Quote from: jhkim on June 15, 2021, 01:34:56 AM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 14, 2021, 09:35:17 PM
Your insistence that nuance is necessary, or even obligatory, is the trap. HPL's monsters are the essence of other.  They are not redeemable, nor are they sympathetic.  They are alien, in the most extreme meaning of that word.  They seek, as part of their very being, the destruction of humanity, not as a hostile act, but because humanity's survival is irrelevant to their aims.  They are no more amenable to compromise with humanity than humans are amenable to compromise with cockroaches or termites.  And that absolute enmity with human concerns is vital, central, impossible to remove without destroying what cosmic horror is intended to mean in those stories.

HPL is not at all about good humanity-protecting people versus evil monsters. I've played in a bunch of Call of Cthulhu games that worked like this, and they always came across as vastly shallower than Lovecraft's stories. I think his stories are nuanced and complex.

For one, there isn't a hard line between monsters and humans. In many of his stories, monsters are an inherent part of the world we live in, part of our history, part of our future, and even a part of ourselves. There is no safe part of humanity or society free of corruption. Pursuing science is dangerous ("From Beyond", "Herbert West"); but also, living in the past and tradition is also dangerous ("The Rats in the Walls", "Arthur Jermyn and his Family").

Saying that the monsters are not redeemable is missing the point of his nihilism. The horror of his stories is that there is no sin or redemption - there is just stark reality in shades of grey.

CoC games where PCs save the world by shooting monsters with shotguns and dynamite can be fun, but they aren't very Lovecraftian IMO. I've felt that games are much more shocking, horrific, and Lovecraftian when the PCs do have to compromise - when they need to make hard choices including compromise, like working with a Yithian that has possessed their friend, for example. Sometimes trying to kill the monster just brings greater doom on everyone, and it's better to just accept, avoid, and/or compromise.

No, there are no white and dark, no shades of grey (your descriptions, not mine).  There is just unending black.  Nowhere did I speak of morality or human triumph (please quote where I did).  The term "redeemable" referred to the folks writing the stories, redeeming the Old Ones via humanizing them (apparently modern Western bourgeoisie leftism destroys reading comprehension, too).  So trapped in your zeitgeist you have to try and work relativism somewhere.  No, in HPL humans aren't "like" the monsters.  We can't be.  They are so far beyond us, in power and purpose, that such a comparison is ludicrous.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 15, 2021, 07:09:34 AM
No, there are no white and dark, no shades of grey (your descriptions, not mine).  There is just unending black.  Nowhere did I speak of morality or human triumph (please quote where I did).  The term "redeemable" referred to the folks writing the stories, redeeming the Old Ones via humanizing them (apparently modern Western bourgeoisie leftism destroys reading comprehension, too).  So trapped in your zeitgeist you have to try and work relativism somewhere.  No, in HPL humans aren't "like" the monsters.  We can't be.  They are so far beyond us, in power and purpose, that such a comparison is ludicrous.

Regarding "good" and "evil", Lovecraft gives his bleak opinion in the same essay "Nietzscheism and Realism" that I mentioned before:

"It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients - or their lack - and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws. We call a thing "good" because it promotes certain petty human conditions that we happen to like - whereas it is just as sensible to assume that all humanity is a noxious pest which should be eradicated like rats or gnats for the good of the planet or of the universe. There are no absolute values in the whole blind tragedy of mechanistic Nature - nothing is either good or bad except as judged from an absurdly limited point of view. The only cosmic reality is mindless, undeviating fate - automatic, unmoral, uncalculating inevitability."

Which is the best summation of the grounds on which he built his cosmology I ever read.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 15, 2021, 07:09:34 AM

Quote from: jhkim on June 15, 2021, 01:34:56 AM
Saying that the monsters are not redeemable is missing the point of his nihilism. The horror of his stories is that there is no sin or redemption - there is just stark reality in shades of grey.

