dance with the ghost of the counterfeit and interrogate its Russian doll, not to blindly consume or retreat into so-called “better times” that, however simple and tempting they might seem, reflect a profound ignorance towards the suffering of others: an escapist counterfeit unto itself that becomes something the meek will mobilize in defense of from subversive agents.

In turn, once shattered (as innocence generally does under Capitalism), purposeful regressions towards it, the counterfeit and process of abjection amount to willful ignorance in defense of Capitalist Realism. Except, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle (the ghost of the counterfeit) without turning a blind eye to the kinds of predation your own consumption (and class) belongs; i.e., informed consumption (a topic we’ll unpack in Volume Three at length) versus the problem of an alien zombie that, however displaced, nevertheless reflects middle-class anxieties about their own hand in genocide (so much convolution merely to pass the buck, in Chrono Trigger‘s case)!

(artist: Mk-5)

Hopelessly dependent on a bourgeois, socio-material arrangement, canon drains workers of any ability they might otherwise have to imagine a better world through monsters as human. It’s always on the cusp of annihilation, whereupon our minds become a trap buying into neoliberal illusions the likes of which videogames, movies, and other kinds of mass media (which generally respond to each other) constitute a prolific breeding ground; i.e., reinforced by the external world as a dogmatic byproduct of older traumatized minds, of minds, of minds: our own past as shared with that of others across former centuries, having common burial grounds for discontent; e.g., the convulsionnaires (next page), but also Harmony and I as constantly relating to them by already having something worryingly in common: our having survived the horrors of a canonical past that extends into the present. Face with it, we seek refuge inside the imagery as a hauntological matter of communion with liberatory agents conjured up—spectres of Marx that, unlike Lavos (whose outer shell is covered in unhuggable quills like a porcupine and whose inner shelf is a womb-like space), demand to be hugged!

Per the dialectic of the alien, iconoclasm defends Medusa from state forces/Cartesian arguments’ canon (re: nature-as-monstrous-feminine); i.e., a creative process whose subsequent rape play demands our inspecting of the imaginary past as hauntological, thus not completely fictional but certainly walking a fine line: martyrdom! As a matter of prolonged struggle against the state, resistance historically associates with rebellious forms of atheism. Except, there’s also non-secular bodies like the convulsionnaires as being zombie-like, too—literally the trauma of state abuse prompting a return to an imaginary past that never existed back then whose paradoxical return now is equally invoked under the present state of affairs pushed by a shared desire: liberation through torment as half-real.

(exhibit 37a2b: Model and artist: Harmony Corrupted. Confronting trauma takes many forms/rituals invoking spectres of Marx; e.g., Harmony’s Fansly exhibit on convulsionnaires: 

Convulsionnaires helped lay the foundation for the French Revolution by being in direct and fierce opposition to the hierarchical system of religious clergy, and thus, also absolutism. Their extreme behavior inspired lots of public discourse, moving people to question the “ancien régime” and the supposed piety of the monarch. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the convulsionnaire phenomenon was a direct result of the people’s frustration with societal inequity, compounded by the feelings of being increasingly alienated from God. […] The majority (60%) of the convulsionnaires movement was comprised of women who were actively challenging the established ideas of a Christian woman’s role and expected behavior in society. […] The individuals experiencing convulsions were “treated” in oftentimes brutal masochistic sessions (sometimes resulting in crucifixions), which were meant to be cathartic for their suffering and a symbol for persecution and their proximity to Christ.

Later on, the movement was made to leave the cemetery grounds by the police and moved to private meetings, where they continued practicing the sadomasochistic sessions and developing apocalyptic visions [source].

[artist: Harmony Corrupted] 

In short, there’s an oft-musical, historical element to the socio-material factors teasing but not executing actual mutilation and rape. Such spectres haunt the viewer during current ludo-Gothic BDSM practices being informed by in-touch contemporaries’ own understandings of older, more violent forms: actual harm as a matter of suicidal protest haunting non-harmful copies. To that, Harmony’s performance is notably inspired by Trevor Dunn’s avant-garde jazz outfit, Trio Convulsant and their new album, Séances [2022]. Such an operatic, “rapacious”-rapturous mixture has been a part of the Gothic as a transcontinental and transgenerational mode, insofar as such spectres constitute a work-in-process we have already touched upon; i.e., a Communist Numinous; e.g., from Horace Walpole’s rape castle, Otranto, to Matthew Lewis’ poetic inclusions and “Gypsy Dance” from The Monk to Blue Öyster Cult’s own music [next page] to Castlevania to Trio Convulsant to my short essay, “Psychosexual Martyrdom,” and so on…)  

Whatever the spectre’s form, the keys to escape through Marxism-as-undead are performative, occurring via Gothic-Communist development during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., by playfully recognizing the myriad ways in which complex trauma is manufactured by state forces to serve profit, then slowly envisioning a way out of the same, prison-like myopia while inside it. If one’s mind is pacified by dogmatic elements—specifically by the canonical zombie as a kind of violent, Pavlovian threat to menticide the viewer with—then such instances must be transformed in cathartic ways by playing with zombies. Zombies, after all, aren’t strictly rotting corpses, but merely those occupying the state of exception that treats them as undead; i.e., damned, thus unable to easily enjoy social-sexual engagements because they collectively elide with historical-material experiences of state-compelled trauma; e.g., the child-like Creature from Frankenstein trying to befriend little girls only to be shot for it.

As such, the zombie’s tragic, forgotten histories must be bravely reimagined through rememory during ludo-Gothic BDSM if workers are to liberate the Gothic imagination (and Wisdom of the Ancients) from capital. The next subchapter will explore this through sexualized toys and artwork that speak to trauma as something to navigate in ghoulish ways. For the rest of this section, I want to outline a) the basic idea, and b) how it is performed by people with each other during rape plays of various kinds.

As I do, I’ll be stressing the sex-positive quality to such examples despite the historical presence of state abuse haunting them; i.e., through the past as written by people who, themselves, often sucked quite a bit, and for whom we have do to better than; e.g., Roman Polanski as someone who, when engaging with the works of, often feels like us making a deal with the devil in more ways than one, but for which there’s much to be gleaned and learned from the affair as a holistic ordeal the so-called “director” is still only a piece of:

…let’s all acknowledge that Roman Polanski, who adapted the screenplay and directed Rosemary’s Baby, was a total dirtbag who had sex with a thirteen-year-old girl, pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor,” and fled to France the day before his sentencing. He wasn’t exactly a shining example of goodness before he engaged in pedophilia either. Rosemary’s Baby is a masterpiece, but Polanski’s exacting vision and his reckless and abusive methods to achieve it caused a lot of drama with a lot of people on and off set. […] Ironically, given that Polanski is such a dirtbag, both the film and Ira Levin’s novel on which it’s based, invite feminist interpretations (source: Meg Sipos and Eric Botts’ “Satanic Capitalists in Rosemary’s Baby,” 2023).

Whatever the forms or faults at work, rape play is loaded with dead things, but especially Gothic markers that, per liminal expression, are less completely true or false and more in the awkward delicious middle inviting troubling-but-fun comparisons to act out.

In terms of the basic idea of rape play as something to act out as a defense mechanism from profit and state forces, think of my arguments per anger/gossip, monsters and camp (re: the basics of oppositional synthesis). These—I would argue—are collectively done to write with the dead in cryptomimetic fashion, but also dance, eat, war or fornicate with during sex-positive, xenophilic rituals. Such ventures aim to subvert the undead’s rape trauma and feeding mechanisms by detaching them from profit to critique it; e.g., the zombie’s dark, massive animal cock (exhibit 37b) but also the dragon’s Impaler-like variety (exhibit 37c1) as both featured in trademark Gothic locales granting trademark Gothic vibes; i.e., a deathly jouissance/mood of proudly identifying with “death” in quotes: as a potent source of imagination, creativity and vitality

When I die
I don’t want to rest in peace
I want to dance in joy
I want to dance in the graveyards, the graveyards
And while I’m alive I don’t want to be alone
Mourning the ones who came before
I want to dance with them some more
Let’s dance in the graveyards (Delta Rae’s “Dance in the Graveyards,” 2012).

but also a foregone conclusion through these same intimations of mortality as gloriously unclean and faked:

It doesn’t matter if we turn to dust;
Turn and turn and turn we must!
I guess I’ll see you dancin’ in the ruins tonight!
Dancin’ in the ruins!
Guess I’ll see you dancin’ in the ruins tonight!

