1980 07-01 Massively- (Magically-) Enhanced Interrogation1981 07-01 What’s that on your cheek–oh, no, you bit right through it!1982 07-01 Aww! He looks so sad and pathetic!1983 07-01 It’s a pity he only has one more to pop!
Explicit version containing gore, graphic violence, and enhanced interrogation themes at 07-01X The Chamber of Torment III at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman
PREVIOUSLY: Channah and Rivqah are interrogating Gasparo Orseolo in the Chamber of Torment, the nighttime nerve center of the Venetian Republic. In another part of the Palace, Chava waits nervously for further instructions with the ensorcelled child, Pen, trying not to think about how much time is passing. NOW:
“You evil little roach. You will be spending eternity with us, in hell.”
“No! No, I am a pious man! A churchgoing man! I was confessed just this morning!”
The two succubae laughed vindictively. “And you were torturing prisoners again before we found you tonight, weren’t you?” Channah observed. “Even under your church’s absurd superstitions, you are no innocent. You’re not even good.” She peered at him—into him and through him—with narrowed eyes, ignoring his blubbering protests, before nodding. “Damned as Judas, your filthy, tarnished soul is.”
“My priest—”
“Legerdemain!” Rivqah roared with amusement.
“Prestidigitation!” Channah concurred. “There are no magic spells that can save you from your Maker’s judgment. Your soul is as you have fashioned it. Old men in dresses, chanting and making hand gestures, cannot alter or hide the filth on it—within it—from God.”
“God is merciful!” This idea seemed to incense both of the succubae, but he was doubling down before he could even consider whether it was wise or not: “He will forgive me!”
After taking her own peer at his soul, Rivqah exchanged a wry glance with Channah. “I wouldn’t count on it,” was all Rivqah said.
“I’m going to ask Rivqah to come find you—what’s left of you,” Channah decided.
“Yesss!” Rivqah hissed, her eyes dancing with delight at the prospect.
“And then we’re going to hang you up again and have another little chat,” she nodded to herself, her voice dripping with malice. Channah laughed. “And down there, we can leave you in exactly this position as long as we want. You’ll never pass out or rest. Not in hell. I’m so going to hope you remember this. Enough of it, anyway, to appreciate how right I was, and how wrong you were. So I can really gloat and rub it in.” And seeing his frown of uncertainty and doubt, she shrugged. “It’s true! And quite irritating. You damned little ants can be quite disoriented and overwhelmed by hell. The red shades can’t remember anything specific about their lives. They’re consumed and defined by their lust. White shades,” she pointed to him helpfully “—that’s going to be you, loser—may remember a few details of their Earthly lives, sometimes many of them, or maybe nothing at all. That’s why I had to come interrogate you here, to learn what I need to learn before you forget it.”
“You’re mad! You can’t just—just question me, inside the Doge’s own palace! The guards—”
“Oh!” She and Rivqah smirked at one another. “I see.”
“Are you, perhaps, hoping for a rescue?!” Rivqah snickered.
Channah disappeared and reappeared a foot to the left of where she had been.
“Wha–?!” the Capo gasped, and even Rivqah—the swordswoman—was clearly taken aback by the sudden shift, although she quickly covered up that reaction.
And then, just as suddenly, Channah was standing two feet to the right of where she had been.
“I can stop time itself, Gasparo. And move through it.” And as she saw the hopelessness she had been looking for, creep into his eyes, she laughed throatily with satisfaction. “That’s right. We have all the time in the world we could ever hope for. But if you don’t cooperate with me, I won’t do that. I’ll loiter here, until another Lord of the Night or a night watchman appears with another prisoner to torture, and kill them. Who do you imagine would win, in a contest between us—your army and navy of Venice? Or my demon warriors?”
“Hail, Mary, full—”
“Oh, stop it, sinner!” she laughed, slapping Orseolo brutally across the face, more-than-incidentally pulling on his arms and eliciting another cry of agony from him. “You can’t very well be answering my important questions, when you’re chanting and whimpering, can you? No.”
And when he started up again, not quite rationally, she appeared thoughtful, moving counterclockwise around him until she stood by his left leg. With more force than Orseolo could have imagined, she twisted as hard as she could. With a scream ending in abrupt silence, Orseolo was knocked out from the pain.
He was awakened again, by a ladle-full of cold, stale water (again), hanging in the strappado—again—in the Chamber of Torment, wracked with pain. Again.
“I think we’ve established your leg isn’t dead yet,” Channah reminded him, as his eyes blinked and tried to refocus on the world around him.
“Not dead—what?”
And she barely poked it, eliciting another scream, this one not ending in abrupt unconsciousness.
“Your leg is still alive. But the tourniquet will kill it soon enough.”
“Tourniquet?!” he looked down and wailed again in horror at the rope constricting his left leg. “Oh no,” he gasped, panicking, head twisting back and forth, eyes rolling in his head. “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no….”
“You won’t be bleeding out on us, Gasp-o,” she assured him. “Sorr—eee. But after we kill the leg, we’ll have to continue above the tourniquet. So….” She leaned down and tugged his chin to the left so he couldn’t avoid her eyes. She smiled brightly. “I’d best take advantage of your shattered knee right now, hadn’t I? How did you first come to suspect Anzola was ‘possessed’?” And then she dug her thumb in , shuddering with pleasure as she watched him cry and shudder.
1976 06-128 Channah & Rivqah show their cards… and their claws 1977 06-128 Nothing Gasparo Orseolo EVER hoped to see 1978 06-128 …and I bet he can take it all the way up to HERE1979 06-128 Standing under a former Lord of the Night
Explicit version containing gore, graphic violence, and enhanced interrogation themes at 06-128X The Chamber of Torment II at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman
PREVIOUSLY: Channah and Rivqah have just killed two Venetian soldiers and captured two Venetian officials who were supervising their torture of a Venetian prisoner in the Room of Torment of the Doge’s Palace. Now one of Venice’s 3 Capos—who rotate responsibility for day-to-day management of Venice—awakens to find himself bound and hanging by his wrists, which are tied behind his back, with his knee shattered, learning that his captors know him already. NOW:
“Finally. You find yourself in the place you most deserve, Gasparo Orseolo.”
The capo couldn’t conceal the uneasy alarm in his voice. “How—how do you recognize me?!”
The women laughed. “We don’t ‘recognize’ you,” Rivqah assured him.
And Channah explained: “We came for you. We picked a night when you would be on duty here. Because we want to know what you know. Well…” she exchanged an amused glance with Rivqah. “That’s half the truth. They say if you want a thing done right, you should do it yourself. But that’s why I keep charge of training my operatives: to make sure every one of them is trained right. If all I wanted from you was information, I could have sent any one of them here for you tonight. Instead of honoring you—and indeed, all of Venice—with my esteemed presence, and that of my Duchesses, in this little backwater.”
