Persephone's (Gothic) Insights
The horror blog about metal, videogames, and sex.

Interview with the Vampire: Retracing My Steps, Post-Book-Series, to Recall How I Got Here

I've spent so much time on Gothic as part of my life, it feels odd to admit that I've never written a full auto-biography (only bits and bobs, in my own book series). To compensate, this video series retraces our steps, "Interview with the Vampire" walking backwards to tell you a story that—like Shelley's Frankenstein (1818)—can only be told backwards (my usual writing style). And given I've written so many books at this stage, I can afford to be more poetic, conversational and abridged when talking about my increasingly vampire self, post hoc (a sanguine calculus, if ever there were).

(source: "Persephone's Academic History" from "About the Author"; see, also: "On Giving Birth," 2023)

"Interview with the Vampire," though written here introduction-wise, takes place primarily on YouTube. In doing so, it documents my YouTube and academic work from 2014 to 2022—meaning everything that led up to writing my book series (and conceptualizing Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism as a trans woman), to start with. Initially inspired by recently reaching out to Andrew Rakich aka Atun-Shei Films about their upcoming vampire movie, doing so got me reflecting about my work on vampirism; re: "State Vampirism" (2026) and how I currently wound up where I'm at—paradoxically writing about vampires when they're not even historically my favorite[1] monster (re: "Modularity and Class," 2024). In doing so, it makes up the opening to my next volume (doing so hot on the heels of my last one): Volume Five: the Reflect Volume or (for the promo series) "The Sphinx' Riddle." This introduction post—apart from the YouTube videos I complete, list and update at the bottom—shall introduce the idea and its immediate inspirations (re: Atun-Shei and Orleans), followed by older past elements, too. Doing so means my past, but also that of other women: namely Mom, Ann Rice, Mary Shelley and Medusa (or her avatars, more like).

Table of Contents

Note: I've expanded "Interview with the Vampire" since first publishing, table of contents included; and while I've made numerous changes throughout, the clear-and-obvious addendums are in bold and color-coded. —Perse, 4/29/2026

P.S. (5/2/2026), I recognized the essay contents, shifting larger sections around; I also did the footnotes and made various small changes throughout (more citations and visual aids).

P.P.S. (5/4-7/2026), I expanded "On Holistic Struggle" to include a polemic, one made in response to Angela Benedict's dubious "Goth Has a Brainrot Problem" (5/4/2026); added to the footnotes (11a) and my aforementioned polemic, but also a side-note to "Ghastly Invitations" and one about the footnotes (and black cats/stigma animals) in a new section, "Footnotes Sample" (5/5/2026); wrote "Taste Test" (feat. Cuwu) under "Footnotes Sample" while also responding to Angela Benedict's playing the race card* (5/6/2026); and added a food-for-thought exercise on Yoshi's Island (1996) before the essay section, one to acclimate readers to the critical-thinking skills that critiquing supermen like Stalin and Thragg (and their dogma) requires: something that starts at birth (5/7/2026). 

(ibid.)

*And who responded about as well you'd expect (above): vainly. It reminds me of the boastful (and cozy) dragon, Smaug with his waistcoat of diamonds; i.e., "gets criticism" > "plays race card" > "gets countered with antiracism card" > "gives up and fans eyelashes like a Jane Austen villain" (showing me their belly and weak spot, as "bared and exposed as a snail out of its shell"). Impunity is the apex of privilege, love.

  • Concerning State Vampirism
  • Disclaimers
  • Footnotes Sample (feat. Allie Reads)
  • Taste Test; or, a Cryptonymy Sample: Concerning Tokens (and Poetically Parsing Them; feat. Cuwu)
  • Setup (the Gist)
    • This Series (as It Unfolds): the Videos
    • On Interviewing Vampires (and Staking Them)
    • Ghastly Invitations: A Letter from the Vampire; or, My Initial Message to Atun-Shei
    • "Just the Tip"; or What's to Come: Summarizing the Rest of the Series
  • Foreplay (or What's at Stake)

*As given to me by my Irish-Maori partner and contributing ecologist, Bay Ryan (and co-writer/co-editor to my book series, above; see: "Disclaimers"), showing me Indigenous struggles alongside disabled, trans, and neurodivergent sex worker ones. Meeting people already radicalized by generational trauma (and systems of oppression) can radicalize you in turn, including through stories and ghosts collectively reversing abjection. We are all Medusa's children, paving the way forwards to a better post-scarcity world; i.e., in pre-capitalist language, married to modern methods rejecting state vampirism in different playful ways nonetheless guided by academic theory amid the fun being had:

(source skeet [and replies]: vanderWaardart, 2/1/2026)

Doing so cites them alongside other activists and academics. These include: ostensibly straight allies like Atun-Shei, Tad Stoermer, Skip Intro and Fredda (etc) alongside openly queer ones like Essence of Thought, John the Duncan (not a twink, above) and Bridgitte Empire as familiar faces; i.e., alongside new ones, mid-masque, like Ashley Adamson I'm only just learning about (all of whom I'd love to include, provided they're willing to stand side-by-side with a Gothic cum dumpster). Orc or drow, goblin or warg—one doesn't simply walk into Gondor without friends, but we "dark wizards of forbidden knowledge" also don't all know each other (capital alienates). We do share a common enemy and larger goal. So try as I might to rally others to my banner/the cause of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism (e.g., with Brigitte Empire, below), remember to do the same for you-and-yours: in a decentralized scheme without singular heroes, kings or state apologists; i.e., during a shared struggle in duality towards universal liberation, one walking away from Omelas and its standard-to-token defenders. Whatever you call it, take what's useful here and leave the rest!

(source skeet: vanderWaardart, 4/29/2026; and Brigitte Empire's affirmation, 5/4/2026)

  • Essay and Rememory
    • On Tyrants and Their Charm; or, Sacking Troy from within while Castrating Nazi Strongmen: a Mini-Essay about Vampires, Capital and Nation-States (from Outer Space; feat. Stalin, Superman, DBZ and Invincible, etc)
    • Making Trouble, Cryptonymy-Style: Ann Rice, Bloodlines, and Charting New Destinies "in the Blood"; or, the Rememory of Older Mothers (feat. Mom)
  • Footnotes

Concerning State Vampirism

(artist: Karen B.; cited: "The World Is a Vampire")

This piece (essay or otherwise) is part of a larger series on state vampirism. As I conceive it, state vampirism = feeding through the state mid-abjection*, be it openly capitalist or Marxist-Leninist. These are largely questions of aesthetic, whose Promethean (self-destructive) function extends to other configurations "of Omelas"; e.g., Zionism. Furthermore, there's overlap between my anti-Zionist work and my work critiquing Marxist-Leninism/state vampirism alongside capital, so consider reading both.

*Which state predation and revolutionary action both rely upon to function; i.e., "on the Aegis" as something to further or reverse, mid-vampirism, through paid/unpaid labor (re: me, vis-à-vis Julia Kristeva). To that, abjection (us versus them/alienation and fetishization) is one of four main Gothic theories my book series utilizes—the other three being hauntology (retro-future), cryptonymy (show/hide) and chronotopes (time-space) alongside smaller theories; e.g., Jerrold Hogle's ghost of the counterfeit† and Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine (Gorgons and Amazonomachia, as I study it). As a queer sex worker and academic, I dialectically-materially prioritize abjection and vampirism through unpaid labor—chiefly sex work as exploited by Cartesian dualism and its harmful, maximalist binaries under Capitalist Realism, treating nature as monstrous-feminine (re: "Nature Is Food," 2024)—but mention the other theories, too (access "Four Main Gothic Theories (the Four Gs)" in "Paratextual Documents" for their longer definitions). In essence, capital/the state rape by design, which unpaid labor prevents by breaking Capitalist Realism mid-abjection; i.e., reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM (rape play) when having the whore's revenge (which "State Vampirism" explores at length): "to break the profit [and productivity] motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes" (source: "Rape Reprise," 2024).

†Re: "Raising Awareness" (2025),  footnote 1.

Disclaimers

"Interview with the Vampire" is 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. This piece doesn't focus entirely on sex work, but widespread exploitation that includes sex work as problem/solution; i.e., in a shared predatory system, "whoring nature (and workers) out" in highly abject ways.

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

For the Visually Impaired: I read this essay out loud on my YouTube channel.

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: classical artistic nudes (oil-painting female nipples), bikini-style pin-ups and cleavage (e.g., boobs and butt cracks); fascism, genocide and rape*; police brutality and carceral violence; whorephobia, racism and queerphobia (of different kinds), and Gothic poetry and violence (especially vampires and blood, for you squeamish out there)

*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). 

Concerning Keywords: My arguments rely on various keywords I've previously coined, which here present in bold while color-coded (usually only once, while stressing their keyword status; e.g., ludo-Gothic BDSM, Metroidvania, or the palliative Numinous, etc). While some are given here, in abridged form, "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents" provides all neologisms, in full.

Footnotes Sample (feat. Allie Reads)

"How do we kill it?" / "You can't."

—Ripley and Ash, Alien (1979)

My footnotes tend to be poetic and messy (as birth often is), but write beautifully as things to find after the main journey concludes (a tasty treat). Before we start, then, here's bit of a poetic tangent to acclimate you—included here to give readers a playful taste of what the footnotes (should you dare to click on them, muhaha) are like: suitably Byzantine (though I might have overdone it with this sample; i.e., enjoying the celebratory invigilation of my friend and muse, Allie Reads, who we'll get to in just a moment; see, also: my interviewing of her). Concerning footnotes, my gay medievalist-meets-Marxist love for them stems from Suzanna Clarke's wonderful Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004). Think Harry Potter but not dogshit (anti-racist and for adults but intellectual with a historical flavor celebrating British-Romantic poetry and activism; re: footnotes and lots of them)—with me drinking such things up like a sponge (or a vampire, though Clarke's novel has evil faeries, their chieftain the menacingly dandy Man with the Thistle-Down Hair*).

(source: Russian News Agency's "Cat Burglar? Bulgakov House reports famed feline Behemoth abducted," 2018)

*One for the ages. "Oh, he's a bastard!" my grandfather once remarked, with relish—one who (the fairy man, not my wizardly grandfather) Clarke gives cat-like qualities, not unlike Carroll's Cheshire, Bulgakov's Behemoth (and real-life varieties, above), Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould's Lalo Salamanca, Mac's pugilistic (and dumb) Nightman, etc. Such beings personify sin/are seen as symbols of chaos and harbingers of death, bad luck and all-around superstition, but also agents (and pageants) of radical change begging your attention, center-stage; i.e., of a fairy-like, wish-fulfillment sort that, despite being canonically demonized, speak operatically to one's intended audience and their dark desires/guilty pleasures so-called "master"; e.g., Tolkien's early renditions of Sauron the Necromancer being a black cat (a classic witch's familiar/sign of witchcraft) and one where, instead of Sauron (queer-coded in his own right), the main antagonist was Tevildo, the Prince of Cats (a nod to Tibert, alluded to previously by Mercutio [and his queer vibes] in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, c. 1594):

Tevildo was a powerful minion of Melko. Among other duties, he hunted meat for Melko and oversaw its preparation by other servants. According to legend, he was either a cat possessed by an evil spirit or an evil spirit that assumed the form of a cat, similar to Ungoliant taking the form of a spider in The Silmarillion. Tolkien described Tevildo as "coal-black" with eyes that "gleamed both red and green" and "great grey whiskers... as stout and as sharp as needles." He always wore a golden collar that granted him magical abilities, calling to mind the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings. Though Tevildo resembled a house cat, he was large and strong enough to contend with the likes of wolves and hunting hounds, as were the many other villainous cats who served him. This was due to a secret spell that Tevildo learned from Melko (source: Sterling Ulrich & Jordan Iacobucci's "Lord of the Rings' Predecessor to Sauron Was Even Weirder Than You Can Imagine," 2024).

Nature is monstrous-feminine, cats or otherwise. In keeping with Gothic, its trademark sex, drugs and rock 'n roll (and all the taboos, stigmas, shames, stereotypes, etc, they cryptonymically further or reject, mid-abjection) are suitably iconoclastic—an allusion to my own "Method in His Madness: Lovecraft, the Rock and Roll Iconoclast" (2017) commenting on rapist Neil Gaiman and mega-racist Lovecraft's own die-hard status, the latter whose cat from "Rats in the Walls" (1923) he called... "N****r Man." Lovecraft ("Fredrick Brennan?" footnote 1) and Gaiman ("Raw Deals," exhibit 45c2b1) suck, but don't monopolize Gothic anymore than Poe frankly did (re: "Rockstars: From Rock 'n Roll Fans and Jimmi Hendrix' Penis to Horror Movie Special Effects," 2025). Black cats, by comparison, absolutely rock (the cradle or otherwise): the Satanic pulse (and purr) of the Gothic's black little heart (and mischief-making emblems of naughty little catboys and catgirls, everywhere).

(artist: Saturday Night Satan; cited: "Medicine," 2024)

"Neko" or "cat" = "bottom" in gay Japanese slang. "Black" = abject as something to vampirically further or reverse, mid-dialectic (of any alien). Furthermore, such socio-material reversals date back to ancient times carried poetically forwards. To that, cats were guardians of the underworld in Egyptian mythology but suffer scapegoating in Western (and Soviet) stories, especially black "void" cats (darkness visible/splendid mendax) treated as "inferior" to white ones; re: for being "witches' familiars"

If someone says "black lives matter" and someone says "white lives matter" in response, you have an argument that can be reconfigured into a poetic form; e.g., cats; i.e., "black cats matter" vs "white cats matter" when the underlying dialectical-material reality is black is functionally alien/oppressed (them) within capital and white is functionally human/privileged (us) by virtue of being the colonizer position during the dialectic of the alien as something to invoke through the Gothic mode. Issues of class intersect with culture, which require us seeing these things in ways that simplify it without reducing it to one or the other but both engaging back and forth. It becomes something of a dance (source: "Time Is a Circle," 2024).

alongside similar stigma animals under a pet/pest paradigm; e.g., bats, black dogs and werewolves (so-called "lycanthropes") but also corvids (so-called "'fowl' play")

(exhibit 41c2 [from "Hell Hath No Fury," 2024]: Fable the raven and her pet human. As a stigma animal, ravens and crows are treated as harbingers of death. In part, this probably owes to their trademark black appearance, as magpies—despite being corvids—don't get the same wholly bad rap; i.e., because their plumage is only partially black ["One for sorrow, Two for joy…" 1780]. However, Christian bigots [and by extension capitalists weaponizing Christian dogma] likewise associate stigma animals such as corvids with manmade sites [and personas] of death and decay...)

that often personify in vice-character ways speaking and translating to genocidal mayhem under state predation bastardizing myth (so to speak, below); re: nature as monstrous-feminine out of antisemitic tropes used in homophobic ways, nowadays, but also fascist and Communist devils; i.e., under centrist kayfabe restoring the status quo's us-versus-them assignment of various giver/receiver persecution antics (and mania, meaning Agamben's state of exception and homo sacer)—of red and black magic, blood and death (echoes of the Black Death dictating human language) and creation/destruction (etc) through the usual suspects' ghost-of-the-counterfeit, cryptonymy-and-abjection refrains (though I suppose "scapecat" or "scapebird" don't have the same ring to it, whereas "death cat" or "death bird" works just fine)! Everyone loves the whore, the invader or Destroyer as something—however suspicious on its face (or lacking one, also below)—to get the juices flowing (commonly monetary gains under a Protestant ethic's cops-and-robbers schtick, but also food for thought rooted allegorically in performative excitement during ludo-Gothic BDSM, also-also below):

(source; cited: "Hell Hath No Fury"; or, Soulblighter's Token Gay Nazi Revenge")

Cute and/or scary per the uncanny's friend/foe (fight/flight) confusion, mid-vaso-vagal and memento mori (what the Japanese call kawaii and kowai versus American zoomers' own "uwu" and "owo"), a vampire is a vampire—one to Numinously "stake," celebrate (or both) with/without irony on and offstage, in highly dualistic, liminal ways (canon vs camp). The state sucks; we suck back—all by using the same stages, bodies and language to liberate ours in exploitation theatre (the educational proxy and vector during a semi-forbidden information exchange, one the state cannot stop [owing to its usual contradictions] and one we exploit, accordingly). Continued force and feat-of-arms alone is not enough, terror the kissing cousin of force (the whore's domain); i.e., that imperialists of all walks (theory or otherwise) devalue to their own detriment through endless wars they start, then cannot escape; e.g., Israel and America (GDF's "Israel Is Losing," 2026). Magic is magic; the ones with a greater command seize the day (as guerrillas always do, after great hardship)! Medusa isn't simply a death goddess, then, but the very Earth itself as ravenous for a fool's march into her porcupine snatch (or any such hole or hyphenation); i.e., the quills and teeth therein sucking the colonizer dry—both of actual lifeforce alongside any will to fight, mid-sarcophagus, into the future of an ongoing anti-predatory PTSD. Equipped to take it all, Medusa the "size queen" goes both ways: "Come to Momma!" a promise and a threat whose nightly envoy's "talent for survival" marries instinct with insight (abusing laser-red "bedroom eyes," which wordlessly rasp "come closer" alongside other blushing tools—their opulent assemblage confusing predator/prey while going "where the sun don't shine," below).

(artist [and dildo owner]: Allie Reads)

"The raven himself is hoarse," indeed! Any "mowing of the lawn" as optimistically routine, then, becomes—much to the colonizer's chagrin—a Promethean quagmire; i.e., one where Medusa's dark-and-spiny pubes (a not-so-palliative Numinous despite her outwardly "sunny" disposition, above) terrifyingly stab and shrivel her invaders wholesale (a princess in the tower that unlike Israel's executive, is actually cute). So does all's fair in love and war turn the prize-like home into an Ozymandian trap, but keep the "Grail Beacon" on; e.g., Routine (2025), after many delays from Lunar Software (spent in "development heaven"), fixating on rogue technology but also predatory trees "eating Zeus" for a change; i.e., in a Freudian, starkly primordial space of forbidden beauty comparable to Alien (1979) from decades prior (a ghost station versus a ghost ship, though "spaceship" and "space station" confuse the two): picturesque scenery with little sound offers up "Medusa's backside" in all her heavenly-to-hellish glory. Here, the moon offers a hare-like symbol that burrows, cuniculus-style (which sounds oddly like cunnilingus), into the brain that drains one's wits; i.e., while arousing a Numinously fatal curiosity (and not just for cats, the Ozymandian litterbox generally open season on all life forms).

(source: David Carcasole's "ROUTINE Tips and Tricks Guide," 2025)

During a notably insect (or fungal, plant, etc) politics, "she succ!" (and impregnate) with the spawn of a copycat brood, her strength-in-numbers (and notably clandestine) approach eating the state's expendable dummies inside-out (sucks to be them); e.g., Alraune-style, or through similar stationary or prey-like examples hiding a phallic, succubean predation/Orientalism "among the tombstones": the power over life and death. So the tree isn't God's dick, it's Medusa's—a self-tending and endlessly replicating (cryptomimetic) garden as not needing a patriarchal overseer to tend her "sylvan scene." As if. The roots clog the drains, corrupting the data therein and minds of those born into such hells experiencing ironic penetration (and impregnation, the whore's revenge taking back the land with such terror devices, a given "Russian doll" [or Iron Maiden] smuggling the Amazon [or the Gorgon] "into Troy"; re: "Our Sweet Revenge," 2025).

(source: "ROUTINE Tips and Tricks Guide")

Medusa, unlike the state, is immortal no matter how much they harvest her organs (though taking too much makes her inhospitable towards/uninhabitable for humans). The colonial binary's class nightmare during Capitalist (and Socialist) Realism, then, denotes "trouble in Paradise" (a Black Bible/witch's grimoire dressed up as "mad science"); i.e., having long since "taken root," an "unweeded garden grown to seed" while home "decays" (the ruling class seeing unchecked life as death for capital unable to exploit such things, "rotting on the vine"); e.g., aping the "super carrot" from Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World (1951) or the Bodysnatcher franchise (1954), either speaking synchronistically to Red-Scare replacement fears mid-pastoral's uncanny decolonization (and dystopian oblivion, the Gothic chronotope "stuck in the swamp"): the slasher and the changeling as ontologically ambiguous, any form they take. So does acid Communism and the hauntological death-and-rebirth "cyberpunk" (and similar Gothic castles) offer up a regular bread-and-circus.

"A bit of strange," such things sell (sex or otherwise) mid-crisis-and-decay through state cryptonymy and abjection stalling death: when funneling towards the drain—what Hogle astutely calls "a vanishing point" per his "ghost of the counterfeit" (re: "The Restless Labyrinth," 1980). It's one Medusa echoes mise-en-abyme while predating (so to speak) such men. This means Marx before Freud, such "spectres" neatly highlighted by Shelley's standing her two feet on giant's shoulders—all while absorbing the monstrous past into a decidedly "lush bush"; i.e., soaking there like a tampon (or a Mormon) to birth her own Gorgon, Medusa-to-Metis-to-Medusa, reveling in androgyny's immaculate/profane (earthly) divinities, hyphenating and hugging alien things: death as a homely space (or spore) of fear to make peace with/grant stewardship towards better caretakers, not defy in futility that boxed-in only destroys the ecosystem, mid-Capitalocene! In place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen (thumbing Tolkien's "Goldilocks Imperialism" in the eye): a bewitching predator who knows the score. So Medusa waits, dreaming—meaning for a chance to wake up, down the road at the center of the maze, and be worshipped again in post-scarcity ways, horn-of-plenty (which isn't utopian because Gothic teaches, pleasure-and-pain, the struggle it takes to get there).

(artist: Allie Reads)

I digress. Returning to the postcolonial note I had in mind (apologies, I have sex on the brain), "Victory has defeated them"; i.e., the DIY castration of these already-lobotomized dunces a proliferation of "mental eunuchs" that Medusa—ever-playful as the feral, "goblin energy" orchestrator of state demise by unifying binaries (of a light/dark and good/evil refrain)—can manipulate, bait-and-switch, as easily as her foes: those "holding the reins" (or so they tell themselves). Control changes hands and must, because that is the natural (unalienable) order of things capital only copies, mid-dislocation. It's not a pussy to fuck (not entirely anyways), but one to be digested inside (a Death Star) saying "Pick me up!" Very diabolical (apparently a word the zoomers use, meaning I "liked it before it was cool"; re: Mom and Dad Save the World, 1992; see: "Whores and Faust: Summoning the Whore/Black Penitent," 2025)! Subversion but also under/overestimation are the devil's coin, ones the Gothic (and its whores) teach us to spend from an early age, cradle-to-grave (so-called "live burial" a reoccurring theme, therein, while retracing one's steps and dangling this in front of that; i.e., while adding and removing "pieces from the board," the equation, the picture as things Medusa uses, one-and-all, to contain her foes and children: lost puppies looking for master inside a yawning concentric labyrinth, castles-inside-castles during a flying fortress trolling for food, a space whale feeding indifferently on helpless plankton). 

(exhibit 33b2c1c2 [from "'Following in Medusa's Footsteps': Meeting Medusa," 2024]: Artist: Luca Maria. Earlier we mentioned the fat lady singing to signal the end—state shift from someone fat, sassy and loud bringing the Cartesian house down. This isn't psychological mumbo-jumbo but a poetic commentary on vast, intersecting socio-material factors that lead to systemic change; i.e., singing out of multiple mouths, of which many things come out and for which those of a female/non-male body [or feminized AMAB body] are treated as alien/fetish...)

And if the usual Cartesian louts seem fat-and-content sending others to die (namely Abrahamic babes by old Saturnine men "cozy in Omelas"), know they will die, too; i.e., once Medusa, the Dark Mother in her own time (and having power over things like all mothers do), eventually gets up, slithers over and sits unceremoniously on them and theirs (without whom she can live just fine, and whose mere gaze or touch makes them [allergic to darkness] spontaneously combust). Existential crises (and planetary evocations) aside, the Gorgon (and her sublime stand-ins, Allie or otherwise) remain a fine metaphorical imprimatur for sex and force during the usual tug-o'-wars—meaning in ways that translate, well enough, to the rebel's "mother of invention" versus deftly the occasional flashes of former genius from the rapist: the one Her Majesty routinely tires out, rest-and-digest (accustomed to rape as part of the natural world, foisted off on the humanly psychosexual side of things), the latter (the state) overshadowed by ongoing flaccidity among the penetrator as "topped from below" (nostalgia for the simulacrum of their own false majesty [and modesty] eclipsed by such things; e.g., Apep's serpentine maw "eating Saigon," above).

So don't fear the reaper or take it for granted; use it, and put the pussy (cat or otherwise) on the chainwax! Show the enemy their own deaths (the only thing they fear) as waiting patiently for them: the proverbial "sins of the father" eating the entire Patriarchy (capital and the state) alive! Poetry (Gothic or otherwise) = perspective and leverage, a cuntly Cubism to make Picasso (and his ilk) shit their pedophile pants. Monopolies are impossible, the endless shapes of a given myth (e.g., Grendel's mother) endless power for Medusa to reverse abjection (ergo state predation) with, mid-worship. Prey and learn at mommy's feet, impaled stake-like on her thirsty "snakes" (or horns, below—same difference)!

(artist: Allie Reads)

End tangent!

Taste Test; or, a Cryptonymy Sample: Concerning Tokens (and Poetically Parsing Them; feat. Cuwu)

"Wanna hit it from the back, little man?"

—Cuwu, showing me the ropes/playing the mommy domme (despite being trans) to help me come out and play (2022)

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

Vampires are dualistic, thus potentially tokenized in ways we'll have to parse "on the job"; i.e., learning while on the job, from others who—seemingly younger and more green—are actually the veteran of things we ourselves have only dreamt about; e.g., Cuwu* giving me the green light to rebellion, all while tapping that fat "skinny thicc" ass and saying "green, bright green!" (the siren's song slicing through state alarm-bell cacophonies to wake me up further than I already was)! The cake is a lie, and ass war is class war to lie as needed, meaning poetry = perception to illustrate consent as seemingly "up for grabs," during ludo-Gothic BDSM; or, to quote, Mercutio, "as dreamers in their beds at night" while "going to Queen Maeb" (and her delicious doubles, below)! Don't rule out paradox; nudity isn't weakness or vestigial, but strength doubling as useful code: ready to pounce (rawr), cryptonymy-and-abjection! Here's a sample to encourage you to taste your own cakes and pies (or creampies), Alice-in-Wonderland: an onion to peel, a strip to tease shaking this or that to rattle this or that, pussy-on-the-chainwax (and open our eyes using forbidden sight as knowledge in the flesh, if-you-give-a-mouse-a-cookie). Disarmingly hot (and open about such things despite looking normal† in clothes, below), Cuwu taught me the same basic skills my work now preserves: my memory of them. Much of that is in photos, but also in my writing keeping those memories—so many things worth remembering—happily alive.

*Something of a vampire, themselves, who—after Zeuhl "bit" my closeted ass to lay the dragon's egg (so to speak; re: "Essay #12: 'Interview with the Vampire,' pt.2: Victim of Changes; or, Spilling Tea," 2026)—Cuwu helped it hatch by repeatedly "biting" what had already been bit (a compound radicalism we'll touch on more, deeper inside). Forget "once-bitten, twice-shy." I was doubly-eager to seek more and more—not bitter at all, but ready-and-willing to play that special kind of game capital doesn't sell (coming out of the closet six months after meeting Cuwu; re: "Coming Out as Trans," 2022). It's not just the meeting of someone that changes your life, but also the indelible impression they leave on you afterwards!

†When they weren't trying to turn me on/get my attention, that is. They were fun, mischievous—a little loveable imp who had both seen and done too much, but still wanted to do more in ways that were healthier (and safer) than their actual past:

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

I digress. Here's a small tangent about tokenism and exposing marginal traitors during the cryptonymy process, specifically the short version including Cuwu the self-described "vampire fae" (we'll consider "revolutionary cryptonymy" and "transgressive nudism" more, in footnote 10). Gothic, as such, is riddled with ambiguity for troubling comparison (and vampiric mastery in seemingly unlikely places, above); i.e., for predator and prey as going both ways (re: "Prey as Liberators," 2024)—meaning workers can prey on owners and vice versa, but also can serve owners in bad faith, hunting minorities while being marginalized; e.g., TERFs and SWERFs, but also black moderates and reactionaries (which overlap as needed to tokenize; see: my anti-racist compendium). My focus combats tokenism, the latter using oppression in bad faith to conceal counterrevolutionary action that must be exposed, on the daily. A good exposure method isn't the "smell test" (or other senses alone, which can be fooled in different ways), but what I call "the scratching method" (or scratch-and-sniff, though that sounds terrible); i.e., reversing abjection to see how workers respond—in short, how they react to different things that get them to drop the mask; re: the magic mirror argument, as demonstrated previously against Th3Birdman: attacking what is sacred (veneers to canonically conceal predation with) that, once scratched, bleed fascist blood (which liberals are, just with more masks and steps). Feed on it, then learn and evolve as needed to "up the ante."

(source thumbnail: "Essay #10.5: Black Moderates Don't Challenge Fascism," 2026)

While many have concentric veneers that have to be pulled down first (above), thus "peeling the onion" (re: "Trans TERFs, NERFs, and Queer Bosses," which explores the queer and racial side of things), you can spare yourself a massive headache by cutting to the chase; i.e., by saying these magic words, verbatim (to bait your foes with talk being categorically "cheap," thus easy to execute): "Trans people are people, sex work is work, all cops are bad, fuck Nazis, and free Palestine (and all Indigenous lands)." Better yet, pick one, meaning whichever issue you need and/or want to highlight, but start quick, punchy and basic—something to rattle the easily-rattled to betray themselves ASAP. It's not hard, once learned, but it takes skill that nonetheless must be taught, and not in school; re: Cuwu's tutelage (of me, student/master and vice versa, below) being extracurricular and frankly painful without leaving lasting harm/visible marks (remember your aftercare). Weird attracts weird, the scar the lesson through new stories (and nostalgia) that don't harm either side in the present or the future; re: breaking Capitalist Realism, in the process, upon ourselves. In keeping with but also building on Marx, to emphasize with the whore (already abject under nuclear models) is to lead capital/the state towards better things: a never-before stateless, classless, moneyless, raceless, and genderless (or fluid, infinite) existence that treats sex and asexuality as two sides of a given exchange (work or otherwise, though work defines workers*); i.e., the way to a whore's heart is through their holes, the ferryman's fee often simply being nice towards something weird looking for fun: trust is built among the heartbreakers ("Two of hearts, I want you, I need you!").

*Which under Communism, become "needers"; re: "from each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] need" (versus work, which Socialism is, "paving the road").

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

From there, and equipped with the muse's tools of the trade (whores or otherwise), you can deal with/navigate the traps of more skilled bad actors (token or otherwise, including their trap-like language). However, most traitors never get that far (many accustomed to brute force versus undercover methods with a steep cost and long investment). It takes too much work and capital/state predation (re: profit and productivity pimping nature) is all about easy access; i.e., that quick-and-dirty exploitation while maintaining the lie. So cut through armor and illusion to gauge someone else's worth laid bare (or your own), seeing through everything else: the Sphinx' proverbial "riddle" not always a question, but a test that paradoxically (through paradox) reveals just as fast "who's the hunter, who's the game" (as Scandal puts it)—specifically a statement judging a response to decide what to do next, per case. So is "worthiness" not a value judgement, but dialectical-material criticism surviving traitors before/after they expose themselves. Bait and switch, my dudes, starting with minimal effort before putting on "the heat"; i.e., meaning without having to lift a finger or take off your clothes (unless you want to/already have; re: Cuwu). Be succinct, but alluring in ways that get your foes to drop their guard, while you—tits-out and seemingly "on the hip" (while under the gun, below)—have your enemies right where you want 'em. Ass war is class war and class war intersects with culture and race to liberate or exploit sex work therefore all work, cryptonymy-and-abjection!

Again, this cuts both ways, our cryptonymy and abjection (of unpaid labor) versus other workers infiltrating our groups, monomyth-style; i.e., for a centralized authority who will pay them should they succeed (so-called "dark money" but also that of their peers baying for minority blood, including that of other minorities eating each other under criminogenic conditions). Blood money changes hands while aping the colonized among themselves, per enclosure. The sooner you complicate that, the sooner you can "gum up" the works and show yourself to be a tougher nut to crack than is deemed "worthwhile"; i.e., they'll have long since dropped the mask, moving onto greener pastures (to exploit), and you'll have exposed them as bad-faith, which again is entirely our goal when combatting betrayal (re: of class, culture and race, through any mask they might wear to divide-and-conquer themselves and us): as where we are, or "where the dogs are shitting" as Chris Cornell puts it. Outshine them. Fuck to metal, but also be it—doing so in ways speaking honestly and dishonestly to each other (workers) as needed (e.g., girls shit/use the bathroom alongside those treated like girls, below). In turn, beauty is only a curse if you let it, the same thing(s) a potent weapon in the right hands with the right instruction (what Cuwu, an enthusiastic stoner [read: eco-Socialist] and fervent Marxist-Leninist, often called "pretty privilege" but I digress): with style and panache, cool (under pressure/as fuck) when our foes are lame.

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

The paradox of sex and asexuality is that many show/conceal different things to get different things; our needs don't always match, and we can get hurt when push comes to shove (an extinction burst). Hurt, not harm, the chase simply part of the game we all play (and not just Cuwu and I; e.g., Macabre Storytelling; see: "Male Dating & Sex Struggles Part 2: A Final Word*," 2026). The mask and the mirror = the Gorgon (and similar beings, above and below). Such is simply how humans operate and have before masks or mirrors (of the material sort); i.e., good or bad, in a dialectical-material refrain that doubles during oppositional synthesis punching up—meaning our daily habits to cultivate and synthesize praxis versus bad actors (re: "On Twin Trees" and "The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis," 2023 and 2024). So Cuwu rescued me from harm, then gave me things to sell and share as I wished—all provided I kept their real name out of it, of course (re: "Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later (give or take) after Five Books; or, Cuwu's Hand in Forming Ludo-Gothic BDSM," 2025). And so I have, laboring to selective secrecy while turning them into part of the show (one that "must go on," with or without them outside these posters). They took me apart and learned what makes me "tick"; but I did the same with them, and through this unsteady and exciting exchange-as-lesson (warts and all) continues to impart wisdom that seems "fatal" but paradoxically isn't: the gateway to Heaven and Hell by marrying the two... and using bad puns that sound harmful but, again, aren't; e.g., "fuck/slay that pussy" to "storm my 'castle'" or simply "more, more!" often how such campy things play out, in practice (and inside the pussy or asshole). Learn from the nymphs to befriend them; i.e., as part of a better cause than simply raping the world one more time!

*Whose prior video, "Male Dating & Sex Struggles: A Problem In Plain Sight" (2021), motivated me to learn and experience better forms of relating to others—sex or otherwise, but often combining them during holistic study. For me, this often meant Cuwu: more than meets the eye, but also front-and-center in their own brand of witchcraft (one casting a spell on me, no slouch myself in the ol' spell-casting department): as student/master and voyeur/exhibitionist. Mix and match, my dudes! "Hex" whoever using your own Voodoo dolls (though preferably in quotes/with irony) provided it leads to systemic reductions of abuse. Cuwu helped me craft ludo-Gothic BDSM; now take and use it yourselves, "on the Aegis":

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

Bodies, booties or otherwise, are made to be hidden and shown, voyeur/exhibit, thus dressed up and engaged with (spankings or otherwise) however workers toil, under state surveillance—not to completely fool the enemy but mislead, overwhelm and confuse them just as well. This and healing walk hand-in-hand (or sword-in-sheath, but I digress; re: "Healing from Rape," 2024). Such are the joys of meeting "a wild cutie" who chooses to show themselves and take part; i.e., often only for a short window of time, but one to capture through a polity of vantage points: communicating that which resists exposure that classically survives on stage in guilded mysteries; e.g., ninjas and kabuki theatre seeing the audience (and the performers) asking the same question: "Were ninjas real?" (Max Miller's "This Recipe Took 3 Years... Ninja Kikatsugan," 2025). Whores are ninjas, including proudly slutty ones still infiltrating this-or-that, heart-to-break (versus something a bit more veiled; e.g., Berlin cocottes; re: "Joy Under Fascism," 2025): the princess in the tower* "eating the dragon" or vice versa, but also being the dragon (or the knight, etc); i.e., as things to hyphenate, confuse and play however workers need to reclaim ourselves. Fight bravely in ways that inspire others to answer the call, come-what-may!

*The Lady of Shalott, as I put it (taking from Loreena Mckennitt taking from Tennyson).

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

To it, show/censor whatever you need to, "milking Medusa" (and her parts) cryptonymy-and-abjection. Paint yourself and your friends; paint over them (above). Abbreviate to slogans that cut the fat/get the gist, preferably personifying either in ready-to-eat ways; e.g., "rattle cages, not join them" (or whatever fits on a billboard*, body or otherwise). Fight through the pain while bearing it all and duping your predators in the bargain (any language a mask and a sign, bodies or otherwise). Make invasion impossible for them and exposure all but guaranteed; out whoever as having "taken the soup" (through any tokenized refrain; e.g., "black skin, white masks" or "gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss"). Fight soup with soup, paint with paint, sometimes literally (with soup as paint, below): threaten norms/the status quo, accordingly, and all to defend people (and other animals, all part of the environment) over property. However "gross" it seems, "Jarate that shit" (some might prefer Molotov cocktails, but same idea; also, I'm being poetic, here, because it's more flexible [thus useful] to our cause). In any event, assimilation is poor stewardship and silence is death (segregation no defense, etc). So speak out in ways that show/conceal whatever you need to maximize advantage/minimize risk. Take what the state sees as "automatically violent" and make it seem meek but "for those who know" among us. Bitch, please; we walk among you!

