Where as "Appetizers; or, Paratextual Documents for Volumes One through Three" (2025) covers paratextual materials in Volume One, Two and Three, "Yesterday's Leftover Rice" concerns the paratextual materials unique to the Practice Volume (release imminent); i.e., each book volume for Sex Positivity has its own full-size PDF and blog-style book promotion (the former which you can download on my one-page book promotion for the entire series and the latter which you can access individually on my Book Promotions page).  Whereas those online book promotions feature the lion's share of Volumes One through Three, they and "Appetizers" don't include a small handful of unessential-yet-interesting paratextual documents I have since decided to include here, for the Practice Volume; i.e., to be as thorough as possible, and which further clarify my process while writing and organizing the volume and its essays, interviews, what-have-you (refer to "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents" [2024] for the more essential of the paratextual documents to this entire book series). Some of the documents mentioned here appear in earlier volumes. As such, this page will also specify which volume subsections include which paratexts (from any of the volumes):

(artist: Lilith Mae)

Document Version: This is the SFW version of this document, and many of the spicy images are cropped, removed or swapped out (for promotion purposes); the NSFW version is on my website. 

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original owner(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer attached to each series of my blog-style book promotion; i.e., for my series volumes. All the models featured here (except Leeza) are active participants in the project, illustrating consent through the dialectical-material context of a given exchange and exhibit (see: "Illustrating Mutual Consent" from "Paratextual Documents").

Table of Contents

Why did you leave the keys upon the table? (source).

—Serj Tankian; "Chop Suey" from System of a Down's Toxicity (2000)

Note: Any section with a hyperlink in its title is posted elsewhere, not here. —Perse

• "Concerning Food Metaphors (promotion only)": A short, promotion-only explanation to the value of food metaphors.
• "Appetizers; or, Paratextual Documents for Volumes One through Three": Various smaller and less essential paratextual documents (versus more essential ones; re: "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents"); i.e., those included inside the PDF for Volume Three released after my book series initially concluded, on June 2025. Length: ~23 pages.
• "Turning Over a New Leaf: Into 2026 and Beyond; or, Introducing a New Volume": Discusses how I got where I'm at, in the project, where it's going and who with, slowly outlining and eventually facing state vampirism head on with my friends and their help. Length: ~3 pages.
• "Essay Paratexts: State Vampirism and the Whore's Revenge": A providing of paratexts that go with all the essays (which are normally standalone). Opening Length: ~1 page.
  • "Concerning State Vampirism": An abridged version of the state vampirism disclaimer that appears at the start of many of my 2025 and 2026 essays. Explains some essential terms, such as abjection, ludo-Gothic BDSM, and the whore's revenge. Length: ~1 page. 
  • "Disclaimers/Concerning Censored Nudity and Its Educational Purpose": The disclaimer (and explanation of fig-leaves, in some cases) that appears in every essay. Length: ~1 page. 
• "Fresh and Familiar Faces, Working in Secret to Burn Rome to the Ground (when reviving Medusa)": The front bookend of Volume Four. A short recognition of older models who have worked in the project, in 2025 and before; i.e., alongside newer ones, appearing in 2026. Length: ~9 pages.
• "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It (the opening to Volume Three)": The opening to Volume Three on tokenism, which I've decided to include in Volume Four, as well. Length: ~25 pages.
• "The Price of Rice in China; or Capital in a Bird Cage (on Chinese Socialism)": A short addendum on Chinese Socialism, which I critique alongside its critics and defenders (who collectively tend to overlook Chinese, Soviet and Western abuses of women, BIPOC, GNC folk and sex workers to varying degrees—often by making them illegal and imprisoning them). Length: ~12pages.
• "Buried Treasure; or, 'Sacking Rome' from Inside the House: Reviews of Several Models": I have several models, Mauve and Maddie Minx, whose reviews verge on mini-essays that touch on various important poetic ideas, but which normally don't appear in my actual book series. I want to include them in a book volume for posterity. Opening Length: ~1 page.
  • "Of Pirates, 'Booty' and Diamonds in the Rough: Mauve's Review": Mauve is a model who doesn't have posters or a promo page, but who does appear in "Tactical Frivolity" (2026)—an essay that touches on piracy and the poetry of bandits (from Radcliffe's Black Veil trope; re: "Radcliffe's Refrain," 2025), which my review of them only appears normally on the Non-Muse page of my 18+ website. Said review expands on Gothic themes of banditry through the works of J.M. Barrie and Peter Pan (drawing Mauve as a gender swap/cross between Eartha Kitt's 1960s catwoman [the princess of plunder] and Disney's Captain Hook). Length: ~8 pages.
  • "Of Gorgons and Looks that Kill: Maddie's Review": Maddie Minx is a non-binary model who represents the Medusa; i.e., as I emblematize the Gorgon for my book series. They have their own promo page/posters and will also be the cover model for Volume Four. But their review—which discusses meeting Medusa in the flesh—is one that I wanted to include outside their promo page. Length: ~3 pages.
• "Remembering the Fallen": A short (and somber) collection of short benedictions/mini-essays I wrote while producing my book series, specifically recognizing the value of different minorities martyred by fascists. Opening Length: ~2 pages.
  • "Remember the Fallen: An Ode to Nex Benedict": A dedication to Nex Benedict, a non-binary teenager killed by their peers in a high school bathroom, in 2024. Length: ~8 pages.
  • "Bushnell's Requiem: An Ode to a Martyr": A dedication to Aaron Bushnell, a former serviceman who immolated themselves in protest of the Palestinian genocide in 2024. Length: ~12 pages.
  • "Quality Beyond Measure: Remembering Jonathan Joss": A dedication to Jonathan Joss, a gay Indigenous Person who died taking a bullet for his trans husband, in 2025. Length: ~5 pages.
  • "The Wolf Is Loose: Honoring Renee Good (and All Victims) by Fighting Back": A longer essay dedicated to Renee Good, but also Keith Porter and Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez of current ICE violence in America, alongside victims (and survivors) of state violence from older historical periods (e.g., the Kent State shootings). Length: ~41 pages.
• "Screaming for Vengeance: It Began with a Whisper (original series conclusion, 2025)": The original conclusion to my book series (written in June 2025, after I finished Volume Three that May), one that outlined the basics of state vampirism and challenging it by reversing abjection through sex work. Said conclusion was not included in Volume Three (which released a month prior), so I'm including it at the end of Volume Four. Length: ~1 page.
  • "Original Document (and Note from 2026)": The conclusion and my 2026 note, after writing "State Vampirism" (and releasing this document as the precursor). Length: ~59 pages.
• "Until Next Time; or, the Power of Dreams: Picking Up Where I Leave Off": The rear bookend of Volume Four. Takes the ideas from the front (re: state vampirism/reversing abjection) and wraps them into a bow (vis-à-vis the opening to Robert Ingpen's Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were, 1985). Length: ~3 pages.
• "Second Acknowledgements": The acknowledgements for everyone involved in making Volume Four (and future projects). Length: ~5 pages.

(artist: Lilith Mae)

Concerning Food Metaphors (promotion only)

All the same, while fetishes humanize the alien as routinely harvested by Cartesian thought, it's also vital to recognize the oppressed are not the fetishes they use to liberate themselves with; e.g., Satan, Dracula or Medusa is a performance, not a person. Even if those fetishizes concern their bodies as dark, queer, fat, or otherwise "other" in the eyes of the state, a fetish is an informed action—a performance tied to a body as one's own by which to identify with nature as abjected by Cartesian dominators (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, "A Problem of 'Knife Dicks'" (2024)

(artist: Lilith Mae)

"Leftover rice" isn't meant to sound demeaning as a food metaphor vis-à-vis the models; it was made in reference to the paratextual documents, themselves (re: the original called "appetizers"). That being said, leftover rice is super useful with cooking—able to be used in golden fried rice, meaning in such a way that only really works if the rice dries out after initially being boiled (then generally fried alongside/coated with egg yolk in a Chinese wok with scallions, vinegar and non-egg protein). Any way you slice it, leftover rice rocks and creativity is the mother of invention/cooking a skill that rewards creativity (the same idea works with stale bread used to thicken gravies since medieval times, but I digress; e.g., Max Miller's* "The Brutal Life of a Medieval Butcher," 2026; timestamp: 4:27). As for the models, they're both ingredients and agents in this winning recipe: giving and taking agency as something to poetically embody through themselves, artist/muse (the shoe "swapping feet," as it were). Food, for much of ancient history into the present, was and remains a weapon—power, to be specific, both as a cultural statement and Numinous exchange of forbidden knowledge (re: the Faustian bargain and Promethean Quest); i.e., where power is, upon worker bodies and through what those bodies represent/tie to: poetry = play thus power when asked for land, labor and sex back in a variety of ways during ludo-Gothic BDSM/the whore's endless revenge  (the Gothic basically sex, drugs and rock 'n roll vampirically hyphenating teeth and mouths, but also bodies and food [and most other things, above and below] as leading to poetic excess but also bad puns, cryptonymy-and-abjection).

*Yes, the "cook tease," himself ("Tasting History Reads Thirst Comments," 2025; timestamp: 2:28).