CoC games where PCs save the world by shooting monsters with shotguns and dynamite can be fun, but they aren't very Lovecraftian IMO. I've felt that games are much more shocking, horrific, and Lovecraftian when the PCs do have to compromise - when they need to make hard choices including compromise, like working with a Yithian that has possessed their friend, for example. Sometimes trying to kill the monster just brings greater doom on everyone, and it's better to just accept, avoid, and/or compromise.

No, there are no white and dark, no shades of grey (your descriptions, not mine).  There is just unending black.  Nowhere did I speak of morality or human triumph (please quote where I did).  The term "redeemable" referred to the folks writing the stories, redeeming the Old Ones via humanizing them (apparently modern Western bourgeoisie leftism destroys reading comprehension, too).  So trapped in your zeitgeist you have to try and work relativism somewhere.  No, in HPL humans aren't "like" the monsters.  We can't be.  They are so far beyond us, in power and purpose, that such a comparison is ludicrous.

The last part is provably false. In some of Lovecraft's stories, humans and monsters are so much alike that they are literally indistinguishable. The narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, for example, is presumed human at first and considers himself human, but turns out to be of monstrous descent. This is also explored in "The Rats in the Walls" and "Arthur Jermyn and his Family" as well as other stories -- that some inhuman creatures can interbreed with humans and indeed have interbred for millennia.

I think running Call of Cthulhu purely as shotguns-and-dynamite, kill-the-monsters misses aspects like these.

I explored some of these aspects in a Victorian era campaign, using John Tynes' Golden Dawn sourcebook. Part of the horror in that was each PC learning more about themselves in disturbing fashion. In one adventure, a PC learned that he was partly descended from a snake-like race that were the basis for legends of the Little People, and he could mesmerize humans and other prey animals.

More broadly, we use the term "mythos" for Lovecraft's monsters - but they aren't a unified group all from the same origin all with perfect knowledge beyond us and the same goals. They tend to have huge differences from humans, but they can also be terrified of what is beyond their knowledge. Creatures like the Elder Things and the Yithians had their own civilizations on Earth that rose and collapsed, just as humans rose and collapsed. The Elder Things were themselves terrified of what was beyond their civilization, that brought about their doom. The campaign module Masks of Nyarlathotep has a captured Yithian that can be a useful source of information if communicated with, which I thought was interesting - and I'm a little disappointed that our PCs missed it when I recently played through that.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 14, 2021, 09:35:17 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 14, 2021, 04:45:11 PM
I think it should be possible to write the fish people without falling into those extremes, those traps. What's frustrating is that people too often treat it as an either/or thing.

No, NO, NO!  That isn't a trap!  Your cosmopolitan, pampered, Western, relativistic worldview is the trap.  Your insistence that nuance is necessary, or even obligatory, is the trap.  HPL's monsters are the essence of other.  They are not redeemable, nor are they sympathetic.  They are alien, in the most extreme meaning of that word.  They seek, as part of their very being, the destruction of humanity, not as a hostile act, but because humanity's survival is irrelevant to their aims.  They are no more amenable to compromise with humanity than humans are amenable to compromise with cockroaches or termites.  And that absolute enmity with human concerns is vital, central, impossible to remove without destroying what cosmic horror is intended to mean in those stories.

You rage against suggestions that you are blind to your own biases that prevent you from understanding these stories, and yet every word you write simply confirms that blindness.  You cannot write Lovecraftian monsters with "nuance" and still have Lovecraftian horror.  Only someone so steeped in modern bourgeoisie relativism that they can't even see outside their own mental constructs could miss this.  By definition, a Lovecraftian horror is one that is impossible to understand, to bargain with, to defeat.  The most you can ever to is to delay the inevitable.  Cthulhu sleeps and waits, but he will awake, and all of our civilization will crumble.  THAT is Lovecraftian horror.  And it doesn't work if the Deep Ones are "reasonable" and "understandable" creatures.

The past four days have been extremely stressful for me in real life (e.g. I've been having nothing but diarrhea all that time), so I apologize if there's any confusion as a result of my responses.

It's not my desire to see the horror subtracted. It's extremely difficult to explain this because we both seem to have completely different meanings when it comes to basic words, but I'll try.