“Backwater?! Duchess—” the Capo looked genuinely incredulous and confused, as well he might. Venice was one of the brightest lights in Latin Christendom, and (in his relatively seasoned and well-informed experience) Duchesses were ladies rather than thieves and assassins. “But—what could you possibly want from me?!”
“24 Sha’ban, 921.”
“What?”
Channah made a circular motion with her hand. “Ahhh…” looking mildly frustrated, she shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter to us.”
“What you would call, um… Wednesday, October 3rd, anno Domini 1515,” Rivqah clarified, with exaggerated formality.
“Thank you, my dear.”
Orseolo looked discomfited, nervous, and uncertain. “October… October two years ago….” His thoughts were slow, even stuck.
Channah let him fumble around for a moment, her eyes flat and hard. “This one, for your sake, I hope you can remember: Anzola Ipato.”
Orseolo gasped. “You—you are what, her sisters? I promise you—I swear to you in the Lord’s name, the Anzola Ipato I knew, she was not your sister!”
“Oh, yes she was!”
“No, I swear it—your poor sister had departed before I ever met her. The Devil had already taken her! Her body was a vessel for him when she was brought to me. I swear it! Three patricians swore it to me and I confirmed it.”
Both women were incensed, stepping forward, faces contorting with rage. “Liar! She was no devil!”
The Capo’s voice rose several octaves, as if they’d already castrated him: “I swear it! The Archibishop himself confirmed it! Her flesh was scarred by Holy Water—it evaporated on he—”
“You threw holy water on her?!” Channah’s hand shot out to seize his jaw and pinch it, hard, impossibly hard for what Orseolo imagined to be a frail woman.
He was baffled and scared; their reactions completely inappropriate, indeed illogical. “I don’t—I don’t understand, I’m telling you—we tried to save her! We did everything we could to expel the demon from her!”
“You did expel the demon from her, exorcist! And with it, extinguished her ability to live and move in this world!”
“What–?!” No one had ever been more baffled than Gasparo Orseol was in that moment. “Praise be to the Holy Mother Church!”
“Fuck and damn the Holy Mother Church!”
“Who are you?!” He wailed.
And with a sly glance at one another, for his reward, they showed him.
It took him a moment to wrap his mind around what he was seeing, the horns rising from their foreheads, their teeth and fingernails sharpening and lengthening, their skin taking on a ruddy hue under the olive one, and even—though he didn’t spot them until later—their tails extending under their skirts to swirl and brush the floor. But as soon as he did begin to try and make sense of the insensible, to the succubae’s delight, Orseolo started quaking and blithering Catholic incantations: “Hail Mary, full of grace, The Lord is with thee. Blessed art th—”
“You honor the mother of your lord by urinating?!” the demonesses laughed.
“Wh—what?” Orseolo looked down and sobbed to see the evidence of his own shame on the platform below him. Then he noticed a second puddle, much larger, and of a much darker and stickier liquid, on the same surface but much nearer to his head than his groin. What attracted his attention was movement, of another dark red drop plummeting past him to land in the puddle. Gasping with shock, before even thinking how much sudden motion would hurt him, he craned his neck to look up, his screech of pain turning into a prolonged scream of terror at the sight of his Lord of the Night hanging half a dozen feet above him by the very same rope.
The two demonesses chuckled and shook their heads. “We haven’t even started to torture him properly yet!” Rivqah clucked her disappointment.
The demonesses simply enjoyed his horror and shock, drinking it in and appraising it with experienced eyes for perhaps 2 or 3 minutes, until he came back to them, and to the room around him, well enough to start thinking and calculating and—this was the sweetest to them—hoping and praying as desperately as he was fearing and dreading, all at once plunged into a complex mixture of emotions and thoughts.
As his eyes came back into focus on Channah’s, Channah asked him conversationally: “You’re an experienced torturer. What are the advantages of the strappado?”
“Wh—what?”
“Over, say… the Judas seat. Or…” she raised her hand, holding an exquisitely-detailed and -inlaid dagger with a radically curved blade. “a simple blade?”
“I don’t—I—I—”
“Oh, I am disappointed,” Channah professed, shaking her head and frowning. “First question, and a simple one. And not even a state secret, by any stretch of the imagination. And you can’t answer it. It’s so easy: Longevity. Specifically, yours.” She shrugged. “Relatively speaking, of course. You know you’re going to die where you hang, don’t you?”
“What?” he barked hoarsely, like a small dog kicked in the stomach.
“You’re never going to leave that rope,” she explained slowly, as if speaking to a small child. “Not inside your body, anyway. Never going to know another second free of pain.” She tut-tutted, as if there were something about the situation she regretted, rather than relished. “Never going to be happy again.”
“Hallelujah, I will when I join my Lord—”
And here both of them laughed, a sharp, mocking cackle with a supreme confidence that rattled the Capo. “Oh, is that where you think you’re headed?” Channah could barely contain her mirth.
1973 06-127 We’re gonna fuck you up so hard1974 06-127 YES! Keep screaming for us, little piggie!1975A 06-127 Before: You’re just WOMEN!…1975B 06-127 Before: Serious persuaders, ready to motivate1975C 06-127 After: … for whom I have only the utmost respect!1976D 06-127 After: Another successful conversion
Explicit version containing graphic violence, gore, and enhanced interrogation themes at 06-127X The Chamber of Torment I at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman
PREVIOUSLY: Channah and Rivqah have just killed two Venetian soldiers and captured two Venetian officials and a Venetian prisoner being subjected to strappado, in the torture room of the Council of Ten. NOW:
The prisoner continued to moan and struggle, but the other sounds—sounds of movement and violence—abruptly ended. Channah had already begun to move to her left, keeping her arrow trained on one Venetian official while remaining mindful of the second official face-down on the floor before her with his arms extended to the sides. Cautiously, she darted a glance toward the middle of the room, nodding with satisfaction to see Rivqah was the only figure standing.
The two of them remained motionless and silent, eyes on their respective prey, listening intently for any sound of alarm.
The Capo began: “What is the me—”
“Shh!” Channah hissed, with sufficient force, and a gesture from her bow, that the Capo fell silent while the interlopers listened for a beat, two, three, four, and five.
Channah flicked her eyes back to the middle of the room, meeting Rivqah’s, and raised her chin questioningly. Rivqah shook her head slightly in response, and both women relaxed.
“Stay still until we get to you,” Channah barked at the two men in front of her, watching the Capo’s eyes widen at the sound of her voice, while Rivqah sheathed her sword and returned to the wall, unwound the rope, and let the prisoner down. He groaned and wept in an odd, sobbing combination of pain, and much-greater relief from the weight finally coming off of his arms. Still holding the pulling end of the rope, she released the man’s arms from the hanging end, and helped him off the platform to a standing position on the ground.
“Thank you! Thank you!” the prisoner wailed gratefully. “My arms—please—for the love of God—” the man pleaded, sincerely, turning his back towards her.