(exhibit 34a1b2b2b: Artist, top: Blxxd Bunny; bottom: Joachim Beuckelaer. This book be full of riddles, but especially mixed metaphors to playfully gorge yourselves with, choosing different ones at its leisure; e.g., food, plagues, clothes, comfort/sex, shelter and bloodshed, but also oxymorons of these things that, per medieval thought, invite a pre-capitalist way of viewing things to critical capital's defenders with: the body as essence, food, sanguine, shelter, etc, that isn't to be harvested by capital, but enjoyed by taking control over such things to liberate ourselves; i.e., away from the state greedily marketing us as sacred/forbidden "produce" to hoard for themselves. We must place this back in our hands. As such, our bodies, though still described as poultry and produce, become our meat to market, our vegetables to sexualize [e.g., the cucumber being an all-time classic] as ordinary and extraordinary while we kick Malthus [and neoliberal proponents of scarcity and austerity] right in the canonical balls [Medusa's pussy has "lips that grip," holding onto power as a carrot and a stick useful to worker aims].

With the Internet, the world is literally at our fingertips—with me able to befriend an ace cutie like Bunny and stumble across Beuckelaer's artwork on a whim through the same search engines. Use technology and poetic history to your advantage; use it to fight censorship, thus extinction, by taking control of what you have access to. You should before the state invariably rescinds your rights; it always wants to, so do what you can now to stay in control of what the state tries to monopolize—violence, terror, monsters, poetic expression, food, BDSM [death and rape theatre] but especially combinations of these things through ludo-Gothic BDSM. Use them to combat scarcity as a myopia, a famine. Worker ownership does not equate to starvation, enslavement, destruction. That's Capitalist Realism talking [more on this specifically in the "Call of the Wild" chapter in Volume Two, part two]. Time is of the essence, but take your time and enjoy yourselves. Your art will thank you for it.)

(artist: Leeza; cited: "Nature Is Food," 2024)

Turning Over a New Leaf: Into 2026 and Beyond; or, Introducing a New Volume

As years are passing by
Silence becomes your friend
You see the world in a different way
Don't be afraid of getting old
Life's still full of joy (source).

—Klaus Meine; "Life's Like a River" from The Scorpion's In Trance (1975)

I often talk in my work about holistic study and the half-real (e.g., kayfabe, Amazonomachia, Japanese sword movies, etc). Through study into real life alongside popular stories, this volume concerns investigative work following-up on current events and living bad actors (a Gothic heroine classically being a detective, turning over rocks in seemingly "dead" spheres).

A holistic, intersectional solution, Gothic Communism—when put to practice, camping the canon—covers a wide range of subjects; i.e., the noun "essay" coming from French verb essayer, meaning "to try." So that is what I have done, here: an attempt to synthesize Gothic Communism (and challenge state vampirism/Capitalist Realism) through over twenty essays (several which don't appear here on account of already being in my Metroidvania corpus), and (currently) fourteen interviews (from my "Hailing Hellions" Q&A series); re: covering current events and people, synthesizing praxis through a continuation of study that makes the world a better place than I (and my friends) found it. Punching up = good and good vampires punch up anisotropically and apotropaically against bad (token or otherwise); i.e., reversing abjection cryptonymically in duality to have the whore's revenge (a concept that will resurface in the essays and interviews that follow). Canon-versus-camp, we share the same stages and use the same language pimps do (which cops are): making monsters for workers or for the state, parody/pastiche. What was once serious can very easily become a joke (or vice versa); the alien can become human, from Medusa to her many Numinous offshoots: a poetically praxial means of palliative care when facing state predation.

(artist: Beetle Moses)

This book volume, Volume Four, consists of every essay written after June 1st, 2025; i.e., minus those already inside the Metroidvania corpus. It will have a second acknowledgements section, as well as the paratexts for the state vampirism and YouTube videos compendiums (there being others, which list in the About the Author section, at the end of the book). After those, the essays appear chronologically. Most of these were written for my blog in SFW or semi-censored formats: a fig-leaf style censorship approach whose formatting and gating approach took time to figure out (compared to my website, which is 18+). I will include information about that—meaning once for the book, not per essay.

(artist: Puppy Bat)

Whores are monsters who take their power back vampirically upon themselves (re: the "Aegis," above). To it, the essays and interviews here follow the same basic pattern: "putting the pussy on the chainwax" to make monsters that punch up (synthesizing praxis for Gothic Communism; re: "Shining a Light on Things, or How to Make Monsters: Reclaiming Our Lost Power by Putting the Pussy on the Chainwax," 2023); i.e., after my book series concluded, in June 2025 (whose conclusion also includes here, at the end of the volume).

Averaging ~1-2 essays a month on various topics (the interviews being Q&As that models in my book series completed on their own), the praxial emphasis remains anti-capitalist, thus anti-racist, anti-fascist, etc. I have different compendiums that organize my essays accordingly but they aren't included here. Again, only "State Vampirism" and "YouTube Essays (Symposiums)" are included in this volume (for essays before my book series, see "Older Writing"). For my sake, I will link to my website unless no other link exists except on my blog. Many images in the essays will be semi-censored, because that's how I originally prepared them; re: for my blog's age-gated, fig-leaf-style exhibits. Some will be uncensored, however (above), and the outer/inner book covers (apart from the front cover) will also be uncensored. As such, this book features the same exact disclaimers all my volumes do (re: at the start).

Lastly, the essays cite themselves and some share images; i.e., from each other and from my book series. Each essay was written to be self-contained, so expect some redundancy with visual aids but also written definitions. Not all of the essays belong to "State Vampirism" but many do. "State Vampirism" is the crux of my research put to practice, going forwards. So I will include the initial paratext about it, alongside the usual disclaimers per essay including the fig-leaf explanation (the full post, "State Vampirism," will appear deeper inside).

Time is a circle; the beauty of holistic study (and expression) is we can return to older things and say different things with them. Hindsight 20/20; the Gothic not only permits, but encourages paradoxical vision under present obfuscation—allowing foresight through historical-material forces at work, which workers camp during dialectical-material scrutiny, context and play (with darkness visible, illustrating mutual consent to hug the alien, mid-dialectic). Just as whores are monsters, we use the same ingredients to "make an apple pie from scratch" ("inventing the universe," as Carl Sagan famously put it). The cake is a lie; we monstrous-feminine use ours to out bad actors pimping nature-as-alien "on the Aegis," during ludo-Gothic BDSM: a paradoxically new-from-old, hellishly exciting way to view the world, breaking Capitalist Realism (and state vampirism) upon our proudly alien selves.

Gothic reinvents and reenacts the past, and that happens by flirting with convention as something to chaotically upend: the iconoclast turning a given church into "Hell's kitchen." As far as monsters and making them goes, anyone can cook. Become your own chef, inventing the universe as you see fit! For science! For luck, for laughs, for the unknown! We might be fruit

(artist: Puppy Bat)

Essay Paratexts: State Vampirism and the Whore's Revenge

My research/activism into anti-Capitalism concerns various essays I have written on Marxist-Leninism, but also personalities; i.e., when critiquing Marxist-Leninism alongside Capitalism for its historically predatory qualities tied to state models (which an-Coms reject); e.g., when preying vampirically on women, queer people and care/sex workers (unpaid labor) similar to out-and-out capital, which rapes by design: state vampirism = feeding through the state mid-abjection, be it openly capitalist or Marxist-Leninist (and their profit/productivity motives). My theories concerning state vampirism/feeding borrow directly from Marx' ideas of vampirism, using them to critique the likes of Lenin, Stalin and Mao, but also the man himself (a noted anarcho-Communist) for leading to such persons; i.e., by camping him (and his followers) in ways ML apologia dogmatizes (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, "Anarcho-Communism vs Marxist-Leninism (re: State Vampirism)" (2026)

These are the paratexts, "State Vampirism" and "Disclaimers/Concerning Censored Nudity and Its Educational Purpose," that appear with most of these essays (with some variation for the CW and individual YouTube links, and not all of the essays being directly linked to "State Vampirism"). They concern—among other things—the whore's revenge challenging state vampirism (the oldest labor struggle vs the oldest abuser): a fatal, vaso-vagal portrait upon which our power is both found/awaits in terrifyingly awesome, monstrous-feminine forms that overlap with our jailors; i.e., while "taking a stab" at things (so to speak) during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Exploitation and liberation, then, share the same stages, bodies and grisly fate, upon which others may look and hopefully learn a thing or two:

(artists: Alliesha Bay)

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/Concerning Censored Nudity and Its Educational Purpose

[The given essay] 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 on sex work itself, but widespread exploitation; 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)

Duplicate Essay: A NSFW version of this document (with the NSFW images) is on my 18+ website.

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 (e.g., "Dead on Arrival," 2026): classical artistic nudes and bikini-style pin-ups; fascism, genocide and rape*; police brutality and carceral violence; transphobia, enbyphobia, homophobia and furryphobia (werewolves and shape shifters), fear of crossdress and BDSM, racism, shadism, fatphobia, classism, xenophobia and ethnocentrism/Anglocentrism (e.g., Brexit and anti-Scottish independence), aporophobia, Hibernophilia, animal cruelty, child labor/abuse/soldiers, pedophilia, ageism, forced transformation and torture (e.g., bury your gays/conversion therapy), sanism/ableism (mental and physical health), anti-Indigenous sentiment/appropriation, Islamophobia/Orientalism, antisemitism, whorephobia and sexism (cis misogyny or otherwise)

*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). 

