HOW TO SURVIVE 2024. GAMEFAQS. CONDENSED WALKTHROUGH. EASY SEVEN STEP PROCESS. PATENT.
Step one: try not to die while alive.
EVERYBODY DIED.
There’s this concept called kyriarchy. Some concepts come from strange places. Kyriarchy is a term that represents a superstructure of domination and submission writ large over social relation. From kyriarchy we might derive sexism, racism, ableism, fatphobia, and the rest. It’s a very useful term when describing social roles. The term was invented by a feminist theologian named Elisabeth Fiorenza, who is presently a Professor of Divinity at Harvard, not too far from where I live. I suppose if she didn’t mind a lapsed miaphysite weirdo knocking on the door of her office, I could ask her myself about the specifics of the term.
In context, the theory that necessitated the term was simple. Professor Fiorenza had prior analyzed the life and path of Paul the Apostle, as well as the women he surrounded himself with. Notably, a fair hunk of canon surrounding our good friend Paul was about women, and how they were as (or more!) righteous than their male counterparts. Significant pains were taken to highlight the equality of women under the nascent Christian tradition. This existed in tension with other parts of the canon, wherein household codes minimized women, and positions in the clergy was restricted to men exclusively. How could the same man cite that ‘male and female were one… under Jesus Christ’ and then enforce an exclusively patriarchial power structure on Christ’s behalf?
Professor Fiorenza posits that the patriarchy was exported from Rome and infiltrated the canon through a civic syncretism. Some cultural machine from within Rome, an interrelated network of relationships which Roman identity was predicated upon, was incompatible with the equality of women under Christ. So they fought, and women lost. Rome then did what it did best; it became.
See, Rome is not a state. Rome is a virus. People catch it, and it takes. It transforms them, warping their limbs around rules that sublimate from the air, severing their pasts wholesale and tying them to the Story Of Rome. They grow full and bloody, and are then slaughtered by the steady march of history. Rome is a disease that can survive in the flesh forever. When the people are gutted, even the carrion crows are infected. The Ottomans, the Gauls, the Saxons, the Egyptians. The Silk Road. The Americas — get this, just for them, it became a real virus.
Viruses are cellular machines. This machine is called kyriarchy. If you catch it, you die. You die standing, walking, breathing. You become a part of Rome, and Rome is always-dying never-alive, as viruses are from the moment they burst from their birthing cell.
Christianity caught it, by Professor Fiorenza’s estimation, and it turned Christianity into Rome. Christendom. Political clergy. The fucking pope. What is this? Christ was a Jewish carpenter, in case you’ve watched the movie but haven’t read the novel. Where did he ask for this? Where did he ask for the procession of cardinals, the ostentation of churches, the microfiche splitting of theology into indexable sentences? That’s Rome, the vast bureaucracy. That’s Rome, with the take-out restaurants and the apartment blocks, in 0 and 2024 both. That’s Rome unchanging, forever. Of course the Pope has a Popemobile. Christ wanted every American ready to form a standing army so that they could crush the Gauls — the Son of God wants YOU to buy an AR-15. Look at his straight spine, the curve of his chin. Doesn’t he look the picture perfect patrician?
And you have it too. You’re dead. Look at me. You’re dead. I’m dead. Look at our letters, our words, our alpha-bet, our logos, pathos. Our Senate or Parliament. Our web forums. We have it. We’re already dead. Do you feel Caesar’s finger on your carotid yet? This isn’t fucking history, all of this. This is narrative.
We like to call the process of being infected by the virus “culture”. Just to rub in the irony. Okay?
In the remainder of this work, I’ll be referring to ‘the kyriarchy’, or ‘kyriarchy’ in the indefinite. I’m speaking of the Roman variant I described above, because it’s the one I most keenly experience as a citizen (how Roman) of the United States of America. The Roman variant is also by far the most successful at exporting its particular relational structures, at least in the west. That’s not to say that it’s the sole kyriarchy that’s ever existed. The Hindu caste system is a kyriarchy. There are as many kyriarchies as there are civilizations. Rather, there were. Now there are only a few. Guess what happened?
Step two: try not to be a necrophile.
EVERYBODY FUCKED.
