vanderWaardart

They/them or she/her, pan, 38; anti-fash and BDSM author, sex worker, indie researcher, erotic artist/pornographer 🔞 MDNI Book details: My name is Persephone van der Waard and I have a non-profit book series on sex positivity and the Gothic. Made in collaboration with other sex workers, Sex Positivity is a four-volume book being released one volume/sub-volume (module) at a time. Simply go to my website's 1-page promo and pick up a copy of each for free: https://vanderwaardart.com/book_gothic_communism Support my work! You can support me and the work I do through commissions; re: I do written and illustrated commissions, whose rates and examples of which can be accessed on my commissions page. Apart from commissions, I also take donations through PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on my Linktr.ee: https://linktr.ee/vanderwaardart Any commission/donation money I make goes towards helping sex workers for my ongoing book series. If you want to help by purchasing a commission, you can contact me on DA, Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky and Discord; my username is the same on all of them: vanderWaardart.

[vanderwaardart86]

I pay sex workers to give them a voice/promote their work through my own book series. Donos/comms go towards collabs/promotions: paypal.me/vanderwaardart

https://ko-fi.com/vanderwaardart

patreon.com/vanderwaardart

cash.app/$NicholasvanderWaard

written/drawn commissions: https://vanderwaardart.com/commissions

Book details: https://vanderwaardart.com/book_gothic_communism

About the Author: https://vanderwaardart.com/book_gothic_communism/about-the-author 

Acknowledgements (for the book): https://vanderwaardart.com/book_gothic_communism/gothic-communism-acknowledgments

Sex work (models): https://vanderwaardart.com/sex-work

[eldritchbauble]

Trans joy is real and it is bigger than hatred.

Your lived truth is a beacon of light in this world.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Obligatory disclaimer that this is not a "Tolkien was ackshually super progressive" post (which is an opinion that way too many people on this website seem to hold lmao).

Anyway, I think it's really interesting how Tolkien himself was much more critical of his portrayal of the orcs as an Evil Race™ than a lot of his modern fans are.

Like it's really interesting how the guy spent the rest of his life trying to square the fact that portraying the orcs as inherently evil creatures is almost a necessity of the sort of story he was writing (because otherwise it's kinda hard to feature multiple battle scenes where a substantial chunk of your cast of protagonists kill dozens of them and come out looking morally virtuous on the other side) with the fact that the concept of an entire species of creatures that is both sapient and ontologically evil was largely incompatible with his particular branch of christianity.

[centrally-unplanned]

Generally endorsed but I would challenge the "he had orcs as a storytelling necessity to allow his heroes to fight battles and still be good guys" - modern writers have this issue but Tolkien did not. His "source world" of medieval European literary & poetic works is filled to the brim with heroes who mow down human enemies in battle and get a pat on the back for it; that is a key part of what *makes* them heroes. Dying and killing in battle is normalized and lacks any of that ethical dilemma we have with it today.

You can confirm this because Tolkien's heroes kill a *lot* of humans lol. The armies of Saruman & Sauron are all mixed human-orc; Aragorn actually spent years of his youth fighting a war for Gondor against the Pirates of Umbar killing nothing but humans. Now Tolkien is also a modern man - he humanizes those enemies at times in ways The Song of Roland never would? (Most famously in a passage from iirc Sam's pov, the hobbits serve that contrast role) But not to the point where there is any "problem" heroically for the main characters to fight them.

(The movies downplayed the human enemy factions or made them fantastical for their own genre reasons, so I think some people understandably forget their prevalence)

The importance of the orcs to Tolkien, beyond the basic "it's badass" storytelling nuts-and-bolts, is his deep affection for the genre of fairy tales which was his life's goal to rehabilitate as an "adult" genre. He has all this theology about the godliness of acts of creation, the nature of corruption, etc which orcs embody that he wants on the page because having just human enemies neglects the power of these stories. Tolkien's most famous academic work, "The Monsters and the Critics", is kind of about exactly this in regards to Beowulf. His academic peers spent decades going "ugh why is this crucial historical text wasting my time with *dragons* when it could be giving me details about 6th century medieval politics", and he defends the monsters as just as important to the culture as a form of expression as the real stuff.

Heroes in Fairy Tales fight monsters! It is the lodestone of the genre thematically, and Tolkien would never neglect it.

[i-am-cybersmith]

That feels like a little bit of an oversimplification.

Yes, Tolkien took a lot of inspiration from medieval and pre-medieval European storytelling, but he wasn't just a modern man looking at the past, he was a modern man looking at modernity.

There's an element of his story that isn't present in Beowulf or any of the other old works, and it's industrialisation. Tolkien saw industrialisation as a dehumanising, corrupting force, something that took individual men and women then turned them into mere tools for war.