Emotionlessly, Rivqah spun him to face her and pushed him backwards to the wall, where she tied the lifting end of the rope back to the ring in the wall, and then tied his arms to the ring, ignoring his sad and pitiful whimper. “Do. Not. Try. To. Escape.” She commanded, staring into his pain-wracked eyes with her own, ice-cold ones, satisfied by his brief nod and hanging head.
“You’re women!” the Capo cried out in surprise, and then humiliation immediately turning to a hard, contemptuous rage. “Just women!”
Rivqah had already moved to join Channah, stepping around the table and grabbing the Capo by the shoulder of his expensive robe.
Imagining he saw his chance, the Capo cried: “Let’s take them!” as he spun towards Rivqah, who stepped back—yanking him off-balance by tugging on his robe—even as she executed a side-kick into his knee, the Capo fell to the ground, never to stand again. When Rivqah pitilessly dragged him further towards her, to pull him out from behind his table, the twisting and turning of his ruined knee elicited a sharp scream and then silence as he became unconscious.
The Lord of the Night, gamely—or, perhaps, with a foolish, misplaced, misogynistic self-contempt—responding to his superior’s cry, pulled his arms and feet in towards his body, gathering himself to rise to his feet. His effort was killed instantly and decisively by Channah’s boot, which she raised and slammed down on the back of his head, knocking him unconscious, his arms and legs falling slack with the rest of his body as blood pooled on the floor.
Channah and Rivqah exchanged another glance and shrugged, like: “well, so much for them.” Then they both turned their faces toward the prisoner to make sure he wasn’t trying to take advantage of the ruckus to get loose. If he’d thought about it, maybe even tested his bonds in the initial seconds after the Capo cried out, he wasn’t doing so now. Now, he was looking towards them, appalled, his face whiter than the rest of him, shrinking back towards the wall as if it might shelter him.
When the Capo stirred back into consciousness, light reaching his eyes through his fluttering lids, he felt cold water rapidly warming on his face, the room swimming slowly back into focus.
Blinking, he found himself facing two of the most beautiful women he had ever seen in his life. Despite the sweat on their faces; despite the tangled state of their black hair after peeling off their hoods and masks; and despite their middle age—thirties or forties, he guessed, although it was hard to tell precisely because their olive skin glowed with the vigor of youth, even as their dark hawklike eyes regarded him with the cold, acute scrutiny of the most hardened and wizened crones—the two of them were unimaginably lovely. So lovely, in fact, they made the most expensive courtesans and the most-desirable debutante noblewomen of Venice look common enough. “Angels…” he gasped before he was entirely alert, even as he was noticing the wood-paneled wall and the shocked, terrified prisoner pressing himself tightly back against the wall behind them.
Memory came flooding back as his body alerted him to the most extreme kind of pain, more than anything he had felt since he was shot fighting the Turks over a generation ago; more than he could have even imagined before that injury. His knee, shoulders, elbows, and wrists stung and burned worse than any sting or burn he could conceive of.
“It hurts! It hurts worse than I—” he screamed. And as full recollection reminded him where he was, he screamed again, twice as terrified to see the corners of the women’s mouths turning up, delighting in his cries.
“Angels…” the swordswoman, now holding an empty ladle, returning it to the water bucket near her feet, sneered.
“Of a kind,” the archer smirked. “You are surprised to be in pain? You know where you are, yes? Where we found you?”
“The Chamber of Torment,” he sobbed.
“The Chamber of Torment,” the archer practically purred. “But not your usual seat. Capo.” The word was spoken with all the venom and hatred of a viper.
“My arms! My leg—” and then he cried in horror, memory and recognition finally completely returned.
“I think you’re a little overdue for this chair, don’t you?” And with a vindictiveness that shook him even deeper: “And unlike the… I’m going to guess, thousands of others who came to sit here before you, you came into this room voluntarily, didn’t you? Like you knew you deserved to be here. Gasparo Orseolo.”
1968 06-126 Succubaean Strike Force1969 06-126 We’re gonna avenge Tirtzah 1970 06-126 Lord of the Night’s last moment of contentment1971 06-126 Rivqah prepares to carve monkey-boy like a holiday turkey1972 06-126 Gimmee 3 steps: Stick-boy’s last stand
Explicit version containing gore, graphic violence, and enhanced interrogation themes at 06-126X Death in Venice at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman
PREVIOUSLY: Channah and Rivqah are concealed on the stairway, just below the floor line of the interrogation room of the Council of Ten, seeing one of their primary targets—a Capo of Venice—and a Lord of the Night before them, but aware from the noise that someone was being tortured beyond their line of sight to their left. They have agreed Channah will break right and Rivqah, left on the count of three. NOW:
Three counts later, Rivqah exploded up and forward, Channah nearly on top of her, so close if either of them had slipped the momentum of the other would have taken them both to the floor. Other than their boots drumming on the wood, they remained silent until they were noticed. It was the Capo who, frowning with irritation wondering who would be barging into his domain creating work for him, flicked his eyes towards them first. Channah, her metabolism and nerves on overdrive, imagined she could actually see his eyes begin to widen as he saw her coming out of the darkness, barreling towards him, the plague-mask magnifying his shock and alarm, forcing him to deal with two different surprises at once.
To further throw him off-balance, Channah let out a blood-curdling scream, echoed a second later by Rivqah. The Lord of the Night spun around to identify the threat, wide-eyed and empty-handed, just in time to offer his crotch to her. She accepted his invitation with alacrity, and with a violent kick containing every last bit of adrenaline and seething rage she was feeling. “Stand and surrender!” she demanded of the Capo, her arrow pointed straight in his eye, and he did, immediately, his hands shooting straight up in the air. Thus tamed, she looked down and kicked the howling magistrate: “Take your hands off your cock and spread them where I can see them on the floor!” And when he didn’t immediately do so, she barked: “Do it now, or I swear I’ll nail your head to the floor with my arrow!”
With a frightened wail, he extended his arms, not perfectly, but well enough.
While Channah had charged forward, Rivqah had pivoted to the left, immediately spotting more-or-less what she had surmised would be awaiting her: a big, burly, hirsute man with olive skin dangling from a rope tied tightly around his wrists, behind his back, dangling above a waist-high wooden platform spattered with blood and sweat. The rope went straight up to the high ceiling at right angles to the horizon, almost two stories high, then through a heavy iron ring embedded in the ceiling, and back down at an angle to where the other end was tied to another iron ring embedded in the wall at about chest height. His figure was sandwiched between those of two rough, thuggish, laughing Venetian soldiers, their red cuirasses set aside for ease of movement while they worked their prisoner over. One was hanging like a monkey from the long rope, near where it was tied to the wall, jumping up so that when he fell back down again, the weight of his body jerked the rope hard, making the prisoner cry out. The other was using a long staff to hit the prisoner whenever he saw a moment of vulnerability, adding a horizontal dimension to the vertical dance called out by his partner on the rope.
