Here is my Patreon which contains many sermons. I am currently working on a way to embed them on this site, but Patreon's embeds are difficult. All of my Gnostic Patreon Content Is Free
Here is an FAQ regarding my Patreon and why I host on Patreon even though my content is for free.
Q: What is this?
A repository for my sermons in the NeoValentinian Apocryphal Christian tradition.
Q: What is NeoValentinian Apocryphal Christianity?
A tradition I have begun due to my studies into Gnosticism and Esoterica. I am not an authority I am a learner and I want this tradition to develop with help from fellow travelers.
Most broadly, it is a belief in Jesus Christ as a philosopher and enlightener. Not the son of the Biblical YHWH, but the son of the Monad, a prime mover above all. The belief incorporates writings from Valentinus and his followers in the first centuries AD, on the nature of the world, the mind, and the soul.
The goal of NVAC is for practitioners to improve their lives in this world and prepare for the next world when their bodies die. It is meant to give peace of mind and a higher purpose in an era where dogma has overtaken the Christian church and society at large.
It is for rational seekers, for self improvers, and spiritual people who want to KNOW the nature of our reality.
Q: Does this cost money?
No. Every sermon is free.
Q: Why host on Patreon if this is for free?
Patreon has robust audio hosting tools and I can also take donations from people who wish to give them. No one is obliged, all are appreciated.
Q: Is this a LARP?
no lol
Q: What is Gnothi Ton Logon?
"Know The Word."
Last Updated June 8th, 2026
Stretching trem'bling hand
Over pluromic sea, endless night
To touch a face she cannot stand
Monad; pure unyielding light
With power, Sophia toyed
A dance, a breath on whisper'd song
Her essence calls across the void
But echoes fade and space is long...
Monad there in silent place
Silent vast, a pointed sphere
No gaze holds, no time's embrace
Beyond thought. Beyond fear.
Sophia bent with hope and pain
A yawning tear upon the deep
Yet she, reaching, once more, again
as she is too tired to sleep.
Her fall is loss in flight of grace
learning logos left unclaimed
Her womb fouls and in its place
A spark in which cosmos is framed.
Listen now: Achamoth beneath
between the stars her song remains.
A talk of love and defied death
Aeon's will that still remains.
Written 9/21/25
This is a project I did back in January. It's based on translations of the Valentinian Liturgies found at the Nag Hammadi site and contains my own reconstruction based on other Valentinian and Biblical writings. There are two tabs, the first is an in-depth reconstruction and commentary and the second tab is a more accessible version I printed out for a study group.
The third tab is an added tab with a reconstruction of the "Prayer to the Apostle Paul" found at Nag Hammadi.
Created Jan 6, 2026. Updated Mar 25, 2026
Here is a link to a playlist on YouTube containing my own study into the topic of Gnosticism.
Video 1: Gnostic Crash Course. An overview of Gnosticism's history from 0 BC to now.
Video 2: Gnostic Phases. This video contains an overview of the nine modes of being based on the Tripartite Tractate. Which being are you?
Video 3: The Five Virtues of Setanael. This video contains five virtues according to the Biblical Satan, known to Gnostics as Setanael.
Video 4: The Myth of the Demiurge. This video is a breakdown of Yaldabaoth the Demiurge, known to Christians as YHWH or God, and what it means to live in the world led by an evil creator.
Updated April 29, 2026
The modern American is a sick animal who does not know they are sick. Their hearts are empty cups which they ritualistically turn over in their hands, attempting in vain to draw water. Some of them have forgotten why they turn their cups, for they have no memory of the water they ought to contain. Like any terminally sick animal, they do not reckon their illness and instead cling to whatever remaining euphoria is available to them, usually chemical in nature.
Boredom is the natural enemy to the sick American animal, for any circumspect invites terrifying realization. Bread and circuses are no longer enough for these medicine-thirsty creatures, they must be piped into a technicolor grid of symbols and heiroglyphs, memetic icons created by mentally bankrupt modern PT Barnums. If any stray moments of boredom occur in the life of the American animal, the profound wounds they suffer bubble to the surface of their awareness and they reach for a screen to avoid the sucking chasm struck on their minds to ensure frictionless existence.
Independence is not only a virtue for this asocial creature, but an enforced way of life. The natural human cooperative instinct has been amputated from them by cognitive behavioral techniques and social reinforcement. Men are trained to self-critique to an unattainable standard and women are forced to endure near-constant harassment, leaving neither gender alone with themselves and yet completely solitary. Men kill themselves en masse and women are abused by the ones that survive.
This misery reinforces the technicolor grid of symbols and heiroglyphs, it is a self-sustaining cyclical machine of misery and torment, designed by distant god-kings to appease advertising agencies. If any of the sickness of the animal comes to the surface, they create a prayer to these god-kings in the form of posts. The auxiliary to the god-kings is a new God named Algorithm. The Algorithm, a mysterious and strange being who decides the fate of all posts, one who can only be communed with obliquely, a new law of nature designed in full by the god-kings. A new Demiurge.
This misery reinforces the bars of the cage. To destroy the screen would be to be doing the human being a favor, it would free them from the supplication they experience daily, it would free them from enslavement to the god-king's machine, and the sick American knows this. They fully realize the depths of their depravity when they agonize over which YouTube video to put on while they miserably eat dinner alone. They are not brave enough to eat dinner with themselves in silence. They are not brave enough to throw their screens across the room and against the wall. They are cowards in cages.
The cage, of course, is very good. It feels good to be inside the cage. It would probably be for the best if you just stayed inside forever. Don't worry about it. Live and die frictionlessly, stay under the radar, make enough money, live to be approximately 65 years old and die quietly, alone. Become the perfect victim, your comfort zone has been constructed to occupy the interior of the bars of the cage.
The god-kings never bothered to lock the cage. The American animal could walk out whenever they want, but they choose not to. The comforting hell is far preferrable to the unknown heaven hidden away from them, the Pleroma of human experience.
