Straight Dog Water; or Saving Alien: Earth (2025) from a Freudian Snob: Rob Ager Shows Full Ass, Reviewing Show He Hasn't Fully Watched
This short write-up takes Rob Ager to task, his review of Alien: Earth (2025) being bad enough merit special mention. I love the show and he doesn't, but the way he doesn't is especially baffling and indicates Ager's drunk the dog water mixed with Kool-Aid (or Freud's jizz). He's a snob, and a lazy one at that.
Note: This 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; i.e., I've worked with muses and models beyond those on my Acknowledgments page, whose featured models worked with me while I produced Sex Positivity. To see everyone I've drawn before, during and after said series, refer to my Sex Work page.
Also, this is the SFW version of this essay. The NSFW version can be found on my website (which features uncensored images). —Perse
For the Visually Impaired: I'll be reading the SFW version of this essay aloud 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 education, satire, transformation and critique, hence falls under Fair Use regarding copyright and free speech regarding defamation.
CW: sexism, racism, and spoilers!
British white moderates aren't above the grift, it seems; in his latest "no shill, honest review," and despite having only seen part of the show, Ager calls Noah Hawley's Earth "another suspisciously [sic] overrated franchise installment" (adding "Disney," at the end of the title, to really add to the clickbait). This is, as the kids say, "straight dog water." As a trans academic who also has her own website and does all her own work—and one who views pure psychoanalysis as anti-Marxist garbage—allow me to weigh in (said the Millennial goth nerd to the Gen-X fossil, the former scolding the latter for worshipping Kubrick, Freud, and Cameron, etc): Alien: Earth rules (so far), and you're dead wrong, Rob.
It should be noted how Ager styles himself "an intellectual," one who worships at the alter of Kubrick and Freud (among other equally sexist men). He's a Film Critic™ in the tradition of Roger Ebert; i.e., as a status to enjoy (and darling to kill; re: "Whores and Faust," 2025); i.e., one the likes of which inspired me, back in the early 2010s, but who feels increasingly underwhelming after I came out of the closet and wrote my own book series. He's precisely the sort I openly despise, and one whose sorry aversion to poetry and fun I will counteract, here; i.e., with a poetic flair married to my academic muscle (despite Ager's statement about "plain language" curiously echoing Wordsworth*, the two aren't mutually exclusive).
*His Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800): "and endeavoured to bring my language near to the real language of men" (source).
Furthermore, far be it from me to accuse anyone of unapologetic schlubbiness, but Ager's own doesn't earn him carte blanche! White straight guys hide behind their ordinary appearance (and place in society's patriarchal, ethnocentric hierarchy of values), Ager having flown under my radar for years:
How quaint. The problem is, you can't review something if you haven't seen it (and his review has nothing intellectual to offer). Ager's issue is, first and foremost, that he reviews Alien: Earth after having seen only three episodes (the fourth of which proves many of his arguments wrong; e.g., that the show treats its children as consciousness transferred, versus copies of the original [simulacra] that simulate a now-dead entity). Ager's premature dismissal is profoundly dumb on its face. In doing so, however, he affirms an exceptional confirmation bias: arguing that he's right because other YouTube comments "agree" with him; i.e., he is right a priori (through parasocial* engagement), and falls on the side of state's rights versus worker rights. It's Alien (1979) minus the irony!
*Versus my trans friends and I liking the show, outside of YouTube; i.e., as a part of the extensive research I do on Amazons and the monstrous-feminine (therefore the Alien universe), their tastes aligning with mine through actual social-sexual interaction (which YouTube comments certainly are not).
This is cultish behavior on its own, and one that cloaks suspiciously Tory vibes within a "no party politics" (above) and faux-rebel façade. Ager never defines his terms, calling Earth "bad" and "stupid" without citation. Instead, "good" and "intelligent" equal anything that upholds the status quo (versus raising class, culture and race consciousness, as I argue); e.g., he thinks DEI "is a problem" (a dogwhistle to his conservative audience while complaining about racial inclusion), and that Wendy is, in his words, "a power fantasy that infantilizes the audience."