There’s laughter where I used to see your tears
It’s all done with mirrors, have no fears
There’s nothing pure or sacred in our time
The nights we spend together are no crime (Blue Öyster Cult’s “Dancin’ in the Ruins,” 1985).

Faced within the hyperreality of Capitalist Realism—a thing that is both so very false, but nevertheless making up the reality of our lives—rape play suddenly isn’t so odd.

“Death,” then, is a poetic, campy means of escape onto something better by letting go of current problematic arrangements; re: the above music, but really any projection of any postpunk resistance unto spaces of escape whose at-times ambiguous, necrophilic, operatic hedonism (any kind of extramarital affair) become their own kind of zombie dance within the danger disco of the black castle as conjured up by us: a “danse macabre” reveling in the sensations of existence and non-existence intertwined, but also the echoes of the dead having a profound sense of joy within the theatrical tradition of rape as divorced from state abjection; i.e., while fear can come easy insofar as wanting to respect the diffuse, fragmented memories of the dead goes, playing with imaginary forms and critiquing their pernicious elements (re: canon and tokenism) provides something of a buffer during rape play.

Said play takes many forms. For one, the home-as-dead is a common homecoming to terrify the middle class with: the house as both containing the zombie and representing some aspect of a larger cannibalistic process returning home; i.e., through a moving vessel that, being hypermassive, travels seemingly without moving at all: across time through the usual dimensions of space. It’s precisely this recursive motion through a fourth dimension (time) that canonically keeps power where it normally is; i.e., by cannibalizing the victim as doomed to return to it, thus be eaten. Except, anisotropically reversing this flow ourselves is, itself, foreshadowed by a sweet, delicious doom we can send back at the usual rapists of the mind; i.e., our own awesome power laughing in the face of those who would seek to possess and ruin us for their own fickle gain. Terrified of death and draining the blood of everyone around them by preying on nature, they seek to make us dance for them; i.e., as abusive recruits that, once touched by death, fear it as a matter of going on to prey on others, mid-calculated risk.

This concerns an ongoing relationship shared between the audience and the text as likewise inherited; e.g., Mad Father (above, 2012), but also those who see such nostalgia offered by similar games as something to unironically defend: Jadis, towards me, falling in love with their father’s ghost and possessed with their mother’s (the next subchapter is dedicated entirely to them). They loved Mad Father for those very reasons, smiling as they took advantage of me while invoking that game as they did, time and time again.

Lucky for us, we can resist these bourgeois spells (and their practitioners) through a joy regarding liminal expression as purposefully in-between, not by accident; i.e., death-as-alive, knowing that life is but a walking shadow and death merely the pause in its dancing before it rises once more from the grave. Per the Gothic, this describes a psychosexual, erotic-traumatic force with intensely cathartic potential in queer an-Com hands; i.e., a lullaby into a waltz, a dance with the dead in the same spaces of childhood, but also a coming-of-age ritual whose constructive criticism extends the confrontation to a more (a)sexual sort: bedroom activities turned inside-out relative to the home as the place of zombies, of graveyards, to embrace and find playful, non-harmful joy inside (above). To, as Eddie Money and Ronnie Spector sing it but with a twist, “take us home, tonight!”

I’m talking about sex, of course, but more to the point, ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of nudism and rape play (which certainly doesn’t preclude sex):

(exhibit 37b1: Artist, left: Indicadominant; bottom-middle-and-right: Blxxd Bunny. When spaces become liminal, anywhere can be a bedroom, a grave, a kitchen, a dungeon [commonly for women treated as virgins and whores]. Literal dancing with the dead is more a novel-of-manners approach, one that gentrifies “necrophilic” sexual expression by avoiding, at least initially, the more eroticized components: the undead sword and scabbard, the monster “Franken” cock, including the swollen zombie cock as huge, dark, “rabid” and threatening[3]; re: “animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms”; i.e., the zombie as animalistic, feral and hugely carnivorous during wild animal lust [akin to the xenomorph or a werewolf, etc].

Such liminalities evolved out of a British social tradition, one whose abject xenophobia Ridley Scott would explore repeatedly in the 20th and 21st centuries using Gothic fantasy and science fiction. As a recipient of targeted violence towards embodiments of undead trauma, the zombie cock can adopt a fearsome, punisher role: the zombie pussy demands a “beating.” The broader theatrical idea, in sex-positive art, is to humanize the monster genitals as potentially slated for giving or receiving abuse as a kind of reclaimed zombie ritual, while retaining their outward, monstrous appearance; i.e., monster-fucking during ludo-Gothic BDSM as patently undead in ways that face and befriend death as normally alien, under capital: “We are all animals, my lady!” [what John Webster would consider lycanthropy as: raw animal lust].

Arguments about rape are made with monsters. Amounting to a synthesis of xenophilia during liminal expression, zombie genitals [and the perverse courtship rituals attached to them] can a) move towards survived trauma as something to express, and b) seek to alter the Superstructure’s canonical shaping of xenophobic cultural values; i.e., that lead to unequal, criminogenic, socio-material conditions. In short, the “rabid, stabby cock dagger” must be camped, and inside the usual grave-like areas as returned to minus the rose-tinted glasses of youth. It becomes a form of play that makes death, food, war and rape front-and-center by literally setting the table with them [above].)

Rememory strives for reunion, especially with lost memories (the ghost of the counterfeit) that have become divided from the physical body over time, or with the body separated from a larger cultural identity that has since been erased by hollow, braindead copies (the counterfeit as abject). Recollecting the zombie’s traumatic past, then, is always imaginary to some extent; the revived or the reviver always bringing something back into the living world—a buried, “souvenir” aspect of reimagined trauma that is perilous to confront. Barring extreme forms of isolation (denial being the final step of genocide, according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust), personal trauma is never fully separate from societal trauma. By investigating the rememory of my own personal trauma in relation to the material world, part two of the “Bad Dreams” chapter pointedly confronts the humanization of zombies through sex toys and BDSM rituals: as flagrant, vulgar displays of phallic, toy-like “violence.” When playing with these eroticized, modular pieces, iconoclasts are working with trauma as recovered from, but also stored between, individual performers, social groups and the material world.

That more or less covers the basics of rape play’s context. Let’s conclude the subchapter by looking at some sex-positive examples from my own life (which will work backwards towards my own lived abuse, in part two of “Bad Dreams”).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Before we proceed unto the examples, though, I want to give several quick, holistic, symposium-style reminders (three pages); i.e., about the context of rape as something to perform. Consent-non-consent is informed consent, so better safe than sorry!

First and foremost, personal and collective traumas can either assist or undermine the humanization of zombies belonging to the same process of abjection; i.e., as something to canonize or camp (thus reverse). It’s up to the individual to determine which way this goes, but always through the larger capitalist world as something to conform with or rebel against through the help of one’s allies. Even then, state proponents and class traitors must be considered, including the ways in which they sabotage class struggle and consciousness; i.e., through the coercion trifecta weighing on the experience of abused children who grow into abusers, themselves. These, in turn, poison the nightmare as a bourgeois instrument that must become gay and campy in service to workers (and their trauma) once more!

For part two of “Bad Dreams,” I shall demonstrate how by inspecting the evolution of my own creative process within these broader parameters; i.e., from my own traumatic childhood and into adulthood, becoming increasingly genderqueer over time despite the presence of systemic, necromantic traumas seeking to closet and silence me… inside a coffin but also above ground: where the undead entity is exposed, vulnerable, and ripe for fatal, pro-state penetration. Through such dogmatic tortures ruthlessly exacted upon the young (or young-at-heart) as “young, dumb and full of cum,” capital punishment reduces state victims to a vegetative mindset the elite can reliably harvest (or use to harvest others with) as needed: per Radcliffean exorcism and monomythic calls to violence tied to formulaic romance as heroically unrealistic by virtue of it not mattering either way[4]: the perception of strength and danger to mobilize police violence against the usual undead victims by the usual braindead cops.

By comparison, the remainder of this subchapter concerns a more enlightened, sex-positive approach as already having occurred based on that history as something I survived my own rape regarding: universal worker liberation (from alienation and fetish-grade sexualization), which occurs within the feeling of one being watched as a matter of performing “rape” in quotes; i.e., the zombie’s ambiguously “alive” (and queer) gaze haunting the performance, mid-ludo-Gothic-BDSM, but also one’s body as bare and exposed: her tits were there, along with everywhere else lying in wait… to gobble up state enforcers, taking their power!

