While I'm definitely on the "Conan was hexed" side of the argument, the story does leave it somewhat ambiguous.

I suppose "Conan isn't responsible for his actions in 'The Frost Giant's Daughter'" is a scissor statement.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on February 24, 2022, 02:11:10 PM
"When the world was young and men were weak, and the fiends of the night walked free,
I strove with Set by fire and steel and the juice of the upas-tree;
Now that I sleep in the mount's black heart, and the ages take their toll,
Forget ye him who fought with the Snake to save the human soul?"

Epimetreus priest of ? You guessed it, Mitra.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Howard intended his world to be interpreted as one in which humanity had turned its back on the true gods in favor of demons -- not because evil is more powerful than good, but because it's, to quote Yoda, "quicker, easier, more seductive." Of course we aren't the first species to make this mistake, as the ancient ruins attest.

As additional evidence, consider that some of the gods of the Hyborean age are villains in their real-world pantheons: Asura (actually a class of wrathful deities in Hinduism), Set (not originally evil but demonized toward the end of Ancient Egyptian culture; one can't expect Howard to have known or cared about that distinction), and Ymir (the progenitor of giants, slayed by Odin and his brothers in order to make the world).

This probably ties in with the influence Theosophy had on Howard and Lovecraft. I'm not really up on Theosophy, but I know it had cycles of ages in which the dominant races by turns embraced and rejected the divine.

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 01:27:50 PM
He tries to rape a woman.  ... He sells all sorts of people into slavery as a pirate.

My first post here.

As others have pointed out, Conan wasn't in control of himself in the Frost Giant's Daughter. Howard makes note of his "madness". And it was no woman - she was a non-human monster who enchanted the dying and took them to their deaths. Sure, she takes the form of a woman, but that was all part of how she worked her evil.

And in what stories does Conan sell people into slavery? I don't remember that ever happening.

Quote from: Cat the Bounty Smuggler on February 24, 2022, 02:14:18 PM
While I'm definitely on the "Conan was hexed" side of the argument, the story does leave it somewhat ambiguous.

I suppose "Conan isn't responsible for his actions in 'The Frost Giant's Daughter'" is a scissor statement.

  I think it could be a case of her hexing him backfired, since all the men before Conan were dead long before they got close to actually touching her.  But as you say, it is presented as if Conan is making a conscious decision about continuing to chase her as well as his intent.   The narration seems to imply he is not so bewitched anymore and just pit bull determined to catch her and have his way with her.   But I could accept that is all on Atali for the enchantment she used.  It just does not seem to be the case from the way it is written. 

Quote from: Krazz on February 24, 2022, 02:34:47 PM

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 01:27:50 PM
He tries to rape a woman.  ... He sells all sorts of people into slavery as a pirate.

My first post here.

As others have pointed out, Conan wasn't in control of himself in the Frost Giant's Daughter. Howard makes note of his "madness". And it was no woman - she was a non-human monster who enchanted the dying and took them to their deaths. Sure, she takes the form of a woman, but that was all part of how she worked her evil.

And in what stories does Conan sell people into slavery? I don't remember that ever happening.

  Again, I am not making Conan out to be a huge monster here, but he is intent on raping her, now if its okay because she is not human, I can accept that.  As for not in control of himself, I think that is somewhat ambiguous after he kills the two frost giants. 
 
   Regarding slavery, while he was pirating the ivory coast he burned and looted many coastal villages.  He sold many of the survivors into slavery.  One of these slaves runs into him again later (I think it was the Scarlet Tower, but I do not remember, nor do I remember the guy's name) who was a chieftain in a village he razed.  The fellow ends up accidentally saving Conan by entering the dungeon to kill him, but is instead killed by the giant snake that is also in the dungeon, and as he falls Conan gets his sword and frees himself from his chains. 

  I am also pretty sure Conan outlawed Slavery once he was king, so redemption arc there.

Quote from: Krazz on February 24, 2022, 02:34:47 PM

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 01:27:50 PM
He tries to rape a woman.  ... He sells all sorts of people into slavery as a pirate.

My first post here.

As others have pointed out, Conan wasn't in control of himself in the Frost Giant's Daughter. Howard makes note of his "madness". And it was no woman - she was a non-human monster who enchanted the dying and took them to their deaths. Sure, she takes the form of a woman, but that was all part of how she worked her evil.