Um, fuck you, but also, come again? How dumb do you think we are, and furthermore, did someone pay you to write that?
This is pure DARVO on Ager's part—with him pining for the Cartesian "peace through strength," "might makes right"(fascist) approach that Cameron enjoyed: strength is good, and anything childlike is weak. It's a very schoolmaster approach, one conveying a nostalgic, Heinleinian obsession with nuke-the-Reds order from Ager that employs different double standards/strawman arguments. These aren't hard to discredit. For one, the show is the opposite of a power fantasy because it follows the same Promethean Quest that Alien did, and by extension, Shelley's novel (which Ager never mentions): undermining the monomyth, ergo its heroic violence and Cartesian binaries (thinking vs extended beings).
For example, Wendy beheads the Gorgon to bring it, the fire of the gods, back and speak in its voice; i.e., the curse of the creature/nature pimped by the state invades Troy, Trojan-Horse-style, through Weyland-Yutani arguably outmaneuvering Boy Cavalier's Frankensteinian hubris: Faust aching to interview the Devil, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (and the will to power), or Hippolyta interrogating Medusa versus shooting first, asking questions never (the settler-colonial MO, under Pax Americana). Wendy speaks the language of the native population, effectively doing what Ash suggested in the original Alien script: talk to the creature, virgin/whore (the opposite to what Victor largely does).
Before we proceed, Ager smugly talks about power fantasies like he's written books on them. It's basically an appeal to authority (re: he's a Film Critic™), one made by an ostensible virgin (the nerd who is always alone in his videos) who doesn't play with power fairly so much as pimp it unfairly. Unlike him, though, I actually have written books on this topic, so let's take him to school! A sex worker and academic trans woman, I'm the likeness of the Gorgon who fucks with such things, biznatch, and men fear naked intelligent women who play with power as something to embody and reclaim; i.e., what the state can't control, try as it might. So "stare and tremble!" at Medusa set free, her Wisdom of the Ancients stabbing at post-scarcity! Behold, a pale whore! —Perse
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
Given my expertise, then, here's an extended note/several citations about playing with power (namely the power of creation) as core themes in my work; i.e., insofar as the fire of the gods is a plaything that mortals play with, in Promethean stories furthering Kristeva's abjection process or reversing it (regarding sex and force, the ancient language of the Imperium into the Protestant ethic, Cartesian Revolution and Capitalist Realism under present theatres borrowing from the past). "She mighty mighty" refers as much to castle-like bodies as body-like castles, mise-en-abyme (re: "Castles in the Flesh," 2024), but any exploration is an interrogation; i.e., movement = dialog during ludo-Gothic BDSM through Gothic spaces of power abuse (rape), or playing with gendered ideas of derelict power "for the taking" whose iconoclastic (and kinky) potential is classically Numinous (the Gothic questing for the Numinous [re: Varma] by embodying such things, person and place); re (from Volume One):
Volume One invites the reader to consider investigating power and trauma through theory and praxis as things to synthesize and express; i.e., through active, informed, collective participation; e.g., through shared exhibits like the one below. Said exhibit was created between Roxie Rusalka and myself, with Roxie being informed of my project ahead of time and agreeing to take part. It was deliberate/planned, and took time, money and work to pull off, but also mutual/informed consent:
(exhibit 6b2: Model and artist: Roxie Rusalka and Persephone van der Waard. Instruction occurs through the interrogation of trauma, wherein power is perceived and performed; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM/general Gothic poetics and simplified theories that incorporate a fair amount of former worker history pushing towards liberation. Said history is typically "lost" under state operations and must be repeatedly reclaimed through a liminal pedagogy—the act of reimagining systemic abuse received by workers from state forces. This reclamation very much includes monsters that are historically regarded as treacherous to status-quo agents, but especially regarding men under the Cartesian model; e.g., the nymph or siren as a regular emasculator of traditional stations of male agency and authority. To that, Roxie's handle, "Rusalka," refers to a type of Slavic water siren, which Roxie suggested I use as inspiration for depicting her in my book. Seeing as I already recognized the mythology from Thomas Happ's 2014 Metroidvania, I drew Roxie as a Rusalki from Axiom Verge to instruct viewers with [source: "Manifesto/Instruction Volume Outline," 2025).