The two goons were clearly cannon-fodder, without any knowledge of interest to the succubae; and that near-instantaneous appraisal signed their death-warrants. With no value, they were only threats. And she saw no need to tolerate extinguishable threats.
Stick-boy was armed and standing, on balance, and thus the bigger and more-immediate threat. But she could hardly reach him without passing and exposing her back to unarmed monkey-boy; nor could stick-boy reach her for 2-3 seconds. Even if he was capering about idiotically now, monkey-boy would become a threat immediately if he could produce a knife from the back of his belt.
In any event, she moved to the left first, slashing monkey-boy’s neck and watching with momentary interest as his stupid grin collapsed into what Rivqah judged was a far-more-comical look of surprise. His last act, sitting dejectedly on the floor like a child’s sad, discarded, stuffed monkey, was to try and stop the blood pouring from his neck by clapping his hands over the gash in near-imitation of the Confucian maxim to speak not what was contrary to propriety. Sadly, it was a finale without an audience, because before he could complete the gesture, Rivqah was already turning and raising her blade defensively to meet the second soldier.
A bit slow off the mark, he had hesitated a beat or two as his mind tried to make sense of what was happening around him—precisely as the succubae had intended with their speed of attack and shrill battle cries. Rivqah met him halfway around the back of the dangling prisoner, seeing he had raised his stick over his head intending to bring it down on her head in a killing blow. Either he badly underestimated her, or the Venetians only used the staff as an implement of torture, for he was clearly not trained as a soldier to do battle with it.
She thrust her blade towards his heart, and he, to his credit, managed to check and reverse his forward momentum, even as he began turning the staff from its slow, clunky, all-or-nothing coup-de-grace position toward a more-convenient and better-balanced position that might actually serve him on both defense and offense. Alas for him, sound tactics had asserted themselves too late. Rivqah’s initial thrust having barely scratched his chest, Rivqah, snorting and spitting in frustration like a Tasmanian Devil, whipped her own blade back and, judging the guard’s stick moving fast enough to give him a good chance of protecting his neck or even chest, flicked the blade forward and in a downward arc, slicing open the man’s stomach.
Rivqah, something of a student of the human face—especially in battle and in sex—observed with interest as his face, too, began to transform in the moment of his mortal injury, from surprise and rage, to agony, fear, and perhaps just a touch of resignation. As if in slow-motion, his hands loosened and the stick began to drop out of his fingers as he reached to protect his belly, or perhaps to try and repair the damage she had done. A moment later, Rivqah slashed again, this time opening him up and watching with interest as he suffered the ignominy of slipping to the floor. Not to put him out of his misery, but to protect their mission and allow them to communicate normally, she stepped forward, sighing with irritation, and cut his neck wide open.
Just like that, the battle had ended as abruptly as it had begun a few moments before.
1964 06-125 Death in Venice1965 06-125 A Haunting in Venice 1966 06-125 Death comes in hot1967 06-125 We’re off to fuck the wizard up
PREVIOUSLY: After eliminating the guards in the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace, Channah and Rivqah race along the loggia towards their assigned entry door near the front of the palace. Chava and her little boy separate from them near the middle of the palace, while Miryam remains behind in disguise, in place of the dead guards. NOW:
Channah and Rivqah didn’t pause until they reached the double entryway to the Stairway of the Censors. Checking quickly for any sign of movement or human presence, and detecting none, Channah pulled open one door even as Rivqah tumbled through it, landing on her feet on one side of the door while Channah tumbled to the other, both of them trying to minimize the time they would be framed in silhouette against the lesser darkness of the courtyard.
After a tense moment, scanning the darkness as quickly as possible—ideally, before any Venetian guards spotted them and attacked—they relaxed as soon as they determined they were alone here and undetected. The palace seemed quiet and deserted, except for muffled cries coming from somewhere up the stairs.
With a glance, Rivqah transferred her crossbow and bolts to Channah, drew her sidearm in her left hand, a falchion with a short curved blade, and darted up the right side of the stairway. Like most of Channah’s operatives based in the West, she was most familiar with the curved swords that dominated the wealthier, better-educated, more-civilized Muslim world most of them occupied. Channah herself was considering relocating from Cairo back to Constantinople; and normally used a shamshir. But the sight of such a blade would have attracted attention in Venice, so Rivqah carried the ancient Greek falchion, undergoing a revival in Italy and other parts of Europe. She had been trained in a wide variety of swords.
Channah waited, scanning and listening, until Rivqah reached the tenth step, then began moving up the left side of the stairs after her. Rivqah peered carefully around the landing at the top of the staircase, waiting tight up against the right-hand wall at the base of the second flight, while Channah reached the landing, sweeping broadly to the wall on the opposite side of the stairs and slipping along it to the far corner, crossbow trained on the top of the stairs, where the low flickering light of candles or torches coming from somewhere further on gave them the advantage, down in the darkness of the stairwell.
Rivqah then began moving again. As she approached the top of this staircase she moved to the left, motioning Channah to the right as she remained on the top stair watching to the left. When Channah reached the top of the staircase, she saw what Rivqah had seen: a third, short and much narrower stairway to their left. From here, the cries were much louder, and between them lower groans of pain were now audible, overlapping with two other, impatient voices demanding information and cooperation between the screams.
Channah slipped to the right, across the landing in front of them, crossbow aimed at the top of the third staircase. With another glance, and a slight nod, Channah raised her crossbow to the ceiling while Rivqah crept up the third staircase. If she fired into the stairway now, the only thing she could reasonably expect to hit would be her own sister. She moved to the bottom of the stairs, keeping only her eyes trained at the third floor. Rivqah ducked as she approached the top, stopping in a crouched position with her eyes barely above floor level as she scanned what she could.
With a glance back, she signaled 2 to the right, unknown to the left, suggesting she didn’t have a direct line of sight to the left without exposing her position to the two on the right, but there were voices coming from that direction. Not the best situation to face; but on the bright side, it wasn’t like they were interrupting a church service. The occupants of this room were torturing another human being, without any effort to muffle their screams. In her experience, most humans who hadn’t become completely inured to torture preferred to move out of earshot whenever it occurred, because they found it unpleasant. And the minority who enjoyed it were drawn to it like flies to manure; they’d be in the room, almost on top of it. All of that gave the succubae a lot of latitude for making noise. They could, quite literally, scream and still blend. Well, more or less.
Missiles? Channah signaled.
None to the right, unknown to the left, Rivqah responded.
