This follow-up covers the direct and touching reply from Heavy Metal Philosophy aka Jon Barbas; i.e., regarding my "Is Metal Racist? Yes, It Is" essay (2025) originally critiquing his "Deep South Asian Metalhead" and Andrew Lee's "How Heavy Metal Upholds White Supremacy" (2025) videos, respectively. It provides Jon's response to mine, then supplies my replies between his own. Also, while I am an instructor and invigilator of forbidden knowledge—and some of these answers will be rather long and spicy—this response remains relatively shorter than the original essay. It was written as a classic essay, therefore is entirely scripted; I do, however, read it on YouTube for the visually impaired: click here to watch the full essay on YouTube.

Disclaimers/Concerning Censored Nudity and Its Educational Purpose

This essay was proofread with my partner Bay's help. It's part of my Sex Positivity book series, which continues after its June 2025 finale in small-form content; e.g., essays on and interviews with other sex workers, all of whom I credit on my Acknowledgments pages and Sex Work page.

(artist, left: Bay Ryan; right: Persephone van der Waard)

Disclaimer Regarding Essay Contents: All opinions are my own; i.e., as part of my research, conducted alongside my book series, Gothic Communism (2023). The material within is written/speaks about public figures and popular media for purposes of (sex) education, satire, transformation and critique, hence falls under Fair Use regarding copyright and free speech regarding defamation/obscenity laws (the Miller Test; source: Justice.gov). Click here for my entire series disclaimer. Lastly many of the links on this page lead to my age-gated 18+ website where my entire work on Gothic Communism is stored and exhibited.

CW: racism, genocide and fascism; transphobia, tokenism and various Gothic themes; rape*; some censored nudity (regarding the sex work I do alongside my writing and illustration work) and images of racism (segregated fountains, blackface and Oriental vaudeville)

*Meaning (from my definition) "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) […] 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" (source: "Psychosexual Martyrdom," 2024). 

Table of Contents

• Basic "Interview" Order
• Concerning Jon's Replies/My Responses When "Heeding the Alien*" (re: Hugging Aliens and the Whore's Revenge when Reversing Abjection)
• On Radicalism; or, Practicing What I Preach (as Taught to Me by Radical Sluts)
• The Dialog
• Conclusion: a Word of Warning (Stuck on Repeat)

*I'm not calling Jon "the alien," here, but referring to/discussing unequal feelings of alienation experienced between two different people: he and I. 

Basic "Interview" Order

Listed here are Jon's replies to my video (taken from its YouTube comment section, below)—in order and with timestamps, followed by my replies to each:

1. 13:45 opening and Jon on identifying as southern versus Asian
2. 25:18 his confusion as to Andrew Lee's comments on Asians "facing segregation" in metal (when they're not); re: "needing to forcefully desegregate" being Andrew's exact words
3. 51:12  Jon clarifying that it's racist for anyone (white or not) to gatekeep metal as "whites only"
4. 1:01:45 Jon expressing interest in historical materialism tied to people's individual tastes (and following them)
5. 1:19:50 Jon describing his going to metal shows with a default expectation of safety
6. 1:26:45 Jon on ranking abuse—not to apologize for it, but focus on forms of abuse that rank higher in terms of priority (e.g., Asian "good at math" jokes vs actual physical violence); Jon also commenting on gaming being far more toxic than metal*, overall (which I wholeheartedly agree) / *Mid-Interview Tangent: Bigotry in Metal and Gaming
7. 1:46:35 Jon checking his privilege vis-à-vis the hardships he faces (and others ranking his hardships while living charmed lives themselves)
8. 1:47:33 Jon discussing found family and metal serving as such within criminogenic conditions engendered generationally by capital
9. 1:48:57 Jon on not being Brazilian but encountering Brazilians at a Cavalera show
10. 2:29:10 Jon on people failing to investigate bias, preferring instead to lean into guilt-by-association
11. 2:44:33 Jon clarifying that "Why did you lead with something racist?" was directed at a racist person in his own life, not at Andrew Lee
12. 2:46:43 Jon warning about Project 2025 attacking metal outright (outlawing it) versus a mere rise in prejudice
13. closing

To that, you could view this entire post as a de facto interview—one whose call-and-response dialog is given in good faith and in stages, but not really planned ahead of time; i.e., I found Jon's answers to be really insightful and wanted to comment on them as such. The aim, here, is to not to upstage anyone but educate readers about metal and the Gothic, showcasing good praxis through diverging perspectives that reach similar conclusions across space and time. So if my lengthy replies ever appear defensive or seemingly out of left field, know that Jon and I essentially agree on everything here (e.g., human rights trump state's rights); we just have, at times, vastly different ways of phrasing it (with me admittedly favoring a nerdy whore's blend of Gothic puns, anecdotes, Amazons/Gorgons* and academia, holistically married to sex work, poetics and scholarship†, below):

(artist: ChuckART)

*The monstrous-feminine and abjection; re: Creed and Kristeva—abjection meaning "to throw off," in Gothic theory. Generally this happens into a state of abnormality (the out-group)—all to reinforce "normal" (the in-group) as the status quo acting dogmatically "superior" to arbitrarily alien things; e.g., said status quo pimping nature as monstrous-feminine/alien, meaning the Gorgon and things comparable to/of it; i.e., nature as alien, criminal, or otherwise "other" tied to workers, often sex workers: the Medusa and its proxies common recipients of the abjection process being furthered; re: the state enforcing its own status quo for profit under capital, thus raping "nature" as placeholder for labor (whether human or not) and the environment. Doing so happens through pro-state dogma being historically fueled by racism, queerphobia, sexism and other bigotries—any and all conducive to such ethnocentric operations (extermination), ranging from the Enlightenment aka "modernity" into late-stage Capitalism. From Antiquity to that point, the oldest profession to abuse is the whore, but some degree of racism—particularly the barbarian outsider to abject by insider elements tied to house and home—is roughly as old (versus systemic racism tied to capital, which is far newer).

†The Neo-Gothic modus operandi—its own "retro medieval" borrowed freely from infamous, long-dead auteurs (and iconoclasts) like Matthew "Monk" Lewis and Mary Shelley (the Gothic historically penned by white women and gay men). So while I do use academic ideas, here, I often do so in ways that are conversational, even trashy ("one foot in Hell," as it were)!

Concerning Jon's Replies/My Responses When "Heeding the Alien" (re: Hugging Aliens and the Whore's Revenge when Reversing Abjection)

Jon's answers appear exactly as he gave them in his YouTube comment (with minor corrections for clarity). My answers vary in length. Some are short, others are long—all try to focus on Jon's feedback; i.e., while teaching the reader tangentially about various things tied to metal, Communism and the Gothic (e.g., sex work, state piracy and the poetry of monsters, etc): Jon points something out and I "Magic School Bus" that shit. As far as that goes, I do so not merely to hug the alien/reverse abjection but heed its outlaw whore's perspective, too: the subsequent testimony turning any "normal" worldview upside-down to favor the oppressed, having the whore's revenge against profit/the state! That's basically what "heeding the alien" means, in this context; i.e., me as a white trans-woman sex worker academic, and Jon as an Asian straight-man farmer and metalhead, finding common ground: both of us living in a giant-if-slowly-dying empire like America whoring everyone out (the "Wings of Liberty" have definitely lost a few feathers, Jack Burton). Equality is alien, therefore radical, in the so-called "Land of the Free" actually being a giant brothel, prison, concentration camp, what-have-you. To dare suggest universal equality and liberation from the ruling class is sedition, terrorism, insurrection, and must historically be "dealt with" through lethal force by state powers:

(artist: Doc Zenith)

And while I can't strictly speak for Jon, I'm ultimately approaching the topic of the alien in favor of worker rights/equal rights for all (and world peace) as "radical"; i.e., in ways I think he'd agree ultimately with—meaning versus state oppression and abjection pimping state victims/the natural world as alien/criminal per Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and settler colonialism: as both built on older patriarchal orders, and as fundamental qualities of capital and Imperialism* by design (re: "The State: Its Key Tools" from "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents"). In turn, these "spectres of Shelley" come out from the ancient past (and the tragic-to-avenging Gorgon, above) to us—a darker Stygian current to swim in and heed its terrible data, the swan-singing sirens inside whispering of deadly deeds (and threats) that, so often, go unsaid in life (the state must die, and will sacrifice/scapegoat everything to hold onto power while calling its own barbarism "valiant")! Cops, kings and billionaires suck, and those they treat like criminals, meaning those assigned some degree of criminal status by state machinery delivering political violence—while often imperfect themselves under said violence—still have useful information to impart as far as that goes (with whores being criminals in state eyes, but also cash cows to alienate and fetishize for profit); re: the alien as a thoroughly flexible and modular combination of this-or-that under privatization (and all the monopolies of the state through private property that Marx' "stateless, classless, moneyless society" tries to escape).

*The highest stage of Capitalism, according to Lenin (1916), but also older than capital and arguably surviving it, according to me; re (from Volume Zero):

whenever I say "the state" in this book, I am referring to the state as both a current mechanism for capital, but also the status quo more broadly—a state of affairs that has evolved into its current form [...]: nation-states, whose sense of national identity in relation to capital had to evolve into itself from the Cartesian Revolution onwards [...] In the past, the status quo would have been the Church, or church-and-state as undivided—i.e., feudal enterprises and city states prior to the rise of nation-states that raised wealth through tithes or conquest (the Crusades). Conversely, the state as a traditional vector of exploitation by neoliberal agents/corporate bodies (taxes and commodities) can also be entirely bypassed by them—i.e., anarcho Capitalism and the accumulation of wealth through the creation and sale of privatized commodities (military and domestic) controlled entirely by corporations (source: "What Is Gothic?" 2023).

This includes sex and force as alien through the abjection process. While it's easy enough to focus on violence removed directly from sex—e.g., underground street fights and "white man's discount Orientalism," including those curious (and pathetic) varieties lovingly explored by always-hilarious (and proudly Irish) YouTuber, Napoleon Blownapart (see, above: his excellent "KING FOR A DAY: A TALE OF TWO FIGHT CLUBS, 2025)—the fact remains that sex is violent; i.e., insofar as state proponents (cops) will outlaw, then brutalize "heroically" for profit, and which workers on the receiving end must pantomime to speak out, regarding (re: "Policing the Whore," 2024).