*"This chicanery? He's done worse. That billboard! Are you telling me that a man just happens to fall like that? No! He orchestrated it!" Try it, yourselves, and "pull a Jimmy" to rob the owner class (and their dogs) stone blind ("a fool and his money are parted soon"). The owner class are already charlatans, so fight fire with fire; i.e., so long as it endears you to worthy friends helping the cause (and avoids literal-to-figurative "sticky situations" like Lalo shooting Howard in the dome, but I digress; i.e., so-called "blowback").

(source: Associated Press' "Climate protesters throw tomato soup on Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers,'" 2022)

In other words vampires hypnotize and penetrate, which goes both ways "inside the cage" (to rage however workers require to "win* the war").  Don't settle for surface-level methods that require a lot of setup and deliver something akin to "60% of the time, it works every time!" Girl, no; use what works every time, penetrating to the heart of other vampires non-invasively to see what's lurking there (dragons or otherwise, Cuwu loving dragons but also vampires; re: "Challenging the State's Manufactured Stupidity," 2024). Clues can be found on the surface/within thresholds (re: Sedgwick), but penetrative action must occur if we're to get anywhere substantial. Trace the bloodline to the source, but do it without harming anyone (as tactical frivolity aspires to) and let them expose themselves: in Promethean (self-destructive) ways that speak to sell-outs among the wretched of the Earth. Whether out of convenience and/or desperation, betrayal is betrayal, but whose masks—however dense and opaque they seem—can be used in duality to anisotropically reverse their terror/counterterror function; i.e., to help, not hinder workers, by showing and revealing this or that as required to empathize with, mid-camp: "We neutronized it, complete protonic reversal!" / "It's Miller Time!"

*"Are ya winning, son?" Wait and see, but also come and see! Take part in the spectacle, one that true rebellion demands!

(exhibit 100a3 [from "Trans TERFs, NERFs, and Queer Bosses" ]: Cryptonymy is layered and dualistic, "Inside [a] Hall of Mirrors" [2024]; i.e., disguise pastiche through concentric veneers/gobstopper masks stems from an internalized desire [for cops] to employ compound subterfuge to defend the state. Some persons might be centrists who are duped by fascists [making them accidental or fascists complicit with their ideas]; many more are fascists in bad-faith, requiring gender parody/trouble to make cryptofascists posturing as progressive, centrist or simply "not Nazis" to gag or shit their pants, self-reporting in the most ignominious manner possible. Once the mask drops or breaks, centrists can be outted as conservative instead of their more polite-sounding disguises like "gender-critical," which is difficult to recover from; for conservatives, they can always posture as strong [another mask] unless they are humiliated in ways members of their own den won't tolerate or explain away.

Their insecurity is our greatest weapon. While humanizing our enemies—i.e., by teaching them to love us and each other by dismantling the source of darkness and division [the state]—sometimes, we don't have that option. We become required to make fascists gag or defecate mid-cryptonymy by simply being ourselves; i.e., in ways we know will upset them, thus drop the mask: flashing, breeding, rape pastiche/play and nudism as a means of attacking our own insecurities as cultivated by the state by reclaiming the instruments thereof. More of this in Chapter Five.)

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

So was Cuwu my Gorgon (and little dragon*, above) to invigilate (and artistically reanimate); i.e., the little freak and fighter who loved to be ravished and to help their friends in deeply Numinous ways, mid-cryptonymy reversing abjection. So has this been a taste of what they offered me, and so does "Medusa lives!" echo "There's still life in the old lady [or trans man], yet!" Whatever the course of action (and gender), "Get it, girl!" Indeed, "stab them on Weathertop," separating the wheat from the chaff (traitors from rebels) to poetically teach consent as a vitally mutual equation (and all without the enemy's knowledge, before/after)!

*Taken from Bruce Lee, a Hong Kong cha-cha dance champion who showed that big power comes in small packages on all registers; i.e., as a lover and a fighter but also actor and activist. Same idea with Cuwu, also a dancer and just as much an activist (and drug user) as Bruce† was (though perhaps a bit more caked-up than Mr. Skin-and-Bones [see: further down]. Also, fun fact: Chinese dragons [unlike their Western counterparts' vice-like characteristics] are considered sources not only of strength, but luck, vitality and wisdom—not unlike vampires)! Bruce was frankly if not one-of-a-kind then certainly one-in-a-million; he blazed trails that continue to burn, long after his death: teaching us girls (and trans men) how to kick ass (with me loving his movies, on VHS)! "Water can flow or it can crash! Be water, friend!"

(source: Reddit)

†Playing folk heroes in his films, Bruce—though admittedly being what black folk would call "bougie" (middle-class, not unlike Dr. MLK)—also conspicuously: fought for equal rights among all non-white workers on-and-offstage and did hard drugs/had affairs (it was the '60s, after all). If Bruce taught us anything, it's don't strive for "moral perfection" or "purity"; i.e., in the dump site. Instead, use the trash therein (dump trucks or otherwise) to wage war in visible rebellion; i.e., that gives your transgressive nudism an invisible shield per cryptonymy that, if done well, might yield far-reaching socio-material effects (and echoes; e.g., Sailor Jupiter, above). So is rebellion half-real (as I argue), and rebellion and scandal aren't mutually exclusive, in that respect (nor are the masculine and the feminine, whatever form the monstrous-feminine takes). But we should all be so lucky to live such full and memorable lives, as Bruce Lee once did! Indeed, I feel like I already have (minus the fame and fortune, I fear)! I fuck with dragons, including Cuwu as my little dragon (only for a moment, of course). 10/10, would fuck again (to flow and crash against that fat ass)! The legend lives on, something to seek and emulate during fresh forays into the endless unknown!

(artist, left: Bruce Lee; right: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Such things only start small, canonizing or camping the holocaust by "revisiting the gravesite." For the state, they point and laugh before turning us slowly into merch for their witch hunters to wear (and worship as they do). And we, growing up with similar toys, feel confused but also desirous: to show you our monstrous selves not as "scary" (at least not entirely) but loveable, too; i.e., in a raw honesty—one, bare-and-exposed that seems to ask, the Phantom of the Opera without his mask, "If we can't stand to share or be seen in each other's company, then what chance do we possibly have?" Whores are monsters, with the power to love and change the world in spite of that fact—nay, all the more for it; i.e., our hearts on our sleeves, our money where our mouths are, to show you where the Red Fern grows (and other "bushes"): "We are the Dead. Short days ago / We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow" (source: "Flanders Fields," 1915).

However oxymoronic that sounds or feels, let stories like Cuwu's and mine (and similar star-crossed lovers, above) warm and give you courage in the dark days that follow. Stabbing as I have at the ghosts of the past (still a better love story than Twilight, also above), let that transfuse and nourish you; i.e., writing as I do as though already dead: seeking illicitly prurient (or at least forbidden) connection in the dead of night brought to light of day. Aren't we all? I'd say men have killed for less (they have, usually some colorful ribbons if you ask Napoleon) but the lever is always sex; i.e., that thing the state polices more than anything through force to maintain its iron grip on the planet, Athens-to-America (and hang over the heads of those who dare just give it away "for free," beheading such "homewreckers" to steal and commodify their bargaining chips through the usual pimp/whore refrains: dowries and plunder). Drive it home, then keep going wherever Medusa, Lady Communism herself, leads you to. That success—what the best revenge is made of—is what we whores of Gothic Communism are all about!

Setup (the Gist)

This Series (as It Unfolds): the Videos

Dee Reynolds: What is "Night Crawlers"?
Dennis Reynolds: It's a game where they crawl around in the night like worms.
Charlie Kelly: I never said that.
Frank Reynolds: Yeah, well that's what it is (source).

—the Gang, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005)

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

My larger book series is a shelf of brains in glass jars, concentrically arranged but also interconnected through a variety of endless "Abbie Normal" pathways (surgical, but "madly" so: a Hamlet-level method to said madness): to embrace decay "among the midden," but also like Shelley's highly undervalued Last Man (1826) consider the beautiful side of such things (enhanced while the world decays; e.g., this dog who loves trains riding a train). Moreover, this video series is largely set; i.e., as I'm working with a pre-made body of work the book volume will include (fixated ritualistically on the monstrous-feminine damsel as "forte/fatale"; e.g., Amazons-and-Gorgons pareidolia, above). But I can/shall choose from it as I wish. As I do, and as I record a given section for YouTube, I will share it here and update this section.

To it, here's the rough scaffold for what the video series shall entail (which "The Sphinx' Riddle" will ultimately either provide [for the written portions] or link to [for the video portions] in Volume Five, when it releases):

[to be added/expanded on; stay tuned]

(source: Persephone van der Waard's "IGN Alien: Isolation Review Introspective," 2014)

On Interviewing Vampires (and Staking Them)

"So a vampire can cry."

—the reporter, Interview with the Vampire (1994)

This series, written and video, is about vampires and interviewing them (or someone who writes about them, but I digress). To interview vampires—any vampire, not just my gay ass monologuing here—is to introspect, abject and retroject (and confess/project this or that, from state margins/partitions "relegating Hell" that iconoclasts decolonize).

To it, this is hardly my first time at the wheel (e.g., "Back to Jadis' Dollhouse," 2024), but is the first time I'll be doing it outside my aforementioned book series; i.e., in a more SFW format, with all the gifts (and curses) foresight offers (to try and monetize and spread me and my friends' work, as dark oracles "telling on Rome"); re: in a compendium of older material to make up said series' Volume Five (for holistic purposes, hence the title). To understand how I'm more vampiric than I care to admit (even if witches are more my style), "Interview" explores: my older video essays on YouTube (e.g., on Alien: Isolation [my defense of the game and personal review] and The Babadook, 2014), but also undergraduate work, graduate work and symposiums in the mid-2010s, followed by my interview series on "Alien: Ore" (2019) and love for horror media tied to YouTube and my horror blog[2] (which I formed in 2015, and eventually had to use for grad school; e.g., my blogposts on the 2013 British zombie show In the Flesh, below).

(exhibit 6*: source, left: "In the Flesh (2013): Season 1 Review, part 1," 2018; model and artist, right: Autumn Ivy and Persephone van der Waard. Zombies are weak/strong the way that Amazons are [and supermen, as we'll see]—the paradox of exposure through victim/avenger fantasies that fascinate on alienation as fetishized, abject and ultimately cryptonymic: showing and hiding different things through competing monstrous[-feminine] appeals, used all-the-world's-a-stage by good and bad actors in a shared masquerade.)

*I redid the exhibit numbers, here; i.e., to coincide with Volume Five, which resets them to 0 from the rest of the series (with "Interview" starting deeper in the PDF for said volume, hence why we're starting at 6, here).

In doing so, I want to give you, dear reader, a special chance to reflect—meaning in ways vampires classically can't (or zombies for that matter, categorically braindead and/or hunted as homo sacer by equally-if-diametrically dehumanized death dealers, exhibit 6). That is, queer folk are treated as "invisible"; i.e., despite having a vault of theatrical codes to paradoxically draw upon, making us both performatively overdressed and epistemologically anemic, "on the Aegis" (with Athena's mirror shield having a vampiric quality I've written extensively about, regarding Medusa; re: "State Vampirism," cryptonymy and abjection composing my corpus on ludo-Gothic BDSM; see: "Concerning Rape Play: a 2025 Note on My Development of Ludo-Gothic BDSM"). But we needn't be so blind, and I want to explain how and why as tied to my own work on vampires (and witches, which I frankly tend to identify more with)—specifically how it evolved into itself. Rome wasn't burned in a day, but it also happened with people participating in ways they aren't always master or even fully aware of (the closet). Again, the state is white, straight and male (re: "Understanding Vampires")—meaning to modular degrees that draw upon imbricating persecution language (re: "Idle Hands," 2024); i.e., that iconoclasts camp in duality to reverse abjection, ergo state vampirism: by using dead metaphors (often Freudian, weak/strong ones) that we effectively graverob/poach for ourselves (Gary Oldman's got nothing on my transformation, below).

(exhibit 63a [from "Half-Real: Recognizing And Performing Empathy," 2025]: Me still in the closet [and long before I came out]: from Kurt Russel to Jesus to Johnny Cash in under a week [and whose "pull" would only compound as time went on, below—meaning I wasn't born wicked, but made that way through a variety of other baddies feasting on me: going from "once bitten, twice shy" to "give me some sugar, baby" minus their unironic predation]!)

(exhibit 7: Left: Artists, top: Zeuhl and Persephone van der Waard, in Manchester England, 2018 [cited: "Non-Magical Detectives," 2025]; bottom: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard [cited: "Going Mask-Off: Showing Jadis' Face," 2025]. Middle: Artist: J. Scott Campbell. Right: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard [cited: 'Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later (give or take) after Five Books; or, Cuwu's Hand in Forming Ludo-Gothic BDSM," 2025]. As I write in "Dead on Arrival" [2026]: "Sometimes you slay the pussy and sometimes the pussy slays you [nerds fuck/enjoy monsters regardless of sex and gender]. I've explored my exes' abuses of me in the past, but also what they taught me and gave me to weather future storms" [source]. To it, whatever "slings and arrows" or vampire's curse initially received from this Salem's lot, I took and turned into a gift to pay forwards; re: flow = function [not aesthetic] and I'm using my scars to reverse abjection with. The undead are, if not anything else, curiously weak/strong—doing so much "heavy lifting" through the poetic power they offer as fresh fertilizer and creation: true birth happens after exiting the womb [what trans folk call "a second puberty" with gender-affirming care, and Superman fertilizing Earth like some hellish sperm].)

Our focus here is vampires, tied to my life and times: the girl who wrote "State Vampirism" and how she got there; i.e., as a "late bloomer" in adulthood, going from good-girl Dorothy Gale—a '90s neurodivergent theatre kid, budding sexologist, and awkward loner with few actual (non-imaginary) friends, and one who loved Alien, Castlevania[3] and Metroid (1979, 1986)—to total baddie Elphaba Thropp, having the whore's revenge in about twelve years (after her twenties and not including childhood, which we'll also discuss); re: by "putting the pussy on the chainwax," as my book series (and latest volume) borrows from Key & Peele. The black mirror is certainly a powerful device—one to expose all manner of bad actors in ways we reclaim upon ourselves, "scratching" our foes to see how they bleed and cry (the magic mirror argument; e.g., "Essay #10.5: Black Moderates Don't Challenge Fascism (re: Th3Birdman)," 2026). Matter shapes consciousness, consciousness maintains matter, and on and on it goes. But something's always troubling the portrait-in-question (a fatal one, below). Something's either missing, sinister or off, smiling at the gods in highly absurd ways, Camus-style: eat 'em and smile!

I digress; before we dive into the essay half about states and criticizing them, mid-rememory (a love letter), let's give my original letter to Atun-Shei and series summary alongside some other stuff (re: what's at stake). As we do, remember that vampires = gay ninjas, or a Trojan-Horse path into the house in weird-hot, uncanny ways (what Freud called "unheimlich"); i.e., "payback's a bitch" both ensconced in darkness visible and more accustomed to seeing with while under conditions of state alienation and persecution: a superman to prop up and stake, per witch hunt. These "Stygian waters" have fascists and Commies sharing the stage, bodies and costumes, "swimming in Styx" (eat your heart out, Sinners). Whores are phantasms, then, that announce themselves in hard-to-believe ways (above). Imagine wearing your normal alien outfit during a Halloween party (and fake blood, also above); e.g., like Dracula or Superman but also Medusa (the OG whore; re: "Always a Victim," 2025; see, also: Elizabeth Hadley's "More than a Monster: Medusa Misunderstood," 2024). Sex work is generally abject, so these kinds of theatrically "false" pretenses allow people the chance to dress up and engage in highly preferential (and magnetic) code; i.e., sex, drugs and rock 'n roll[4] but also pulp media at large (re: Gothic = trash). So shall we abject state ideals of power as something to prescribe, going where power is to unmask and critique its secret identity (with "On Tyrants" focusing not just on Superman, below, but various Radcliffean offshoots of the same highway banditry's "Caesarean Numinous"; re: "Camping the Canon" but specifically "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp," 2023).

Ghastly Invitations: A Letter from the Vampire; or, My Initial Message to Atun-Shei

I'm the prince of phantoms
[...] My telepathic powers
Weave you in my spell (source).

—James Rivera; "To Sleep, Perchance to Scream" from Nosferatu (1989)

(source thumbnail: "Interview with the Vampire: Inviting ‪@AtunSheiFilms‬ to Interview Him/Review His Upcoming Work," 2026; see, also: source skeet [on the Richmond, VA Poe Museum and other aspects of my Gothic past and routinely reexploring it] from vanderWaardart, 4/26/2026)

This series started with a letter (and a warning before that saying "don't pursue a PhD unless you're independently wealthy*" but I digress). That is, from Frankenstein to Dracula (1897), vampire stories (or things comparable to vampire stories) typically begin as such; i.e., secret missives that—unto themselves and everything they entail, composite-wise—reference this or that in epistolary ways that go in and out of fashion; e.g., Ann Rice's famous novel from 1975, which I knew better from its 1994 film adaptation (with Cruise and Pitt, above). Needless to say, the tropes were all present and accounted for when I—like Girl Dracula to Jonathan Harker—reached out to Atun-Shei and gave them something interesting to write in their diary. So I want to include that, here, before proceeding deeper in:

(source: YouTube comments to Ev Boxing and Dan Morley Boxing's "Is Inoue The Best Asian Boxer Of All Time," 2026) 

*Side-note, real quick: I am, for all intents and purposes, a failure in capital's eyes (which many incel-grade dickheads [or mean girls] to this day love to remind me; e.g., that I am "sick," however normally trans I try to present in public, above). I spent my childhood and teenage years mostly alone/playing games and nursing crushes while reading about sex, and my twenties writing about/drawing sexy witches, vampires and Amazons I secretly wanted to be (while still struggling to find love). And currently having access to love, but also the fiduciary means to stay afloat and pursue my PhD accordingly—i.e., first with loans, for grad school, then with Mom's help after Covid (taking me in after my ex raped me and Mom's fiancé died from the virus)—I decided years ago to follow my dreams: to write as if it had value, and everything had been worthwhile/steadily building up to a "finest hour" a priori (re: "From Master's to PhD," 2025). It's a day that never comes, but instead one to delight in the journey of new friends met and made along the way! I don't have much in the ways of money (read: hard cash) but can/do offer writing and artwork in exchange for things (my entire series based on that principle). My work and that of my friends, then, is done to help others prevent rape, but also befriend those I help/watch these people help others unto themselves. There's the ticket, the real joy to find out in the world! "To find the others, you must be brave," meaning daring enough to show your true self to others let's-get-weird (thus face rejection, even violence if you're not careful); re: the paradox of exposure yielding the finest rewards only when risk is taken (to whatever degree workers culture and calculate, per case and holistically over time). Whatever wonders Atun-Shei and I describe, I can promise you they're real: out there, waiting for those who learn, however painfully and long it takes, not to harm the Gorgon's children (those who do facing a life of perpetual solitude, love a stranger they call by many names while denied its heavenly-to-hellish embrace). You cannot bribe or coerce such beings; you can only ask for permission and see how the chips fall. Intimacy = vulnerability. So find what makes you happy—to react like ol' Jack Burton (who?), with "My truck... my truck!" then go from there onto new adventures (and lighthouses/radio towers boosting signals amid stormy weather). Make your own monsters made with love, then wait and see for who comes a-calling (adventure in the flesh, below)!

(artist: Vana; cited: "Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit," 2025)

Atun-Shei,

My name is Persephone van der Waard, and I'm a Gothic academic, author and critic/trans sex worker and activist who specializes (more recently) in vampire poetics; i.e., as metaphor for state predation, mid-abjection (re: "State Vampirism," 2026). I wanted to ask if there's a place to watch your upcoming vampire film, The Vampires of New Orleans—meaning either in part or in full, as I value the work you do greatly. This includes your work on animal rights, anti-racism and Indigenous struggles, but also Gothic as a whole. One Gothic nerd to another, I would very much like to review The Vampires of New Orleans (or interview you about it) as part of my state vampirism compendium [concerning your hybrid academic-meets-theatre-kid approach].

For context, I recently saw you announce your upcoming vampire flick and it piqued my interest; re:

You: Vampire movies can be creepy, sexy, atmospheric and fun... they're rarely legitimately frightening. [...] Y'all have no idea what's about to hit you, good lord, this movie's gonna blow your socks off.

Me: You know what, mister? I'll take you up on that. When it releases, I'll review it and add the review to my work on critiquing capital/state vampirism.

In other words, vampires = undead and the undead are a metaphor for capital, specifically its feeding (through trauma) mid-abjection (from Julia Kristeva, 1980). Frankly they have been since before Marx [re: Medusa and whores, the world's oldest profession ergo labor struggle], but certainly after him and his famous spectres' dialectical-material critique. This ranges from myself and my work, in the 2010s and 2020s, but also Creed and Derrida in 1993, George Romero in the 1960s and '70s (and Matteson in 1954 and similar works; e.g., Bodysnatchers or The Thing from Another World, etc), Lugosi's 1932 White Zombie as arguably the first zombie film in the modern sense* (not including Whale's Frankenstein from a year prior)—all of them preceded by Marx' Gothic paraphernalia, in the mid-1800s (1848 with his manifesto and spectres, and 1867 with Kapital and vampires), and tout le monde beaten to the punch by Mary Shelley's seminal [teenager] 1818 novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus† (as I've written on extensively after finishing my book series, whose Undead Module dedicates to zombies, vampires and other undead poetics). In Gothic, there's also an overarching element of vaudeville and exploitation, which liberation shares the same language, bodies and costumes with, in duality (thus speaks subsequently to your tactical frivolity—clowning theatrically on fascism/reversing abjection [re: me, vis-à-vis Kristeva but also Creed's monstrous-feminine] by literally wearing Nazi "mil spec" outfits in your own work‡).

*See: "Attack of the Bourgeois Braineaters" (2004).

†Which I recall you covering yourself, in "The Sexual Politics of Frankenstein" (2025), though I haven't seen it yet.

[‡The "bash the fash approach," a kind of tongue-in-cheek kayfabe that takes fetish gear and uses it ironically for revolutionary purposes versus classically false or counter-revolutionaries; e.g., Mercedes the Muse versus someone like Autumn Ivy (see: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome"); i.e., reactionary/moderate in centrist stories under Bretton Woods and neoliberalism decaying towards fascism under Capitalist (and Socialist) Realism. It's all cut from the same proverbial cloth, which has value in monstrously poetic ways; re: from Tolkien to us—specifically me and my friends' work  camping the canon through the monstrous-feminine: "From 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' (1936) to my own body of work, camping Tolkien's canon while drawing on his "Tookish" side (re: 'My Tolkien Scholarship,' 2025). Witches are monsters and monsters have power the state cannot exclusively control; i.e., through violence, terror and morphological expression as two-way streets (re: 'The State: Its Key Tools')" (source: "Dead on Arrival," footnote 12).

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)]

To conclude and reiterate, I would like to see your work and synthesize it to my larger corpus thereof (re: "State Vampirism"). Feel free to reply with the necessary details, if you wish to take part. I also do horror interviews, if you'd like to do something more conversational (e.g., "'Alien: Ore' (2019) Q & A, Kailey and Sam: Meet the Directors," 2019).

Yours,

—Persephone

I know what foreplay is, and when someone is selling something they're proud of (their penis or otherwise). To follow their lead, or top from below? I chose the latter, if only because I didn't want to scare Atun-Shei off. But therein lies the rub—the lonely vamp looking for connection and accidently spooking someone else who isn't as freaky as they are:

It happens. But maybe in this case, Atun-Shei will come to my castle and have a look around?* Fingers crossed! I admire their purity insofar as their work is Gothically mature[5] and combats tokenism as I study it (re: "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It," 2025). In the interim, let's discuss what's to come if you step inside!

*Update, 5/5/2026: He agreed to an interview! We have one tentatively planned for September or October (when their movie is closer to completion). Stay tuned! —Perse

"Just the Tip"; or What's to Come: Summarizing the Rest of the Series

"Is it in yet?"

—something many penis-havers don't want to hear unironically (versus cock-shaming but I digress) 

Foreplay exhausted, this area of the series introduction remains "just the tip" of the vampire's fangs (or witch's broom)—merely the insertion of what any vampire (strongman or otherwise) can only hint at (and which the essay half shall go a bit deeper than the videos and older materials themselves do). From there—and using an episodic style that Marilyn Roxie always told me to use and one I mostly avoided after 2022—the rest of this series' videos will dole out, piece-by-piece (echoes of Osiris and similar underworld stories): one aspect of my gay academic past, per meal. It includes various anecdotes, too, interspersed between my older essays and blog posts as I cover them; e.g., my love life and meeting cuties who radicalized me (all in a SFW-if-censored format, of course). In the videos that follow (again, primarily on YouTube), we'll read from "My [Older] Body of Work" (2021) and "YouTube Videos (Symposiums)" (2026). We'll be semi-chronological, though I may jump around a bit—probably starting with "Sex, Metal and Videogames" (2021); i.e., as it outlines much of what we'll be talking about, followed by my aforementioned "Alien: Ore" series (as it highlights an interest in indie horror media tied to Atun-Shei and my return to my roots: where my interviewing the entire cast and crew of "Ore" had to be approved by Fox, but remaining part of my postgrad work all the same).

 (artist: Geminisoku; cited: "Meeting Medusa")

In doing so, I'm bridging the past, present and future by giving you the secrets of the vampire (and similar beings, above): how I learned to do two things at once, namely consume Gothic media as trashy and thought-provoking in the same breath, we "psychosexual bimbos from outer space" giving and taking as needed (speaking to an uphill overcoming of congenital-to-comorbid damage, also above). Knowing what I know after I walked backwards into Hell once more (only to find it waiting for me, on my return), perhaps I'll have saved you a trip in the bargain (or encouraged you to enter Hell, yourselves). Time is a circle, the Gothic (and its Promethean Quest and/or Faustian bargain) going in and out of the past to make concentric labyrinths, mise-en-abyme. Consider this your vampire's vanity but also Ariadne's thread, working with shadows to break Capitalist Realism "on the Aegis." Yours. It's beautiful, yes, but also paradoxically ugly (and Numinous, tied to bigger things eating us that we can't see, below). The two go hand-in-hand, speaking to interesting lives and times that most only hear about, under capital, and which Gothic revives "in small," vampires or otherwise (the blood admittedly grossing me out, but also drawing me operatically in, Dayman-fighter-of-the-Nightman).

(source: Anthony Breznican's "The Undying Mystery of Max Schreck—the First Nosferatu," 2024)

Vicarious or otherwise, use what I holistically impart here to change the world for the better. Predation is predation, but who is preying on whom? Gothic concerns the social and the anti-social at odds—what prison abolitionist Mumia al-Jamal describes to F.D. Signifier as follows: "something to use for liberatory purposes, or which [capital and the state] will use against us for destructive purposes" (timestamp 17:53); re: state's rights vs worker rights, on all registers: the movement of money (a form of theft) through nature, the stopping of which is death for capital and the state (re: Patel and Moore; see: "State Vampirism," footnote 1). But death is nothing to us, getting ourselves (or others) pregnant (that female Gothic, as Moers put it, but foisted onto male and intersex bodies, too). So suck what must be sucked, ravish[6] and hyphenate this or that in duality to deconstruct, defy and disrupt the state's singular interpretations and monopolies, turning their worlds upside-down (re: the whore's revenge during ludo-Gothic BDSM chasing palliative-Numinous forces to fight fire with fire)! You have all power to do so, born with it in ways that predate God and capital (re: Medusa vs Caesar and his goons, fleecing them by flaying them alive). "If it bleeds, we can kill it" to "For a ghost, you bleed just fine!" Gentle or strict, try something different (new for you, if not others) and see if the shoe fits (or proverbial "crown of thorns," below).

(artist: Loretta Vampz; cited: "Gothic Ambivalence: Canonical Torture in the Internet Age," 2025)

Foreplay (or What's at Stake)

That's one letter down. You've got the gist; but before we get to the essay half (the love letter), let's talk more about what's at stake (so to speak) and why vampires are so vital at hitting upon the core issues of capital! To that, I've said it before and I'll say it again: vampires aren't my favorite monster—a truth "universally acknowledged" that I never bothered to question until now. Why was I sinking my teeth into them, time-and-time again (to "spread it, mount it, pin it," as lepidopterists sometimes put it)?

(artist: Axel Ross; cited: "Modularity and Class")

Sadly the truth on the other side isn't always sexy (above). Turns out, however, vampires aren't just the perfect metaphor to critique and skewer capital with, pimps-and-whores (the oldest struggle), but also the state and Marxist-Leninism's shortcomings; i.e., whore = vampire as performative critical device/actor (the model and the master). This involves a variety of whores, and those salacious things for which they stand for/against pimpish auditors.

There's Some Whores in This House; re: Sex Workers Ahead!

To my readers, consider this image the Cerberus guarding our underworldly [and cemetery] gates; if you can't handle this, now's the time to bow out (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, in the initial dedication to Bay Ryan for Volume Zero (2023)

About that. As I told Atun-Shei in my video to him (timestamp: 13:43), "There be sex workers." To it, this series—despite being as SFW as possible—still covers sex workers, queer folk and other unpaid labor divorced from privilege by the universal class subject (as white, straight, paid and male under a Protestant ethic; re: me vis-à-vis John the Duncan; see: "State Vampirism" footnote 1, and "A Gothic Researcher [...] Responds"; timestamp: 1:39:55). To that, what do you think vampires are? Bastards, destroyers, homewreckers, impostors, criminals, pirates, terrorists, witches, and yes, whores but also gay icons dishing counterterror out; e.g., Gary Oldman or Christopher Lee, etc, as theatre nerds who, despite being straight, still speak to queerness, prurience, live burial, hypnosis, feeding and "boners" (all the usual puns, oxymorons, what-have-you)—meaning the way we queers psychosexually do: bad to the bone, "al dente," and so on (the Gothic's usual hyphenation of sex and death, bodies and castles, sickness and food, mouths and teeth, etc).

(artist: Alliesha Bay; source: "The Price of Rice in China")

But it's not just "one of us" in a smaller community of singular freaks; we are Legion, a confederacy of communal bloodsuckers (sucking this or that):

(source: "Yesterday's Leftover Rice" [2026]: artists, top-left to bottom-right [SFW version]: Hallie Cross, Darling, Puppy Bat, Puppy Tyko, Jael, Ryder K., Clockwork Rhxbynn, Lilith Mae, Fishnet Housepet, Pupstar Darina, and Cosmo Wanderlust)

So, parody and pastiche, I'll refer conversationally to my sex worker companions (the creatures of the night, what sweet music we make); e.g., their interviews with me and times to shine, on my book covers, making my work all the better in the bargain (ones we struck per case between peers): "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe!" Let's bottle those tears (of blood or otherwise), shall we?

(model and artist: Maddie Minx and Persephone van der Waard)

We'll also probably cite my book series a little, though I will try to keep that to a minimum. Instead, "Interview" explores (again) primarily my older works from 2014-2022, conversationally interjecting my historical readings of said pieces with bits of color (re: as most of this is on YouTube, reading from said essays while recalling different stories about them [and whores] between the reading portions). May its eating turn your lips (and other things) red (the color of desire* and passion, but also arousal, below)! Whatever the fluid, paint your own canvases and weave your own spells; re: Blake's "Heaven in a Wildflower" (from "Auguries of Innocence," 1803) describing (as I see it, 2024) fire flowers, sideways smiles, what-have you, as feeding endlessly but also collectively into a brave new world: a house for whores, blushing with joy at confronting profound things through the sensibilities† involved (tumescence, or what randier academics might call "jouissance" or "frisson," meaning "orgasmic" or "skin orgasm" tied to Numinous things).

*For the smell of desire, refer to the aforementioned  "sex panther" scene from Anchorman: the Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004): "It smells like Bigfoot's dick!" Maybe Jordon Peterson wears some (remember those pulse points, love); i.e., under those goofy suits he sells—all while endlessly complaining about women in the workplace, "postmodern neo-Marxists," and anything else under the sun that invariably makes him cry like a little bitch (until the sun burns out). Retire your foes in the salon (of death, big or little); poke fun at them, bursting their bubbles and wounding their egos, but also exposing them as not getting any (sex and/or genuine friendship)!

(artist: Lilith Mae; source: "The Price of Rice in China")

†Speaking to Austen's Sense and Sensibility (meaning reason and feeling personified by that story's sisterly heroines-of-manners, 1811); i.e., as used by state powers, like so many things, to divide women into tame/wild, obedient/unruly virgin/whores. All are conventions to dig up and play with (as Austen did, lampooning Gothic while still writing her own Gothic pastiche, Northanger Abbey‡).

‡Written 1803, but released posthumously in 1817 (only for Austen to be outlived by Ann Radcliffe, the "Mother of Gothic novels" [re: "Radcliffe's Refrain," 2024] and crafter of the famous Black Veil, horror/terror binary [released after her death; see: "On the Supernatural in Poetry‡‡," 1826] and explained supernatural Austen's replica was poking fun of: "Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?" (source: Northanger Abbey; cited: "Shining a Light on Things," 2023).

(model and artist: Mikki Storm and Persephone van der Waard)

‡‡To quote the Great Enchantress herself (and go on a bit of a tangent before the next section), "Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them […] and where lies the great difference between terror and horror but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil? (source). I dissect and praise her at different points (and do so before my book series even started, 2020), but I digress: playing with what I call the palliative Numinous as something to literally "fuck with" superfreak-style (above). So often Radcliffe's "dreaded evil" was simply a scapegoat for capital/state vampirism she would delay for hundreds of pages (re: the Black Veil, in Udolpho [1794] being a 500-page McGuffin). It's merely the Aegis as something for whores to embody and reclaim; i.e., by reversing abjection, ghost-of-the-counterfeit, to decolonize Gothic terror monopolies upon ourselves (a process of fakery that, in our hands, undoes Western lies and sovereignty in non-zero-sum games). Whore is ubiquitous, in Gothic—someone the state legitimately fears in ways we "homewreckers" can leverage against our would-be pimps: the stuff of nightmares and dreams, made flesh.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny; cited: "Shining a Light on Things").

It bears repeating that Gothic was penned by women without rights and closeted gay men, which open-secret whores (cis-het or otherwise, white or otherwise) can camp as we wish, want, desire. We are delicious, but also ravenous—our public nudism (and aesthetic) a half-real, monasterial, fog-of-war buffer to wage ass war from: "A new term I coined, one that stresses the liberation of sex work through revolutionary struggle; i.e., hugging the whore as alien/seeking revenge through unity illustrating mutual consent with other abjected workers" (source: "Paratextual Documents"). Nudity becomes strength, not weakness, through the paradox of exposure having the whore's revenge; i.e., in cryptonymically vampiric ways for unironically rebellious purposes (re: "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy" and "Transgressive Nudism," footnote 10): sucking our power back while punching up, through "ace" public nudism interrogating trauma (see: footnote 16). So we put "rape" quotes during different vaso vagal, "ravisher" fantasies that teach mutual consent as performance; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM and the uncanny per confused, historically maladaptive survival mechanisms we paradoxically learn to control in safe spaces of "danger" to weaponize against our would-be pimps; i.e., a given danger disco as friend/foe and fight/flight, etc (see: "Healing from Rape" and "Paid Labor" but also "Castles in the Flesh," 2024). Everyone loves the whore, but for different reasons (exploitation and liberation)—meaning those that anisotropically and apotropaically share the same dualistic stages, bodies, and costumes between good actors and bad (the former which rely on a pauper's inventiveness [and tramp-like easy charm] to win the day and control the room, the latter resorting to superficial charm, money and brute force): a fascination with power as classically erotic and phallic. Consider the Roman god, Fascinus and to "fascinate" (meaning "stare in a hypnotic studious manner") combating the Evil Eye... which applies to phallic women (with snakes [one-eyed monsters of a Freudian sort] for hair) easily enough—often predator/prey stigma animals and skin colors (re: "Prey as Liberators"); e.g., sharks and bats of a property/pest sort. A pimp's a pimp, the usual masters [and madames] selling "danger" to the middle class haunted by systemic abuse leaking "from the bedroom" (re: the ghost of the counterfeit, and Foucault's A History of Sexuality Vol 1. [1980] explored by me in "Understanding Vampires") but also "from nature" in voyeur/exhibit ways. It's those damn sharks, can't you see? 