Considering the width of the building, Channah couldn’t imagine there was too much open distance to the left. Still… She crept up behind Rivqah, pressing up against her back to see nearly what she saw in the crowded space at the top of the stairs. On the right was a long desk, three chairs wide, closed in front, with a candelabra sitting on it to provide light. Behind the desk sat a gray-haired man in elaborate robes of expensive fabric, talking to an equally gray but otherwise lesser man—in proportions, in status, and certainly finery—who wore a neat but simple and unexceptional robe, standing with his back to them.
The seated man, she knew immediately, was the Capo, a member of Venice’s ancient and privileged patrician class, rulers of the Republic for the better part of a millennium. Knowing from her mission planning, exactly who he was, she felt the faint ache of her horns, claws, and fangs straining to erupt, an instinct she was barely able to restrain in the nick of time.
The other man would have to be, she thought, the Venetian Lord of the Night for San Marco—night commander, judge, and all-purpose representative of the Venetian state in this district of the city during the hours of darkness. He had five counterparts in the other districts of the city; and some nights their business brought them together here. But evidently not tonight; if it had, they would all be gathered around that table, or outside the torture chamber altogether. If she’d seen this fellow on the street, she would have guessed he was a shopkeeper or clerk, perhaps a merchant on the make but not yet worthy of consideration for marriage into or other admission to the ruling class. She tended to doubt the Venetians would tolerate giving anyone other than a patrician the title “Lord.” So perhaps he was of an ancient family that had fallen on hard times.
Both of the men were old, for humans; and would be unlikely to pose a grave threat. They were both examining a parchment as they talked, so their attention was focused elsewhere. She doubted the standing man could turn around before she was upon him.
Leaning into Rivqah’s neck and enjoying the smell of her, she whispered “I’ll try to take both of them alive. You take the left; I doubt any of them will matter. If you need me, shout at me to turn.” Rivqah nodded her understanding, managing to tickle Channah’s cheek with her hair. With a final “on 3,” Channah slipped back to give her room.
1688 07-04 Look for the deadly women: Partisans, Gonorrhea and Syphilis (ABRIDGED version)1689 07-04 Easy to get… Degenerate sluts and their diseases1690 07-04 Avoid Pollution–Use Protection Squad Salons (ABRIDGED version)1691 07-04 PARTY MEMBERS BEWARE! Loose talk to loose women can cost lives1692 07-04 TELL THEM NOTHING! They might be agents1932 07-04 Join the CCF-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Center1934 07-04 Join the CCF-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Center1946 07-04 Here are the “Liberators”! (ABRIDGED version)
These images arose out of a desire to show adult Penny and Chas acting in roles similar to their roles as operatives of Channah in ARP, namely, spies and saboteurs. Since I wanted them to be acting for the Western Allies, they would have to be portrayed as a risk warned against in Axis propaganda.
As the project expanded, the posters became a way to comment on the narrow roles Axis ideologies prescribed for women—and the hypocrisy shown, especially as the war wore on, in their treatment and use of women. Even the Nazis, from the very start, when faced with defiance by some strong women, celebrated them for their achievements in areas outside the home. Notable examples (listed not to apologize for them, but to criticize fascist ideology) include one of the most-important propagandists on behalf of the Nazi regime, Leni Riefenstahl; women who used their celebrity in nontraditional roles to support the Nazis such as Hanna Reitsch; and Yoshiko Kawashima (identified in images 1932 and 1934 by her Chinese name, Jin Bihui), a tragic figure victimized from a young age and deeply conflicted about her own sexual and ethnic identity who burned a fiercely unconventional arc through the Japanese occupation of China ending in her execution for treason.
By the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of German women had been trained in military schools and were serving for all intents and purposes as soldiers of the regime, in dangerous battlefield jobs, most of them performing air-defense and fire-fighting missions during air raids while Allied bombs were falling all around them and Allied fighters, virtually unchallenged in the air, could focus on suppressing air defense. Yet I found only one example of a recruitment poster showing a woman wearing a helmet, and only a couple with women in uniform, at a time when uniforms were ubiquitous in German society, worn by civil servants and military personnel alike in a fully-mobilized economy.
Their own country refused to call them soldiers, asserting that they were merely civilian “helpers,” despite the fact that by the end of the war, their formations and positions appeared on Wehrmacht organizational charts and their uniforms displayed military, or more-sinister (i.e., SS), insignia. Which points to a complication in understanding their position in Nazi society: After the war, German men and women alike, especially those “helping” the SS, had every incentive to, and in fact fell all over themselves to, deny women had been in the SS (which was declared a criminal organization) or the military (which was deeply implicated in crimes of the regime).
Nonetheless, it seems clear that the Nazis were unwilling to admit they needed women’s help outside the home as well as inside it, to fight their war; or even that women were capable of doing the jobs they were actively recruited, and eventually drafted, to perform (and that they did, in fact, perform), because to do so would have meant admitting shortcomings in their own ideologies and propaganda. There is much less information available, at least in English, or that can be found using English-language searches, about Nazi Germany than Fascist Italy, or even more, Imperial Japan. Accessible portrayals of women in Japanese wartime propaganda were few and far between, and those I did find weren’t accompanied by text I could cut and paste into Google Translate, or retype on my keyboard. But totalitarian regimes and newly-emergent industrial economies tend to be socially conservative, and what I was able to find suggested very conservative and limited roles were prescribed for women.
Axis ideology did not allow women to be heroic figures. It did not even allow them to be dangerous, nefarious, or even sexualized ones. Thus, even in propaganda reminding people not to discuss or reveal sensitive military information, which were ubiquitous across all combatants, Axis posters rarely identified nefarious or seductive women as the threat.
Posters of the Western Allies (Soviet patterns sometimes allowed or required women to be heroic but didn’t offer them much agency or sexuality) were another matter. If anything, as suggested already in relation to Allied Recruitment posters (subsection 07-04-F), women were often portrayed as conniving, traitorous, diseased sluts constituting a threat to the war effort and to decent servicemen. Women featured prominently as antagonists in Western Allied campaigns warning against loose talk; and almost inevitably, were the primary villains in campaigns warning against venereal disease. These campaigns were prominent and widespread, with some reason; venereal disease had become a significant source of manpower shortages in World War One, and the US in particular from the very start went to war with a vengeance against VD. The results, helped by medical improvements, were notable: infections among US servicemen in World War Two were possibly as low as 3% of those a generation before when the total number of mobilized men had been lower. But to a significant extent, the campaigns focused not on the logic and mathematics of infection, or on the diseases themselves, but on the (mainly female) agents of transmission.
For purposes of these images, I used propaganda posters produced by the Western Allies as the starting points for made-up Axis ones that the Axis powers would have been unlikely to produce.