(artist: Lysippos; cited: Michael McClellan's "Professor Butter Beard and 'It's All About the Fig (Leaf)'")

Concerning This Pages' Censored Educational, Fig-Leaf-Style Nudity: This pages features censored, fig-leaf-style nudity* for purposes of sex and artistic education operating under the Miller Test/protected speech under American law (source: Justice.gov). For further info on my approach to censorship and sex education, kindly refer to exhibit -1 from "Raising Awareness" (which also discusses the hate campaign censors are currently waging against me and my friends' sex-ed work). All censored material is used elsewhere in my book series; i.e., as part of said series, and with permission from the models therein (re: my book series disclaimer). All models are over 18 and were when said material was produced. 

*Meaning no bare genitals, just bare butt cheeks, curves and sexual context (and lots and lots of pubic hair, below); i.e., within a sex-educational, art-meets-porn framework that follows the Miller Test—one performed by sex workers and their content being voluntarily part of a larger project I continuously invigilate; e.g., Cuwu and I:

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

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" (2024) provides all neologisms, in full.

Fresh and Familiar Faces, Working in Secret to Burn Rome to the Ground (when reviving Medusa)

"Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven." The idea is one of war-as-temptation; i.e., Medusa was a pirate, a hefty disruptor purveying under state harvest her own forbidden-fruit flesh to kickstart the elite's class nightmare: a right to bear arms and rise up against them (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, "Tactical Frivolity" (2026)

A maze needs a signpost, a labyrinth Ariadne's thread (tied to the monsters inside—us). These bookends, "Faces" and "Until Next Time" touch upon three things: Gothic maturity and the Wisdom of the Ancients/Ancestors; re: an ability to play with taboo things to prevent harm—and a cultural understanding of the imaginary past known to Gothic theatre and Indigenous Peoples—which holistically serve an anti-predation role: during ludo-Gothic BDSM versus state predation (and bad actors), cryptonymy-and-abjection. Intersectional problems require intersectional solutions.

To that, tactical frivolity and sex work are each a part of that, and take a variety of forms; i.e., stereotypes = scapegoats, which we subvert in modular but oft-intersecting persecution language; e.g., blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft (re: "Idle Hands," 2024) as a lineage: I was raised by matriarchs, learning how to be a witch from women who—while they weren't explicitly pagan, per se—punched up against Patriarch forces in ways that segued towards my own transition, as an-Com and trans (married to my academic work):

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).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

First, nature is a whore and all whores, under capital/the state, are monsters; i.e., "Rome" (Omelas) as something to reclaim through camp: the dualistic subversion of things canonically used to demonize and pimp us, which we beings of nature—both as alien (virgin/whore) and monstrous-feminine—reframe in obscure, poetic ways to have the whore's revenge; re: "to break the profit [and productivity] motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible […] by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes: to hug the alien—not demonize it to receive state violence—thereby (ex)changing how the world is seen to begin with" (source: "Rape Reprise"). Put more conversationally (to say the least), we do so through a particular refrain—one Key & Peele sum up as putting the pussy on the chainwax" (2013) and whose dialectic I isolate to canon vs camp, centermost being the Medusa (re: "Camping the Canon," 2023): something the state both loves and fears, a sinister ancient enemy whose demanding of recognition (and equal rights, pay and so on) the ruling class calls "sinister" (during state vampirism/Capitalist Realism).

Medusa's much-touted "terrifying powers," abjection cuts both ways; we whores are essentially Medusa-in-small, using the Gorgon's avenging curse to send power back anisotropically and apotropaically towards ourselves. We revive the Gorgon as a palliative-Numinous force in a perpetual battle—itself vivid and obscure through preferential code evoking evolution and survival (the corruption is the data). Expect fresh and familiar faces when working in secret, as whores do; i.e., to burn "Rome" to the ground, feeding and transforming through trauma, unequal exchange and dark desire (the usual qualities of Gothic poetics; re: "A Cruel Angel's Thesis," 2024). Rome = capital, the state, the nuclear model as things to subvert in all the usual ways (the whore not just a homewrecker but a pirate, a bandit, an inside/outside invader). Eventually the chickens (or snakes) come home to roost, the paradox of exposure ushering in different Gothically mature revelations to acquire and foster aforementioned Wisdom.

Amazons, Gorgons, or anything else Medusa is the Big Whore of an ongoing reckoning—the ghost in the machine/of the counterfeit, therfore the Communist Numinous for us to "chase" by embodying that fearsome original-that-never-was (the simulacrum/darkness visible). Female or not, Medusa as the avenger takes endless forms; this book volume draws upon new models alongside older examples (meaning "in terms of recency" in this project, not their ages). To that, Volume Four is like all my book volumes, insofar as it features paratexts that have different images I swap in and out; i.e., of different models. There remain some images of older models in exhibit images; but in swappable paratext images, there are many new faces to go with familiar ones. All are models in my book series, usually muses (see: "Second Acknowledgements" for all of them): a composite Aegis whose golemic polity of fetishes seek awareness in Pygmalion's shadow, one "castle" after another (a plethora of Pandoras, Galateas, Medusas, Phyllises, etc).

(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)

Everyone loves the whore; we love her as her to have the whore's revenge. Diversity and invigilation are the name of the game. In turn, the whore's revenge happens in stages, mise-en-abyme; i.e., one among many all and once and to the last syllable of recorded time. In any given case, I include different images taken from commissioned shoots; i.e., as part of my book series, while plugging a given model's page (often on my site, though not always). Chasing the Gorgon and her Numinous power is a bit like chasing Ahab's white whale: forever incomplete, but also shrouded in secrecy when fighting fire with fire (re: darkness visible) to break Capitalist Realism "on the Aegis."

Infinite power, infinite forms. So, don't listen to anyone who poo-poos sex work; i.e., the whore's instrument of revenge; e.g., this person playing the SWERF in bad faith:

This is not transphobic. Socialism is a historical necessity in the genuine liberation of LGBTQ+ people everywhere (not just in the first world) and only Marxism[-]Leninism can achieve and maintain Socialism. Sex Work is also inherently awful and demeaning, the majority of prostitutes are forced into it because they have literally no other option and if you do it willingly you are participating in a system that brings down your gender as all pornography is inherently harmful to society and to human happiness. Neither Pornography or any over form of "Sex Work" (Sexual Slavery) will exist under Communism.

My source post reads, "The person [re: Charlitics] appealing to authority and state power ignoring my response to out themselves as a TERF and a SWERF? Not a good look, especially for a queer person" (source YouTube Community post: Persephone van der Waard, 1/29/2026). Reactionaries punch down and steal.

And the above quote follows the same ML refrain: "Stalin" loves and protects women, racial minorities and the gays, etc. Sure he does. To which I respond, "You're so wrong it hurts." Anyone who talks like the above person does is a pimp and not to be trusted. They see the booty and blame the whore, infantilizing and demonizing them in the same breath to keep them in the household (which exploits unpaid labor by design; re: "Raising Awareness"); i.e., Marxist-Leninism is conservative thinking splashed in red paint to further state vampirism (ibid.). They're philistines, incels and falsely pious/fake friends—the butt pirates they accuse us of, monopolizing sex through DARVO and obscurantism (of lies and force) for the state. They don't just lie; they love-bomb. They don't just lie; they love-bomb and gaslight, unable to fess up to prior state abuse, let alone current bullshit. If they can't even do that, why should we trust them? As I write in "The Price of Rice" (2026).

The elite have many tools to divide-and-conquer with;

from Marx to me, capital alienates and sexualizes everything (1844 and 2023); it monopolizes violence, terror and morphological expression (monsters) through sex and force (re: Weber, Asprey and me; see: "The State: Its Key Tools" from "Paratextual Documents"); and its qualities through the state are settler-colonial, heteronormative and Cartesian (ibid.) [... and through different imbrications of modular persecution language ...; e.g.,] blood libel, witchcraft and sodomy through whores policing whores; i.e., for the pimp and their revenge, stealing power from the past (the Promethean Quest), divide-and-conquer (re: "Idle Hands," "Policing the Whore," and "Rape Reprise," 2024). Again, skull = theft and flow of power determines function, for workers or the state. Workers can further/enforce abjection to flow power up, mid-predation, or they can play with "rape" (and its symbols) to change polarity during ludo-Gothic BDSM (source: "Dead on Arrival").

under state vampirism, they do so across generations and geopolitics under Capitalist (and Socialist) Realism. In turn, problems of race overlap with culture (sex/gender) and class, intersectional problem.

To it, raise a flag and see who salutes/who turns their back; i.e., MLs love to discredit or neglect whores, GNC folk and BIPOC while saying "we love LGBTQ+ people." Burst their bubbles, with butts or otherwise; let Medusa out to reverse abjection by expose the state's bad actors (the "scratching method"; re: "Raising Awareness"). Again, Gothic is dualistic; we share the same stages, bodies and costumes, abjection merely the flow (thus function) of power anisotropically and apotropaically up or down. When the Man comes around (or someone acting like a man for the state), show him your Aegis! No Omelas whores!