As we’ll see in the following exhibits, power is both a ritual, then, and something to perceive as going different ways. Sexist men, for example, classically fear the Medusa, but also are drawn to her precisely because capital has alienated them from their basic needs and enrichment. Spend enough time with (and inside) her and you might start to realize you’re the state’s arm, attacking and maiming those monstrous-feminine components of nature and labor the elite require you to in order for them to profit. It’s simple and brutal, but remains an effective trap that continues to work into the new millennium: a book or some-such instrument of the dead to—like Jim Henson’s titular Dark Crystal—take power for the elite through those who all the same struggle to control it.

Except while canon operates through the eyes as the mechanism that is most widely used to enslave workers (a quick path to the brain), this aforementioned monopoly isn’t absolute. Furthermore, the difference between canon and something akin to Henson’s Crystal (and similar works—again our rape-play exhibits, next) is effectively an anisotropic, children’s-story critique of such things; i.e., one that dares to suggest it could go both ways.

By comparison, the likes of weird canonical nerds like Sam Raimi (who we’ll explore more in the Demon Module) and other unironic, Pygmalion-style practitioners of abjection through Orientalism (re: Blizzard, Naughty Dog and so many others) will always serve profit by pushing genocide to the margins of Western civilization. In doing so, they effectively scapegoat older (usually non-white) empires and victims; re: the process of abjection, per the ghost of the counterfeit, which “displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell” (re: David Punter). Aa always, this kind of jungle fever sends a Christ-like figure (the middle class, playing Jesus) into rapture; i.e., martyring themselves and the usual victims of state abuse through a spurious guilt trip, a lie presented as “truth.” Perception becomes reality to such persons.

In short, this abjection can be reversed through various splendid lies (e.g., kayfabe), but our focus shall be the rape exhibit at its most naked and extreme.

Even with less extreme forms/performers, though (re: Henson), there remains unto both a dark undercurrent: liberation occurring within rememory as playing with the same funerary incantations, demonic resurrection passages, and Gothic exchanges used by all—a sort of “church curtain” raised by groups of people with a shared goal against the state; i.e., using the various danse macabre to camp exploitation as always being haunted by ghosts of the real thing (and its moral panics) behind canon’s typical obfuscations (disempowerment, death, rape, mutilation, etc). Any manipulation canonically serves profit; any successful camp does not, preventing rape by playing with “rape” as something to speak to past abuses actually suffered—to show the audience one’s rape, normally unspeakable, as something to act out, mid-enjoyment on a reclaimed stage (churchly or not). But this takes practice—of being careful and thorough to avoid harming others; re: through calculated risks, not unnecessary or unplanned ones (a history of Gothic-coded bad decisions we’ll examine in the Demon Module, once more dragging Radcliffe, before pushing away from such gaffs in Volume Three).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Last but not least, rape—as something to play with—is always a risk under capital, is always something that returns in zombie-like fashion (an “epidemic,” in political language). To prevent actual harm, workers must return to the site of older trauma (the grave) as threatening to come back, post-anniversary (returning from the grave, again and again and again…); i.e., to learn from it, but also use it to establish new boundaries with. To that, there is always a partially imaginary and playful, campy element to rape play—of going back in time to move forward in a circle; e.g., from Percy Shelley’s timeless “Ozymandias” to Charles Dickens’ ghostly tryptic A Christmas Carol to Rocky Horror‘s “Let’s do the time warp!” to the Muppets, and onwards to these current examples I’m about to show you, now.

As I do, remember that from kawaii-to-kowai, big power and trauma often lurk on the surface of gentler-looking (and smaller) bodies, their double operations showing and revealing different things useful to state or proletarian agency through Gothic reenactments of paradise lost; i.e., of shattered innocence, of childhood devastation confusing pleasure and harm through conflations of psychosexual pleasure-and-pain responses inviting the audience to consider an uneven pedagogy of the oppressed: look on those of us affected by rape and see how we cope with the trauma it forces us to live with. Just as often, our attempts to express ourselves are policed; i.e., through the discourse itself as something whose own imperialism of theory (re: Sandy Norton) is a matter of choice normally serving the state, one our own revolutionary forms of sex-positive expression rail against to invite speculative thought about receiving state abuse: from the zombie’s perspective.

To these performances I’m going to be showing you, then, surviving rape is only the beginning for those made undead as a matter of consequence. Doing so leaves a massive hole inside victims that only the Numinous—however brief or fabricated (re: Dennis Cooper’s Frisk, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, etc)—can truly fill. It can seem odd, then, to watch people submit to “rape” as a theatrical means of transgressive exhibitionism that is so obviously bogus and verging on the real deal. Except—and this is very important to remember—it’s not actually rape unless irony (and mutual consent) are absent from the act-in-question.

This brings us to the consent-non-consent exhibit. Wanting to do the process justice, I’ve felt driven to include as much as I possibly can. As such, we’ll be demonstrating rape play both as an act and testament to lived abuse (nothing is deadlier or more conducive to rape/genocide than the silence surrounding it). That being said, the following has extended into a messy soup of various examples; i.e., one that features rape play between myself and either Harmony Corrupted or Cuwu, while also going over the theatrical-historical mechanics and half-real, therapeutic elements which present and regard the complex emotional state of rape survivors. Myself included, we’re commenting on ludo-Gothic BDSM through a testimony that, per an attempt to illustrate the fun and games being had, suitably feels “off the cuff,” whimsical, and fragmented.

Rest assured, while that might sound ominous at first blush, and while these images certainly look extreme at a glance, they’re still just that—half-real acts of rememory for the viewer to study and consider the undead paradoxes at work. Often at war with themselves and their surroundings’ imaginary past as caught historically-materially between the two, everything strives to communicate displaced abuse in language that readily imparts the source and result of undeath: the trauma of rape. Here, I will try to explore and preserve the intimacy of me and my friends’ healing from it with a degree of poignancy, color and love.

(exhibit 37b1a: Artist: Zuru Ota. As a matter of profit, rape serves settler-colonial systems by dividing its recipients into different groups as a matter of genocide; i.e., it makes people feel undead through botched love as instructional, but especially historical recipients of such abuse under patriarchal systems that have grown more predatory over time: women—but especially white cis-het women—being made to fear rape as something the state uses to triangulate them against its other victims through legitimized violence. To break the curse, these living-dead girls must learn exactly what they want as being fundamentally at odds with the structures they haunt having divided them inside and outside of themselves. Their exhibits of “rape” must speak cryptonymically to the consequences of rape normally harvesting them and nature at large; e.g., reducing the party-in-question to something of a toilet, a cum dump for useless semen either divorced from sexual reproduction, or in competition over the same entity as something to dominate in activities that have little if anything to do with actually reproducing. It’s about power as something to communicate in order to subvert or enforce its usual lopsidedness.

Recall that legitimacy under current Western models is to conform to one’s position of disadvantage under profit as administered by white European men and their allies; e.g., women being performatively subservient as virgins and targeted for police violence anyways; i.e., as whores, whereupon the two elide on the same performer less as one or the other and more as both to varying degrees at once: “I can be your angel or devil,” your Athena or Medusa, your Hippolyta, etc. They are often at war with each other in ways we’ve already discussed in this series, and which you should keep in mind, here; re [from Volume One]:  

It bears repeating that [the imaginary] past is sewn with conflict and confusion—not because it is old, but because its ownership is challenged. Its monsters—and the various instructions they supply as gargoyles—are generally at war with themselves, mid-lesson; i.e., psychopraxis, psychosexuality, psychomachia, and Amazonomachia through doubles and paradox amid liminal expression as things to view in ways that remain ambiguous. As my thesis argued, “Doubles invite comparison to encourage unique, troubling perspectives that ‘shake things up’ and break through bourgeois illusions.” Gargoyles, like all monsters, double people and their conflicted sense of humanity but also supply them with various inhuman qualities that likewise exist within dialectical-material opposition. During oppositional praxis, then, they effectively “go to war.” Praxial stances also double through gargoyles, and grow increasingly ambivalent during the maelstrom. It’s a war of optics, but also of perception linked to one’s state of mind as thrown worryingly into question near positions/statements of power and trauma. Said statements seem both concrete and oddly fluid [source]. 

“Gargoyles,” as the quote [and volume] use it, refers to police agents as something to view as a matter of coding the audience through what they see as instructional. The same fear-and-dogma principles are essentially at war with the whore, who is both expected to police their venue while conforming to its heteronormative elements [and tokenized extensions]. They are expected not simply to identify as women, but dirty vermin/chaste, nun-like property that performs readily as either when called upon by a white, cis-het male master as literally or ipso facto owning them. In turn, this unfair position presents nature as monstrous-feminine through devices like the whore or virgin as made to serve profit; i.e., as currently abusing the language of the half-real, chronotopic past to conceal its own atrocities at a systemic level: rape shows and hides itself through cryptonyms.