1688 07-04 Look for the deadly women: Partisans, Gonorrhea and Syphilis (ABRIDGED version)—UNABRIDGED VERSION INCLUDING FASCIST IMAGERY AVAILABLE AT PATREON.COM/THEREMAINDERMAN. 2025-06-17; Penance & Chastity; propaganda poster; compare numerous examples at https://cvltnation.com/crazy-venereal-disease-posters-from-wwii/. Translation (German to English): Suchen Sie nach den tödlichen Frauen: Partisanen, Gonorrhoe und Syphilis Look for the deadly women: Partisans, Gonorrhea and Syphilis. The linkage between “good-time girls,” “loose women,” “prostitutes,” “pick-ups,” “bags of trouble,” etc., and diseases in numerous posters was thoroughly spelled out for slower servicemembers. The broadest categorization, and the closest to bluntly suggesting all women are whores, that I saw, which also offered some spurious pseudo-scientific statistics, was the poster cautioning “98% of procurable women have venereal disease.” Alternatively, that could be interpreted as insulting servicemen, e.g.: “98% of the women available to losers like you are diseased….” An implication more narrowly targeted against women suggested “Amateurs” are just as dangerous as prostitutes. I included partisans because actual German posters addressed them as menaces, including at least one instance where as I recall, they portrayed a female as a partisan. I originally made the unabridged version thinking nothing of it, then realized it could create a risk of being removed and had nothing really to replace it.
1689 07-04 Easy to get… Degenerate sluts and their diseases—2025-06-18; Penance & Chastity; propaganda poster; compare https://artpictures.club/autumn-2023.html specifically, and other posters generally, at https://cvltnation.com/crazy-venereal-disease-posters-from-wwii/. Translation (German to English): Leicht zu bekommen: Degenerierte Schlampen und ihre Krankheiten Easy to get… Degenerate sluts and their diseases. There were at least two versions of this poster during World War Two. The comparison of prostitutes to their diseases was made visually by the original images in both versions. I just spelled out the comparison between human beings, viruses, and bacteria more explicitly here.
1690 07-04 Avoid Pollution–Use Protection Squad Salons (ABRIDGED version)—UNABRIDGED VERSION INCLUDING FASCIST IMAGERY AVAILABLE AT PATREON.COM/THEREMAINDERMAN. 2025-06-19; Chastity & Penance; advertisement; Translation (German to English): Vermeiden Sie Umweltverschmutzung – nutzen Sie die Schutzstaffel der Salons Avoid Pollution–Use Protection Squad Salons. There is no specific historical example behind this poster; the anti-VD advertising campaign was Allied, and the Allies (to my knowledge) didn’t operate any brothels like the SS, Wehrmacht, and Imperial Japanese Army (although the Japanese administration under American occupation after the war did operate official brothels for a time). The address is the actual address of Salon Kitty, a high-end brothel that was taken over by the Sicherheitsdienst (SS Security Service) for spying on Germans and foreigners of interest (and is actually not representative of the official, overt forced-labor brothels run for German military, SS, and kapo personnel since it was a clandestine operation). The phone number in the abridged version is that of the Reichsführer-SS’s (Himmler’s) office according to the 1941 Berlin phone book (only a limited number of entries from it were available and legible online).
1691 07-04 PARTY MEMBERS BEWARE! Loose talk to loose women can cost lives—2025-06-20; Chastity, Penance; motivational poster; compare https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/original-john-falter-wwii-poster-458626456, for the Allied anti-loose-talk poster that was the departure point design- and slogan-wise. More broadly, see the Allied posters warning about loose women at https://cvltnation.com/crazy-venereal-disease-posters-from-wwii/ and https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/25/health/wwii-vd-posters-penis-propaganda/index.html, further discussed above. Translation (German to English): Parteimitglieder Aufgepasst (vorsicht)! Party members, pay attention (beware)!; Unanständige(s) Gerede (Gespräche) mit unanständigen Frauen kann (können) Leben kosten Indecent (loose) talk with indecent (loose) women can cost lives. The original is targeted at sailors but because of challenges with the AI (discussed elsewhere), this one is targeted at a category of people who theoretically could be in civilian clothes since I could not generate any suitable images for this with uniformed Germans. Google changed translations on me when I double-checked before publication from German back to English; the translations shown are based on the final re-check with variations to illustrate how words varied based on the original English and English translations of the later German.
1692 07-04 TELL THEM NOTHING! They might be agents—2025-06-21; Chastity, Penance; motivational poster; compare https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/american-propaganda-posters-world-war-two/. Translation (German to English): Sag ihnen nichts! Tell them nothing!; Sie könnten Agenten sein They might be agents. I counted it as a win that I was able to get the girls on their stomachs. The AI really does not like being told how to position people, especially women. I really like the faces and expressions here, which seem at once girlish and sinister. Unlike 1945, which I was able to double-check with an Italian pronoun guide online, I didn’t find a way online to double-check whether the German would be different for a female vs a male or mixed “them”; any input on this point would be appreciated.
1932 & 1934 07-04 Join the CCF-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Centre—UNABRIDGED GERMAN COUNTERPART INCLUDING FASCIST IMAGERY AVAILABLE AT PATREON.COM/THEREMAINDERMAN. 2025-06-22; Fang; recruiting poster; compare: https://www.alamy.com/vintage-ww2-recruitment-poster-with-female-ats-member-in-uniform-union-jack-flag-flies-behind-women-with-a-will-to-win!-join-the-ats-apply-at-any-army-recruiting-centre-1939-1945-image342804140.html?imageid=16439DED-FF10-4602-991A-74F85C0BBF85&p=66052&pn=1&searchId=eecbd4edf63c33347e7f7b028a6f8218&searchtype=0; Translation (Mandarin to English) 有必勝意志的女性！ Women with a will to Win!; 般的 General Jin Bihui; 加入 Join the; 反叛亂騎兵部隊 counterinsurgency cavalry force; 向任何陸軍招募中心提出申請 Apply at any Army Recruiting Center. Any feedback on the technical aspects of this poster would be much appreciated. The poster is in Chinese but I’m not even sure, if there had been such a recruiting poster, whether the proper language would have been Chinese, Manchu, or even Japanese. The “counterinsurgency cavalry force” is the irregular formation raised by the Qing dynasty princess who was adopted (abused) and raised in Japan and later became associated with the Manchukuo puppet regime (it is her photograph above her name, Jin Bihui, in a Manchukuo army uniform). I am not sure if the force had an official name; or if it did, whether it was actually that, or if “counterinsurgency cavalry force” is a descriptive reference. Being that it was a cavalry force and she was a Manchu, perhaps the most obvious pool for her to recruit from would have been Manchus. By the time of World War II, however, I understand Manchuria had been heavily Sinicized. Because the poster is in Chinese I used her Chinese name, Jin Bihui. I’m pretty sure, but not entirely, that I have the correct Chinese-character transliteration of that name; but in addition to having formatting issues with it, and the lingering uncertainty, I did hope by including one bit of Latinized text with the only specific name I included in the poster (it doesn’t even use the word “Manchukuo” in the text) that people who didn’t notice this description could find relevant historical information about the poster online. I made two versions, one for the year the puppet regime was created and the other for the year it was renamed Manchukuo and made nominally imperial, because what can I say: I like Fang in black leather. These posters came about because, having seen Channah in leather and thinking of poster 1933, it seemed only right that the leather-armor-clad Fang should have a poster of her own on the evil side of the fence.