His tensions with killing large numbers of people in battle should be viewed in light of the fact that he personally experienced it. This was an author who wrote at least some his works after seeing his countrymen cut down like wheat in a field by enemy machine guns, and then turned those same weapons onto people wearing different uniforms.

Orcs are particularly identified with industrialisation. Unlike the towering, brutish tribal warriors of Blizzard and Games Workshop, Tolkien's orcs are small, weak, cunning creatures. They work extensively with metal, they have a productive capacity that exceeds any of the human polities of the Third Age.

The PJ films don't dwell on this, but they do depict it. Orcs are using mass-produced armour and swords, poured into moulds without the loving care of an expert craftsman. They use explosives, and composite crossbows.

I think this isnwhere some of the tension comes from in how Tolkien thought of the Orcs, and of warfare. He saw war as something which had the potential to be glorious and medieval, but under malign influences like industrialisation, it also had the potential to be brutal and depersonalising.

The man who wrote the Charge of the Rohirrim also wrote of the Dead Marshes.

The Orcs aren't just fairytale monsters, they are in some ways almost a creature we might associate more with Science Fiction (and keep in mind that Tolkien would likely have been familiar with the Morlocks and Martians of HG Wells, at least); industrialisation gone to hell. Compare Doctor Who's Cybermen or the Borg from Star Trek.

Something recognisably a person, but degraded and warped by industrialised mass-production and the logic of the conveyor belt.

[vanderwaardart86]

Orcs = different things at once, like any monster; e.g., Smaug = rarefied cruelty/commentary on modernity. I've written elsewhere ( https://bsky.app/profile/vanderwaardart.bsky.social/post/3mbtj7i7qtk2k ): Tolkien was racist; e.g., Anderson Rearick's "Why Is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc" (2004) but also Jeff LaSala's "Tolkien's Orcs: Boldog and the Host of Tumult" (2021), detailing why Tolkien hated orcs. Also, he was Zionistic in his writings; e.g., "Dwarves Are Not Heroes," writes Rebecca Brackmann in 2010. See my extensive research/writings on Tolkien for even more reasons why he was a giant bigot, monarchist, and closeted gay man. Apart from my and these above examples, Dr. Stephen Shapiro also wrote to Reddif in 2003 regarding Tolkien's racism in Jackson's adaptations, Put simply, Tolkien's good guys are white and the bad guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a psychologically undeveloped horde. In the trilogy, a small group, the fellowship, is pitted against a foreign horde and this reflects long-standing Anglo-European anxieties about being overwhelmed by non-Europeans. This is consistent with Tolkien's Nordicist convictions. He thinks the Northern races had a culture and it was carried in the blood. While Tolkien describes the Hobbits and Elves as amazingly white, ethnically pure clans, their antagonists, the Orcs, are a motley dark-skinned mass, akin to tribal Africans or aborigines. The recent films amplify a "fear of a black planet" and exaggerate this difference by insisting on stark white-black colour codes. https://pillars.taylor.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=inklings_forever https://www.tor.com/2021/06/10/tolkiens-orcs-boldog-and-the-host-of-tumult/ https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol28/iss3/7/ https://nicksmovieinsights.com/2025/04/my-tolkien-scholarship.html https://nicksmovieinsights.com/2024/03/a-note-about-canonical-essentialism.html https://www.rediff.com/news/2003/jan/08lord.htm

[vanderwaardart86]

"You got the Big Key! Use it to access the room where the dungeon's boss lurks!" My drawing of #Link and from #ALinktothePast NSFW version: https://bsky.app/profile/vanderwaardart.bsky.social/post/3m7o4bdd4es2z The model: Vivian Strange Read her review (18+): https://vanderwaardart.com/sex-work/muses/vivian-strange

[vanderwaardart86]

"Do you wanna live forever?" A commission from captain-odie.bsky.social, of their OC Windsly Thorne.

Support my work! You can support me and the work I do through commissions; re: I do written and illustrated commissions, whose rates and examples of which can be accessed on my commissions page. Apart from commissions, I also take donations through PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on my Linktr.ee.

[crypticcripple]

Poeming and clowning tonight. Hottest jester you ever saw vibe achieved

[vanderwaardart86]

I love everything about this!

[vanderwaardart86]

"Where in the world could we be? Eee-hee!" My drawing of #Midna and #WolfLink from #TwilightPrincess The model: pupstar-darina.bsky.social NSFW version: https://bsky.app/profile/vanderwaardart.bsky.social/post/3m6cjv4z7bs2n

Read her review: https://vanderwaardart.com/sex-work/muses/pupstar-darina!