And in what stories does Conan sell people into slavery? I don't remember that ever happening.

  You know what?  I might be wrong about him actively selling them, the guy just mentions Conan slaying his brother and then the Stygians taking him into slavery... So maybe just murderous pirate and not a slaver, though those people from the broken villages ended up as slaves in some cases. 

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 03:11:42 PM
  Again, I am not making Conan out to be a huge monster here, but he is intent on raping her, now if its okay because she is not human, I can accept that.  As for not in control of himself, I think that is somewhat ambiguous after he kills the two frost giants. 

I'm not saying that it's OK to rape non-humans, I'm saying the statement that Conan tried to rape a woman can't be true if the person in question isn't a woman. That's of course independent of whether it was attempted rape. There's no mention of him coming to his senses after he kills the giants, and given how protective of women he is in the other stories, I find it hard to believe that Howard meant for us to read between the lines that he was intentionally out to commit rape.

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 03:20:59 PM
  You know what?  I might be wrong about him actively selling them, the guy just mentions Conan slaying his brother and then the Stygians taking him into slavery... So maybe just murderous pirate and not a slaver? 

Yes, Conan was no paladin. To quote Howard, he was "a thief, a reaver, a slayer". Shades of grey indeed, but Howard avoided assigning some of the worst of human nature to Conan, giving him a rough chivalry which often leaves him looking better than some of his civilised foes.

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on February 23, 2022, 11:46:43 PM
The following quote by Jordan Peterson on the nature of evil and evil acts struck me queer:

QuoteJordan Peterson:
And you have to think about it from an aesthetic perspective, in a sense, because it's a celebration of horror, and it's a conscious attempt to violate the conditions that make life itself tolerable, and it's aimed at dehumanization, destruction of the ideal and, at an even deeper level, revenge against the conditions of existence itself. I'm trying to understand the developmental pathway that leads to acts like that.

This sounds a lot like what the Cthulhu Mythos are, and what a game revolving around them is doing, and what Lovecraftian weird fiction in general is doing. Their premise is that Finite human confrontation with the Infinite leads to a realization of the prosaicness, chaos, amorality, and hostility of Being. The opposite of these things might be wonder, order, morality, and love, but these latter all seem to be excluded from any realistic human view of the world in the Mythos' own terms.

One might object that the Mythos, if nothing else is granted, still contain wonder (and, for the Dreamlands this might hold, as a special case), but, the wonder of the Mythos proper is always uneasily tinged with horror, which might make it a parallel to the way woe and joy coexist in the artistic category of the Sublime. It might be argued that any hypothetical wonder in the human perspective in the Mythos is always ultimately corrupted by the underlying horror, such that the corrupted but otherwise functional human personality ceases to find wonder in anything, but, rather, attends, like any wizard worth his salts, to problems of the pleasures of power.

Setting that aside, it looks as though the Mythos consumed as entertainment embodies a kind of "recreational epistemological evil" on an infinite scale. Prima facie, it glorifies and celebrates horror, engaging its consumers and participants in conscious attempts to construct mental maps of the violation of the conditions that make life tolerable while dehumanizing its characters and destroying all human ideals. Given Lovecraft's "functional dysfunctionality," the possibility arises that this scientific atheist was mythologically mapping out something like his "revenge against the conditions of existence itself."

Let's say we exonerate Lovecraft of any conscious such intentionality. If he did enact such desires in his work, they were unconscious, but no less potent for that. That many (if not yet multitudes of) people respond avidly to this color out of Lovecraft's psychic space indicates that he drilled down deep into what Peterson might call the archetypal substrate of the human imagination. We have yet to realize the full manifestation and power of such a psychic contact.

The wider appreciation the Mythos gains, the more it touches a human desire for human meaning beyond just the recreational epistemological evil, which I submit are Comedy and Tragedy. Both feel like a kind of betrayal of the Mythos' intent, even while in popular imagination they snuggle comfortably into the same boat. Do bobble-heads and plush toys insult Cthulhu as much as the "woke" insinuation increasingly surfacing in games like Call of Cthulhu? The former is like an innocent mouse traipsing on the head of a hungry python. The latter decorates the darkness with noble sentiment ("democracy," "freedom," "fairness," etc.). Both try to "tame" the Mythos by wrestling it back into a frame of human meaningfulness.