Okay, Funk- "Phone Bad." We already know "Phone Bad." That's one of the hottest shows in the cage! "Phone Bad" always does numbers inside the cage!
The American animal is first and foremost a cannibal. They know the names and faces of their god-kings, but they can hardly be bothered with them. They ridicule the god-kings openly, complain about the shoddy construction of their cages, smugly assert themselves above their captors, but this is a performance. The god-kings are too far from their reach, too insulated from consequences with money. And yet, the American animal is bloodthirsty. To fill the empty cups of their hearts, they need blood.
So they eat each other. They feast on their fellow captives, they do anything and everything to make an enemy of their peer, to use the full power of the cage to kill them. As soon as they are inconvenienced, the most principled leftist calls the police in tears. As soon as they are slighted, the most virulent conservative turns on their own. As soon as they are afraid, the most loyal criminal rats out their friends. As soon as they have a sliver of power, the owners step on their charges. And when they tearfully explain their own justifications, they ease their troubled hearts and betrayed consciences with the pandering comments of strangers who only know their side of the story.
The god-kings are unavailable to justice. They are exempt from it. If they were not, the system would collapse, and that is untenable to all those reliant on it for dopamine release. The American animal is reliant on this dopamine release, bought easily at supermarkets, on social media, clothing retailers, and anywhere with price tags on mass-produced items. There is no ethical consumption.
So, because the god-kings are unavailable to be placed in the gallows and guillotines, replacements are quickly found. People who are powerful enough to be substitutes have nooses wrapped around their necks. With so many public prayer-posts, with so many willing confessions free to browse on the indexed internet, any person can be made into a scapegoat to pay for the god-king's sins. But these scapegoats are always pathetic imitations: Cartoonists, media figures, celebrities, spurned lovers, streamers, YouTubers, posters, article-writers, producers, critics, influencers, and just plain folks.
The American animal could not countenance a true gallows, it would be too problematic, too discourse, too woke, too unwoke, too proship, too anti, too much of a bad look, too gauche, too cringe, too diddy, too epstein, too much. The DIY culture has come to the public execution. Tutorial: How to tie your own noose when you get put on blast online! Tutorial: How to pull your own guillotine's cord! Travel Vlog! Top ten places to jump into the ocean! Torturing their fellow captives in public and chasing them down to torment them when they leave the internet in disgrace. This is the essence of the central cultural artifact of this millennium: The Lolcow.
The sheer joy felt when reading drama-posts about other people, the titilating narratives spun freeform by posts with thousands of likes and comments, the thrill of dissenters being put in their place and ratioed, the euphoria of seeing someone become the main character of the internet for a day. If you want to make your own Lolcow, there are only a few simple steps you need to undertake for free entertainment.
One, make the lolcow an appropriate target. This is done easily, by trawling easily-searchable posts. Try common slurs for various marginalized groups or find out if they follow anyone who has previously been made an appropriate target. Once you have found enough incriminating posts, eliminate context and create a narrative where they are a sick and twisted person. Better if the person is already embroiled in some minor controversy. Best if the person in question is marginalized themselves. The irony will be lost on your audience.
Two, release the documentation as anonymously as possible. This is to avoid any direct repercussions and add a patina of credibility. Say you are speaking out out of fear of their power. Do all you can to play up the Lolcow's power over others. Best if they are in a position of authority, no matter how minute.
Three, encourage disassociation with the Lolcow. If anyone hears their side of the story or remains sympathetic, make sure their association with the Lolcow is as odious as possible. Make them regret speaking up on the Lolcow's behalf.
Fourth, any response the Lolcow makes, no matter how reasonable, justified, or outraged, can be further farmed. Screenshot their reactions so they cannot take them back. Mock them, no matter what they say. Come up with buzzwords to explain their actions. Accuse them of being facetious. And if they remain silent, ridicule them for not responding to these allegations.
Fifth and finally, use this as your refrain: "Believe victims." This is the easiest part, as every American animal is, by default, a victim, except of course your Lolcow.
It is best in these situations that you make absolutely sure you have as much personal animosity toward the Lolcow as possible. If you think of it as human, you may experience regret or anxiety. If you think of its feelings, you may have an urge to pull back on the campaign. It is not human any more, it has given up that right by virtue of being the target of your harassment campaign- I'm sorry, I mean "callout post."
And after the dust settles and your Lolcow has committed suicide, abandoned the internet, or otherwise harmlessly vanished, you can bask in the smug satisfaction that by airing out a personal grievance online, the world is now a better place.
Isn't it?
Written 5/20/26
Drowning buckets are traps laid, usually by farmers, to kill rats by making them fall into a bucket where they drown after struggling for a little while.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a particular kind of tragedy. The main character, David, undergoes a metamorphosis into something hideous and ugly, and in the end, dies horribly. The supporting protagonist, Lucy, ends up achieving her dream of going to the moon, but she is forced to go without the love of her life. Everyone else dies horribly along the way. It's difficult to pull any meaning from this narrative wreck, from a world so thoroughly fucked by circumstance and exploitation.
Something that struck me as well was how relatable the conditions of Night City are to reality. The first episode is an extended sequence of David being tormented by circumstance: His mother's medical bills, rent, the washing machine, his own medical needs, his school, all of these big and small institutions suck him dry, every solitary moment is spent attempting to tread the water of these constant bills. When his mother dies, he reacts with exhaustion instead of grief, because he doesn't have a moment to spare for sadness.
When David does finally fall in with the crew, he finds a father figure in the same man who nearly killed him for the Sandevistan cybernetic implant that kicks off the series. He falls in love with the woman who betrays him. His friends are all violent and cruel and he only falls in with them because he promises at gunpoint that he will be useful to them. David trades in one form of slavery for another.