(source YouTube thumbnail: "Jaws | Nighttime Shark Attack | Film Clip | Own it on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital," 2012)

In turn, these Gerasene scapegoats tie to different bugbears to scapegoat, including aquatic nightmares fetishized by Zionists—thereby continuing the oldest struggle under Pax Americana (re: unpaid labor) by pimping nature as monstrous-feminine in Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial false flags, DARVO-and-obscurantism (monopolizing violence, terror and sex/monsters; re: Weber, Asprey and me; see: "The State: Its Key Tools" from "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents," 2024). Consider Spielberg and Jaws (a PG movie sold to kids in 1975 while depicting that '70s bush of a given nameless damsel-in-distress, above) or Tolkien's infamous orcs and goblins while men fight over ladies and land (meaning breeding rights, a white planet vs a black under "Goldilocks Imperialism" gentrifying war per Tolkien's ludic-cartographic refrain, into the 1970s; re: "Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking," 2025). Here, the profit motive's Protestant ethic is, point-in-fact, Judeo-Christian; i.e., in ways that lampoon Catholics and Muslims alike, under current neoliberal orders: all tied to imbricating persecution language and lady/tramp or pauper/prince courtly love/captive audience romances (re: "Idle Hands" and "I'll See You in Hell," 2025)! Gothic is dualistic but also holistic in its mutilative desires. The dividing line between toxic and non-toxic (not sacred/profane, which are merely value judgements) remains irony and consent.

(artist: Lucid-01; cited: "Ladies First; or, the Grift of False Rebellion," 2025)

On the Strength We Draw from Our Fellows; or, the Book Volume This Series Shall Inevitably Become (re: "The Sphinx' Riddle")

"I feel like a young strapping lad, beating his meat vigorously for the first time!" (source).

—Lord Slug, TFS's "Dragon Ball Z Abridged MOVIE: Lord Slug" (2011; timestamp: 13:31) 

Whatever comes next, this whorehouse is composite; i.e., Gothic Communism a non-profit endeavor that—despite my being unemployed—still consists of a patchwork bride made of different wicked ladies' to form "Gorgon Voltron." I don't tend to make much money from this project, because I put everything back into it. But it gives me (and others) strength, all the same; i.e., in ways that routinely draw strength from while playing with dead things: whatever we leave behind, for others to find! Use that as a pathway to look good/feel good about yourselves, chasing your own dragons to happy endings. Make a better world together where whores can say yes or no while free from judgement, scorn or violence, and you give them what they want should they ask for it (as Cuwu often would, below)—not as unthinking mechanical things to outwit and exploit, but treat as equals; i.e., in a shared struggle that doesn't always work out, at the time, but still leads to lovely things to remember and look back on with rueful fondness, her-tits-were-there: illustrating mutual consent through the dialectical-material context each exchange depicts (e.g., Cuwu being a GNC Marxist-Leninist who helped radicalize me even further, below). Moments are magical, and while they don't last in the moment (or after), we can preserve[7] them (and their value) as best we can:

(exhibit 8: Artist and model, far-left: Persephone van der Waard; source, left: Do Chokkyuu Kareshi x Kanojo, 2017 [cited: "Illustrating Mutual Consent: Empathy," 2025]; artist and models, right: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu; model, far-right: Cuwu)

Keep that in mind, as we proceed; you're treading the footsteps of divinity (Goldilocks Icarus)! In turn, everything dies; so find joy in it, her-tits-were-there (or butt, below)—meaning a hauntology to plant new flags and flowers! Grow whatever you like, as long as it builds collectively towards intersectional consciousness/solidarity and universal liberation! No Omelas whores!

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard; source: "My Logo for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism!"

Also, with "the Sphinx's Riddle," I want to release a book volume (appearing on its outer covers, higher up); i.e., one that catalogues, but also engages with, my older work in different ways; re: in future YouTube essays, recorded and released over the following months: to discuss things from the written to the oral, there-and-back-again. It includes the written stuff, but also spoken accounts of me at the present space and time that are more conversational and reflective, years afterward. "Interview with the Vampire," then, marries the oral to the written—all to catalogue and explore the "guts" of what Gothic Communism ultimately became! "I was, I am, I shall be!" and like Rosa Luxemburg shall not plead meekly with my conquerors, but rather become the apple (and the tree bearing it) to dodge the rapist/face the axe they hold (the tree remembers); re: the paradox of exposure that liberating sex workers from rape demands—not just struggle, as Fredrick Douglass explains, but naked struggle cryptonymy-and-abjection (see: "Prey as Liberators"). To it, "long and hard is the way, that out of Hell leads up to light." Medusa never dies (a shapeshifter, like Milton's Satan); she only returns to haunt Europe (and elsewhere) in ways Marx could scarce imagine! They kettle us, gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss; we clap back, using what we have "on the Aegis"! Our bodies, our labor and our art to shout, loudly and proudly from the rooftops: "Land back, labor back, sex back!" (re: "It Began with a Whisper," 2025).

Or, as other "spectres" impart along the same vampire's refrain of socio-material transference:

Land back. Free Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, Turtle Island, Lebanon, and all occupied, oppressed, embargoed land. Give to mutual aid. Learn about the indigenous nation whose land you are on. Lead with kindness but don't shy away from conflict. Always ask yourself who is being left out and why (it is almost always going to be disabled people, indigenous people, trans people, children). Start a garden. Make some art. Stay curious. Don't obey rules that don't make sense. Be loud about injustice. Abolish ICE. Abolish the police. Abolish the government. All power to the people. And wear a mask and test for Covid! (source: "Hailing Hellions[8]: An Interview with Delilah Gallo," 2025)

(source: exhibit 33b2a1b2c, "Preface: Inside the Hall of Mirrors")

We live in Gothic times. So go wild, babes! You have only to lose your chains (and avoid a slow agonizing death from state shift aka climate change, but eye on the prize). Take these books (and their prior synthesis) and synthesize, post hoc, your own pandemonium. Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, Medusa (and her ilk) the queens of Communism that—rather than be impressed with or repressed by state power—shake their rattles the bones of the victorious dead as beings to dance with/unify mid-rememory[9] (above). Survival is victory for women, queer folk and other state targets; e.g., Billy from The Nightingale (2018) telling his colonizers after killing the dastardly Captain Hawkins (the abuser of Claire, Billy's imperfect Irish friend, and the killer of Billy's own people): "I'm still here, white man!"

So says he, echoing her own "I'm Ireland!" to defy those who raped her as part of a shared, uneven struggle (re: "Healing from Rape")! Not to rank rape, but share the struggle through uneven ratios of privilege/oppression, which doing so echoes; i.e., inside a hall of mirrors, insofar as "Everything sits within a cycle of imaginary history that plays out through an endless, genocidal mirroring that must, if it is to cease, be met with mirrors" (source: "Author's Foreword"). Whatever side of the river Styx we stand, vampires seek and violently claim revenge—meaning the avenger a classic monstrous-feminine device I embody alongside those of my friends, past and present (and shown to me by others, below); re (from "Quality Beyond Measure: Remembering Jonathan Joss"):

Postscript: Arrows for My Quiver

Terror is the kissing cousin of force and, real or implied, is never far removed from the pages of history. To define (and condemn) terror from a peculiar social, economic, political, and emotional plane is to display a self-righteous attitude that, totally unrealistic, is doomed to be disappointed by harsh facts (source).

—Robert Asprey, War in the Shadows (1975)

As previously stated, Bay—being Maori-Irish—constantly recommends me elements of Indigenous cultures that jive with my own work on the monstrous-feminine; i.e., they nerd snipe me and I put it in the book, arrows for my (and our friends') quivers; e.g., the fire-stealing Polynesian god, Maui (who the Maori worship, among others), from "My Words to [Th3Birdman]" from "Dead on Arrival," but also Hine-Keira and the pukuna:

(source: Pam VanChaos, Facebook)

Pam VanChaos writes:

My elders taught me this is the most beautiful a woman can be, fierce in battle. Women will not extend their tongue in haka. Instead we flash the whites of our eyes like the hammer head shark who is known to fight fiercely even after death. I project the sacred marks of my ancestors on my chin forward so you can see who goes before me, I stamp my feet to rattle ancient bones and wake the spirits to come to arms, every woman who came before me is at my back [...] (ibid.).

Not unlike the Gorgon/nature-as-monstrous-feminine argument I normally make, no? Avengers, guerrillas, and pirates but also the femme forte/fatale and the monstrous-feminine are all over Gothic. Turns out, they're all over Indigenous stories reclaiming their cultures, too: to survive capital and take what the colonizer took back from them—land, labor and bodies, exploitation and liberation, appropriation and appreciation occupy the same half-real stages of a shared Wisdom; i.e., of the Ancients and the Ancestors, both something (and in some shape or form) to reclaim from state predators of all different kinds monopolizing or discounting us wholesale. Death by Snu-Snu, indeed; we reverse terror/counterterror to serve our needs and that of nature versus assimilation (which is poor stewardship)! Nudity is strength—armor and weapons (re: darkness visible, below)!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

They will call you violent, regardless, or ask you to destroy us. This was a question that weighed on me back in 2014 into 2022, when I finally came out and bared it all: "I'm thought and rememory! Full of trauma, appetite and rage, my spells are orgasms! My hexes reek of power that can peel paint, strip peaches of their skin—to send your toenails growing inward, you mess with me! I shapeshift and impart fatal knowledge! I am Ileana, hear me roar! I am Revana, strong and brave! I am Persephone, daughter of Melody, granddaughter of Ellen, great-granddaughter of Mildred, the teeth in the night, the Queen of the Night, Titania and Tamora, and you do not scare me!" (source: "Facing Death: What I Learned," 2024). Hell-bound yourselves, I am the witch telling you my story as it happened, sending you on your way (as my mother did before me, which we'll get to in the rememory portion).

To that, I want to reiterate vampires, our poetic focus and lens through which holistic struggle is attained.

Vampires: Our Poetic Focus, Here (and a Sticky One)

[U]ndead exploitation under Capitalism as a giant zombie-vampire takes many different forms, themselves stuck inside a gradient of psychosexual abuse workers relay during liminal expression's surfaces and thresholds [...] Per all the usual paradoxes, any sex-positive, liberatory form (of camp) occupies the same performative shadow zone as any sex-coercive, carceral form (of canon) (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, "'That Which Is Not Dead'; or, Capitalism as a Great Zombie(-Vampire)" from the Undead Module (2024)

(ibid.)

First thing's first. A quick note about vampires, our poetic focus and hermeneutic metric, being somewhat "sticky" (as blood generally is, but also sanguine, darkness visible, "heat," etc). All poetry is, lest it become rigid and useless—less stiff in a useful sense and more completely paralyzed, a zombie paperweight (above) for others to feed on; re: the state is canonically male, white and straight but also paid (re: "Understanding Vampires" and "Paid Labor"). This means in ways the vampire can anisotropically uphold or not, doing so in cop/victim, predator/prey (owner/pet, terror/counterterror) ways, often female ones (centered around creation but also anti-creation and damsel/demon; see: Harmony and the xenomorph, further down); i.e., the Gorgon a classic symbol of nature-as-monstrous-feminine (one to pimp out of revenge, dressed up as "progress" to stymie reversals; see: next section). Nudity = scapegoat, but also anti-predation disruptor cryptonymically[10] listing their demands (and seeking forbidden love—less "bad kissers" [fangs or otherwise] and more like "mating porcupines": with great caution until you get in close and find someone compatible).

Doing so through sexual-to-asexual public nudism, the vampire comments furtively on trauma as two-way street (the vice character's vice-grip pussy [or ass/the love that dare not speak its name] breaking off whatever goes inside, turning "gimme that dick" into something of a menacing dare). It's what Gothic calls "an argument," generally installed through tension (of courtship with heretical ideas) that manifest and convey otherwise unspeakable (for the state) notions: the myth of total power/decay of mastery and civilized progress* felt alongside a silent scream, castle in the flesh (2024), and/or study in scarlet that ludo-Gothic BDSM calculates accordingly through cryptonymy and abjection. Risk and temptation are part-in-parcel, making a total furthering of abjection impossible (owing in no small part to capital's usual contradictions). There's always leverage to have the whore's revenge, however "imperiled" the vampire seems (dualistic, as all monsters are, and loaded with gentle/strict energies).

(cited: "Leaving the Castle," 2024)

*Progress = televised spectacle out from older forms into the Computer (and later Internet) Ages, a given tech race (arms or otherwise) all part of capital/state vampirism; e.g., space†, aka astronoetics (the colonial gaze of planet Earth) and the language of conquest mapping territory concentrically out: from the Covenant of the Rainbow to Plato's Republic and Caesar to Divine Right to Enlightenment hypocrisy and the Protestant ethic. Said ethic squanders home-turf advantage (stolen land and labor) under bourgeois executives and governing bodies' Manifest Destiny—all to ring the death knell of empire and the established neoliberal order towards something different. Vampirism is vampirism; the usual simulacra stay "at play" however decayed or hyperreal they become, as charts like those Columbus once used to massacre the locals and rape the land: "The modern map did not merely describe the world; it was a technology of conquest" (source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, 2017). Such things can reverse, technology used against a master/slave arrangement, one whose perceived benefactor (and their rotting inheritance) eventually sees a damned homecoming led by nature's mischief (the Imperium's pallbearers dancing for joy on the graves of state pimps laid low).

†As highlighted by Gil-Scott Heron‡, the "revolution" of technological spectacle definitely televised (and white supremacist; i.e., space cowboys eventually cannibalized by profit/sacrifice on the altar of neoliberal hegemony's so-called "final frontier"; re: the Challenger disaster's link between profit and exploitation, war and "peace" teaching education and crew as thoroughly expendable; see: "Unto the Breach," 2026).

‡Whose "Whitey's on the Moon" (1971) sums up the drive to hide behind the skirts of a national pride/ethos, ignoring the systemic bigotries (and stolen land/spilled blood) baked into such things: "Few things get televised as much as the space race (moon or otherwise)" (source YouTube community post: Persephone van der Waard, 4/29/2026 in response to Pillboy's "Whitey's (Back) On the Moon," 2026). And yet, "defense of the state is not homogenous," I write, elsewhere. "Dissenters of the state and its abuse often coming from lovers of science and/or military servicemen; i.e., 'where people are' as meeting them at and speaking frankly to already-frank opinions; e.g., Peaked Interest's 'The Untold Story of the Challenger Crew Cabin' (2026) discusses the science side of state predation, and Sector Seven's 'The Time that I Killed and Why I Doubt Other Veterans' discussing something equally uncomfortable/taboo: killing for the state, and counteracting fascist braggadocio" as something to reify and perform accordingly (source: "Unto the Breach"). For example, the xenomorph—Alien's (1979) "field slave" stowaway/ghost of the counterfeit onboard Ridley's retro-future Demeter (well, Nostromo, but same idea)—is the plainly non-white "furious vampire" (a lawn-jockey offshoot of the Numinous Space Jockey "big chap" that everyone remembers). But the silent partners—the evil company signing people's checks (and death warrants)—feed invisibly on everyone; re: "crew expendable," Medusa the whore and her endless trafficking their top priority. No matter how efficient (and Promethean) said profit is (or careful their proxies are), state vampirism gonna vampire. The universe is their oyster to shuck, Ozymandias-style. We gotta shuck back, land or otherwise—the classic femme forte/fatale (monstrous-feminine) less reversing capital's curse (and its trauma) and more breaking the cycle by shattering Capitalist (and Socialist) Realism where it occurs (the Gothic, on and offstage): our inherited confusions (re: Baldrick, 2009). Whatever the device, payback's a bitch but whose revenge is sweet, mid-Amazonomachia (re: "Our Sweet Revenge").

(model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard)

Female or not, our running theme here is vampires (and blood/penetrative violence, though not focusing on the Freudian, explicitly gendered [cis or otherwise] aspects of vampiric strength and other saint-to-sinner virtues/vices; e.g., vagina dentata, hysteria and phallic women—with Harmony being agender*, above); it's also mad science, monsters and making them in superhuman ways for/versus state hegemony (which the mini-essay will cover). Such things aren't mutually exclusive. Furthermore, vampirism = abjection and abjection goes both ways, canon-versus camp during chaos personified. It's what we queers call "a hot gay mess," and which vampires assemble/encapsulate very particular tropes (e.g., "cruising" and dungeons evoking sin, raw lust, unmitigated torture, venereal disease[11] and excessive appetite); i.e., those that, in animal cases, sometimes have insect/parasitoid (and chattel/vermin) qualities: that merge chimerically with various organism and monster types; e.g., the xenomorph basically Medusa (already undead, demonic and animalistic) as fungal, phallic, wasp-like, witchy and vampiric—a sex demon and "walking sarcophagus" hungry for brains, but also sex (to extirpate under a Puritan ethic). It's a "Wandering Womb" hauntology/nightmare-on-legs raping everyone in sight during live burial (a curse with one's eyes, Medusa-style [and her weapon-like nudity versus the Amazon's "armor" style]—what the Maori call "makutu," or witchcraft to leverage against one's enemies). Here, the inadequacies of a purely material critique butt heads with the social side of things (the "dark side of the moon," for many-a-Marxist-Leninist). Except dialectical materialism allows for the social and material in Gothic ways, which we simply take further than Marx did (re: "Making Marx Gay"). It's bound to get messy when pushing towards our final forms!

*Refer to their interview with me, from my "Hailing Hellions" series (2025).

(source: "Giger's Xenomorph," 2025)

To it, exactly classifying a given case sometimes falls apart/relies on the complicated, at-times-entropic reality riddled with stereotype. This means that, while the undead historically hone on particular things, so can demons as I categorize them (re: "A Cruel Angel's Thesis," 2024). One sucks (feeding and trauma), the other fucks (dark desire), and vampires frankly do both equally well; i.e., known primarily as undead but frankly having animalistic, transformative and BDSM-flavored demonic qualities that—merged with their impressive raft, one boasting cultural metaphors ripped from history as half-real (re: "Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches)," 2024)—makes vampires the most morphologically complex and diverse of the three undead classes (zombies being nonstop punching bags that appear uncanny/endlessly ravenous [not unlike vampires only more hungry and less sentient] and ghosts being ontologically strange, even Numinous in tell-tale spectral ways). They're classy and cliché, beloved and done to death (and ghostly as well as animal, a given predator having mist form while also granting all manner of wishes in demonic, genie-like ways invading the home).

Furthermore, it's all a spectrum with different modules; these play out within Gothic, which hides and/or builds upon various disordered pathways to speak to reality as Sublime, Absurd, Numinous, Weird, etc: the world and capital in small, personifying different aspects of predation for different sides (with Giger's Gothic surrealism touching on various drug-like things we don't have time to explore, here; re: Fisher's acid Communism and freaks of nature set loose from captivity to run wild once more; see: "'Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit'; or Magic, Drugs and Acid Communism"). The struggle is holistic.

On Holistic Struggle: Healing the World from Different Positions within It (feat. Angela Benedict)

Descartes had not stumbled upon his revolutionary philosophy all on his own. The second law of capitalist ecology, domination over nature, owed much to Francis Bacon (1561–1626), a philosopher widely credited as the father of modern science. (That gendered language will make sense in a moment.) Bacon was also a prominent member of England's political establishment, at different times a member of Parliament and the attorney general of England and Wales. He argued that "science should as it were torture nature's secrets out of her." Further, the "empire of man" should penetrate and dominate the "womb of nature." Science must "hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again… Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object." Bacon was a major political figure at a time when the lives of European women [and all such "extended beings" under Cartesian thought's thinking-versus-extended binary] were being threatened, surveilled, and dominated in new—and thoroughly modern—ways (source).

—Raj Patel and Jason Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017)

Intersectional problems demand intersectional solutions, but also holistic study to get at things that normally self-disguise; i.e., what's at stake as something to carry out through the poetry (and praxis) of vampires, repeatedly over time with others by your side. Teamwork makes the dream work (much of "Interview" was written based on feedback[11a]; i.e., from friends listening to me read, or enemies pushing back during de facto peer review):

(cited: "I'll See You in Hell," 2024)

To that, capital/the state rape by design, pimping the planet as black, alien, the whore-to-blame per witch hunt, Radcliffe-style (those "meddling kids" [above] the state's "little vampires," de facto cops chasing a given scapegoat of capital to its lonely birthplace and resting place, pulling the Black Veil of the Great Enchantress [re: "Radcliffe's Refrain"] aside to expose and kill the pirate); i.e., versus nature as abject/monstrous-feminine, under Cartesian thought (one of the qualities of capital alongside state monopolies of violence, terror and monsters). As Gothic Communism is a holistic* discipline challenging said rape (and triangulation), our material goal here is eco-socialist, anti-racist, and anti-fascist, all emphasizing compound radicality through exposure but especially Indigenous stories (and unpaid labor at large—whores, in particular) alongside Gothic ones: by wedding BIPOC struggles to white without ranking rape/monopolizing oppression, appropriating other cultures, or otherwise reducing things merely to class, culture or race (which cheapens struggle); i.e., interrogating Gothic's Wisdom of the Ancients (a cultural understanding of the imaginary past) alongside Indigenous cultures' Wisdom of the Ancestors (re: "The Value in Showing Intersectional Solidarity When Combating Fascism," 2026). The invitation is global, healing together while pushing forwards in highly vampiric ways that break Capitalist Realism's boom-or-bust refrains "on the Aegis";

*Overlapping gender/culture, race, class and war while pushing for intersectional consciousness† and solidarity (awareness and teamwork) under state predation, mid-abjection.

†"A neologism I coined, one meant to combat various forms of reductionism (re: class, culture and race); i.e., by building on Marx' notion of class consciousness: combining class with culture and race consciousness (awareness) to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence while synthesizing praxis" (abridged, source: "Paratextual Documents"). 

When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon [and/or] castle needn't spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics' endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains (source: "Prey as Liberators").

i.e., the appearance of a dark castle that feeds in secret suddenly dropping its cloak, the liminal hauntology of war (danger disco) making the world something to change even when it (the ruling class behind the certain) try to stall things: until the end of the world.

Under Capitalist Realism limping to the grave, we have all the power we need to affect change. But we must unify to do so—whores, yes, but merging with other educators, artists, performers, activists, etc

(source skeet [alt-text]: vanderWaardart, 1/31/2026 [the thumbnail for "The Value in Showing Intersectional Solidarity When Combating Fascism"]: "From top-left to bottom right: Mercedes the Muse, Vic Menza, Lady Izdihar, Mexican Indigenous dancers honoring Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Alicia Axiom, Olurrinati Politics (center), Black Liberation Media, a local Indigenous protest in Minneapolis, Jessie Gender, Rhyna Targaryen, and Julesss Next Door")

as part of a collectively naked (or cryptonymically and abjectly semi-naked, below) struggle of "cheeky bitches (or enbies, also below)"

(artist: Maddie Minx)

then rarefied through our non-corporeal artwork (often still illustrating bodies, below)

(artist: Persephone van der Waard*)

*With redheads and Hibernophilic imagery tying just as well to witchcraft, sodomy, blood libel and Orientalism, in the modern era—all things to reclaim upon ourselves, meaning our bodies, labor and gender/sexuality tied to the land: as object of power and fear we reverse terror/counterterror anisotropically with (re: "Overcoming Praxial Inertia" [2023] and "Our Sweet Revenge"). Survival is victory to start with, getting the ball rolling towards Communism (of a non-queerphobic, anti-racist, pro-sex-work, and eco-Socialist sort), thus away from state vampirism during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: "on the Aegis"! So we terrorist Commie whores circumscribe, enclose and digest our enemies accordingly—alive!

as one we cannot survive capital with alone. Indeed, not everyone does—harm happening locally

(source: "Martyrs" [2025]. Our martyrs, from top-left to bottom-right: Nex Benedict, Jonathan Joss, Aaron Bushnell, and Renee Good)

and around the world to impact a variety of peoples over time (often Indigenous/female/non-white but not always):

(exhibit 1 [from "The Wolf Is Loose"]: Subject, top-left: Renee Good; top-middle: Neil Morris; top-right: Mary Ann Vecchio and Jeffrey Miller; bottom-left: Keith Porter; bottom-middle: Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez and his children; bottom-left: Bay Ryan. Different victims and targets of fascism and imperialism [which fascism brings home to empire]. This extends not just to outright rape and murder but also generational trauma/stolen generations...)

In other words, much of human history—especially modern human history—historically-materially determines through state predation as ongoing. "Invasion is a structure," Patrick Wolfe famously said (source: "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native," 2006; cited: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome," 2025). So is extinction as something to discuss (or not) concerning all the usual cop/victim scapegoats capital/the state demand, under Capitalist (and Socialist) Realism; or, as I write: "Our general focus, here, is learning from nature about violence, terror and sexual morphologies; i.e., as controlled by state monopolies silencing proletarian ones (censorship equals extinction); i.e., queer-transformative elements that feel magical, xenophilic and drug-like (during acid Communism) but also controlled, forbidden, and chattelized: as a potent and hauntological, sex-educational means of escaping Capitalist Realism to become better stewards of nature than Capitalism is (which only rapes nature)" (source: "Call of the Wild," 2025). So whether city-state or nation-state tied to church, corporation, monarchy, bureaucracy or some-such fixture of the ruling class (the bourgeoisie aided by the petite-bourgeoisie), the basic predicament boils down to state vampirism, cryptonymy-and-abjection: state's rights versus worker rights, in duality and perpetuity. It also includes overcoming bias and establishment norms, which what might seem "punk" can actually have a semi-cloaked SWERF-y "fortress" element to them, in crisis within the panopticon. Gothic is full of phonies, from Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis onwards. So who's the real vampire, and the fake?

(source: Reddit)

Note: Owing to some weird reactionary bullshit in the Goth YouTube community (re: from Angela Benedict, above), I've expanded heavily on this section today. It includes huge block quotes, if only because I've done this to death before and don't feel like repeating myself (save to copy-and-paste my own essays and book sections, blowing my horn/whistle). This polemic, however "catty" it appears, is meant to educate others on the harms present within Gothic online discourse (and elsewhere). "If you prick me do I not bleed?" Let's see what kind of "blood" you bleed, Benedict, when "struck" (so speak. All of this is opinion and research, and nothing here is to encourage harassment of the person shown above or their fans, the former a public figure I am criticizing through Fair Use and free speech under American law); i.e., how you react when critiqued without kid gloves on. From "Thou call'dst me dog [through veiled language, in my opinion] before thou hadst a cause; / But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs" (source: The Merchant of Venice, c. 1596) to "What is a TERF? A miserable pile of secrets! But enough talk, have at you!" (source: Clyde Mandelin's "How Symphony of the Night's 'Miserable Pile of Secrets' Scene Works in Japanese," 2013). It would seem the theatre kids are fighting again. Take something useful from it. And to Benedict: 'Tis but a scratch, girl; think of it as a love tap/reality check to shock you to your senses (a system shock)! —Perse, 5/4/2026

(source: Fandom)

P.S., Expanded on this opening a bit, especially regarding gatekeeping after talking with my partners about Angela Benedict:

(exhibit 40j2b [from re: "'Ruling the Slum'; or, Crime Lords, Police Tokenism and Sell-Outs," 2024]: In part, Top Dollar's hideout stands for a demonic version of Trump Tower [which, itself, is simply a more boastful version of Capitalism in moderation—a vanity project advertising the owner]: the center of a dilapidated city bled dry. Detroit's territories are divided up and policed, then fought over to coax money, drugs and weapons; i.e., towards the nucleus and through the giant structure's vampiric throat, up and up to Top Dollar. It's also a front, disguised as a club, whose musicians sport the countercultural façade of a latter-day speakeasy—the prohibited Satanic imagery and BDSM gear of a band playing with caged impunity on a stage ringed with security between them and the paying mob.

And directly upstairs, we're shown the sprawling lifeblood of the city—converted into the usual merchandise and arranged along the same giant table like food. At the head of the table is a phone and Faustian business deals; i.e., the city's central nervous system wired between its assigned underworld boss and his obvious-if-implied connections to City Hall and the police. The division between cops and robbers is a conservative myth, glorified by the movie's nostalgic consumerism towards outlaw culture/music; i.e., as a school of disguise concealing the fact that all illustrate and serve capital until our titular vigilante—the movie's outlaw folk hero, killer clown, Satanic musician—paralyzes the whole operation: by cutting the snake to ribbons with Top Dollar's own supply [when the cops arrive, they threaten him in force: "That's all she wrote! Move and we shoot!" Profit defends profit].)

(source: Facebook; cited: "Chapter Two: Sex Coercion [...] Sex Coercion under Zombie Capitalism, Including Bad Drugs and Voluntary Lobotomy," 2025)

Gatekeeping can have an anti-predation quality—generally among decentralized communities (especially with the homeless, speakeasies, underground networks, etc), and generally as protection from cops. But in wider, more popular and mainstream territories—or even just commodified ones (which Goth is [so-called "mall rock" and the Hot Topic effect Jeff Waters* sung about years ago] and has been, similar to punk or anything else that capital assimilates)—gatekeeping functions more like anti-immigration policy: as something xenophobic in a variety of ways that, more often than not, target various marginalities separately and together. The latter is regressive, and Goth subculture is not immune to tokenization (above)—meaning in ways other Goths have commented on, besides me; e.g., By Candlelight's "Is Goth Gatekeeping Toxic or Necessary?" (2026). Prescription and gatekeeping historically become elitist, in that case—a pernicious and sinister means of de facto police action harming the movement, and generally by keeping it exclusive during fascism and capital-in-crisis; e.g., akin to Brexit and TERFs in Britain and Christofascism and all it entails, in North America. Anyone who does that is a giant, unmitigated cunt. Morticia Adams wore black-and-red (not a fash†); so did the Nazis, and I see you, bitch: Nazis and liberals are posers, on the tin or functional (e.g., Fairuza Balk, below; re: "A Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches)" footnote 15).

*"Hey, man, I hear they're having a sale down at Hot Topic. Let's go!" (Annihilator's "The Trend," 2010). What capital outlaws, it also commodifies; re: sex, drugs and rock 'n roll (and anything comparable to rock stolen from black culture by white; e.g., rap, funk, blues, jazz, etc); see, also: "Chapter Two: Sex Coercion" (above). For the colonizer pimping the witch, the abuser class commonly reverses roles in bed to fetishize what they're unironically doing elsewhere: dehumanizing the harvest while furthering abjection (sex and force along Cartesian models; re: part zero, one, two, three, and the finale of "Synthesis Roadmap, or Nature Is Food," 2024). For them, anything goes; for those they discipline and punish, everything is an offense (the same Puritan hypocrisy dating back to Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" [1835] and well before; see: Atun-Shei's own excoriations of the pre-Revolutionary-War Puritans, including their 2023 precursor to The Vampires of New Orleans: The Sudbury Devil).

†See: John the Duncan's "A Funhouse Mirror? The Addams Family and the Failure of Netflix's Wednesday" (2022); or, my own response to the show (and character): "Pigtail Power and Crossdressing: Sex Repulsion in Gothic/Queer Narratives" (2023).

Speaking of the panopticon—a tower designed to sequester and surveille lepers (and which Foucault made famous in his 1976 Discipline and Punish)—in-groups (meaning capital and the middle class serving the ruling class to enact state predation) impersonate out-group prey they shamelessly imitate in bad faith (enjoying a variety of double standards, as they do). So when Angela Benedict released "Goth Has a Brainrot Problem" (above, 2026), I—a sex worker and anti-fascist—immediately noted the reactionary element hidden, mid-pastiche (and mid-genocide): "The internet has turned goth into a caricature. E-girls cash in on exploiting tropes, gooners drool and now those outside goth think it's true. It's not" (from her video description, which feels rich given her pasty-white* ass is also on the Internet). I'm not saying you can't critique sex work (re: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome"), but this felt SWERF-y to me, ergo TERF-y while "blowing the whistle" in bad faith; i.e., in ways that—seemingly defending a Fortress of Solitude from evil enslavers—is actually its own form of Red Scare/moral panic: whorephobia. Red flags began to wave before the shooting started. However, this led to something revealing about their fanbase in the comments after I opened my mouth (as one does):

(source, comments: "Goth Has a Brainrot Problem")

Me: As a trans sex worker, academic/activist and Gothicist, I'm disinclined to lean into "sex bad"; i.e., blaming the whore. My book series (and work I do alongside other Gothic whores) is literally against what you're saying here (which feels a touch SWERF-y, to be honest, but correct me if I'm wrong). / And "Goth as a caricature" is a bit funny to me, given it's been that way for centuries (all the way back to Lewis and Radcliffe, in the 1790s, and before).

Suigintou Desunator (a white knight): This reads as parody [translation: "Look at the dumb whore!"]

Me: It's not. I'll do a video about it, today. / However, and to reply, a lot of Goth subculture feels like means testing/is very material-focused ([read:] middle class; i.e., Tim Burton syndrome), which is its own kind of gatekeeping.

Suigintou: I'm not going to watch your video. I'm going to do my makeup and listen to Death in June [translation: "I'm not listening! I'm not listening!"].

*Benedict's reply—however bad-faith, pernicious and "gotcha" (read: lazy) it feels—raises a curious point:

Her: It's ironic to condemn prejudice while stereotyping someone's ethnicity based on appearance. Referring to my "lily white ass" ["pasty white," but go on] and assuming my background because of my skin tone is still racial bias. I'm Sicilian, Filipino, and Chinese but the real issue is the contradiction in claiming to oppose judgment while engaging in it yourself.

Me: To be frank, comrade, I was referring your corpse paint (which IS lily-white), not your ethnicity. But if you felt otherwise, I apologize all the same, and will make a note of clarifying to readers: you're Chinese/Filipino who wears lily-white corpse paint (though perhaps NOT on your ass). Regardless, you're still a prude and a SWERF who, regardless of the color of your actual ass, is still gatekeeping Gothic; i.e., in ways that, now that you mention it, feel pretty white; re: like Anita Bryant. Through you're right; assumptions are harmful and non-ethnically-white people can [also] be gatekeepers within capital, a predominantly white, European system that bears out white qualities adopted by other ethnic groups. These groups shouldn't be described as incapable of doing such things; e.g., Fanon's black skin, white masks or Coulthard's red. Same idea with Chinese and Filipino. So I will make a note of that as well.

(source, comments: "Goth Has a Brainrot Problem")

Notice how Benedict only played the race card, meaning her only leg to stand on and a notably shaky one. To it, let's sweep the leg (or point out the trolley problem/anchor she's tied herself to, below)!

One, I was specifically referring to Benedict's face paint when I wrote "pasty-white ass," which, I know, isn't ass paint, so I will clarify (not to Benedict, but the audience): her Italian, specifically Sicilian, and Chinese-Filipino ass. So what? Racially-token people can still be racist (and "bougie"), insofar as their actions (words or otherwise) punch down at activism to maintain whorephobic power structures; i.e., with a white, straight and patriarchal nucleus, defended by token bad actors in the Goth community emblematizing "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss." Or as Cinzia Arruzza writes in Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (2019), "We have no interest in breaking the glass ceiling while leaving the vast majority to clean up the shards. Far from celebrating women CEOs who occupy corner offices, we want to get rid of CEOs and corner offices [...] Feminism must be anticapitalist, eco-socialist and antiracist" (source). It must also, I argue, be pro-sex-work, lest the same old Cartesian sins continue (re: Patel and Moore).

Two, I don't recall saying I'm "above" anything. Bitch, please; I grew up in southeast Michigan, and had to consciously overcome my racism, and even then it's possible to still make mistakes. Shit happens. And three, ethnically non-white people can still be SWERFs and, more to the point, act white accordingly. The idea comes from Fanon but isn't unique to him, being a concept Gothic has explored for centuries: regarding the colonial powers (and assimilation under police violence) that Fanon only discussed in 1952.

In your case, Benedict, you're literally wearing white face paint and acting like Morticia Adams (a "bougie" play if ever there were), but specifically the neoliberal, gentrified version, post-'90s; i.e., as played after Anjelica Hudson (and Carolyn Jones, both notably white women) by Catherine Zeta-Jones, who, though she often codes as "Latina" in films (e.g., Wednesday but also the Zorro movies) is actually Welsh. If she can do it, so can you, just in a slightly different visual way that has the same socio-material outcome: appropriation and vampirism. In fact, swap the black mask and cops-and-robbers appropriation of Central American culture for a North-American one, and you have the general idea (though Banderas [shown with Zeta-Jones, below] is Castilian aka European [non-Arab] Spanish—made famous in Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown [1988] and Mexican-American director Robert Rodriguez' own "bandit vaudeville" [echoed in Neo-Gothic novels demonizing Italians and other non-Anglo groups]—but I digress): similar to Batman, Zorro was playing at a bandit (though it depends on the legend, below).

(source: Jessica Wedemeyer's "CZJ Hopes The Mask of Zorro Isn't Canceled," 2021)

Whatever the mask, acting and multiculturalism remain dualistic/dialectical-material, like anything. The point being race is just as much a social construct as gender is; i.e., something to perform, often hand-in-hand with other intersecting factors advocating for or resisting austerity (the core feature of fascism). To it, and as I write in "Pigtail Power" (2025) on Gothic heroines (who were classically detectives, white or otherwise):

the female detective ostensibly rejects compulsory sexuality (the societal endorsement of sexual desire as natural, normal and rewarded) on every register, though especially physical appearance: a "dark" spoof of the American Puritanical WASP [emphasis, me] (re: John the Duncan's "A Funhouse Mirror? The Addams Family and the Failure of Netflix's Wednesday," 2023), haunted by death and rape, serial murder and so on.

I say "ostensibly" because Wednesday Adams from Wednesday exemplifies [... as] non-white* and ace, vocalizing her disdain for sexual love: "I'm not like you, Mother," she says. "I will never fall in love, get married, have children."