There’s a legend about how poisoners used to make the most poisonous poison. They’d stuff a bunch of snakes in a clay pot, then not feed them. Eventually, they’d eat each other for food. The one that survived was thought to have the most potent venom, due to having ingested the venom of every other snake. Kyriarchy is the last snake. It’s very good at eating snakes. Its venom changes a little, sometimes. But it’s still the same snake.
Here’s what being infected with kyriarchy feels like. Your vision flattens to a two-dimensional disc. Inscribed on it is the object-world. Where you would see, in the third dimension, the history of an object, or the process used to make it, or the person who granted you that object, or any context at all, there is rather a difference in elevation on the disc. There are seven different elevations. Here they are, in no particular order:
WHO IS MY GOD?
WHO IS MY MASTER?
WHO IS MY ALLY?
WHO IS MY OPPONENT?
WHO LOVES ME?
WHO ORIGINATES ME?
WHO CAN I KILL WITHOUT REMORSE?
Soft power is different from hard power. The kyriarchy’s body, its virome, lives in the space of soft power. When it strikes, it uses its zombie-limbs in the material. These limbs enact hard power. Mao once said that political power blooms from the barrel of a gun. I love Mao Zedong, but he was doing chest compressions on a nation on the verge of becoming more Rome. Of course political power blooms from the barrel of a revolutionary’s gun. A doctor only gets to influence the immaterial from the material. Rome-power, the kyriarchy, unfurls its razor claws from nowhere. Political power blooms from the carrion fields. The dead rise and start asking whether it’s cool if they fuck each other. That’s where the guns come in.
Queerness is differentiative. To be queer, one must conceive of straightness. To conceive of straightness, one must associate heterosexuality with normativity. Normativity is, of course, proliferative. Soldiers for the corpse farms. Before we had two and a half children, we had five children. Thank God we have this ready-made set of ideas lying around. What? Where’d they come from? What are you talking about? Are you sick? So the queers don’t get to stand in the kyriarchial constructions of sexual relationships. They’re Other. The kyriarchy fucks its way into the future, and if you won’t fuck alongside it, well, let’s strap you onto this device and see if it kills you or if it makes you okay in the brain again, you Pervert. How dare you use your dead flesh, how dare you pervert it to your own ends? Don’t you know how this works? WHO ORIGINATED YOU?
So the queers invented their own thing. There’s a long-standing tradition in people who have been Got by the kyriarchy — the colonized peoples, the proletarians, the racialized sexualized disenfranchised Others — that there’s only one thing to do when you waken to your own rotting flesh. Humans need culture. Why not make your own, or at least import the shattered remains of whatever the snake couldn’t digest? Of course, you’re still in the snake’s guts yourself, the rotting dead, so materials are scarce. We get gospel music. We get the first major victory of feminism being suffrage. We get tops and bottoms. In the spaces of heretofore nonsecularized sexual deviancy, we get BDSM.
Kyriarchy is a structure of domination and submission. Of course, someone’s gotta take the dick, or the strap, or the finger, or the fist. A dominant. And the requisite submissive. Here we are acting out the social role as sexual transgressivity: Doctor-Patient, Teacher-Student, Father-Son. To eroticize these sacred links in the moral web of the kyriarchy is high sin. A whole symbology emerges in queer spaces. Sappho in clay fragments, Achilles and his olive oil. The vajra, the Scythians. Drag is Mardi Gras fashion. Bootstrapping a culture from digested narrative throughlines is tough, but someone has to lay the bricks that’ll get thrown later. When in Rome, what can you do but do as the Romans do? Except, the queers can do it queer-ways. Subvert. Win. Take it back. We got gay marriage. We got HRT, kind of. Did we beat the kyriarchy? Did we shatter its bonds?
Of course we fucking didn’t. Are you paying attention? We’re dead.
Step three: try not to choke on the stench of death.
EVERYBODY LIKED ME.
Let’s talk about fandom for a moment.
Capitalism is the face of kyriarchy now. Adam Smith writes about the invisible hand of the free market. You know who else is huge, invisible, and a layer of reality behind everything else? The virome gets a new set of tools to enforce hard power. Bourgeois revolutions depose blood-soaked kings and grasp the vacuum of nobility themselves. Let’s trade, they say, in the only thing that matters, and let the one who has the most of it rule supreme. That thing is time. It looks like coins and paper, kind of like it used to. But here’s a clock, and for each corpse, a reference sheet for converting an hour of their time to hand-value. You don’t sell products anymore. You sell time. You just make the products. But you — you can’t buy time. You don’t have enough time to buy someone else’s time, you silly little meat puppet. You still have to buy the products, though. Guaranteed sold for less time than it would have taken you to make it yourself. Everyone say thank you and then say Grace, and then take a big bite of what you bought with all that time. Aw, grain mush again? Shame it takes time to eat, you could have sold that time to get anti-masturbation corn flakes instead.