When David's mentor dies and he is forced to step into the position of leader, he becomes exactly that: A leader who can only maintain balance in the crew he is part of by over-exerting his body and taxing his soul with more and more cybernetic enhancements that push him further into a psychosis that he cannot afford to reveal to others.
David is special in this world. He has an unusually high tolerance for cybernetics, but even this, which should set him apart and make him unique, is used up like a resource by those around him. He has no ability to make use of this ability beyond staving off cyberpsychosis for longer than some others. When he wears the exoskeleton, he appears as an amputee, helpless and nude in the middle of a mech that is too big for him, too alien and strange. We realize that this is what has been happening to him all along, just more well hidden.
Faraday, David's handler, ultimately causes David's downfall not out of malice nor even strong emotions. It is all in service of lining his pockets and assisting his climb in status. Faraday, in the end, is remarkably low-rent for the instigator of an entire animated series. Even though David sacrifices his mental state for material gains, what does he actually earn? He manages to kill Faraday, but David is ultimately done in by forces larger and more incomprehensible than he could ever interface with. Against Adam Smasher, David is an ant. To the corporations, this is just another coverup they'll need to orchestrate.
In the real world, we are all David. Even given everything, a life, a school, food, and prospects, it can be taken away in a blink, and it may never have existed in the first place. We are all forced to toil, beholden to brands and named corporations that are trying to bleed us dry for a little more money. We are all reduced to cogs in the machine and bricks in the wall, and there is well and truly nothing to do about it. Even if, like David, we band together to eke out a meager existence as career criminals, opportunists and lawmen will fuck you anyway.
The ladder out of the drowning bucket has been silently removed. Banding together is not an option inside the drowning bucket, so the only available recourse is to try to climb on the corpses of our fellow rats, but as soon as we reach the drowning bucket's lip, someone comes and shoves us back in.
Edgerunners is a tragedy because the idea of a cyberpunk dystopia is now the simple fact of reality. I would go so far as to say that David's world is more vibrant and beautiful than ours is, because at least he can use speed superpowers. Reality now has all the hallmarks of the classic cyberpunk setting, spare for the superpowers: Neon lights, overcrowded cities, absent governments, titanic conglomerates, malignant AI, constant surveillance, wage slavery, and healthcare inequality.
Edgerunners is tragic because it's just the world we live in now. People running themselves ragged just to make a decent living, then dying before they can so much as sniff their real dreams. Cyberpunk has come out of the screen and we now live there, the threshold has been crossed. When you look in the mirror, you see David, you see Lucy, you see David's mother, you see Faraday, you see one of these desperate people trying to swallow the cognitive dissonance of living in a world that rich people have created because they hate you.
Political adventurism is on the rise. Assassins without ideologies killing people at random, the media attempting desperately to construct an identity for all the Davids who pick up a gun and try to kill someone. It's impossible. It will continue until morale improves, because it is the only way that human beings are capable of fighting back. Humans aren't cattle, only the rare few go into the killing floor and accept the bolt to the head like pigs and cows. The rich owners are so used to dealing with farm animals they don't know how to act when a human figures out that she shouldn't stand in the line where everyone in front of her suddenly dies. We'd like to get out of line, please.
We as a collective are going to see what happens when collectivism is made impossible by the ruling class. We are going to discover what happens when the lower classes run out of money and start killing each other before killing the owners. We are going to be there when bread and circuses fail.
Or, here's a far worse possibility: Everything gets worse and nothing happens. Even David doesn't show up. No one comes to overthrow the system, no one comes to save the day, even with violence. Everything gets worse and nothing happens. You and all your friends die at age 50 from something preventable while the Henry Kissingers and Donald Trumps and RFKs and all the other fossils learn new ways to live into the 120s.
Your job is to live a shitty life for a corporation, you know that. Me pointing it out is honestly cliche. But what have you actually done about it? Better question, what have you done about it that has actually worked? Your job is to live a shitty life for a corporation. What are you going to do now?
Written 5/26/26
Just to start off this essay, I want to make a bold statement. Jax is trans and it's not just a headcanon, it was written into the story directly. I'm not going to spend a lot of time explaining this because it's self-evident. If you can't see this even after someone explains it to you, you've failed the vibe check. I'm sorry Sarcastic Chorus, you failed the vibe check. Leroy uses he/him, that's true, but if you've never heard of a "boymoder" then I'm sorry, your power level isn't high enough to discuss this topic.
Jax is a trans character written on purpose by a trans author who went through conversion therapy and is trying to tell a nuanced story without having to resort to Jax turning to the camera and saying "hey Pomni I'm transgender now." This kind of blindness to trans themes in stories is on the level of thinking Brokeback Mountain isn't gay or that the skeletons of ancient lesbians are "just good friends."
We've all made mistakes, haven't we?
Regrets, little moments of doubt, choices we wish we could undo. Incedental regrets of various sizes that snowball into a crippling sense that we aren't where we're supposed to be. A sense of wasted potential and wrongness, a combination of failure and circumstance that leaves us with the quietly haunting revelation that we just fucked up and the damage is done.
I feel that way every time the clock hits 1 AM and I'm still awake.
Jax is a bad person. As soon as we meet her, she is interested in causing problems on purpose and remorselessly hurts the feelings of others to push them away. To Jax, any moment of vulnerability is weakness, a learned response from living with a single mother and absent father. We've all heard Jax's backstory before, it's routine, so much so that you could essentially just say "mommy issues" and be done with it. The way Jax is a bad person is so rote and so stereotypical, so ordinary, so mundane.
His mom is kinda homeless... Speed, why you laughing??
From the metaphor before, how big do you think your regret-snowball is? Mine is probably the size of an apple. Jax's is the size of a city block. The regret-snowball is a culmination of choices to alienate the only people who remain in her life because of her deep-seated fear of intimacy and connection. In episode 9, we see the only time Jax is completely vulnerable, and this moment is rubber banded instantly, when she fears Ribbit will use her vulnerability against her. How could she not? Vulnerability for Jax is impossible, it is the quintessential hedgehog's dilemma.