*The praxis, here, is semi-canonical. Netflix making Wednesday's parents Latin American [again, coded as such] largely feels appropriative—i.e., functionally white, blue-blooded do-gooders conspicuously loaded with "old money." While bourgeois Marxism is entirely possible provided it quickly delineates from the status quo, it very much needs to be recognized amid the neoliberal AAA conventions that celebrate ostentatious wealth as the "best" means of achieving social-sexual activism. / To this, Wednesday's biggest failing is the setting itself: a magical boarding school for rich kids, which strongly reeks of assimilation fantasy in both directions (the desire to go to such a school; the entire world is like the school, an ideological site that brands activity for a select group: those who can afford the tuition fees). I much prefer Andor (re: "Marxism in Space") whose widespread holistic revolution incorporates working and owner class peoples into a grand collective action against Capitalism [emphasis, me].

In postcolonial theory, black/white are abstract, not concrete. In turn, "white" can be performed by anyone regardless of skin color (re: Fanon and Coulthard, but also my arguments, above). Zeta-Jones can act brown when she is Welsh; Taylor Sheridan's White Indians and non-Indigenous women—specifically Thai (Skip Intro; timestamp: 24:48)—can appropriate the struggles of actual Indigenous Peoples, playing the role in Yellowstone (2018) to whitewash and lionize white actors (or non-white actors acting white) playing "Indians"; James Cameron can hire black actors and actresses who happily do the same for blockbuster dollars; Marc Dacascos can play an Indigenous American when he's actually Hawaiian/Filipino and Irish/Japanese (re: Melissa Slaughter's "Mark Dacascos Can't Cook," 2022; cited: "Leaving the Closet," 2024); and Benedict herself can act/self-typecast (and -report) as white despite being an ethnic combination of different non-white things (with Sicilians historically being treated as non-white in America [read: marginalized in-fighting among immigrants trying to assimilate—often in gangster narratives whose endless stereotypes they commodify/participate in, similar to Irish-Americans, Hibernophilia and "plastic paddies"], say nothing of that one scene from True Romance [1993] I suspect Quentin Tarantino [a famous racist and someone who helped write the film's screenplay if memory serves] probably wrote).

(source, comments: "Goth Has a Brainrot Problem")

I digress. Not being white doesn't, pardon the expression, give you "carte blanche" or otherwise make you exempt from criticism, comrade. And to that, my critique of you didn't focus on race (though consider this entire footnote an addendum to my original thesis). Rather, it prioritized your whorephobia as decidedly fake in bad-faith ways. To that, another person also called you out [above]:

krytture1881 [with typos]: So, you are fake as shit. You are playing the game harder than most do. You might not be as cheesy, or horn,ie but it's the same thing. Stop being jealous. Also, Oh no! Dudes pay attention to me and give me money! How horrible! Uuuhgg...!! Nah, you just pissed that OTHER girls are getting that money. Sorry babe, you ain't Goth #1. This isn't a pyramid scheme. Be nice and frick everyone else. Get your bread, let them eat too.

If the shoe fits, Cinderella (with Disney engaging in Rainbow Capitalism all the time, racial and gender). Americans with Chinese-Filipino/Sicilian heritage can still be fake in whorephobic ways; i.e., it's all about what you do with the fakeness of Gothic reinvention, which you yourself—a token racial minority in the middle of rising fascism—are using to blame the whore. It's the oldest—again, pardon the expression—trick in the book, and tokens get spent, my dude. Your face paint may as well be egg whites (or whipped cream, but I digress) for all the egg it leaves on your face, out-out-damn-spot; re: like Anita Bryant† likewise "taking the soup." You even have the same initials! Selling out is selling out, no matter who you betray along the way (or masks you wear). Quit sucking the state's dick (whose semen contains the nutrients of dead whores, their blood turned into blood money you happily ingest while sucking on our necks, too. You are what you eat, tit-for-tat).

(source: Gregory's "There's Never Been a Better Time To Watch Anita Bryant's Pie in the Face," 2024)

†A Southern Baptist who was, despite her mixed heritage (one-eighth Cherokee, as a matter of fact), remained a massive bigot until the day she died: "Upon her death at age 84, Anita Jane Bryant was remembered most vividly for her harsh stance against homosexuality in the 1970s and not for the successful music career that preceded her advocacy" (source: Wingfield's "Anita Bryant, dead at 84, remembered for what she opposed," 2025). Or as GLBTQ notes (who put the G before the L, which is curious):

Anita Bryant's career started out as an American success story: born into poverty in rural Oklahoma, she won a beauty pageant, became a popular singer, and was eagerly sought by Fortune 500 companies to advertise their products. She sang at the White House [never a good sign], was featured in People magazine, and co-hosted eight Orange Bowl parade telecasts for NBC. But after becoming the poster-girl for homophobia, her marriage dissolved and her career tanked. Bryant became a controversial figure in 1977, when she successfully campaigned against a local ordinance in Dade County, Florida that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. She then helped repeal similar laws in Eugene, Oregon, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Wichita, Kansas. She also inspired a major anti-gay initiative in California, which failed, and an anti-gay law passed overwhelmingly by the Oklahoma legislature, which was ultimately ruled unconstitutional. 

[...] Anita Jane Bryant was born March 25, 1940, in Barnsdall, Oklahoma. Her parents, an oilfield worker and a housewife, divorced soon afterwards, remarried, and broke up again. Since her father had a Native American background, Anita was one-eighth Cherokee [emphasis, me]. / Bryant was raised primarily by her mother and her maternal grandparents in a strict Southern Baptist home (source).

(source: Matt Lavietes and Jillian Eugenios' "Anita Bryant, a former beauty queen turned anti-gay crusader, dies at 84," 2025) 

The point, here, is it was far harder to find information about Bryant's non-white heritage than her white-coded actions; i.e., because she acted white and straight despite her material hardships/non-white and impoverished success story and rape survival (allegedly being abused herself as a child; re: GLBTQ Archive). To that, we're shaped by our environments, yes, but also by our own choices within said environments, kill-the-Indian-save-the-man; and Bryant acted white and straight, accordingly (which includes appearance, above). It's the very "red skin, white masks" and cunning recognition that Coulthard cautioned about (which emerged in the 1970s, when Bryant was most active): punch down as/at minority and get a prize, Skinner-Box-style. To that, bigotry or not bigotry = what you do/don't do to combat socio-material oppression. Be that Bryant's token homophobia or your token whorephobia (and bad reputation), both are bigoted on account of your being racially-token women attacking queer/sex workers (which often walk arm-in-arm). Again, being a racial minority doesn't make you above criticism, and playing the race card here just makes you look worse; i.e., hypocritically bad-faith and/or ignorant (take your pick). Race, a social construct, becomes a ceremony whose ongoing legacy opposes this or that; re: Bryant, the gays, and you the sluts, both of you literal racially-token beauty queens. Bigotry is bigotry that pure aesthetics can vampirically aid when used unironically. Do better.

(source: Pinterest)

To summarize, Goth baddie (dressed like a vampire and plugging their shit while handing down dogma, dominatrix-style) says thing and it sounds legitimate to a larger circus/cult; i.e., one they can ringlead with plausible deniability (again in my opinion, tied to my academic work defending sex work). Owing to the material side of things, any ensuing de rigeur has been established seemingly ex nihilo but in fact actually occurred over time; e.g., De Sade's BDSM gear tied to later usage (source: Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism," 1974) happening alongside (now) openly gay metal god, Rob Halford, adopting a judge's robes (and aura) for he and his bandmates' stage gimmicks amid legal troubles (source: Metal Matt, "Dream Deceivers Documentary - The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest 1992," 2021; timestamp: 42:29). Point in fact, they did the same "BDSM from outer space" gimmick that KISS did; re (from "Judas Priest: Invincible Shield and Zionism," 2024):

as time went on, Priest sold out. Their critical lyrics became deliberately dumb—starting with British Steel (1980) into Painkiller (1990), the latter being something to emulate with Invincible Shield as pastiche of something that, far from becoming a joke, has become canon to espouse whatever dogma the band wants to enrich themselves with. It's an empty ghost of a reinvention that remains holy. Like the titular Painkiller—curiously summoned out of the imaginary past during a time of civilized collapse (thus medieval apocalypse and rapture amid the decaying cities' surrounding wasteland and tombstone-esque skyscrapers) and laden in mythical symbols ejected from their historical context to fulfill a new goal—Priest have become something to "call for" and preach a new wisdom to the masses. And yet, out of the ruins they're ripping themselves off and other musicians to boot (with their musical mascot clearly inspired by Meatloaf's phantom biker from Bat Out of Hell, 1978).

This brings us to the famous (and mysterious) Priest insignia. It dates back to their second album, Sad Wings of Destiny (1976), but which the band have deliberately injected into their logo since 2008's Angel of Retribution. Not much is known or said about it as far as I could find (the band staying quiet on it when remembering Sad Wings 35 years later with Malcom Dome) but it remains highly ubiquitous and arcane; i.e., serving both as cryptic heraldry for the Painkiller's knightly armor (stamped on the shoulder like a military badge) while he defeats alien forces in times of state crisis, thus decay and collapse. All serve as part of a pointedly medieval regression, one whose proposed damnation and salvation operate through the unironic worship of force. In short, it's fascist obscurantism made to elevate the band both in terms of wealth and status: as heavy metal gods who look after their own as a kind of "flock" to part from its wool; e.g., Halford explaining in 2020

"We love our fans. We would never put anything in our music with the intent of harming them" (source: "Judas Priest's Rob Halford Reflects on 30th Anniversary of Subliminal Message Lawsuit").

except also having another revelation that hints at the parasocial (and parasitic) relationship between bands and those who support them:

"I had to sing 'Better by You, Better than Me' in court, acappella. I think that was when the judge thought, 'What am I doing here? No band goes out of its way to kill its fans'" (source: Rock 'N Roll True Stories' "Judas Priest: The Lawsuit Over 'Better by You, Better than Me' that Shook the Metal World," 2023).

Priest, specifically Halford, also recognized the judge as a staged, imposing presence the singer likened to himself when viewed by his own fans onstage:

"When you're in court, you always see this guy in the back with a gown and he's very imposing and very dramatic; and it's amusing—I think of the judge like the fans think of us when they see us onstage: 'What's he really like, closeup? Has he got feet and all that business?'" [source: "Dream Deceivers Documentary"].

In the same documentary cited above, Halford also curiously describes himself as an intellectual who writes about dark lyrics that aren't "American love songs." But the fact remains that capital accommodates him according to his relationship with fans loving him in ways that cater to their fragile (white) worldviews; i.e., as things to defend using heavy metal as comfort food, not activism. This reflects in Priest's metal pastoralism, which in modern times assists in Capitalist Realism by a bunch of posers who suck precisely because they're making hay while Palestinians are being killed on a Military-Industrial scale. So much for being an intellectual as Edward Said would call himself, in Representations of an Intellectual (1993); though Priest ain't got the guts to challenge their own position despite fans around the world loving them, they've proven for decades they will exploit '70s-era BDSM fetish gear (the Nazi echo) and biker/"leather daddy" culture:

(source: Revolver)

That, I think, speaks to the complicity Priest bear in things and the utter fragility of Capitalist Realism as a transactional process. Better to keep mum regarding the quiet part and posture as a hero than kill the hero by speaking truth to power in consequential ways—all very ironic considering Priest's immortal line in "Heroes End" (1978): "Why do you have to die if you're a hero / When there's still so many things to say unsaid?" (source: Genius). "The idea has become the institution," except, per Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism (1991), this means blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs remediated through endless pastiche. Posing as liberators and rebels, Priest with Invincible Shield have become deaf, dumb and blind; but as men behind the curtain, I think they're either well-aware of it or they don't care enough to challenge their own brand as part of a Zionist-capitalist enterprise.

The idea of "heavy metal warriors" certainly isn't unique to Britain (with American band KISS' Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons both being Jewish*). [...] The Judas Priest symbol is really no different, effectively taking ancient, non-Christian symbols like the menorah (or rather, a weird, convergent likeness of it) and imbuing them with a fresh sense of settler-colonial purpose; i.e., during Imperialism's ongoing evolution inside Capitalist Realism, expanding the imperial potential of revivals of Caesar through an endless series of counterfeits. In turn, these forgeries drive profit through infinite military conquest as "dressed up" in symbols of recuperated oppression: a rock 'n roll army.

(artist: Ken Kelly)

*As Jon Stratton writes in "KISS: Jewishness, Hard Rock and the Holocaust" (2020):

"KISS was a hard rock group, one of the most successful during the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s. The group's two founding members, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, were both Jewish. Indeed, both were the sons of Holocaust survivors. This article examines the impact of Simmons's and Stanley's Jewishness on KISS as a rock group and on its success. One of the most obvious impacts was the drive to succeed which Simmons and Stanley shared. Simmons writes about wanting power, Stanley that he wanted respect. As children of survivors they wanted safety. During much of the 1970s, the Holocaust was not yet publicly acknowledged. However, its trauma is evident in, for example, the stage characters that Simmons and Stanley adopted" (source).

To this, Capitalism and Judas Priest have recruited Jewishness to serve settler colonialism through a metal voice that has lost much of its irony but none of its dogmatic potential.

Cis women and gay guys sell out, too; i.e., "I used to be louder [...] So maybe stop judging the kids for being too much. They're fighting for their lives while we're worried about maintaining what we've built. I'm not saying burn it all down. I'm saying, remember when you would have and ask yourself what you lost when you decided fitting in mattered more than fighting back. Because the people trying to erase us don't distinguish between the good gays and the bad ones. They just wait for us to be too tired, too comfortable, or too respectable to fight. Don't make it that easy for them" (source Facebook post: December 10th, 2025; cited: "Sharing the Blame," 2025). Same goes for women (cis or otherwise) and sex work—the formerly (or never) wild segregating themselves, if only to a degree from something they can criminalize, blame and prey upon, cryptonymy-and-abjection.

(ibid.)

Gothic is sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, policing it even when sobriety and prohibition creeps into the message. Priest gentrified and decayed their cop/victim false-rebel complex under capital like punk historically did (see: skinheads and their history vs heavy metal [and other "outsider" groups] being historically white straight men, playing the part in bad faith; e.g., Black Sabbath—with Ozzy being a hardcore Zionist). In Halford's case, eventually he and his sobered up, cleaning up the band's image by removing the radical elements present in their '70s work (while still keeping the comic-book [and lucrative] façade of rebellion). In fact, they continue to make millions in light of ongoing genocide (queer but also Palestinian, alongside KISS, above). The same "pick me" idea of a false rebellion (from Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds, 1997) ties to feminism and tokenism as I cover it (re: "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It"). That is, behind one bigotry or act of exclusion, you will find others lurking "within Omelas," as shown within first and second wave feminism adopting Goth aesthetics; i.e., to disguise themselves/defang the mode's rebellious potential through tokenized witch hunts chartering and partitioning the usual cells (re: "Policing the Whore" and "Ladies First; or, the Grift of False Rebellion," 2024 and 2025). A cop's a cop, ipso facto, reactionaries and moderates alike relying on audience ignorance to function/deliver calls to action* against "problem issues." The same goes for Goth subculture, past and present: "Pot, meet kettle; you're a prioress pimp in whore's clothes! A vampire sucking for the status quo (ergo the state)!"

*Awareness becoming fascist, thus anti-woke dressed up as "woke" (the colonizer aping the colonized on all registers).

(source thumbnail: "Goth Has a Brainrot Problem")

Speaking of which, and returning to Benedict's hypocritically asinine video (especially its "sex = anti-intellectual degenerate" premise, above), let's quickly dissect it. Before we do, some more history (a smidge); i.e., while keeping the basic historical-material fact, "punk decays," dialectically-materially in mind. As I've said, there's often a gatekeeping quality to Gothic, and has been since the 1790s (at least). In fact, the first modern Gothic novel (after Shakespeare's oral stage plays) appeared in 1764 by Horace Walpole (which he passed off as a historical "document" to only confess as his own, in 1765). The movement gathered steam in the 1790s with Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis (a straight woman and gay man) as competing novelists during the Gothic "invention of terrorism" (re: Crawford, 2013). Even here, there was an exclusionary element to Radcliffe, who distanced herself from Lewis, radicalism and the French Revolution (see: "On the Supernatural and Poetry," 1826)—a trend that would continue into future Gothic stories (and replication) monopolized by white straight paid men and women for the next several centuries. There's a homonormative element in spots, but if you need proof of the cishet feminist (transphobic) stamp, look no further than J.K. Rowling (re: "Dead on Arrival"). Same goes for Angela Benedict, it seems—our resident detective essentially arguing for Gothic purity and cleanliness from "stupid whores" (with easy clickbait: "sex = dumb," above); i.e., keeping Gothic ("Goth" or otherwise) SFW under a Protestant aka Puritan ethic, one shaming the slut thus devaluing sex work in deeply criminalized, moral-panic value judgements.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

I beg to differ. Gothic aesthetics (vampires or otherwise) exist in duality, and flow (of power) = function (e.g., Blxxd Bunny and the work they've done with me, above). That means we sex workers have to smart to survive the censors and make our living under capital, Gothic circles included; i.e., decolonizing vampires under duress (re: Blxxd Bunny censored by search algorithms) versus fake clowns (fascist and liberal, the latter fascist with more masks) recuperating Gothic in SWERF-y ways; re (from "Tactical Frivolity"):

The point, here, is morphology plays out in the flesh: by speaking tactically to larger inequalities, which workers relate to differently through shared struggle. "In the same boat," their personal alienation occurs through abjection as reversible. In turn, Gothic wish fulfillment cloaks commands; i.e., cryptonymically in the feudal language of power and place: a given "fortress" embodying time and space—as "planet" to conquer in state eyes, but which rebellious forces reverse the flow of power "on the Aegis." In keeping with nature-as-fetish during ludo-Gothic BDSM, whores = anything the state wants to pimp thus feed on, and whose subsequent terror we can bounce froggily back at them; re: "Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it" (source: Robert Asprey's War in the Shadows, 1975).

That is, fake jesters who, dressed up as dead whores—a tradition (of graveyard sex) that goes back to Ancient Rome into Neo-Gothic live burial (see: B.B. Wagner's "The Graveyard Prostitutes of Rome and Beyond," 2020; cited: "A Cruel Angel's Thesis," 2024)—curiously have the same braindead, reactionary-to-moderate takes an open philistine might; re (from "Dead on Arrival"):

To it, there's stiff differences between praise and perdition; i.e., someone who responds by asking "Are you a wizard?" and someone (e.g., Bad Empanada [or Angela Benedict]) who goes:

The incel loves/hates the baddie; i.e., as someone to chase in Puritanical, pimp-the-whore ways (older Socialists [or those nostalgic for Marx, Stalin and Mao's sexism and homophobia] being conservatives in red paint; re: "On Sex Work versus Marxist-Leninism" from "Raising Awareness").

I digress, abjection is abjection, mid-cryptonymy affording weird paradoxes; i.e., where the nun apes the monk to "punch Pazuzu*" here at home (above)—a given "defender of the faith" exorcising the homewrecker whore, mid-abjection as loaded with endless crusader bigotries and detectives/demons "boundaries for me, not for thee" hypocrisies; re: "Nancy Drew Syndrome" (2025) with an elitist Halloween stamp: "No actual whores allowed!" shouted under false flags playing vampire cops-and-victims. "Oh, won't someone please think of those poor meddling kids? Of the women and children? Of our right as Americans to 'clean house' of degenerates, mid-vaudeville? Make Halloween Great Again! Clean up Goth and the streets of any evil fakes doing the Devil (and the pimp's) work!" A cop's a cop, Bryant's traitorous function ironically betrayed through the arguments they make in costumes shared by perceived impostors (we whores). So does Benedict radiate Anita Bryant energies in bad faith; i.e., while playing the rebel, punching spectres not just of Marx but of Medusa accordingly. She's betraying the larger cause we both belong to (as cops do, including TERFs and SWERFs infiltrating different discos for blood money). Whose brain (and moral core) is rotten, again? DARVO and obscurantism, hard at work (the Protestant ethic). So does Gothic endlessly sell out; i.e., from Radcliffe to Rowling to Benedict, all living in Gothic times alongside those they reactively scratch and kettle. Sometimes, whores scratch back (to see what shit you're full of, as much as blood and other things).

(source: "The Imperial Boomerang, part two: Cryptomimesis, or Pieces of the Dead," 2024)

*The lawn jockey and minstrel-show blackface, wearing bone-white corpse paint, echoes Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952); i.e., while being used by white performers acting in bad faith (colonizing Gothic, above). It's the White Indian on Gothic stages, fearful of so-called "black planets" they warn of through various scapegoats; re: skull = theft of a Radcliffean sort, its ensuing cryptonymy furthering abjection (ergo state vampirism) in defense of nuclear home; re: the Black Veil Radcliffe's chief commercial success, first and foremost (and one incumbent on terrorism serving the status quo, even if they can't monopolize it).

To it, Goth subculture has similar "gatekeeper" elements that punk/postpunk, aka disco*-in-disguise) did, themselves being tied to different cultural movements in their areas that allowed certain people in and left others out (take a wild guess at whom); e.g., postpunk in Thatcher's England/neoliberalism, Peter Hook and company's the Hacienda literally being a music club challenging that status quo, but not one without its own problems (see: The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club [2009] as Marilyn Roxie, a postpunk nerd and Mancunian transplant, did during my stay in Manchester England for my masters). Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss is a fundamental problem of Gothic and has been from the start (re: "Radcliffe's Refrain" and all my work on her); i.e., in academia and children's fiction, as Chloe German Buckley points out in Twenty-First-Century Children's Gothic: From the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject (2017), and Catherine Spooner on the larger Gothic mode including Goth in Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (2019). There's a "monster mash" party or clubber exclusivity to such things, and academia or not, they get bounced like anyone "guarding the doors." And such things have routinely founded on fakery to further or reverse abjection, mid-cryptonymy (thus state predation); re (from "Raising Awareness," footnote 1):

*Which cannibalized funk (as Mumia al-Jamal explains to F.D. Signifier, 2026), but I digress: white power structures, even when posturing as "black" (racial or otherwise) commodify oppression in Gothically immature ways (see: footnote 5). In turn, SWERFs tokenize to fight over "tips," sloganizing "tip your waitress (or Goth barista)" instead of your sex worker. A pimp's a pimp!

(source: Malachi Lui's "The Haçienda*: How Not To Run A Club— Peter Hook’s Page-Turning Quarantine Read," 2020)

*I actually saw the former club when I was in Manchester at MMU—meaning from September 2017 to June 2018 (and its own gatekeeping mechanism; re: Persephone van der Waard's Quora answer to "How easy is it to get into Manchester Metropolitan University?" 2019; cited: "From Master's to PhD"). In keeping with neoliberalism and gentrification, New Order's "Alamo" had long since been turned into condos for expat city-goers (a topic discussed by local academics, including a seminar I attended while living in the boom-town college district of a larger industrial throwback).

Hogle's counterfeit ties to Western models of power that tyrants around the world hauntologically imitate, meaning anachronistically but haunted—as I and others argue—by state power (re: spectres of Caesar). [...] "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: "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)

The same fakery and trickery can be used by state power or by workers, onstage and off—meaning in dialectical-material exchanges that hug the alien as a dualistic force (an "inkblot").

To that (and to reiterate), sex workers (a facet of unpaid labor alongside care/reproductive labor) can challenge the nuclear model versus defending it (whether on purpose or not, Benedict); re: (from "Raising Awareness," footnote 2):

Any movement—be it openly capitalist or "socialist/Communist" in name (and arguably capitalist in function, to whatever degree that is)—historically exploits "women's work" (re: me vis-à-vis John Duncan; timestamp: 1:39:55); i.e., by taking women's work for granted, therefore advantage of all over the place:

In the discussion of cheap work in the previous chapter, we connected rural and urban economics in the link between global farms and global factories. The availability of proletarian labor was possible only because of the transformation of care work into unpaid work, available as one of Nature's "free gifts"—which, as we have seen, are neither free nor gifted. […]

One radical response to the fundamental devaluation of care work involves a jujitsu pricing move and the demand that housework be paid. As the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign argued, "Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink. To deny this is also to deny the slavery of the assembly line itself, proving again that if you don’t know how women are exploited, you can never really know how men are." The irony here, of course, is that there's a long history of women who were paid little if at all for their domestic labor: those working under slavery. The United States is not alone in this pattern, with carers from different classes, castes, and indeed nations suffering widespread exploitation in other countries too. And even if payment were a route to recognition, there's much further to go to reach dignity. As Angela Davis put it, "Psychological liberation can hardly be achieved simply by paying the housewife a wage." Yet the insight of Wages for Housework shouldn't be forgotten. To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to call for an end to capitalism [emphasis, me] (source: Seven Cheap Things).

This tendency is so pervasive that John Duncan, in his own video, doesn't even mention sex workers at all—leading me to have to call him out for it (re: timestamp: 2:18:02); re: "When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!" To free the land is to also free labor and sex, therefore all of nature as monstrous-feminine (female or not, white or not)—a breaking of all the monopolies used to pimp nature-as-usual; e.g., of violence, terror and monsters rooted in the ancient cradle of abuse showing capital where it eventually will die during the whore's revenge (re: "Our Sweet Revenge").

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; cited: "Meeting Rebels," 2024)

Or as Carl Sagan put it, "To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." To that, the "inventors" of Society and Nature are in for a rude awakening (re: Descartes, Bacon and others—see Patel and Moore's section on the Cartesian Revolution, but also state shift; i.e., when Mother Nature [climate change] takes the planet back for good, the Capitalocene laid ungraciously to rest: when Medusa sits on it). To prevent that, we must learn to see women (or those treated like women) as capable not just of intelligence, but of revolutionary action; i.e., building a better world through Gothic Communism (the domain of Amazons and Gorgons); re: through a holistic and shared, intersectional consciousness (of class, culture and race); re: Cuwu (above) was a revolutionary actor (a trans man, to be specific) who thought and read, but also used their sexual labor to further radicalize me. Development is a lifelong battle, continuing long after the present generation has kicked the bucket.

(cited: "Who's Fredrick Brennan?" 2026)

Intent doesn't matter, socio-material outcomes do. So when Benedict writes "Goth Has a Brainrot Problem," she's already invoking the insider/outsider argument that furthers abjection through a Goth aesthetic as "under attack" by whores (the false-flag alarm bell to ring and profit off, in equal measure). If you scratch a SWERF, a TERF bleeds fascist blood. It's just more pearls to clutch, throwing others (namely sex workers) under the bus—meaning in the Faustian bargain she's making whether she realizes or not; i.e, one that blinds her (and others) to those they need to solidarize and empathize with, not ignore (above). Silence is death, my friend, assimilation poor stewardship defending the nuclear model/state predation (male or not, a cop's a cop, a pimp's a pimp):

 

(right, source: Brooklyn Museum's "SILENCE=DEATH," 1987; artists: Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás; cited: "The Wolf Is Loose," 2026)

(source skeet: vanderWaardart, 5/1/2026)

As far as all of that goes, pinkwash is pinkwash, and austerity politics root in fascism. Same goes for blood and red pills being recuperated and reclaimed, back and forth. Vampires are "Goth" mascots and blood merchants for the middle class, in canonical forms. Policing Gothic and neighboring territories like the Holy-fucking-Bible, Benedict et al demonstrate "the idea has become the institution." Being a line uttered in 1994 by Michael Wincott, it still feels disturbingly relevant today during feminist betrayals; i.e., by those white, straight, middle-class, and/or paid, etc, versus those who aren't (see: John the Duncan's "The Femosphere?" which I respond to [above] regarding TERFs and SWERFs). Token vamps speak poetically to a consolidation of power but also a dependency of feeding under toxically "undead" predator/prey conditions; i.e., that Gothic Communism subverts by design, doing so in asymmetrical ways: the "toxicity of our city" where "eating seeds [or drinking blood, in so many ways] is a pastime activity" challenging cloaked reactionaries like Angela Benedict, who walks in the footsteps of people like Angela Carter and worse, Anita Bryant, J.K. Rowling and Janice Raymond (author of the incredibly transphobic screed The Transsexual Empire, 1979), etc. Whorephobia is bigotry and bigotry (slurs or otherwise) isn't activism; it's a spectrum of exclusion, one that through spurious invasion-and-replacement fears deliberately targets those who do sex work to survive—both in the immediate material sense, and in the social sense when racism, anti-trans rhetoric, and similar reactionary/moderate staging points continue to rise (all sides of the same die). Betrayal isn't an accident, and it looks and acts like "revolution" on its face:

(source skeet: vanderWaardart, 5/5/2026 in response to Mike Feher [a NASA software engineer making Star Wars memes that, however apt, performatively valorize a liberal Zionist, go figure] and his 5/4/2026 skeet) 

It behooves functional Communists, then, to interview those eating the seeds (Seussian allusions or otherwise, above), and I've eaten my fair share (and been eaten by opportunistic predators, whores closer to exploitation than most); i.e., Gothic is sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, as such, but also comics, videogames, cosplay ("Goth" or otherwise) and so many other things, the socio-material dialectic (of the alien) enabling guerrilla action in multimedia ways (re: revolutionary cryptonymy and public nudism, or things comparable to nudism). All comment on corporate greed and capital decaying into fascism (theft and lies [false flags] but also open-to-veiled, endorsed-if-not-openly-sanctioned violence, "Proud Girls, stand down and stand by"): where one is, the other is never far behind—scorching black the very Earth, itself (re: "White Indians, Black Planets" from "Unto the Breach"). Nothing is more policed than sex through lies and force. So do Gothic feminists (of older waves passing off as "new" again) take a black pill that celebrates the aesthetics while nihilistically* punching down at whores (and other performers treated like whores; e.g., drag shows) in bad faith. Don't do that, fuckers; we want more life.

*Or "cynically," in Oscar Wilde's words (a man famously persecuted as the world-first homosexual [not sodomite] to go to trial, in 1895): "A cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing" (source: Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892). Same idea with tokens (women or otherwise); i.e., any who separate along the usual lines, meaning whose instruments the ruling class (owners) abuse to divide-and-conquer those who do versus those who don't (workers)—to present reform or even regression (workers vs workers) not just as "reasonable" but the only choice available (an ultimatum; e.g., Pablo Escobar's infamous "Plata o polomo?"), and all despite revolution (workers vs owners) as having been the clear-and-obvious choice now for centuries, if not longer (e.g., the Pagan Romans feeding Christians and Jews to the lions, only to convert and weaponize the language of Christianity [originally a rebel punished by the state] against the world at large: Christians vs Jews, then Christians and Jews vs Arabs [and everyone else; e.g., Satanists, atheists, Pagans, Hindus, etc, who can all tokenize, too]). Anyone can betray or radicalize to punch up, and there is much to disabuse, notions-wise; i.e., as I respond (to a short from John the Duncan's "The Femosphere?"): "On the main difference between the Manosphere and Femosphere (which both have tokenized elements, to be clear): [...] the main difference is one is token (as far as reactionary elements of it, go) and the other is white, straight and class-privileged, first and foremost, then tokenizes (through women who tokenize, starting from the in-group outwards; i.e., out of convenience, followed by out-group desperation)" (source YouTube Community post: Persephone van der Waard, 5/5/2026). So the cookie crumbles, one made to crumble a particular way—and often through different shapes (according to class, culture, race and different modular persecution languages): a prison/death lottery "ticket," the venue-in-question policed by the inmates and the guards recruited from the same populace (re: "The World Is a Vampire"). Very Foucauldian!

Enough about Benedict and her creed (and Foucault, who I try to mention in small doses)! Now that you have the gist and know what's at stake (and what "stakes" to use, yourselves, in response), let's examine things a bit more deeply using those devices: first, an essay on vampire supermen* (canon) and camping it (and similar things), then through rememory as the passing down of what we assemble afterwards (re: camp, as taught to me by my mother's wild life).

*A note before we start: This part of "Interview with the Vampire" shall be called "Superman, Sell-outs and Separating Them," for the YouTube video; i.e., supermen, Kal-El or otherwise, tend to disguise themselves openly while walking among the populace (doing so similar to rulers of the East and the West of yore; e.g., Chinese Emperors and Prince Harry from Shakespeare's Henry IV pt. 1 (c. 1596)—the latter befriending Falstaff to eventually heed his father Bolingbroke's words and duel aider-to-the-Welsh Hotspur to finally claim his birthright: to ascend to the throne, Divine Right settled not by gods, but boys fighting boys for old men to grow old, themselves). To separate them, we'll need the help of friends as much as theory (re: Allie Reads and Cuwu), so keep those in mind as we proceed. Also, it bears repeating that such things are sold to workers from an early age. So while the essay examples are far more adult-coded (re: Invincible and Stalin), also remember that Mortal Kombat (1993) was arcade-style Orientalism, it and DOOM's "family-friendly" violence routinely sold to kids under a Protestant ethic.

Speaking of Orientalism, here's a critical-thinking exercise to levy against something a little cuter than Thragg and his minions; i.e., food for thought, to get the ol' juices flowing before we tackle them, head-on: Yoshi's Island (above, 1995). Cute, yes. But beneath the surface, the same-old monomyth-grade metaphors stay at work. Sold by sinister Japanese companies acclimating first-world kids surreptitiously to the Nintendo mantra (its name), "Heaven rewards hard work," the "work," in this case, is force (the capitalist linga franca)—a military exercise under Pax Americana that does two basic things (sides of the same imperial coin): First, it simulates American foreign policy disguised as kid's media; and second, whose ensuing child's play gives an ongoing nostalgia/cunning means of curating the usual us-versus-them thinking that furthering abjection demands (and all its baked-in contradictions, under crisis). There's nothing "innocent" or "accidental" about it, such indoctrination a meta bildungsroman that relies, start-to-finish, on all the usual copagandistic tools states abuse; i.e., to prey past, present and future under monopoly capital (re: violence, terror and monsters, enacted through Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative stories). Never forget, the world is their oyster—one to map out and chart endless courses of cartographic domination, from coloring books to military field manuals. Same difference, and where supermen of all walks come from—meaning origin stories, and generally sexless ones that paradoxically nucleate sex (and the Military-Industrial Complex) in storybook forms; e.g., the baby and the stork from Yoshi's Island yet-another-Trojan-Horse essentializing war (and master/slave palingenetic ultranationalism) in the minds of young impressionable brains: those being repeatedly told over countless generations, "you're special provided you do this"; re: Aristotle's "until he is seven, and I will show you the man" adage, preying carousel-style on men, women and children. Monsters are made, capital making them on assembly lines bleeding into stories hiding the factories.

Don't believe me? Let's give it a shot, plying the shadows on Nintendo's cave wall with a Gothically Communist (and short) dialectical-material critique—one concerned with alien impostors recruiting from an ambiguous prison population to fleece the land, all while disguising their theft as "home defense" in the language of "everyday heroism"; i.e., "from the Jungle" or "the gutter" to enact gang violence useful to the ruling class saying "make yourselves useful" and "back to work," all by using multimedia avatars (e.g., not just the Yoshis, then, but TMNT and its endless reincarnations out from comic books into TV, movies and videogames):

Watching Yoshi murder those monkeys with bullet seeds feels so ethnocentric, a Vietnam (or similar) allegory when a local resident - and rival of the different warring factions - is normally indifferent but currently tasked with rescuing a "superior" (white) species baby from a witch (or warlock) lizard person (all antisemitic/queer-coded tropes). It's basically The Twilight Zone Movie (1983) minus the helicopter crash-landing on the actor (and child labor); i.e., while playing White Indian (or Rainbow Capitalism, with all the different Yoshis' cunning recognition serving the Mushroom Kingdom): a jungle filled with tribal mercenaries, monkeys (guerrillas) with bombs (dropped ordinance), hostile flora and fauna, and various military objectives and power targets given a drug-induced haze (re: "the fuzzies"). And in keeping score (with Vietnam-style necropolitics and metrics counting the dead, Conan-style) is a literal scoreboard treated like American football (a nod to General Westmoreland, rallying the troopers to die on hamburger hills). Yoshi is Ellen Ripley aka Girl Rambo for kids: swapping bullets and bombs for watermelon seeds (echoes of minstrel shows) and dinosaur eggs. Hatched during South Vietnam saved from another draconian scapegoat, it's the good, Japanese-penned dragon (which "Yoshi" translates to) vs the bad - baby Bowser a second-chance gimmick to assassinate a Communist-coded rival "in the crib": valorizing the token immigrant (the player) in cutesy monomyth (and completionist, centrist) pastiche sold to kids in perennial sequel forms (source YouTube community post: Persephone van der Waard, 5/7/2026 in response to U Can Beat Video Games' "Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island SNES - ULTIMATE GUIDE," 2026).

America has been at war for virtually its entire existence, and Japan—emulating America (and the West before that)—are their faithful allies; i.e., former foes who bent the knee only to get nuked for it (with Yoshi also being echoes of Godzilla, in that case). Here, the "get 'em while they're young approach" (echoed by Kamek, the game's cradle-snatching evil wizard abusing fairy dust to also scapegoat, above) segues easily enough to more nakedly fascist examples, later in life: the one-man army in a war game, which a dragon/superman/vampire basically is; re: "The Promethean Quest and James Cameron's Military Optimism in Metroid" but in a deliberately emotionally anemic society predicated on underdeveloped infrastructure, overabundant and oversold military tech, shortages of this-or-that (often sex), bread and circus, and infiltration through false flags menticiding workers from cradle to grave, geography-is-destiny (and bloodlines, presenting as DARVO eggs shielding the aggressor pimping nature-as-whore: "your brood is bad, rotten, black, what-have you," making omelets from witches' eggs in bad-faith, below). Such is state predation through cryptonymy and abjection as complicit and furthering factors, therein. To reverse them and cease predation, thus aid workers punching iconoclastically up at such things, we must critique what we eat and respond accordingly. Heaven in a Wildflower, kids; the power is yours, but you gotta kill your darlings, cracking their eggs (or bursting their bubbles) to expose the foul yolk inside, chicken-or-the-egg/the Ego or the Id (while valorizing our own as nonetheless demonized by nuclear models colonizing us out of revenge)!

