Persephone's (Gothic) Insights

I'm starting to roll out the 2025 blog-style book promotion for Volume Three, "All the World." To it, I wanted to specifically share the portion here that I wrote thanking Harmony Corrupted for their contributions and assistance over 2024 and 2025! Copied from the original NSFW post , wherein I swapped out the images for tamer variants! With Harmony's Help: Addressing Volume Three's Grand Emptiness and Ambitions through a Good Friend (feat. Harmony Corrupted) 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 ( source ). —Jerrold Hogle, "The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic" (1994) This is a 2025 addendum briefly (two pages) considers Volume Three has having big ideas it could never explore fully but which I was abl...

 This interview is for "Hailing Hellions," a Q&A series where I interview sex workers (or ex-sex workers) who have modeled for me and my  Sex Positivity*  book project. Today's guest is Rhyna Targaryen! This is the SFW version;  click here  for the SFW-version interview compendium! *The longer title being  Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Liberating Sex Work under Capitalism through Iconoclastic Art  (2023). Part of an overarching movement that connects sex positivity to what I call "Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism,"  Sex Positivity  essentially provides a hybrid; i.e., one established between academic (Gothic, queer, game and Marxist) theories, and wherein  applied  theory towards  universal  liberation is achieved by challenging Capitalist Realism (the inability to imagine a world beyond Capitalism) at a grassroots level. To it, Gothic Communism specifically occurs through direct mutual worker ...

I decided to make a little page decided to my Tolkien scholarship. It's not as extensive as my Metroidvania work or work on ludo-Gothic BDSM, but I thought it's still worth having all the same.  Note: This version is copied directly from my website version ; the two are identical. The rest of this post is the copy/paste. —Perse Persephone van der Waard is a leading expert on Metroidvania ; re: from her master's, postgrad material, and PhD* in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM . This page specifically highlights her work on Tolkien (the rest of Persephone's portfolio can be found on her 18+ website's About the Author page ). *Re: Volume Zero of her Sex Positivity series, the latter of which which you can read about on its one-page promo ; the former has its own book promotion, " The Total Codex ." Persephone's Tolkien Jargon Here is the neo-jargon Persephone has written that focuses specifically on Tolkien (refer to " Paratextual Documents ...

This interview is for "Hailing Hellions," a Q&A series where I interview sex workers (or ex-sex workers) who have modeled for me and my  Sex Positivity*  book project. Today's guest is Tate (Cum Baby 98)! This is the SFW version;  click here  for the SFW-version interview compendium! *The longer title being  Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Liberating Sex Work under Capitalism through Iconoclastic Art  (2023). Part of an overarching movement that connects sex positivity to what I call "Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism,"  Sex Positivity  essentially provides a hybrid; i.e., one established between academic (Gothic, queer, game and Marxist) theories, and wherein  applied  theory towards  universal  liberation is achieved by challenging Capitalist Realism (the inability to imagine a world beyond Capitalism) at a grassroots level. To it, Gothic Communism specifically occurs through direct mutual worker act...