Psychomachy aside, the virgin performance is coveted and owned, the whore performance chased for quick, dirty thrills that, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, subversively translate to the whore reclaiming their power through the usual modes of Gothic poetic expression; e.g., sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, heavy metal, videogames, penny dreadfuls, etc; i.e., camping “rape” to establish boundaries the usual benefactors of capital cannot cross without outing themselves as harvesting nature as usual: raping it. Historical abuse is always at least adjacent to psychosexual expression, but it [and its exploitation] is not automatic insofar as exhibiting and exploring sexual violence through art is a matter of performance: spousal rape, but also gang rape by mythical rapacious forces; e.g., “zombies” being code for black men, but also non-white agents of any gender or color against straight white women, period. Such things canonize per a particular kind of double standard/oscillating rhetoric: “The monstrous-feminine is always weak and strong as a matter of acting slutty and chaste, ordinary and demonic, undead and pure,” etc.

Keeping this in mind, would it really surprise you to know that such acts are generally loaded with their own internalized elements to embody and overcome? Classically the whore is something to attack and kill as imposturous, alien; i.e., othered by virtue of the presumed maiden’s own shame, guilt, and self-hatred that, per the process of abjection, projects onto a dark, non-Western, oft-Communist reflection. Just as often, though, someone identifies with the whore for precisely those very reasons and must find value in humanizing said struggle by exposing the police element, mid-performance, as a capitalist one; i.e., in token Amazons, whores, what-have-you. Again, they’re a) visually identical, and b) constitute the battle extending to one’s self as torn between policing the whore and playing with whore-like tropes to subvert their usual police violence; i.e., as yet-another-battle on and offstage, inside and outside oneself: fucking monsters to metal during ritualized forms of “rape” whose outcomes always threaten actual abuse in cartoonishly silly forms.

[artist: Zuru Ota]

That is, canon enforces binaries that thrive on fetishization and alienation to serve capital as patriarchal by design; i.e., as something for the dutiful whore to internalize and the rebellious one to camp pursuant to the same zombie-like enormities [cocks, bodies, power imbalances, etc]. The iconoclastic power of the Gothic comes from working inside hellish dialogs of exploitation, which dissolve binaries through cryptonymy as a means of exposing trauma and feeding in reverse; i.e., paralyzing police agents, mid-observation, by presenting the whore’s “rape” as something to camp and haunt with its own actual violation: the original rape and its advertisement as felt within camp’s reclamation of it. The threat display becomes a playful declaration/pun, “Over my dead body!”

That is, the guilty parties are forced to observe a form of undead play they cannot participate in, one that makes rape impossible by virtue of mutual consent as something to illustrate during calculated risk; i.e., not as dogma, but de facto good sex education through the same aesthetics of power and death the Gothic thrives on. If you camp the threat, it loses much of its dogmatic power but retains its paradoxically treat-like ability to please the usual recipients of the threat. Escape becomes a matter of performance that is commonly sought out of consequence, pushing our luck behind Aegis-like buffers to flash our abusers with: in and out of a dark shadow space, akin to Hell as our river Styx to dive into while seeking power of a particular kind. It’s a paradox we feel compelled to return to when triggered by reminders of our own deconstruction—our rape—as having made us undead to begin with.

For performers seeking paradoxical empowerment, then, actual rape often has one of two prominent side effects that color these artistic displays: asexuality or nymphomania. In keeping with psychomachia, both occur with a fair degree of performative overlap; i.e., sex, for those who survive its purely harmful forms, generally exude a frank degree of vulnerability onstage when seeking Hell; i.e., through various acts or bartering mechanisms that use things they are desensitized towards, but especially the rape symbols they camp, onstage. In doing so, the performance becomes simultaneously detached and indulgent as a matter of negotiation and play towards actual empowerment under capital as designed to rob us blind; i.e., as something to liberate ourselves through these performances as educational by virtue of their theatrical qualities challenging canon: establishing and testing boundaries, including the audiences’ own comfort levels!

In turn, these generally boil down to projection onto a performer regarding the usual vulnerable elements simply being exposed at all; e.g., the genitals as a kind of offering to the viewer torn between different feelings about rape as a generally spontaneous and legendary crime the performance flaunts the historical victim’s vulnerability in defiance of. It’s not a fear of the reaper but a teasing of them with the usual harvested goods; i.e., tempting fate.

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

Except “rape,” unlike rape, actually takes practice; you have to learn how to communicate and recognize the boundaries [and Gothic codes] at play that are likewise constantly being [re]established on a daily basis, while also knowing what kind to establish—in short, how to play “rape” out in quotes, using the various symbols of power and death that overcrowd the venue. There’s both a) some general rules you can bring to any play session, and b) a high degree of idiosyncrasy keeping said rules in mind while you build towards the “rape” as echoing actual rape, once-upon-a-time: “hurt, not harm” and “learn what they like.” Both occur by openly communicating and asking questions, mid-playtime; i.e., learning what someone likes/dislikes, ahead of time—their BDSM preferences, hard/soft kinks and limits, etc—which, in turn, usually involve some very straightforward questions when putting them to practice, in bed [or wherever the play session is taking place]: “Is this ok?” “Does this feel good?” “Harder? Faster?” and so on.

It’s extremely important to remember that rape play is a hard kink/form of calculated risk that, like all sex-positive examples, wants to avoid harm while playing with the same-old symbols, games, and histories as interwoven. Achieving this aim takes two basic things: a thorough, well-rounded and experienced sense of BDSM, and a play partner who understands [and respects] all of the above before you even start! Learn what you want and don’t want, then operate within the mechanisms of capital as something to alter by your own example: raising awareness through artistic expression doubling as the actual thing while simultaneously not being harmful as a matter of practical exchange. The half-real nature of calculated risk evokes danger as zombie-like; i.e., sitting between history and invention, but also punishment and pleasure as ultimately falling on the latter side of things, provided the zombie is humanized:

[artist: In Case]

If undeath is a consequence, so is the feeding on unequal power as essential to combating one’s zombie-like state. For survivors of rape, “rape” as a matter of theatrical power exchange—e.g., fucking to Slayer nice and hard, your lover’s cock deep in your ass and their hands wrapped carefully around your throat to seem threatening—simply feels good. This healer’s plight, the paradox of pain, speaks to a complicated truth within capital: trauma shapes our weird appetites while living under abusive systems. In turn, these same systems trigger us; except, to survive and thrive as emotionally and Gothically intelligent people, we must learn to seek oblivion/spifflication as a sensation, not an actuality!

For instance, not everyone wants “true love” by virtue of prescription; some people, having survived abuse, just want sex, cuddles, pain, or whatever else you might call “the simpler things in life.” For me, that’s the Numinous, which I present as palliative to my psychosexual urges, triggers, and maladaptive survival mechanisms resulting from genuine abuse. Like me, others learn what they want as an equally puzzling means of chasing the dragon, then having to learn how to ask for the medicine from the dragon without actually getting choked to death [most cis-het men have a very literal interpretation of domination, squeezing the neck like they’re trying to break it]: to dress up different invitations of “danger” and “rape” as a carefully prepared matter of calculated risk that many virgins to trauma won’t understand, thus cannot be trusted to execute safely.

Except, the privileged must learn if we are to heal as a society from rape; i.e., by subverting capital and its usual instructors thereof! Volume One’s “Healing from Rape” establishes the basic idea; re: through Cuwu and I learning about rape as something to relate to each other from opposite ends of, thus heal from according to my listening to them about rape appearing in media indicative of the abuse they suffered. As something to dance with, trauma becomes a demonstration in hindsight; i.e., an undead, uncanny ability to summon and dismiss, mid-contest, by virtue of one’s appearance sexily beckoning the destroyer out of the past, to then reify your supremacy as stronger having survived it before. You chuck that fucker into the stratosphere, looking graceful and delicate as you do, but also like Cuwu did: “Strong, strong, strong!”

[artist: Hamza Touijri]

For one, such implements aren’t so odd. As I write in Volume One; re: 

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. […] Simply put, the Gothic is where we retreat to interrogate our trauma (and relative guilt, desire, anxiety and other repressed emotions) in relation to other survivors; i.e., to trauma-bond through the usual displays of music, violence and sex [source]. 

Whatever the form or paradox, then, one’s lived experiences commonly reify inside Gothic media as rather oxymoronic. Without a pedagogy of the oppressed poetically tailored to help us find similarity amid difference, though, this can feel incredibly alienating for both parties: one damaged to push-pull towards and from echoes of said damage, the other suitably concerned, guilty and confused for having not living through those kinds of events the same way.