(model and artist: Mikki Storm and Persephone van der Waard)
In stories like Alien: Earth—which is to say, stories like Shelley's novel (ergo Metroidvania)—Medusa is a talking head, of sorts; i.e., a thing to be raped and killed, only to be reborn for future dialogs to be had about rape, "on the Aegis"; e.g., a costume to wear or mask to put on, playing with "rape" in quotes. She's darkness visible, Milton's Satan a rebel that Medusa—when empowered to receive new bodies, mid-Amazonomachia—can enact rebellion through a given population; i.e., Gothic Communism; e.g., Mikki Storm and I (with Pyramid Head, above), but really any engagement with whore as palliative Numinous, therefore Gorgon to parlay with: a giver of forbidden knowledge (fire or otherwise), offering the power to change the world in darkly radical ways (the desert 'round Ozymandias' colossal wreck, below)! Nature is whore holding the keys to life and death between her thighs and upon her criminal, reprobate ass (under the Protestant ethic married to mad science). Her stony bum is the Sphinx Bonaparte stood before, the smaller of the two by a country mile:
(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard)
Meanwhile, power flows on said Aegis in different directions; i.e., the Promethean Quest anisotropically reversing abjection—hence the flow of power (the fire of the gods, therefore nature)—away from the state; e.g., land back, labor back, sex back an operation to perform during the whore's cryptomimetic revenge. While the state pimps nature to preserve itself, mid-cryptomimesis, the whore works at cross purposes; i.e., the oldest profession (therefore exploitation and struggle) gracing a variety of popular (often infamous) stories and media types invoking Shelley's Modern Prometheus; re (from Volume Two):
Astronoetics are what Michael Uhall calls a celestial, intelligible presence ("Astronoetic Cinema," 2019). Reframed by me slightly, it is the colonial gaze of Planet Earth in any imaginary scenario, which the Metroidvania commonly portrays as nature vs civilization. [...] The fact remains that men like Weyland rape nature all the time, but only double their efforts when they—like the system they personify—reliably starts to die (false power). In turn, the state and its men of reason will do anything to preserve themselves, weaponizing their own bloodline against nature, the latter having evolved to resist dominion (thus rape) through counterterrorism and asymmetrical warfare. [...] That's what the Promethean Quest effectively encapsulates and discourages, Medusa fucking back to reverse the flow of power and information the monomyth normally supplies in outright parental language, but also monomythic media exposed to middle-class children at a young age (source: "'She Fucks Back'; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics: the Man of Reason and Cartesian Hubris versus the Womb of Nature in Metroidvania," 2024).
From novels to movies to Metroidvania, all embody Mother Nature's revenge. In turn, the whore's revenge against profit (re: "Rape Reprise," 2024) embodies a cycle of violence versus the usual dialectical-material forces of capital (and its forebears); e.g., the Cycle of Kings and Shadow of Pygmalion's Patrilineal Descent, but also Cartesian hubris historically-materially having the state's revenge against nature; i.e., blaming the whore for "gating Paradise," ergo cockblocking Bacon's rapacious desire: to penetrate nature's womb, thus achieve everlasting life for the elite, mid-Capitalocene (re: Patel and Moore; see: "Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge" [2024] for a good example of this larger process). Shelley clearly disliked and critiqued such men of reason, in her novel; i.e., a desire of the rape victim that survives in a variety of media forms "standing in for absentee parents (videogames, for our purposes): the givers of Cartesian dogma, but also rebellious sentiment through Promethean allegory (the appearance of the black castle/fallen manmade paradise to begin with)" (ibid.):
(artist: MirroredR)
The idea is both older and newer than Forbidden Planet, surviving in various stories that came after it. This brings us to Metroidvania, whereupon games like Metroid and Axiom Verge present the Promethean Quest as the fatal discovery that one's actual or de facto parents suck royal ass, and that one's home is ultimately doomed because of it (founded on nature as raped by science); i.e., there's a couple basic ideas about Metroidvania that come from Forbidden Planet, At the Mountains of Madness, and ultimately from Frankenstein (and to a lesser extent, The Tempest):
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- a hero is summoned from earthly spaces by the gods to break the stalemate between nature and civilization
- they learn about their infernal, godly parentage (raised by wolves, bird people, or mad scientists, etc); i.e., that they're Persephone come home; or Alucard, son of Dracula; etc
- the land of the gods is destroyed afterwards; e.g., blowing up a planet, sinking an island, or closing a gate that leads to such places; i.e., destroying evidence and witnesses, but also keeping monomythic mementos (souvenirs) while treating the larger event as dream-like similar to A Midsummer Night's Dream—something to suggest and dismiss
Science and technology become mythical, even magical, but still comment on our world now in relation to technology and Capitalism "back then" as inherently illusory, manipulative and unstable.