That's what I bring to the table, when responding to Jon in this dialog. There is always another alien to heed, including the alien parts/correspondence of ourselves and our friends rooted uncannily on home turf. Aliens are fuckin' metal, but also part of who we are; i.e., that which state forces demand we periodically deny and self-destroy for them: raping ourselves like Roman fools, acolytes of the Medusa giving herself a haircut (or "lobotomy" in zombie parlance) to appease state barbers! Whatever empty promises fascists make—whatever sex, drugs and rock 'n roll they try to monopolize as weird incel nerds/Cowardly Lions entirely dependent on the system to relate to others purely through unironic dominion—they're really not worth it, babes; they're bad actors completely full of it, posturing as "strong" but, in truth, are little more than paper tigers attacking state victims by blaming the whore* (the performance of strength not automatically a proletarian feature/what Michael Parenti in Black Shirts and Reds [1997] calls "a false rebellion," and I describe as pimps-in-disguise)!

*As I write, "everyone loves the whore, including the bourgeoisie profiting off sacred ideas of Satan-as-whore. Power is power as something to perform, then, the performances repeating and playing out through endless variations for or against the state pimping nature! The state is an addict that can never stop exploiting nature—i.e., having only doubled down on its own dogma over time—and this is where we can work our magic, on the Aegis! The elite love the whore to pimp; rebels, to hoist her foes on their own petards!" (source: "Rape Reprise," 2024).

(artist: Jeremy Anninos)

On Radicalism; or, Practicing What I Preach (as Taught to Me by Radical Sluts)

Rome wasn't burned, overnight, and radicalization is a multi-stage rocket. Nor did Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, as I coined it, sprout ex nihilo; the means of doing so was taught to me by other radicals. Keeping that reality in mind, please note that—while a lot of my current work is quite radical—I also wasn't always radical enough to produce it; once, I was in the closet, and far more bigoted than I presently am (me, from the late '00s):

Again, such things happen over time, radicality something that can help or hinder workers (fascism radical from a right-leaning perspective, Communism from the left, and both being modular elements on a spectrum where multiple ratios are possible). It all depends on what you consume, when, why and from/for whom (the bell tolls). In my case, I starting consuming metal as a little girl, but didn't knowingly encounter other GNC people until in the early 2010s; i.e., when I started coming out of the closet* in my late 20s, meeting so-called "preachers," ipso facto. As queer people, metal was a unequal/asymmetrical point of connection—for me to show other gay people heavy metal, and for them to show me a different slice of the human condition metal speaks to; i.e., a collective chance to bond with those who seemed different than me but, point-in-fact, were actually who I was turning into: a black mirror to gaze upon and see what I wanted to be, but also my former self to shed and replace with fresh satisfying skin. Coming out is painful and confusing† but also glorious, when-and-if the conditions are ripe for it!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

*"Closet" is a position that one can exit or go back into (aka forced detransition through conversion therapy). Queer folk have a lot of slang describing our condition, including the closet as something to leave; e.g., an "egg" being someone who's gay, said process called "cracking" and "hatching," etc, when leaving the closet. In my case, I was always an egg but my process of "hatching" was lengthy: "up the dragon's ass" as a child/teenager (the '80s, '90s and early '00s), "laid" in my 20s (when I started to write queer fiction and have sex, mid-'00s), "cracking" in my 30s (when I started dating queer people, 2015 onwards), and "hatching" on August 7th, 2022. From there, I grew and developed—evolving from "baby queer" (and my "second puberty") into queer mastery as I wrote my book series: "I didn't know exactly what to do with it—not at first, but eventually I started to dial it in, figuring out what mastery can be used for regarding proletarian concerns" (source: "Back to Necropolis," 2024). From "hatchling" to "dragon sex wizard" (or whatever old queers call themselves), my books were my babies (a concept I was comfortable with, early into the series; re: "On Giving Birth," 2023): "chasing the dragon" (and the Numinous) while "going back to Hell" having different meanings for me (and my transformation) than for straight folk (though drug use and queerness aren't wholly separate, especially in poetic usage during "acid Communism"; re: "Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit," 2025); i.e., "Hell" something to bring to Earth and turn it into something better than capital: "Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven" borrowed from Milton's pandemonium (and Satanic rebellion) by Mary Shelley all the way to us (re: "Making Demons," 2025). We are alien, which becomes something to embrace over time; i.e., reversing abjection to decolonize Hell, hugging the alien to have the whore's revenge against profit (re: "Rape Reprise," 2024).

†E.g., not having a land (on Earth, anyways) that feels queer enough; i.e., while races are historically tied to different landmasses, no queer nations historically exist—meaning none that start queer and don't treat queerness like something to give and take away by state forces (re: "the state is straight," as I put it; see: "Understanding Vampires," 2024). In other words, "racism actually requires people of a given race to be in the area for it to fly, whereas with antisemitism or transphobia, in the absence of trans people or Jews, people will happily come up with some paranoid delusions about us regardless" (source skeet, Iris Meredith: November 5th, 2025).

As time went on, I met more and more minorities, many of whom were radical (usually queer) and, in dating them, I myself radicalized, too; i.e., during a "show and tell" dialog that concerned not only us, but a broader Wisdom (of the Ancients*): one composed of outlaw thinkers meant to expand our minds, "warts and all"; e.g.,

• Zeuhl showed me Foucault and taught me about GNC people/the genderqueer movement.
• Lindsay aka Jadis showed me cute animals (e.g., frogs, below) and taught me about BDSM (and how not to do it).
• Cuwu showed me kindness after Lindsay and taught me how to heal from rape while embracing my burgeoning queer self (my "second puberty").
• Bay showed me kindness after all my exes and taught me how to appreciate the Indigenous perspective those people lacked.

*A cultural understanding of the imaginary past that Gothic Communism pushes towards a better future with (versus fascism's obsession with the state and its "past" greatness; e.g., when men were men and women were women ...and endlessly subservient/sexually available towards the former through state paradigms pimping the latter nostalgically out; i.e., the nuclear model and its harmful divisions of nature and labor essentializing rape while abjecting it in monomythic language; re: the Gorgon a whore to blame by token cops, subjugated Amazons classically stealing from nature for the state; see: "Always a Victim," 2025).

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

Dating and education, for me, went hand-in-hand—not even starting in earnest until I was 29(!); i.e., I lost my virginity at 21, but didn't date "in the wild" until I went back to college the second time around. From there, I learned that sex is dangerous only because it threatens to radically change who we are. In my case, I went from a sexually awkward nerd who used metal as a crutch to a sexually liberated nerd who embraced metal as "Where the Wild Things Are." After fucking GNC baddies to metal, I could suddenly see—there in my mind's open eye—visions I had already experienced as a little girl: dreaming of warrior-princess womanhood!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Making "wild rumpus," indeed! Pleasure and pain are excellent teachers, and you can't develop Gothic Communism without connection through power exchange (which metal explores with vigor). Through the connections I developed, I cultivated something to currently preach, here; i.e., in this dialog tied to many others, all of us passing on what metal taught me, but also the baddies who taught me through a shared dialog that goes ever onwards! To it, I couldn't say I practice what I preach unless I shared what they taught me with all of you, here! Our existence is political because the eye of Sauron is currently upon us and we must camp canon to survive. However, yours is too because the state—the Great Destroyer, below—devours everyone eventually (saving white straight people for last). "There is no life in the void, only death"? Well, lucky for us Medusa's a death god (and puppygirl, in my case)—one who knows how to clap back when staring down state machinery from the void (re: "She Fucks Back," 2024)!

The Dialog

1. Jon: Hello Persephone, once again, thank you for approaching my episode with kindness and good faith. Yours is rather long. You went quite in depth with a lot of great references. The Matrix [1999] references in particular resonated with me. We have a lot of agreements; I have a few points I'd like to clarify and a few I'd like to thank you for moving me on.

13:45 It's not that I DON'T identify as Asian. I do. I identify MORE as southern because I experienced more southern culture than I did Asian. It's not a binary, it's a ratio. No, I do not own a Confederate flag guitar nor have I owned anything with any Confederate symbols on them. When I say I identify as southern, it's not the caricature of "southern pride." I love the rural pace of life, the small community. I run a small farm and spend as much time as I possibly can in the woods. I love the food down here, the Appalachian mountains, and the art. Note that nowhere in my episode did I bring up the Confederacy, Lost Cause, or even any defenses of the South's worst characteristics. In fact, the reason I even brought up the South at all was to point out that I'm no stranger to racism, including far worse degrees of it than I have ever experienced in metal.

As a small but related side note, podcasting is a lot like getting into a disagreement with your spouse... a few days later you always think "Aww damn I should have said it this way instead!" I do wish I would have put more emphasis on my intention to defend metal, because I can see after the fact, and because of conversations I had with people in the comments, that in several places it seems I'm downplaying racism. My intention was never to downplay racism but to illustrate that while no space is perfect, metal has been a net positive EVEN in a place as flawed as the South. If we believe the stereotypes, the southeast of the US is the most racist place in the country and yet even in such an environment, metal has been a net good for weirdos and outcasts down here. 

(source thumbnail: Persephone van der Waard's "Anti-Semitism vs Antisemitism: Discussing My Grandfather (a Dutch Holocaust Survivor) w/ My Work," 2025)

Me: That's entirely fair! For me, it was the inverse—with me having grown up in Southeast Michigan but having been exposed to more Dutch culture than explicitly "Michigan" culture. As I grew older, I found myself alienated from my Dutch roots, too (divorces do that—my parents separating when I was ten, and me only go on to critique my grandfather after I came out, above). Instead, I found my family among queer and neurodivergent people, both in the streets, sheets, and online—with me really starting to come into my own in my late 20s, returning to university after my uncle's family business fell apart (from 2014 onwards). From there, I started to encounter people who changed me for the better—itself coming down to blind luck initially followed by informed luck; i.e., insofar as doing so largely required me to learn from these chance social-sexual encounters, meaning in ways my friends and I could pass on; re: through my Gothic Communism book series, which only built consciously on that hard-fought and hard-won tradition ("love is a battlefield" 'n all that): holding onto my past while changing into someone new, "Persephone" + "van der Waard" "becoming Brundle-Fly!" (as Jeff Goldblum might put it).

