Quote from: jhkim;632582I can't tell what you're saying here.

...what?

Quote from: Catelf;631878That is according to the regular scare tactics used for the mythos ....
But, really, considering the "fuel" used for the Mythos, namely rampant fear of the unknown + racism ....
A new take on the Mythos would be to see it for what it is ... a racism-driven nightmare that isn't really true.
Thing is, today, the tables have seemingly turned to instead pinpoint the racism as the bad thing.
,,, I say seemingly, because the heritage of fantasy and horror from tolkien and Lovecraft is still hard to shake off.

What do i mean?
Since Racism comes from the fear of the unknown, and a tendency to say "this one did this bad, then probably all do like that" ....

Ok, many blatantly ignore this origin and say "It is just Fiction".
Well, for the same reason one could then create a Fiction, where humans in a certain world were created by trolls in order to be servants, and that all humans that is disobedient, is also proven to eat their own children, when the trolls of course is the pinnacle of civilazation.....

What would people (humans) irl think of that kind of setting?
Several would think of proving to the trolls that the humans aren't child-eating murderers .... and that they aren't the slaves of the trolls.
Essentially, humans would not like to see humans in such a situation.
Some would agree on the premises, but say: That is not humans, it is human-looking aliens in a different world.
A notable few would use "it is just fiction" and stay with that.

However, other beings are fair game to be defined as cruel, murderous, child eaters, genocidal .... or even evil. ... and that is as a species, not as individuals.

So, my point is:
Racism and similar functions is the only thing that has defined the Deep Ones as genocidal as a species.
That do not mean that they are.
But, if you think that they must be in order for the Mythos to be "correct" .... then there is just no point in arguing this line of thought.

.... Perhaps i should just leave this thing here ....
http://jordangreywolf.deviantart.com/art/My-Little-Byakhee-297270473

This notion that "they're just misunderstood" and that somehow we have to turn the Cthulhu mythos into a "moral" (and I use that term loosely) lesson in cultural relativism, is just absolutely absurd.

We're talking about a species that is utterly alien to us; they aren't human beings, they can only take a semblance of it as a PREDATORY METHOD, the way certain predators in nature can make themselves look like something else in order to hunt their prey.

The Mythos is about an absolute kind of inhumanity; its freaking ABOUT how the universe is not intellectually a fit to human ideas. That's its entire fucking point, that nothing is like what we assume, that all of our fancy ideas about reason, art, civility, goodness, even our basic assumptions about sentience are just FANTASIES.  

If all of a sudden the deep ones can be reasoned with, or have hopes and dreams like our own, or can be capable of anything we'd understand as goodness for the same reasons we would see these things as good, then you have completely lost the point of the Mythos, for reasons that have fuck all to do with racism.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Catelf;631878That is according to the regular scare tactics used for the mythos ....
But, really, considering the "fuel" used for the Mythos, namely rampant fear of the unknown + racism ....
A new take on the Mythos would be to see it for what it is ... a racism-driven nightmare that isn't really true.

Oh God. Fuck no.

What Pundit and Benoist said.

A good idea could be to read Machen (who inspired HPL a lot, especially the Deep Ones and Dunwich) and Howard (whose Worms in the Earth draws on the same Machen inspiration as the Deep Ones do). Machen's Little People and Howard's Worms in the Earth are way more human than Deep Ones are and they're still horrifying monsters w/o any kind of good qualities (but harder to get rid off, it seems, what with being subterranean).

Quote from: jhkim;632352The above works as an interpretation of the stories, and is probably closest to what Lovecraft intended.  

However, I think that one can run a game with a different interpretation that still fit the text of Lovecraft's stories.  The easiest is allowing that narrators like Zadok could be wrong about things that they had no first-hand knowledge of.  Even without this, though, I think there is a lot of range.  The Deep Ones could worship Cthulhu in the same way that human religions would worship scary-seeming figures like Kali, Shiva, or the Horned God.

Sure, except that it is a known fact in the game that Cthulhu exists, the Old Ones exist, and that their reality is so inimical to human logic that the worship of these beings drives anyone mad, by the human standards of madness.  So effectively, even if worship of Cthulhu is just like sunday service to the Deep Ones, that still makes them INSANE by human standards; with part of that insanity being that they seek the time when Cthulhu will rise and put an end to the human race.

Now of course, you could extend your "narrator biases" of Lovecraft further, and say 'well maybe the Great Old Ones don't make you insane and won't end all life as we know it' but at that point are you actually still playing CoC at all?  Haven't you just undermined the entire fundamental point of the Lovecraft stories?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;632820If all of a sudden the deep ones can be reasoned with, or have hopes and dreams like our own, or can be capable of anything we'd understand as goodness for the same reasons we would see these things as good, then you have completely lost the point of the Mythos, for reasons that have fuck all to do with racism.

So what?  My games don't have to adhere to the "true point of the Mythos" - they're games.  It seems like a new and potentially interesting direction that one can take the Mythos in, as per the original topic.  

I'm definitely warming to the idea.  I'm picturing now an alternate 1940s - where the Antarctic has been explored, some surviving Elder Things are being sheltered from the shoggoths by humanity.  The assault on Innsmouth being the opening salvo of a global war with the Deep Ones.  After a few years of fighting, though, an uneasy ceasefire is reached.  Hmm.  It seems like it definitely has possibilities.