For example, when relating to Cuwu, I thought I hadn’t been raped because it wasn’t sexual [from Volume One] like their abuse was:

While I have been beaten and mentally tortured, for example, I have never been sexually raped […]  However, I know many workers who have been raped. Listening to them has helped radically change my systemically privileged views, but also reflect on my own lived trauma and complex emotional abuse compared to theirs [ibid.].  

My thoughts on that have changed, insofar as I currently feel like I was raped differently than Cuwu—emotionally versus sexually. But we were still a part of the same conversation; i.e., one had between us about such stories as things to relate to and perform ourselves:

After the film was over, we talked about it from Cuwu’s point of view as someone I related to in both sexual and asexual ways. Doing so frankly opened my eyes to what, for them, was an everyday experience: living with the trauma and threat of rape as something for you and others to behold, often as voyeurs, but also as BDSM practitioners fetishizing our own survived abuse in psychosexual, Gothic forms. Many of the fantasies that Cuwu and I played out reflected the sorts of unspoken abuses generally granted some kind of voice in Gothic fictions. The choking hand is, at its most basic level, meant to relieve stress from having seen something stressful that reminds you of an abuser who won’t follow your commands [ibid.].

To that, the idea of any long-lasting friendship is stability. To achieve that as a matter of good praxis, abuse victims need to learn how to acknowledge each other’s survival as different according to power affecting us differently. Indeed, it was Cuwu’s inability to ultimately respect my boundaries and survival story that led to our friendship breaking apart like it did; they didn’t heed my instructions, falling victim to their own condition as aping Maynard James Keenan’s “Stinkfist” [1996] chorus: 

Just not enough, I need more
Nothing seems to satisfy
I said, I don’t want it, I just need it
To breathe, to feel, to know I’m alive [source: Genius]. 

A certain amount of regressive vanity is required to control a scenario as matter of submissive roleplay. In Cuwu’s case, their own survival mechanism was maladaptive to predatory extremes; i.e., it operated through being seen by someone they could control through their bodily displays: controlling the entire room through their vanity as borderline, their personality disorder coming to life through their fractured, undead sense of self. This ceaseless, draconian vampirism started through our disagreements spilling into our play time, our conversations, and ultimately our time apart.

[artist: Cuwu]

All of these borderline attractions to destructive, psychosexual power and back-and-forth arguments between actors/players probably seem rather odd to the uninitiated. In truth, it only really makes sense if you’ve been there yourself, touched by death as something to spend the rest of your life camping to best strike that precarious balance [from Volume Two, part one]:

The greatest irony of Jadis harming me […] 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]. 

From Jadis to Cuwu to myself, the undead generally feed as a matter of seeking an old trauma to fill themselves out with, undoing the hollowed-out shell after their initial wounding.

Addictive and undead paradoxes aside, there’s always something that somebody wants, for which others can provide that as a matter of exchange that cannot, unto itself, be monopolized. Such barter occurs through a matter of play that is, to some degree, coded; i.e., by virtue of one euphemism [or physical object] swapped in and out for whatever you can think of: cupcakes for popcorn, or “cupcakes” for “popcorn.” It’s less about avoiding the playing of games altogether and more about recognizing who you’re playing with, how and where; i.e., determining intent through a matter of good play/acting versus bad play/acting through ludo-Gothic BDSM while establishing fresh boundaries to increase success as a matter of preventing rape [risk reduction]: the thrill of the danger haunting the venue without causing the harm normally associated with it.

[artist: Cuwu] 

This paradox occurs within a given venue whose rules during interpersonal exchange [versus, say, a bar or dance club] are not writ in stone to nearly the same extent, but for which the players are contributing to something larger [a proletarian Superstructure] that is challenged by state dictates and operatives! From there, you establish trust and work towards the moment at hand, which serves another important function: challenging the ways in which power is normally presented and performed in canonical media [a deliberate lack of clear boundaries or consent]. Putting “rape” in quotes is camping its normal performances as a matter of acting and actually committing said behaviors; i.e., in a half-real sense, on and offstage as a liminal activity that graduates to more advanced forms. Rape can happen anywhere; it can likewise be camped as such, provided people are taught how.

The Gothic classically has a historical element to its fabrications marrying fact with fiction, as well as the abject and obscene to the ordinary by what are effectively weird art nerds. Such education, then, stems from recreations of the imaginary past as “rapacious”; e.g., Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” constituting a curious British trend at the time: possessing but also replicating said urns to convey a particular message to interpret the past from a modern perspective romanticizing the ancient past in, at times, highly inventive ways[5]; i.e., the draw of fatal power as ultimately displaced, far-off and imaginary, thus paradoxically safe per a calculated risk as something to make sex-positive through iconoclastic interpretations, mid-execution. Whether it’s whorish Medusas, Amazons, daddy’s little girl, or some combination of these things, systemic trauma leads to monstrous-feminine that canon will always try to police/rape; and camp, to reclaim.

Say what you will about the undead’s fractured, complex emotions; it’s less complicated from a dialectical-material standpoint and more through how the state complicates our attempts to humanize ourselves through “rape” fantasies. The reoccurring issue is, canonical stories generally rely on “confidence” as a matter of men [and token agents] acting first, “making a move” based on what amounts to telepathy and dogma through Man Box entitlement; i.e., the kind that treats sex like a heteronormative reward that serves profit: relations—be they sex and/or love—presenting as “taking” and always more, more, more!

In short, white cis-het men are owed sex as a matter of fact; they chase whores and marry Madonnas, but likewise carry these trends out in monomythic refrains that parallel domestic and foreign abuse as a means of harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine: per all the usual police violence internalized/externalized as what I have previously called “prison sex” mentality. While Cuwu became predatory as a submissive agent, dominant agents—generally men and tokenized Man Box proponents—generally become police agents through the same system; e.g., TERFs, but also media that seeks control in ways that discourage the kind of introspection I mentioned as previously occurring between Cuwu and I. Either shows how media and people share the same spaces. Keeping that in mind, we can go easily enough from Cuwu’s controlling the room, to something quaint and seemingly innocent as the formulaic vigilantism in ’90s kids cartoons; i.e., anything that can be consumed, thus absorbed and passed along.

For instance, despite a random show like Swat Kats [1994] having admittedly awesome music[6] to rock out to well past its show date, the production yields the same underlying problem as TMNT and other neoliberal media we’ve already examined: a complicit cryptonymy per open-secret police identities. Through such devices, police agents historically project their insecurities onto their victims as a matter of dogma; i.e., are expected to police their wives and anything else that qualifies as property from/of nature for them to litigate by force: raping nature as something “wild” to tame. Except, its subsequent rape, harvesting and undeath all become, like Cuwu, a kind walking contradiction present in both parties: a little zombie/dark mother to befriend by camping the whole ordeal as well as we both could!

[artist: Cuwu] 

To that, camp’s surreal nature remains haunted by mighty ghosts that come alive through us and our games’ semi-secret identities yielding a dominator flavor to their visual code: the monstrous-feminine class of destroyer as a theatrical device loaded with all the usual historicized fetishes and clichés made for or against the state on different registers. Due to their own age and damage, Cuwu couldn’t handle it, flying apart at the seams [the photo is strictly period blood, mind you]: preying on me while offering themselves up behind closed doors, per an escalating decay of our usual bedroom dialogs.

By comparison, Harmony can take on these kinds of fantasies, treating them as fun and healing for both of us in a very toy-like fashion:

 

[artist: Harmony Corrupted] 

As she demonstrates, it’s all a matter of stability as something to work on; i.e., through the games we play together contributing towards this book: healing from rape through an informed process. By comparison, hawks/police agents are often victims of the state who, radicalized to its service, will take any theoretical or cosmetic aspect to praxis, synthesis and aesthetics they then us to embody the state’s trifectas and monopolies.