The screen presence of Jax through the first six episodes is tiresome. When she isn't actively antagonizing the cast, she is a punching bag, tied up and discarded like a cartoon character. She is a bully toward Gangle, and the only way the group can retaliate is to treat her as hostile. She makes a victim of anyone who comes to her with vulnerability, Ragatha and Pomni in particular, punishing them for attempting to get close at all.
There is no solution to this. The harm she has done to the residents of the circus is deep and painful, her coping mechanism of reflexive contrarianism is too deep to undo. And yet- how far would an apology go? She hasn't done anything physical or permanent to the residents, and it doesn't seem like forgiveness is ever out of the question. It wasn't for Caine, who did arguably more tactile harm to the group.
Snowballs melt, don't they?
In the harrowing montage of Jax alienating Ribbit in episode 9, we see a thousand chances for Jax to apologize, to make things right, to fix everything. Gooseworx's post-show post on Bsky cements this, depicting a happier version of Jax who came to her senses, as if the version we experienced in episode 9 was just a "bad ending." But this is a fantasy, a total abdication, it would require a change so radical in Jax that it stretches belief.
Jax is embroiled in a pattern of behavior, and patterns don't break unless they're broken. People change, but they don't simply decide to change, they have to be given a reason to do so. This lack of impetus is what so frustrates the other residents, it is why they cannot meet Jax where she is.
In the real world, young men are facing a crisis. Not the crisis that the influencers and shills and Claviculars are moaning about, the so-called "Male Loneliness Epidemic," but something far deeper and more profound. Men are being amputated from emotional expression and this intense pressure requires a release valve. Men are punished actively for showing emotional responses, they are interrogated for homosexuality when they express interest in the wrong activities, and this adherence to masculinity is enforced by other men in positions of authority as well as peers.
Fellas, is it gay to smile?
The real epidemic of Male Loneliness is patriarchy, it is the structure of society itself, it is men being forced to die in wars and be providers for the family unit, to be useful members of society until their bodies give out and they find out they're not eligible for disability.
Jax is a singular unit of this male loneliness, an absentee father and a mother who interprets her father's failure into Jax, a failure to provide, a failure to do her job as a man. Jax suffers and is amputated from her emotions, her mother treats her emotions as jokes, and as a result, she becomes a person who is unable to feel anything comfortably, a totally nude fetus of flesh, squirming impotently forever.
Patriarchal male alienation can be observed in how people react to it. The rise of the self-identified "femboy," the looksmaxxing community, the resurgence of pickup artists, all reactions to the attempt to force men into boxes. The two furthest extremes of these phenomenon are incels and trans women. Many people have already pointed out the latent transness within the incel sphere, the pervasive feeling by incels that they are "failed men" that they will never access the promised fruits of patriarchy and the bitterness that comes with this.
To be blunt, incels are correct about their conditions. Most of them are indeed unsuited and unserved to masculinity and are right when they feel they are being compared to an ideal that they cannot meet. The problem is that instead of blaming the system as constructed by other men, they blame women, who are even larger victims of the patriarchal system.
If you are a failed man, then why be a man? Again, to be blunt, there is a word for individuals who feel an intense disconnection with the gender and sex they were assigned:
Gamers.
Am I saying that all incels are transgender? No. I'm saying it wouldn't hurt them to consider it. Actually, it would hurt them, because to consider they are transgender would be robbing them of the last scraps of masculinity they have, something they cannot countenance. If you've ever identified as a man, you know what I'm talking about, a loathesome fear of the feminine, as if girly things are being inflicted on you, an illusory sensation that you have to be suspicious of anything with female signifiers.
Jax is, in the first several episodes, an incel. She is misogynistic, victimizing the weakest, most feminine character in the circus, Gangle, she is performatively masculine, using a rifle to literally shoot Gangle, she is unpleasant to be around, and more than happy to misattribute blame for the condition she is in. When someone like Jax or an incel misdirects their anger like this, it creates a feedback loop where their anger never goes away because the causes are never truly addressed, leading to more anger.
The most flustered visibly that Jax becomes is when she is wearing the maid dress. She is forced into a feminine article of clothing and loses it. And yet, she comes to terms with it shockingly fast, eventually all but forgetting it, even kind of owning it. Why? This is whiplash, but at the same time, it's easy to explain. This is the behavior of someone who not only does not want to admit she is a woman, but someone who quite literally cannot. she is incapable of it, physically, for the same reasons of her maladaptive coping mechanisms. she has amputated her ability to process vulnerability and paradoxically is the most vulnerable one of all.
Why does Pomni try to save Jax?
Why do the residents give a single solitary fuck about her? If you've ever treated anyone like shit, you probably wonder the same thing. Jax understands that she is alienating herself, she comprehends the idea that everyone is going to hate her, she prefers it that way. Pomni tries to save Jax because Pomni understands this, because if we're being honest, it's not actually that hard to call out.
Insecure people, especially guarded people like Jax, unintentionally wear their motivations on their sleeve. Did anyone think that Jax was just an asshole for no reason? Did anyone seriously think she's just an irredeemable asshole like a cartoon villain? Of course the fucker has mommy issues, it's clear as soon as episode 1. Pomni sees right through her, but unlike the other residents, she actually has the position to do something about it, she hasn't been shut out yet.
Jax is a bad person. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's reasonable to interpret that due to her direct actions, two people committed the circus equivalent to suicide. Our instinct is to hold her accountable for this, to reprimand her, to punish her. The patriarchy is also punitive, and we expect justice to look like violence. It's arguable that Jax does experience punitive justice, she too succumbs to abstraction the same as her victims did.
The instinct we're given in society is that punishment and justice are necessary evils. Revenge movies are incredibly popular for the closure a violent confrontation gives us. There is nothing wrong with this, but at the same time, it's not sustainable. An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind.