(source: Ashley Falls' "The Art of the Movie Poster: Kenny Gravillis on Alien," 2018; artists: Steve Frankfurt and Philip Gips)

Egg = female (or baby queer waiting to hatch, but I digress), skull = theft, vampire = flow + skull as something to cloak (the shell of the egg) when placed inside the home/nuclear model, and Gothic = vampire home or death egg come home to roost: nature as monstrous-feminine but also bad actors mimicking nature to pimp it, tokens included—Amazons and other superheroes maintaining the status quo by policing nature and sex through force, "White Indians, black planets" (whores policing whores, workers eating themselves for state hegemons). We can subvert such things through play (demonizing nuclear reproduction for framing us like homewreckers, child abusers and rapists, etc), but doing so during ludo-Gothic BDSM is always emergent, iconoclastic, and revolutionary (cracking the case, peeling the onion, parting the veil, etc)—meaning in ways states will identify as "threat" and concentrically cage, kettle and kill on sight (with their own eggs passed off as ours, counterfeits and their ghosts); re: typically in Freudian language that workers canonize or camp, accordingly. "The key to your identity is hidden in your childhood," says Mochii. I would respond, "Yes, and inside the home as a 'restless' symbol of invaded/pre-occupied space, one that cryptonymically furthers or reverses abjection: where the abusers and victims but also survivors are found, dancing in the ruins." Truth is dualistic, too, as is falsehood.

(artist: Mochii)

In other words, is the rebellion and Gothic poetry (of dark transformative power) performative in service to states or workers? Dragon's fire, fire of the gods (mad science), black magic—the Gothic walks the line between fantasy and science(-fiction) to offer up half-real solutions; i.e., to worker problems and state problems alike (and their respective rights and questions regarding said rights). As we proceed, apply the same poetic-praxial ideas to more gruff-and-bellicose supermen (not women this time); state apologia (re: DARVO and obscurantism) all encapsulate the abjection process and its grim harvest: as something to further mid-cryptonymy any-which-way (though often through neoconservative strength, prepackaged and resold to kids by traitorous poster moms—specifically chaste frontierswomen/warrior-Madonna TERFs and SWERFs, each aping Anita Bryant* when taking the soup to complete a given cycle of genocide: "This time, it's war!").

*Or any crusader criminalizing this or that when staging war/playing war games. Criminalization doesn't protect groups (women/children or otherwise); it preys upon target groups by taking away their rights. To that, people would keep on breathing if the state outlawed respiration, but the state would see itself as having the right to punish (selectively, of course) anyone who breathes. In the same breath (so to speak) sex work will continue regardless if it's legal; the people involved will just have less rights, turning to sex work to try and support themselves while the state dies (and criminalizes this or that to stay in power). Criminality = control/states rights to rape workers, full stop. Anyone who hands control over to the state is a cop, token cops the worst ones of all (the witches policing their own, a nun in whore's clothes colonizing brothels for the Man; re: Angela Benedict a racial minority selling out to "protect Goth" and nonsensically keep it pure from "prurient" invasion, little more than a Stygian pimp selling other women down the river).

Love Letters: Essays and Rememory

On Tyrants and Their Charm; or, Sacking Troy from within while Castrating Nazi Strongmen: a Mini-Essay about Vampires, Capital and Nation-States (from Outer Space; feat. Stalin, Superman, DBZ and Invincible, etc)

"Now you've got a gal in your wrecked truck with a missing leg? A missing leg that's now missing?" (source).

—Sherriff Hague, Planet Terror (2007)

Earlier we mentioned missing things, so here's a brief tangent/mini-essay about the charming[12] side of state vampires—namely strongmen from those sided with state power, often by embodying it (and its earthly/otherworldly temptations) while these factors complicate; i.e., the likes of Stalin, the Z fighters and Thragg (who we'll unpack inside) doing so in duality across holistic studies of power as such: as caught between "splinters" of wish fulfillment and guilty pleasure injecting the injured with trauma, and something to smuggle forwards better lessons than before, cryptonymy-and-abjection. This often happens in trash, schlock and other misfit, easy-to-camp forms "playing Brutus"; e.g., so-called "phallic women" made whole, through the poetic application of violence, to speak their truth: battle makes her feel alive, killing her enemies in highly gratuitous and fetishized ways (as Cherry Darling does, above); i.e., reifying power between exploitation and liberation, seeking this-or-that. "That boy's got the devil in him!" yes, but also at his back (the enemy at the gates as much an Athenian debutante, a secret warrior princess threading the line between virgin/whore and damsel/demon)! Thus, reparations—while famously costly (for the state)—can also be quite fun for the denizens of the gutter (through razzle-dazzle, T&A, gender trouble, etc)! We make it gay in ways that set the queer free (versus bank on it, below):

(artist: Jan Duursema; cited: "Cruisin' for a Bruisin'!" 2024)

Note: This essay dedicates to Vivian Strange, whose own essay "Superman Isn't Punk" (2025) I cite elsewhere in this document (shared, with her permission). I also dedicate it to Thought Slime, whose own pithy examination of James Gunn, "GIVE ME SUPERMAN'S UNDERWEAR, I AM NORMAL" (2023; timestamp: 8:57), inspired my work on Superman (and similar supermen), onstage and off (e.g., Gunn's Brightburn [2019] and Stalin). That includes here, but also sporadically throughout my book series—meaning when examining the same basic "superhero pathology"; e.g., both "Selling War as Sacred" and "The Fascism-in-Disguise of [...] Male Gatekeepers" (2024) but also "Cruisin' for a Bruisin'!" (above) dissecting ordinary characters like Copland's Common Man (which Heinlein's Competent Man would echo; re: "Military Optimism," 2021): alongside more hyperbolic cases like Captain America and Wonder Woman, etc. There's power in these characters, power we can take and use for ourselves! Probe them. —Perse, 5/3/2026

P.S., While I critique male action heroes in canonical narratives, I actually grew up with quite a few. Anything Mel Gibson, of course (though he sucks in real life), as well as Liam Neeson, Clive Owen, Michael Biehn and Paul Newman, etc (the brooding "noir" anti-hero on the Western side of things); and Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, and Jackie Chan (the "Hong Kong" sort on the Eastern side); but also, from non-movie examples, Zero from Mega Man X (1993), and various male characters from David Gemmell's swashbuckling potboilers (a contemporary of George R. R. Martin, who I also read when he was new): Rage the gladiator from Midnight Falcon (1999) and Jaim Grymauch from Ravenheart (2001), who are generally outlaws and vagabonds with troubled pasts (similar to the reformed heroism of Arnold's T-800 from T2: Judgement Day, 1991). Needless to say that while I focus, these days, on more effeminate GNC male characters (e.g., Link from the Zelda franchise) and female Amazons (take your pick), the classic male action hero isn't something I completely detest or discount (though many of my favorites either come from my youth and/or are notably seeking redemption; e.g., Toshiro Mifune's Kikuchiyo from Seven Samurai or Kevin Costner's Bud from A Perfect World, 1954 and 1993). In other words, I'm just more picky with and critical of male heroes (as we'll see, in just a moment), or like them a bit "rough" around the edges (think Conan the Barbarian and you've got the right idea). With cishet men, I especially like them as villains; i.e., of the "slasher" sort being integral to Gothic rape fantasies/consent-non-consent (such as the Hunter from The Dark Crystal, Robert Patrick's sleekly eerie T-1000 [though I actually prefer Arnold's evil T-800], Nick Castle as the Shape from OG Halloween [1978], and so on). There's also a whole bevy of vice characters (who, apart from classic anti-heroes like Milton's Satan or Shelley's Creature) tend to be outright villains serving as "broken clocks," but also who tend to be queer-coded (even when ostensibly straight; re: theatre nerds); e.g., Tolkien's Smaug in cartoon form, and James Earl Jones, Alan Rickman and Christopher Lee as [insert '80s cartoon villain here]. The same also goes for Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith from The Matrix (1999), anything with Charles Dance, or Jon Finch's 1971 Macbeth. Heroes are okay, especially if they feel more realistic (which the good guys generally don't), but villains are where it's at: where cryptonymy and abjection can run wild, and where I generally have more to say when it comes to evil superheroes breaking bad (as Thragg does, which we'll explore here)!

(artist: Zdzisław Beksiński; cited: "I, Satanist; Atheist: A Gothicist's Thoughts on Atheism, Religion, and Sex," 2021)

Likewise—and in keeping with state predation as something to historically-materially divorce, thus castrate the strongman (often from "outer space," or some-such "curtain" they cross over into normal spheres to exsanguinate the locals, Grover's Mill or otherwise)—there's commonly no end to such princes of the universe. Aliens to hug and drape in moribund flags of war (above), they're sold to us since birth—a false birthright promoting fictional godhood, in hoc signo vinces (a dead language for a braindead race of warrior numbskulls "saved for last"). Cryptonomy-and-abjection, kayfabe is kayfabe, and no one group can monopolize it. Instead, such bodies are classically bread and circus to shock and awe viewers, mainly power fantasies to pilot and apologize for state force (avatars) that workers do different things with (e.g., Zangief the Red Cyclone and Capcom's neoliberal nation pastiche [and wrestler hero worship]—revived repeatedly, decades after Reagan's '80s and Bush and Clinton's '90s, to be adored by "his loyal fans" nowadays, below).

(exhibit 1a1a1h4a [from "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp"]: Just because centrist theatre demands a bad guy for the good guy to punch doesn't mean we, as workers, should just unironically embrace this role [and the historical materialism/punching down that results from it]. We can punch up and still enjoy being ironic "heels," who love our big, bearded, ostensibly gay himbo and protector-of-Russian-skies, Zangief.)

As I've said, already. Many times. I adore such things—just not how the ruling class (and petit-bourgeois middlemen) want me to, under Capitalist/Socialist Realism (a brainless spectacle but also dogwhistle putting the usual dogs of war to heel; i.e., armed subservience)!

For example, I write in "State Vampirism": "per Marx and myself, Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything [...]. Analyzing the larger historical-material problem those factors perpetuate, 'State Vampirism' gazes through the unpaid labor umbrella—care/sex work and natural forces, but focusing on sex in light of ongoing abuses committed by the state pimping nature as monstrous-feminine: TERFs/fascist feminism" (source). There's also fascist dogma and Capitalist (and Socialist) Realism, at large. In state eyes, we're the enemy (or alien) within as much as we are the barbarian outsider "sacking Rome," Troy or anywhere else (the wasp eating the caterpillar in duality); but so, too, do our enemies serve the state with equally splendid lies (which vampires are). To that, we're often charming the pants off each other—giving the other side our neck to, as Banquo puts it: "betray's in deepest consequence" (never mind that Macbeth was the villain and Banquo just-another servant of different kings). Such is history (and Gothic reinvention making things up to suit our needs; re: Madoff, 1979); i.e., forever "at odds" (and out of joint) during class war as having "vae victis," woe-is-me qualities that good and bad actors use at cross purposes (doing so alongside intersections of culture [sex work, in our case] and race, but also monstrous-feminine poetry modules to uphold or undermine state power in highly Promethean ways, below). Such myths are extraordinarily productive, regardless of usage (and tokenism = death for workers being something to resist; re: "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It").

(artist: Henri Fuseli; cited: "On Giving Birth")

The point, here, is how monstrous theatre—specifically of nations and strength, wrestling this with that—date back to ancient times; i.e., while echoing them in modern retro-future struggles, which practitioners vampirically signal/communicate through useful abstraction (the Gothic, at large). Pimps or whores, such things root in revenge—canonically in defense of the home/nuclear model from campy betrayers (which unruly whores are, but ones capital demands to generate profit with anyways); i.e., from Shakespeare's Caesar and "Et tu, Brutae?" to more recent crossings of the fateful Rubicon (the death river, which planetary destruction [of the life-giving home] neatly symbolizes: in ways that demand fresh blood, the Stygian impostor/worldly traveler [and aristocrat] drinking crimson lifeforce [sanguine] versus ordinary water). Such is the stuff of many vampires lifting larger-than-life qualities from the half-real past ("all the better to eat you with, my dear..."). The paradox in reversing abjection to challenge state predation lies in camping its heroes, which means having dance partners who—apart from being flat-out weird, flat-footed and/or stronger than us—are also bad actors at least part of the time. Again, we use the same masks, costumes, and bodies "when in Rome," and Rome is full of vampires, then and now. Vampires charm; state vampires lie, Pygmalion-style and through a Cycle of Kings, to repopulate the Earth in their image—a hubristic wackiness on its own suitably tied to unequal power that states afford and demand (e.g., billionaires, below), and one that isn't without its own binary magnetism (wealth attracts the desperate). All make of the same stuff, yes, but do and say different arguments, mid-dialectic; i.e., through Gothic's useful abstractions borrowing from older pulp, including kayfabe and wrestling strongmen (and women; re: Amazonomachia) shaping Capitalist Realism currently.

Viewers beware: no one reads Batman for the heroes (no one cool, anyways—making possible exceptions for the Adam West version, a "vamp" in his own right but still outshined by the villains; e.g., the immaculate and fabulous Eartha Kitt; see: Greg Mckevitt's "How Eartha Kitt Rose from 'Extreme Poverty' to Superstardom," 2025). Instead, people are attracted to vampires (and similar vengeful, "terrorist" beings) dissecting nuclear prescriptions in dialectical-material "pull" (anti-capitalist actors [vice characters] anisotropically reversing the terror/counterterror binary in duality). In turn, my prompting of others—deliberately advertising "vampires" instead of sex work and trans rights (at least up front)—suddenly saw me not being gatekept; i.e., meaning in all the usual ways the Straights (and puritanical tokens) historically abuse, theirs having that usual "chilling effect" tied to open discussions of queerness, BDSM and sex work (that corporations demonetize by association): for "being political," "not family/advertiser friendly" or "making things gay" save for certain token examples (essentially male privilege/a tolerance for the homosexual theatre nerd, comic book enthusiast, and/or "cruising" metal head; e.g., on par with Shakespeare, Rob Halford or Tim Curry's Doctor Frankenfurter but also various "slasher," vaso-vagal-style scapegoats like Stoker's antisemitic Dracula or Angela Baker's intersex bête noir from Sleepaway Camp, 1983). Whatever the period (and amniotic gel housing it), the campy allegory (and subversive political function) remain; i.e., making Marx ironically gay—a man whose entire canon existed at a time when the language of queerness was entirely abject/monstrous-feminine (and still is for many Marxist-Leninists, embarrassingly nostalgic for imperial what-ifs playing Red Knights, below).

(source: comments for YouTube Community post: Persephone van der Waard, 1/29/2026; cited: "The Price of Rice in China," 2026)

The same goes for what vampires attach to, commonly the land as predatory or cursed (and its leaders being stunted statesmen, expected to deliver disproportionate violence to police their legacies tied to state predation). This arguably starts with Count Dracula for modern readers, but also historical figures like Vlad Dracul as "aping Caesar"; i.e., as demonized in ways that—out of the medieval period for which he lived, and into retro-future histories campily demonizing him through the eyes of those who survived his infamous wrath—can speak to current geopolitics haunted by similar problematic figures; e.g., Stalin, Russia, and Red Scare (which we'll compare to Thragg in a moment) that, while often overblown by Horseshoe Theory and tall tales, remains thoroughly saturated with the blood of that man (and nation's) enemies; i.e., under Marxist-Leninism as having its own flaws/problem areas like America (and its comic books) do. I don't read comics, but I love critiquing them through selective reading "courting the gods" (the Whore of Babylon, sacking this or that); re: the iconoclast "when in Rome," making such things political/gay (re: camping the canon to expose state lies "on the hip"). Rape survivors calculate risk/reverse abjection by camping our holocausts to upend status-quo norms. For state defenders on either side of the ocean, though, it's historically far easier to blame the whore and/or rape victim—i.e., as harlot and hysterical, kettling the whistleblower during reactive abuse—than it is to critique state leaders and the systems (and myths/stereotypes) they embody (e.g., me, being a rape survivor and granddaughter to a holocaust survivor and Dutch resistance member, who other "activists" repeatedly attack and pimp during trans genocide, below).

(source: Jonathan Chatwin's "The girls Mao Zedong had Sex with," 2022; cited: "Mao's Vampirism: Bad Empanada's Favorite Dictator?" from "Raising Awareness")

Nation-states, by their very design, are predatory through Imperialism (monopoly aka late-stage Capitalism, which gentrifies and decays); i.e., as something that—beyond its aforementioned Age before Stalin—became synonymous with the man himself and his own apologia doubling American strongmen: of various "friendships signed in blood" and women's rights betrayed (e.g., by Mao, a famous womanizer preying on peasant women, above), but also "degenerate" queer folk by so-called Great Man theory and its avatars of war doing all the usual things dictators do, as they and empire decay naturally (or otherwise); e.g., the so-called "proletariat" Stalin and company embodied signifying a power imbalance that kept things top-down, favoring Patriarchy as heteronormative, misogynistic and racist to varying degrees compared to China and America. Also, it turns out (and to no one's surprise, if they're trans), cis-supremacist—a brick wall I often encounter by weird fans of the dude, though every so often am mercifully met with approbation for daring to say what most cis MLs apparently will not:

(source skeet: Lucio Jaimes, 5/6/2026—in response to vanderWaardart's "The Price of Rice" skeet, 4/20/2026)

Regardless who's sucking his dick a tankie's a tankie. To that, Stalin worked hard to cultivate his cult of personality as surviving him seventy years after he bought the farm. For one, his nickname (not birth-given) literally means "Man of Steel," evoking Superman in 1912 as already being fascist on the Western side of things before Siegel and Shuster birthed Superman/Clark Kent (and his farm), in 1938 (their* doing so arguably to ramp up the American war effort, similar to Captain America); i.e., blood ties, race science, vampirism and eugenics (mad science, etc) as copied by Eastern powers haunted by treacherous nobles and feted-to-fated czars; i.e., defenders but also diplomatic representatives of predatory feeders tied to state trauma, but also unequal power, shapeshifting and dark desire (the demon side of the die) through cults of personality generally found around the world: out of the ancient-to-medieval past's dying empires come fearsomely back to life; re: vampires are charming and educated, having access to power as something they symbolize as statuesque, suitably imposing (funerary) symbols of sex, strength, and knowledge, etc, as power. Statues, be they vanity-project effigies or otherwise, are historically things to camp/pull down (or portraits commissioned by the usual commissaries, below).

*As Jewish-American immigrants camping blood libel, but also banking on it... only to have their character stolen out from under them by the American media conglomerate (source: Kylie Mar's "How the Creators of Superman Were Screwed out of Millions of Dollars," 2017). No honor among thieves!

(exhibit 2: Different exhibits from "Stalin's Kayfabe: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact" in "Raising Awareness": 

Left-to-Middle: "Artist, top-far-left: Liu Chunhua; top-mid-left: Jacques Louis David; bottom-left: Chen Yanning; top-right: Bungie; bottom-right: William Blake. City or nation, state revolutionaries [and their poppy-red sanguine] historically decay into tyranny—from Caesar to Vlad Dracul [the dragon a symbol of status, sex and power] to Napoleon to George Washington to Mao [to Captain Hook; re: Mauve's review in "Yesterday's Leftover Rice," 2026]—both in and out of fiction, with 'purely' fictional additions [e.g., Shakespeare's 'historical' play and its famous line: 'Et tu, Brutae?'] actually gigantic 'vampire hauntologies' that bear a non-fictional stamp; e.g., Balor the Leveler [and his own 'dragon's' red cape of power, top-right] built on top of stories of stories of stories; i.e., the narrative of the crypt; re: from Hogle's 'The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonymy in the Gothic Novel' [1980]. However cryptomimetic these seem, they nonetheless bear a kernel of truth [as all vampires do]: dictators suck [and must be anarchistically slain alongside their myths and statecraft]."

Right: Top-right and bottom: Matt Whittaker's "What Was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?" [2023] and Stephen Coles' "'U.S.A. Surpasses All The Genocide Records!' Poster and Fact Sheet" [2016; cited: "Symposium: Aftercare; What Is the Gothic?" 2023].

Such "men" are states, corporations and empires in disguise/small, decaying accordingly and refusing to die; i.e., despite them and theirs being reduced to unthinking zombies [thralls] and vampires [masters] who can't digest what they eat [the decay of mastery, above]. They become more and more like corpses, thus more and more blind to the harm they cause but also charming in their Ship-of-Theseus [or George Washington' axe] desperation; i.e., as something to abject by us back in their faces. Fire of the gods belongs to the gods—meaning both those playing at gods [re: "Fire of Unknown Origin" from "Making Demons," 2025] and of the natural world as alien to them and vice versa [what I call mirror syndrome].)

(source thumbnail: Bornok's "I'm Terrified of Tighten," 2025)

To this, vampires are paradoxically stealth hunters, yes, but also bullseye-red targets for whatever they're drawing attention to; re: cryptonymy-and-abjection (which, again, we'll get to). It's very "bull in a China shop," a given Sino-Soviet split (or something comparable; e.g., Stalin and his tenuous "friendship" with America) speaking to various nation pastiche "under new management"; i.e., that affords the usual displaced critiques, foisted off onto "the stars" and "outer space" (from Star Wars to Superman, 1977 and 1978): by speaking to the usual abject, capital-in-small power trips "for boys" we've been alluding to; e.g., Tighten from Megamind (above, 2010) and Homelander from The Boys (below, 2019)—both cases "aping Zeus" reflecting the Patriarchy's worst habits into the present space and time; i.e., incels, MGTOW and fascism "chasing Rome" through killer babies horribly entitled but mentally weak. Like slashers turning "Rome" inside-out (with Medusa holding the mirror), they speak to Superman's classic "it's a bird, it's a plane!" pick-up note: his vampiric super strength, speed and power of flight (and tell-tale red cape/fatal vision) while being notably allergic to non-toxic love and yellow sunlight (a superior-minded weak/strong infiltrator who secretly thinks people [according to Quentin Tarantino, a rape apologist] are categorically feeble). The bigger they are, the harder they fall—bubbles waiting to be popped by those holding the needle.

And yet, Superman was always a cop, thus prone to abjection exposing the state's fears of death (as built into it, a mortal "man" doomed to die). This includes more recent kayfabe (out from ancient forms); i.e., making similar "sympathy for the devil" arguments, in alien ways; e.g., Thragg from Invincible (further down, 2021)—specifically the show, not the comic, making its own kneel-before-Zod tyrant's plea as back from the Phantom Zone at a given Fortress of Solitude, Castle Greyskull, etc (from Milton's own comics-grade silliness; re: Hallucina's "The Accidental Satanist," 2014). Think Superman with a mustache (and pouting like James Gunn and David Harbor's rendition of the Creature chasing the Bride[13] in Creature Commandos [2024]—dressed in red, below): a warrior king dating back to Alexander the Great, but "no homo" (focusing on biological reproduction to regenerate a prior dying empire, and one Alexander famously* left his generals, not his [non-existent] children or slave/prostitute boys).

*The refrain, "Jesus wept," translating well enough to "Alexander wept" (re: "Scouting the Field," footnote 12); i.e., during the same-old cartographic refrains, geography-isn't-destiny (anymore than blood is; see: "A Note on Canonical Essentialism," 2024).

(cited: "Concerning Venezuela (and State Vampirism)," 2026)

You mean Space Hitler (or Octavian, avenging Caesar)? Don't get me wrong. The performance is fine (it reminds me of the voice actor for the '70s Rankin/Bass Smaug[14] in spots). But, he's a Nazi, let's not forget, m'kay?

Edit: He's also Dracula Mario, but I digress. Sympathy for the devil is a core Gothic idea, but it's dangerous to see Thragg as "the most human"; i.e., the Great Man theory. I would argue he's conflicted, but his humanity [stays] in conflict with [his being] a space Nazi. / But (and here's where things complicate), he's also Stalin: fascists and Communists share the same kayfabe space, and Thragg echoes some Socialist ideas as much as the Betrayer (a mad scientist) echoes fascist ones [specifically eco-fascism, or the "humans are the virus to exterminate" trope]. Nothing is discrete, which is how the Dracula character historically works: a vice character to invite troubling comparison from the audience (source YouTube community post, Persephone van der Waard: 4/27/2026, in response to Constantine James' "Thragg - The Most Human Viltrumite," 2026). 

(source: Reddit)

Note: "You're huge, so you must have huge guts!" To that, I've expanded my dissection of Thragg a bit, here (to get up in his guts and parse their significance); re: the Caesarean Numinous I alluded to earlier, and one where I—the trans-woman medievalist taken from her mother's womb "untimely ripp'd" (my brother and I delivered via C-section, just like Caesar)—am basically gay Macduff sticking it to Macbeth: "Lay on, Macduff! And damned be he [or any pronoun] who cries, 'Hold, enough!'" —Perse, 5/3/2026

However "great" he appears, Thragg is lord of the dead (a corpse under the skin, above). The state has signed him a bad check, one he cannot cash. To compensate, such situations (and men) resort to unchecked bloodletting—to culling the herd, but openly and in secret. Like Peter Pan stealing children (or brides/child soldiers in this case), he's a fairy king whose own magic is fading, and which he and his Lost Boys replenish by bathing in the blood of virgins (echoes of the Skeksis; re: "The Dark Crystal: AoR - Appetites," 2019). Whether taken by guile or force, rape is rape and their wishes don't come true. It's not long before his men mutiny and target themselves, nigh everyone expendable while Thragg consorts with his de facto father's skull like Hamlet to Yorick: "I knew him, Horatio." Except he's more dependent on such artifacts than even the Prince of Denmark: his own "father's" ghost an endless source of unresolved "daddy issues," an absentee mother, and nonstop misery (a story famously paranoid and fixated on the simulacrum of revenge, killing everyone by the fifth act: "the readiness is all"). The dangerous thing about him (as a dictator) is he thinks he's smart, and he's cornered and desperate—fatal hubris the stuff of Greek heroes [and Dark Souls games; e.g., Gwynn, Lord of Cinder that game's (2009) lonely and miserable Dracula for his debatable "son" to stake, plinn-plinn-plonn] echoed by Shakespearean warrior-nerds and, later still, American offshoots of the same Cesarean Numinous (and its Freudian, invasively witchly theft; e.g., with scissors, as the changeling baby snatcher from Inside [2007] does while aping the Manson girls doing Shannon Tate* in): a maverick general without a leader to tell him what to do (similar to Soulblighter in the Myth franchise, or Octavian in real life), a steerless de facto executive gone rogue, a volcano waiting to erupt; "a bride without a head, a wolf without a foot" (etc). So is Thragg deeply unstable, dishonest to others and himself, self-destructive, and ultimately cannibalistic beneath the surface of strength/façade of communal values—just like fascism or capital in decay is (which decays by design), DARVO-and-obscurantism. 

*The late wife of pedophile Roman Polanski, who recreated her murder in his 1971 Macbeth adaptation (a movie both X-rated and funded by Playboy magazine).

In keeping with Hamlet, Thragg's completely bonkers—meaning he talks to himself a good part of the time while ignoring his friends' sagely counsel (the emperor's "therapy skull" something of a meme: a Magic 8-Ball, above); i.e., while seeing ghosts he cannot distinguish from living people. Indeed, some of those are traitors; i.e., dead-men-walking for him to batter senseless and drink the blood of unwillingly. But Thragg himself, for all his might, is also just a corpse—a mighty one "killing for company" that doesn't know it is dead trying to cheat death; i.e., deaf to interventions from his former friends, and hallucinating badly relegates to a given land he makes into his black pyramid (until the protagonist throws him into the sun, Icarus-style). His life is joyless—an unhappy wraith who walks the Earth (and the stars) in the afterlife bereft of warmth (the sun killing him symbolic of the vampire's curse finally coming to an end, and poetically by his rival biting him on the throat like common prey). Whatever value he once had is long gone, eclipsed by he and his dwindling men having dug their own graves chasing "greatness" (echoing Peter S. Beagle's "discount Robin Hood" Captain Cully and his band of free men): men cannot eat gold anymore than dragons can, and skull = theft, pirate flag or not an enchantment Thragg has obviously fallen under/prey to (similar to Hamlet chasing Daddy to destroy everyone in sight). A council of witches uprooted by witch hunters (a problem all on its own, but I digress), the latter plunge the former into the sun. It's purification by fire, any greatness Thragg once possessed eclipsed by his own gargantuan stupidity. "There is no trap so deadly as the one you set for yourself." Too little, too late, my friend. He takes his father's place, trying to be king so hard it kills him: buried alive like any other criminal the state chews up and spits out. "I can add colours to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, And set the murderous Machiavel to school. Can I do this, and cannot get a crown? Tut, were it farther off, I'll pluck it down" (source: Richard III, c. 1592). Sure, Jan.

(cited: "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State's Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror," 2024)

Corpses chained to corpses—in Gothic, such things are endless per Aguirre's infernal concentric pattern: "A hall to die in, and men to bury me." Glory is a myth, escape (and resistance) futile; re (from "Escaping Jadis," exhibit 39c2): 

(artist, left and right: Bernie Wrightson)

In Frankenstein, the story is a murder-suicide, enacted by the zombie son shambling towards the father-mother in an act of childhood revenge the double-parent first dreams about before sculpting his child [re: Zeus pulling Metis from his forehead]. Alucard, by comparison, does not want to kill his father, Dracula, who had sex with Alucard's mom to have a, by and large, natural birth tainted by blood libel and pre-fascist coding. But the reckoning felt during the fatal return to his childhood home [something he does repeatedly throughout the franchise] is always traumatic to Alucard. It's also [as we shall see ...] dangerous: sometimes the house wins...)

It's recursive motion, something I've explored per the Gothic chronotope (the black castle) extensively on the backs of older authors (re: "The Monomyth and Cycle of Kings; or, 'Perceptive Zombie Eyeballs': Paralyzing Zombie Tyrants with Reverse Abjection," 2024); e.g., Paul Martin for my master's thesis, "Lost in Necropolis" (2018). Martin writes:

We encounter this kind of recursive movement throughout the game and these movements are executed alongside the recursions of the game's plot. […] The path in the labyrinth leads Theseus, regardless of its windings and regardless of the direction in which he is moving at a given time, always toward its centre. Similarly, Alucard's journey, both physical and psychological, is always ultimately pointed toward the destruction of Dracula and the rejection of his overtures [re: Aguirre's infernal concentric pattern] (source: "Ambivalence and Recursion in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night," 2011).

I respond,

For Alucard, Dracula is the end goal. However, unlike Simon, Alucard's arc of motion is influenced by items he discovers inside the space. This includes "warp" devices and magic forms. The former allow Alucard to teleport back and forth—in either direction, not simply forward, as seen in Super Mario Bros. (1985) (fig.8). The latter include the wolf, the bat, and mist, each able to move and attack. Alucard rivals Samus in terms of pure mobility and Simon in terms of combat prowess. Yet, the most impressive part is the space, itself, which cannot be traversed without upgraded motion (source: "Lost in Necropolis").

Figure 5. "Castle Map" from Toru Hagihara and Koji Igarashi's Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Sony Playstation, 1997)

commenting as I do on the dark fairy sodomy castle giving the player unusual spaces (re: the liminal hauntology of war/danger disco) to repeatedly reify then move through—a simulation of pandemonium to rule inside, through magical assembly (and other poetic devices I coined, below). All foster a routine Wisdom of the Ancients and the Ancestors coming up from Hell (an ambiguous "inkblot" danger tied to larger systemic problems, also below); re (from "A Song Written in Decay," 2024):

(artist: Jocelin Carmes)

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

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

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

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

(artist: Amber Harris)

The point isn't to despair at Hell's arrival, déjà vu, but to use its powers to equip workers (unpaid or otherwise) with whatever's needed to dodge state predation (and avoid assimilation, which is poor stewardship). The joy is partly the point, but also the emancipatory power it dialectically-materially offers beyond the space of play (a training grounds eventually taken to the streets). Rebellion is concentric, retro-future—escaping into Hell to, afterwards, bring Promethean treasures back to the mainland; i.e., that sack "Rome" (the pastoral lie) to have the whore's revenge on monomythic structures; re: a post-scarcity world founded (at least partially) on pre-capitalist Indigenous ideas (and preferential code), but also the cryptomimesis of sex drugs and rock 'n roll that Gothic showcases, year-round; e.g., Metallica's "Disposable Heroes" (1986, the year of my birth): "Life planned out before my birth, nothing could I say / Had no chance to see myself, molded day by day" (source). It goes on and on, mise-en-abyme, because capital and state predation—a retro-future enterprise—go chronotopically on and on (always another castle and monster inside, aristocrat or otherwise). This has all happened before, and we're laughing at bourgeois resurrections of old, dead stupid people (often kings, below): "The idea has become the-institution. Time to move on!" (to quote Top Dollar from The Crow, 1994; re: "Ruling the Slum"). So often, the dead are skins to wear until capital lets you "inside the house" (with Metallica selling out to monopolize metal for decades), and which Promethean stories comment on house as well-and-truly doomed:

(exhibit 1a1a1c1 [from "Thesis Argument—Capitalism Sexualizes Everything," 2023]: "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" ["The Eighteenth Brumaire"]. To this, the oral traditions of the stage play can be especially medieval, thus plastic and vivid. Macbeth's fatal vision isn't just "A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain" [Macbeth], but a copy of a copy of a copy in an endless nightmare loop [a simulacrum]. The yawning hall of kingly mirrors shadows him as shown guilt and revenge of a smiling past victim that somehow is all around him, having already won...)

I digress. Studying the bones of the dead includes the kingly dead in their liminal boneyards. Such things communicate through/comment on recursive doom, meaning from Macbeth to Doomguy to Thragg as "Roman fools" meandering-then-speedrunning towards demise in Caesar's Numinous shadow (rabid with bloodlust). So do characters like Alucard or Thragg (the "tragic prince," himself, and son* of Lord Dracula, just like the historical Vlad was) cannot escape such places (or their false bloodlines). They really can't, for they are trapped in them like rats in a maze (or the minotaur in the middle; different animal, same predator/prey plight: "I'm in danger" vs "I am the danger"). Such places cryptonymically suck, per Marx (though he was speaking to capital and the bourgeoisie, which Neo-Gothic castles secretly symbolize), and suck endlessly and royally the blood of those who either live there or try in perpetual futility to reverse aging and restore a circular ruin (eat your heart out, Borges); i.e., to its former, imaginary "greatness" (a copy of a copy of a forgery that eats the forger alive). Sound and fury, babes. Which is why I repeatedly say how salvation comes from within, holistic study a refrain stressing that very fact. Pound that drum until the cows come home (which activism essentially is, disguised or not).

(artist: Ayami Kojima; cited, left and right: "Nancy Drew Syndrome" and "X Marks the Spot," 2025; see, also: "Castlevania, Season 3 Review," 2020)

*Alucard also being a half-breed monster/demi-god (similar to Heracles, Achilles, Merlin, etc, out of the Pagan religions into the Abrahamic ones), thus forever insecure, unwelcome and indebted to the past while standing in Daddy's shadow (and having Oedipal mommy issues when chasing the whore, virgin/whore, but I digress). He's also—like Thragg—queer-coded, insofar as his blood is "cursed," and any attempt to reproduce is doomed by endless penance, accident-of-birth. Thragg is more the ancient Spartan kind of gay man (with Catholic, Christ-on-the-cross notes), whereas Alucard (and similar tortured Japanese heroes above) are more like fash-coded twinks (twink death, echoing Dennis Cooper but the twink hitting back against state enemies); i.e., homonormativity caging and killing the whore (succubae or otherwise and their Young-Frankenstein-grade [1974] "knockers," above).

Indeed—and to practice what I preach—I do so, here; (re: "Conflict, Mothers-in Conflict, and Liberation"):

(source)

A paradigm shift requires a change of perspective (ruffling feathers, Said-style), but also a structuring of optics, of triggering factors, of outcomes that feel doomed, but which a part of us never sees coming. Families are always rising and falling in America. We can prevent that, but have to change the system by seeing its grave danger (mirror syndrome) for what it is; i.e., by who it views and treats as monstrous-feminine, the wild and the feisty but also the innocent. [...] But we can't afford to be innocent, either—to be willfully naïve about the reality that all work is sexualized and alien, thus demanding patronage from privileged peoples to move forward to happier days. [...]

In turn, capital will be exposed as a prison, its sick home an unironic torture dungeon filled with patriarchal jailors and tokenized fiends. To transition away from that to post-scarcity requires reflection on the present world with pre-capitalist nostalgia in updated, non-fatal forms: Medusa as friendly to the Cause. It requires seeing the false harmful qualities in idealized things, to tell them we don't want their "protection" but to be left alone; i.e., as a collective monstrous-feminine working against state predation, inviting all workers to grow and develop in harmony with nature: not unironically alien and fetishized, but part of the same complex interaction made ironic. Thanks to Enlightenment thinking's modern interference, our traumatic past becomes involved. But through Gothic reflection and reinvention, it lets us become the thing that never quite existed: a xenomorphic, biomechanical assisted by recent technology and pre-capitalist forms whose combined thinking achieves post-scarcity through natural resources and morphological freedom of expression. It is not posthuman, insofar as our basic human rights are attained and humanity reclaimed from a thoroughly Western idea sickened by Enlightenment thinking and Cartesian domination; it's merely the conclusion of the riddle(r) reclaimed by us—to make our own monstrous-feminine arrangements of something akin to a caterpillar and wasp that leads to future metamorphoses as healthy regards of what emerges from the chrysalid.