In regards to them, there’s no room for anything else—the monstrous-feminine at large—to negotiate, unless these boundaries [and associate trust] are tested and ultimately reestablished by the likes of myself, Harmony and, yes, Cuwu; i.e., as a messy and complicated means of confronting the usual arbiters of sex, terror and force: as something to overcome by humanizing their usual victims on the same stages of lost childhood. So many weirdos want to regress to childhood as a means of raping others for real [e.g., “when men were men and women cis-gendered and submissive“]; we want to camp it to expose such nonsense, dissecting the past as, like the Creature by Shelley was, kept alive for its beauty amid pain. Like a rainbow in the sky, it touches us before it fades, staying with us in ways that we never want to end: “In your sleep, I hear you say, ‘Don’t let the morning take him'” [Judas Priest’s “Before the Dawn,” 1979]. Moreover, it becomes a very hellish way to see the world:

To that, Cuwu and I knew each other long enough to become familiar with what the other liked and enjoyed, and communicated constantly in terms of these things whenever we played. The same now goes for Harmony and me, but as something more mature and stable, less spiraling and draining of me [quite the opposite, in fact]. All of it goes into the book, including our own instances of consent-non-consent for your consideration—as a matter of pride, something we want to show off so you can learn by our example. It should become second-nature first in bed, and then on a cultural level that transforms the societal treatment of such things; i.e., as a constant relationship between real life and media as half-real, but also plastic:

 

[artists: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard]

In short, no matter how massive a hyperobject like Capitalism seems, it can be transformed through smaller, simpler abstractions of itself and its abuse. Liberation is gained through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a showcase thereof: escaping inside the places that normally imprison us to receive/deliver unironic harm like zombies. The showcase is the apocalypse and we are the zombies, our “violent” performance adjacent to real-world harm in the same kinds of exploitative spaces and aesthetics. It’s nice meeting someone with baggage who knows how to work through that with you to synthesize catharsis as a means of good praxis, not unironically dominating the Madonna or the whore [as survival sex work forces the monstrous-feminine to be]. It’s often absurd, silly and, yes, fun: a stress button to push not once, but over and over!

To that, Harmony is an excellent friend and comrade, and I love surrendering my power to them, but likewise love being the dutiful, loving service top who can ravish them or even—with their trust and permission—”rape” them per all the usual cryptonymies, buffers and codes we use to get our point across [with soothing pep talks often coming into play to coax someone into coming (the little death) when they’re close and trying to cum[7]; e.g., “You’re working so hard! Do you need to come? Yeah, that’s it… Come for me, baby… Just let it all out for me… Good girl…”]! This includes imperatives like “rape me” as something to follow through in ways that don’t cause harm—quite the opposite, actually! More to the point, it’s a service that not only goes both ways, but gives back to those normally without; i.e., through evocations of the dead per our orgasms, vaso vagal responses, and disassociative performances having an element of truth to them[8], but also a performative, intersecting history that gleefully invokes the devil as someone to summon in jest while earnestly exposing taboo things; e.g., Nicolo Paganini famously rolling his eyes back into his skull[9] to evoke elements of rapture, of possession, by a devilish agent aping a Godly force that normally prohibits power and knowledge exchange: showing off.

Such “dumb suppers” actually tend to be rather loud; i.e., involve us freezing on command through the contest of “rape” as camp, only to give back to the workers of the world: showing them how to become better stewards of nature and ourselves in our own exquisite “torture” dungeons. It’s not so different than playing a fighting game and quoting the vice character domming you or vice versa; e.g., Shang Tsung saying “Your soul is mine!” from Mortal Kombat or any such recreation of what really is a very old theatre trope: the baddie, the vampire, the Destroyer as a kind of “necro dom” [daddy or otherwise]. It’s an act, a paradoxical form of comfort [and to which Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is actually rather sleek and soft spoken compared to his deep-throated menace, onscreen[10]]: the sort you love to hate, but also camp.

 

[source: r/MortalKombat] 

We pick up these tricks from all over the place. Childhood aside, I actually picked the basic idea up from school and Jadis, who was drawn to my weirdness and they mine; i.e., as a matter of lived trauma/stolen childhood something we both returned to in popular media to reclaim our stolen power from; re: Mortal Kombat as something we both liked, including the recursive, endlessly self-referential memes breaking the fourth wall. It’s essentially Matthew Lewis’ bad echo as camping rape, murder and undead violence; i.e., as a kind of memento mori that stretches backwards and forwards to be used for different aims [we fags love memes].

More to the point, it was something we could do together whenever we wanted; e.g., “murder dick” [during period sex] and “war bride scenarios” [when Jadis was domming me and I submitting to them: “I’m keeping this one!”]. Jadis, of course, was too damaged to not avoid abusing me, favoring the kind of unequal, coercive BDSM that inspired me to invent something better based on older works [more on that in just a moment]. But lucky me, I escaped and went on to pass a healthier message along through future recreation—with Cuwu and then Harmony!

The paradox of rape is the desire to feel safe while “in danger.” It might seem corrupted and jumbled from passage to passage, then, except the corruption is the data. Capital makes us reliably feel out of control, which we must play with to regain control through intimations not just of our abuse, but older forms that fascinate us; i.e., the means, materials and methods of placing “rape” in quotes through ludo-Gothic BDSM as needing some element of vice to camp. It’s often rather silly onstage and off [re: Mortal Kombat, above].

However, it’s also incredibly hot when you get the balance right, and important, too, insofar as capital marks us for trauma; i.e., as zombies looking to recreate our own abuse in non-harmful forms! In short, we seek to feed to sate our odd appetites without harming anyone [versus police violence/DARVO arguments tied to these same spaces as “non-lethal,” but in truth designed to disperse and control us by any means necessary to achieve false power and rebellion; i.e., weird canonical nerds breaking their toys but also hogging them through false preaching and penitence—a staunch refusal to change versus trying to despite past sins]. More to the point, this becomes a vital means of altering the sexist paradigm under capital, not predatorily enforcing the monomyth [ordinary people in a fantastic place] as it presently exists by abjecting the ghost of the counterfeit as it so commonly manifests: a zombie, an undead sex doll, a slave—a victim!)

Despite the above examples’ consensual nature, I strongly suspect they and their subject matter are taboo (from a bourgeois standpoint) because they lead to liberation in sex-positive forms that challenge profit; i.e., how not to rape people by “raping” them during rememory. When rape is impossible, the sub has the upper hand, but no one wants to be a doormat (as we’ll see with me and Jadis, in the next subchapter); it helps if the dom is good at playing with “dolls” (dressing them up or hosing them down, below). This gives us plenty of room to play on/toy with the zombie-like trauma present within us—sometimes quite literally!

For example, Cuwu and I would sometimes do consent-non-consent through “somno,” aka sleep sex, as a kind of zombie-like exchange (the body rather limp and doll-like when asleep):

(exhibit 37b1b: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard after a consent-non-consent “somno” ritual. Our relationship, though brief, yielded some good examples of what I now call ludo-Gothic BDSM. For added context, these before-and-after photos of Cuwu and I show them, asleep, having taken sleeping medication so I could fuck them while they slept. They were really into the idea—liked being my little doll/cumdump! They wanted quite vocally to be visited in the night and ravished [to which I obliged while thinking of Eddie Money’s Dracula spoof, “I Think I’m in Love!” 1982].

Death, as it generally is in the Gothic since Lewis and Radcliffe, wasn’t an ending of anything at all, but a swelling of paradoxical life among the deathly imagery as undead, erotic, intensely seeking to give and deliver what is normally lacking in our lives onstage, and generally to [white, middle-class] women as haunted by trauma; i.e.,  as something for them to play with to escape abuse: graveyard sex. Or as Gladys Hall writes in “The Feminine Love of Horror” [1931]:

LUGOSI sat in a deep chair in my library. (One does not go to his house!) A single light burned above him, making his pallid face more pallid, obliterating all but the red lights burning ceaselessly in his too-pale blue eyes. The windows were opened and there came the mournful sound of the wind in the tall boughs of the eucalyptus…Was it only the wind playing in the boughs of the trees…or was it…? No answer. No answer. Better not ask. His voice came, remote and far away, dying down, rising to a penetrating. 

He said, “When I was playing Dracula on the stage, my audiences were women. Women. There were men, too. Escorts the women had brought with them. For reasons only their dark subconscious knew. In order to establish a subtle sex intimacy. Contact. In order to cling and to feel the sensuous thrill of protection. Men did not come of their own volition. Women did. Came – and knew an ecstasy dragged from the depths of unspeakable things. Came – and then came back again. And again” (Was there gloating in his voice? Or was it my chilled imagination playing me tricks, feverish and fantastical?).

“Women wrote me letters. Ah, what letters women wrote me! Young girls, women from seventeen to thirty. Letters of a horrible hunger. Asking me if I cared only for maiden’s blood. Asking me if I had done the play because I was in reality that sort of Thing. And through these letters, crouched in terms of shuddering, transparent fear, there ran the hideous note of – hope. They hoped that I was Dracula. They hoped that my love was the love of Dracula. They gloated over the Thing they dared not understand. It gave them something as potent as poison, as separate from their lives as death is separate from life. 