(artist: Lilith Mae and Soleil Succubus)

Pimps gonna pimp, and generally while acting smug and superior about it (as TERFs and SWERFs do, including Socialist ones thinking they're "real" nerds and we fags and whores are "fake"; i.e., weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds). A pimp's a cop and cop's a cop and ACAB. Therein lies their Achilles Heel; they labor under Socialist Realism, which categorically gatekeeps Gothic poetry and Indigenous elements, but also care/sex work through unpaid labor by the universal class subject as white, male, straight and paid (on the Western, Soviet or Chinese sides); re (from "Dead on Arrival"):

The revolution won't be televised, because—and in Gil-Scot Heron's own words (1989)—it starts from inside while responding to/collating external things Base-and-Superstructure; i.e., Gothic Communism is holistic for a reason, critiquing Socialism as flawed from the start/something that decays inside capital:

Leave Mark Fisher alone, nerds (timestamp: 16:10). Marxism understands the mechanics of capital, but is often lacking on the social and psychological side; i.e. from anyone who isn't white, straight and male, first and foremost (the universal class subject being paid labor under those qualities: "working men of all countries," from Engels); e.g., Marx and Engels' homophobia followed by Stalin's (and his racism and sexism, etc) followed by Marxist-Leninism and different interpretations of Marx that overlook his flaws/forget he was a Gothicist (to an extent; re: "On Marx, the Gothic, and Camping Them through Poetic Shorthand" from "Raising Awareness"); i.e., someone who, alongside Engels, talked about queer people as criminals ("sodomites") and aliens from other worlds ("Uranians"). There's plenty to critique in Marx, and plenty to value in Fisher's work; i.e., that Capitalist Realism is something we must avoid by combatting where it happens; re: through the Gothic mode, I argue. So-called "pure Marxists" are allergic to synthesis, but especially the gay shit, and to varying degrees the rights of other minorities/marginalities, too. You need to hybridize, not pulverize your approach to "just Marx" [class reductivism]. Take what is useful and leave the rest. Also, it's annoying that these guys are like, Marx' models predict everything when their prediction—that mass accumulation and an inability to do anything with the wealth leads to crisis—is the same basic conclusion that Tolkien made in The Hobbit (1937) with his Battle of the Five Armies:

(artist: Justin Gerard; cited: "Prey as Liberators")

Or as Patel and Moore write, "For Marx and for us, capital happens only in the live transformation of money into commodities and back again. Money tucked under a mattress is as dead to capitalism as the mattress is itself. It is through the live circulation of this money, and in the relations around it, that capitalism happens" (source: Seven Cheap Things). In other words, money not in motion—say, a dragon sitting on a pile of gold (stolen wealth)—is dead capital; i.e., capital needs motion to live, which requires but also causes violence when wealth accumulates invariably at the top that causes it paradoxically to die. Monopolies play out, competition stagnates, and the old conquests raze anew to claw back and fight over resources under crisis. In short, it's dead on arrival—building towards a panic room with no exit; pressure builds and it explodes. Imperialism, then, is the highest but also final stage of capital, which must evolve or die. But evolution also = death for those under Capitalism Realism; i.e., it's a delusion, a death cult that gentrifies and decays while insulating itself with asbestos. It's cancer waiting to happen, a foregone conclusion for those who cannot see any way out

Ignoring the myopic prescriptions of pure Marxism, there's more than one way to skin a cat [or a bear, below]. Indeed, the choosing of invocation is vital to avoiding what Sandy calls "the Imperialism of theory":

I do not believe that I am required to demonstrate "a need to invoke Foucault" (and the diction here is interesting precisely why does Perkin use the word "invoke"?). Like Marx or Freud, Foucault is himself an example of what he calls in the essay, "What Is an Author?," "founders of discursivity," figures who have "established an endless possibility of discourse" (154). "To expand a type of discursivity," he proposes, is precisely "to open it up to a certain number of possible applications" (156). Rather than "needing to invoke" Foucault, I choose to apply Foucault because of the speculative richness such application offers (source: "The Imperialism of Theory: A Response to J. Russell Perkin," 1994).

The example she gives is Foucault, but the same basic idea applies to Marx—and to which I myself write, in "Preface: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; or, Synthesizing Emotional/Gothic Intelligence through a Sex-Positive Gothic Mode" (2024): "Simply put, singular and enforced interpretations are dangerous, and we need to be choosy in ways that prolifically and flexibly enrich our arguments, not simply dot them with the fancy patriarchal ornaments of accommodated [and venerate] intellectuals." Marxist is guilty of this, haunted by Marx' spectre versus any he himself wrote about (source YouTube community post, Persephone van der Waard: 4/12/2026, in response to Revolutionary Communists of America's "The Decline of MAGA and US Imperialism," 2026).

(artists: Steve Frankfurt and Philip Gips)

I digress. Many MLs are extremely lame and, oft-times, complete full of themselves—acting like we're "in the cave" when they invoke "pure Socialism" in magical, highly Realist ways; i.e., as "rescuing" us fags and bimbos from certain doom (all while kettling us, "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss" (re: Socialist Realism alongside Capitalist Realism; see: "The Price of Rice"). To be frank, we whores don't need rescuing before aren't wallflowers; we need allies who listen, thus understand that we fart and spill blood, bathing in the blood of our enemies (troublemakers steeped in the language of adventure): naked violence, terror and monsters—the stage our place to shine and bleed into real life, the whores and their "money shots" punching up from Hell as in between this-or-that (the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune); re: "To combat nation-states as the ultimate foe, Gothic Communism's chief aim is to be campier (thus sexier and funnier) than Marx; i.e., camping his ghost to develop a holistically intuitive anarcho-Communism begot through a widespread, collective and solidarized emotional and Gothic intelligence/awareness" (source: Gothic Communism" abstract).  Again, many older forms of Socialism are lame/unable to understand poetry and play = powerful ways to communicate under state actors' noses (surprise, surprise); they lack imagination, thus can't see past state models (which Socialism requires to achieve a classless, moneyless, stateless society, my dudes).

Likewise, trauma but especially generational/complex trauma is hypnotic—survivors of trauma deeply magnetic in ways that speak to the imperfection of abusers and victims, but also survivors who use it to control situations/rooms in oft-maladaptive ways. It's not strictly a "weakness," but it manifests in ways we're not always aware of. Gothic rarefies this in different signature; e.g., vampires hyphenating predator/prey. Whatever the form, prohibition of Gothic is a fool's errand; the Gothic is controlled chaos in times of crisis (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM and calculated risk; e.g., Dadaism and the absurd, taken to hyperbolic extremes seen in other cultures; see: "Moe/Ahegao, Incest, and Eco-Fascism in Japanese Exports" and "Tactical Frivolity," 2025 and 2026). It's a vulgar-and-enchanting means to explore taboos and expose our enemies, punching the Aegis we show them to betray themselves (thereby outsmarting them): through flights of fancy and great deeds, but also men and women (and anything in between) that are suitably larger-than-life yet tied, all the same, to ordinary things "from the past" serving as fetish gear* (often outlaws, folk heroes, noble barbarians [savages haunted by generational trauma] and other criminal-coded outsider "homeless" [alter-ego] types, shaking things up); e.g., Robin Hood or people like Robin Hood, below). Gothic maturity swims in the wisdom of the past as revived in ways that expose bad actors. Reversing abjection is a messy business: thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf.

*I.e., ipso facto, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Fetish gear is generally military outfits playing with unequal power while the original insignias are removed. But the cops-and-robbers function remains: to calculate risk with; e.g., Mercedes the Muse:

Marx always felt a bit chicken-and-the-egg (re: Steve Frankfurt and Philip Gips). Matter shapes consciousness, but consciousness happens inside the mind, where anything is possible (and maintains matter) and, more to the point, ties to our bodies as things the state ties to monopolize, sex-and-force. Nudity isn't weakness, then, it's power—cooties to reverse onto our enemies, fire-with-fire; i.e., to scare into submission those calling us "witches," "homewreckers," etc, in defense of the nuclear model, and which the Soviets took from the Czars and the West; e.g., the Western as an East-meets-West story living and dying through different frontier revivals rooted in myth and historical fiction; e.g., Sanjuro (above, 1963)—the dialog of endless possibility that cuts both ways, ker-splat (open abjection still having a cryptonymic function, above): a way inside, to where the battles for worker hearts and minds categorically take place (and generally among the young and what they consume; re: the Gothic). History and invention overlap, regressing, revisiting and reinventing on the same half-real stages our enemies use to exploit us. Our liberation grapples with their fetishizing of us, hoisting them on their own petards: "You sunk my battleship!" Goose cooked, motherfucker (and so many other medieval/neo-medieval euphemisms hyphenating sex and force, sickness and health, food and predation, etc)!

To that, whores are monsters and monsters matter. We don't need rescuing. We need to be heard. To that, Gothic Communism = porn to liberate with itself, sex-drugs-and-rock-'n-roll, and therein lies the rub (so to speak). However trashy, games and play keep us alive. Yet sex work, if not outright criminal, sits in an uncomfortable grey area in most places (which Gothic highlights). Many whores fight to have their work decriminalized, but do so from the shadows/with the shadows (darkness visible)

Whores are guerrillas who bait our enemies inside the usual brothels, then get 'em good to reclaim such poetic territories' recursive value; i.e., through Gothic fakery's anisotropic replacement, reclaiming the planet for ourselves by representing its abused elements! We workers aren't merely rewards to harvest, virgin/whore. Land back, labor back, sex back, stories back! We "choosers of the slain" (which whores are) decide who can play with us and who cannot, then rub it in; i.e., like GLADOS: "Anyways, this cake tastes great; it's so delicious and moist! (source: "It Began with a Whisper").

and often speaking to queer rights alongside sex work, cryptonymy-and-abjection:

Not all whores are gay of course, but gay whores are basically vampires—gay ninjas (or sex wizards) enamored with an imaginary past (the "Gothic"); i.e., teaching others through what I, again, call the Wisdom of the Ancients: to fight back against state monopolies, pushing gradually away from colonial models with pre-colonial ideas towards post-scarcity as Gothic Communism does (or, as Key and Peele put it, "by putting the pussy on the chainwax," 2013) (source: "Replying to Jon Barbas," 2025).