We don't need a paternal "protector" at all, then, but merely to be left alone by colonizers acting in bad faith through shared poetic devices. But convincing their enforcers to cease their attack (thereby surrendering their hold and their power on Medusa) requires humanizing us through the very things the state lies to us with. It requires steady demands, but also the will to fight back inside the realms of imagination and reality as intertwined; i.e., through courage and wit, cunning and perspective, the ability to blend in and play with illusions natural and material. "It takes a wizard to beat a wizard," but we are all of us wizards, kings, queens, gods and devils with the power to unite inside capital: to escape it by transforming it, thus ourselves, into a better world over time [emphasis, me]. It is, like Ovid's Metamorphoses (c. 8 CE), a magical make-believe to bring the impossible "could be" into existence: from an egg, a caterpillar, and from there a beautiful butterfly? Or is it a wasp inside the caterpillar to emerge from the same container a sleek sexy "destroyer"? Does it represent our revolutionary potential to win, as the Punic invader does, through splendid-mendax deception, or as a double of that exposing Troy as false and we, like Medusa, wrongfully accused? Does it portend to our own unmaking through inaction by capital devouring us from within, or we turning the tables to avoid such a fate when Medusa eats us? Why not both? Poetry is a battlefield.

(source)

...and here, drink up; re (from "Meeting Rebels," 2024):

Capitalism must be escaped from within, but also with the help of those who inspire* us at different points in the process. As cryptonyms, monsters speak to obvious trauma as obscured by things that point to yet also conceal it: the forbidden, surreal knowledge hidden between language, inside the grey area, as something to track down in obvious forms we don't want to escape at all, but lose ourselves inside to find a hidden truth contain between the narrative, the castles, the obvious fakes obviously speaking to obvious problems as concealed badly by capital and concealed by us from capital to survive while critiquing it; i.e., cryptonymy and camp; e.g., Giger's Gothic surrealism, the xenomorph (more on that, later). It's often right in front of us, staring us in the face while written all over our face as "our" face to face. Monsters are everywhere, denoting a wider problem concealed by its own data commercialized.

*I.e., mythically like Ariadne's thread, except we're not escaping the labyrinth and killing the minotaur. We're teaching it to be our friend and make the labyrinth our home [...]

As always, the Gothic is rife with massive-but-useful paradoxes [re: Gothic castles and those who embody them]. Fatal knowledge isn't a detriment or a deterrent, then, but happily sought out for fun as a means of rapturous and creative solutions built on older attempts. "Escape," for workers, isn't to bury our heads in the sand, then, but enter authored sites of paradox/dens of confusion (the infernal concentric pattern) to play with cryptonymy as deliberately leading to [a] healing of the home as sick with Capitalism [and its built-in predation demonizing nature; i.e., in psychosexual ways fetishizing the rape and death of would-be "contenders" while in the same larger "belly of the beast," below].

Heavy lies the crown, in any event, and I've written about the campy power of Satan in anarchist hands/power-as-paradox to perform (re: "Notes on Power," 2023). However, calling Thragg "the most human Viltrumite" unironically is a bit like calling Hitler the most human Nazi (or Heracles, abjectly punching death through not-so-cowardly Lions—the Nemean, Lion, above). "Punching death" is a very old idea—with Great Man theory (as far as modernity cares, under state crisis) dating back to populist, draining conquerors like Napoleon Bonaparte; re: Shelley's Frankenstein camping the Ogre (a famous propagandist) while alluding to older creation myths fascism would play out a century-or-so down the road (depending on the novel's edition); i.e., threatening the status quo while simultaneously regressing towards a vengeful past—meaning the very Promethean Quest (and Ozymandian dilemma) Shelley outlined with her own ambiguous (though ultimately far more sympathetic) manmade superman, the Creature:

(artist: Bernie Wrightson; source: "Wrightson's Frankenstein at 40," 2023; cited: "Making Demons")

Said creation offered a troubling reflection of the Cartesian man of reason's flawed self image, a dark master/slave double capable of the very mortal, gladiatorial violence its "nobler" (chickenshit) half represses (treating the other wrestlers less like flesh and more like claymation; e.g., Celebrity Deathmatch, 1998). Rip and tear until it is done, indeed (such hyperbolic bloodletting echoing the feral lycanthrope phase of the Saiyans' wounded pride/destroyed homeworld, planet Vegeta; re: "Dragon Ball Super: Broly (2019) - Is it Gothic?" speaking to a similar palingenetic ultranationalism "from space")!

Except, it's never done, each murder one in a long "hit" list before the killer's own demise by their own hand (the "human condition," here, something of a gladiatorial train wreck—an impactful spectacle to revel in the self-fulfilling suffering of others. This happens per cautionary tale* punishing "treason" in Hammurabi-style, eye-for-an-eye ways—meaning those that regrettably blind the blinder as suitably homosocial and Oedipal: "Here lies Dumbass the Dumb" echoing Sophocles' Oedipus Rex face-fucking himself and his family members to death). Only a matter of time before others do to him what he did to them and theirs (repaying the favor by castrating him, beheading or otherwise); i.e., before the "lion sleeps tonight" in the mighty jungle's laws thereof, the harder he struggles the more enmeshed he becomes, might-makes-right and death before dishonor. 

*Or spoofs; e.g., Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) a delightfully campy story that sees the small-town sheriff squaring off against the "klowns": space aliens less disguised as clowns and more who actually look like clowns; i.e., who then cocoon humans in cotton candy (or something that resembles it) before sucking out their blood in spidery fashion (spoofing Steven King's It [1986] for good measure).

Pride, whether from the Bible or Greek myth (the two often overlap), comes before the fall; Thragg the strongman overestimates himself (and his mythical "strength"), slips and falls in gross humiliation (drinking more than his fill, mid-bloodspill, his hydrophobic lust for battle doing him in by overtaking his wits, mid-trolley-problem). So "a king has his reign and then he dies," Thragg a giant baby throwing a tantrum while losing at chess (with Death): clawing back ineptly at the last word having outrun him and his deceptively aging imprimatur—where Death, in medieval thought, is the Leveler of kings and peasants, alike; i.e., there's always someone bigger than you, and Death always wins, Divine-Right-(and its entitlement)-be-damned; e.g., The Seventh Seal (1957) and similar stories in and out of fiction; re: (from "The Eyeball Zone," 2024): 

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

Cite whatever you need to "do the trick," including your enemies' numerous fatal errors to revive Medusa ("She's alive!"). In trying to stay relevant, Thragg only cements himself as hopelessly vain and blind—both colossal blood-sucking twat and irritable and crabby manchild, who the gods (or Medusa) step on, Prometheus-style: only a man, and a dumb animal one at that (who makes other animals [all as intelligent as they need be in order to survive] look positively genius, in the bargain). He fucks his own ass*, not meaning to while his legacy—what was promised to him and he feels he's owed—enshittifies before his very eyes (which cannot see what is happening to him, nor notice the sweet taste of victory turn to ashes in his mouth). And so we point and laugh as Medusa steps on Nazi Batman (or Superman, whatever), staking himself silly (the ignominious death leveling the proud to his chagrin and our delight): "What a dumb-dumb!" Laugh at the gods (of a fascist sort), for they are false (and all deities reside within our breast, loves); use what keeps them up at night to make their worst nightmares (and our dream-like universal liberation from Omelas, Camelot or otherwise) come gloriously true!

*And if that sounds vulgar and crude (which the Gothic is, prone to bad puns while playing with taboos), consider how impalement generally involved inserting the pike into someone's ass before ramming it up through their bodies and out their mouth (source: "29. The Real Dracula Did Not Suck People's Blood – He Shoved Sharp Poles Up Their Rears" from Khalid Elhassan's "Horrific Facts from History that Will Invade Nightmares," 2021). "A new Dark Age," indeed. I think I'll take crucifixion (or live burial, etc)!

(source: Nathan Grayson's "Finally, a Game in Which You Play as the Monty Python Foot," 2014)

And with that all said and done (for now), consider our extended dissection of His Majesty's flying corpse (or circus, above) closed! Roll credits to "March of the Gladiators"! —Perse

Such tyrants' ignoble battles of the gods echo older oral stories (e.g., Zeus and Mount Olympus, the Titans, etc), but also modern written fascism giving empire (and capital/state predation) a human facelift, once more ("blood, hair, sweat—grown for the cyborgs" by state-corporations; i.e., trading in flesh—both chattelized and verminized for their aims, often infiltration; re: The Terminator [1984] and "Healing from Rape"). Crisis, a facet of state production and capital, yields dark desires for perceived outsiders; i.e., to fit in and be strong enough to avoid future harm, triangulating in-group members (and out-group tokens) to punch down all the harder (and keeping power where it is, all the while). So was the case for Stalin, Superman and Thragg from older state models already straddling feudalism out of "Rome"; re: as refusing to die, including their myths; e.g., Vlad the Impaler and his iconic 'stache (and patronymic, below): supermen reflect royalty as eating more than their "lessers" (the "lion's share" cannibalizing the elderly and the young by stubborn-to-a-fault, entirely paranoid pack leaders who, eating too much, eventually succumb to an internal, might-makes-right revolt* skinning the apex predator alive). Echoes of Divine Right, supermen = their own spectre of Caesar versus the Gorgon's Communist one (and Numinous aura to seek, in either case). Not "once upon a time," but for all eternity as hyperreal/a simulacrum of power as perpetual false copy (as states—from Sparta and Athens to America—are built on slavery and will always lie cryptonymically [through false flags feeding in bad faith] to preserve themselves for as long as humanly possible).

*Or letting Stalin die from "a stroke" because his own guards were famously too scared to check on him, or perhaps had him assassinated (source: Jackie Mansky's "The True Story of the Death of Stalin," 2017).

(exhibit 0a1b1 [from "On Giving Birth"]: [...] "A painting of Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia [1431–1476], also known by his patronymic name Dracula [patronymic meaning a name based on that of a male ancestor], and posthumously dubbed Vlad the Impaler due to his brutality. The name of the vampire Count Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula [1897] was inspired by Vlad's patronymic" [source: British Library ... In short, Pygmalion casts a long shadow and one we break using the same larger-than-life language...].)

Blind to their actual reflections, we iconoclasts (whores or otherwise) reverse what they refuse to normally behold, doing so "on the Aegis" (and its infernal concentric pattern; re: "Perceptive Zombie Eyeballs," 2024). Vampires = canvases that enjoy (or revile, from garlic to silver to Kryptonite) a variety of poetic qualities, including taboos mid-abjection; e.g., homophobia and antisemitism (and the patriarchal, homosocial nature of such beings), but really any objection the ruling class can file and pro-labor defenders (of nature) counter mid-regression (making for a "close shave," as it were). Yes, they're undead, demonic and deeply animal (often creatures of the night; e.g., wolves, rats and bats), but also planetary in their former "might" as doomed; i.e., "laid out" on unavoidable paths, whose terrible circuity turn ultimately inwards to collide with hard, earth-shattering realities (that Death [again] always wins—exhibit 40g1, further down). There's nothing new under the sun (or moon, but the sun weakens Superman like it does any vampire, him having a weak/strong side like any Nazi, and a dark side like any tidal-locked orbit). These supermen (and women) are often "of steel" (unfeeling and weapon-like) but also flesh-and-blood "gargoyles*," Peter-Pan shepherds culling the herd while trapped mythically and biomechanically between duty and desire; i.e., as things to witness, the menticidal* traveling barbarian coming home to roost (whether theirs or not, the usual ghost of the counterfeit speaking to middle-class fears of faulty inheritance and alien invasion): the soft-yet-strong parodied imperfectly by Tarantino and Rodriguez in the '90s, but also Kevin Smith (and similar weird canonical nerds that iconoclastic ones challenge, therein; re: Gunn, to some extent):

*Terms I unpack in "The Nation-State" and "Monster Modes, Totalitarianism and Opposing Forces" (2023), respectively.

(exhibit 45c2b1 [from "Whores and Faust: Summoning the Whore/Black Penitent," 2025]: Older feminists/SWERFs tend to knock the topos of power of women, but it's something that neo-medieval argument can broach from a variety of sources; e.g., Smith's "angelicizing" of the formerly demonic Selma Hayek [above] from an exotified "other" wrought with vampire tropes punching down at Mexico from America, and attacking sex workers; i.e., with Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez' From Dusk 'Til Dawn [1996] presenting the vampires as bloodsucking fodder the bar full of combat vets, bikers and runaway criminals must kill to survive; re: black penitents being one-upped by older more experienced black penitents, but also the assimilative myth [for Rodriguez] of a savage Mexico: a "bad" bloodline threatening a white American hostage virgin, and who Clooney's suitably gruff, swarth-and-sexy antihero must protect from out-and-out whores [which is what a Neo-Gothic demon, out from the medieval past, ultimately is: an illegitimate claim to power through sex and force]. In his own words, Clooney's "a bastard, not a fucking bastard [...]").

"Psychos don't explode when sunlight hits them! I don't care how crazy they are!" (though I presume Thragg just melts or burns to a crisp). A vampire's a vampire, but the state variety are specifically cops that further abjection during endless war (thus predation). Cops lie because states lie; i.e., raping by design in ways that share the stage with Communists, the latter whose critical function/poetic devices must travel beyond mere aesthetics (of a so-called "nominal" or "siege Communism" being something the Soviets were guilty of, when it came to their victims being thrown without mercy into gulags by false friends—meaning alongside American/German concentration camps, and all to prohibit/consolidate power around a given executive and their armies of bootlicking yes-men, but also Ozymandian doubles mise-en-abyme, below). To that, we don't want to give rise to witch hunts that harm workers (and heroes of the working class), but to eat the rich and powerful by showing the empire's nude mortality the light of day (and state citizens drunk on such things); i.e., redistributing power to a more horizontal plane (as whores do): by killing our darlings, however "super" they once were (or tell themselves) and currently have fallen under Randian acrobatics—meaning of the Brad Bird* but also Bioshock (2007) "Big Daddy" sort echoed tragically in bodybuilders like Mike Mentzer uncritically lapping Atlas Shrugged up (four years after Stalin died, 1957). First, overpower them; then show them their own mortality and cosmic-level dupe status: the useful-idiot "Roman fool" (re: Macbeth), ultimately expendable and left holding the bag for the state (whose ruling class sups on figureheads doubling as momentary spearheads: their time in the sun becoming too close to keep them afloat).

*See: Renegade Cut's "The Incredibles - Ayn Rand and Objectivism" (2018), which highlights how Randian "supermen" were corporate bureaucrats not dissimilar from Stalin (or American executives)—men often accented by outrageous facial hair (not just Stalin and Hilter's mustaches, but Andrew Ryan's from OG Bioshock: an entitled, underwhelming and tragically stupid "superman": "a man chooses, a slave obeys" to [as the mad scientist (not Hatter) in the game says] "kindly break that sweet puppy's neck").

(model: Rick Valente)

From Polyphemus to Balor to Stalin to Thragg (and many others besides), giants have weak spots to denude and thrust into (and dragons and/or vampires, etc, but I digress). To that, Patriarchy and capital weaken men (or those acting like men, blaming the woman; e.g., Mick's Irish vaudeville from the Rocky movies saying this sexist gem: "women weaken legs")—meaning as receivers of universal privilege (under capital's modules of class, culture and race); i.e., fragility as white, straight and male, and something to show/castrate them with, "on the Aegis." So less Ayn Rand and more Plato Aristocles* (or the Gorgon, her world-sized ass making Atlas shrug by sitting on him, above); re (from "Canonical Discrimination in Videogames," 2025):

*Or Socrates, but watch out for hemlock.

Think Zeus pulling Metis from his forehead, the Patriarchal "Seat of Reason" that Renaissance thinkers supposedly channeled when rebirthing Civilization, except that concept doesn't really spring from nowhere and, in fact, was codified during the Enlightenment: Plato wasn't just the tutor of Aristotle and "a founding father" of Western philosophy. He was a conspicuously muscular man whose immortal name harkens to his halcyon days as a young, strapping wrestler!

Plato was a fighter. This is not a metaphor. The historian Diogenes Laërtius tells us that Platon, meaning "broad-shouldered," was the philosopher's wrestling nickname. As a prominent aristocrat, Plato was known for his pedigree and youthful poetry but also for his physique: the muscles of a gifted grappler, who reportedly competed at the Isthmian Games. And for all his wariness of the body and its wayward desires, Plato also recommended wrestling for the youth. In his dialogue Laws, he celebrated the benefits of stand-up grappling. This had a straightforward military use, developing "strength and health" for the battlefield. But it also cultivated character if "practiced with a gallant spirit" [Bay: "Boys will be boys, so let's put them to use" as an ancient placation/apologia of men's spirits as indominable, uncontainable, thus unaccountable]. The overall impression is that physical virtues encourage psychological excellence: perseverance, courage, and perhaps a greater sense of autonomy (source: Damon Young's "Plato Said Knock You Out," 2015).

While easily parodied, this kind of male privilege socially-sexually translates to "braindead, pushy" masculine personas in the here-and-now that vampirically demand sex from those they deem inferior to themselves—women; or in the case of femboys, "women" (the top being stronger than the bottom, practitioners of these rapacious deeds lying to themselves in increasingly bizarre ways: "It's not gay if we close our eyes and pretend"—i.e., a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" approach). / Furthermore, the havers-of-the-muscles become false preachers with false bodies and powers—king-like Pygmalions to worship and follow as leaders; i.e., regardless of their authenticity or merit (the tissue is "dead," slathered on like clay to disguise who they were/are) and entirely because of what they represent: ghoulish patriarchal dominance under Capitalism.

This "tilting at windmills" (another dualistic idea useful and detrimental to different actors) extends to any cartoon under the sun; i.e., any showcasing of Superman, Thragg or Immorton Joe, et al, as Quixotically "sundowning" (which, if you haven't already guessed, I love doing alongside Amazons, below):

(exhibit 40g1 [from "Metroidvania, part one: Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge," 2024]: Artist, top-left: Wildragon. Resembling the skeletal Immorton Joe from Fury Road [which came out a year before Axiom Verge] but also, oddly, Jacques Derrida, Athetos is Happ's "writing with ghosts" by evoking the heteronormative spirit [and cartographic tools of conquest, exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] of the old, Enlightenment tyrant/con man Wizard-of-Oz, Peter Weyland. As the vain owner of everything around him, Weyland becomes desperate to cheat death, yet only discovers the Leveler on his own Promethean Quest: "A king has his reign, and then he dies," his daughter, Mary Vickers, explains to him. "That is the natural order of things..."

[artist: Persephone van der Waard; ibid.]

[And pointing that out becomes its own kind of joy while in "Rome" (or some-such offshoot) as dead and we happily undead/dead-and-loving-it, above; i.e., nudity is strength through dialectical-material context].)

Any way you slice it, vampires are vice characters whose abject experience—one of alienation and fetishization to differing degrees and ratios—is hideously attractive to self-righteous dickheads like Marx (and imitators of the man himself and those who survived him; re: Stalin, Superman, or anyone else). They're closeted in ways that lead them to ignominious death (the dupe their own worst enemy/slave to tradition easily mislead by overtures to false strength: Caesar pulled from mommy's womb to perish "from exposure"). So cataloguing and wedding my lived experiences to my early YouTube work (video essays) and graduate/postgraduate work, after my book series, should give my viewers some idea of what being in the closet* is like, and likewise inform them on how we overcome that/challenge state vampirism in highly liminal, subversive ways of public nudism while doing crowd work (comedy and ridicule, explains Thought Slime, being fascist Kryptonite—one where "Fascists Will Waste Your Time" [2025] echoes my own "Tactical Frivolity" well enough);

*Or Superman's phone booth (or whatever Thragg uses keeping them in the dark).

(artist: Bruce Timm; cited: "Teaching between Media and our Bodies, and a Bit of Coaching," 2024)

i.e., that play with power per medium (e.g., videogames; re: "Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning," 2025): whilst fully or partially inside the closet (which the state's nuclear model is). You can't just say "go read Marx" (or Stalin, Mao, or Marvel, etc), because all of those men were queerphobic* (and Foucault has his own problems [re: "Preface," 2024], though I enjoyed Butler well enough). And now that my book series is complete, I may comfortably articulate my own lived experience when camping state vampirism as I developed it: from childhood, to some extent, but mainly from 2014 onwards (and my attempts to branch out and experiment while launching Gothic Communism on the bones of the mighty dead; re: exhibit 1). The homewrecker with a dirty little secret (as vampires and other antisemitic/queerphobic tropes deal in), I'm excited to share it with all of you! Just screaming with delight, really (comfortable in my own weirdness/willingness to engage with abject things, below)!

*Or homonormative, in X-Men's case (1963).

So concludes this mini-essay on state vampires and camping them (to drain them of their vitality for once). Onto the rememory portion!

Making Trouble, Cryptonymy-Style: Ann Rice, Bloodlines, and Charting New Destinies "in the Blood"; or, the Rememory of Older Mothers (feat. Mom)

"I'm an intellectual" (source).

—Melody Vassoff (my mother), interviewed by Linda Meloche* after releasing her poetry book, In Drought Time: Scenes from Rural and Small-Town Life (2005)

*Who also interviewed my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor and Dutch resistance member (2007). 

(cited: "Army of Darkness: Valorizing the Idiot Hero," 2020)

Monsters and mothers predate Mary Shelley/are as old as Medusa; i.e., as de facto teachers for when the men aren't around (or Quixotically let us down, above). So, a quick refresher on cryptonymy and bloodlines, vis-à-vis the echoes of this-or-that, during the rememory process (a ghostly assemblage of the past; re: from Toni Morrison); i.e., that give rise to young blood (made from old parts; re: "Dissecting Radcliffe," 2025). From Milton's Satan to Shelley's Creature, rebels chart new destinies while swimming in oceans of spilled blood (to "pull a Bathory" versus "a Moses," a Red Army parting the Red Sea to free Palestine ["from the river to the sea"] alongside all oppressed peoples in a shared pedagogy "healing from rape":

Like Omelas, the point is walking away from Egypt if that means not genociding other people, not towards it! Israel is a ploy to buy cheap loyalty in furtherance to capital's continued raping of others—Jews included! This will certainly ruffle some feathers, but I'm a Satanic atheist; i.e., there is no God, only workers vs the elite and whatever deities either fabricates for their own purposes. My doing so happens while speaking to those harmed by refusing to look past matters of a "purely" ethnic character. It was never about "pure ethnicity" [so-called "ethnic Jews" echoing "ethnic Germans"] but dividing and conquering more broadly using that and other means of persecution through various networks, thereof. Jews don't have a monopoly on holocaust, and as Zionism shows us, they can tokenize like any other minority group to police nature with; i.e., non-white skin, white masks; e.g., the Inca's imperial subjugates and the Conquistadors. Betrayal is betrayal. It's only ever a question of who and why (source: [from my anti-Zionist/anti-racist work]: "On 'Anti-Semitism' versus 'Antisemitism,'" 2024).

(ibid.)

In turn,

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate. But undeath is something that can be felt through echoes of ourselves that aren't diegetically spectral; they feel spectral through an uncanny resemblance, like standing over our own graves. This becomes something to play with during ludo-Gothic BDSM, akin to an (at-times) humorous, even trashy gallows theatre [camping our own holocaust as] rife with dark, forbidden language: sin, vice, violent sex, all-around death, and other taboo subjects discouraged by privileged (and unimaginative) moderates who historically frame the Gothic as a puerile, good-for-nothing backwater while simultaneously suffering from conservative delusions of privilege and/or tokenism (re: Jameson). In other words, the pedagogy of the oppressed faces its classic foil: tone-policing (source: "Healing from Rape").

To that, ghosts, in a linguo-material sense, are records of people that survive them, often versions of said people that no longer exist (if they ever did). This includes my mother, who—while very much still alive and kicking, today—remains a survivor of things that paradoxically survive her current self: as fragmented ghosts of a collective past; re: the rememory process, one concerning an assemblage to concentrically assemble and reflect cryptomimetically on whilst between these different puzzle pieces (a caramel onion/skull inside the pumpkin).

So, in cryptonymic terms (that show and hide restless things at the same time), I wish to "ungag Medusa" on the black mirror—to set her free and have the whore's revenge (regardless of gender) as intersectionally conscious and solidarized in tactical frivolity. Mazes or monsters in mazes (the dark home synonymous with the secret home owner [the whore] now kept prisoner at its dreadful core/closed space leeching from the unhappy host). Whores witness things to testify to about capital, later (often postmortem, above). In turn, we heal from rape by playing with "rape" in quotes, which vampires per the dialectic of the alien neatly encapsulate (and why we keep returning to them: echoes of ourselves, released and resonating recursively in oft-parental, "long-lost" siblings buried alive; i.e., working ways out through rivalries of a friendly to not-so-friendly sort, above and below). It isn't tunnel vision, but forbidden sight opening (as Blake would put it) "the doors of perception" (also, my mother's a huge Jim Morrison fan, but I digress). So did I emulate my mother but also, in the same token, women like Mary Shelley all the way back to Medusa (who my mother [or parts of them] emulated, before me): as rebellious, uncanny and sexual-to-asexual symbols of power that remain, nonetheless, keenly psychosexual (and psychomachic, etc, on the social side of Socialist development). Nature is classically female/monstrous-feminine, and game recognizes game; i.e., as passed down, one whore-in-the-whorehouse (the secret dark princess in a black castle) to the next, dialectically-materially. Trauma is difficult to avoid, often billowing outward and collocatively through sudden outrageous violence: the cartoon haunted by the real deal, parody/pastiche, but still drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid (or chocolate milk, below). If you prick me, do I not spew?

(cited: "Yesterday's Leftover Rice")

Furthermore, there is always another castle to reify and raze, mise-en-abyme (and often through that neo-medieval revival [and rivalry] that modern Gothic celebrates, reviving ghosts; re: "Scouting the Field" and "Giger's Xenomorph," 2023 and 2025); i.e., newer vampires come from older vampires, the flexible bloodlines in and out of fiction: speaking to us and ours dwelling and dueling onstage and off. We're all made of the same "meat" (or ectoplasm) as something to enrich or reduce (tenderize), accordingly. For example, my mom—in hearing me gush about The Vampires of New Orleans—immediately asked, "Does it have anything to do with Ann Rice's novels?" So I figured I may as well add the film synopsis here:

In an announcement video,[1] writer/director Andrew Rakich explained how the idea for the film originated in a short story he wrote about a character closely based on Louis du Lac from Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles novels. In the books, Louis is a 18th century Louisiana plantation owner who becomes a vampire and refuses to take human life. In Rakich's short story, a similar vampire character has the same moral qualms but does not consider people of color to be human, and therefore fair game for bloodsucking. The film expands this concept to include other vampires which Rakich described as "historical figures in arrested development," such as the serial killer The Axeman, who prey on the vulnerable in modern New Orleans [Rakich's Omelas], as well as a "Black Van Helsing" who emerges to fight them[2] (source: Fandom).

In keeping with that—and in pulling on the thread of destiny as something to seize the day (and means of production), mid-abjection in Gothically mature ways—consider here a taste of the cryptonymy side of that equation (which I explore alongside abjection, all the time; re: "State Vampirism" but also "Seeing Dead People," 2024): secret whores trapped between virgin/whore binaries that proletariat vampires (unpaid or otherwise, and queerly favoring the environment with anti-racist dialogs) cryptomimetically camp. Doing so here happens under a holistic, intersectional exhibit of rememory—one concerning the open-secret troublemaker who, mother to me and Gothic Communism as a Numinous echo of the Gorgon, inspired my shenanigans (and Atun-Shei's; i.e., Ann Rice and her vampire novel's racial and queer allegories being tremendously productive, then-and-now): Mom, the strongest person I know, but also the most complicated (as ghosts generally are, vampires a kind of ghost). My apple didn't fall far from the tree.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

I digress. Dad wasn't around, so who else was I supposed to learn from? Mom taught me what strength was (especially Amazons, including the ones [above] I modeled after Robert E. Howard's Red Sonja[15]; i.e., as revived by Marvel in the golden age of Amazons post-Marston, below):

My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn't so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray's creation of sexual difference). I'm hardly the first person to notice this:

As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng's "'The Most Powerful Weapon You Have': Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita," 2003).

I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, "Commie-Mommy" means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the "rape" castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others (re: "In Search of the Secret Spell," 2024).

(artist: Ed Benes)

Where do you think I got that from, the void? I got it from Mom, who taught me gingers do have souls (and kick ass like Red Sonya, above); i.e., so many with privilege (often white straight men) speak of oppression in abstract terms, while never having faced it directly themselves (men are taught to be dumbly penetrative, as are women/other tokens who emulate/serve Patriarchal Capitalism in deeply tragic ways, ACAB; re: "Valorizing the Idiot Hero"). Having been under someone else's power (who celebrated capital, defending it [and neoliberalism] from Communism; re: Jadis; see: "Going Mask Off," 2025), I chased what I wanted to become as taught to me through my mother's stories (and media she shared with me that mirrored, to a degree, her life in idealized form): those historically underestimated by Patriarchy's bourgeois element. All of that weird humor and love for D&D-style badass bitches I got from Mom and her ghostly "homebrew."

(exhibit 103 ["Liminal Monster Porn in the Internet Age," 2025]: Artist, left/right: Persephone van der Waard. My fan art of the Amazon and vampire boss from Dragon's Crown [2013, a college favorite] and a drawing by me of Tyris flare from Golden Axe [1989, a childhood favorite].)

So a given flame-haired thing (a firecracker) appears desirable, albeit in highly tempting veneers that resist easy translation (the Amazon [and her angel/devil battles with Gorgon-like things] nakedly powerful but also fearsome, off-limits, etc). From "I am woman, hear me roar!" to "Get your hand off my penis!" Eat that meal but also become it—a given "dish" (forbidden fruit) succulent and Chinese (or otherwise) to proof and poison, thus delight and devour in equal confounding measure (for measure):

(source: "Amazons," 2025)

Weird attracts weird; to learn from the past, we must interrogate its Wisdom of the Ancients and Ancestors (re: "The Value in Showing Intersectional Solidarity When Combating Fascism"). Doing so means in the flesh as memento mori, reborn in endless interviews with vampires who birth us (and us others, on and on)! Time is a circle, one haunted by whores who refuse to stay silent (my mother being homeless, once upon a time, and teaching me the value in sex work as something to support that prevents homelessness in the future; i.e., as the world's oldest profession, service, and struggle tied to monstrous-feminine poetics, but also the land; re: with her own book, In Drought Time, and one I recalled while remembering her wisdom, nature-is-alien (see, again: "The Riddle of Steel"). She lived life to the fullest, mad for much of it while hell-bent on making sure I was safe/able to learn from her stories whatever I needed to survive. A ghost is a ghost, vampire or not.

To that, here's the Wisdom Mom shared with me—most of this common knowledge in the family (as open secrets) by the time I was old enough to vote:

(exhibit 9: Source, left: Chelsea Library, 2011 [originally 2005]; right: "It Began with a Whisper" [originally the early '90s]. Vampires are, amongst other things, alter-egos—with women in Gothic fiction classically delineating through their desire of different "lover" archetypes [and mutilative desire; re: Cynthia Wolff, 1979; see: "Radcliffe's Refrain"]. However, they're also our blood ties, meaning where we come from and, to some extent, where we're going [a recursive mystery to solve while "on the tracks"]. In my case, I'm the spitting image of my mother as virgin/whore. Such "dead ringers" are uncanny insofar as we re[as]semble however partially a secret side of someone tied to somewhere; i.e., a "ghost of the Gorgon" who preceded us, bound by [and to] the same ancestral home's traveling burial site [a space of rest that cannot sleep]: a rift or emerging dispute but also potential resolution when the chickens come home to roost/the past given flesh in so many ways hyphenating house and home as fatal homecoming [the classic plight of any Gothic heroine, facing herself as prodigal whore]. Think Jane Eyre [1847] and the bildungsroman, except our debutante never left the Red Room: the wedding of one to trauma as forever "in Hell," meaning highly dualistic in ways that elide safety/danger and pleasure/pain that cannot unscramble [the bride of Dracula a monstrous-feminine being regardless how "saintly" she seems, Persephone wedded to Hades]. Forget "reader, I married him"; for women, historically property for the state, their hell is often just beginning when the "storybook" ending shuts for everyone else [re: "Defined Through Sex: Sex Normativity in Popular Media," 2025]: sex [work] sold role-wise to those who, given a choice, would never have sex[16] [or kids] ever again [though still loving the ones they already have, of course]!

From Austen to us, a woman's upward social mobility canonically = prostitution whitewashed in churchly lace[17] [one with a heavy price for the ghostly bride; e.g., not just Fanny Price in Mansfield Park [1815] but Anna Karenina, 1875]. These portraits capture moments in time that don't always yield obvious answers, but—white splashed in red in fourth dimensional ways—remain uncanny nonetheless, thus vampirically magnetic. In 2005, for instance, my mother was living with an abusive second husband [not my dad, above] who actually harmed her far worse than when she was homeless [and which she escaped initially in the mid-'80s through marriage, her stalker chasing her home—meaning from where she had gone to escape home, to begin with]. Yet you might hear her state, at the time, "I'm an intellectual" and think her privileged. Fair enough. From Athens to America, it's possible to have privilege and still be second-class in state eyes; i.e., women the ancient virgin/whore scapegoat to blame by patriarchal forces who, themselves, never really left: home as dead. So women perch historically on the forefront of that frightening discovery. Trapped in/along with it like amber or glass—and something fragile that, when viewed, might break you to pieces—they give up the witch's secret/ghost. Destruction is something to "come and see," in Gothic; cryptomimesis writes with ghosts to get at things between pieces of dead language that—from Marx to us—gets at things Western Marxism* often overlooks [the power of Gothic predating Marx but also outlasting Freud, Creed, Derrida and others to champion unpaid labor]: fatal portraits and live burial that, paradoxically having no mouth but needing to scream, beckon to onlookers "Stare and tremble!"; i.e., in all the usual ways state defenders ignore. Full of riddles, Gothic is riddled with nameless female ghosts [e.g., Lewis' Bleeding Nun] or mysterious beauties treated like currency by state powers [re: prostitution]:

[artist: Gustav Klimt—one of my mother's favorite pieces by him, and one she kept on a wall in our childhood home]

*E.g., George Rockhill's Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? [2025] extending to my own Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communist criticisms of Marx and Engels, Stalin and Mao, but also Freudian psychoanalysis, Chomsky's unapologetic stupidity with Cambodia, and Sino-Soviet Marxist-Leninism [re: "Preface" and "The Price of Rice" but also "State Vampirism"].

[artist, left: Tim Jacobus (cited: "Death by Snu-Snu," 2024); middle and right, models: Regina Kay Walters [18] and Melody (at the time) van der Waard]

Gothic = decay [of memory and trauma] as something to live with/within, and try mid-rememory to preserve what slips between our fingers while "topping from below"; e.g., fatal portraits/photographs—these of my mother's wedding I found when moving from where I am to where we're going [and haunted by spectres of other dead women, above]. I'm adding them here to testify to someone who never knew innocence, but—through all the double standards [and virgin/whore contradictions] state power requires—stayed for many years trapped in the nuclear model to eventually escape it: a survivor with complex trauma and PTSD seemingly "unclouded by conscience, remorse and delusions of morality" [the destroyer] but, all the same, incredibly loving and kind. She was, back then, the sport of sorrow and its deliverer from abject misery for others she birthed; i.e., my mother was, for me, my first exposure to a witch secretly of the devil's company whispering forbidden knowledge: one I walked in the footsteps of when trying to escape the same curse. "To reach the Red Bull you have to walk through time," and I chased the "ghost" of my still-breathing mother [and the Gorgon] to secret hauntologies she herself relayed to me [and me to you] that I survived before writing my books; re [from "Angry Mothers," 2024]: 

[models, from left to right (SFW versions): Ms. Reefer, Blxxd Bunny, and Milking Marlo] 

How could I have any [regrets] when working with such angels, and while having survived the complete-and-utter torture that preceded them? Jadis was my Great Destroyer. They took with impunity. They scattered my wits, drained my sanity and stole my will to live [source: Persephone van der Waard's "Setting the Record Straight; My Ex's Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022"]. By comparison, these cuties—stellar and glowing—utterly restored it, gave me something to live for—something warm and serene, but joyous, thunderstriking and awesome: helping my friends avoid similar fates; i.e., an angelic and devilish bliss comparable to what Matthew Lewis described following the riot and fall of Ambrosio in The Monk [1794]:

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

To that, I'll let you in on a little secret: The greatest irony of Jadis harming me [...] is they accidentally gifted me with the appreciation of calculated risk. Scoured with invisible knives, I don't view my scars as a "weakness" at all; I relish the feeling of proximity to the ghost of total power—of knowing that motherfucker took me to the edge but didn't take everything from me: I escaped them and lived to do my greatest work in spite of their treachery! Like the halls of a cathedral, my lived torments and joys color this castled work, ornamenting its various passages with the power of a full life. I've known such terror that makes the various joys I experience now all the more sweet and delicious. I am visited by ghosts of my rapturous design, the empress of my fate, the queen of a universe shared with seraphs the likes of which I can hardly describe; "no coward soul is mine."