1946 07-04 Here are the “Liberators”! (ABRIDGED version)—UNABRIDGED AND BONUS VERSIONS INCLUDING FASCIST IMAGERY AVAILABLE AT PATREON.COM/THEREMAINDERMAN. 2025-06-23; Miryam, Rivqah, Lancelot; propaganda poster; compare https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-italian-world-war-ii-poster-here-are-the-liberators%60-shows-the-statue-57365951.html. Translation (Italian to English): Ecco I “Liberatori”! Here are the “Liberators”! The original poster chilled me, partly because it reminded me of the Norwegian fascist poster (widely used by the Germans) “Liberators,” and partly on its own account, and its description by one source online as an “angel of death” version of the Statue of Liberty. As an American, it creeps me out to see American icons toppled and reversed that way, especially in this day and age; and especially when—by alluding to Allied bombing campaigns in the Italian example, and half-a-dozen ways in the “Liberators” poster, they manage to capture a kernel of truth about America’s own moral challenges. In some ways, I imagine this to be the worst nightmare within the ideology of Axis propaganda because it depicts women from fascist countries not just as victims (as in poster 1945), but as collaborating or cooperating with the Allied conquerors, perhaps even with a bold spirit of determination to survive in difficult circumstances where the roles assigned to them by Axis ideologies are no longer enforced, and the men they were supposed to rely on for protection have been defeated in a war of their own making. Of course, there were German and Italian prostitutes during the WW2 era; but the German and Japanese policy of forced-labor brothels very much reinforced and followed their racist ideologies by making women from occupied countries service their troops. Racially-ambiguous Lancelot allows but does not require the viewer to add a racial dimension to the poster, although as noted with respect to 1945, doing so would be entirely consistent with Italian wartime propaganda.
1685 07-04 We Can Do It!1686 07-04 LIFE America’s Secret Weapon1687 07-04 Young England Wants to Help1737 07-04 Help China! China Is Helping Us1736 07-04 On Our Side: The Chinese Fighter1738 07-04 This woman is your FRIEND–She fights for FREEDOM1781 07-04 Keep fit to fight1782 07-04 Cadet Nurse: The Girl with a Future1935 07-04 Join the ATS-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Centre (UK black version)1936 07-04 Join the ATS-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Centre (UK Union Jack version)1945 07-04 Defend them, they could be your mothers, your wives, your sisters, your daughters (abridged version)
The images in this first subset (07-04-A) of the Defend the Constitution! (07-04) project more-or-less represent what I originally set out to do with it: Place the characters from ARP into the context of actual, specific historical propaganda posters from World War Two in a way that both related to their role in ARP, and reflected the original character and intent of the propaganda posters they were based on. Hopefully there is plenty of personality in these images, but I don’t think they contain much tongue-in-cheek mockery of the original images or of the streams of intellectual thought they represented. In a couple of images (1736 & 1738), women are portrayed where women would probably have been outside the contemplation of the original poster makers; but overall, the messages here are generally consistent with the messages in the original posters, whether for good (the Allied posters) or bad (the Axis poster); and the liberties taken in using female characters don’t undermine or attack the source material per se.
1685 07-04 We Can Do It!—2025-06-02; Chava; motivational poster (J. Howard Miller 1943); compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Do_It! This poster actually became better-known as a result of a postwar revival of interest, than it was during the war. I liked its association with female empowerment, and the absence of any traditionalist trappings trying to shoehorn women supporting the war effort into an unequal or subordinate role to men. It’s just a matter-of-fact call to women, encouraging them and asking for their help and support. Chava seemed the obvious candidate for this poster as a physically-strong foundry worker in her own right.
1686 07-04 LIFE America’s Secret Weapon—2025-06-02; Chava; magazine cover (Norman Rockwell 1943); compare https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/07/rosie-the-riveter/. Notes: Deliberately switched magazines and style because I think of Life as iconic for WW2 images and I wasn’t interested in a Norman Rockwell vibe per se. Life had a few color covers although it was very rare in that era; but I liked Chava’s red color too much to make it B&W. As with 1685, I like the fact Rosie the Riveter is taken on her own terms without trying to limit her by proscribing her role or what it might mean; and knew instantly this one was right for Chava. Here we see an everyday moment from her life, that in no way distinguishes her from men in a stereotyping way.
1687 07-04 Young England Wants to Help—2025-06-03; Young Hellinore, Young Pentecost; motivational poster (F.T. Chapman c. 1939-1941); compare: https://go-leasing24.info/practice-areas/bergen-county-dyfs-lawyers/#google_vignette. Based on a poster from a US-based charity supporting Britain in the early years of World War Two urging American children to help in supporting Britain. I changed it to English supporting Dutch because the two characters are English, the English supported the Dutch in WW2, and in the lifetime of the two characters, the English supported the Dutch revolt against the Spanish. Although I generally disfavor children being encouraged to participate in warfare, e.g., being recruited for underage units like the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, excluding them from the sense of community encouraged in wartime would be alienating and devaluing. I think this poster suggests an appropriate route for helping without infantilizing them or emphasizing their undeniable role as particular victims of war.
1736 07-04 On Our Side: The Chinese Fighter—2025-06-04; Fang; educational poster (1944); compare: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/side-wwii-propaganda-posters-russia-1924405148. As indicated at the provided link, this is one of at least four posters in the “On Our Side” series along with British, French, and Russian counterparts. Like 1738, the original seemed to be part of a broader effort to educate Americans about the geography and nationalities involved in the war by explaining who our allies were. This image became a way to use one of the pilot images of Fang I really loved, despite the difficulties of getting accurate insignia on the plane itself (discussed elsewhere). In the original series of images, the flags of each nation were separate from the images with people; and the angle of the image made it plausible no insignia would be visible on the plane.
1738 07-04 This woman is your FRIEND–She fights for FREEDOM—2025-06-04; Hong; educational poster; compare https://www.redbubble.com/i/poster/This-Man-is-Your-Friend-Chinese-1940s-WW2-Poster-by-Lueshis/102507112.LVTDI. I confess, when I first saw the original image on which this one is based, I took it as being of a piece with the wartime Life magazine article indistinguishable from phrenology or Aryan race theory, trying to explain how American readers could tell a Japanese person from a Chinese one just by looking at them. However, like 1736, this was one of a whole series of posters portraying European and Asian allies on an equal footing, presumably as part of an effort to educate Americans about who our allies were. This series was a bit bland artistically, but of the limited historically-authentic options available for portraying Asian characters positively on Allied propaganda, I decided to take it. Handily, the bar at the bottom of the poster also provided an elevated surface for Hong’s left boot without including any background from the underlying image, which would have been inconsistent with the original composition. Like many posters of the time, human figures were isolated from their original backgrounds before being included in posters.