I really agree with the idea of ratio versus binary! Such things are not fixed, but remain "in flux" throughout our entire lives (what, in medieval thought, is generally referred to as a "psychomachy" or "mind battle"). Likewise, a love for nature was something instilled into me from an early age, too; i.e.,  my lullaby being Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Kahn" (1816), after which I studied the British Romantics as an undergrad into grad school and beyond; e.g., my friend and muse, Nyx, hails from the Appalachian Mountains—so much so that I wrote on her in my series; re (from the Demon Module)

those making art aren't doing so in the abstract; it represents their homes as a part of who they are and vice versa. As Nyx writes in regards to coming home:

I love coming back home and exploring the woods I grew up in. It's such a refreshing experience and cleansing to my soul. These WV woods will always have my heart, no matter how far away I stray" (source tweet, 2023).

Whores of nature have an ace element, then, insofar as the things they love that "grow" aren't just genitals, but the greenery of plants that fauna feed upon (and take us home when we die)! This threshold and proximity with the divine in nature is both intense, but also oddly nurturing and protecting in ways that eroticize nature as optionally orgiastic: a potential bacchanal that lets people enjoy the same current aliens pushing towards reunion however all parties agree to (source: "Monster-Fucking and Furry Panic," 2025).

(artist: Nyx)

We're often wrestling with caricature to mold it in more liberatory ways; i.e., as it, in turn, molds us. Also, as nature changes and grows around civilization, capital kills it in ways that haunt us towards change (of any sort, but generally radical). So I get loving the idea of a place that you describe, meaning as you've lived and breathed your entire life: something to fight for and protect from Capitalism, ergo racism as a means of capital defending itself through armed subservience (state proponents pimping nature as monstrous-feminine to keep the bourgeoisie alive; re: "Nature Is Food," 2024). To that, you write, "If we believe the stereotypes, the southeast of the US is the most racist place in the country and yet even in such an environment, metal has been a net good for weirdos and outcasts down here." I wish to add: Michigan has a strong rural element up north, but also conservative revival among not just the Dutch colonial mainstays, but also the Michigan Militia and KKK.

(exhibit 48b2 [from "Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives," 2025]: Models and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl, my brother Ben holding the camera at my twin's wedding...)

So, as something of a weirdo and outcast, myself, I can totally relate to the net positive you speak of, regarding metal (e.g., my partner in grad school saying to themselves, when they first saw me [and while I was still in the closet]: "He must be a metal guy!" And that led to many adventures henceforth, above).

2. Jon: 25:18 It's important here to recognize that this episode is specifically about metal. I definitely should've done a better job of reiterating that point. When Andrew says we should forcefully desegregate metal, it's not the violence that I want clarification on, it's the actual mechanics. During the black civil rights movement, POC were forbidden to participate in white spaces by law. Those people drank from white fountains and entered white restaurants in protest. What is the equivalent of this for Asians participating in metal? If I as an Asian man want to start a metal band, no one can stop me. Who do I have to force to allow it? That is the point I want clarification on. This part of the episode didn't come from a neo-liberal place of aversion to violence, but from a place of genuine confusion [emphasis, me]. Who do we have to force to let us in? Now to be honest, I do have an aversion to violence without due process, but honestly that is not the place where my question came from. I have no issue with violence when it's either voluntary (martial arts) or justified... and by justified I don't mean... made the mob angry... but justified with evidence. I can see why it was seen as "tone policing." Do you have a suggestion on how I could better articulate curiosity without seeming like a tone cop?

(source: Rodney Coates' "Separate water fountains for Black people still stand in the South," 2024)

Me: "If I as an Asian man want to start a metal band, no one can stop me. Who do I have to force to allow it? That is the point I want clarification on." That is entirely valid, and admittedly something I entirely failed to recognize! To that, confirmation bias often leads critics of oppression to see it everywhere we look, so much so that we miss the obvious right in from of us. Not being Asian, myself, I overlooked the relative privilege/oppression that minority has experienced in the US—so much so that I fixated on something I thought you were arguing but weren't; i.e., me interpreting your argument in ways that overlooked these realities. Mea culpa!

In regards to tone-policing, I confess you have me a bit "on the hip"; i.e., I ultimately misunderstood your argument, so the term "tone-policing" doesn't really apply, in this case. However, a good rule of thumb with tone policing is to remember that—while we all have different degrees of privilege and oppression to consider (which also intersect among other minorities and in-group/out-group members)—tone-policing is historically done  in ways that consciously apologize for state power. This, unto itself, can be reactionary or moderate, and it really boils down to who you're talking to/about and why. TERFs, for example, can tone police in ways that are more openly hostile or veiled, depending on who's doing it (they can also eat crow and then try and apologize to the very people they've attacked—as Brianna Wu recently did, below). The reality is that tone-policing is just that: a form of police activity that is often stochastic, serving state power in unofficial capacities; i.e., blaming the victim and insisting for "politeness" from the oppressed when there's really no grounds for it. 

(source skeet, Katelyn Burns: November 1st, 2025)

Again, I really don't think that's what you were doing (and I may have been a tad sassy when implying it at the time). However, if you ever feel worried that you're tone-policing others, just keep those ideas in mind and try to avoid them. Like racism, tone-policing is punching down, and generally happens through veiled threats, knowing-better rhetoric and auras of self-righteous impunity (therefore superiority)—the very sort insulating and justifying the kinds of assholes who ordinarily tone-police victims of state abuse; i.e., the "white moderate" problem, from MLK onwards (re: "Letter from Birmingham Jail," 1963): real token shit. This happens whenever some minority (or the other) consciously or otherwise punches down instead of up, emulating white moderate straight men, first and foremost. As far as that goes, I can't speak to the Asian side of things, but GNC traitors do so to the detriment of all; re: Brianna Wu. Take "Brianna Wu," imagine the Asian male straight version of that, and avoid it like the plague (also, don't defend Nazis by tone-policing anti-fascists)!

3. Jon: 51:12 Here is another place where I could have expressed myself much better. I don't think it's racist to point out that metal is "white people's music," at least not from an Asian person. It does seem to feel more racist if a white person declares metal as "white people's music." I do think it's racist for Andrew's friends to shame him for doing something other than what his race is supposed to do [emphasis, me]. It's a sort of internalized racism. You see this a lot with black musicians in rock bands; they of course get racism from whites, but also their own brothers and sisters. Andrew should be able to do what he wants. It's obvious that white people shouldn't try to stop him, but it's not so obvious that his own people shouldn't try to police his interests based on his race. They shouldn't be the ones constructing the cage around him. To bring myself into this statement, I get a lot of shit down here for hating country music. Yeah, I'm a country person. I'm a farmer. I own a truck (for buying hay and feed for the animals*). I'm an outdoors person. So what? I don't like country. They're not going to get me into it, because I'm "supposed to." 

(artist: Vera Dominus)

*My friend and muse Vera Dominus also lives in the country and is big into the land and reclaiming it/her labor. But one's birthplace (or place to land after much traveling) doesn't automatically preclude or guarantee a given belief system; e.g., Vera is a soft pleasure domme from Gay Philly and she took that with her into the countryside.

Me: I absolutely agree that ethnic minorities often, far from emulating Whitey (re: Fanon), emulate Whitey's idea of what minorities "are supposed to be" (re: Said, Orientalism). It's definitely a form of internalized bigotry and it can lead to treating metal as "not for us" because it "belongs to our betters" per a master/slave dichotomy. You see this all the time with self-hating queers leaning into negative stereotypes on and offstage, but it's just as much an issue when setting boundaries for things that are "off limits" racially for much the same reasons: what we can and cannot consume within a presumed and ongoing social order. It's one thing to install our own individual boundaries based on personal taste; it's entirely another to have others do it "for us" against our will (e.g., Sammy's father in Sinners [2025] telling him rock 'n roll is "the Devil's music" while  having turned to the White Man's pulpit, himself, to colonize his own people, post-diaspora). In turn, pre-conceived stereotypes uphold the same gates to keep; i.e., that persist not just through house and home (re: redlining), but the music played inside and across those territories over time. Education and reeducation take time, and generally as an uphill matter of actually challenging harmful societal norms; i.e., on stages shared by bad actors performing "oppression" bleeding into real life: colonization dressed up as "rebellion (re: me vis-à-vis Parenti).

In regards to country music, I generally dislike it because of its politics. Yes, I've seen some fine country shredders and singers/personalities (e.g., Brad Paisley and Dolly Parton, respectively), but the national attitude it advertises upholds the very white supremacy Andrew warns about; i.e., an experience to prescribe to a nigh-Biblical degree: the lived experience of the straight white man acting far more oppressed than he actually is playing missionary on home soil (often in bad faith by middle- and upper-class men; e.g., Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs [2003] or Graham Planter's Nazi tattoo and that whole business, but also Ted Nugent's 1995 Spirit of the Wild—the so-called "Motor City Madman" playing white Indian, above).

As my partner Bay Ryan puts it, "American white men [and any white colonized nation; e.g., South Africa] love to treat freedom of speech as, 'I want to say something regardless of how true it is and you not only have to sit and listen to me, you have to agree with what I say. It's a complex of entitlement." If white moderates tone-police, then the entire middle class has become something timeless and sacred to defend its own dogma with versus the colonized—the latter pushing towards post-scarcity and away from capital and the former attacking them, onstage and off; i.e., after Manifest Destiny into the present (re: me vis-à-vis Howard Zinn): state proponents policing the alien by playing Cowboys and Indians in bad faith (with Hitler emulating Jefferson's idea of the "noble savage" during Lebensraum; re: Bad Empanada's "How the USA Inspired the Nazis - From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum," 2021). DARVO and obscurantism monopolize violence, terror and monsters for the state; i.e., to raise false flags over the same-old territories, time and time again (until capital dies, which it does by design and fights mid-decay not to: by punching down harder at state victims; re : fascism)!

4. Jon: 1:01:45 You moved me a little on this one. I certainly should consider historical materialism on people following their interests. 

Me: Groovy! Let me know if you need a hand!