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

Am I privileged enough [white, male, American/middle-class] to not be immediately killed by those with the stomach for it, trapped on the wrong side of the imperial fence or the law? Yes. But let it be known all the same that all of our abusers—however powerful they might seem—can't completely own us, nor take the best things "during the divorce"; i.e., they don't monopolize "what works" when combined adventurously by us [which we may do as we want—to have fun and learn with those we have "eyes for"]: my creative stealing of their power through my own work, eliding sex and warlike metaphors to liberate the monstrous-feminine by illustrating mutual consent with sincere revolutionaries. 

To it, there are no perfect victims or abusers, but she—my mother and her Galatean spectres [of Medusa as much as Marx]—being some of the oldest exploited by the state's nuclear model out of antiquity into present space and time. They speak, however liminal, to a scarlet imprimatur—to the vampire's ageless awesome power of discovery as cryptonymic ways to voice our predicaments across generations routinely stolen from: the courage of the seemingly meek and small [and devils-in-disguise] showing you what real courage [and arrested development] looks like. That's not simply in appearance, then, but vastly unequal [and unfair] conditions; i.e., of power arranged in dialectical-material ways, seen by future workers through all the usual dualities ludo-Gothic BDSM was tailored to address; re [from "Sharing the Blame"]:

You take the smooth with the rough, returning to trauma to camp it knowing your abusers (and criminogenic conditions) are undoubtedly present, as well. It's a Black Veil—one to pull aside and remind you your abusers are gone, but how it feels to have their stamp of trauma linger on, within and all around you, candy-from-a-baby: "Show us on the doll where the bad man touched you."

Speaking as a rape survivor/former victim of child abuse, such "dolls" are necessary. Furthermore, the Neo-Gothic ability to recreate such scenes (and their awesome confusion, above) can serve us in profoundly educational, anti-predatory ways; i.e., not reinforcing stigma and stereotype, but playing with them concerning the survivor's acclimation to trauma: as something to forever live with/return to in Gothic maturity lacking in canonical forms (and often caught in the middle; e.g., Dragon, 1993—below):

(source: "Trial by Fire: Demon Muscle Mommies," 2024)

Conjuring up Numinous things to comment on systemic inequality under capital; i.e., home = alien, in Gothic—one whose nuclear model remains haunted by older abuse, and whose victims have tremendous power in terms of their axe to grind: to a seasonal degree felt year-round, the grim harvest of the Halloween whore come home to roost! Nature is monstrous-feminine; the merchandise, during the whore's revenge, becomes a weaponized sphere. By reversing terror/counterterror through a hostile planet-in-small, the alien beings "of nature," under Cartesian dualism, can reverse abjection; re: in duality by anisotropically reclaiming the Aegis upon themselves: "humanize the harvest, expose the state as inhumane" (source: "Paid Labor"). This happens by recognizing how we're alien, then embracing such things to reach others with; i.e., on either side of privilege/oppression, finding common ground during ludo-Gothic BDSM (re: "Healing from Rape"). Paradoxically this requires some degree of fascination with things we see as alien, including our bodies and those of our potential friends; re: of the fertile kind, loaded for bear to change minds with (different strokes for different folks, in that respect; e.g., Rose's hefty knockers, below).

(artist: Romantic Rose)

In conjuring the bastard or the whore (and their sizeable assets, above), such things are notably regressive doorways [that repeat in tragedy and then in farce useful to workers punching up from Hell, below...]

[cited: "Angry Mothers"]

"Like mother, like daughter." We imperfect survivors have it rough, yes, but "make it" to have the whore's revenge in mythical ways that survive against all odds; e.g., Medusa was raped in her sleep, then castrated to birth a demonic rape baby postmortem [re: "Medusa Misunderstood"]: the Pegasus. Alongside that, Medusa's head remained chthonically sovereign, eventually destroying the men exploiting her power for themselves. In my mother's case, she endured terrible things—a series thereof that cannot be described in polite company [and which she struggles sometimes to remember]—to birth a little fighter [me] who also faced and survived her own great trauma[19] tied to a larger cycle [of generational trauma and theft]. Mom always, at least publicly, struggled to voice her own abuse; and being a rape survivor myself clawed from two eggs [C-section and baby queer], Mom gave her waywardly gay daughter a home after Covid: one I used to write my book series speaking out for both of us ["a room of one's own," as Virginia Woolf once put it]. Cut from the same hellish cloth, we shared the same expectations society forced on us—albeit diametrically inverted in my case because of my sex, but me being a woman thus policed all the same; i.e., through transemasculation as a kind of vampire not unlike the "scarlet woman": as both homewrecker witch and lady of the night going her own way to upend state models of psychosexual domination and control. For the state, whore = anything that fights back, which it unironically tars using the same basic brush—with cis women and trans men classically feminized by heteronormative powers, anything "masculine" [monstrous-feminine] castrated or cut off like Medusa's proverbial head; e.g., staked, shot, shorn, or burned at the stake, etc, as trans women [framed as violent, perfidious home invaders] classically are [re: exhibit 1a1a2b from "Symposium: Aftercare," 2023; see, also: "Policing the Whore"].

[artist, left: Ben Wickey; middle: Joe Morse; right: artist: pagong1—cited: middle and right, in "Assembling Trauma and Questions of Betrayal" and "Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches)"]

And yet Medusa cannot die, surviving in ghostly ways that rise repeatedly from the grave to "ransack 'Rome.'" Everyone loves the whore, nothing more policed than sex through force by state powers pimping nature. Holistic revolutionaries "free Medusa," liberating the sovereign [and all of nature] from state bondage—meaning under settler colonialism, heteronormativity and Cartesian dualism, thus Capitalist [and Socialist] Realism as threatened by Communist life after death of state powers; i.e., as Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism does, camping the canon alongside bad actors we can never wholly escape: to play with scapegoats, thus subvert the usual pimp-like violence they vengefully afford, onstage and off. Again, abjection cuts both ways, the good actor using the same predator/prey devices bad ones do to deliver a hidden wound; i.e., one our enemies don't always feel at first [any more than babies do their umbilical cord being cut], but certainly will the next morning [eating their bloodline alive, above, like Titus Andronicus]: while "waiting upon nature's mischief!" So is revenge, phallic or otherwise, a notably bloody business—if only to articulate the flow that "blood" [actual or not] normally travels, the polarity reversing while coursing in our veins/on our teeth [and from ours to others, to others, to others...].

[source: "A Vampire History Primer; or, a Latter-Day Conceptualization of Vampirism, from the 1970s Onwards," 2024]

Seductive and elusive, vampires = ghosts that feed and speak to trauma in different trope-ish ways; e.g., the abuser, the victim, and the avenger all being survivors in some shape or form [often at odds/an extension of the author, above]. Abjection = flow and flow goes both ways—the vampire a metaphor for capital-in-small, but also state decay as dualistically fascist and Communist to deeply liminal extremes. Things don't separate in Gothic; they elide, inviting an endlessly operatic and troubling comparison, mid-dialectic, one raising socio-material concerns: danger discos "in the flesh" that translate/triangulate visually in highly performative ways [above and below]. One can focus on class, culture and/or race to varying playful degrees, the world-is-a-vampire [or oyster]. There's often, too, a wavering degree of troubling intuition, naked power and dark premonition [and metamorphosis]. And often, we do it while under the vampire's magic spell—drawn myopically to trauma and predation in deeply hypnotic, wraith-like ways we can't help but play with, ourselves; i.e., like others before us did, often weird nerds who feel the call while having tasted its terrors already. So the call isn't just "of the void" while "inside the house," but of an [un]canny ability to feed how we desire—all while commenting on foreboding things in semi-taboo language, mid-chronotope [the traveling castle chockful of wandering ghosts, hemorrhaging data]. Gothic is nothing if not flexible, die-hard [the Gorgon the enemy the state cannot kill, because it needs to move money through nature, selling scapegoats as sex, drugs and rock 'n roll; e.g., Castlevania and its many resurrections]. Under Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism, nothing is sacred except for basic human, animal and environmental rights; assimilation, poor stewardship [see: "The Power of Dreams" from "Yesterday's Leftover Rice (a lovely pun)" for more maxims and slogans].

[cited: "Leaving the Closet," 2024]

So we "vampires" [whores and their lady/tramp and pauper/prince spectres, above] speak in ways that "slay" our foes, the state/status-quo, through various "stormings of the castle" [and similar psychosexual puns]—meaning as a cunning-if-cunty way to prevent harm, during and after ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: through darkness visible, splendid lies, what-have-you: "Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart" (source). Doing so cryptonymically grants us heartbreakers; i.e., not piously prude weirdos like C.S. Lewis—a bit of a broken clock; e.g., The Problem of Pain (1940)—the Numinous ability to hide and strike, feeding and hunting "from the shadows" as taught to us:

Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told "There is a ghost in the next room," and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is "uncanny" rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous (source: The Problem of Pain, 1940).

[artist: Sarah Kate Forstner's "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" (2017); source: Michael Uhall's "A Specter, a Speaker: 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' (1968)"; cited: "Origins and Lineage," 2023]

Instead, we're the Tyger burning bright, in the forest of the night. "Did he who make the Lamb make Thee?" Again, I call it the Communist/palliative Numinous; i.e., the "perfect domme" between person and place to quest for while camping the canon during ludo-Gothic BDSM—doing so in ways that showcase myriad interpretations while favoring ones that don't occlude the state; i.e., avatars of the Gorgon [a ghost of the counterfeit] who appear mighty in ordinary veneers that, to varying degrees, cryptonymically bely their abject/tremendously mysterious and uncanny cargo [re: "The Quest for Power" from "Camping the Canon," 2023]. Power is something to perform, not monopolize [re: "Notes on Power"]. This includes Rice being deceptively ordinary [at least on the surface]: like ninjas, pirates, guerrillas, etc, as all reversing Capitalist Realism cryptonymy-and-abjection, by humanizing nature-is-alien [whore]: in deeply theatrical ways [re: Radcliffe's Black Veil often splashed in red to denote healthy-if-cannibalistic appetites, also above]. "When in Rome," we burn "Caesar" to the ground while haunting its venues [me "lurking" in Mom's VHS tape of 1994 Interview until I wore it out]. By deliberately calculating risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM, we camp the language of moral panic; i.e., a campier vampirism injected with irony as something that doesn't instantly betray itself. Instead, it oscillates—a "dance with death/the dead" and "masque of the Red Death," etc [with black and red being the colors not just of fascism and Communism or witches and whores, but power and death tied to vitality and corruption: radical change evoking Ptolemy's humors (and so-called "fatal visions"; re: Macbeth) to expand the mind (and other things) in pre-capitalist ways].

Vampires love heirlooms, tied to their lengthy and complicated pasts [e.g., my mom's old college textbooks and polaroids, above]. We live in a world where the magical have been replaced by awesome technologies that make everything easy to an enshittifying degree. And while not everyone has access to such things, some do alongside the past as something to uncover among the debris, the left-behinds. In turn, choosing to play with dead things is frightening and fun, rememory's reminders of a "before time" felt vividly and obscurely among a variety of other warring sensations that—far from elide and explode, divide into an army of dance partners tied to us and ours [e.g., me watching and reading Ann Rice for its hot, lesbian-coded men when Mom didn't know, and Hamlet chasing his father's ghost]. Gothic castle = nightmare anti-home that—beyond Victorian policings of young maiden's desires [so-called "pearl-clutching" to hammer the point home]—task ourselves with the usual Numinously nightly subversions brought to light of day [re: darkness visible, yes, but also "hot blood" speaking to a rainbow of fluids; see: "Castles in the Flesh"]. So I've dug up my mom's bones, celebrating her tragic courage like Lewis' Bleeding Nun: of a former life, bottling bloody tears and dancing with footloose skeletons [or fakeries of them, ghost-of-the-counterfeit]. We don't blame them, but do recognize the agency they had while state powers infantilized them under criminogenic conditions. Humor becomes a form of stealthy critique, but also enjoyment dodging the censors and critics' condemnation: to bend like a reed in the wind [not a femur (or those holding it) snapping under stress, below].

[cited: "My Experiences," 2024]

In other words, learning is naughty through open-secret lessons lying around the house/neighborhood; i.e., imparting through campy code, concealing a truer purpose that gives way during the interview-as-rememory. So the whore's revenge is a derelict one—to find and turn someone consciously undead [demonic, animalistic, etc, as capital gentrifies and decays to afford workers strange appetites; re: "A Cruel Angel's Thesis"]. So we whores rebel in a variety of voyeur/exhibit ways that vampires [and comparable virgin/whore beings to assemble, below] hyphenate/excel at, mid-rememory [re: "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy" and "Transgressive Nudism"]: those close to life and death, in big/little forms [size difference] conveying secret treaties during ludo-Gothic BDSM. I learned it from Mom and she from the street [where Medusa (the Big Whore) awaits]! Whores rock 'n roll; they also rule from the shadows:

[artists: Allegra Viper and August Harper; cited: "Leaving the Closet"]

Murder will out, babes; slay! Secret sluts, become the Great Destroyer states fear in ways they cannot pimp to serve themselves; i.e., with as much stealth or open threats you desire/require to break the usual monopolies on yourselves in Gothically mature ways [an "angel in the streets, freak in the sheets," or vice versa]. People are here for a show, after all—to see venom and fireworks fighting poison with poison, fire with fire, etc [re: trash, below, evoking Federici's commentary on witch hunts as tokenizing alienation devices quoted by "Hot Allostatic Load," 2015; cited: "Policing the Whore," 2024]. And if one of us "jumps [or doesn't jump] the shark" the way you prefer, find another piper to play Pied [or Pan's] dreadful tune [to blow the whistle, also below]: "Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to Hell with you!")

(artist: Mercedes the Muse; cited: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome; or, an Early Stab at Cryptonymy: the Fur(r)tive Rebellion of Amazons, Body Hair and Whistleblowers in Duality")

I digress. The difference between Rice and Rakich (while keeping her and Mom's unconsciously rebellious characteristics [and other mothers to monstrous rebellion] in mind, above), the latter—at least on the surface (again, I haven't seen Orleans yet)—plays with the same theatrical devices; i.e., to allow for greater intersection (and insurrection, sedition-in-disguise): a postmodern/postcolonial (and postmortem) tradition drawing from Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Beloved (1989) and similar rememory-style catalogs. Specifically Rhys' making Bertha/Antoinette Causeway from Jane Eyre (1847) the central protagonist (compared by Brontë to a vampire or a goblin, and which Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in 1979 called "the madwoman in the attic"), so does Rakich race-swap their protagonist; i.e., doing so to shift focus onto race/a racial allegory arguably present the entire time (the 2018 adaptation of Ann Rice's story making Louis black, below). Such things are fine provided it's to raise awareness, not cash in on cunning recognition's bad-faith representation; i.e., of racial minorities alongside other oppressed groups "feeling the heat" in different ways (those preyed on by state-corporate machinery and actors; e.g., so-called "Black Snape" in the billionaire-backed HBO "double dipping" of the Harry Potter franchise; re: "Dead on Arrival"). The devil's in the details, the data "in the blood" however "corrupt" it appears (the abject/cryptonymic but also cryptomimetic presence of conflicting reports, fascism famously [from Lenin] capital-in-decay but also Socialism and Marx's infamous spectres; i.e., pushing imperfectly towards Communism to take, at the same time, several steps back; re: he loved vampire metaphors, but remains a giant homophobe/debatable antisemitic person).

C'est la vie. Rebellion, for all the poo-pooing Marxist-Leninists (of a reactionary sort) whine about, is performative (and often in ways that include/warp gender performance; e.g., crossdress, drag shows, and trans folk punching up, drag-me-to-Hell; re: me vis-à-vis Butler and Greene et al's famous works; see: "Inside the Man Box," 2025). Development is both social and material, Marx' Base and Superstructure something to camp in duality (re: "On Twin Trees," 2023). Immortality is, from Matteson to us (and Mom, Ann Rice, Mary Shelley and Medusa, etc), a drinking of the blood (or eating of green eggs and ham) to "live forever." So rememory isn't an act of forgetting exclusively, but raising awareness "in the blood" as among those of flesh and blood. This roots in consciousness as intersectional; i.e., through holistic study reversing abjection in different anisotropic/apotropaic ways, but also by allowing different forms of excluded labor into the fold—racial minorities, yes, but also, as I argue, sex workers (which homeless people often are, meaning survival sex work). This categorically stresses unpaid labor as also including care work aka "reproductive labor," but me taking it one step further than many (older) feminists: to lionize the chief scapegoat of capital/state, which the whore very much is (the homewrecker). Whores are clowns, then, but also class warriors swimming in vitality as "blood," in so many words; i.e., ass war is class war (with modular elements [of race and culture] selectively thrown in, per case)! It's a cloak, but a vampire's—with black and red striking at reality and Realism as two different things (and allowing for shared struggle and disagreements concerning virtues [and vices] around sex work under Socialist Realism, below). It goes for workers of any gender or sex, but also religion and other qualities:

*And before anyone asks, my mother only thinks sex work is harmful when people are forced into it by pimps: "Tip your sex workers; it's a service, after all," she'd always tell me (alongside "don't hit girls" and other adages†). Heart of gold or otherwise, never blame the whore; blame the state (and criminogenic factors) pimping them in bad faith.

†Alongside "girls don't poop" but I digress. Girls shit and that's a fact.

(source thumbnail [feat. Lady Izdihar, right]: "Intersecting Discourse: Inviting Two Different Muslims to Discuss Trans/Indigenous Rights," 2026; see, also: "Critiquing Soviet Aesthetics during Socialist Realism" from "Raising Awareness")

Such is cryptonymy as a complicit or revolutionary device, defeating or upholding state predation from one mother's rememory to the next (chasing the Communist Numinous [and its Dark/Archaic Mother] either way; re: "The Quest for Power")! But what of the whores, themselves, outside my family circle? Well, you see... they've been here the whole time. This means in a Foucauldian[20] sense—paradoxically relegated to the prison-like, panopticon-style bedroom they're trying to escape but also reclaim, discipline-and-punish; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM reversing abjection, specifically by placing "rape" in quotes!

So fight fire with fire, babes; re: (se)X "Marx" the spot, and Marx needs cheerleaders to make him gay real bad! Save him from himself, and ourselves from the state. Whatever monsters state vampirism (and Capitalist/Socialism Realism) summon to fuck us, make your own (forte, fatale, or otherwise) and fuck back: hard ("Wendy Kroy" that shit, minus the transphobia).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard; source: "It Began with a Whisper," 2025)

Footnotes

(artist: Knut Ekwall; source: Robert Lambert Jones III's "Mythological Beasts and Spirits: Naiad," 2016; cited: "Death by Snu-Snu")

[1] Amazons are (and similar monstrous-feminine beings, above)—though here I inspect kayfabe and strongmen of a fascist, otherworldly sort, its "ancient" (retro-future) pastiche concerning the superhero archetype as emblematic of state predation, Cartesian (and similar) binaries, and Western Liberal values (essentially capital/state vampirism in small; see: "On Tyrants and Their Charm"). So while some people reject the idea that Superman is fascist (e.g., NerdSync's "'Superman Is a Nazi,'" 2026), I've known others who say how Superman very much isn't punk; he's the status quo as vampirically policing the world through "immigrant washing" fantasies of assimilation, under Pax Americana (the usual superhero/supervillain cops-and-robbers problem, mid-dialectic of the alien, as concerning the uncanny embrace of such things): as Vivian Strange argues while still enjoying the latest Superman film (enjoyment and criticism not mutually-exclusive; re: cis-het feminist Anita Sarkeesian's famous adage lambasted by Gamergate chuds, similar to MGTOW weirdos—acting "apolitical" in bad faith—demonizing the Wachowskis, two trans women). Zombies take many forms, some ordinary and others not but all concerning sex and force to varying degrees of semi-naked undeath (with fear of the manmade superman* dating back to Shelley's novel, the precocious teenager inspired by Milton to draft the first sci-fi story out of Gothic pastiche [rude materials]: the ancient power of the gods, their "fire" falling from the sky as if delivered ominously from on high...).

*The morpheme "super" synonymous with "franken" in compound nouns, Shelley's Modern Prometheus denoting a self-destructive presence of power and nationalism, but also mad science and human parasitic interference over nature; e.g., superfoods and frankenfish, but also superheroes and Frankenstein's Monster alluding to super soldiers grown in laboratories. Deeply unethical zones, these places (and their unscrupulous workers/owners' Faustian bargains) injecting mysterious (and toxic) chemicals into patchwork corpses/test tube babies/the very land itself—the basic phenomenon (and its clone-like replication and consumption, in and out of media) highly visible through different abject forms of popular stories (recuperated into controlled opposition, then abused for efficient profit); i.e., superhero comfort foods that Gothic routinely draws up, doing so whenever reifying power as something to sublimate then critique: of men and monsters—whose usual plans (of mice and men) do far worse when modern science (and capital/the state) butt in, wreaking havoc through highly militarized and infantile refrains (above). Assimilation is poor stewardship, but so was the Enlightenment surviving into the present. Shelley's novel wasn't a guess, but a highly accurate dissection of what capital was, already centuries underway by 1818 (the year Marx was born and back when electricity was previously called Galvanism).

[2] All of this the precursor to what became my Monster Volume and its three modules: Poetry, the Undead and Demons. "Lions, tigers and bears, oh my!"

[3] Fun joke I heard once, during a Super Castlevania IV (1994) speedrun: "Why did Dracula not keep a mirror at his castle? He couldn't see himself using it. Ah-ah-ah!"

(cited: "Sharing the Blame")

[4] Re: Trojan Horses; e.g., Chumbawumba's "Tubthumpers" (and various evocations of it) being anti-fascism in disguise, and leading by design to more obvious out-and-out cases: "The Day the Nazi Died" (1998). Code is code, cryptonymy (and camp) something to work abjection out with in duality (a concept we'll unpack more, deeper in).

[5] Gothic maturity being (as I coin it) "the ability to say healthy things through taboo language during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., while pushing for intersectional solidarity and consciousness, developing Gothic Communism (thus universal liberation) through various creative successes that collectively overcome praxial inertia, division, dormancy and betrayal." To tell women to cover up and smile more doesn't work, then, because segregation is no defense (silence = death and assimilation is poor stewardship); to prohibit Gothic's subversive potential (camp) denies workers historically awesome tools, which the state will pimp out anyways, through canon:

Camp = rape play to reverse abjection, and "we camp canon because we must" (from Colin Broadmoor to me, 2021 and 2023). This happens by enjoying taboo things, specifically by playing with them in subversive ways that liberate sex work (therefore all work): enjoy "harm" without endorsing its unironic forms, subversive play a necessary form of critique, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, regarding things normally played without thought (me vis-à-vis Anita Sarkeesian's famous adage) (source: "Sharing the Blame," 2025).

All's fair in love and war (canon vs camp), provided we unruly whores/subversive amazons cryptonymically reverse abjection in duality versus subjugated Amazons (and other symbolic tokens' armed subservice); i.e., in anisotropic/apotropaic language that speaks to our past harm and ability to overcome it under present circumstances haunted by past failures; e.g., Marx (and his followers) were Gothically immature, so we must go beyond what they felt comfortable doing/must transgress against state dogma, including Socialist dogma and its Realism, to thwart state vampirism on all registers (re: "Making Marx Gay," 2024).

(source: Pluto Press; ibid.)

[6] Consent being non-existent in nature, which generally (under Freudian/Cartesian models), codes as female and/or queerly monstrous-feminine (re: "War Vaginas," 2021). Such things are canonically "done to death," but iconoclastically "oldies but goldies"; i.e., if it ain't broke, don't fix it! You can't beat the walking vaso vagal—that white and black-and-red funerary of classic sadomasochism (of which ludo-Gothic BDSM emulates as much as any aesthetic under the sun, camping psychosexually the Catholic martyr fused with fascist torture dungeon and Communist provocateur under Capitalist Realism): gluttons for punishment fucking with master/slave in various top-to-bottom ways. Infinite power, infinite forms cryptonymy and abjection may take to offer palliative-Numinous evocations.

[7] To appreciate, not appropriate different cultures alongside a lack of transcendental signifieds—all to communicate as something to flow down towards workers; e.g., fire as a source of Christian dogma under a Protestant ethic (chiefly fire and brimstone) that, under Polynesian and Pacific islander cultures, become the volcano as fire echoed in Prometheus and Buddhist culture: volcano coochie birthing islands and reducing worlds to ash by spraying the Earth's fiery blood outwards, force-of-nature; re (from the Maui portion of "A Response from Th3Birdman, and My Words to Him" from "Dead on Arrival"):

(source: Fandom)

During our talk, Bay explained to me how Māui was a demi-god (source: EBSCO) with one foot in both worlds—a trickster shapeshifter (similar to Loki* or Satan) who stole fire from the gods, specifically Mahuika and to te ahi o Mahuika or "the stealing of the fire" narrative (see: Encyclopedia Mythica); i.e., similar to Prometheus from Greek myth but also, in my case, Persephone betrothed to Hades. In trying to conquer death and join the rift between Humanity and the gods (symbols of alienation, immortality and nature-as-Numinous), Maui pays the ultimate price:

*Giving him hubristic (tragic) but also trans characteristics (see: J.G. Harker's "Loki, Gender, and Sexuality in Norse Society," 2023).

Finally, Māui decides to overcome his ancestress Hine-nui-te-pō, goddess of thunder [and the Underworld]. Full of confidence [and Faustian curiosity/a somewhat greedy thirst for knowledge centered around deception], Māui gathers a flock of island birds as companions. Together, they come to the place where Hine-nui-te-pō is sleeping. Māui plans to enter Hine-nui-te-pō, crawl through her body, and pass out through her mouth. This will kill her and ensure Māui's immortality [after seemingly disemboweling her, the Earth, and raping her unironically in her sleep]. However, Māui's plan will succeed only if none of the birds laugh at him in the process [shown, below]. Unfortunately for Māui, one of the birds cannot help but laugh once Māui is inside Hine-nui-te-pō. In consequence, the old woman awakes, and "she open[s] her eyes, start[s] up, and kill[s] Maui" (Grey 57). / Māui's surprise death means that all humans have become mortal. Humans will bear children, but all will have to die eventually (source: EBSCO); i.e., Original Sin [and hag horror tied to witches humbling Cartesian forebears on the Indigenous side of things].

In this case, it's quite similar not just to the Promethean theft of the gods' "fire" and Eve from the Bible (and her racecar-red apple), but also the Medusa story (somewhat, though I think Hine crushes Māui's head between her thighs versus a petrifying gaze); i.e., nature is monstrous-feminine and classically female (or having female elements tied to life and death): a source of terror guarding something sacred, alien and mighty (dark, intense, etc).

(source)

Gorgons aside, such stories teach us morals about nature-as-abject; i.e., in ways we can reclaim/rejoin through the exchange of forbidden knowledge (re: the Promethean Quest and Faustian Bargain, two Gothic staples; see: "Forbidden Sight, Faust and the Promethean Quest; or, Knowledge and Power Exchange," 2025).

In short, there's room to play thus work with language as a far fuzzier thing to embody and empower ourselves than canonical forces care to admit/allow (save for themselves, of course).

[8] A series catalogued in my latest live volume, Volume Four aka the Praxis Volume or "Pussy on the Chainwax" (2026).

[9] From Toni Morison, and sadly forcing people to face the totality of a cultural past and its theft, one including tokenism; i.e., people with privilege betray out of convenience, and those with oppression out of desperation (re: "Rememory, or the Roots of Trauma," 2024).

(ibid.)

This plays out in ways that appropriate Indigenous cultures—not just cunning recognition but of assimilation by the conqueror using the skins of dead Indigenous Peoples as sock puppets; re: from footnote 16a of "Unto the Breach" regarding an idea I call "White Indians, black planets":

Where a speaker in the video recommends The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (2011) by Jodi Byrd. Byrd's book discusses Indigenous Peoples and zombies, and which I respond vis-à-vis the Resident Evil (1996) videogame series [citing Byrd alongside John the Duncan's aforementioned "Cunning Recognition" video and Noah Caldwell-Gervais's excellent "A Thorough Look At Resident Evil," 2021; timestamp: 2:55:26): "Cunning Recognition the Game. Shiva = sexy token tour guide to Tame a Savage Continent. / Zombies are bare-life shooting galleries to embody and further settler colonialism through give/receive violence [against nature. ...] OG post I responded to: 'Bring back Shiva,' like a zombie. Zombie = resurrection and living death; i.e., that voices oppression, but which can become empty pastiche of the original/a sock [puppet]; e.g., Revelations [from the Bible] written by oppressed Christians under Pagan Roman rule that now ≈ state vampirism" (source skeet, vanderWaardart: March 31st, 2026). Again, skull = theft, specifically the presence of abject generational trauma (and concealment) under criminogenic conditions—the state and its predation, treating nature (and those of it) as the alien-fetish undead, demonic and/or werewolves through dualistic modules of imbricating persecution language; e.g., blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft, but also Orientalism (re: "Idle Hands").

and

(exhibit 0: Artist, middle: Magion02; cited: "In Search of the Secret Spell"; screencaps, left and right: The Red Nation and Led.Amaya21. Escapism and rebellion aren't mutually exclusive. Furthermore, resistance and submission—while categorically separate—share the stage while fetishizing under state dialogs/capital; i.e., that workers reclaim, mid-abjection. They do so in Gothic dialogs on nature-as-criminal, whose critiques allow for cultural appropriation and appreciation: terms like "White Indian" and "black planet" taken back from white-savior vaudeville and/or explored in exports to America; e.g., The Red Nation's "RPH vs. Avatar: Fire and Ash [re: footnote 16a]" and Leo.Amaya21's "[preview #4] - 18 vs Vegeta" [2026]. The irony isn't always there/must be added by the critic[s] skeptical of representation; i.e., as a state tactic of cunning recognition [e.g., "The Cunning Recognition of Palestine," 2025] meant to stymie resistance; re: me vis-à-vis Glenn Coulthard's Red Skin, White Masks [2014]. Amazons are Numinous, yes, but also deeply trashy actors sitting between worlds: the Wisdom of the Ancients, or "cultural understanding of the imaginary past" in Gothic, but also Indigenous Culture's Wisdom of the Ancestors [which my Indigenous partner, Bay Ryan, helps me catalogue and explore, in "The Value in Showing Intersectional Solidarity When Combating Fascism," 2026]. SWERFs are TERFs and TERFS are fascist, but react through grievance on kernels of truth used for state revenge.

To that, nudity and bodies aren't automatically "sinful," but exist that way canonically in Western eyes; i.e., that, to reverse abjection, must view things through a radically empathetic lens: from those with more/different oppression, a pedagogy of the oppressed hugging the alien in ways, which—like a curse—carry across space and time, in written/oral forms; re: "Healing from Rape" [2024]. Alienation ends when fetishization [the making of something into an object of power] serves worker needs tantamount to universal liberation: the poetic merger of sex and force that Amazons represent, and which Indigenous cultures envision through their own stories revived by themselves and others at cross or shared purposes. Closing the gap requires care, courting good actors while avoiding bad ones; e.g., weird Marxist-Leninists waxing nostalgic—meaning for a time before trans people entered public discourse, whereupon MLs spout platitudes like "Socialism for All" before blocking trans critics of Stalin's queerphobia [as Socialism for All and Deculturation do, below].)

(source skeet, Persephone van der Waard: 3/19/2026*)

*Click here for a follow-up where S4A's fans rise weirdly to his defense in bad/blind faith (ibid., 4/19/2026).

As I write (also in "Unto the Breach"): "Language is a tool, one whose optional expanding of the mind/empathy (awareness and teamwork) happens through Gothic stories' subversive potential" (source). This concerns us punching up against open capitalists, but also state apologists on the Marxist-Leninist side of the die.

[10] Re: "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy" and "Transgressive Nudism" (2024 and 2025). Any mirror-like terror device we embody, cryptonymy-and-abjection, sits alongside various material factors made social: terrorism and Gothic. This extends through "the preoccupation with evil, fear, and violence [as] the defining characteristic of later Gothic literature [meaning of the late 1700s]" (source: "The Invention of Gothic Terrorism") into current geopolitical confrontations; i.e., echoed cryptomimetically through sex work (with whores being the arbiters of violence and terror through sex-and-force, terror/counterterror reversals and paradoxical, anisotropic/apotropaic reclamation, in theatrical forms). Abjection = flow and flow = function, not aesthetic. To it,

Bombing never convinces the colonized to leave their own land, but always pushes the colonizer out through asymmetrical warfare. Instead of repurposing dropped ordinance in Vietnam or improvising IEDs in Iraq, modern tech has become so cheap as to make drones accessible to freedom fighters worldwide; e.g., in Ukraine [and its publicly available 3D-printable drones] but also in Iran and elsewhere [a de facto tactical unity sharing the love]. Giant machinery through colonial projects are slowly and then suddenly being swarmed by small angry bees, any attempt to swat them away tiring out the invader alongside simply taking damage. The two compound, the entirety of this blowback coming home to roost abroad after decades of declassified warning signs; i.e., in manmade frontiers America and Israel can no longer afford to cheaply police. Now they're meat grinders. Alongside this, climate change and manufactured crisis have made people desperate enough to try, and it's working to favor the colonized. This death knell, [for the Americans and Israelis, sits] alongside the Russians, meaning when the oppressed suddenly become able and motivated to fight fire with fire. And there's fuck-all the ruling class can do about it - especially when everyone is recording every single attack and flooding social media with it (more blowback). There's simply no way to stop it and nowhere to hide: so much of their power is false, the inequalities of American Imperialism starting to evaporate. "Terror is the kissing cousin of force," wrote Asprey in 1975; and now, the shoe's on the other foot. "The old world is dying and the new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters" (source YouTube Community post: Persephone van der Waard, 4/30/2026 in response to HistoryLegends Flashpoint's "FPV Drones Are Destroying the Israeli Military," 2026).

To that, old empire and states absorb into new ones, the proverbial "rats flee a sinking ship" testified through an American brain drain beating it overseas. And likewise, the dialing back of domestic civil liberties (concessions) by the state tells all, including abortion rights or minority voting rights; e.g., "Roe v. Wade" in 2022 and the Civil Rights Voting Act today by the usual American checks and balances; i.e., the tools of pacification, at home, slowly and then suddenly playing judge, jury and executioner to serve the ruling class more nakedly. Anything to cannibalize, they will—the cushions of state benefactors in the Imperial Core (namely the middle class) systematically stripped/peeled like fruit of their rights for the same-old gluttons to gorge themselves on, one last time (with reactionaries and moderates being two sides of the same predatory [and mendacious] coin). It's Frank Zappa's classic rug pull, during the Imperial Boomerang. I digress; when being stripped, talk to a stripper to gain fresh perspective.

So while the decimator has become the decimated, at home and aboard, the whore's revenge unfolds alongside all scapegoats (and sacrificial lambs): coming back to eat the sacrificer, vampire-style (xenomorph or otherwise). Not so silent anymore, eh? "Did He who made the Lamb make thee?" Hear (or see) us roar! Or as Creed wrote, once-upon-a-time:

When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not – as commonly thought – put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers. Afterwards, Athena embossed her [mirror] shield with the Medusa's head. The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa's own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view [the OG "ahegao"]. Athena's aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend – the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa (source: Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993).

So, too, we whores become the Gorgon upon ourselves (re: "It Began with a Whisper"). Now scream, doing so like your lives depend on it (they do)! Mock and defy whatever you must to survive by reviving and preserving the fearsome past:

(artist: Caravaggio)

[11] Or things confused with venereal disease; e.g., rabies aka "hydrophobia" or "lycanthropy" (furries*) that, like the phases of the moon (or menstruation), treat nature as not simply alien or criminal, but feral and "hungry like the wolf." It becomes a freakshow—a paradoxical source of patriarchal fascination and fear to chase by monomyth weirdos (re: the Numinous, but one iconoclasts can render palliative when camping canonical norms). To it, Medusa—symbolic of unpaid labor (sex or otherwise) as the oldest labor struggle, if not monster—has gravity as something capital hypes up to get state workers to attack (thus pimp), which all on its own empowers the hellion with counterterrorist potential: to turn the tables while seemingly "on the hip." Like any avenger worth their salt, she's strong as hell but able to control a sticky situation while on her back (a Freudian spectre [the Archaic Mother] as much as any Marxist one Shelley touched on).

*Another way to demonize or valorize nature tied to Indigenous, queer and children's media: as iconoclastically commenting on our world being part of nature, not separate from it (re: "Call of the Wild").

(artist: Angelica Alzona; cited: "Origins of Faust; or, a Brief History of Demons and Their Torturous Summoning Rituals and Effects" from "Dark Shadows," 2025)

[11a] E.g., my partner Victoria Saix on vampires:

Theory: Vampire is what they called autistic people because they didn't understand people who have/had it. Prefers to only go out at night/more active when the sun goes down. Plain meals with little seasoning or multiple tastes and textures being overwhelming or "allergic" to them. Avoids the symbols of the church as they don't see the point in some cases. Abnormal dress sense. Ages slower because not in the sun as much/pale skin. Would rather live alone/isolate in a building that could house their collections of books or items. I have seen myself as wanting to be a vampire if that had been an option; they just keep to themselves. Vampires, like [some] autistic people, have to ask/be given permission to enter a home or be invited to feel welcome; and if they vibe with you/care for you they can collect special others as "familiars"; e.g., people or pets that they will defend as they feel responsible for keeping them safe and close. They avoid silver as the flatware was probably a sensory nightmare or made food taste weird. They avoid mirrors as neurodivergent people have higher chances of body dysmorphia/dysphoria about themselves and how they want to look or think they look [and, being chimeric doggies, would need someone skilled to handle them, wild or domestic].