[censored in this version]

(artist: Bay Ryan, Victoria Saix, Cuwu)

This book offers a rare invitation, then: a vivid, holistic, intersectional window looking voyeur/exhibit into the secret world/soliloquy of whores-as-rebels and teachers (triply secret, in that case). It is a book of ninjas, pirates, and marauding barbarians, all having the whore's eternal revenge, per adventure (echoes of Tolkien's "Tookishness" and Barrie's impish Pan kidnapping those older sorts to paradoxically grow up and regress in spaces thereof, etc); i.e., "by taking pre-capitalist language (the Gothic's Wisdom of the Ancients and Indigenous Peoples' Wisdom of the Ancestors; re: "The Value in Showing Intersectional Solidarity When Combating Fascism," 2026) to push in duality towards a post-scarcity world" (source: "Dead on Arrival").

To camp the canon, we need to "get weird" (as Tim Curry puts it); and all the world's a stage in and out of stories, which my friends and I brand in you'll-know-it-when-you-see-it ways, putting pussy (or anything else) on the chainwax, cryptonymy-and-abjection, through preferential code (from trans folk to drag queens and kings to neurodivergent "theatre kids," whores and anyone else channeling "Gothic" as a Communist force, below*): where power is performs and reifies (re: "Notes on Power" and "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp," 2023). From Butler to us, "queer" = performative to make trouble (of gender or otherwise). We're flexible, anything meaning through conflict—much more than many "real Socialists" (of the Marxist-Leninist schools) are. Or as Jinx Monsoon puts it, "Theatre kids are horny" ("Exposing Our Unhinged Theater Stories," 2026; timestamp: 45:52). There's power in that. Use it and stir the pot—not as something alien to prohibit, but embrace and set free (a real witch's brew)!To tell our foes, "Go to the ends of the Earth—even to the moon far above (VideoFromSpace's "Artemis 2 Commander Captures Amazing Earthset Video with iPhone," 2026)—and Medusa will be there, waiting for you! She is the very planet itself (re: "That Ass Is a Higher Truth," 2024), but also the sun and stars (and asteroids, below)! A Black Veil waiting to be cryptonymically pulled aside, her-tits-were-there! Abjection's a bitch, but sneaks up on you!

(artist: Goddess Brooklyn)

*Re: per "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy" and "Transgressive Nudism; or, Flashing Those with Power" (2024 and 2025).

Repeating Myself: On Formatting Hiccups

It was Helm's mother who pushed her into the movies. She sent her teenage daughter's photograph to screenwriter Thea von Harbou, and there was an element of subterfuge involved in delivering Helm to her screen test. As soon as she was enrolled in the cast of Metropolis, Helm signed, and was locked into, a ten-year contract with the Ufa studio (source).

—Silent Helm's "Bridgette Helm: the Perils of Hedonism" (2023)

(source: Facebook)

Cz Directors and their creations have a love/hate relationship that often (though not always) demands perfection. Sometimes, perfection is impossible, but the recursive and slave-like contractual qualities remain (the stage [or costume] a jail cell, above). Case in point, this volume references previously standalone pieces. Specifically they would cite other essays and book sections of mine, which normally includes the date in parentheses next to the citation. By doing that repeatedly in my book volume, I am in effect breaking my own rule.

That being said, changing it would take a great deal of work for something so relatively small. Likewise, being as the director and invigilator of my own production, I have the power to torture myself or not. So as much as it galls me, I have since decided to "split the baby" and preserve that portion of their original formatting.

Also, the writing is holistic in ways that stand on the shoulders of giants; i.e., I'm the giant I'm referencing as much as others—this book based on compendiums that emerged after my book series versus before (with a variety of "bridging" or references to things in things in things, etc). Redundancy is important with archiving and tutelage, but not so much the creation of new information. Except this book volume—five out of five—does a bit of both, while favoring being as efficient in its redundancy in either respect. There will be some redundancy but I've tried to keep it to a minimum while cataloguing and cross-referencing tout le monde.

Buried Treasure; or, "Sacking Rome" from Inside the House: Reviews of Several Models

[R]ape victims are forced to be their own advocates, appealing to the public by virtue of what the middle class will pay attention to—the victims' own rape and murder as something to reify and sell, per the ghost of the counterfeit. This can be Pavlovian—electrocuting the bitch to induce a panic response—but the same actions also constitute a theatrical performance that looks the same, and yet differs through context: the irony of acting out one's death ("O happy dagger!") […]: a secret key and plan to a dungeon (re: Thror's map, key and mountain, but also dragon, inside) that must be explored. […] They say that dead men tell no tales, then, but few things are as loud, brutal and difficult to ignore as rape.

—Persephone van der Waard, "Policing the Whore" (2024)

Men cannot eat gold, but not all that glitters is gold (with many sex workers being ace; i.e., while using public nudism/Gothic poetics to perform power [sex and force] while interrogating it; e.g., Blxxd Bunny in "The Finale," 2023)! A common metaphor I make regarding rebellious whores ("homewreckers" capital/the state treat as endemic and alien) is bastard, barbarian and avenger coming home to roost, but also pirate—in short someone in search of treasure inside "Rome" as well as ourselves. Such things are often buried, waiting to be found (often composed of whatever's on hand*). Such things also walk the line (or the plank) between what's safe and what isn't, fetishizing power as something to appreciate but haunted by virgin/whore appropriation (camped by iconoclasts, hyphenating these qualities).

(source: Best DOS Games)

*E.g., my brother, when playing the DOS version of X-COM: UFO Defense (1994), needed to name his base. So he looked at the nutritional facts on the back of a nearby Cheetos bag and read, "trans fat." His newly-christened base, Trans Fat, was later stormed and razed by invading aliens (the "enemy within," as the game tells it; i.e., "marauders from space").

To that, I wanted to share several reviews I wrote (something I don't often do in my books, themselves; i.e., normally appearing exclusively on my website's Sex Work page: Muses, Non-Muses, and Bad Reviews). Both are muses. One review is of a model, Mauve, who doesn't have a page on my site, but whose review contains some hidden wisdom not found in my essays themselves; the other is of Maddie Minx, someone who personifies the Gorgon a bit more literally. They're the danger and the disco!

(artist [SFW version]: Mauve and Maddie Minx)

Of Pirates, "Booty" and Diamonds in the Rough: Mauve's Review

All wanted blood except the boys, who liked it as a rule, but to-night were out to greet their captain. The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins* them out…

—the narrator, "Chapter 5: the Island Come True" from J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1911)

(artist: Mauve)

Artist: Mauve [as shown, on "Non-Muses"]

About: Mauve's' Bluesky bio reads "Your favorite neurodivergent e-slut 🖤 30, She/Her, SW, Black, Bi 💖💜💙, BBW DMs open to moots, tippers, & buyers Age in bio or 🚫 Flirty, but Unavailable ACAB, Fuck ICE, Fuck bigots Faceless, tips often rewarded, MDNI🤺 linktr.ee/MauveisChubby"

*Slang for "kills." As Science Fiction and Fantasy users explain (to the OP's question, "Did I misunderstand the meaning here?"):

1. It is clear as day […] "thins them out" means and can only mean and has only ever meant "cull." / The clear and obvious meaning (kill) is the only meaning I have ever seen "thins them out" used by for example farmers or hunters - kill a few of 'em. / But sure, it could be a (dark!) humorous way of referring to, say, "exiled" or "sent to some other realm".
2. Like any ribald and fantastical period children's story, it is packed with slaughter, typically horrific, from beginning to end. Just as in classic-era "cowboys and Indians" movies, and indeed small-children's movies like say Star Wars, minor characters get killed left right and center, usually brutally. […] Pan's body count of disposable "pirates" etc in the story is Terminator-like (source: "Did Peter Pan, in the novel, kill every one of the Lost Boys as they showed signs of starting to grow up?" 2024).

This idea—of presenting frontier violence (normally abject) to would-be practitioners while they're still growing up—is a tried-and-true imperial device; re: Aristotle's "give me a boy until he is seven and I will show you the man"; e.g., Tolkien and Cameron's refrains, as I discuss them (re: "The Quest for Power"). The state's playground (and bread and circus) is ours to subvert:

The original telling of the Peter Pan story is so much more complex than the Disney movie we all know and love. /For one thing, Peter is not portrayed as a loveable imp, but as a forgetful and uncaring boyish character, while the ever-hated Captain Hook is actually shown to be a morally fraught gentleman, with a vengeance. / For another thing, the subject of death is broached without much formality, and a Lost Boy could die as soon as any dastardly Pirate. Such is the way of things in Neverland (source: Life Gazing's "Peter Pan and Wendy," 2016).

(ibid.)

Sex work review: Mauve is a wonderful model who achieves activism through art. Stressing body positivity and liberation with her own body's labor value tied to art, this includes collabs; e.g., inside my book series, which features her multiple times; i.e., as someone I find tremendously beautiful, yes, but also game: eager and willing to partake in acts of activism married to art, produced between us according to the boundaries doing so demonstrates (re: "Illustrating Mutual Consent," from "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents," 2024). To that, I would normally include her as a muse in my galleries, had she given permission. Lacking it, the work she does remains incredibly important (the same goes for every model that I've worked with/featured in my series). I'd like to explain the value in some of that, here, making this review a mini-essay of sorts—a novelty/anomaly for this page, but one begot from Mauve's inspiring presence within my work!