“It was the embrace of Death their subconscious was yearning for. Death, the final, triumphant lover. It made me know that the women of America are unsatisfied, famished, craving sensation, even though it be the sensation of death draining the red blood of life. Women gloat over Death. Avidly. Morbidly. They will spend hours discussing the details of death. Over and over again. Wives will spend hours of frightful joy, telling of their husbands’ or their lovers’ last words. They will describe with macabre minutiae the death agonies, the death rattle, the awful ceremony of the mortician, the rites of the cemetery. Have you ever watched a woman talking about death? DON’T. It is women who crowd cemeteries, using anniversaries, the veil of sentiment, the legitimacy of grief. It is women who crouch over graves, loving them, covering them with flowers and tears. Women feed the cemeteries. Without women, the shattered vases that were our bodies would be reduced to decent ash and the ghoulish appetites of the world would be apart of folklore [source: Vampire Over London: September 11th, 2011]. 

Simply put, vampires slay because they go beyond the nuclear model as something to suggest; i.e., in death-like states of playful, lucid sleep that have a sacred boundary that many will happily enter to violate their martial vows: a graveyard. Rather than recoil from the love that dare not speak its name, they practice it as a matter of good praxis and fun; e.g., the Count shows up and the lady is lying in wait—to chomp on him, Carmilla-style, as much as the other way around:

As Eddie Money [above] shows us, while such things were both incredibly cliché by the time Lugosi played the Count, they certainly were afterwards; and all the same they collectively account for an evolution of genderqueer discourse that, parallel to queer sexuality as a criminal condition, had been given a new evolving voice; i.e., through the sorts of horrors middle-class ladies were starting to realize were better at pleasing them than their boring [and abusive] state-sanctioned grooms! Such things often were/are predatory in ways that generally leach off the queer as objectified by said women, but it’s not always the case.

 

[artist: Zuru Ota]

Just as often, “danger” excites these women relative to what they’re told is dangerous but isn’t. Their pussies get wet [and their emotions high, their fangs coming out] because they know they can’t get hurt, thus have some sense of control in camping things the way that Gothicists generally do: hyphenating sex [especially the orgasm and vasovagal response] and camping harm through the theatrical language of food, war and death [there’s also an element of graveyard culture and paid mourners/troubadours romancing loss, but I digress]; i.e., “Take me, I’m yours!” Translation: “Stake this fat ass, stab that pussy! Fuck me like you mean it! Yes, yes, yes!!!” [sex, when done right, looks/sounds like your recipient is dying—especially female, but also prostate orgasms].

[artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu]

Like a graveyard’s tombstones, these provide a memento mori to regard as keepsake; e.g., Cuwu repeatedly asking me for proof of such things—hence the photos of their doll-like, seemingly lifeless body evoking historically compromising positions, which we enacted in future play sessions where they were more awake[11]; i.e., seemingly harmful but in truth safely negotiated as a means of sexual healing and good, naughty fun. However, while such puzzles—of it being difficult to illustrate mutual consent through similar photos—became the premise for Sex Positivity as it currently exists, Cuwu sadly went on to drain me not just of my cum, but my wits: from them being an abusive sub, a “phallic woman” but with GNC elements [from their being trans]. But, like Eddie and the lady from the music video, I still learned a valuable lesson from their shitty treatment of me: that knowledge—like the “blood” in John Donne’s 1633 “Flea” poem—is passed along through the same straws and cups; i.e., through literal fluid, but also a fluid-like, playful exchange as patently undead and hungry for, as Cuwu would put it, “more, more, more!”

[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

Simply put, ludo-Gothic BDSM could not exist without Cuwu’s harming of me, but also the sheer fun we had mixed up in all that Gothic sublimity-made-flesh: wanting to fuck, plain and simple. A little vampy fae cloaked in red and pink, Cuwu was someone with many different sides to them, as far as that went. I want to show some of those here—not out of spite, but as a matter of respect and love; i.e., what they helped contribute towards, in the end, as a product of said feelings, thoughts, and praxis as playing with fire, Prometheus-style. This exhibit’s for you, Cuwu!)

I could continue the exhibit and want to, but we must press on. Hopefully I’ve at least conveyed that trauma is both the lighting that strikes you dead, and the thunder that charges your emotions and scrambles your brains. Once it visits you, you never really forget it; you become undead. As such, it leaves a tremendous scar but also a memory you’ll to want to revisit under elements of control that evoke its power as felt, but ultimately harmless; i.e., the return of the castle space to subvert its seasonal tortures: capital’s historical-material zombies and apocalypses. “Rape” becomes the opposite of rape and profit, then; i.e., as something to challenge Capitalist Realism’s usual illusions, albeit with theatrical tensions informed by the latter to grant the former its bizarre undead healing properties: regeneration by sluttily eating what the zombie can’t digest and the vampire always needs more of.

 (artist: Cuwu)

Playing with rape by camping changes how you think, thus see the world as an illusory space that workers can liberate themselves with. To that, old Plato had it wrong: there’s no leaving the cave, “no outside” (as Derrida would put it); there is only subverting its canonical implementations through rape play.

As a matter of rape fantasy being half-real, “rape” becomes incredibly transformative and fun, appreciating humanized instances of such language reclaimed from their rapacious canonical usage (which commercializes such suffering into merchandise to buy during a gold-rush-style FOMO grift): a veteran cutie’s strong ceiling/zombie-like tolerance for pleasurable pain[12] amid nerve-wracking conditions made into theatrical “peril” (combined with the architecture of their body/genitals—their floor, roof, wall, etc); i.e., to mess with their various prey to survive bad-faith parties and enrich good-faith parties through the same appetites, the same thirst.

“Captured,” then, such a being becomes suitably untouchable, entering a playful, sarcastic-yet-endearing state of devilish grace that siphons power out of traditional disempowering scenarios (of being shown who the boss is). It’s not a put-down, but a position of power reclaiming itself as such—by summoning the succubus, the slut, the destroyer as monstrous-feminine, motherly and secure in her liberatory goals. Medusa might be the undead whore, the sex demon, but she’s nobody’s bitch: stacked, loud, and not to be fucked with.

(artist: Amber Mimsy)

This might sound like the usual topos of power of women, except its Gothic-Communist, thus GNC. Camped for maximum effect/expressiveness, these allow for the zombie’s continued survival as a subversive, playful means of winking at the audience, mid-“rape”; i.e., as potentially having abusers in it to provoke through camp that leads to systemic change by exposing them and raising effective boundaries during ludo-Gothic BDSM: “I’m totally being raped right now!” Such cryptonymy is a powerful revolutionary device, insofar as it puts capital’s usual watchdogs in a precarious position where their brute, dumb force and repulsive mindset towards the monstrous-feminine aren’t to their usual advantage.

Like all monsters, then, zombies are made during their formative years as apocalyptic, revealing future abuse as built on past forms of theatre home to such things (quotes or not). While homemaking trauma through more skillful rape play (thus better communication) is the idea, such subversive, cryptonymic reclamations—of so-called “hysteria” killing our darlings by camping them with the same stigmatic, at-times-anecdotal symbols and taboo theatrical devices—can still be very intense, when challenging profit: silly and serious as sex and bodily functions normally are (farts, ejaculations, blurted dirty talk, zombie-like O faces, etc), but especially Gothic castle-like spaces and bodies’ “rape” scenarios extending into life as something to bravely face: our past as something to return to during rememory without the rose-tinted glasses of youth (“There is no place like home!”), nor its perceived “safety” or compelled binaries; e.g., the perils of a woman (especially a young woman) without a man in a man’s world extending to the monstrous-feminine subverting that myth for the monster’s benefit: “A man? Who needs one of those? Gimme the castle!”

From there, we might actively and ironically play with those decayed exaggerated spaces and beings in an involved, emergent, empathetic (culturally appreciative) sense; i.e., to take chances and have adventures in hauntological spaces of death that respect the victims of past police abuse while preventing future ones, mid-enjoyment: a tomb, an arena, and/or bedroom, but also body parts that have a certain size and shape endemic to such scenarios, etc!

(artist: Sakimi Chan)

As we’ll very quickly see, camping “predation” requires putting it in quotes that aren’t automatic—indeed, must be revisited from a time when they weren’t present; re: Jadis raping me versus Harmony and I “raping” each other to help me find peace while now reexploring Jadis’ hellish curse (a kind of threat looming over my head; i.e., sometimes a person-like castle or vice versa)! Catharsis generally stems from returns to trauma, which we’re not immune to. So please remember your safewords and aftercare when ridiculing rape mid-calculated-risk, lovelies! The rememory of dreams are one thing. But also, actual dolls can express “murder” and dismemberment far more literally as memento-mori than humans can (and profit will defend itself by tearing you apart, Tommy-Wiseau-style)!