Let's turn our idea of ethics on its head for a moment. Revenge is mentally satisfying, but what is even more satisfying is simply not being harmed in the first place. Revenge is a victim empowering themself to do the same violence as the person who did violence to them, but that creates more violence. If the goal is to minimize violence, what is right and what is wrong?
Pomni enacts what I can only refer to as reverse-revenge. She has been hurt by Jax, but at the same time, she hasn't. Jax has lashed out at sher, like she lashes out at Gangle and Ragatha, but Pomni does not seem as susceptible to these outbursts. She is not allowing sherself to become a victim, she is giving Jax something other than what she intends: Pity. Refusing to victimize herself is her virtue, it is what allows sher to go inside her, to confront Jax in her own brain. Pomni doesn't allow herself to become hurt, she endures.
This is the truth at the heart of the Amazing Digital Circus. Being a victim is what leads people down paths of violence and misery. Gangle, the one victimized most by Jax, becomes a petty tyrant the moment they are in charge of the fast food adventure, Jax is herself a victim of the systems I've been discussing, victims are the ones in this show who hurt others.
Hurt people hurt people is a cliche, but it's more profound than that. Being hurt is in a way doing violence. Allowing yourself to be harmed is in a way harming others. Fear in the self is the motivation behind all kinds of atrocities, making one's self the victim is how violence is justified. Making a villain of someone else, no matter how justified, is going to come back to haunt you.
Why does Pomni try to save Jax?
Because Pomni comprehends what Jax is. A person. No person is categorically evil, and if someone thinks that they are, they're trying to sell you stock in for-profit prisons.
This idea that being a victim causes violence is brain-breaking for people because of how our society's justice is oriented. What I'm not saying is that if bad things happen to you you're a bad person, what I'm saying is that it's your responsibility to do something about it. It's not fair that life is like this, that you are responsible for the actions of others, but that's the life we live in.
Because what happens to Jax when Pomni extends to her the slightest bit of grace, the slightest unconditional love? What happens when Pomni and Jax explode into light? Someone new is born. Isn't she lovely?
Pomni creates a space that Jax can be vulnerable and forces her to accept it, to do what Ribbit couldn't, to overcome Jax's emotional tumult and her violence and become untouchable by it. Justice by way of the sheild, not the sword, dispensed by love and peace. If more people had extended Jax grace, how much better would life have been? If more people were resilient enough to endure Jax's pathetic facade, how much more beautiful could the circus have been? I don't think it is too much to ask to be resilient in this life.
Jax is transgender, and she is a bad person. She is a person that no matter what she has done, forgiveness can be achieved. She can be redeemed by her friends, she can be accepted and forgiven and not discarded just because of her actions. Jax deserves a community of people who are resilient, of people who understand when she falters, who can forgive her when she is at her worst. We all deserve this community, we all deserve grace and love, and we all deserve a chance.
Transgender women are disproportionately targeted, harassed, stalked, and abused, and they are expected to be resilient. They are expected to take it and ask for more, they are expected to be perfect in everything they do, they are expected to endure scrutiny and pain and hardship simply because our society isn't ready to face them and would rather they not exist. These conditions have created many people like Jax in the real world, people who can't express themselves correctly, people who lash out, people who say strange things and alarming things and horrible things.
Ask yourself, who would you rather be? Gangle or Pomni? A noble victim or someone who is actually here to help? Someone helpless or someone effective? Someone full of fear or someone full of love?
Jax is a bad person not because of some moral failing, but to be blunt, something is wrong with her. Something specific with a solution. Trans women aren't clean and pretty, they aren't before-and-after pictures on social media, the torture they undergo before they become who they were meant to be is unfathomable, and many trans women don't make it at all. What do you think Jax would act like after she transitions? Would she be the same cruel person, or would that impetus to change finally exist? Would she finally be able to apologize? How much do you think that would mean to Gangle, to Ribbit, to Ragatha, to Pomni? How resilient would she be able to become, herself?
A great many people on social media, to be blunt, failed the vibe check. By calling Jax a bad person or calling her bad representation because she has moral flaws is weak. Denying Jax is trans at all until Gooseworx had to come out and say it is weak. This is basic shit, I'm talking the blue curtains represent sadness levels of basic. This might be cope, but I genuinely think most people who are saying that Jax isn't actually trans are legitimately all in bad faith, the kind of contrarian um-actually type of people who want to argue Idiocracy is a documentary or Starship Troopers isn't satire.
If it's really that hard to tell Jax is trans, then I'm some kind of super genuis, I must be Jimmy fucking Neutron because I clocked that shit easily. I'm the Albert Einstein of Gender. The Miss Isaac Newton of grungy trans women. I think they should have characters who do worse shit. I think they should have a trans woman who kills people and isn't sorry. Oh, I guess they already have Vr
[THE REST OF THE ESSAY HAS BEEN CORRUPTED]
Written 6/20/26. Typos fixed 6/24/26
I saw 2026's The Odyssey with my girlfriend, and in spite of listening to innumerable adaptations of Greek mythology, this one really stuck with me for some reason.
I read the original poem back in High School, but the cultural artifact of The Odyssey drips through different works, most recently Hades 2, which features Odysseus as a character as well as some of his rogues gallery like Circe and Scylla. My girlfriend also introduced me to the Odyssey musical adaptation called "Epic" which is pretty good, and of course the famous "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" All this to say that The Odyssey is a piece of fiction that I'm familiar with, but isn't very "vivid" to me, it's more like this haze of story beats and stock characters, and Nolan's Odyssey brought that haze into sharp focus.
The thing I think is by far the most interesting, though, is the way Nolan portrays Odysseus the character through Matt Damon.
Going in, I didn't know Matt Damon was going to be Odysseus, and I found the casting decision distracting, though not in a bad way. The Matt Damon films I'm familiar with are his shittier ones, like the beach that makes you old and "The Happening," so when I saw him, my first reaction was laughter. Even so, I think this side of Damon is important to remember through the film as Odysseus blunders his way through the various obstacles he and his crew encounter.