First, Mauve is a newer model, one who appears primarily in "'They're Making the Frogs Gay!'; or, a Sex Worker's Musings on Tactical Frivolity to Combat Racism (and Other Bigotries)" (2026). Go and read that if you want an in-depth analysis of our teamwork; i.e., tied to camp/rape play during ludo-Gothic BDSM (reversing the abjection process by using public nudism: as a monstrous-feminine, anti-predatory means of weapons and armor versus state doubles). Said work, in turn, informs "State Vampirism" (2026); i.e., as a larger research corpus, one concerning Amazonomachia* that speaks poetically to universal liberation: versus elite predation on labor/nature, whose theatrical betrayals bleed into real life—cops being the pirates and criminals they accuse others of,  and whose terror/counterterror binary capital anisotropically monopolizes for itself: the pirate's pimp/whore aesthetic, whose "ancient" arguments of sex and force revive in quotes/alienate and fetishize accordingly under crisis, and which cryptonymically further Kristeva's abjection process. What's a girl to do but fuck back, reversing the process mid-cryptonymy (to show and hide, mid-alienation-and-fetishization by capital/state powers in crisis; i.e., bread and circus with a retro-future flavor that pirates historically reify and exhibit)?

*Essentially cops and robbers, the modern-day Amazons-and-Gorgons schtick dating hauntologically back to Ancient Athens.

The joy of Gothic is that anyone can play at pirates. Children learn through play as something that shows and hides different things; i.e., that capital polices labor with, regarding sex and force being played with: that workers aren't allowed to play with unless doing upholds state models, per war game. The same goes for adult, which aren't wholly separate anymore than life and make-believe are, and/or pornography and art. Through these, we can draw up the map—its symbols and boundaries, on canvas and off, able to interrogate and ultimately redefine how society's rules parse such matters; i.e., how workers should reify-then-interrogate power through behaviors of play during games: as normally owned by the ruling class (or not) through different mantras; e.g., "keep out" and "no girls allowed," etc, under Gamergate (a precursor to modern-day TERFs). Loaded with Numinous threats (of nature/wild animals but also safety/danger tied to vengeful nuclear models traveling in doubled language*), such bargains make a shaky-yet-playful, powder-keg promise of radial change; re: of the whore's revenge during ludo-Gothic BDSM, a given example "shaking things up" using what she's got (regardless of gender but often female, under Western models).

*The pirate ship as both extension of the owner and their home sailing in "dangerous waters," policed by good actors and bad—an ontological-and-phenomenological statement to the world as "divvied up" and something to seek in mythical, doubled forms of piracy. Said doubles generally purvey a cartoonish, family-friendly approach towards crossdress; e.g., Captain Amelia from Treasure Planet† (above, 2002) echoing the Sphinx of Oedipus Rex (429 BC) but also the Halloween slut: as creature-of-magic; i.e., doggedly pursuing "home" as something to take with them, wherever they go, and whose "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" the state will pursuit in its own half-real warships (that pimp the whore avoiding abuse as Lady Luck might, agent-of-fortune):

Masquerading as a man with a reason
My charade is the event of the season
And if I claim to be a wise man, well
It surely means that I don't know
On a stormy sea of moving emotion
Tossed about, I'm like a ship on the ocean
I set a course for winds of fortune (Kansas' "Carry On, Wayward Son," 1976).

Rock-'n-rock theatre aside (which the Gothic happily and operatically employs, danger-disco), it's a vastly liminal sentiment—one shared both by adults and children, passing through "oceans of discord' while merging devices for safety with sexual power and raw, war-like force (the ancient taking of wealth through military action: re: Weber). Pirates are terrorists but also rebels/troublemaking role models; i.e., punching up from positions of criminality the state tries (and fails) to monopolize, one territory to the next.

†Ron Clements and John Musker of Disney fame, reviving a dead genre just as Radcliffe and company did, centuries prior (a circular resurrection/romance with/forgery of the past as habitually "pirate," in its reimaginings).

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

This brings us to the pirate drawing (above). It's seemingly "just a picture," but—like a treasure map—contains code as part of a naked scheme: a frank announcement of open conquest, but one that doesn't yield up its contents at first glance! In short, it's cryptic, the ensuing show/conceal scheme (the fog of war) begging repeated study to get to the bottom of. It's nerdy and sexy—unfurling and fusing in ways Mauve happily takes part in. In my usual spirit of dialectical-material analysis and performance, then, I've since written down my thoughts having worked with Mauve—as binding cryptonymy and abjection, through teamwork, to my aforementioned bodies of work, and where Mauve's body as I portray it unabashedly celebrates the usual reversals; i.e., while signifying the Gorgon as pirate whore to euphorically revive and embrace, mid-charter and its partition (embedded, for emphasis):

(source: Eric Juneau's "Analyzing the Disney Villains: Captain Hook (Peter Pan)," 2012)

The state decays by design, one whose crisis workers of all ages navigate in Neo-Gothic forms (abstractions of state crisis and subterfuge, but also bandits and ghosts of dead men). To it, exploitation and liberation occupy a shared stage, in Gothic (classically the chronotope or traveling castle, but also pirate ship: as having a similar ghostly/otherwordly function—above). There, pirates are clownish vice characters par excellence, dead metaphors both cool and fun; i.e., revered for their uncanny ability to misbehave but also evoke alien, far-off/off-limits (unknown) pleasures of a guilty sort (under Western models/a Protestant ethic). Onstage and off, vice characters emblematize Gothic, whose half-real theatre furthers or reverses abjection; i.e., fascism and Communism occupy the same basic kayfabe—one whose ensuing frivolity cryptonymically shows and hides different things, mid-camp: within abject (alien/fetish) spaces of concealment, but also through warring motives (and motions) of actors, good-and-bad; e.g., Captain Hook being something of an invading plotter/vampirically flamboyant gay man as foil for Peter Pan

Hook is a plotter. Rather than take the enemy head-on, he uses cunning to not only lure his enemy out, but put him at a disadvantage before attacking. He can think ahead, and despite his fighting prowess, prefers to stage a ruse or a trap. I don’t know if that’s because he finds it more delightfully cruel to do so, or he lacks confidence in his abilities. He did lose his hand in a fight, and he’s forever victim to Pan’s childish taunts (ibid.).

whose original novel was written by probably-a-pedophile J.M. Barrie (whose connotations of a pedophilic Never, Neverland are explored further in Alien: Earth; re: "Straight Dog Water," 2025). For Barrie, Peter wasn't the hero; he was the villain Barrie eventually rescued from villainhood, doing so by inventing in another pirate in Pan's place (a shadow): "But despite these familiar trappings, Barrie's version of Peter Pan is quite darker than the character audiences know and love today. Barrie's original draft depicts Pan as a villain, kidnapping children from their beds; Captain Hook was only added later, as a theatrical device to distract the audience while stagehands changed the scenery. 'To die would be an awfully big adventure,' says Peter Pan in one of the novel's most famous lines — a sentiment, coming from a child, that's both courageous and ghoulish" (source: Charles Moss' "The surprisingly morbid origins of Peter Pan," 2015). Indeed, the spectre of child abuse, pedophilia and British xenophobia/crumbling Imperialism collectively haunt the narrative, ergo its playful "map space" of childhood; i.e., as suitably alien-yet-indiscrete, mid-interrogation (the home as alien pirate, helping the abused in society "learn to fly" while "swimming with sharks [or crocodiles]"). We whores can embody such things for ourselves: the fantasy of power as something to re-establish and redistribute as workers need, thereby conveying the very socio-material inequalities pirates speak to; i.e., under state dominion (and lies), necessity the mother of invention (and not always the polite, British-household kind prescribed by Disney and Barrie; re: Hook, below, something of a dandy lover-of-boys).

I digress. The 1954 Disney adaptation remains incredibly racist in its own right—the "swarthy" big-nosed pirates, yes (which lean into Orientalist tropes, above), but also shamelessly cowboys-and-Indians vaudeville; i.e., of a British-coded nostalgia, regarding Americana frontier stories through Cartesian/setter-colonial yarns: so-called "White Indian" or "leather-stocking" stories sold to kids across the pond—which my friends and I reclaim, Mauve and I doing so, here, through another shared, concentric labor exchange. Though dialectical-material, they remain regressive; i.e., abject, half-real spheres of territory to conjure up and reexplore, thereby send our own signatures out from and back into polite society. So a Promethean Quest, or pursuit of the Numinous past, can marry to monomyth, there-and-back-again yarns workers utilize; i.e., dipping "into Hell/the river Styx" in search of power to achieve heroic (and villainous) uses; re: the whore's revenge* during ludo-Gothic BDSM/rape play* while nature as monstrous-feminine* (or those "of nature" under state models/Cartesian dualism) punches up, in highly liminal ways: hugging-the-alien* as whore including pirate whores of a more literal sort—an aesthetic of adventure and theft, which pirates and playing at pirates, mid-Gothic, very much encapsulate (re: tactical frivolity reversing abjection). Fear of theft, in Gothic = fear of rape as lose of control, ergo dialogs concerned with sex and force being unstable under state inequity subsequently camped through calculated risk—the ensuring quest for power (the palliative Numinous) being a highly Promethean but also dualistic, policed, piratic discipline the state cannot hope to monopolize, alone (through violence, terror and monsters, which pirates [and their aversion to women through buggery and matelotage] neatly encapsulate)!