5. Jon: 1:19:50 You are correct on this one. I haven't felt unwelcome at metal shows because I don't go to shows where that would happen. Fair point. I would add to that point that these kinds of shows are so rare that I have never felt the need to "make sure" before I go to the club to see a show. If Arghoslent came to Atlanta... then yea, I wouldn't go. And that's about it. Or if I see a show where they aren't advertising the venue, where they say the venue will be revealed the day of the show...  yeah.. why are y'all doing that? I ain't going to that show. These examples are so rare in the scheme of the millions of metal bands and shows as to be something I don't even consider. I go to metal shows with the default expectation of safety. That's a pretty good thing to be able to say about metal [emphasis, me].

Me: That's totally valid! I haven't been to a metal show since 2010, and in those days it was largely word-of-mouth ("Mike the metal guru" always coming into our family store, shooting the shit with me while I played metal on my refurbished laptop—kinda like a used record store without the records). A huge part of harm reduction is communicating safety, and it sounds like that's still very much the case (similar to when girls go out to the club: we talk and know what to look out for)! Also, I very much agree about metal and safety going hand-in-hand; e.g., my friend Nyx going to metal shows to revel in a community that you can't easily find anywhere else; re (from Volume Three's "Rockstars: From Rock 'n Roll Fans and Jimmi Hendrix' Penis to Horror Movie Special Effects," 2025):

(exhibit 105a2: Top-left, top-middle-left, and far-middle-left: Nyx and her bestie, Dino Des—source tweet, 2022; middle and bottom-middle: Cynthia Plaster Caster, in the flesh, holding a plaster-cast mold of Jimmi Hendrix' penis; top-right and middle-right: Judas Priest and [a very gay but then-closeted lead singer, Rob Halford] in Japan; far-middle-right: Zakk Wylde; bottom-right: the man himself, Jimmi Hendrix; far-bottom-left: Jimmi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen, with their signature guitars "Black Beauty" and "the Bumble Bee" [which Eddie's original was buried with Dimebag Darrel's casket after the other musician was killed onstage by a crazed fan; you can, however, buy your own replica].

Rock concerts are an excellent place to conduct iconoclastic praxis—by "getting' together" and having fun with metal as something that can bring peace-loving people together [out of "free love*" and Woodstock into more recent metal spheres]. Just beware of colonizers, as always [Spectre Sound Studios' "Racism in Metal: A Very Bad Idea," 2016]. Even when it's "just a joke" told by your heroes like Jason Newsted, expect pushback from fans of those people unironically defending the Nazi-fucking-salute as a bad joke; i.e., when silly trans people like me "try to spoil the fun" by pointing out that, no, the Nazi salute shouldn't be done for funsies [source: my response to a 2022 YouTube community post by Ahdy Khairat]. To defend "free speech" is to defend white people's "right" to do the Nazi salute as canon; it's war and rape apologia executed by the oppressor class' class traitors: white boys [and token people]. You see any black dudes doing the Nazi salute for fun? If they want to, they may but most don't for a very good reason; it serves no purpose but to disparage them and their entire culture. To pretend otherwise by demanding the paradox of tolerance is more bad-faith nonsense: perfidious arguments made by bad sons taught by bad fathers; "prison sex" for the mind that makes these boys the collective "bitches" of Capitalism.)

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

*Bitches love metal for what it allows them; e.g., the freedom to remove their clothes at shows (with clothes invented arguably after music). To be frank, stripping is historically a form of rebellion (exhibitionism), one that feels more comfortable when the people around them (voyeurs) don't make the boobies feel weird (e.g., to "be seen, not heard; cover up, smile more"; etc). In terms of the ethics of stripping at shows, vino veritas holds true centuries after Bacchus—with alcohol served at modern venues that often having cordons dividing the parents and kids from the extramarital adults (so-called 18+ "shows/venues"). Obviously double standards exist regarding male nudity vs female nudity but the important thing is informed or implied consent: the enclosure of such spaces being where entrance happens with the expectation of sex, alcohol and all-around "rowdy" atmosphere. This isn't a tax audit; it's a metal show, "when in Rome" a practice played out by the partygoers looking to go wild! Consent is generally understood/advertised by the larger venue and those attending: a chance to meet but also be unicorns (e.g., Harmony Corrupted, above and below, being a massive metalhead and exhibitionist). From the Gorgon to us, the antidote to Puritanism (which divides and conquers labor for profit, thus rape) is public nudism; re: "When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!" (source: "It Began with a Whisper," 2025); i.e., nudity for Amazons/Gorgons is an armor and a weapon, but also a form of data exchange, hence mode of discourse to convey on multiple registers across space and time: "her [ass was] there."

(artist: Harmony Corrupted; source: "With Harmony's Help: Addressing Volume Three's Grand Emptiness and Ambitions through a Good Friend," 2025)

Capital is a system of pimping whores of all kinds, so learn from whores in ways that undo this process (of abjection/monstrous-feminine). Bitches love metal because metal—despite the appearance of danger—is actually a danger disco of sorts; i.e., promoting calculated risk during paradoxical exposure and temptation of forbidden knowledge (a bit like a BDSM dungeon minus the open kink; e.g., Harmony Corrupted, above)! Such things are instrumental towards development (of Communism), and they are classically taught by workers at or comparable to such "pirate brothel" venues; re (from Volume One's "Healing from Rape," 2024):

Since I was small, I always pondered about appropriated violence and rape fantasies, though I didn't know that's what these things were. Eventually I learned, meeting Cuwu as someone who liked to ponder about and transmute these stories into transgressively sex-positive forms. A lot of proletarian-minded workers do, male or female. But Cuwu taught me that getting "ravished" can be incredibly fun, thrilling and/or hilarious. Likewise, "ravishing" someone who's high, asleep or both can be super fucking hot provided it's mutually consensual in advance (someone can't consent after they're drunk or asleep). Cuwu taught me that. To play with sex is to play with power through sex.

Cuwu also taught me that appreciative, sex-positive rape fantasies are not actually rape (they loved the show Lucifer and would fantasize about being "taken" by the actor of that show as someone sexy and strong but also a little dangerous). I learned this while having a previous understanding that appropriative, canonical rape fantasies function as rape threats at various registers; e.g., "be a good girl and don't have extra-/premarital sex or Jason Voorhees will cut your head off with a machete!" As it turns out, unironic and ironic rape fantasies and demon lovers are tremendously common, but so is their eliding during liminal expressions that seek healing from rape through "rape." Such ubiquity comments on state abuse as ever-present, but denied, displaced, dissociated—abject.

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Spending time with Cuwu, I learned how to reverse this through our own stab at ludo-Gothic BDSM. We could play around with "rape" as a form of theatre, involving many of the usual cliché activities (choking [above] and sleep sex, but also BDSM commands and unequal power arrangements; e.g., Cuwu being my mommy dom): Gothic fantasies invoke the heroic person as capable of murder and rape, but choosing not to.

6. Jon: 1:26:45 Yes. You are correct. I am ranking abuse. When it's assumed I might be good at math, I rank that much lower than a black dude down here being told "Get out of here [word you can imagine]" which btw I have never seen at a metal show. This goes further in to my overall point that the South is a racist hive and yet even down here, metal is one of the most welcoming spaces. Further, I rank the math jokes a lot lower than getting jumped by half a dozen dudes in the school locker room. When it was clear things were about to get violent, I challenged the main dude's manhood by saying he was too chicken shit to fight me one on one. To which he replied something about me knowing kung fu and then they beat my ass. Yes, I rank the ohms joke much much lower than that. I've been roasted by my friends over much more hurtful things that had nothing to do with race. You call it looking the other way. I call it perspective. 

Also, note that the personal experience that Andrew brought up in his video was also a math joke. He also "looked the other way" because in the grand scheme of things that isn't something worth causing a scene over. He took much more offense to the pet eating joke his friend endured. Also, Andrew did stand up when a band he was supposed to share a bill with (Master) was OK sharing a bill with Arghoslent. That does rank a lot higher than a math joke and Andrew took a stand. / Further, I would rank any math joke I've gotten WAY lower than the abuse you've suffered as a trans person in gaming. I think you would agree with me that gaming is a far more toxic, abusive, and downright dangerous space than metal* is. 

A Mid-Interview Tangent: Bigotry in Metal and Gaming

*Overall, yes, though again I did experience some blacklisting in the online YouTube metal community for being queer—with "Giving My Two Cents: A Metal Compendium" (2020) eventually ending because no one wanted to call me "two cents girl" versus "two cents guy." Also, however, I have received transphobic hate (which is extant, above)—meaning online regarding metal after I came out as trans in 2022—but that probably owes as much to toxic Internet culture more broadly as the live metal scene/metal culture more broadly.

That being said, gaming and metal often overlap—with both having walked arm-in-arm with male culture, games/toys, military optimism and Pax-Americana upbringing (re: Man Box, Green) since the early '90s; i.e., with DOOM (1993) onwards, much of my transphobic hate coming from the gaming community: FPS metal fans defending their favorite franchise from me (re: "No Girls or Trans People Allowed," 2020). Most of this came from straight white guys, mind you, but some of the hatred also comes from GNC folk punching down at me as some kind of "toy-breaking asshole"; e.g., my ex-friend Jade, a DOOM fan who met me through my 2020 Doom Eternal review (the one got all the trans hate, above) someone who—loving metal, horror movies, videogames and action figures—tried to get me to "transvestigate" my own partner... only to incite violence against both of us when I refused; i.e., from other sex workers, many of whom were cis but some who were not (re: "Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023" and "Policing the Whore," 2024).

To it, whores are taught to police whores, generally through different degrees/ratios of privilege and oppression, but also popular media like videogames heavy metal—a pecking order inside a prison-like system that pits this against that (and so on). They drink from the same cup: the cup of capital and state oppression via bread and circus colonizing territory on and offstage, through the middle class charting maps for conquest (re: "A Note About Canonical Essentialism," 2024). The anthems for Gamergate and trans genocide have classically been heavy metal (and metals forebears; e.g., Tolkien, below), which we camp using the same devices while occupying them (e.g., Metroidvania, also below):

(cited in "Canonical Essentialism"; source: Volume Three's "Scouting the Field," 2023).