[Whatever the form, a] Promethean story revolves around the child as coming of age while inheriting the past through such discoveries: hell (and the gods, fascism and nature) coming home Their parents are away, asleep or otherwise, and the child (often grown up, like Morbius and Victor, but also Samus, below) must explore the hellish home (the unheimlich) to put the wrong things right. In doing so, the home wakes up, putting the child in danger while teaching them about their doomed past (often through heraldry and statues, below). The past, then, becomes something to inherit and destroy with whatever's on hand, scuttling the castle, the boat, the giant (or some combination of these things) as having the means to self-destruct built in; e.g., the switch in Morbius' lab or the Nostromo's scuttle mechanism, etc (ibid.)
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
The Cartesian rubric is always one of rape, thus genocide dressed up as "progress," "civilization," "reason," what-have-you. Whereas revolutionary cryptonymy reverses abjection on the Aegis (re: "Rebellious Subterfuge," 2025), state cryptonymy furthers abjection by abusing nature, specifically her monstrous-feminine "peach" buttressed by this or that (often God-given bodyfat, above); i.e., a routine prize cut up by state proponents (re: "Nature Is Food," 2024). Across a state's lifetime, the Earth and its territories and peoples, animals and environments, are endlessly cannibalized by "thinking beings" scared of death (and sex), yet emboldened by Divine Right (from Columbus, onwards). We stewards of nature escape capital's hellish stalemate, liberated mid-exploitation using rape play of the special kind Shelley offered; i.e., to free the Gorgon during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: as I envisioned it based on Shelley but also those she learned from:
As far as I see it, the Gothic isn't solely empty escapism, but tries to imagine things beyond Capitalist Realism using the Numinous language of the imaginary past (through bad replication): to evoke powerful sensations that penetrate state deceptions; i.e., a retro-future that envisions possible futures good and bad through the reclaimed language of the past as it once was reimagined, not the future (as Fischer's hauntologies, the cyberpunk, speak to/with). Like Milton's Satan, it is defined by its ability to create things that go against pre-conceived ideas of the West, haunted instead by Western atrocities and failings. The future is gay and hellish, set free to express reality in Gothic maturity (source: "Always a Victim," 2025).
On the Aegis, we whores (de facto or otherwise) use what we got; re: "when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!" (re: "It Began with a Whisper," 2025). The state assigns the Gorgon (and her offshoots) "victim" status to police nature, but any victim can be a survivor who lives to tell the tale. To that, Medusa's also a pirate who may challenge said status (wearing black as she does, below)—a bold and intrepid explorer who can take it all back, her seizing of the means of production referring to (and with) her actual body (female or not).
This happens through the same endless dialogs we've discussed, which embellish but also marry sex and force, war and Gothic, to poetic freedoms of expression (therefore existence); i.e., half-real dialogs raising intelligence and awareness (therefore Cain) versus state actors pimping Amazons in bad faith (re: "Witch Cops and Victims," 2025). What they cage, we set loose, and in defense of workers and nature! That's our utility, and what Ager's notions of "intelligence" and "good" lack (a real pimp, he is): a means to materially challenge state power (and state shift; re: Patel and Moore) through social codes played out. We (and our secrets weapons) hide in plain sight, power "in the flesh" something to behold, "monkey see, monkey do." Come to Mommy, little one! She has needs like you wouldn't believe (the Amazon a "conqueror/abductor" archetype [from Athens, onwards] that plays into RACK, consent-non-consent, and ageplay kink, among other taboos the Gothic explores easily enough)!