*All concepts unpacked in "Frogs Gay!" and "State Vampirism."

(source)

Power is always "in dispute," in Gothic, ergo something to perform in highly volatile, disordered ways; i.e., "ergodic," meaning "through non-trivial effort," whose ensuing entropy (chaos) applies easily enough to pirates (war is work). In turn, such things can be reclaimed/rediscussed, incorporating different modular elements of the performer-in-question "wrecking home": a given actor identifying with vice characters however they wish—something to project and communicate different ideas, reclaiming and reviving them through the Gothic language of swashbuckling theft/adventure stories across space and time. Skull = theft, famously relaid by Radcliffe's Black Veil into the 1800s (and fascination with hauntological [retro-future] pirate stories—those Radcliffe herself sold back to a growing-but-nascent middle class, whose consumers therein clutched anxiously at pearls; re: Punter and Hogle). Capital—Disney or otherwise—treats abjection as a lucrative sideshow attraction, its subsequent cryptonymy draining worker wallets while endearing their next-in-line: to an ongoing nostalgia haunted by state abuse, mid-Romance (often videogames, above and below).

(source)

Luckily, there's no monopoly on theft, whores a kind of pirate whose "swaggy embellishments" can swing abjection back in labor's flavor. Everyone loves the whore, and pirates are cool as fuck; re: Hook something my trans, Michigan ass grew up on, and whose closeted, alter-ego half fell paradoxically in love; i.e., with the perceived "abuser" (the captain of the ship) as key to me and my friends' liberation: an ironic source of comfort/performative war on child hearts and minds; i.e., before, during and after they grow up: as the Peter Pan story disseminates, across all registers. Mortal Kombat (1993), for example, showcases the Lost Boys' infamous ability to fly (on a stage where flying would admittedly be useful, above)! Of all stripes, pirates are rebels to a true/false degree—those who, mid-performance, convey their own value dualistically upon themselves; i.e., as being both the "black mirror" map and holder of the map, sporting tremendous "wares" in every respect. Amazing chest ahead! Full booty to plunder! Land back, labor back, sex back, whatever the pun! So do lovers of pirates/workers emblematic of piracy (the kind useful to Communism's Gothic arm, as my project entails) collectively and synchronistically show and hide, but also threaten whatever we want to break Capitalist Realism, "on the Aegis" (the pirate concerned with legendary warriors, but also sea monsters and ghosts of old dead things, spectres-of-Medusa)! Yarrrrr!

(artist: Mauve)

The state-in-crisis decays—a fact (and rot) it historically-materially conceals, furthering abjection through concealment; re: cryptonymy showing different hidden things, including theft (which vampirism is, leaving a trail of skeletons and buried treasure in its wake). Here, whores only ask to curate themselves as they see fit—the agency of which challenges capital (and fascism) through ludo-Gothic BDSM having the whore's revenge. To that, Gothic Communism is a compound, holistically intersectional discipline—one whose rowdy theatricality interrogates generational trauma, "across the board," and which relies collectively on awareness and teamwork as things to continuously raise; re: like a pirate flag that reminds the elite of different things: dead (wo)men do tell tales, and men cannot eat gold. Mauve is queen of the pirates, as such—a title meant less to express "superior" or exclusive positions within vertical hierarchies, and more as actors through dialectical-material studies, threading "choppy waters" over time. By reifying power as Mauve and I have, but doing so as part of a larger conversation/artistic movement, we negotiate labor exchanges through art; i.e., that illustrate consent as mutual, informed and yes, adventuresome. All happen under flexible roles of performance that share and (ex)change power as needed (and operate, as the Gothic and pirates do, within taboos; re: from Radcliffe to us, bitches-love-pirates). Racism, sexism, fatphobia and queerphobia, etc = systemic bigotries that require adventure to break (thus Capitalist Realism).

To conclude, pirates = abjection, mid-cryptonymy. Fortune favors the bold, then, and few can rival the fun and daring-yet-down-to-Earth character Mauve delivers, but also inspires through different creative acts built on "older skeletons." Captain Hook was ultimately her idea, one given to me through conversation ("Whatever you like! It seems you've got a Disney villain theme going anyway, haha"). The fun of revolution, then, lies in whatever anarchy typically results—of disguising and broadcasting its more radical, revolutionary elements, reversing abjection to "free Medusa" anywhere and everywhere: through play indulging in poetic taboos, the Gorgon paradoxically "in chains" while freeing herself, a harvest of forbidden fruit promoting this-or-that to end capital as a system of exploitation (and for which racism, fatphobia, and other bigotries en/pandemically "call home").  To that, Mauve's a brick house, but also lighthouse tied to larger dialectical-material struggles she shines like a beacon upon herself onto others! She's the powder keg—a hysterical galle(r)y of sin, stacked as hell/armed for bear (above) and ready to explode while looking for hugs in pirate-like ways! Hail to the queen! She'll rock your world!

Of Gorgons and Looks that Kill: Maddie's Review

Watch out her poison heart, she's a dragon lady
Look into her crystal ball, it tells all
Watch out now she's breathing fire, she's a dragon lady
Look into her crimson eyes
Say good-bye (source).

—Midnight; "Dragon Lady," on Crimson Glory's Crimson Glory (1986)

(artist: Maddie Minx)

Artist: Maddie [as shown on their promo page on my site]

About the model: Maddie's Bluesky bio reads: "✨{18+only}✨they/them …feral librarian of pleasure… ~6' All Natural Tatted Ginger 🇺🇸American Midwest Amateur 🏳️‍🌈Non-Binary/Pan/Poly ~Kink/Fetish Friendly Switch linktr.ee/godisaminx throne.com/minxymaddie"

Sex work review: It's not everyday you get to meet someone who embodies your life's work, let alone see naked and play with accordingly. For me, that's Maddie—standing in for Medusa, my chosen sigil for Gothic Communism (re: "Always a Victim," 2024). Beyond  their frankly awesome tattoos—and combined with Maddie's being both incredibly friendly and hot, but also capable—they boast a stellar work ethic, bangin' bod, caring personality and worldly sense of camaraderie. Maddie is the Gorgon; i.e., as I see it—both seeking and "finding Medusa" while standing among similar cuties' "terrifying powers," having the whore's revenge (escaping the pimp while still enjoying sex work as the vector of escape/material gain; re: "Rape Reprise," 2024). But few emblematize Her Majesty—the Big Whore and her intimidating aura —quite so keenly as Maddie. It's not just an otherwordly aesthetic, but ability to command power in paradoxical ways both strict and gentle, light and dark, etc; i.e., like Medusa, whose "shadow" (simulacrum) Maddie nails with aplomb. It's "to meet someone where they are," my husband explains—appearing fierce but actually a sign of respect (as the Maori phrase it), one made seemingly to ask, "Are you here for peace or war? The land welcomes you and you it" through various profound exchanges crossing boundaries; i.e., building a rapport between host and visitor(s) from tapu to noa (a ritual of sacred restriction* to ordinary/safe, moving energy in warrior-like ways).

*"The ātea (space outside)," Bay explains, "is considered the domain of the God of War (Tūmatauenga), while the wharenui (meeting house) is the domain of the God of Peace (Rongo). The ceremony moves visitors from the domain of war to peace." It's very Gothic!

(source: Gymeagary's "Tamaki Wharenui within the Clan Marae," 2015)

To it, I've spent my entire adult life working with many-a-cutie—all laboring in search of something I call "the palliative Numinous," or healthy presence of unequal power/eustress to camp trauma with during ludo-Gothic BDSM (another term of mine, and one whose own spectrum of calculated risk occupies spaces of play to perform with/give unequal, Numinous [divine, alien, awesome] power as Gorgons do): intimations of rape that allow one to embrace power as raw, intense and, yes, fun through play of different kinds: to punch up collectively through visitors in either direction, seeking common ground mid-abjection (fetish and alienation, chief-most being the liberation for all workers occupying nature as [monstrous-feminine] stewards). Through feelings of safety haunted by power's abuse (which rape is under state power), Medusa metaphorically "turns people to stone," but that can mean so many things (a poetic device, specifically metaphor describing anti-predatory safeguards that fend off attackers while Medusa sleeps; re: "Medusa Misunderstood," 2024).

So I don't want to give the wrong impression, here: Maddie isn't scary/dread-inducing on their face (that so-called "strict" vibe). Instead, they were nurturing in ways that met my trauma where it's at—all to occupy a zone of play/roles within said zone that both needed to enjoy ourselves, mid-play. Rape play (which we didn't do, but for which the Gorgon intimates through an imposing presence) isn't automatically a given scenario of actual explicit deeds "spelling harm out," but merely the fantastical presence of power that puts "rape" in quotes; i.e., to ponder the presence thereof, which someone helps you live with, any-which-way. It isn't always literal, then, but a seeking of unequal power in ways I can't fully distinguish; i.e., from past abuse, which—at a thrilling glance, pointedly of a mighty alien not wholly divorced from my world—I feel impressed by in Maddie: as both gentle and strong because my wires are crossed, and because Maddie's just that hot and capable. In other words, they're an Amazon with a darker side that—far from suggesting actual punishment or harm (rape or otherwise)—denotes the very guardian paradox a good mommy affords, mid-Amazonomachia. Denoting the gargoyle's destroyer/protector aura, Maddie has "pull," and in spades/ways my work on Amazons/Gorgons typically explores through play. It's a mood, one with modular elements; e.g., "soft pleasure domme" and "dark mommy domme," etc, summing up how I see the Gorgon/saw Medusa on Maddie (re: their tattoo), playing with me like we did.