Eventually, thanks to the terror of the Other and the need to advertise all the flim-flam bullfuck of the factory era, literacy skyrockets among even the lumpenproletariat. Radio, film, television. Oh, my god, Ruth Coalminer can watch a screenplay every evening? Start the TV dinner foundries! I need all sweating manual laborers hitting hamburgers with hammers, STAT! I better see sparks flying!
The kyriarchy at this time in the West has this rule: Women stay at home, men go work. Women do domestic labor, men assume a goblin cleans the sink out. Women cook the meat, and women also buy the meat, but men, men eat the meat, and also finance the meat so the women can buy it. So when the man heads out to hit hamburgers with hammers, the woman gets the TV to herself. She gets her stoaaaa-riiiiieees. (I live in Massachusetts, I can say it).
Hey, look, it’s the Beatles! Here’s Mr. Lennon’s famous ham walk.
Beatlemania happens. And the kyriarchy HATES it. Here are a million good women, dedicated to their hubby-doos, openly PHYSICALLY lusting after a bunch of British faggots wearing stupid clothing playing Bob Dylan Elvis Presley music. Elvis happened already, and Elvis had a lot of fans, but the Beatles had a fandom. It could be argued that it is at precisely this point that “cringe” is calcified as an emotional locus in mass Americana.
Fandom is cringe. The first fancam was played on a slide deck in a Star Trek convention by hand, synchronized to music. Homestuck fans play Spin the Faygo and smear unsealed Ben Nye on each other. Before the Burned Furs, you weren’t a furry unless you were willing to drop a few grand on a silly costume and had six to ten non-normative sex deals. (Remember this, it’ll be important later.) Fandom is so fucking cringe — women, effeminate dudes, failed men, all the Other, all the Enemy, getting together to smack stupid plastic bullshit together and go kissy kissy about Hiddleston Fiddleston Downey Spirk Destiel Hetalia. Never mind that Hetalia is fascist, it’s not like anybody ever watched it. SO SAYS THE AGORA, MILKY-EYED WITH WRATH: CRINGE, CRINGE, CRINGE!
They’re not stupid. They know they’re cringe. The point is that they’re cringe. The point is that these reanimated corpses seeking to escape their role under the heel of the kyriarchy have entered a compact of mutual cringe. Here we are, they holler, the media failures. Come care with us. Give a shit! And it worked. I was on Tumblr in 2013. I roleplayed. I engaged in media analysis. I cut my teeth on Homestuck fanfiction. I made a lot of friends, too. And a lot of posts. I even originated an old classic Tumblr neologism. Maybe two or four, who’s counting? Won’t say which, though. Cringe, all. I knew it from the moment I made an account to liveblog Homestuck. I lurked SA before I joined Tumblr. I made my peace.
Hey, remember Dashcon? Dashcon was a critical step on the historical-materialist process of fandom, I swear. Don’t look at me like that, I’m just as dead as you. Trust me? Okay, good. See, Dashcon happened at the exact turning point where the kyriarchy did what it did best when the Other became an enduring cultural force.
Step four: enjoy!
EVERYONE ATE OF MY BODY.
Carthage and Rome were once China and the US. The Pacific Ocean was once the Mediterranean Sea. You must understand, I have to be reductive for any of this to make sense. We’re dead people speaking through cracked lips. All we can think in is metaphor. Regardless, Carthage and Rome were once China and the US, and the Pacific Ocean was the Mediterranean Sea, and this was before they invented realpolitik, and the world was very very small. Alexander the Great’s sons were the European powers fighting over Charlemagne’s feces. Rome and Carthage skirmished for a time, because the common knowledge at the time was that peace was a liminal state. And they were the others’ Other.