[vanderwaardart86]

Finished essay on Bad Empanada: punching down at me—a #trans PhD, #an-Com, activist, sex worker and #rape survivor—but also attacking my friends in different intersecting minority communities, fighting for our rights alongside Palestine.

youtu.be/WDSQaOmFInE #FreePalestine #SexWorkIsWork #Zionism

[underrotting]

Btw I am officially coining VATM and VRATM

VATM: Violence Against Trans Men - Violence specifically perpetrated against trans men including assaults, sexual assaults etc…

Examples of VATM: Trans men facing more violence as they transition, corrective rape, high rates of sexual assault in airports

Example of use: VATM is way too common in airports

VRATM - Violent Rhetoric Against Trans Men -

Examples: “All trans men should die” “Bomb that explodes all trans men” “kill yourself trans men”

NOT an example: “All men should die” ( do not use VRATM to describe this, this is a very different discussion that I frankly do not care about since not all men are impacted by the minority stress model )

Example of use: “High levels of VRTAM online can lead to proximal minority stress processes and poor mental health outcomes.”

[vanderwaardart86]

"Look what the little kid has become in the past seven years..." My drawing of #Nabooru from #OcarinaofTime

The model: darktendenciesx.bsky.social

Read her review: https://vanderwaardart.com/sex-work/muses/vera-dominus!

[vanderwaardart86]

Today's essay has me, a white #trans #Gothicist and #antifascist, critiquing Heavy Metal Philosophy's good-faith follow-up response to me previously critiquing him critiquing Andrew Lee on #racism in #metal.

the video: https://youtu.be/PhNMg7H9dnM

works cited: https://nicksmovieinsights.com/2025/11/replying-to-jon-barbas-a-follow-up-to-my-is-metal-racist-video.html

[vanderwaardart86]

Essay addendum; re: on Mike Israetel's race science. Many are defending Mike, but Solomon Nelson especially sucks; i.e., he's kept quiet on Mike's racism despite knowing about it since at least January:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l493ugtxuYc original essay (this addendum attaches to): https://nicksmovieinsights.com/2025/10/follow-up-white-moderates-still-dont-challenge-fascism.html

[vanderwaardart86]

A review of my security specialist:

https://nicksmovieinsights.com/2025/10/my-site-security-reviewing-and-recommending-josey-howarth-and-love-sudo.html

Josey and Love Sudo helped me secure/archive my work. She specializes in helping vulnerable workers seeking protection from political violence—often sex workers (having been one, herself).

"While my website is designed to promote other sex workers, Josey can help you set up your own; i.e., doing so at an incredibly affordable price."

[vanderwaardart86]

With del Toro's Frankenstein (2025) hitting theatres, I review his film but also celebrate Mary Shelley's ur-text; i.e., as having a profound impact not just on del Toro or myself, but the entire world: the girl who did Marx before Marx! https://nicksmovieinsights.com/2025/10/reviewing-del-toros-frankenstein-and-celebrating-mary-shelleys-immortal-legacy-2025.html

[vanderwaardart86]

Today's video essay has me, a white trans Gothicist and anti-fascist, critiquing Heavy Metal Philosophy's good-faith response to Andrew Lee's essay on racism in metal.

works cited: https://nicksmovieinsights.com/2025/10/is-metal-racist-yes-it-is-or-a-trans-woman-critiquing-heavy-metal-philosophys-good-faith-response-to-andrew-lee.html

[vanderwaardart86]

Following up my prior essay on Solomon Nelson. Before, we covered his racism, specifically how he defends Mike Israetel's; here, we discuss Bro Science calling out bodybuilding culture's racism, which I apply to Solomon:

https://youtu.be/y90m6cbKdCM the link to the unscaled/uncompressed timeline collage: https://nicksmovieinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/solomon-nelson-racism-timeline-min.jpg works cited: https://nicksmovieinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/bro-science-addendum-cited-material-10_23_2025.pdf

[vanderwaardart86]

"The sanctity of this place has been fouled!" My latest drawing—of the formidable Hannah Hussein, who I commissioned to pose for my book series!

Support her work: https://linktr.ee/hannah_hussein13 I'll be reviewing her on my 18+ website, too: vanderwaardart.com/sex-work

Book details: My name is Persephone van der Waard and I have a non-profit book series on sex positivity and the Gothic. Made in collaboration with other sex workers, Sex Positivity is a four-volume book being released one volume/sub-volume (module) at a time. Simply go to my website's 1-page promo and pick up a copy of each for free!

Support my work! You can support me and the work I do through commissions; re: I do written and illustrated commissions, whose rates and examples of which can be accessed on my commissions page. Apart from commissions, I also take donations through PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on my Linktr.ee.

Any commission/donation money I make goes towards helping sex workers for my ongoing book series. If you want to help by purchasing a commission, you can contact me on DA, Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky and Discord; my username is the same on all of them: vanderWaardart (it’s vanderWaardart86 on Tumblr). You can also use my website’s contact form, which puts you in touch with my business e-mail.