(artist: Robert Ingpen; cited: "Understanding Vampires")

"We are all animals, my lady!" In other words, monsters (vampire or otherwise) describe what in-group societies commonly demonize/repress through force (e.g., silver bullets or stakes through the heart). This includes anyone different, but especially neurodivergent and GNC people in Western Europe before systemic racism took off (more likely to be burned at the stake, back then, for resisting state decrees that targeted women, Jewish people [after Rome, formerly Pagan, converted to Christianity with the Byzantines] and the mentally ill; e.g., Hammer of Witches or On the Tricks of Demons, 1478 and 1563; re: Alzona, higher up). Animals are hunted by state powers, including werewolves, vampires or anything comparable (re: "Nature vs the State," 2025). The symptoms would include a variety of things that, unto themselves, have been dead metaphors for some time (e.g., hairy palms, above). Vampires don't just embody superstition, but esoteric superstition (and dogma) in duality that has been sacred and profane at different points throughout history (e.g., the Catholics vs the Protestants, or the Communists vs the fascists, and similar sectarian conflicts during moral panics; re: Matteson's I Am Legend and mad science a metaphor for American 1950s Red Scare aka McCarthyism: "Have you no decency, sir?").

To that, another person (on Reddit*, ibluminatus) chimes in on r/Socialism_101, in Chozogirl86's "Can Vampires Be Socialist?" (made by me alongside my Atun-Shei letter, 2026):

(source Reddit comment: butchfatalez on r/horror, which you can read separately in its own document)

*For further thoughts I share publicly with other people on vampires (and the vampire superman essay), refer to "Vampire Supermen in Invincible (and similar stories/persons)" on r/vampires, r/socialism_101 and r/horror. Most of it feels productive/good-faith, but sometimes yields oddly combative scenarios: myopic and condescending weirdos trying to draw blood and me, in the mood for some improvised fun, playing with my food to salvage and present something useful for the record (scratching back during "de facto peer review†," above). 

†Basically the hologram "danger room" from X-Men or that robot training sequence from Dune 1984—specifically by using stupid, argumentative people on Reddit for instant pushback; i.e., as training dummies who ask annoying reactionary/moderate questions that I can treat accordingly: while "stress-testing" my work (a method picked up in 2021 with my Metroidvania postgrad research). This largely involves dumb, mean and/or bad-faith people trying to find "weaknesses" in my arguments, which—while the critics aren't always smart unto themselves—still get me to think of defenses, anyways; i.e., as a critical-thinking exercise from de facto prompts, delivered by what are basically evil monkeys clacking away on typewriters whenever I give them papers to "read." It's actually pretty useful, and more to the point, relatively safe (everyone's anonymous/not in the same room). Useful idiots, indeed! 

I figure they would be considered a form of class traitor based on the idea that undead are a metaphor for capital. I think something I often consider is truly how much individual mortal human beings acquire and control and hold onto and I feel like a lot of world building ends up limited with portraying all Vampires as uninterested in domination and extraction given their predatory relationship with humans much like capitalist and the working class.

Like take Rennick [from Sinners (2025), above]—he hated colonialism and had grown lonely in his immortality and in turn sought to take an ability from other colonized people's to use to his own ends. He had no intentions of changing their positions or using his power to do so. I literally cannot rationalize in a class system where Vampires as a class of human are not dominating humanity. So what about the ones who choose not to do that? What about the ones who take issue with that? What about the ones who want to find alternatives?

I think a vampire can be a socialist.

It boils down, then, to revolutionary pessimism vs optimism (to gatekeep or not to gatekeep), to which I respond in the same thread:

I would argue that any monster is dualistic, thus can be a class traitor or warrior; re: Rennick, as you accurately point out, is a class traitor, whereas Matteson's vampires in I Am Legend (the 1954 book, not the movie) are essentially Communists (or metaphors for them, on par with the Bodysnatchers and similar McCarthyist Red-Scare caricatures).

(source: Daniels' "Book Review: I Am Legend by Richard Matheson," 2018)

As for your inability to imagine vampires beyond a domination of humanity within a class system, that makes total sense. I would argue that stems from Capitalist (and Socialist) Realism extending various tropes of vampires as natural dominators with no other purpose, within a class structure. All it takes is a little subversion to imagine them not as dominators, but liberators (re: Matteson*) from class [and race, Rennick being a race and culture† traitor (confessing to his ongoing sins, predation and secret shame to a black preacher's son, the wolf to the sheep) insofar as the English Protestants deemed the Irish racially inferior under settler-colonial models; see: Livia Gershon's "Britain's Blueprint for Colonialism: Made in Ireland" (2022)]. ^^

I liked Sinners as a film, but its approach to vampires furthers abjection; i.e., by framing them as the usual parasites tied to capital, with no humanizing characteristics beyond the usual homophobic, antisemitic crap that frankly also haunted Marx' work and private correspondence. Vampires ARE a good snapshot of capital "in small," but they have many positive elements as well that the film reduces to "EVIL MUSIC PRODUCERS" [a notion of "diabolical" that feels a tad reductive].

(model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl, the former posing in the latter's grad-school project)

*Who swaps the traitor status, insofar as Robert Neville (and similar men of science) are the blindly hypocritical, STEM-grade penetrators of women (the very "vampires" they accuse others of doing and being evil things to displace their own predation, DARVO-and-obscurantism, cryptonymy-and-abjection). The class conflict (and confusion) remains, insofar as both sides see the other as "traitor" but which the assignment of witch-hunt-grade violence by either towards their enemies metes out through unchanging material conditions; i.e., beset by revolution (a desire to change): cops and victims, the victims-in-question (his neighbors, sick of his shut-in bullshit) punching up and pushing back versus cops (a class position that doesn't change despite the warring ontological framework or ambiguous vampire poetics; re: "Attack of the Bourgeois Braineaters" but also Deborah Christie's "A Dead New World: Richard Matheson and the Modern Zombie" from Better Off Dead [as shown under my butt—above, 2011]. They are legend and so are we).

†Bastardizing his culture alongside should-be allies' while "taking the soup" (symbolized, here, as "blood," wherein terror and violence walk arm-in-arm, fangs-in-throat). Music, as Zizek points out, has no singular function (what he calls, in his 2012 Pervert's Guide to Cinema, a "universal applicability" to music). Same idea with monsters-as-poetry and any other language (oral or written) that humans use. It's fuzzy in ways Gothic classically doesn't shy away from (during a process called "oscillation").

Blood is the symbol and code for data, here—but also its cryptonymic (and abject) means of trade, dialectically-materially. To it, vampires are ghosts haunting capital as past betrayals whispering of present ones: of scabs, hitmen (aka road or hard men, highway bandits, etc) that blur the line between Robin Hood (a precursor to Batman) and robbin' da hood (e.g., Sublime's quintessentially hilarious [and problematic] "Raleigh Soliloquy Pt. I," 1994); i.e., the useful billionaire (or aristocrat) playing outlaw in bad faith, and those born into privilege who want to help (as I do, despite what people say about me). To it, ghosts (vampires or otherwise, demons and anything else; e.g., "rabies*" something to catch) are things to conjure and terrify for different dialectical-material aims: to scare into submission, to shock into action for worker rights vs state's rights (and vice versa); re: abjection is a two-way street, as are all Gothic theories and monsters concerning class (race, culture and ass) war.

(source: Science Fiction Station's "Doctor Jenning Is Possessed By The Dark Overlord")

*Or "space rabies," as Howard the Duck calls it (my own favorite Marvel film [above] with bestial, cross-species echoes of Alien's "death egg" and The Exorcist's demonic possession [and pedophilia, given Jeffery Jones, also above]—1985). Superstition is a weapon useful to both sides. The only question is, who can use it better (eat your heart out, Orwell)?

[12] A good critic critiques power where it is, killing their darlings (and fatal nostalgia)—what True Geordie and company comically describe, during the AJ vs Dubois superfight in Saudi Arabia (sell-outs to American hegemony furthering genocide behind bread and circus, themselves), as "watching Superman get killed" by "demons of the past killing the king" (with all the grave severity of a bald, later-day Walter Cronkite, above; timestamp: 4:25:11). As funny, childish and phoned-in as that sounds (though frankly par for the course, as far as kayfabe announcers go), history repeats in tragedy and then in farce (as Marx put it, 1852): summoning the past only to be devoured by it, Macbeth-style; re: "when in Rome," all roads leading back to a system of domination that never really left as continuously castrating itself (one lion eating another). Abjection is repulsive—a gnarly process both hideous and revolting that concerns bodily functions such as eating tied to historical-material atrocities: eating one's children, but especially one's bloodline to doom patrilineal descent within the contradictions of capital entering routine crisis.

(artist: Francisco Goya; cited: "Tactical Unity")

[13] The same Mars-needs-cheerleaders schtick playing out in Invincible's superman species, the Viltrumites—super strong but paradoxically weak enough to need state-prescribed mates (then invading other habitable worlds after destroying their own, Brightburn*-style). Shelley's Creature wanted a mate because he was alone but also one-of-a-kind and literally manmade; the Viltrumites are an entire species able to crossbreed with other races, so the metaphor doesn't match (a "Nordic," white genocide refrain Shelley did not argue for).

*Another Gunn project, one framing "boy Superman" as homicidal: a "cuckoo species" compared diegetically to wasps (re: "Brightburn (2019): Gothic Analysis, part 1").

[14] Smaug being a silver-tongued (and queer-coded) seducer as much as a strongman in dragon form:

(artist: the Brothers Hildebrandt; cited: "Policing the Whore")

Thragg, by comparison, is voiced wonderfully by Lee Pace, who incidentally played King Thranduil in Jackson's Hobbit films. To that, Pace and co-star Richard Armitage—both eloquent, soft-spoken theatre kids and homosexual men outed maybe accidentally by openly queer Ian McKellen—notably inject their hypermasculine characters/the usual monomyth* fare with Shakespearean gravitas lacking in the original novel, cartoon and comic versions (while leaning into the original vampiric, antisemitic elements). To that, Thragg is the male loner who's best friend was an older man betrayed by his friends, echoing Alexander the Great (a famous homosexual warrior king who slept with men and boys) but also Octavian and Caesar in a master/apprentice refrain (the Sith, from the Star Wars universe). It's queer-coded in a deeply ancient format: military expansion and conquest through theft, dynastic primacy and forbidden love between a leader and their homosocial generals—one seen in quaintly homophobic stories with latently BDSM themes (of ritualized torture) like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Bungie's Myth: the Fallen Lords (1954 and 1997; re: "Concerning Rings" and "'Hail, Caesar!'; or, Balor the Leveler as Gay Zombie Caesar," 2024).

(ibid.)

*About that. Here's another tangent—one concerning Invincible in particular that pushback from the show's fans inspired, which concerns our childhood darlings and salvaging them as all made of the same basic stuff: monsters, which from Tolkien to me have value. This means the space opera—with Invincible the monomyth "from space," featuring supermen who fly instead of mostly-grounded space wizards twirling magic swords in space. If Jedi and Sith = good cop, bad cop or white knight/wizard vs black, Invincible uses kayfabe strongmen (and women) to achieve the same effect: the warrior nerd. Nolan is basically a scout like Raditz from DBZ (1992) but also a spy/assassin "Trojan Horse"; i.e., a homewrecker saboteur/double agent (and child soldier groomed for war) who—during Red-Scare invasion fears (with American exceptionalism coded as "innocent planet," corporate DARVO-and-obscurantism foisting the ruling classes' crimes onto an angry himbo)—deliberately kills the guardians of the Earth. Then, and for maximum melodramatic effect, he catches feelings by going native afterwards (oops). If anyone deserves to be critiqued, it's this guy:

Shitty parentage was a core theme in Frankenstein (a story about generational trauma under Cartesian hubris); Nolan's basically if Raditz (or Goku) intentionally killed all the Z fighters before King Vegeta comes to collect—the former burning bridges with Gohan and Chi-Chi... only to seek forgiveness and side with Doctor Gero to dethrone the tyrant who made Nolan a monster when he was a child; i.e., face/heel reversals during shoots and fixes expressing intraracial conflict between Saiyans or, in this case, Viltrumites (same difference): blood feuds bleeding interracially outwards, as Promethean metaphors for ordinary folks relaid in godly personages. Furthering abjection dehumanizes the in-group vs the out; i.e., as Übermensch/Untermensch under white replacement and genocide fears but also backstabber scapegoat conspiracies leery of pacifism (which it brands "traitor," "trafficking with the enemy" or otherwise calls "enemy within" or "foreign plot" to serve the ruling class; re: Eco). The state-in-crisis becomes vampiric through its godly heroes' own alienation, and wherein the conspicuously self-preserving and self-prescribing "superior" side historically uses an arbitrary "inferior" for sex and food: as weak/strong broodmares mounted by entitled fake gods in a maximalist, exogamous racial hierarchy (one fueled by every bigotry there is to bully the globe). The whole thing is completely barbaric and asinine, but central towards understanding how capital works "when in Rome." The conquerors are victims, too, ignominiously expendable under state vampirism saving them "for last." Thragg disembowels Nolan.

(artist: Pokkuti; cited: "The Promethean Quest and James Cameron's Military Optimism in Metroid)

Again, I was raised not just on Amazons (which the show has, too), but shonen-style anime and Western cartoons in the '90s after the Cold War—so much so that my initial book series title was a toss-up between two forks in the road: Neoliberalism in Yesterday's Heroes (which focused more on '80-style action heroes; re: "Policing Bodies," 2021) and "The Promethean Quest and James Cameron's Military Optimism in Metroid" (above), the latter which turned into Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion (2022) and later expanded into Gothic Communism (2023) before absorbing Neoliberalism (while still analyzing shonen anime, below).

Stories for boys and girls aren't mutually exclusive, and binary-to-non-binary trans people can play with the cis-gendered elements for iconoclast aims. Per holistic study under Gothic Communism (and us looking at my older catalog and media I consumed, back then), here's some examples:

(exhibit 39c2 [from "Escaping Jadis; or, Running up that Hill," 2024]: Dragon Ball has an absurd premise that is easily camped [dbzking541's "The Funniest DBZ Dub I Have Ever Seen," 2016]. Its canon still rolls The Modern Prometheus into The Iliad, presenting the zombie tyrant king as trapped between father-and-son according to man-made, unnatural husbandries: the Divine Right of Kings and the imperial relationship of master and slave, but also the cruelty of a bully patriarch-god towards his bizarre, man-made children: the archaic male baby as a killer child for state forces stemming from Beowulf into the present through hauntological regeneration; i.e., as undead/composite but also able to change its shape like Cú Chulainn's ríastrad, aka "warp spasm"; or Milton's Lucifer gradually shedding his angelic form to turn into a variety of animals—a demon, in other words...)

(exhibit 51b3 [from "In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress," 2025]: The sentai and shonen idea of anime taps into ancient warrior ideas of masculine strength/virility being something to summon and wash oneself in; i.e., the "fire of the gods" being destructive but also purifying in a variety of ways; e.g., Japanese Shintoism/the fascist side of Buddhism tied to Japanese sun gods and the self-belief/personal responsibility argument made to young post-Occupation Japanese men. / Specifically made in the return of the Shogunate for a brief moment, the argument unfolds during The Ronin Warriors' whitewashing of Japanese imperial crimes; i.e., said crimes likewise haunted by a really big and annoying wraith whose appearance anticipates the Japanese '90s Housing Crash, or boom-and-bust historical-material cycle: a vice character literally called "Tulpa" [a Tibetan word comparable to "Yokai" or "egregore"] to burn away with holy fire. It's a witch hunt—one whose myopic shadow [Capitalist Realism] is summoned, Radcliffe-style, then prevented by embodying the destructive forces of nature for the state: a hideous raging inferno!

In other words, the show was something to canonically prepare the next generation for capital's usual boom-and-bust; i.e., with a seasonal call to arms [more on this, in Volume Three]: young sexy boy warrior threatened by white ghostly jizz light coming for his codpiece, only to "juke" him, surround and envelop him, and begin to armor him in fire that—far from destroying him—basically turns him into human Godzilla: a sun avatar that banishes the darkness [with rainbows] for a short time by—and I'm not really kidding—jizzing light from his sword onto the ghost emperor until said tyrant fucks off. [...]

Above, Jupiter "handles" the boys while still appearing girly-if-austere, and in doing so, she subverts current Japanese hero tropes; i.e., by having the obvious and awkward damsel-in-distress rescued by another woman [echoes of female property owners in the Warring-States Period being trained in the art of war to defend their homes from their husbands' rival warlords]—in ways that speak to a shared desire with Western variants of the Amazon's subversive wish fulfillment, post-Marston and his Wonder Woman BDSM schtick: the power fantasy/calculated risk of being rescued through the theatre of demon BDSM as subverting traditional Western ideas scapegoating the Amazon in two-sided echopraxis [from Japan to the US and vice versa]. / Instead, such device become genuine heroes through Jupiter and the other less-masc Sailor Scouts that, all the same remain alien insofar as they aren't binarized, but remain desirable precisely because of those liminal, erotically gendered components tied to force [sex and war]: power is performance, which is largely dress-up and play-acting war as a matter of decolonizing gender roles/rules, thus heteronormativity and the other qualities of capital while inside capital...)

(artist: Akira Toriyama; re: "'Cruisin' for a Bruisin'!': From Herbos to Himbos, part one," 2024)

Furthermore, all of these I still interact with. Basically I embraced my trans girly side (with some "tomboy" masc elements; e.g., Sailor Jupiter in exhibit 51b3, above) and focused on TERFs and Amazonomachia while still critiquing the male/cis-masculine side of things, too (the Ginyu force, directly above). It was like learning how to cook and discovering ways to find/add flavor but also learning what flavor was; i.e., while still cooking with (delicious) garbage salvaging my childhood. My imaginary friends from that period didn't "vanish"; they changed insofar as I saw them differently: a vital method towards observing power's manifestation vampirically in society and how I could isolate and critique it (with bodybuilders essentially being means-tested gluttons reflecting in the knights of medieval Europe [the lowest order of nobility defending the crown] and most superheroes being cops, etc). From Invincible to DBZ or Star Wars and similar stories in multimedia forms, we want to apply critical thinking towards anything despite gatekeepers.

For me and the Doom franchise (1993), for example, shooters and speedrunning were things I grew up and into, side-by-side—from "Postcolonialism in Doom" and "No Girls Allowed" to "Spectating FPS Speedruns: Potential Pitfalls Exemplified by Doom Eternal" to "Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning" and "Fuck Id, Free Palestine," 2021-2025), we want to comment on more than mere good/evil theatrics and dialectically-materially recognize the allegory (and aesthetics) at work. Such things aren't zero-sum, the ensuing enjoyment intended and emergent. To it, consumption of popular media concerns state machinery directing consumers at their enemies; i.e., a Faustian bargain with Promethean (self-destructive) effects. As I write in "Fuck Id":

Furthermore, these world events make id's current Rambo-style power fantasies ring incredibly hollow. Doom's graphical bells and whistles/muscle are merely coats of paint designed to repeatedly whitewash genocide and pacify American workers, as usual—to "render [them] the dupe," as Joyce Gloggin puts it (source: "Play and Games in Fiction and Theory," 2020). In short, Gamergate was victorious and now the sedatives are in full effect, the state-corporate hallucinations working overtime: consume, sleep, betray per Mussolini's fascist model (the merger of state and corporation to defend capital through popular media, on and offstage). Said model extends to workers endorsing Force of Will arguments during might-makes-right posturing. Fascism is the product being sold: white supremacy dressed up as "mere play," which players perform beyond the usual avatars "grown for the cyborgs." They're straight-up dorks, but still want to kill people like me and my friends.

To it, you don't want to watch Star Wars and miss the part about the evil empire space Nazis—meaning Vader and company symbolizing American foreign policy in Southeast Asia during the 1950s until 1975 (and onwards). Same idea with Doom, Invincible, or anything else I could list: strongmen are not gods anymore than Krypton is a real planet, but they and similar athletes still embody capital/the state and their executives "in small" (e.g., Sparta, Athens, America, Soviet Russia, etc). In turn, boxing is the sport of the underclass (Napoleon Blownapart's "YOU DON'T HATE ZUFFA BOXING ENOUGH," 2026; timestamp: 42:21) and bodybuilding isn't a even sport at all, but cult of the strongman centered around eugenics and statuesque physiques literally killing the performers themselves (Mystic Ratman's "How Bodybuilding Became a Death Cult," 2026). The image and natural/unnatural binary is hyperbolic but paradoxically requires moderation to avoid decaying into fascism and all that entails: liars and cowards, blowhards and violent pimps—all "high on their own supply"; i.e., while often not simply addicted to attention (though that is part of it), but performance-enhancing chemical drugs being readily available in factory grades for grey-to-black-market consumers since the 1980s (e.g., trenbolone, a Frankensteinian growth hormone for cattle and not designed for human consumption, explains doctors Alex Tatum or Chris Raynor). Capital makes you dumb, but especially those universal "beneficiaries" drunk on stolen blood siphoned from stolen land: white straight guys—with those like Andrew Tate patting themselves prematurely and constantly on the back (and his fans who think he's cool when he's really not, below).

(cited: "Fuck Id, Free Palestine")

I digress. This shit is fascinating to me. More to the point, thinking critically goes beyond the simplistically emotional, operatic shit, and I say that as a gay theatre nerd (sacrilege, I know); i.e., we have to think past merely emotional subversion, or that superficial (cheap) upside-down crucifix, Anton-Le-Vay-style Satanism, etc, when taking a dialectical-material focus (which includes, and which I focus on, the social/poetic side of things, during ludo-Gothic BDSM). Versus other nerds different from myself who consume the same media, I realize I'm probably intimidating—not just from being neurodivergent, but also because of my pedigree, profession, gender and journalistic platform. Then again, I was trained to hash things out in person; i.e., in early-Internet spheres into the 2010s pre-AI and -Covid, when students still took in-class essays for tests and debated each other in pro/con ways. It's something of a dying breed, and in my case that of a queer polymath who jumps at the chance not to "win" but educate in ways that do get heated. God forbid we care about those things we actually like. Most of written human history in academia and politics involves this kind of discourse, which while it probably feels alien to many in a post-Covid world, remains important: to learn passionately what society moralizes, fears and lionizes on par with Halloween's Michael Myers (the Boogeyman, below) and Invincible's strongmen panoply. They're two sides of the same coin, the slasher and the savior (with the girl traditionally stuck between them; i.e., a love triangle).

(source: exhibit 42d2, "Seeing Dead People")

The point, here—and speaking as someone who's studied this shit all her life—is that bread and circus still contains plenty to analyze; i.e., taking a nation's "temperature" and then changing it through a challenging of anti-intellectual sentiment. This means actively combating a fear of or hatred towards teachers, women, minorities, etc, that punches up against reactionary systems following the leader into an early grave, Gamergate-style. Going against the grain takes courage, and a willingness to experiment—meaning to change, radicalize and not do what you're told, but also consciously kill your darlings/the entire worldview that bread and circus canonically offers under Capitalist Realism; i.e., when reversing abjection, yesterday's heroes revived in retro-future forms of regressive comfort food we enjoy and critique; re (from "Saying Goodbye: Onto Better Times Ahead (and Harder Ones)," 2025):

Once someone corrupts, they become bad cops, then sacrifices during the euthanasia effect's refrain during modular and intersectional persecution mania; i.e., nature is other and death must be brought to the barbarian traitor or suddenly outsider menace, Brutus or Hannibal: "I am nothing like you!" shouts Sonic at his own shadow, Peter-Pan-style, while Robotnik the evil Doc Brown tries to turn the moon into a wunderwaffe as the Marty-vs-Biff wunderkinds do battle outside (while the parent shoots themselves in the head from success fatigue).

Now where have we heard that before? Take your pick; history is littered with such copies and egregores pointing to their offstage Roman fools in similar Icarian-Promethean numerical sequences (re: Sonic 1, 2, and 3 vs WW1, WW2, and WW3). First in tragedy and then in farce, such things repeat because they're built to repeat; i.e., as the elite want them to, harvesting the bloodspill by moving money through nature during the pimp's revenge. [...] To have the whore's revenge bursting the heroic death cult's bubble, we must anisotropically reverse the flow on all registers; i.e., at the usual gravesites where capital has died and revived before. Rather than install self-defeating abject (us-versus-them) apotropaic barriers—doing so to alienate and fetishize nature as undead/demonic by chasing the shade/monstrous-feminine whore monomythically to Hell to sacrifice them (as Sonic does, chasing his evil half into outer space to banish Shadow and Robotnik [a play on peacenik and beatnik] to oblivion)—we must go to where the dead are and interrogate their trauma and token mistakes; i.e., to prevent a fresh, even-worse cycle of cyclical destruction resulting from the Promethean Quest and Faustian bargain tied to capital acting on loop.

Capital is recursively Promethean/Faustian, and neoliberal power is recursive false power and delusion; e.g., Superman, Super Saiyans, Super Sonic; i.e., all equaling personal responsibility and austerity politics alienating and fetishizing nature, thus workers colonizing themselves after God is dead (a secular dogma). Sex positivity vs sex coercion happen in the Capitalocene as fading towards state shift; i.e., we must revive increasingly Socialist, thus Communist forms using Gothic poetics to liberate all workers (sex or not) using iconoclastic art: to talk cutely to our pets in symbiotic stewardship, all of us in the same boat! [...] Onto dead malls and the graveyards of capital; i.e., where Medusa waits for us, inside! We need to negotiate with ourselves, because she'll walk away with everything Humanity has to offer! Gird your loins; the end is 'nigh, but not secured!

(artist: Pereira Cartoon Studio)

So experiment! Don't be afraid if they call you "mad." Prove them wrong (whoever they are) by living your best life and making the world a better place; re: by using Gothic stories and poetics in duality. I love me some superheroes, but love the whore's revenge even more—not escapism but transformation inside/outside ourselves. Slay, queens! Marx needs cheerleaders (to make him gay)!

[15] With Mom loving pulp media like Amazons for sharing a troubled past (the latter conquered by imaginary Athens, and Mom by those who came after)—one she passed on not out of fear but admiration and love rooted between imagination and real life to prevent future harm (re: "The Riddle of Steel; or, Confronting Past Wrongs," 2024). In Gothic, this "get 'em while they're young" approach typically uses frankly trashy stories to lead people towards allegories deeper inside/on the surface; i.e., Red Sonya (1985) is an objectively terrible movie, but we still rented a copy from the local Chart Hits every weekend. I like the idea, if not the execution, but even there we still wind up with "seriousness that fails" (what Susan Sontag in 1964 called "true camp*"; re: "My Least Favorite Horror Movies?" 2020).

(source: "Persephone's Silksong Symposium," 2025)

*And later "fascinating fascism" (1974). Manure is manure, but one having a fertilizing effect (erotic or otherwise) if fetishized correctly. I took Amazons and ran with them, but it all started with Mom; i.e., she thought they were cool. Ergo, so did I. And now we remember them, here, as ghosts of ghosts of ghosts.

[16] Gothic often seeing "ace" parties (which care/sex workers commonly are, accident-of-birth) treating sex as public nudism to interrogate trauma; e.g., Blxxd Bunny in "The Finale" (2023) helping me formulate ludo-Gothic BDSM: you gaze into the abyss; sometimes, the abyss gazes back!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

For the "ace" side of Gothic art and sex work, refer to "Crash Course: An Introduction to Asexuality and Demisexuality" (2025).

[17] As much a status/class symbol as one of virginal purity (dating back to Queen Victoria for the former)—and also a ghostly marker of the kept woman after leaving the sexual marketplace; i.e., forever young/old (the maiden and/or the crone, aka child/hag horror) preserved uncannily in her wedding dress (or nightgown): reduced to an unwilling sex object, one that testifies to nuclear horrors out-of-joint through a liminal, terrifying appearance in and out of shared space. In Gothic, ghosts of women East and West speak to female violence not survived save as ghosts, aka fragments; i.e., a ghost (and its appearance in a home) commonly signify two basic types: victim and avenger invading the new homeowner's still-occupied house, or the demon and the damsel (and other black/white binaries; e.g., good/evil, cop/victim, terror/counterterror and order/disorder) papered over/exorcized by capital on previously and recursively stolen land. Damsels are screwed because they're not "supposed" to be abused, making their testimony anathema; demons, by comparison, offer forbidden knowledge to give/trade for in radicalizing ways, live-burial (re: "Demons: From Composites and the Occult to Totems and the Natural World," 2024). Either case = ratting on the state, which furthers abjection per Faustian or Promethean exchange—generally by punching down at a given restless labyrinth and its spectral inhabitants (re: "Policing the Whore"). From Beauvoir's "woman is other" to us and "nature is monstrous-feminine" as awesome mystery to solve, the devil is in the details (a method to the madness, both allusions to Hamlet surviving mimetically into the present):

(artist: Henry Fuseli; cited: "Seeing Dead People; or Undead Feeding Vectors, part two: Ghosts/the Numinous")

Yet ghosts, being uncanny [as the Gorgon is], cannot die, making their mere existence an ontological refusal to be erased. It's often involuntary—both cryptomimetic and historical-material: "the traditions of all past generations [of dead whores] weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living" (source: "The Eighteenth Brumaire," 1852): "Never shake your gory locks [or snakes-for-hair] at me!" Her dead tits were there!

(ibid.)

Rather than bottle those genies up, we let Pandora out of her box—a dark oracle whose unsealed testimony has the whore's revenge: often a murder ballad, opera or ghost story that conjures up hellish voices, mid-xenoglossia; e.g., Rashomon, Ringu and The Grudge, etc, from Japanese stories (1950, 1998 and 2004) and various ghost stories from the West's own ghost of the counterfeit. All weaken state power by reversing abjection through lopsided conversations that unfold during revolutionary cryptonymy's denuding of a given case (state secrets protecting rapists and Patriarchy's other benefactors; i.e., black penitents in and out of Gothic sex, drugs and rock 'n all; e.g., D4vd and the murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez in 2026 echoing Beauvoir and Sartre's "Lolita Syndrome" and raping of students under their own power imbalance, 2013). States rape by design, primarily nature and those "of it" (re: extended beings) as things to gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss under toxic formats, then scapegoat; we iconoclasts (whistleblowers) expose them (and cops and judges protecting them) during ludo-Gothic BDSM—acting out the "ghosts" of rape, Hamlet-style, but for women and other marginalities: making Medusa understood, again, but keeping her Numinous (abject, divine; re: from Varma and Otto to me, 1917-2023), mid-cryptonymy. "What was she wearing?" Dead men might tell no tales, but female and/or monstrous-feminine ghosts are a bit more chatty (re: "Seeing Dead People"). "Say cheese'!"

(Trippelgänger's "Possessor (Official Audio)," 2024; cited: Modularity and Class")

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their
spheres,
Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand an end,
Like quills upon the fearful porpentine (source: Hamlet, c. 1599).

There's power in that the state can't monopolize. Use it!

[18] Who Mom had me paint, once—not just hanging the portrait on her store wall, but keeping it up despite the customers complaining. Also, Regina was killed at age fourteen by a serial killer truck driver (who took the above photograph before killing her) and Mom—who already has a thing for truck drivers, of whom she relied on when hitchhiking as a homeless teenager—knew someone her age from Ann Arbor killed by a truck driver, too. Spookier still, this girl looked just like Mom. Creepy! Such things are tragically commonplace in and out of Gothic stories' sex, drugs and rock 'n roll pimping women/nature as monstrous-feminine as usual, but inside whose buried stories are as front-and-center as a catchy chorus; re (from "The Origins of Demonic Persecution and Camp," 2025):

Lyriquediscorde writes,

In an interview (and also in the VH-1 special I mentioned) Ann revealed that the "Magic Man" was her then-boyfriend, band manager Michael Fisher, and that part of the song was an autobiographical telling of the beginnings of their relationship. (from Wikipedia) Michael was originally Heart's guitarist. Ann followed Michael to Canada during the Vietnam War years so he wouldn't get drafted. In 1974, Nancy joined the band later and Michael then became the band's manager and sound engineer (source: "'Magic Man' by Heart," 2018)

Equally common is their repression by polite society outside of Gothic. Hence, the rememory process and cryptomimesis (a process, I should add, that Marx wasn't above; re: "a spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism"). To be a good Communist is to be an anarchist "barometer" for mostly-invisible spirits displaced (and formerly abused in life) by state powers (with me extending cryptomimesis to other monsters and their language, but I digress; e.g., Amazons = mighty warrior ghosts). Believe women and other survivors (e.g., drug use, child abuse, carceral violence, police brutality and so on).

(models: Melody van der Waard, left; Henri van der Waard III, right; Benjamin van der Waard, bottom; and Persephone and Henri van der Waard IV, middle-left and -right[?])

[19] And who, born many weeks premature, was covered in hair—so much so that Mom called us twins her "little wolf men": her own Romulus and Remus that, when I came out as trans, she accepted without question (the monster child only a mother could love, monsters and motherhood a classic tokophobic trope to reverse abjection with; re: Wandering Womb; see: "Following in Medusa's Footsteps," footnote 5a).

[20] Mom also hates Foucault, but love/hates Edward Said, leading me to write essays about both men*; re: Zeuhl, similar to Obama and his bad-faith sexual conquests, gleefully showing me Foucault's twink predation to unironically prey on me: "I feel like I fucked Obama with a facemask" (source: "Leaving the Closet"). In the words of Darren Ewing (from Troll 2, 1990), "Oh, my god!" Gothic invites the ability to laugh at our mishaps, turning disaster into delight post hoc (while still warning about toxic love†, in danger-disco ways). So whatever "devilry" Zeuhl used when charming off my pants, I can celebrate their teaching me witchcraft all the same; i.e., how to slay pussy in ways I tweaked, meaning to prevent harm; e.g., by reflecting on their own bogus nature (re: "Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives"). Enchant this, bitch!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard; cited: "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp")

*Re: "Understanding Vampires" and "Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire" (2022).

†Re: "'Real Life': Toxic Love and Criminal Sexuality in True Crime‡ (feat. Killing Stalking, Jeffery Dahmer and Ted Bundy)" (2025).

‡An extension of the detective side of Gothic fiction (re: "Radcliffe's Refrain") and one that often sees a variety of thefts taking place, on and offstage; i.e., the above example featuring material "written" by Jameson Somerton, a famous charlatan and thief eventually exposed for epic levels of plagiarism; re (from "Criminal Sexuality in True Crime"):

Note: This piece was originally made in response to the James Somerton videos, "Killing Stalking and the Romancing of Abuse" and "The Troubling Thirst for Jeffery Dahmer" (2023). Said videos are reuploads, as Somerton—now self-described as James of Telos in connection to his now-defunct film company/scam enterprise, Telos Pictures—removed them from his YouTube channel (also defunct). In other words, I wrote this piece in early-to-mid-2023, before James was exposed as a giant plagiarist (which I responded to after it happened; re: "James Somerton: A Guy Who Sucked, But So Does Capitalism," 2024). Also, from what I understand, the above essays that I cite were actually written not by James but by his editor/co-writer and former friend, Nicholas Hergott, who wasn't involved in James' bullshit (source: Reddit, r/hbomberguy).

(source tweet: Dan Olson, 2023; cited: "James Somerton: A Guy Who Sucked, But So Does Capitalism")

The problem is always Capitalism and state vampirism, DARVO-and-obscurantism, but some people embody that better (or worse) than others!

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My name's Persephone van der Waard; I have my MA in Gothic English literature and independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing partially on Metroidvania), and I am the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity vs Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). A rape survivor/granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor and Dutch Resistance member—and someone anti-war (as a business), anti-Zionist and anti-racist/anti-white-supremacist who specializes in tokenism (e.g., TERFs, SWERFs, and fascist feminism)—I'm a MtF trans woman, Tolkien and Amazon enthusiast, former YouTuber, anti-fascist, loud critic of Marxist-Leninism/state vampirism, atheist and Satanist, poly/pan kinkster with multiple partners, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist; i.e., under my brand of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism as a holistic, intersectional discipline: one devised in 2022-2023, and which my friends and I currently achieve together. / Originally this blog explored my love of movies when I was cis-het; now I use it to write about the Gothic—horror, but also sex, heavy metal, and videogames in a queer way (especially Metroidvania).

I take donations for my work (which goes towards helping sex workers, trans people and other minorities). I currently take payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on my Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Regarding Formatting Issues for Blogposts (Older than October 2025): Recently Josey Howarth helped transfer my old blog from Blogger to WordPress, which—while vital for security reasons—altered their formatting. On a phone screen, the posts are mostly readable, but look slightly "jank" on computer screens. Many also contain outdated "About the Author" sections—meaning inside the posts-in-question, alongside the blog website "footer" (as added by Josey after the transfer). Such things are temporary. Eventually we plan to overhaul their visual design, remodeling my blog and website (thus fixing the issues in the question)!

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