First, let's zoom out and remove some of the gravitas that comes with adapting such a famous piece of literature- What is The Odyssey about? At its core, The Odyssey is the story of a man literally gifted by Athena who fucks up coming home so badly that he loses every crew member he is responsible for. It is a comedy of errors, a cavalcade of amusing mistakes and bozo decision making that depicts Odysseus both as a hero and as a tragic figure. The actor Matt Damon is the perfect guy to depict Odysseus: An ostensibly smart but unlucky guy with a lot of failures to his name who still has that Hollywood allure.
The movie makes a lot of hay about "Zeus's Law," which is a dubiously historical concept where hospitality is expected from anyone who is capable of hosting a stranger. The idea is that one should host any stranger if they can, for if the stranger is Zeus in disguise and he is treated badly, then Zeus's fury will rain down on the person. It's a pastiche of the golden rule- "Treat others how you want to be treated," which is even quoted in the film in those terms.
Now, on paper, Zeus's Law is clearly a tradition that is intended to promote charity and comradery between people, to be advantageous to the downtrodden, to create an expectation of charity from those higher on the social ladder- But during the movie, Zeus's Law is constantly invoked not to gain charity, but in fact to extract free stuff from the downtrodden. There's a massive theme in the film of "people barging into other people's homes," from the catastrophic run-in with the Cyclops to the suitors swarming Penelope's palace during Odysseus's absence.
In this way, "Zeus's Law" becomes essentially an excuse for people to post up in someone else's house and steal their shit. The most interesting case of domestic invasion is with the witch Circe. Let's do a little thought exercise:
Imagine you're Circe. You're a witch, you're a middle-aged woman, you're living on your own because presumably you're persecuted for being a witch. Now imagine that you come home to a band of armored thugs who are demanding you cook for them, and when you reasonably freak out and run off, their acting leader pins you to the ground and starts shouting at you. If I'm Circe, I'm going to be terrified. I'm immediately outmanned, outarmed, and outflanked, and all of these men have a track record of pillaging and stealing shit when things don't go their way. At best, I'm going to get eaten out of house and home, and at worst, I'm going to become a rape victim.
It might seem unfair for Circe to turn the Odysseus gang into pigs to the viewer, who understands them as the protagonists, but Circe was entirely justified. When Odysseus saves the day and the crew is turned back into humans, Odysseus's right-hand man Eurycholus suggests they kill the witch for acting in self-defense. The only reason Odysseus gives for not killing her is because he needs directions for where to go next. The only reason Circe is still alive is entirely transactional.
Circe's behavior should be particularly relatable to any American readers, who live under both the Castle Doctrine and the Third Amendment.
In this way, Zeus's Law isn't something that protects the weak, in practice it is a weapon wielded by the powerful against the weak to extract free resources from them. This seems to be the interpretation the text is going for, too, since Odysseus righteously kills all of the suitors in the last scene in a triumphant battle. Zeus's Law is bad.
Another theme of the movie that has gone underdiscussed is the patriarchy of it all. My girlfriend wisely said "this movie is for dudes," which I do think is true, but there is a measure of oppression against women that is very earnestly portrayed, too, through the characters Penelope and Helen of Troy.
There is a scene between Penelope and Telemacus where Telemacus argues that she should choose a suitor so Ithaca may have a king. During the argument, Penelope points out that the throne hasn't been empty at all, she has been sitting in it, and angrily demands why she can't have the authority of king. This question is potent, Penelope sees that she is essentially an obstacle in the way of power, and in spite of having all the claim in the world, cannot claim the power for herself. She is forced to be this objectified MILF that a bunch of dunces fight over while stealing her food every single day. Telemacus doens't really have an answer for her, either. As in he has no response at all, her challenge falls on deaf ears.
Another scene between Telemacus when he is departing Sparta after seeking to Menelaus, Helen comes forward and embraces him. Helen, critically, is another objectified woman, the entire impetus for the war with Troy was to secure her hand in marriage. There are some lines in the film regarding Agamamnon fighting for trade routes, but the evidence for this is flimsy. The war was fought over a hot girl, and the reason Helen's home city is in ruins is because a bunch of macho guys were forced to fight on the behalf of two horny brothers.
Helen embraces Telemacus and begs him to apologize to Penelope for the horrors she has caused. This scene is heartbreaking- Helen feels responsible for Odysseus being missing and empathizes with Penelope, a woman she has never met, for stealing away her husband. She can see the pain Telemacus feels and believes she is at fault for it. Helen begs Telemacus to pass along this simple message, and her husband Menelaus yanks her away and tells her to stop annoying him.
Critically, however, at no point does Telemacus actually pass this message along. Just like the scene where Penelope questions the succession of the throne, Telemacus has quite literally nothing to say. It leaves no impression on him whatsoever and Penelope never learns of Helen's plea.
I want to be clear- I'm not criticizing The Odyssey for depicting these things. It's actually incredibly thought-provoking, the way that the struggles of these women are depicted as hopeless and helpless, that the film would give these three women so much empathy and show in stark contrast how little empathy is afforded them in turn. The film is showing us the casual and brutal misogyny that still exists today and just leaving it on the table for us to think about. The tears shed by Circe, Penelope, and Helen are potent, beautiful, and moving, and they mean less than nothing to the male protagonists of the film.
The Odyssey is a great film, probably one of the best ever. It's up there with Citizen Kane and The Shining to me, it's absolutely fantastic and thought-provoking, and I don't want the story Nolan depicts of these three women to be lost in the shuffle among culture war bullshit and analysis that focuses on historical accuracy.
Also that Cyclops looked fucking bad-ass. I was shitting my pants in the theater, that thing is grody as fuck.