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
Note: These are merely samples from a larger body of work. For a comprehensive look at Metroidvania, refer to the entire chapter, "She Fucks Back," but also my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus and extensive work on Amazons (e.g., Medusa vs Amazons in "Always a Victim," or Amazons and anal sex in "Our Sweet Revenge," both 2025), as well as my chapter on Shelley and her novel ("Making Demons," 2025). Such things are dualistic (cops and robbers), so fuck back, take back land, labor and sex in dialectical-material ways; i.e., that make Amazonian cryptonymy a rebellion, subversive variety that challenges subjugated (cop-like) forms! Aesthetics (form) don't determine function, flow (of power) does! Cops, billionaires, states—ACAB! ABAB! ASAB! —Perse
While difficult to fully kill, mid-cryptonymy (during extermination for profit; re: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome," 2025), Dark Queens are classically fetishized and punished—meaning by state chastity narratives, mid-monomyth. So often, the warrior maiden or princess—a pale Madonna playing cops-and-robbers from a tokenized position—rapes their own as "terrorist" (re: Federici; see: "Policing the Whore," 2024); i.e., repeatedly only for Medusa to curse all parties with her revenge (e.g., the Radiance, above). But these are things we rebels can interrogate through the Gorgon "in the flesh"; i.e., as de facto educators of the infernal lesson Medusa offers up, "in small"; re: bringing "Hell" to Earth in a half-real sense (on and offstage, mid-liminal-expression); e.g., Cuwu and I, or Nyx and I—like the Gorgon brought back to life—turning the nuclear model upside-down (therefore "Rome" in all its hauntologies).
So do whores—relegated by state power to unspeakable-yet-commodified states of existence—fearsomely invade the present with retro-future echoes of the monstrous-feminine; re: (from "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It," 2025): fucking back, for a change, coming home to roost! What they alienize and rape, mid-dialectic, we humanize through the language thereof; i.e., hugging the alien during a dialectic of the alien that weakens our jailors' hold on nature (thus labor). So often, "hugging the alien" involves various double entendres—a warm wet embrace, the exchange being for "data" of all kinds that camp unironic Wandering Womb, moral-panic "hysteria" arguments with silly-serious hyphenations of sex and force (forbidden fruit, below)! "Wet ass pussy make that pull-out game weak!" So much of canon is the heroine denying she's a whore; we Commie sluts do it backwards!
"Not only can terror be employed as a weapon," writes Robert Asprey, "but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it" (source). Same idea with violence (re: Weber) and monsters (re: me; see: "The State: Its Key Tools; re: the Monopolies, Trifectas and Qualities of Capital," from "Paratextual Documents"). Gothic Communism uses any and all to break capital's "monopolies" (and monomyth) on Medusa's Aegis! We were the Gorgon the entire time—the very Destroyer capital lusts after and run away from!
Returning to Alien: Earth and its notion of playing with power, it behooves us to remember that children are expected to subsist in Paradise as troubled—overshadowed by the Tree of Knowledge speaking to their own abuse as tied to the rape/pimping of nature (ergo workers made in God's likeness). But while Earth stresses actual talking versus capital punishment, the Amazon (warrior) dialog is not incongruous, so far as horror goes. Amazonomachia ("monster battle") is, unto itself, a kind of dialog expressing power as monstrous-feminine; re: during the abjection process—one that is suitably "ancient" (and derelict) into the present world, workers of all kinds rediscovering Medusa's power resisting discovery/colonization (to astronoetic extremes). As Creed notes:
When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not – as commonly thought – put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers. Afterwards, Athena embossed her shield with the Medusa's head. The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa's own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view. Athena's aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend – the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa" (source: The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993).