Carthage sent some elephants to destroy Rome’s agrarian capacity. Rome sailed a thousand ships around the Mediterranean and flattened Carthage and its colonies into dust, destroyed their bones, paved over their foundations, burned their books, shat in their wells, then pretended that they invented the cothon. We know vanishingly little about Carthage, now. What survives, survives because inland North Africa is far from water. What do we know? They… liked cheese. Marcus Porcius Cato, Rome’s Most Hitler, said that, right next to how Carthage must burn. They wore skull-shaped beads. Neat! They made fish sauce, but so did everyone. Oh, yes, they sacrificed children. We know the Carthaginians sacrificed children. So many children sacrificed in the tophet. It’s the Carthaginian legacy that they did human sacrifice. Only recently have scientists taken a second look and found that the tophet was mostly an ordinary cemetery, and child or animal sacrifices were only taken from the noble classes, only in times of extreme famine or war. Sparta’s coming of age ritual for children was rape and slavery. Sparta makes good soldiers and Carthage kills children.
Viruses are interesting things. When they infect your cells, they don’t just kill them. They inject their viral load into your cells’ very DNA. This viral load can do a number of things; usually, it causes the cell to produce more viruses using its cellular machinery. Then, the cell dies, and the viruses burst forth. Or the cell doesn’t die, but rather emits the viruses through its inter-cell channels. But between injection and ejection, the incubation period can vary quite a lot. Some viruses infect T-cells — the cells that kill viruses, and they force them to attack healthy cells instead, damaging them to attract more T-cells. Other viruses hitch rides in endemic bacteria.
Before Dashcon, the average headline about a fandom convention read as follows:
Smelly Outsiders Gather in Hilton Convention Hall to Trade “Sex Pillows” — Editorial by Moloch Tank Thinkerton
After Dashcon, something very interesting happened, akin to the allowance of the lowest on the kyriarchial chain the luxury of literacy.
Is Fandom the New Shape of the Future? — Editorial by Moloch Tank Thinkerton
Oh my god, they’re eating her! And now they’re going to eat me! OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!
You don’t get fandom anymore. Fandom lives in the comments section. Information is on Fandom dot com. What a fucking joke. Fandom dot com? I’m going to bread dot com to order any bread. Fandom is a billion wide. The Bacon Number between any two fans on the same website is one hundred on average. And with that, cringe is dead. Your well-kempt next door neighbour is waiting for the next season of Boku no School. When I went to school, the only guy willing to talk about anime with me was another smelly autist who insisted that I should give Oreimo a shot. (It’s shlock, incest aside.) Now my coworker’s pumped for Chainsaw Man. I haven’t seen a shipping music video in seven years, just six second long TikTok clip loops set to Imagine Dragons. “First the lightning, then the thun-der!”
This is not a “fandom got too big” argument. This is a “fandom got colonized” argument. Because this is what kyriarchy does. It sails clockwise around the defines of its world and it kills everything you’ve ever loved and all that’s left is corpses and the corpses are smiling with beautiful straight teeth and thinking beautiful straight thoughts and they reach down to pick up their faces, your friends’ faces, and they say please won’t you die with us?
Here is queer culture in the gullet. Pro-anorexia transfems encourage each other to cut their flesh to nothing and cleave from their fat sisters. Black transmascs are double-fist-punched by misogynoir and racialized masculinization by crystal-eyed respectables howling about queer unity. Straight men who are a little too fruity about women are predators, quoth the bisexual flagbearer, harkening to the kyriarchy-relation of the effeminate man as a duplicitous rapist-in-waiting; a replication of transmisogyny. The gold star is a purity ring. Look how easily the compact of queerness is broken! Now all that’s left to debate is who goes in which spot in the kyriarchy’s sephirot of dominance. Is the black trans woman the keter of queerness, or the white gay New Yorker? Quick, fit the intersex person into the new ontology! Half-remembered feminist platitudes become vectors of lateral disenfranchisement, magnetizing along the extant lines of kyriarchy. Bones snap, muscle splinters, flesh chars. Corpses.
I’m Soviet, or at least I fantasize that I am. I was born in the US to an Armenian woman and a Ukranian-Jewish father. My mother was disenfranchised in the post-perestroika period; what was once the breadbasket of the Soviet Union had fallen into disrepair. There are more taxis than humans in Yerevan, because no other work exists. I’m half Karabakhi. My extended family was firebombed by the Azerbaijani military. They are dead and in the ground, along with my ancestor, Saint Sarkis. His tomb is elsewhere — a small relief. My father was a straight up fascist, an embittered bastard who spun the antisemitism he experienced on a personal level into a long and storied career automating insurance death panels to maximize both profit and suffering. It didn’t work out between him and her, or him and me.