Also-also, gaming has a queer side that is hardly monolithic; re: Anita Sarkeesian vs Gamergate in 2014 being feminist, of course—with Brianna Wu being a token, gentrified† queer game developer pinkwashing fascism through transmedicalism; i.e., despite facing harassment herself during Gamergate (PinkNews Reporter's "too little too late," 2025). Even so, queerness and videogames date back to the 1970s and '80s, meaning before Gamergate and to the very origins of what people even think videogames are; i.e., as a product to sell, but also storytelling device penned by gay folk; e.g., Shakeena Johnson's "Seven trailblazing LGBT+ pioneers who helped to shape video gaming as we know it" (2021): "Many people are unaware that LGBT+ people have been heavily involved in the ongoing video gaming revolution since its inception, largely because their achievements are often hidden or not celebrated" (source). But, in this case, there's a big difference between gaming devs and gaming culture—with gaming devs being whored out by companies for entitled, bigoted consumers who, again, tend to be white, straight and male (or token).

(artists: David Gaider Veda Hlubinka-Cook, Rebecca Heineman, Jamie Fenton, and Danielle Bunten Berry—ibid.)

†Class character informs culture and race. In Wu's case, she made Gamergate about her in ways that took the struggle (and spotlight) away from those with less privilege (the "white feminism problem"; e.g., #MeToo originally started by a woman of color only to be hijacked by affluent white women). As Ally Gibbs writes,

I know that Brianna Wu's "apology" was fake, and any desire she may express to return to our community is a lie. Just yesterday, she made a tweet suggesting that trans women who come out while dating or married to cis women are "wrecking their lives," and railed against Zohran Mamdani as a liar and a "goddamned communist." Don't worry, though, she does think he's sexy.

Brianna and I come from very different worlds. I was raised in poverty and have spent my entire life poor, and expect to die without ever advancing a tax bracket. Brianna grew up wealthy, was once loaned nearly a quarter of a million dollars by her parents to fail to make a video game, and literally has a collection of Porsches. Silver spoon doesn't even begin to describe the insufferable level of privilege Wu has experienced her entire life. / That isn't why I despise Brianna Wu, though. I hate her with every fiber of my being because she and her monstrous buddies in the conservative anti-trans grifting sphere have driven countless trans people to suicide, and have actively made the world a more hostile place for us so that they could enrich themselves.

No apology will ever do the trick, Brianna. You can’t make amends for the blood on your hands, and I hope that keeps you awake at night for the rest of your life (source: "Let's talk about Brianna Wu," 2025)

In short, while gaming is a medium that can represent a variety of interests, the baseline has always been white, straight and male; i.e., treating women, POC and queer folk as outsiders who classically betray their own for a chance to be "let in" (so-called "pick me" behavior). Marginalized in-fighting generally starts from those with more privilege, branching out to those with less (re: convenience and desperation); e.g., Brianna is a "transmedicalist," meaning someone who gatekeeps queer legitimacy through costly-and-surveilled medical procedures; i.e., that many non-white and/or poor white queer people can't afford/are gatekept from—a generational means of assimilation/"hospital redlining" echoed in other queer traitors like binary trans woman, Natalie Wynn 9above) : historically punching down at non-binary people (re: "Trans TERFs, NERFs, and Queer Bosses"; written 2022, published 2025) and Palestinian Arabs (re: "Slurs Aren't Activism: Critiquing Natalie Wynn's Zionism," 2025).

In other words, a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all, and fighting for intersectional solidarity/tactical unity towards universal liberation (therefore inclusion) requires we move past the dated, harmful idea of sacrifice/exception that some are willing to make; i.e., an Omelas child; e.g., Nex Benedict:

Resume Interview (starting with my answer to Jon's sixth question)

Me: I'm so sorry that happened to you, comrade! Also, long-ass answer for this one!

First, bullies never fight fair (mine being adult men abusing me as a child, or various token parties when I was older). Certainly that's an awful thing to have to go through (the bathroom, public or private, being a hunting ground for opportunistic cowards; e.g., the killers of Nex Benedict, above)! My dad would beat me; I would listen to metal from my mom to escape (and comparable music, below)—an effect I carried forward into my 30s; i.e., when cultivating not just a means of escape but way of transforming the world, meaning through the magic that metal and the Gothic offer as part of a shared mode. To that, our views aren't simply inherent or essential at birth, but shaped over time afterwards.

To it, racism is taught like any bigotry through the consumption (and embodiment) of media, but so is empathy for other people—generally through the Gothic (and its assorted media, metal or otherwise) historically viewed as "trash"; i.e., playing with monsters, including whores (the oldest profession, ergo demonization of work to later reclaim): as some of the smartest people I know (e.g., Delilah Gallo, Goddess Asterin, or Harmony Corrupted [above] all showing this "mythical" intelligence through their uncanny ability to play with but also discuss these ideas through their interviews with me). Whores have to be clever/playful or they won't survive, but also, keeping quiet is suicide, genocide. There must always be a whore for the state to pimp/an enemy to subjugate and kill, and the whore is always a cunning homewrecker and unthinking slave made by the state the state punishes when it refuses to obey* (re: the whore's paradox; see: "Rape Reprise"); the whore's revenge occurs through the same process (of abjection) reversing profit as revenge versus the pimp (ibid.).

(source: "A Further Note on Angry Gods (and Playing with Them)" from "Making Demons")

*E.g., Frankenstein's monster being clearly made for war—e.g., "DEMON. ATHETOS SAY, KILL"; re: "Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge" (2024)—but also a "demon" to punish by a Cartesian master having made future robota [slaves] from dead former slaves, criminals, whores and madmen. If you ever feel privileged and want to know what it's like to be alien—i.e.,  framed as "scary" as a product to sell to the middle class clutching their pearls, be it non-white, queer or non-Christian, etc—think of the Creature from Frankenstein (1818) standing in for all of oppressed beings: "alien" = "whore" and "whore" = the recipient of police violence from the pimp (or those functioning as pimps).

The difference, as always, is function per a dialectical-material context, not aesthetic. Yes, a fat booty (or any form of exhibitionist/voyeur public nudism, below) can be "just a product" to anesthetize viewers; i.e., mere bread and circus peddled to the masses to placate/weaponize them, but especially the usual target audience: entitled straight men (white or not) or those acting like them (re: TERFs and Man Box) clamoring for "meat" (white or dark, dressed up as sex and force, mid-Amazonomachia). Likewise, it can be a form of expanding one's mind (and actions and/or organs) through preferential (and performative) code: Gloggins' illusion of "mere play" (or sex, which is generally sold as playtime) that—entertained between equals in power if not in circumstance, pointedly playing together through a shared goal—can pass vital data along through ongoing discourse: brothel espionage, the line between house and whorehouse/corporal punishment and pleasure/vaso vagal (fight or flight, fawn, etc) a historically thin one, illustrating mutual consent as sadly optional (the elite are pimps and pimps only care about profit); re (from "Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries," 2025): a battle to fight, waging class war as "ass war" intersecting with culture and race (with white bodies having "non-white" characteristics, below):

(artists [clockwise, starting top-left]: Nyx, Romantic Rose, Harmony Corrupted, Annabel Morningstar, and Crow)

Fantasy is often more fun than reality but also pushes towards brave new worlds. That's the paradox, the victim putting "rape" in quotes not just to spice up their sex life (a form of negotiated labor), but reclaim their power framed historically as alien by state pimps—our power scaring the bourgeoisie when wielded subversively by workers undermining nuclear models, ergo Capitalist Realism (re: "'Heaven in a Wild Flower'; or, Exhibiting the Monstrous-Feminine Ourselves," 2024): the Gorgon in small, burning Rome "on the Aegis." It seems like escapism/total nonsense, but sets us free while in chains—the wily whore waging stealth war through open secrets, mid-cryptonymy! Her booty is a cloaking device and a weapon, "conquering Earth" through land back, labor back, and sex back as one-in-the-same, mise-en-abyme (re: "Our Sweet Revenge," 2024); i.e., "we have 'castles,' too!" and woe to any to try to conquer them (re: "Castles in the Flesh," 2024)! Hell hath no fury, indeed!

(source)

To be clear, the cake is a lie, but lies and truth aren't mutually exclusive; they classically serve different aims mid-cryptonymy* depending on who's using them to "live deliciously" (what Jonathan Swift called splendide mendax and Milton "darkness visible"): "And [s]he came to know the pleasures of [wo]men, and was bred to the finest stock." Pound Town is a school of mysteries, such "hard knocks" actually love taps from Russian Dolls (above) exchanging tit for tat! This isn't merely the stuff of mighty heroes on the page (ambrosia), but concerns ordinary workers eating it up wherever! The Gorgon's signature fury speaks to but also through us. Scorched earth, motherfuckers!

*To show and hide at the same time. Refer to Volume One's "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy" (2024) and Volume Three's "Chapter Five: 'Rebellious Subterfuge'" (2025) for a good introduction/exploration of cryptonymy tied to heavy metal (and the stuff that heavy metal sings about, from damsels to demons).

Before I learned how to "slay" coochie on my own, for example (chasing Amazons and writing about them for years), I was raised on Evil Dead and Conan the Barbarian (1981) through my uncles and Aliens (1986) and Super Metroid (1994) through my rocker D&D-loving mom, as much as Monty Python and Godzilla (1954) through my admittedly eccentric grandparents (discovering Matthew Lewis' The Monk [1794] in grad school, overseas). Loaded with such silly-serious stories, I took their messages to heart—meaning into me and doing my own thing with them, afterwards; i.e., camping the canon from Broadmoor to me, reversing abjection to humanize those that, through canonical media (as something to make and mete out), are historically objectified to serve profit using dehumanizing language; re: whores (which Amazons are, albeit with a barbarian's warrior/monstrous-feminine [alien masculine/phallic/forte] element). Not all whores are gay of course, but gay whores are basically vampires—gay ninjas (or sex wizards) enamored with an imaginary past (the "Gothic"); i.e., teaching others through what I, again, call the Wisdom of the Ancients: to fight back against state monopolies, pushing gradually away from colonial models with pre-colonial ideas towards post-scarcity as Gothic Communism does (or, as Key and Peele put it, "by putting the pussy on the chainwax," 2013).