1737 07-04 Help China! China Is Helping Us—2025-06-05; Hong; fundraising poster (James Montgomery Flagg c 1940-1942); compare: https://digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/collection/p17208coll3/id/1014. This (like 1687) represents one of the numerous US wartime fundraising campaigns for various allied causes. United China Relief (“UCR”) brought together seven different China-relief organizations in the US dating to the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and was later amalgamated with others into an umbrella organization that was an antecedent of the United Way. Given the frustrating difficulty with placing Hong and Fang into historically accurate contexts using the AI discussed elsewhere, I thought about making them actresses in movie posters, but the convention of the time in the US was to have white actors portray significant roles regardless of the character’s putative nationality; and in an effort to avoid attracting more Japanese attention than necessary (and perhaps to keep the left-leaning Chinese film industry more generally apolitical), the Nationalist Chinese movie industry was discouraged from overtly portraying warfare against the Japanese. Because the UCR’s purpose was to raise money for China, UCR images tended to portray the Chinese as sympathetic victims as well as fighters; but the image on which this one was based managed to fully convey the fighting spirit of the Chinese, in a way that to me (from the determined expression on the Chinese mother’s face and the soldier marching instead of recuperating despite being injured and not-quite-uniformed) suggested behind-the-scenes partisan resistance—which is how I imagined Hong participating in the war effort, sending radio reports on Japanese troop movements back to the Chinese army.
1781 07-04 Keep fit to fight—2025-06-06; Lancelot; motivational poster; compare https://www.dpvintageposters.com/posters/war-citizenship-public-causes/world-war-ii/american/heath-and-welfare/keep-fit-to-fight-original-american-wwii-air-force-physical-fitness-poster-no-3_9324. I wanted to find an appropriate but not boring or stereotyped platform for introducing Lancelot, perhaps the most traditionally male hero character likely to appear in ARP; and I decided for symmetry, to avoid diminishing women by comparison given my clearly-revealed preference for pinup, cheesecake, and similar depictions of women, that all of his appearances in this series had to have an aspect of beefcake: The more-unrealistic-while-pretending-to-be-realistic, the better. There are a number of US wartime posters of men that seem to modern eyes, at least, to have an erotic undertone, especially recruitment posters which from context strongly suggest that undertone is homoerotic. There was a fantastically unexpected US poster emphasizing hygiene depicting three hunky soldiers showering naked at a jungle encampment. But unfortunately, the AI wouldn’t let me even get close to doing it justice. This image was as close as I could get to that vibe, and I think it gets the job done.
1782 07-04 Cadet Nurse: The Girl with a Future—2025-06-07; Kadidia; recruitment poster; compare:
https://goldenageposters.com/products/1944-be-a-cadet-nurse-the-girl-with-a-future-jon-whitcomb-wwii-full-size?variant=44536213242136. This poster introduces Kadidia, in the form of the uniformed, determined nurse to the left, but provides only minimal information about who she is or what she represents. (More fulsome introduction of Kadidia to follow in subsections B, D, and F.). The reason for including this poster, despite its fairly uninteresting composition is really because, in the first phase of this project, when I was trying to be very true to historical antecedents, I was surprised by the near-total absence of minorities from any of the US World-War-Two posters I found online. This is notably in contrast not only to images from later US wars, but to earlier ones—at least in World War One and the Civil War, there was a clear and direct appeal to blacks to support the war effort. (Late in my research, after finishing this image, I came across a “Together We Win” image showing people of color fighting alongside a white soldier and I’ve kept that in case the reception for these posters is warm enough to persuade me to do another set.). I also found a US image portraying Japanese-Americans quietly cooperating in their own segregation and detention; and a couple of British images with minorities, one analogous to the US “Together We Win” poster, and another intended to recruit blacks from British colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Apparently before it was ever used, however, the British decided not to recruit black soldiers because they didn’t want to arm and train them given the anti-colonial sentiments gaining traction within the Empire. I would categorize the original of the Cadet Nurse poster as ambivalent on the issue of race; and did not find any online commentary to clarify the artist’s or the program’s intentions. The idea they could be black women is supported by the fact the Cadet Nurse program, apparently quite rarely for wartime government programs, was amended at the insistence of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to prevent racial discrimination, eventually recruiting more than 3,000 minorities including even Japanese-American women recruited from the US relocation (essentially concentration, although not as deadly as the Axis variety) camps.
1935 & 1936 07-04 Join the ATS-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Centre (UK black & Union Jack versions)—2025-06-08; Hellinore; propaganda poster; compare: https://www.alamy.com/vintage-ww2-recruitment-poster-with-female-ats-member-in-uniform-union-jack-flag-flies-behind-women-with-a-will-to-win!-join-the-ats-apply-at-any-army-recruiting-centre-1939-1945-image342804140.html?imageid=16439DED-FF10-4602-991A-74F85C0BBF85&p=66052&pn=1&searchId=eecbd4edf63c33347e7f7b028a6f8218&searchtype=0. I was thrilled to find a poster so emphatically directed towards independent female patriotism and personality, showing an assertive woman doing something other than supporting a man or looking for a man, that didn’t go out of its way to allude to traditional women’s roles. [1936 only: It was also a lot of fun pushing the adult-Hellinore in-your-face-bling-priestess image to yet another level, like a professional wrestler and valet rolled into one, in this and a couple of subsequent posters combining religious fervor with patriotism.]
1945 07-04 Defend them, they could be your mothers, your wives, your sisters, your daughters (abridged & unabridged versions)—Explicit version containing fascist imagery at 07-04[X] Defend them, they could be your mothers, your wives, your sisters, your daughters at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman. 2025-06-09; Penance & Chastity; propaganda poster (1944); compare: https://history.blog.fordham.edu/?p=257. Translation (English to Italian): Defend [all-female] them! Difendile!; They could be your mothers, your wives, your sisters, your daughters Potrebbero essere le tue madri, le tue mogli, le tue sorelle, le tue figlie. The original of this poster depicts a rape in progress, more explicitly than I could imply with AI or upload to DA without worrying about being kicked off again; but the image of the enemy menacing women is not at all uncommon in the period. The enemy is represented by a black man in the original, with obvious racist overtones. Nothing subtle or nuanced about the message there. I comment further on the racial issue in 1946; for historical accuracy, I was reluctant to shy away from the racist component; but in addition to worrying about the very real risk of the image being taken offline, and feeling a bit queasy myself about actually implementing the poster, racism among humans is not an overt theme of the first volume of ARP. Ultimately, I decided to execute it this way because it focuses more on the vulnerability and suffering of the women and thus the gender aspect of the underlying poster, which is more relevant to the themes and characters in the first volume of ARP.