Eight years ago, now, I went to Russia to visit my grandparents and my aunt. A few hours outside of what we know as Moscow, I was struck by something. These flatlands and apartment buildings were half-finished derelicts, but they formed a pattern. Low-capacity roads existed between them, linking partially-built cells to each other. I blinked free Rome from my eyes and I saw the vision. My grandmother lived in one of these apartments. It was dignified, colorful, beautiful. It was small but complete, and had stood the test of years. I looked out of the window and saw any workplace ten minutes away by bike, a grocery store five, a theater next door. The non-theme-park suburb, the living-place. My eyes flicked to the nearby billboard looming over the highway, then the next, then the next. Vodka, cognac, vodka. It was a ruin again. Everybody died.
The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore. Pizza the Hutt ate it in one big gulp.
Step five: have the temerity to ask for seconds.
EVERYBODY WAS TRANSFIGURED.
I am transgender. I was a man. This is not controversial, though much queer theory engages in saber-rattling about how being transgender is a retrospective transformation. I’m not going to bullshit. I was a man. I certainly failed at manhood, I was deeply dysphoric, I was alienated and ironic and never quite aligned with my assigned spot in the kyriarchy. But in the relation-graph of the kyriarchy, I was a man, read as a man, spoke like a man, acted kinda like a man.
The act of transition is a change of the self. Again, the saber-rattling: All you have to change is the self! Huh? What does being a woman actually mean? What does being nonbinary actually mean? What is gender? Well, gender is a social role. It’s a carefully crafted and enforced set of phenotypical markers, it’s a mask, it’s a way of being, a way of existing in relation to others. It’s a different position. It is -else on the kyriarchy from maleness. If you transition, you are moving. Eventually, there will be somewhere on the kyriarchy you settle into. You might not like it there. But you will have transitioned to it. Me, I’m nonbinary. Where did I go? Womanhood is close to what I wanted. Unfortunately, I have a job, and I’m too physically disabled to lose office respectability politic, so womanhood will have to suffice.
I am a therian. Wow, this autist is transgender and a therian, big round of applause. Do a flip next, retard. Okay, here’s my flip. I’m also married. I sleep in a big bed with my wife. The fact that I hallucinate rabbit ears atop my head matters less to anything than the fact that I have natural F cups and also have hair dark enough for an inevitable five o’clock shadow by five o’clock. It matters even less than the fact that I’m in a committed lesbian relationship with the love of my life. Being a therian does not change my position in the kyriarchy. Being a fat working married transfem lesbian(ish) does.
Despite this, being a therian indicates something in the corpse network. My job might not give a shit, but my fellow transfems might. Virus-ridden corpses that we are, we still have culture (ha ha). It’s more of a horoscopy thing, an aspect of self-presentation similar to clothing. Here’s what you expect of me, as I present my theta-delta. Vivacity, bounciness, a measure of jitteriness. I also have a cat thing, so a coiled languidness, detachment, self-assuredness. I could just kin Ramona Flowers, but I lost my fictionkin gland in a freak Vriska accident. If I did (and I have the trail of exes to justify it), who’d care but those who knew what fictionkin meant? The point is that it’s aspirational. It gestures at a position on the kyriarchy that is unreachable, because it is not on the kyriarchy. We do not have a place in our society for a cat-rabbit who is a person because such a thing has never existed.
Contrast this placelessness with sex. Sexuality is important to kyriarchy. BDSM is still not mainstream, even as close as it stays to kyriarchical dynamics. 50 Shades of Gray was widely ridiculed, even as it featured an incredibly tame consent-forward mush mouthed sexy boss fantasy. Too much, they said, what a crazy rapist with whips and such. And queer people, in the corpse fields, we look at BDSM and we go “finally, something too disgusting for the kyriarchy to digest!” and that’s where it all goes wrong, because we are corpses, and all we can do is become.
One might engage in submission habitually as a participant in the BDSM subculture — and it is a subculture, not a fetish. Rope classes are nonsexual as a rule. Someone could die if they thought with their dick too much. But participation isn’t enough. No, us modern queers, with our compacts broken and the boot of kyriarchy on our necks forever, what can we do but become submission, embody submission? People don’t do submission in furry circles, Tumblr circles, wherever queer people crop up. They are submissives. Not as a matter of preference, but as a matter of perfect access, they are submissives. Here it is in my bio, next to my pronouns and my name. My name is Marisa Perpetuation, my pronouns are she/her/hers, and the third thing you need to know about me is that I very much prefer being weaker than you.