(artist: Bay Ryan, Victoria Saix, Cuwu)

The more I consumed, the more I played; the more I played, the more I learned because I consciously tried to. As time went on, I started to ask myself, "What if?" What if objectification (and power) are still possible, but through the inverse (and avoidance) of the usual harms caused by capital and its routine fetishes? Rejection sucks, but fortune favors the bold; i.e., I suddenly felt tempted to try long before it paid off (e.g., meeting Bay* who helped me write my PhD, but also Cuwu and Victoria, above)—asking myself as I did Valeria's signature refrain: "You wanna to live forever?"; re (from "X Marks the Spot," 2025):

*And who loves showing me rebellious queer music; e.g., Cain Culto's "KFC Santería" with Sudan Archives (2025) singing about American politics and Palestine versus Culto's OG solo version (also 2025) singing about being queer/non-white in Kentucky:

(source)

I only fuck with gay boys, theys, bad bitches, and dykes
Yeah, the redneck thick butt sluts my type
Yeah, the big breasts, big dick dolls my kind
Yeah, they taught me how to fight, so I'ma fight for their rights
Uh, fuck Trump, fuck ICE, free Palestine
I'ma say that shit again: free Palestine
It's American dollars funding genocide
But the people waking up, we got open eyes (source: Genius).

The same rebellious spirit goes for any being of nature fighting back for land, labor and sex with land, labor and sex as, to some degree, performative (re: Amazons, below, refusing to tokenize as they've historically been forced to). Leaving the cave, we meet other rebels, mid-pandemonium: Satanic smugglers bringing hell back into Plato's cave (with Valeria being the Queen of Thieves, below, and thievery serving different aims depending on who does it, why and to whom)!

(source: Facebook, 2024. Samus has many palimpsests, including Sandahl Bergman's aforementioned Valeria. And being girls in a man's world, they all endure comments that spill over onto the men around them. Several sexist comments include [ridiculing the man while paradoxically worshipping the Amazon next to him]: "Nice mangina!" "Ah yes, the male camel toe makes its appearance." Through such "sissification," fans [male or otherwise] can fetishize the Amazon; i.e., to achieve different aims, all at once—both to objectify the woman and attack "inadequate" men, simultaneously [a "crisis" of masculinity from projecting weirdos].

To it, Bergman isn't the tallest woman on the face of the Earth, but she is above average (5'10"). Yet, she's also someone shorter than Arnold, her male co-star who she saves in the movie, anyways (and has the best lines; e.g., "All the gods, they cannot server us; if I were dead and you were still fighting, I would come back—back from the pit of Hell—to fight by your side!"); i.e., she reclaims her power on and off stages that classically fetishize her in different ways. Amazons don't escape fetishization, but reclaim it on different registers: by performatively distinguishing themselves despite the gender trouble, and all without assimilating! To that, Bergman carries herself well—still a woman while fighting "like a man"; i.e., in ways that me, a trans woman, still look up to and respect, today. A "femi-Nazi" [read: TERF] she ain't:

[source]

Language works this way more broadly. "Amazon," for example, isn't classically a compliment, but a stigmatic, highly pejorative label; i.e., when applied to Athenian women by Athenian men, the latter describing the former as monstrous-feminine, ergo second-class. Yet, actresses like Bergman—despite the historical censors surveilling them—have reclaimed "Amazon" to varying degrees of cryptonymic success; i.e., from their classic police function, the act of doing so transforming the aesthetic without changing its appearance: into a sexual-to-asexual, public-nudist weapon with no set role, and one that anyone can use for any purpose. The same reclamatory aim plays out for similar "insults," once camped.

For example, a timely and self-delivered "manlet" can be fine, insofar as it speaks out against abuse; i.e., as much for reclamation [through admittedly self-depreciating humor] as genuine insults delivered unironically by insecure dickheads [the ability to insult oneself paradoxically a form of control, thus power]. Context matters, an ostensible put-down becoming venerative just as easily as not; e.g., "short king"; i.e., depending on who's talking and why. Valeria was the queen for a reason, giving as good as she got while carrying herself well: "You're not a guard!" "Neither are you!" And then they fucked.

Amazons or otherwise, all my work (and that of my friends working with me, two [or more] standing against many) is based on transmuting canon by camping it (ergo its infantilizing elements; e.g., Demi Adejuyigbe punching up against white feminism calling him "wholesome," 2025); i.e., changing what people see (regarding trauma, below) through the context of play post-inheritance. This includes me and my trauma relating as much to stories I consumed before, during and after my abuse connected to that of other's across space and time:

For all Stranger Things' [2017] 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. 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].

In other words, metal is Numinous; i.e., something to pursue, the Gothic quest for power (the Promethean Quest) taking many forms, some of them fierce (rape play per the usual Gothic go-tos) or joyous (re: Beethoven) and some of them oddly quaint; e.g., Rob Halford's "Donner and Blitzen" (2019):

The title refers to Donner and Blitzen, Santa's foremost reindeer. The song uses short-but-hefty words like "power," "icon," and "glory" to regale the listener as D&B tear through the sky (much like their namesakes, thunder and lightning). It's a Christmas chant, but one imbued with divine might.

Consider these lyrics (transcribed by ear so there might be mistakes):

Lots of dactyls (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable). The typical Judas Priest scene—of a mighty invader raining down on us earth-dwellers ("Dreamer Deceiver," "Invader," "Starbreaker," "Painkiller," etc)—is well intact. The only difference is the payload. Moreover, if you listen creatively certain words have the potential to sound malign ("one holy" : "unholy" / "raining love" : "raining blood") [source: "My Two Cents: "Donner and Blitzen" (Rob Halford and Family)," 2019].

Infinite form, infinite power. Regardless of which, whatever people sing about as lyrical content translates to the singers and subjects, too: a sense of community and power through said community—sex, to be sure, but also safety in numbers and all-around social connection; i.e., denied to us elsewhere by Puritanical forces (and the Protestant ethic). Capital alienates everything, Marx argued in 1844; it also sexualizes everything, I replied in 2023. To it, pursuing the alien to reverse the abjection process—often by hyphenating the language of sex and force (as Judas Priest, being queer, love to do)—is key when developing Communism; i.e., as fundamentally Gothic and campy, from Marx to us (re: "Hugging the Alien" and "Making Marx Gay," 2024). We learn to camp power by playing with power as alien (re: whores), and to play with power you must go where it is (re: "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp," 2023):

(artist: Mercedes the Muse; cited from "Toxic Schlock Syndrome," 2025)

As for gaming being toxic—oh, God, for sure! While gaming certainly has the potential to relay important messages through its prolonged study (or I've wasted much of my life), it remains—at least on a casual, mainstream level—absolutely toxic (re: "Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning," 2025). Partly this sees the fanbase(s) bringing conditioned behaviors into the arenas-in-question, but also the games themselves; i.e., conditioning players not just in general (re: "Our Ludic Masters," 2021) but to be, well, giant bigoted assholes anywhere and everywhere they go. Marx' Superstructure is "half-real," in this respect—occurring onstage and off, but also across intersecting media forms and registers of communication (re: me vis-à-vis Jesper Juul, 2007). To that, challenging such canonical norms (and behaviors endorsing those norms) requires steady awareness and intelligence, but also effort to better maintain either in the face of abuse: playing intelligently to encourage critical thought about the usual "opiates."

(source thumbnail: Tommy the gamemaster's "E Honda’s Stage in Street Fighter 2 Why Capcom Removed the Flag and What It Means," 2025)

For me, this means fighting fascism as liminal; i.e., something in/outside videogames, but also between them; re: while "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" (source: "Modularity and Class," 2024). Gamergate happened between an ongoing relationship between America and Japan, corporate executives on either side of the ocean (and from competing nations elsewhere*) exporting Japanese-American fascism cryptonymically back and forth over decades (e.g., the E. Honda stage from Street Fighter II: the World Warrior [1991] having the Japanese Imperial flag in it until 2025, above).

(source: "On the Importance of Creed" from "X Marks the Spot," 2025)

*E.g., China and Hero [2002] being a profoundly problematic piece of media I've written about (above), but also other authors as well (schnee's "Protect Yourself From Media Like This..." 2025); i.e., "hero" in canonical (monomyth) media = "cop" but also barbarian scapegoat (the outsider) for imperial overreach in and out of stories: state apologia unfolding alongside defense of one's home as conflated with bourgeois hegemony. Said hegemony historically treats others like thieves, not the state. It's a classic middle-class trick, in Gothic; i.e., from Radcliffe's banditti into more recent stories stuck in a pro-state past—meaning towards Scooby Doo (1969) and similar false flags, any and all raised by the real pirates owning the cops: corporations and the state, who direct gentrified workers (classically artists, authors, and actors) to blame others (often individual scapegoats) for state theft of worker resources (re: "Radcliffe's Refrain" (2025). Of course, there's proletarian propaganda, too, which unto itself classically involves paid-labor bias that, if not demonizing outside then certainly excluding whores (re: Engels, 1844†), as well as considerable ironies injected deliberately by iconoclastic workers: into status-quo narratives originally produced by big-budget studios with state backing and reach (with Hero being the most expensive Chinese film ever made). Anything they do is legitimate and anything we do is not, but the state will make temporary exceptions within its own embedded contradictions; e.g., recruiting temporarily from minorities, the victims of mandatory state abuse, if only to have them punch down against their own (until the next bust period, that is).

†A problem that lingers well into the present, with Marxist-Leninists (re: "Making Marx Gay"); i.e., the state is straight and historically controls sex to vampirically preserve itself and capital, meaning despite nominal titles like "Communist" employed by Stalin and Mao: apologizing for their own crimes alongside Hitler and American presidents (re: "Understanding Vampires"). As a Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communist, I think all states are bad.

The fruits of that grim harvest are in full-bloom, too—with trans people bearing the brunt of various bigotries passed off onto them by third and second wave feminism, in the '80s, '90s, and beyond (fourth wave being intersectional in ways that merge gender studies with class and race). Combating it is no small feat, my doing so something of a de facto "undertaker" reporting on the perils of trans existence. This includes covering the murder of trans people and their allies (e.g., Nex Benedict or Jonathan Joss), but also the denial of their rights (e.g., the trans youth of today's Michigan, denied by Michigan hospitals strong-armed by the federal government: Eli Newman's "Out of reach: Where do Michigan’s trans youth go for care now?" above, 2025)—and all while searching for allies amid our own intersecting axes of privilege and oppression (e.g., myself, but also this tall drink of water, below). The paradox of survival and healing from past, present and future abuse (rape or otherwise; re: "Healing from Rape") requires seeking solace and sanctuary from people who, at times, admittedly look scary (the knight in shining armor, the Amazon, the femme fatale, etc): there's not enough trans people for us to rely solely on ourselves, and we're classically framed as monsters* by state powers.