Quote from: TristramEvans;632514Wait...what does Dances of Wolves and Avatar have to do with Lolita?



He must have for some reason mistaken Lolita with Ferngully.

which is kinda a creepy mistake, actually.

My guess is he was talking about stories where you can get very different readings depending on how you interpret Narrator Bias.

RPGPundit

Quote from: jhkim;632582I can't tell what you're saying here.  But it sounds like you're viewing Deep Ones as an evil that has to be attacked.  
.

What he's saying is that trying to view "deep ones" as just being human-like with human motives that can be understood and dealt with in human ways is a bit like rats at a medical lab telling themselves that the humans performing experiments on them are really just like rats with ratlike motives and can be comprehended dealt with in a ratlike way.

RPGPundit

Quote from: jhkim;632843So what?  My games don't have to adhere to the "true point of the Mythos" - they're games.  It seems like a new and potentially interesting direction that one can take the Mythos in, as per the original topic.  

I'm definitely warming to the idea.  I'm picturing now an alternate 1940s - where the Antarctic has been explored, some surviving Elder Things are being sheltered from the shoggoths by humanity.  The assault on Innsmouth being the opening salvo of a global war with the Deep Ones.  After a few years of fighting, though, an uneasy ceasefire is reached.  Hmm.  It seems like it definitely has possibilities.

I don't see that as new or interesting.  It just turns the Deep Ones into Doctor-who Silurians, or a D&D PC race, and removes all elements of horror from what is supposed to be a horror genre.
I mean, by the same stretch you could claim pokethulu or "My Little Cthulhu" would be "new and interesting", but I would take these, and yours and catelf's "deep ones are just the misunderstood victims of white privilege" notion, as signs of the genre being utterly spent (by some groups; fortunately others are doing more interesting stuff).

RPGPundit

Well, since several die-hard "Mythos fans" rejects or even misunderstands my points, purposefully or subconciously(because they may be afraid of what the idea really points towards) ... and i really didn't expect much of a change from the earlier reactions on my differing viewpoints ...
i'll see if i can just stop bothering about this thread.

After all, i have already said what i would suggest.
^_^

Quote from: jhkim;632582I'm still pondering what I would make of what Zadok described as sacrifices.

You've got a few options.  The first, and most obvious, it to treat them as the ravings of a madman.  Zadok kinda is a old crazy kook.

A more interesting possibility is to give him a grain of truth.  Innsmouth as a town is falling apart, and it is vastly underpopulated.  Folk might well disappear from Innsmouth.  That doesn't mean that they're being ritually slaughtered.

  Instead, focus on what it'd be like to actually live in that sort of situation, especially as a normal human.  Imagine living in a place where your childhood friends might well suddenly shed their skins and go to live forever beneath the waves, immortal, while you're increasingly alone in a dying town, set apart because you don't feel the call.  How long would you go before moving somewhere else?  Or imagine exposure -- rare, minor, just as radiation exposure might be rare and minor -- to deeper and unsettling truths, of things you can't even find the words to describe, other than 'pain' or 'hurt' or 'joy' or 'enlightenment'.  Or imagine the surface world of Depression-era rural Massachusetts, contrasted with an undersea realm of undying beings that have thrived for longer than all of human history.

The Deep Ones can, and should, still be terrifying beings.  They're a million-strong army with more knowledge than mankind can match.  They've got knowledge that doesn't fit into human patterns of thinking -- maybe knowledge that can't even fit into a human brain.  You definitely don't want to turn them into victims, since that's trite when you do it with vampires or zombies at this point, but just as equally you don't need to turn everyone else into helpless victims just to make the Deep Ones threatening.

Quote from: RPGPundit;632844My guess is he was talking about stories where you can get very different readings depending on how you interpret Narrator Bias.

RPGPundit

Actually no, I said Lolita when I should have said Pocahontas, the daughter of a Native American tribe chief and English soldier who lived at a time when English colonists invaded 17th century Virginia. Not being a particularly great scholar of such works the two were conflated in my mind for some reason. Mea culpa, well done to those more familiar with that kind of artistic expression.

Quote from: Catelf;631878That is according to the regular scare tactics used for the mythos ....
But, really, considering the "fuel" used for the Mythos, namely rampant fear of the unknown + racism ....

Nah, this is the fuel for the Mythos, as very nicely encapsulated by Carl Sagan:

Quote from: Carl Sagan"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Lovecraft wrote that people generally ignore this immensity of the universe, and its uncaring, amoral nature with regard to humanity, because if they could see the REAL big picture, see that our planet, our history and our entire species is just a mote of dust on the galactic wind, and more importantly, encounter the entities that really do perceive our world as that dust mote, everyone would go stark staring mad with the revelation.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

That Lovecraft was racist is really incidental to the whole thing. You could remove every scrap of racism from his stories and they'd remain pretty much the same.

Quote from: The Traveller;632911well done to those more familiar with that kind of artistic expression.

You mean....books?

You're still on ignore tristram, and you aren't coming off it.