I feel that Innsmouth stories are typically extremely schlocky. They rely on violence, gore, graphic rape (of women, and only women), etc. The more subtle psychological horror in the original story is completely absent. The fish people are reduced to caricatures with more in common with dothraki or orcs than anything else. I feel these recurring elements betray the writers' biases and hangups regarding horror and sexuality more than it says anything about cosmic horror.

The stories that don't fall into that are typically SJW claptrap where the fish people are a persecuted minority with nothing but redeeming values. Any kind of horror is absent; at best you get dark fantasy.

It's extremely difficult to find stories that actually emphasize the alien nature of the fish people without resorting to gory misogynistic b-schlock. The only decent effort I've found is Call of the Sea, an adventure puzzle video game.

What I mean to say is: I think writer biases and hangups regarding violence, sexuality, more recently social justice, etc cloud our ability to explore cosmic horror. This goes in all political directions. This problem is particularly pronounced whenever stories broach any topics that relate even remotely to human social issues like race relations.

It's easy to avoid complicating a story where an alien from another universe is trying to eat you or an ancient city is telepathically eroding your mind. It's a lot more difficult when things like sex with fish people is involved.

I'm not trying to argue that we can make peace with the fish people and live in a peaceful multicultural society, unless the story is presenting that as horrifying. And to be fair, going by Hahn's xenology speculation, a multicultural society would result in fish people genetics dispersing through the human population and making everyone subject to Cthulhu's dreams.

I think there's tons of potentially interesting avenues that are being completely ignored here.

I've also been having similar problems trying to pitch omnivoracious hivemind bug stories elsewhere. I keep running into people who think the bugs should inevitably engage in diplomacy, when my entire argument has been that they're so alien that they don't interact in any way other than genocidal warfare. I'm pitching these bugs as intelligent and introspective, and reasonable in the literal sense: they've reasoned that the best way to interact with humans (and everything else) is to eat/assimilate them as part of their quest for borg-esque perfection. In fact, some bugs who give it any thought are actually surprised that other species would not want to join this quest and blame this resistance on pathological ignorance. The bugs are reasonable, yet impossible to reason with. They don't bother to engage in communication with other species because it won't convince them to surrender and let themselves be eaten. Etc.

I hope I explained that right because it's really difficult to get it across to human readers, it seems.

Anyway, I'm tired now so I'll sign off.

Quote from: jhkim on June 15, 2021, 11:01:40 AM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 15, 2021, 07:09:34 AM

Quote from: jhkim on June 15, 2021, 01:34:56 AM
Saying that the monsters are not redeemable is missing the point of his nihilism. The horror of his stories is that there is no sin or redemption - there is just stark reality in shades of grey.

CoC games where PCs save the world by shooting monsters with shotguns and dynamite can be fun, but they aren't very Lovecraftian IMO. I've felt that games are much more shocking, horrific, and Lovecraftian when the PCs do have to compromise - when they need to make hard choices including compromise, like working with a Yithian that has possessed their friend, for example. Sometimes trying to kill the monster just brings greater doom on everyone, and it's better to just accept, avoid, and/or compromise.

No, there are no white and dark, no shades of grey (your descriptions, not mine).  There is just unending black.  Nowhere did I speak of morality or human triumph (please quote where I did).  The term "redeemable" referred to the folks writing the stories, redeeming the Old Ones via humanizing them (apparently modern Western bourgeoisie leftism destroys reading comprehension, too).  So trapped in your zeitgeist you have to try and work relativism somewhere.  No, in HPL humans aren't "like" the monsters.  We can't be.  They are so far beyond us, in power and purpose, that such a comparison is ludicrous.

The last part is provably false. In some of Lovecraft's stories, humans and monsters are so much alike that they are literally indistinguishable. The narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, for example, is presumed human at first and considers himself human, but turns out to be of monstrous descent. This is also explored in "The Rats in the Walls" and "Arthur Jermyn and his Family" as well as other stories -- that some inhuman creatures can interbreed with humans and indeed have interbred for millennia.