Written 7/23/26
In 2020, JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter franchise released an essay on her web site under her "In My Own Words" column titled "J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues." This essay is nothing short of a bad faith screed defending her cooperation with numerous anti-trans activists in the UK and abroad, but it also remains endlessly fascinating to me.
My response to Rowling's essay will be in two parts, the serious part and the funny part. The serious part will come first and will detail all the ways JK Rowling is either wrong or lying in order that we can all see what a fraud she is speaking about a topic she knows nothing about. The funny part will come after that and will detail all of the quotes in her essay that shocked me for reasons you will soon understand.
THE SERIOUS PART:
I will be responding paragraph-by-paragraph with references to the paragraph number.
The reason JK Rowling made this essay is as a response to a number of people who got on her ass in 2020 for liking a post by Maya Forestater, an anti-trans activist, which she calls "evidence of wrongthink" to trans activists who at that point were already criticizing her online. Paragraphs 1-8 are devoted to the background and context of this incident from her POV.
Her description of the event is as follows: "[...] activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF."
She describes her critics in these very dire terms, and quite frankly, having used Twitter, now X the Everything App, for about five years in that time, I don't actually doubt that the hate she received was this intense for her. She also mentions people threatening to burn her books, which is something that has long been practiced by the religious right against her. More on this later.
Whether or not the hatred she got online was this intense is irrelevant, however, because she goes on to use this incident to make claims that are not true.
Paragraphs 9-12 outline her brief etymology on the term "TERF," of which she includes examples such as the late YouTuber Magdalen Berns expressing that she would never date someone with a penis as well as a number of anecdotes such as "the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying," and an "older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms."
This kind of thing is what I'm going to broadly refer to as "penis fearmongering."
From paragraphs 13-16, Rowling describes her reasons for speaking out on the matters of sex and gender in spite of the pushback, which can be summarized in her words as worries about "eroding the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender."
In this section, she makes her first actual fact-claim, which is, "I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning [...]"
What she is referring to is the concept of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, pioneered by Lisa Littman, who Rowling also cites in her piece.
Paragraphs 17-22 contain several data-backed claims by Rowling, and though she cites no sources, the sources are quite trivial to find.
In Paragraph 17, she claims, "ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers."
I'm not actually sure where this particular factoid comes from, but as this point doesn't actually lead to anything, I'm willing to let it slide.
In Paragraph 21, Rowling discusses the pushback against Lisa Littman, where much of this data comes from. Rowling describes the pushback in the same way she describes her own critics, as lunatic activists who "cannot be persuaded."
Littman, a self-described "Gender Dysphoria" researcher, is a pioneer in junk data who made several claims that were later critiqued not because her study was controversial, but because her claims were wrong.
Littman describes Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria as "a subset of youth, primarily natal females, with no childhood indicators of gender dysphoria but with a sudden emergence of gender dysphoria symptoms during puberty or after its completion."
There is a long piece in The Guardian that aggregates a critique to Littman's work, none of which is in terms of activists who "cannot be persuaded" but in terms of fellow scientists who don't like her theory, mostly because it did not involve interviews with trans kids, but instead their parents.
In short, Rowling is going to bat for a quack doctor who is creating junk science for the sake of Rowling's pet ideological bugbear.
Paragraphs 23 to 25 are more of her personal feelings and a quote from Simone De Beauvoir that don't contain anything empirical. More on this in the funny section.
More data are presented in paragraphs 26 and 27. She makes the claim that "extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria."
Again, nothing is cited, but finding these sources is easy. Unfortunately, these sources are woefully outdated.
During the late 20th century, gender and sex became a fascination by a number of dubious individuals in the medical field, and a number of common misconceptions arose from this time because of the irresponsible practices of this era. The specific 60-90% figure comes from twelve studies done from 1968 to 1980, but more recent studies from 2003, 2013, and 2024 depict numbers of trans children who "persist" or remain trans after initial treatment rose to over 90%.
Why is this? There are numerous reasons, and the one Rowling and her friend Littman subscribe to is the idea of "social contagion," or that trans people are influencing each other to transition. This assumes a number of things- First of all, from the use of the term "social contagion," transness is positioned as something negative. Certainly gender dysphoria is negative, but being trans cannot be "contagious."
The more likely answer is the fact that trans people have become more widely accepted and understood since the 1980s, when there were still "bearded woman" exhibits for people to gawk at. Numbers of self-identified homosexuals also increased in a similar fashion in the 2000s leading into gay marriage legalization in the 2010s in America.
Social Contagion and Rapid Onset Dysphoria are concepts invented to devalue the personal feelings of trans people and treat their feelings as illegitimate or in doubt.
Paragraphs 28-30 regard Rowling's opinion on women as a social category. She writes, "I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive."
This, of course, is a matter of opinion and I don't feel like arguing it, but I do have one question- Why? Why is "biological woman" an important social class? Earlier in the piece she eschews the notion that girls need be "pink" or "frilly" or that there are any particular objective female traits. What are they?
"Woman" is not a class that someone can control being part of. Rowling writes, ""Woman is not a costume," but are trans people claiming that they are? Perhaps drag performers claim something like this, but drag performers are not generally "trans" but "cross-dressers."
Rowling also critiques non-gendered language such as "menstruators" and "womb-havers" and so forth, but these terms, while clinical, have an actual use. Many "natal" women do not menstruate. Women go through menopause from 45-50 and in the US alone there are about a hundred million women older than 45, according to Census.gov.
I'm being slightly obtuse here, but I'm trying to illustrate the point that there are no objective measures of womanhood, "woman" is a class subordinate to "man" that is imposed on women by men. Rowling understands "woman" as an immutable, biological category, and that is her right to believe, but it does not stand up to scrutiny.
Paragraphs 31-34 describe her own history of domestic abuse. I'm not going to get into this too deeply except to extract the fact that she very clearly understands men as dangerous and understands trans women as "biological men," which is the first principle from which she constructs her entire gender worldview.