*To kill, mid-moral-panic; re: "GNC people have always been alienized and made into deathly fetishes within the state apparatus" (source: "Remember the Fallen").

(source Instagram post, someidiotwithawrench: October 17th, 2025)

Last but not least, you raise an excellent point: picking our battles. Doing so is so important, because bait through microaggression is always the precursor for those giddy for lethal force (macroaggression). Namely execution while pushing their foes against a death river (the Roman modus operandi, forcing their victims to fight to the death or drown). Our surviving of said warrants demands resisting the very urge to lash out when reactive abuse occurs: our abusers have us surrounded, eager to shoot the fish in a barrel. In hindsight, I spoke out of turn when I described your actions as "looking the other way"; your perspective—one of survival against the same enemies that trans people face—has merit and I see you, comrade.

7. Jon: 1:46:35 First let me acknowledge my privilege. When I look at the world I can't help but feel grateful for the ENORMOUS privilege I enjoy. First, I'm a straight male. That alone has smoothed a lot of road. Both my parents being involved and encouraging is an unquantifiable privilege. It would have been more privilege if they didn't divorce when I was a baby, but still a better circumstance than a lot of people have. Now with all of that being said, what I said in the episode is that of all the hardships I face, being asked a question about my heritage ranks really low on the list, and you called that privilege. I would argue that if that interaction ranks higher on someone else's lists of hardships... that person has way more privilege than I do [emphasis, me]. If the worst thing they have to face is a rude question... wow I can't even imagine. That must be a charmed life. 

Me: I agree! Many of the most privileged are also the most fragile; i.e., white straight Americans breaking down the moment you challenge their beliefs. Often this happens by showing them their own hypocrisy (and beneficiary status); i.e., under imperial models—a conflicted state of mind/existence I call "mirror syndrome" furthering abjection to deny one's cop-like role; re (from Volume Three):

Per Radcliffe, rape and police abuse is a potent aphrodisiac (re: "Radcliffe's Refrain"), hence where shadows are both invented and power is found by demasking such fiends; i.e., what canonical Gothic uses to hint at police abuse, only to tokenize us through the same gaslight (source: "'Real Life': Toxic Love and Criminal Sexuality in True Crime," 2025).

In turn (and per Radcliffe's refrain), such things are scapegoats to banish but also ghosts of the counterfeit to quickly summon and banish from behind Black Veils pulled aside, mid-inheritance:

In the Gothic from the later eighteenth century on, as David Punter has shown, "the middle class" often does what we have just seen Leroux do in Le Fantôme: it "displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell" with feelings of both fear and attraction towards the phantasms of what is displaced (Punter, 418). The Gothic, well before Leroux adopts it, enables a growing bourgeois hegemony to be both haunted by and distanced from the "hidden barbarities" that have helped make it possible (Punter, 419)—and hence the repressed uncertainties it feels about its own legitimacy (as in Abraham's "phantom")—by projecting such anomalies into the horrors of apparently old and alien specters, buildings, and crypts (source: "The Ghost of the Counterfeit: Leroux's Fantôme and the Cultural Work of the Gothic," 2002).

In other words—and per Hogle unto myself—power in the West is largely faked and has been out from the start: "Hogle argues that modern Gothic is grounded in fakery. [In turn,] Hogle's observation of the history of The Castle of Otranto forms the basis for understanding the concept of counterfeit as a result of the abjection process" (re: West, 2023); but Gothic, especially from the middle-class side, remains haunted by its own betrayals unto rising feelings of terrorism tied to modern Gothic (re: Crawford, 2013), ergo police violence under Capitalist Realism monopolizing monsters for these aims/profit-through-abjection (re: me, 2024). A wild bastard or conqueror of some kind appears From Somewhere Else (a fearful past, below) and must be subsequently "dealt with," generally through heroic, medieval-levels of violence/extreme prejudice:

(artist: Darek Zabrocki)

Per abjection, there must always be a whore to scapegoat, including crooked cops whitewashing dark castles when destroyed (from Walpole onwards): a bastard to expose and expunge, rectifying a wronged power it presumably imitated and usurped. It's state apologia, whose DARVO arguments author "dark" scapegoats (and death warrants) to transfer power from one ruler to the next (often through barbaric levels of poetic force inside the same chronotopes; re: from Bakhtin unto myriad castle-themed power fantasies; e.g., Howard's Conan the Barbarian looting many-a-fortress from unrightful heirs, such as evil wizards, dragon lords, black knights, Archaic Mothers, etc, as "dark" to justify their righteous slaughter, below).

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

8. Jon: 1:47:33 "The family that you have is the one that you find." Absolutely, and as an outsider in the South the family I found was in metal. Hence, why I felt the need to come to its defense. Now, if I'm not allowed to "rank abuse," then I don't think I can properly defend metal or claim that its existence is a net good, because as we all three would agree, it's definitely not perfect. But it's been a refuge for me in a region that sorely needs it. Here is another place where I regret not phrasing it this way, but the intention of my episode was never to minimize racism but to defend metal. You ultimately agreed with my conclusion that it isn't actually metal that upholds WS but the conditions the art form has no choice but to exist in. 

Me: Precisely! We fight capital (a system founded on rape) while inside it. And I more or less agree: we have to rank rape as a means of strategy amid recognition; i.e., doing so to prevent it provided our ranking and recognition aren't to discredit the testimony of actual victims. In hindsight, this wasn't what you were doing. Furthermore—and similar to your previous query about tone-policing—I would add, here, that appropriation-vs-appreciation boils down to dialectical-material context. Moderates, for example, rank rape to uphold capital through rape apologia; e.g., Richard Dawkins saying he cares about women when, in truth, he only cares about policing the bodies and language of victims (women or not); i.e., Melissa McEwan's 2013 article about him was eventually taken down:

For many survivors of sexual abuse, lasting trauma is defined not by the actual acts, not by their quality or quantity, but by the support they receive following the abuse. Dawkins notes that, as soon as he got away from his abuser, "I ran to tell my friends, many of whom had had the same experience with him." He may not recognize that as a crucial point in his not suffering lasting harm, but the fact that he immediately found support among peers who validated his experience, who neither shamed him nor called him a liar, and the fact that, years later, they would still speak to one another about the abuse after the abuser died, is an invaluable resource to a survivor, which many of us do not have. / To the contrary, many survivors of sexual abuse are silenced and neglected and shamed by the very people who are meant to support and protect us (source, Wayback: "Dawkins Defends Himself with More Rape Apologia," 2013).

The difference between someone like Dawkins and victims like us (of any kind of rape/power abuse) reading the room is just that: victimhood in service to workers and solidarity. While Dawkins was abused himself, McEwan reminds us how he uses his lived abuse to encourage further abuse systemically—to bury his feelings and punch down, in other words. He's a cunt.

To clarify (as to be crystal clear), "ranking abuse" but especially rape (of any sort) is generally done to deny its existence; e.g., I was raped, then accused of not actually being raped; i.e., by someone who was defending a cryptofascist from criticism (a form of tone-policing that bullies the victim while blaming and gaslighting them):

Gen-X Gamer [in "A Token Bigot Goes Full Mask-Off Fascist!" (May 11th, 2025)] goes full mask-off; i.e., this time saying he'll prove that I'm a "fraud," only to employ witch-hunt and conversion therapy arguments while deadnaming me and misgendering my friends and I. He also: apologizes for sexual/sex worker abuse, slut and kink shames myself and others, hates on artists/poor people/service workers, denies the validity of my arguments and relationships, calls me a coward for talking about my own rape, and attacks my professions (re: sex worker and erotic artist fundraising for sex workers and disabled people, with him literally comparing me to Andrew Tate while confessing to his own wife being a sex pest)—all while still being racist, sexist, and transphobic as he brown-noses Karl Jobst! Dude straight up is asking Karl—a broke cryptofascist who misled his own audience to fleece them (now a matter of public record; re: the judge from Billy Mitchell's lawsuit certifying Karl's defamatory actions)—to sue me for calling Karl and Gen-X racist (source: "Token Defenders of Karl" from "Hot Karl," 2025).

This certainly wasn't what you were doing by critiquing Andrew Lee then (or me, now), and it wasn't my place to tell you how to protect yourself in your day-to-day life; i.e., when weighing your abuse against that of others; re: "reading the room," as it were. Solidarity is a balancing act, and self-preservation is totally fine provided we don't punch down.

9. Jon: 1:48:57 No, I'm not Brazilian (at least not that I'm aware), I just spoke clumsily there. As Atlanta is the main market I travel to, I usually see a relatively decent ethnic mix at shows, though definitely still majority white. However, when I saw Cavalera... the room was majority South American (probably 55/45) and I heard a lot of Portuguese (I can easily discern between Spanish and Portuguese thanks to martial arts) so I'm reasonably sure they were mostly Brazilian. I've never been in a room with so many Brazilians, even more than a BJJ seminar. 

Me: There is something entirely profound about being the odd person out/a member of the out-group in a given environment; re: my Animal House (1978) analogy from the essay itself (above), but also my having been the only white person in a given room, and not entirely welcome for it (usually regarded with curiosity, suspicion, or even mistrust)! Trust is earned, and mistrust is sown over generations; i.e., in ways that compound over time, aiding the bourgeoisie by dividing-and-conquering labor across a polity of class, culture and racial lines (re: Marx' tragedy and farce axiom, from "The Eighteenth Brumaire," 1852). Rather than get upset and merely insist that other less-privileged people worship the ground I walk on, I've tried since then to learn how to read the room; i.e., in ways that can change the pattern by breaking the cycle: to understand why whiteness isn't always welcome in non-white spaces.

(artist: Bay Ryan)

To this Bay—my Māori partner—describes how white folk historically don't like to be othered (discussions of voluntary kink aside):

We had a discussion recently about the word "savage," and how one of my exes, Cuwu, used to say the word was historically genocidal, thus should never be used by anyone; yet, they were white, and in your opinion didn't really have room to speak for Indigenous Peoples about their own terms of genocide and how they should use them. It bothered you that white people* get so high and mighty about the oppression of other peoples. And yet when I described frisky behavior from you as "savage" (attached to you being a cute little fuck-goblin), I gave myself pause and asked you what you thought about me using it (remembering Cuwu all the while); you replied matter-of-fact that the term "savage" was accurate and you weren't bothered by it, but that it boils down to personal preference per person and those they interact with regarding overlapping axes of oppression and language thereof. To that, you are my feral little gremlin, my trickster in the forest, and I love you with all of my heart (source: dedication to Bay Ryan from the Poetry Module PDF version).