You know, your argument might be better served if your evidence didn't actually support what everyone has been saying here the whole time.  The entire point of HPL's stories on these matters is that "race" wins out.  The narrators in those stories aren't human.  Their lineage has warped them beyond humanity, to the point where they behave in incomprehensible (to normal, rational people) ways.  That's the whole point.  They aren't "good" or "redeemable" or "relatable" or anything else that would connect them with humanity.  They have become the other, due to forces beyond their control, and now are warped and inhuman.  That's HPL's cosmic horror.  It isn't "shades of grey."  If it touches you, you lose everything, including your humanity, with no hope to prevail against it.  I don't see how that contradicts anything I said.

Quote from: Reckall on June 15, 2021, 09:29:52 AM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 15, 2021, 07:09:34 AM
No, there are no white and dark, no shades of grey (your descriptions, not mine).  There is just unending black.  Nowhere did I speak of morality or human triumph (please quote where I did).  The term "redeemable" referred to the folks writing the stories, redeeming the Old Ones via humanizing them (apparently modern Western bourgeoisie leftism destroys reading comprehension, too).  So trapped in your zeitgeist you have to try and work relativism somewhere.  No, in HPL humans aren't "like" the monsters.  We can't be.  They are so far beyond us, in power and purpose, that such a comparison is ludicrous.

Regarding "good" and "evil", Lovecraft gives his bleak opinion in the same essay "Nietzscheism and Realism" that I mentioned before:

"It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients - or their lack - and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws. We call a thing "good" because it promotes certain petty human conditions that we happen to like - whereas it is just as sensible to assume that all humanity is a noxious pest which should be eradicated like rats or gnats for the good of the planet or of the universe. There are no absolute values in the whole blind tragedy of mechanistic Nature - nothing is either good or bad except as judged from an absurdly limited point of view. The only cosmic reality is mindless, undeviating fate - automatic, unmoral, uncalculating inevitability."

Which is the best summation of the grounds on which he built his cosmology I ever read.

I haven't seen that quote before.  It's good to see that what I thought was the basis of his worldview (as expressed in the stories) is borne out by his own words on the subject.  It's exactly what I said above...

Quote from: jhkim on June 15, 2021, 11:01:40 AM
The last part is provably false. In some of Lovecraft's stories, humans and monsters are so much alike that they are literally indistinguishable. The narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, for example, is presumed human at first and considers himself human, but turns out to be of monstrous descent. This is also explored in "The Rats in the Walls" and "Arthur Jermyn and his Family" as well as other stories -- that some inhuman creatures can interbreed with humans and indeed have interbred for millennia.

Your shades of grey is literally "50 shades of grey"? 

How does the moral flow diagram work in this case:  Can you have babies with this creature?  If yes then morally ambiguous;  If no then morally black or white.

That Joe, he may be the spawn of Satan but hes not so bad once you get to know him.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 15, 2021, 05:02:36 PM

Quote from: jhkim on June 15, 2021, 11:01:40 AM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 15, 2021, 07:09:34 AM
No, in HPL humans aren't "like" the monsters.  We can't be.  They are so far beyond us, in power and purpose, that such a comparison is ludicrous.

The last part is provably false. In some of Lovecraft's stories, humans and monsters are so much alike that they are literally indistinguishable. The narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, for example, is presumed human at first and considers himself human, but turns out to be of monstrous descent. This is also explored in "The Rats in the Walls" and "Arthur Jermyn and his Family" as well as other stories -- that some inhuman creatures can interbreed with humans and indeed have interbred for millennia.

You know, your argument might be better served if your evidence didn't actually support what everyone has been saying here the whole time.  The entire point of HPL's stories on these matters is that "race" wins out.  The narrators in those stories aren't human.  Their lineage has warped them beyond humanity, to the point where they behave in incomprehensible (to normal, rational people) ways.  That's the whole point.  They aren't "good" or "redeemable" or "relatable" or anything else that would connect them with humanity.  They have become the other, due to forces beyond their control, and now are warped and inhuman.  That's HPL's cosmic horror.  It isn't "shades of grey."  If it touches you, you lose everything, including your humanity, with no hope to prevail against it.  I don't see how that contradicts anything I said.