I am sympathetic to her domestic abuse and I understand that in this section she explicitly extends sympathy to trans women and acknowledges their high rates of victimhood, but this is all a tiny drop of sympathy in a large bucket of junk science and fearmongering.
In paragraph 35, Rowling states, "I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined," a sentence which totally undermines the entire essay entirely. If she believes this, why is she making this essay? She recognizes the vulnerability of trans women and understands they are "zero threat to others" but still clutches her pearls about incorrect detransition rates and penis fearmongering.
In paragraph 36, she expands, "[...] I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe." The implication of course being that trans women make "natal" women less safe.
In paragraph 37, she brings everything home: "I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one."
What she fears, in essence, is men gaining access to women's spaces under false pretenses. I don't mean to be obtuse here, but is this not a completely separate issue to trans rights?
Let's say that a hypothetical woman is assaulted in a restroom by a man. Would this man get off the hook by saying "I'm actually a lady?" No. He has committed an assault. Men facetiously gaining access to women's spaces in drag is not a trans rights issue, and the law she's referring to does not make assault, done by a man nor woman, legal.
What she is arguing in essence is that she opposes being made to "feel" less safe by sharing women's spaces with trans women. She is not arguing that she "is" less safe, nor that this decrease in a feeling of safety is due to trans women. In paragraph 41, she mentions her sympathy for trans women being assaulted, but insists that men remain in women's spaces.
The harrowing truth is that women do not face assault by trans women, it is that trans women face assault by men. Rowling is essentially conflating trans women with the very category who rape and abuse trans women most often, that being, in short, men.
Rowling's feelings are the most important thing in the world, and of course, this is her essay, so why shouldn't they be? She says in paragraph 40, "Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists." This is not a statement she backs up with facts and figures, this is a statement she feels is true and is basing her opinions on.
Which would be fine if she was not the richest woman in the UK. In 2008, she donated one million pounds to the Labour party. She donated another million to the Scottish anti-independence campagin "Better Together." She got 150 signatures for a letter opposing an Israeli boycott. In 2018, she described trans women as "Men in Dresses" on Twitter.
In 2025, Rowling founded The JK Rowling's Women's Fund, using the finances gained from publishing, and used this organization to funnel money into anti-trans legislation and legal battles.
The fund, from its web site, claims "The J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund (JKRWF) offers legal funding support to individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s and girls’ sex-based rights."
In paragraph 42 of her essay, Rowling says, "The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them."
Men and Trans People, conflated once again.
When comparing the essay to her actions over the next five years, a stark contrast emerges. Rowling pays lip service to anonymous trans friends and plays the violin for all the trans women who have been abused, but in the end, she is attempting to wall off who is allowed to be a woman and fearmongering about things that are not represented in the data like trans women abuse and detransition rates.
Rowling uses her own past of abuse to justify hating a class of people who do not even belong to the class of people who actually hurt her. It's obscene and it makes her bedfellows with the very people who hated her books for religious reasons to begin with.
THE FUNNY PART:
Okay. You ate your vegetables, now you can have dessert.
You already know all this, right? You know that JK Rowling is a delusional has-been who is using her personal wealth to fuck over trans people for the past ten years. We're on the same page.
Here's a doozy for you, then: Is JK Rowling trans?
In paragraph 23 of her essay, Rowling drops a bombshell that I genuinely never thought I would read: "The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria [in trans men] I’ve read, [...] the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition."
She goes on to opine that "the allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge."
When I read this for the first time, I was genuinely flabbergasted. If you're familiar with the trans community, you're probably familiar with terms like "repper" (represser) and "egg" (trans person who does not yet realize they are trans) and these two statements are shockingly in-line with how many trans people talk about their feelings before coming to understand they are trans.
The idea of "escaping womanhood" I am sure is very common among cisgender women, as being a woman comes with innumerable social downsides because of reasons I've discussed before- They are the subordinate class in an oppressive patriarchal system.
At the same time, though, most cis women do not want to "escape womanhood" in a literal sense, they want to establish equality between the established genders. The fact that Rowling explicitly states that she empathizes with trans men is not insignificant.
Rowling also uses two pen names, JK Rowling and Robert Galbraith, the former chosen because it is more androgynous, and the latter explicitly a man's name.
Let me put it this way- If your friend said that they want to "escape womanhood" and have been reading accounts of trans men and wish they could be one, and used a man's name, what advice would you give them? You'd probably say- "Maybe you just ARE trans."
I'm pointing this out not in some attempt to get JK off the hook, she's still a terrible person, I'm saying this to point out the titanic hypocrisy at play here. Rowling, who is exhibiting classic "egg behavior," is one of the most virulent anti-trans activists of all time. The width between her and being a pro-trans activist is a matter of her birthday.
In this way, she is practically admitting she is nothing but a dinosaur, a fossil of a previous era. Using the previous era's understanding of trans people on herself and others to the detriment of everyone.
If JK Rowling had been born 30 years later, she might be Robert, a YouTube video essayist with a bunch of piercings and green hair, but she was born when being trans meant you got electrocuted by doctors who kidnapped you in your sleep.
Through this lens, her essay takes a completely different tone. It seems like an essay where she is desperately trying to convince herself that being trans isn't legitimate for her own sake, not her own.
At the end, in paragraph 44, she says "All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse," but that isn't all she wants. If that were all she wanted, she would not be a TERF activist.
The central question I asked in the serious section was "why?" Why is Rowling doing all this? There is a total void at the heart of all this, and she even lampshades it: In paragraph 39, "It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow."
Why not? She describes relenting as so easy, as preferrable. She seems to understand that everything would just be simpler for her if she saw reason, if she accepted the facts, if she let go of her own fear. Why doesn't she? Why does she choose the worse path?
I don't know. I'm not her fuckin' psychologist.
All I know is that if you buy any Harry Potter merch, you're a dumbass.
Written 8/3/26