We’ll explore all of this even more through our undead, toy-like bodies (and body-like toys), next! Onto Jadis, or “Bad Dreams, part two: Transforming Our Zombie Selves (opening and part zero)“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] He once loosed an arrow from my brother’s second-story window and pinned a squirrel to the ground; my brother stomped it to death, and I sadly buried it in the garden. Men teach men to kill animals not for food, but for sport, for profit, for domination—for shows of force against other humans or beings otherwise deserving of humane treatment by humans suddenly deprived of it.

[2] The argument for younger brides is a fascist regression that curiously didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s day (fascism is Capitalism in decay, not feudalism). As J. Karl Franson writes in “‘Too soon marr’d’: Juliet’s Age as Symbol in Romeo and Juliet,” (1996):

William Shakespeare made references to Juliet’s young age in Romeo and Juliet to show that love between boys and girls and early marriage can be treacherous. Shakespeare emphasizes the numbers 13 and 14 in several parts of the play. Romeo refers to Juliet Capulet’s name 14 times in the play, with major events occurring every 14 hours. Juliet’s age is turned into a vehicle that moves the play through its scenes toward the tragic ending. Shakespeare himself was influenced by an unhappy marriage at age 18 (source).

Such stories become nostalgic unto themselves, but contain hidden lessons that speak to our own systemic abuse; i.e., shown and hidden by such playwrights carried and performed into the present.

[3] I.e., the BBC trope, but also the pent-up, animalistic coupling of this with that to find harmony amid forbidden interracial (re)unions healing from Big Rape by putting “rape” in quotes as only Gothic theatre can!

[4] The Quixotic sentiment certainly matters; i.e., convincing the audience that they are somehow as incredible, righteous and invincible as their in-text heroic counterparts, but also paradoxically threatened by an invincible enemy that can only be killed by virtue of their own side of the same dogmatic rubric. It’s less that it’s all bullshit, and more that said bullshit serves a particular purpose: profit, thus genocide.

[5] As Michael Vickers writes in “Value and Simplicity: Eighteenth-Century Taste and the Study of Greek Vases” (1987),

There are two themes which run through the scholarly literature relating to Greek painted pottery over the past two hundred years or more: (1) the view that such pottery was an especially valuable commodity in antiquity, and (2) the idea that pots with simple decoration are somehow more worthy than those which are ornate. The fact that most scholars in the field of classical archaeology today take these ideas for granted should not obscure the reality that they are concepts of relatively recent date and that they have little to do with the values or aesthetic judgments of antiquity (source).

The same idea applies to any concept of “ancient” revisited in modern times, constituting an interpretive but also poetic argument towards the past as either a spurious means of consolidating power towards the usual in-groups and/or delivering the means of policing this power against the usual out-groups; i.e., relaying power through the question of aesthetics as having a quaint, dusty approach to such things dipping in and out of fiction; e.g., Ridley Scott’s “vases” from Prometheus (2012) and Amazonian elements, in overt, 1970s Gothic fiction with a historical element to its inventions, but also outside of such British theatrics: a similar degree of playfulness when academics whitewash Roman marble personas

“Imagine you’ve got an intact lower body of a nude male statue lying there on the depot floor, covered in dust,” Abbe said. “You look at it up close, and you realize the whole thing is covered in bits of gold leaf. Oh, my God! The visual appearance of these things was just totally different from what I’d seen in the standard textbooks—which had only black-and-white plates, in any case.” For Abbe, who is now a professor of ancient art at the University of Georgia, the idea that the ancients disdained bright color “is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art.” It is, he said, “a lie we all hold dear” (source: Margaret Talbot’s “The Myth of Whiteness in classical sculpture,” 2018).

to subsequently view the Roman empire as somehow homogenous and entirely of a single, white presentation useful to settler-colonial projects (and rape) now.

Consider similar arguments, then, relative to Amazonomachia as an ancient artform with heavily modernized interpretations:

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).

Arguments about the “ancient” world are often false or inventive to serve modern power structures. Unto them and their disparate, jumbled hauntologies, then, there is a total lack of constancy save for European, Cartesian supremacy and its decay (fascism) raping the monstrous-feminine in classically monstrous forms; i.e., police violence against the usual victims in hauntological language serving porfit. As we shall continue to see throughout this volume, this fragmentation and follow-through also applies hauntologically to zombies, vampires and other undead, as well as demons, the natural world and intersections of all of these modular components to make the same basic, us-versus-them arguments during the dialectic of the alien.

[6] That being said, 331Erock’s “SWAT Kats Meets Metal” (2024) is the usual marriage of great music to regressive policies. In this case, his invocation of said policies were originally employed during the Clinton administration by weaponizing the usual blue-collar cops-in-disguise; i.e., to serve the state during neoliberal decay following the 1980s, stringing such scapegoats up like an abject piñata, then shooting them Godzilla-style with militarized cop gear (except, in this case, they appear to win): a literal fighter jet (source: Warner Bros. Classics’ “Intro | SWAT Kats: Radical Squadron | Warner Archive,” 2015) conducting settler colonialism at home as, yet again, something to regress into and grow up with. Such fatal nostalgia is always meant to cozen the kids up to undercover cops presenting as lower-class vigilantes, thus acclimate these audiences to military urbanism when foreign policy becomes domestic policy not once, but again and again under false pretenses, flags, pasts and mythologies that, however imaginary they are, still serve a very real purpose: settler colonialism, thus profit, through genocide.

Faced with such hauntological charm offensives, Sarkeesian’s adage remains vital. For example, I always liked Kats, but readily acknowledge how problematic it all feels in hindsight; i.e., the tendency for American audiences to want regress into childhood fantasy’s as already-decayed (the canceled future)—all to fight (thus abject) cartoon enemies standing in for genocide anxiety felt at home: empire in decay, the proverbial enemy at the gates! The war horn/alarm becomes a fascist lullaby to win future generations to a bellicose nursery preparing them for war felt across different registers; i.e., from children’s cartoons, but also stories like the Bible; e.g., Israel and the book of Joshua as a matter of grim instruction paralleled by Pax Americana like Kats: kill your enemies as cartoon-like zombies in function, not just appearance (GDF’s “Debunking the State of Israel,” 2024)!

[7] Zeuhl would enter an almost fugue-like state when rubbing their clit super-fast, to which me whispering encouragement to them would send them spiraling into an orgasm (the same idea would happen in reverse, Zeuhl gently telling me, “You can fuck me as hard as you want!” when I was close [and sweating like a pig from topping their fat pussy]. It always did the trick).

[8] The fronting of an oblivious shell to protect the mind from rape, but also to help those, post-rape, find closure the only way one generally can: by living with trauma as something to play with and recontextualize through elements of control that give the victim power. For our purposes, this happens while also discouraging power abuse, thus rape, per ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as something that makes us feel whole through catharsis during a palliative Numinous, thus a Communist one that leads to post-scarcity by humanizing the very mechanisms that normally lead to genocide; e.g., Harmony makes me feel whole in ways that address my trauma have emptied me, us playing together filling that void with bad campy echoes of trauma: “rape.”

[9] As Georg Predota writes in, “At the Center of the Music Universe” (2017):

Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) almost single-handedly established a new brand of performing musician, the touring virtuoso. In a brilliant strategy of self-promotion, he even circulated the rumor that he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his uncanny technical abilities. Contemporary eyewitnesses report that during performance “his eyes would roll into the back of his head while playing, revealing the whites. He played so intensely that women would faint and men would break out weeping” (source).

Such rumor-like tall tales continue into the present, whispering of career musicians who sold their souls to get good at their instruments, thus get all manner of shiny rewards; e.g., Crossroads‘ Steve Vai getting the girls, or Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” (1979) offering up a fiddle of solid gold.

[10] From “Mortal Kombat: The Movie – A Journey Behind The Scenes” (timestamp: 3:41; 1995).

[11] Even during the consent-non-consent sleep sessions, the medication generally wasn’t strong enough to fully knock them out. Sometimes, as I fucked them, Cuwu would smile in their sleep, their rather large vampire mouth more than a little knowing as to what was about to befall them.

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

[12] E.g., the vasovagal response, sub drop and frankly just really good orgasms and full-body workouts, mid-coitus. Sex should rock your world, making you feel temporarily dead to your surroundings; i.e., as a matter of being allowed to lose control and let down your guard (versus the usual hypervigilance of rape victims).