And when the Gorgon survives to be interrogated by Wendy charming snakes, the robot girl befriends the monster who charms her (reversing abjection, having the whore's revenge; re: "Rape Reprise"). The would-be maiden learns from the whore a different side of a bigger struggle (re: nature vs the state); i.e., the Gorgon might be a size queen, but she's also a "grower" who starts small only to grow out of control: "Big things have small beginnings," and Rome wasn't burned in a day!
In any event, forget what Ager says about the show's "power fantasy" infantilizing the audience; Wendy is a victim infantilized by capital—i.e., until she reclaims her power from the state by not playing into its hands (as Cameron's sexless Wonder Woman does). The same goes for the other children, the Lost Boys; i.e., abused by the cult-like head of state: as manmade, Boy Cavalier supplying each a warlike body through the creator's warped view of himself (Ozymandian syndrome); re: like Shelley's Victor Frankenstein. All of this goes over Ager's head, of course—with him blaming the show (and the children, below) for the "failure" of not being "intelligent" (war-like) enough.
Keeping with Frankenstein, it's Cartesian, ethnocentric—prone to view anything beyond oneself as degenerate, weak, childish and stupid; i.e., the master and the slave under an astronoetic enterprise of endless conquest into space (with Ager attacking Hawley for a retro-future dystopia, despite Ager sucking Kubrick's nihilistic dick). Such conquest—and its cartographic refrains' routine exploration (of old space to conquer anew)—are Cartesian, ergo Puritanical in their policing in and out of themselves. It's Pavlovian to a generational extreme, Ager convinced he is correct versus "those meddling kids" while he punches the whore to correct her "immodest" antics: Saturn devouring his son, Perseus killing Medusa, Pygmalion raping Galatea, etc. Kindly or not, the state champion is always rigid, intolerant and blind:
To it, anything that makes the state look weak, incompetent or bad is, unto itself, bad and must be punished, in Ager's eyes; i.e., the company must make intelligent decisions, Ager argues, overlooking a bourgeois propensity for cruelty and alienation by capital; e.g., Boy Cavalier torturing machines he makes into children, exploiting the living for their memories and the mechanical for their labor (which includes the warlike elements projected onto a superiority complex from the master versus the slave, the general commanding child soldiers).
Hermit is, likewise, critiqued as boyish, silly and discounted by Ager. He doesn't care about equality but the proper place where power currently is: by celebrating Aliens' 1986 Zulu Dawn (1979) rehash-into-Vietnam-revenge as the end-all, be-all; i.e., Cameron's false power fantasy and neoconservative, neo liberal, Neo-Gothic power dynamic subjugating the Amazon for decades after (re: Cameron's refrain [the shooter] pimping Hippolyta into Metroidvania; re: "Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph," 2025). She roars for the state, utterly cowed in that Radcliffean refrain: to summon and banish as needed, when the liminal hauntology of war (the traveling castle) comes home to empire (the Imperial Boomerang). Trigger the rape victim, then hand her a gun and kettle, mid-DARVO and obscurantism (the fash playbook).
The alleged monomyth power fantasy—one that emasculates Ripley in a very "pick me," Quixotic way (upholding genocide while acting "pure" per the Protestant ethic pimping her out, our warrior Madonna made jobless, homeless and childless by the very state she cleans house for)—is exactly what Ager wanted with Wendy, and which the show's writers denied him through a proper Promethean Quest (and in hauntological [retro-future] ways he whines about; e.g. deducting points for the dead bourgeoisie in costumes [as if theatre and parties don't exist in the Alien universe, below] while forgetting Alien's Gothic is hauntological: a flying castle sailing through outer space).
In the absence of an actual thesis, Ager lazily resorts to reactionary "critiques"; re: calling something "bad" or "dumb" (code for "weak," meaning inferior to Western values). However, his white moderacy betrays itself in others ways, too. He also whines about the actress who plays Wendy's body, specifically her neck and childish mannerisms. Never mind that Ager has zero rizz (and looks like a pale chubby Gordon Ramsay); he forgot Wendy is a performance and that her uncanny aspect is deliberate. So is interrogating the immortality fantasy that Ager accuses the show of supporting (re: Wendy). The whole point of Shelley's Modern Prometheus (and, by extension, Hawley's), is a reckoning for the proud; i.e., that their desire to conquer death is a fool's errand. The biggest fool, it would seem, is Ager pointing fingers. Excluding Cameron's tokenism in Aliens, Ager hates inclusion, ipso facto. He sees Wendy as a failure to be Ripley, versus a completely different character playing with power differently.