This is not like being a therian. There is a place in our kyriarchy for people who are weaker than you. It’s below you. So the wires get crossed. Something very strange starts happening. Neoteny is in vogue. The machine of BDSM begins to run in reverse. Submissives are below you — what else is below you in agency? Little sisters? Children? Animals? Let’s say you have a fat fetish. Of course, fat people are below you from a shape-lens if you’re skinny. Is that fat girl submissive to you? You’d think so, wouldn’t you. This isn’t accusation of pedophilia or zoophilia, but it’s a reversal of the subversion of BDSM. Prior, you’d explore a literalized power dynamic though a sexual lens. Now, your sexual lens forms a literalized power dynamic. Maybe this isn’t great?
Check this little trick out: if your sexual lens forms a literalized power dynamic, you can absolve yourself of all agentive sin by blocking out the dominant part of your sexual lens. Why reckon with whiteness? You’re a bottom, you’ve never done anything in your life. If you construct your understanding of the world as dominant-submissive in a sexual sense, you can avoid having to think about the nature of power by never being a sexual agent. Just never dominate. Never, ever dominate. Hell, never even top. Don’t even think about topping or dominating, because that gives you power. Power is bad, don’t you know? Predators have power. You don’t want to be a predator, or use predator-power, right? The kyriarchy used predator-power to kill everyone you love. If you never use it, you’ll be clean. Lie down and take it. Be a pillow princess. Better yet, be a little sister, or a dog, or both. Age regress too, while you’re at it. Be a corpse. Little sister dog regressor corpses can’t perpetuate anything because they don’t have power. (ALL THE SOCIAL CHAUVNISTS ARE NOW MARXISTS. TRY NOT TO LAUGH CHALLENGE!)
This probably makes you bad at sex. Sorry, little sister dog regressor corpse girls. Chances are you’re terrible at sex. Sex is an act of agency. If you reject agency wholesale, you bring nothing to the table but some orifices and a half-baked personality.
The thing is, trans women are just as likely to call themselves trans girls outside of casual or sexual connotations. Cis women circa second wave feminism don’t quite cotton to referring to themselves as girls. Girlhood is enforced by the patriarchy if you’re an adult. It’s neotenizing, it’s degrading. “The girl in HR.” Disrespectful. Woman dinner is different from girl dinner. “At the bar with some ladies” implies a different relationship than “at the bar with some chicks”. (Chick! How neotenic. A bird child.) Trans girl is different from trans woman. Trans girls… you’re carrying the neoteny out of the context! Oh my god, you’re perpetuating kyriarchy even if you reject power! Very unexpected. Everyone gasp for effect, please. Nobody knew this would happen, truly.
Worse yet, if everyone thinks like this, and they do, then transfems who DO have sexual agency get put in a dark place very, very quickly. This former man is a predator for daring to use power. They (and it’s always “they”) are evil, they have allegations. Quick! They’re infiltrating our pure deagencied space! WHO CAN I KILL WITHOUT REMORSE? THEM! If being a submissive implies purity from the sin of power, then being a dominant is supreme predatory behavior, the bearer of the sin. Strange that the submissives are so able and willing to socially kill, considering they allegedly don’t have power. Ah, it probably doesn’t mean anything. In the prim bright future of the puppygirl commune, there is only a loaded gun on the table that nobody’s allowed to touch unless someone acts weird. Remember, we’re already dead. We see the world like this. Who can I kill without remorse? Who is my enemy? The ersatz man-predator who is still mysteriously just as vulnerable as I am. Hello, kyriarchy, can I get you a glass of water? Sorry, I forgot you were a virome, carry on.
Maybe us queers can’t change much about our position in the kyriarchy. But we can spin in place. We’re experts in becoming. We’re experts in gesturing to places we could be in, and abstracting those things into narratives. But we already live in a narrative. It’s so easy to believe the puppygirl fucktoy is really, actually, subhuman, especially when she tells you she wishes she was. It’s so easy to believe the ordinary autistic girl wants deeply to suck your dick, even though you just met her. She’s subaltern, right? That’s the same as submissive. C’mon, don’t make me uncomfortable by making me use my predator-power to ask consent. Abuser. It’s so easy. If everyone you know is already dead, and you’re already dead, even murder is so easy.