To that, I felt totally safe with Maddie, who was nothing but sweet/never performed as "strict." Rather, it's how I feel power as something my body recognizes paradoxically as "danger"; i.e., in ways Maddie helped me theatrically navigate without shame or storm clouds (merely a sky that, if provoked, could storm if called to): I could tell them how I felt, including when I felt safe with them despite the trauma forever living inside me (the egg that can't unscramble). In the heat of the moment, many muses meet the same basic role—walking the line between Great Destroyer and Archaic Mother to perform power as something to establish, then exchange care/danger as needed; i.e., helping nurture victims of former abuse that exchange vulnerability (therefore trust) on both ends: the dom serves the sub, who gives themselves to the dom (and switching roles, from time to time). In that respect, Maddie embodies my work and its highest virtues, in practice—someone who instantly put me "at ease," when speaking to/playing with an exchange of power and labor (which play is, and which ludo-Gothic BDSM employs). I felt an immense sense of confidence and control, in their presence, but also genuine satisfaction/delight that went both ways: "Oh, you dare approach me?"

Here, Maddie gave gradual relief as something to build up to, all while being immensely supportive; i.e., of my work, before, during and after my approaching of them. What's more, they helped me find balance, mid-session; i.e., insofar as I felt I could be myself around them/give myself over to them momentarily while asking for goodies; e.g., asking about their sex life, or to hear their voice in my ear saying how to fuck them. They're a true switch, as such, and I enjoyed that flexibility with them—their easy mixing up of various things a deft practitioner conveys, moment-to-moment, sex-is-power passing back and forth Blake's "Heaven in a Wildflower." So the Gorgon = that awesome potential and thrilling joy of play (frisson and jouissance), one the Numinous conveys per Promethean Quest "in the flesh"; Maddie  embodies that paradigm—a gentle, palliative storm, offering (as they put it), "intense smut and feral energy." They've got the goods and know how to use 'em—the black castle and thunder it holds, a force of nature promoting unknown pleasures, pussy-on the-chainwax (the highest compliment I can give)!

(artist: Maddie Minx)

Screaming for Vengeance: It Began with a Whisper (original series conclusion, 2025)

"Rawr."

—Animala, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavara (2001)

(source: Alex Cranz' "25 Years Ago We Got Genre's Most Unapologetic Heroine," 2020)

This is the series finale I wrote in June 2025. The idea behind it applies to Volume Four and its essays, so I'll include it here; i.e., as a de facto "conclusion" to something that, in truth, never really ends. "I am woman, hear me roar!" indeed. Keep screaming, girls. It feels good—both a means to let off steam and legitimately fight back in a variety of ways.

[The conclusion (and 2026 note) has its own page.]

Until Next Time; or, the Power of Dreams: Picking Up Where I Leave Off

There are those who scoff at dreams and call them a waste of time. But dreams are as much a part of you as the beating of your heart. The gift of dreaming, of fantasizing, is precious because it expands one life into countless other lives […] Those who cannot dream are to be pitied by those who can. They will never know the magic of slipping through from Realtime into Dreamtime.

—Michael Ingpen, The Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were (1985)

"Class war is ass war." "Land back, labor back, sex back." "Worker rights vs state's rights/the nuclear model." "Assimilation is poor stewardship." "When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis (to break state vampirism/monopolies and Capitalist Realism)." "No Omelas whores." "Infinite power, infinite forms; flow = function." "Nudity is strength." "Sex work is work." "There are no perfect victims (or abusers)." "Gothic Communism punches up in duality." And so on.

Such refrains, as I say them, haven't changed much since last year (or the year before that); i.e. since last I put a bow on Gothic gay-anarcho Communism, and now again after putting it to practice, here, through ludo-Gothic BDSM (and synonymous ideas, like tactical frivolity and camp). A huge part of synthesizing praxis lies in dreams—of seeing the dream world as something we want alongside the nightmare we fear to push towards/away from, respectively. Like a vampire and their prey, these aren't wholly separate; nor is the role either plays fully obvious on its face (abjection = flow and flow [not aesthetic] = function, but I digress). Capital gentrifies into liberalism and decays into fascism, a false copy of something that never was. A lie, a curse—what the Māori call makutu, or witchcraft. Development away from capital is a cycle that never ends, replete with dreams (of the dark "deathly" sort, below) and the confusion/concerns they invariably invite, cryptonymy-and-abjection. Setting the land free to embrace our mortality versus playing Prometheus for the umpteenth time:

(artist: Alexandria Huntington)

Likewise, the Gothic and Marx aren't mutually exclusive. Nor is unpaid labor purely the stuff of unironic "hysteria," "counterrevolution," "bourgeois degeneracy" or anything else to gaslight, kettle and pimp. Renowned for its terrors and chance happenings (close encounters), Gothic isn't pure wish fulfillment (and guilty pleasure) scapegoating nature in sugary Halloween doubles; it's the awesome, terrifyingly abject power of something mightier than ourselves: the marriage of the historical past (and its material continuation) with the mythical—a Numinous, Promethean space of endless possibilities through dialectical-material dispute (and Faustian exchange).  Of facing death (radical change), which Gothic maturity is.

A dualistic avatar of, and bridge between, life and death, Medusa and her revenge—whether as undead, demonic and/or wild animal—revives cryptonymically through dreams; i.e., preferential code, given flesh through poetic shorthand to synthesize theory with whatever poetry we desire (our creative successes). A mighty means of disguise and vantage, that's how Gothic Communism works—a holistically intersectional solution to an intersectional problem, one felt back and forth "where power is" (a performance). Circular time, ruins, rebirth. Embody it, and become one with the universe, the Wisdom of the Ancients (and the Ancestors): merging written and oral stories through the great canvas you own, reversing abjection (and state predation) during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Yourselves and your bodies. With them, don't accept your lot as it is given by the ruling class fleecing you. Demand better treatment while hunting for these things (and our enemies); bounce it back, cryptonymy-and-abjection, weird-attracts-weird.

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu; cited: "Hailing Hellions")

To that, you are not powerless; your means of connecting with others to survive capital and bait/communicate its predation are right in front of you. Hybridize, the Gothic a multimedia mode of dreams. So even if I never write again/never draw another cutie in my life (fat chance), don't be afraid to dream, yourselves (and meet/fuck your own muses who, sword-in-the-sheath, radically change and transform your life). Anyone can do what my friends and I do. So draw from the same proverbial well—the same spectrums and modules—to make your own monsters; i.e., no matter how often the state intervenes, invades and doubles them in bad faith, doing so to harvest people, animals and the land (nature as a whole) on repeat. Change starts in the mind, salvation a thing to pursue while inside capital and its illusions weighing on us.

In keeping with Ingpen (from the epigram). "Everything we accept as part of our lives was once a fantasy." He continues, "A scientist might deplore the notion that there is any link between science and fantasy, but fantasy always comes first. It is the creature of imagination, and without imagination there would be no science. Every invention is the result of fantasy." Verily, Communism is an attempt to imagine a better world, one currently constrained by an imagination state artefacts shrink, and which Gothic Communism borrows from the past to grow into increasingly audible/visible spectres (similar to Marx but gayer).

To it, Gothic doesn't dream small; it—like a black castle on the windswept moors—exaggerates to operatic highs and lows, poking at hidden realities hiding in plain sight. Darkness visible. Make it a lever (or a weapon, below) and with it, move the Earth. Decolonize Gothic through new creations that subvert eclipse old ones, but also use them (and their stereotypes/shadows of violence) for spare parts to anisotropically and apotropaically terrify the state with (reversing terror/counterterror [and similar binaries] as you do). Your "guiding moonlight," as it were, shining in the dark but also made of darkness (the usual Gothic paradoxes). Like the pussy on the chainwax, its meaning is often occluded but well-trod—a boomerang coming home or a castle to come home to. Every body a castle; every castle housing a vault, library or dungeon to ransack of so many wonderous (and awful) things. Revolution responds to material conditions, but happens inside the mind using the body as a lever to gain advantage; re: while "on the hip," en medias res—a lesson in disguise, camping the canon to subvert stereotypes and death warrants into weapons for workers, mid-iconoclasm. Rebel = terrorist, in state eyes, but this (and other binaries) reverse and elide easily enough, on the Aegis.

And with that, I leave you with one last quote (my book echoing Ingpen's): "This book is planned to help you release your own powers of fantasy: to show you that in slipping through the shadow curtain [from Plato's cave to Radcliffe's Black Veil at Udolpho] you are following an honourable tradition." Expect contradiction, all part of a larger dialectic (wrestling match) we hybridize and embellish, taking turns "on the hip"; i.e., as needed, spreading vital essence back into a larger hunting grounds: the ghosts of the past, at our sides and ready—when called—to become whatever we need to survive and pass our own spectres happily along (to live and die in tandem, in and out of madness). Not an ignominious death or defeat to meekly accept, but a glorious revival steeped in gravitas: the Gorgon shrinking tyranny through ghostly reminders of inevitable change, which again death is, and adventures of all sorts—to invent and invite what Tolkien would call "something Tookish" (queer) to wake up and make mischief. Don't be afraid to experiment, turning the nuclear model upside-down.

Happy hunting, comrades.