Ager's moral outrage extends beyond the actors or the plot, though; e.g., hating Noah Hawley's heavy metal selection—i.e., despite Hawley being an accomplished musician, and Romantic music being the heavy metal of the 1800s before electricity—but also hating camp in Gothic like Alien (though apparently Ager thinks it's okay in Rambo II, 1985). In doing so, Ager operates on par with Samuel Taylor Coleridge; i.e., complaining arbitrarily about Matthew Lewis writing The Monk (1794), meaning despite Coleridge's hypocritical "Christabel" (1797) having the old man colonize Gothic in ways that Ager does while aping Cameron (who eclipsed Scott's neoliberal critique with an endless false flag punching down): the Man (any man) using the Pygmalion fantasy to eclipse the girl who wrote Frankenstein. "Give me a boy until he is seven," said Aristotle; "Behold, a man!" said Diogenes. Ager settles for Cameron's immaculate conception, aborting Wendy for disappointing him.
Whatever his target, Ager's an old man yearning for a perfect past that never was—one where children with agency don't exist; i.e., the sort who find power when disempowered by state forces sending them into anti-homes (e.g., haunted houses, per Freud's unheimlich and Bakhtin's Gothic chronotope). Vulgar displays of power see the powerful playing god in ways that uphold capital, haunted by spectres of Marx (which the Medusa very much is). By comparison, Ager does all of this while appealing to the ghost of an audience (re: YouTube comments) and franchise; e.g., his spuriously calling Cameron's marines "well-trained badasses," despite those being—in Cameron's own words—late-stage versions of incompetency from the Americans during Vietnam's Tet Offensive. Indeed, Cameron's entire revenge fantasy hinges on weakness, Ripley avenging the marines killed by the Alien Queen; re: Hippolyta versus Medusa, the White Queen vs the Black—with Ripley becoming a dark Valkyrie temporarily to fire fight with fire (a white Indian/savior); i.e., Eco's mantra, "the enemy is both weak and strong" (source: Ur-fascism, 1995).
Per Parenti, so much fussing amounts to a false rebellion—one where Ager makes a pro-corporate stance; i.e., while scapegoating Disney and throwing the director under the bus. This happens in multiple steps: saying first how Noah Hawley should have been guided by the Coen brothers as executive producers (versus Ridley Scott, I guess); second, that horror doesn't exist alongside child characters in popular media (Ager's "protect the child" argument ignoring Disney's own marriage of child heroes to horrifying violence); and third, whining that Wendy has "plot armor" while implying that Ripley doesn't? Bullshit, my guy. Wendy is incapacitated by one xenomorph; Ripley's literally female Rambo—a TERF-style girl boss working tirelessly for the Man to kill black people, Commies and sodomites, et al and en masse; re (from Volume Zero):
Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth-like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards "playing war" in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force. / Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite's exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state's property [weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc] while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its "wild" variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures (source: "Scouting the Field," 2023).
To that, "the problem of Cameron's centrist feminism is that it 'empowers' the female warrior to uphold the status quo, dooming women at large (say nothing of everyone Ripley attacks to "save the world" by paradoxically blowing it up; or as Metroid put it: 'Pray for a truce peace in space!')" (ibid.). Ripley's a Zionist policing "space Hamas," immune to acid but allergic to Wandering Womb during insect politics (re: "Military Optimism," 2021).