*What you call pākehā—a Māori word used to describe non-Māori people, but generally in reference to white New Zealanders; it isn't a slur any more than "gringo" is or "gaijin," but white people don't like to be "othered"—i.e., called "cis-het," "white," or otherwise not recognized as being of the in-group in some shape or form [e.g., cracker. Bay adds, "Good white people of New Zealand aka Aotearoa [Māori for 'Land of the Long White Cloud'] will self-identify as ngāti-pākehā, or 'belonging to the people of the colonizer group, specifically of European descent'"].

In my case, I just try to acknowledge that I'm white and that means various things (sort of the inverse of the "you're black" gag from Lethal Weapon 2, above—1989). Like, yeah, my ass is white, and I've had to work pretty hard to overcome my own privilege, but also my own racism; e.g., my mother was not only beaten by her black neighbors as a child/teenager, but also raped when she was homeless by the one friend she had in her late teens; i.e., who just so happened to be black, who she trusted and who, in turn, betrayed her trust in the worst possible way. And while I'm certainly mad at the people who abused my mom (no means no, you creeps), I wouldn't scapegoat them for the criminogenic conditions that led to such things. In short, I wouldn't act racist towards them, because doing only causes the abuse my mom suffered to repeat.

That being said, while many perhaps know the phrase "there's no perfect victim," there's no perfect abusers, either. Rape is a terror weapon, and so is racism, mid-abjection, in ways we weird slutty and/or non-white nerds can reverse (re: "Our Sweet Revenge"). To challenge the state and its alienation, we must critique the state, not its victims. Regarding my mom, all of the people involved were victims to some degree; i.e., to such a degree as to betray out of convenience or desperation, gentrifying and/or tokenizing for Judas pay but also petty revenge (mommy issues). And while assimilation is poor stewardship on its face, that never makes it okay to beat or rape innocent people; re: my mother was poor and white, preyed upon by non-white kids or adults her own age seeking revenge against a vulnerable white girl who never did anything to them except exist; re (from series finale, "It Began with a Whisper"): being oppressed doesn't give you the right to oppress other oppressed people, and believe it or not, white women can be oppressed, too, Jordan Peele!

(source image: A Polaroid taken of my mother when she was younger, shortly after the Fall of the Soviet Union; i.e., circa. 1991, while hanging with the Red Army. Mom's incredibly educated, but one whose streetwise past ensures that she always has a trick [or two] up her sleeve! She also gave me a room of one's own, in essence funding entire my book series.)

10. Jon: 2:29:10 Yes, agreed but actually do the investigation. A lot of people online stop at the association part and then their mind is made up. 

(source: Joe Siegler's "Shadow Warrior Turns 20," 2017)

Me: Absolutely! In my case, I had to learn to unsee the stereotypes informing my opinions of (thus behaviors regarding) non-white people; i.e., that were given to me by media/generational trauma; re: Animal House and my mother's experiences with black people, growing up, but also videogames regarding Asian people; e.g., Mortal Kombat (1993) or Shadow Warrior (above, 1997). Vaudeville is vaudeville, the paradox of nostalgia being that state dogma is dressed up as minstrel-show-in-disguise. To break Capitalist Realism, we must set nostalgia aside while playing with it, too—with Anita Sarkeesian vs Gamergate applying to any bigotry under the sun, but also intersections of different media and modular bigotries. Exploitation and liberation share the same space.

Nowadays, I'm certainly far more tolerant than I was. Doing so took steady conscious effort, on my part—not just to see others different than (and similar to) me as human, mind you, but likewise to invite them; i.e., to overcome problems of division through shared dialogs on power and playing with it, mid-dialectic (of the alien); e.g., my commissioning of Clockwork Rhxbynn to pose for me in my book series galleries: a white trans person working with a non-white trans person. I did so not as a diversity checklist but as a polity of sex workers operating in shared struggle (re: Douglass), ergo finding similarity amid difference: contributing towards a pedagogy of the oppressed that, more often than not, has anisotropic qualities; re: when seeking universal liberation through intersectional solidarity and tactical unity (the stuff of rebellion)! It worked for Bruce Lee, didn't it?

(artist: Clockwork Rhxbynn)

11. Jon: 2:44:33 Point of clarification here. When I said "Why did you lead with something racist" that was not aimed at Andrew and his friends. In context I had just spoken about a guy who sees me in public, walks up, looks both ways, and then says something racist. Why would this person lead the introduction this way? Why is this the ice breaker? That is a very weird social strategy that unfortunately I have experienced more than once (probably less than 10 times) over the course of my life. And just to be very clear, my response was the same every time: "bro what's wrong with you?" (1/2)

Me: Oh! I gotcha! That makes perfect sense!

12. Jon: 2:46:43 On the issue of Project 2025 and the ascendant Right, I think that threat is far more existential than whether or not there will be an increase of prejudice. I believe if Sauron's eye turns to metal, it will be after its very existence rather than attempting to further segregate it. It will be Satanic panic 3.0 [emphasis, me. They will be], as per usual, hypocritical in this endeavor by carving out exceptions for FFDP and Disturbed, but death metal, black metal, metalcore, etc? Puritanism will be the issue. 

Me: Fucking oath! I couldn't agree more. The Nazis, from Hitler and Himmler and Heydrich to Steven Miller and Nick Fuentes, are historically hypocrites of the highest order but also deeply venal, stupid and mortal (the perils of privilege). The same goes for corporations and tech bros, but also token people; i.e., "boundaries for me, not for thee"; e.g., trans people and sex workers of different races (re: "Policing the Whore"). Such betrayals might seem like a bad idea (they are)—and queer people can betray just as much as anyone—but often are infiltrated by outside actors who are either closeted and/or bad faith; i.e., fascism is a gang and said gangs have their own ladders of preferential mistreatment: not to play with the language of the alien to prevent harm, but directly assist in its systemic continuation (undercover cops furthering abjection through the cryptonymy process, below).

As Bay puts it, "Fascism is scared, and to sow fear among others to a higher degree is them trying and failing to hold onto power. Likewise, it's the career liberals who make a life out of it that really get my goat; i.e., I'm not gonna slag off a young liberal—not when they have room to radicalize and grow [and put the pussy on the chainwax]." Concerning fascists, they might be bad actors (and in more ways than one); they remain dead serious in pursuit of power despite being sad little weirdos who think that rape (without quotes) = love. For them and theirs, unironic domination, thievery and lying for the state—to cause harm and consolidate billionaire positions within capital—is baked into their culture, their existence, their entirely insipid, brute-force and incredibly meaningless ways of "life": loveless idiots who can't even like each other while following the leader into a cold, ignominious grave (with "Joy Under Fascism" [2025] being partly to remind Nazis just how little game they have, mid-struggle and by example; e.g., Cuwu and I having loved in ways fascism can never experience/reproduce). Love is alien to them, death their only comfort (allergic to genuine sex and connection)!

(source, top: Jonathan Poletti's "Is Nick Fuentes gay?*" 2024; bottom: Alex Mann's "Catboy Kami: How an internet troll went from an Ipswich bedroom to the heart of the US far-right movement," 2021)

*Are they "gay" or not doesn't really matter insofar as their function is heteronormative (ergo settler-colonial and Cartesian); i.e., people like Fuentes and Kami (above) crossdressing or even exhibiting queer tendencies, social and/or sexual, in bad faith to uphold the status quo. Betrayal is betrayal (refer to "Inside the Man Box; or, Patriarchal, Nerdy Hatred Against Transgender/Non-binary People, Intersexuality and Drag" for discussions of these ideas regarding catboys, twinks and drag queens, etc; read "Chapter Four: Bad Faith. 'Rise, my pretties! Rise!'" for an emphasis on TERFs and fascist feminism, in particular—2025). 

13. Jon: And that's it. My comments went a bit more verbose than I intended as is my custom, but that's the main clarifications I would like to add. I got a lot of value out of your video, certainly some things to ponder that won't fully settle in one sitting. Be safe and be well indeed. (2/2)

Me: You as well, my friend!

Conclusion: a Word of Warning (Stuck on Repeat)

Wrapping things up, I would ask our readers to consider this discussion as part of a larger dialog than our own—one had by older poets like Plato (and his allegory of the cave), directors like the Wachowskis and their seminal Matrix film (above, 1999), and Gothic academics like me responding anisotropically to both, back and forth (re: "The World Is a Vampire"). The same goes for musicians having spills seas of ink; e.g., Frank Zappa:

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

Take it from all of us, comrades: fascism is on the rise again, capital dying in ways that have been dead from the start: "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks" (source: "Limits of the Working-Day," 1867). In other words, death is built into the system, and to revive said system, it will kill as many of us as it can (doing so anyways for profit).

And yet, while metal and its calculated doomsdays' "nightmare fuel" certainly make for good bread and circus stuck seemingly "on repeat," they serve just as well to stabilize and weaponize our voice, mid-cryptonymy—meaning for revolutionary aims reversing abjection! But we have to heed the alien S.O.S., including ourselves as alien and "normal" in differing ratios; re: Jon being Asian and straight and I being white and trans, but both of us being in the same boat trying to survive (a bit like Alien, 1979). Fascism is terminally uncool, that monopoly very much favoring the oppressed (who steal their creative power back from those who historically have none); i.e., punching up at those who are so lame and unoriginal, they need the fucking Imperium to get laid (real "incels," even/especially if they call themselves manly men). Likewise, total control is a myth, the ability for a better world in the hands of those with the dualistic awesome power to change things from inside the prison (ship or otherwise)! Divided, we fall into the pot, helplessly cooked alive; united, we choose the recipe, our individual contributions loading a black cauldron with apotropaic disorder—one whose hellish "witch's brew" sends forbidden knowledge (and unknown pleasures) bubbling to the surface: your lineage is doomed, Nazi scum!

(artist: Michael Whelan)