As others have observed, these gaming taming efforts water down the Mythos. They're not "hard core" no matter how fun or dynamically intricate they may be. To become a person deeply colored by the Mythos is to confront the experience of cosmic fear. To turn that into a game is to dance on the knife's edge of what has been called the "ecstasy of horror". Too far to one side and one encounters meaningless cosmic dread; too far to the other and one encounters the banal. It's there, dancing to the tunes of the celestial flutes, that the meaning of the Mythos is located.

If we want to avoid the Mythos becoming nothing but recreational epistemological evil, what this begs is a way to expand that meaning in a way that justifies mankind's existence. This would mean living in such a way that the universe is better for one's having lived, even if one lives out a tragedy, comedy, or tragi-comedy. Anthroponormativity is the only escape both for the characters in the game, and for the participants controlling them. In other words, out of the struggle for meaning, the thoughtful play tends to proceed as if the category of the Sublime were attainable.

The Finite confronting the Infinite is to realize one's profound vulnerability. This is seen most compellingly and dauntingly in the Crucifixion of Christ, the idea of the Infinite assuming that which it lacks—finitude—in order to confront itself on behalf of the vulnerable, in a Sublime manner. This is why we can apprise that the corrupted wizard has made a spiritual error, as has Cthulhu himself, for both of them remain vulnerable in the face of the Infinite that dwarfs them immeasurably.

Recognizing this plants something unspeakable at the heart of the Mythos, and, so, defines the Mythos in terms of a psychological substrate of humanity that recaptures the wonder from the jaws of the horror. Even in the face of the unendingness of the madness of the Mythos, a "higher level" persists—in the reality of the participants in the real world of which the Lovecraftian Secondary World (Tolkien) is a warped shadow—accessible to the characters therein only through an element of faith which elevates Tragedy to Sublimity.

In the end, the spell is broken. The residue of plush Elder Things and tragic color remains, alongside fond memories of a foolish foray into a fun and fruitful preternatural phantasy.

"Is Call of Cthulhu a fundamentally evil premise for a game?"

Wrong question.

"Is Call of Cthulhu an entertaining and financially viable premise for a game?"

Right question. Answered by history.

And what the fuck does Conan the fictional character have to do with Call of Cthulhu the game?

Quote from: jeff37923 on February 24, 2022, 03:43:49 PM
And what the fuck does Conan the fictional character have to do with Call of Cthulhu the game?

Howard and Lovecraft borrowed heavily from each other, to the point you can (almost) treat the stories as set in the same universe.

Almost because in Howard's universe there are good gods like Mitra while in Lovecraft's universe there's nothing looking out for us.

Quote from: Krazz on February 24, 2022, 03:38:14 PM

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 03:11:42 PM
  Again, I am not making Conan out to be a huge monster here, but he is intent on raping her, now if its okay because she is not human, I can accept that.  As for not in control of himself, I think that is somewhat ambiguous after he kills the two frost giants. 

I'm not saying that it's OK to rape non-humans, I'm saying the statement that Conan tried to rape a woman can't be true if the person in question isn't a woman. That's of course independent of whether it was attempted rape. There's no mention of him coming to his senses after he kills the giants, and given how protective of women he is in the other stories, I find it hard to believe that Howard meant for us to read between the lines that he was intentionally out to commit rape.

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 03:20:59 PM
  You know what?  I might be wrong about him actively selling them, the guy just mentions Conan slaying his brother and then the Stygians taking him into slavery... So maybe just murderous pirate and not a slaver? 

Yes, Conan was no paladin. To quote Howard, he was "a thief, a reaver, a slayer". Shades of grey indeed, but Howard avoided assigning some of the worst of human nature to Conan, giving him a rough chivalry which often leaves him looking better than some of his civilised foes.

  I do not see it as between the lines.  Atali is clearly in absolute terror as he chases her after killing her brothers.  And when he catches her and hugs her and tries to give her unwanted kisses...This is described and Conan obviously sees this.  He was around 17 in this story, and maybe he has not yet learned no means no.  Is it your position that her enchantment has caused him to be a rapist?  I could actually accept that as a case, but it is ambiguous given Conan's remarks throughout the chase and killing of her brothers certainly seem to be Conan being Conan.