Furthermore, assimilation is poor stewardship, the real empowerment fantasy one where workers subvert the state's idea of strength through service; re: on the Aegis, nature taking her power back through any and all forms (the booty of the Amazon but also the Gorgon, below). Unlike the Amazon (who historically sells out, part of the time), Medusa is the weapon that refuses to play ball; the vice character who breaks the Fourth Wall (ergo Capitalist Realism), her crushing aura pulls you in and tears you apart! "Destroy me!" goes both ways, "is it in, yet?" a prophecy to foreshadow a parade of acquired tastes (re: "strange appetites"; see: "A Cruel Angel's (Modular) Thesis," 2024). Whatever the code, it's preferential as a means of stealth and attack. It's a mood; make its complex trauma, Pandora's "Box," the gift that keeps on giving! Ass war is class war of an asymmetrical sort, Medusa giving and receiving backshots from the shadows!
As Percy Shelley once wrote in "Defence of Poetry" (1821), "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World" (source). Indeed, so we are, but act as we "legislate" far gayer than Mary Shelley's atheist (and sexist, womanizer) husband (the Gothic being a bit randier and pulpy than the high-minded Romantics*, especially the first generation's Wordsworth and Coleridge). The Gothic is sex, drugs and rock 'n roll as both fun and informative to a cryptonymic degree—to dance and aggressively shake our sizeable monstrous goods against the colonizer acting as "friend" in bad faith; i.e., the white moderate being as harmful to any marginalized group framed as nighty visitor (e.g., the vampire or succubus a "lady of the night" as much as the xenomorph, above). The struggle must vocalize, the Gothicist go-to being darkness visible—meaning in ways whose fatal nostalgia the state will colonize through men like Ager preserving the status quo.
*Scott would revive the muddy relationship between the Gothic and the British Romantics—first reviving Mary Shelley's novel in Prometheus (2012), then misquoting Percy Shelley by attributing his "Ozymandias" (1818) to Byron, in 2017's Alien: Covenant (re: "Making Demons" and "Dissecting Radcliffe," 2025).
You don't kill home rule with kindness, kids; the secrets to universal liberation are in Necropolis, meaning as a half-real place of ironic hope felt among genuine despair. Both a ruin of tremendous obscurity and hideous-yet-divine power to intercept, mid-decay, and a treacherous gravesite of self-discovery among the unholy bones, such forbidden and come-hither places—from one faraway castle to the next—invent and invite danger-as-Oracle at home. A dark commentary on home as fallen empire bounced back, they collectively depict capital's infernal concentric pattern (re: Aguirre); i.e., to reify and interrogate power as Gothic has done, from Walpole to Radcliffe to us: where the brave routinely go to find and hug the Gorgon haunting the crypt! The pedagogy of the oppressed is a revelation, then—one whose spectral voice has been demonized previously by state forces, and turned back around by iconoclastic means fertilizing revolt on the corpse of empire. That's what Hawley has done, and what Ager's smugly conspiratorial dismissal has completely overlooked.
To that (and to conclude), Ager's "review" is a sad fatal joke—one in which he comes across as profoundly regressive towards, ignorant of and allergic; i.e., to the land back, labor revolt, and punching up allegories Alien borrowed from Shelley (and Shelley from Milton's seditious and defiant Satan). In Plato's cave, Ager abjects them in highly snobby ways; i.e., whose shamelessly nerdy (middle-class) entitlement pimps Hogle's fakery/ghost of the counterfeit (re: the Gorgon) while foisting its crimes onto critics of capital ("You're doing a power fantasy, not me!"). Odd to see a psychoanalyst sci-fi nerd who has no idea who Shelley is, or Barbara Creed (a film nerd who wrote her PhD on the monstrous-feminine using Freud's essay, "Medusa's Head," 1922). A pimp is a pimp—Medusa the whore such men of reason endlessly fetishize for their own delight, and which Ager grumbles at Hawley for daring to liberate. Silence is genocide, and Ager's decree is one of muting Medusa.
Again, straight dog water. You can't kill the Gorgon, little man; for her, life and death are part of the same endless equation—one Alien: Earth explores by emphasizing the parent/offspring dialog of the characters (read: plural, the show being communal versus singular in its heroism, lending a Sense8 [2015] feel to its Lord of the Flies [1954] panoply). You know, like Mary Shelley did? Girl was a cosmic whore, wrecking homes across the stars!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, Tolkien and Amazon enthusiast, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with multiple partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). To learn more about Persephone's academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
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