That is soft power, the real power. Soft power is control of the heart. A corpse can be any shape. A corpse can be the claw of kyriarchy and think it’s fighting it. Look closely. Do you see the pattern of the wool before your eyes? It’s got pawpads on it, which means you’re fine forever, so you don’t need to touch your face ever again. Kyriarchy makes rapists and killers and cannibals of us all.
Step six: clean your plate and thank the butcher of men for your meal.
EVERYBODY GOT BACK UP AND PRETENDED IT WAS ALL GOOD.
A few weeks ago, I'm talking with a friend about writing, from the lens of tabletop and collaborative fiction. Both of our wives are picking up meat for dinner, because we forgot to hit the butcher's before we'd gone to the sandwich shop for lunch, so the two of us went home first with the sandwiches. In the course of this conversation, there's this model they bring up (in their words, all models are imperfect but some are useful) that I’m quite fond of.
The model is as such. You can split writers into two camps: systemic and blorbo. Systemic writers ask what they want out of the full assemblage of a story, then weave in the interrelations. To them, characters are live wires in the story-assembly. They are words who represent things, beings of fiction who mean something. If they feel, it is because it is important to the story that they feel. Blorbo writers, on the other hand, write inside-out. This character (the blorbo in question) lives, breathes, exists in the writer’s head. When they react, the world itself must change to make it make sense. The character might emblematize a system, but critically the system bends to the character. Who is this person? What world can they live in? They are guy-first and the world is set dressing.
Earlier than that, I'm talking with their wife, and my wife. We're sat in the living room talking about chuunibyou syndrome. Chuunibyou syndrome is distillable down to the dysphoric feeling of structural placelessness. "I'm never going to be satisfied," my friend sighs, "because I can't be a princess. and that's it. I have to live with that." I agree, of course. I yearn to be a representational livewire in a narrative; a mad scientist, failing that, a princess, failing that, a knight, failing that, a crone.
My wife doesn't get it. My wife is a staunch realist, a model Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. It is perhaps the most steadfastly honest person about its desires I have ever known. This is one of the hundred reasons why I fell in love with it. "Why be upset about something you'll never have? How can you live like that?" It's the fairest question about the matter that might be asked. My friend and I look at each other. It's not something we can answer. There are no words for it. The desire to be a reducible livewire of a larger thing is inexplicable in English or Spanish. Soft power is language, too; subject verb object, agent-patient. How can you describe a web-of-being without describing it through objects? How can you describe that web at all, without replicating the narrative web of our world, the kyriarchy? How can you possibly understand or extrapolate that new web from only the transformation of a normal woman into a princess?
Much later, my wife and I are talking about devil-deals. I argue this: a fairy appears and says "Here is your perfect-timeline present where everything you'd want is true. I could transport you there, with your memories of your old world, replacing that version of you. Alternatively, I could put your consciousness in that version of you without your memories, and you could live in that context."
Option A: I am thrust into a relational web I am not compatible with. Causality is severed. I am an ingrown tooth in the mouth of a life I've never led. I would not have fucking been this good to everyone. That’s not me. I am not I.
Option B: Suicide. The context I'm in is killed forever. And what is consciousness if not context? What is selfhood if not your place in the web? Would I be me if I were a man? No. Nothing is different in the perfect world. I am not I.
This is all to say: you are what you are where you are. The shape of the world shapes you. The vast lie of the west is that we are blorbos who may defy the chain of being through the power of humanity, the power of want, the power of love. No. We are live wires for soft power. The world is systemically-constructed. The collective power of humanity, that stupid thought-ending cliché, it doesn't exist. The platonic human being has no power because it doesn't exist. Humanity, the idea, it doesn't exist. No salvation will come from being, no matter what you become. You will never escape, no matter what shape you take, or how far you run. You cannot escape the truth that when you change what you are, the only thing that changes in turn is where you're placed.
Look at your place. Feel what fell current runs through your live wire body. What ordained spot do you stand in? What do you represent? You might be able to change it if you want to, or if you need to. But that is not going to fix you. The only way to break the kyriarchy is to break it. I’m sorry.
Step seven: repeat until normal.