Quote from: Cat the Bounty Smuggler on February 24, 2022, 03:45:43 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on February 24, 2022, 03:43:49 PM
And what the fuck does Conan the fictional character have to do with Call of Cthulhu the game?

Howard and Lovecraft borrowed heavily from each other, to the point you can (almost) treat the stories as set in the same universe.

Almost because in Howard's universe there are good gods like Mitra while in Lovecraft's universe there's nothing looking out for us.

Or the same universe with another 10,000 years of humans turning their backs on any beacons of light, in getting to Lovecraft.

Quote from: jeff37923 on February 24, 2022, 03:43:49 PM
And what the fuck does Conan the fictional character have to do with Call of Cthulhu the game?

  I used it as a parallel example of whether the setting is inherently evil and used a bit less dour of a setting to make the point, just because abject good is not overtly represented in the mythos, does not mean it does not exist.  It just means the elder creatures are much more overt in their influence and presence in the universe (at least from the perspective of humans getting a taste of the "gods" and minions). 

Quote from: Krazz on February 24, 2022, 03:38:14 PM

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 03:11:42 PM
  Again, I am not making Conan out to be a huge monster here, but he is intent on raping her, now if its okay because she is not human, I can accept that.  As for not in control of himself, I think that is somewhat ambiguous after he kills the two frost giants. 

I'm not saying that it's OK to rape non-humans, I'm saying the statement that Conan tried to rape a woman can't be true if the person in question isn't a woman. That's of course independent of whether it was attempted rape. There's no mention of him coming to his senses after he kills the giants, and given how protective of women he is in the other stories, I find it hard to believe that Howard meant for us to read between the lines that he was intentionally out to commit rape.

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 03:20:59 PM
  You know what?  I might be wrong about him actively selling them, the guy just mentions Conan slaying his brother and then the Stygians taking him into slavery... So maybe just murderous pirate and not a slaver? 

Yes, Conan was no paladin. To quote Howard, he was "a thief, a reaver, a slayer". Shades of grey indeed, but Howard avoided assigning some of the worst of human nature to Conan, giving him a rough chivalry which often leaves him looking better than some of his civilised foes.

   I do not know about that.  Wanton murder is the worst crime you can commit, and Conan is willing do so at the drop of a hat.  He also betrays several people to take their ship/bandit gang/etc.  So though I agree he does come off better than most of (honestly all of them) his civilized foes, it is simply because we the reader like Conan more, because he is a bad ass, he takes no shit, and the reader sometimes wishes they could just break all the rules.  He has a rough code, but it seems malleable regarding the mood he is in.  If he makes a deal and gives his word specifically, he does not break it and sticks to the deal even when it is better for him to break it.   He is charismatic, and he does change his perspective on wanton slaughter and stealing as he goes through his years (by the time he is a King he feels responsibility and loyalty to a lot of people) but he at some point has displayed pretty much every characteristic of behavior that would get you a life sentence or a death sentence in most places at any time in history.   We excuse Conan because he is brave to the point of insanity, is built like a super Chad, pulls women easier than James Bond, slays his foes (and it turns out a good number of them are terrible people or monsters) in dramatic fashion, and gives zero F#$ks.   It is not because he lacks the worst of human natures, it is because we overlook the bad because everyone loves a winner.

Quote from: oggsmash on February 24, 2022, 03:53:01 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on February 24, 2022, 03:43:49 PM
And what the fuck does Conan the fictional character have to do with Call of Cthulhu the game?

  I used it as a parallel example of whether the setting is inherently evil and used a bit less dour of a setting to make the point, just because abject good is not overtly represented in the mythos, does not mean it does not exist.  It just means the elder creatures are much more overt in their influence and presence in the universe (at least from the perspective of humans getting a taste of the "gods" and minions).

But wasn't you who said there was no Good Gods in Conan? Where you do have evidence of their existence yet you say they're neutral.

On Lovecraft where there's ZERO evidence of any Good God you revert to: Abscence of evidence isn't evidence of abscence...

Dude choose a position and stick to it, I can't follow.