I can't tell if we're disagreeing or not, because the verbiage here is very abstract.

From my view, I feel like this is projecting a specialness onto humanity that isn't present in Lovecraft. You say that monsters aren't "good" or "redeemable" -- but I would say that in Lovecraft's mindset, humans also aren't "good" or "redeemable". Nihilism rejects those terms. Humans aren't uniquely special and good - they are just an ordinary species that is no better or worse than Yithians or white apes or any other life form. "Humanity" isn't some precious snowflake quality that makes people good. Human beings are frequently terrible and murderous to each other.

Objectively and scientifically, in Lovecraft's world, humans can and do communicate with inhuman life forms, compromise with them, and even live and breed with some of them. The humans who do this can be considered "other" -- but they aren't necessarily punished for those sins, because there isn't any such moral framework of sin and redemption.

In game terms, the difference I see is:

1) The PCs always just destroy anything inhuman or strange, with shoguns and dynamite. Maybe the terms "good" and "evil" aren't used, but it's still clear and simple fight-the-bad-guys.

2) The PCs sometimes need to make judgement calls about compromise or dealings with monsters to achieve their goals. I gave examples of strange dealings in some of my campaigns - like the PC who found he was of snake-creature descent, and the captured Yithian in Masks of Nyarlathotep that the PCs could gain useful information from.

In practice, I've felt that #2 is more interesting, more horrific, and more Lovecraftian.

There's the Charle's Stross novel where they went along with Nyarlathotep becoming Prime Minister of the UK, because it seemed like the least worst option.

There is an interesting (and thus often overlooked  ) passage that Lovecraft places right at the beginning of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth":

"There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. [...] Complaints from many liberal organisations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to coöperate with the government in the end."

It is, AFAIK, the only time that Lovecraft inserted a political element in one of his stories. It shows how the Government, while keeping the secrecy, it was actually quite open regarding the events concerning Innsmouth. Lovecraft doesn't write that the liberal organisations became passive "as usual", but "surprisingly". It is not a statement against liberalism or the free press, but the recognition that once one saw what was really happening in Innsmouth any partisanship was dropped. It immediately became a matter of "us vs. them".

I feel that there is a connection, here, between the tale and Lovecraft's famous quote "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown" (which is actually a recognised psychopathology). It doesn't matter if the "other" may actually be a tragic figure, like the Replicants in "Blade Runner" or a malevolent entity like the Pod People in the "Body Snatchers": once an unknown entity may mix with humans and become indistinguishable from them, fear kicks in; then containment, then destruction.

Quote from: jhkim on June 14, 2021, 08:09:57 PMI generally agree with Reckall's commentary, but I also agree with BoxCrayonTales that the interesting question isn't "Lovecraft was racist" versus "Lovecraft wasn't racist". It seems to me that most people's answer to that is just a declaration of identity rather than a nuanced position.

Lovecraft was a brilliant writer, and had tons of depth to his work. Part of where I also agree with BoxCrayonTales is that Lovecraft generally avoided having good versus evil in his stories - so talking about Old Ones as evil is dodging much of the depth of the stories. There was a potential escape in ignorance, but it was never a very good answer.

In terms of gaming, I've played and run a ton of Call of Cthulhu. It works well enough as a general monster-killing game, but I think it gets even better when there are complex sides rather than just monster-killing (and cultist-killing).

1: Very. SJWs love to throw around terms till they lose all meaning then the usual village idiots parrot it as holy writ.

2: To Lovecraft the real horror was not that they were good or evil. But that they were totally indifferent to siderial life. They seem good or evil from a terrestrial viewpoint. But its like an ants view of a human unknowingly stepping on an anthill. Or actively trying to be rid of pests. Or as Gerry Anderson loved to put it. It is not life as we dont know it. It is life as we can not know it.

3: CoC works horrible as a general monster killing game. That is nigh the diametric opposite of what CoC is intended for.

Quote from: Valatar on June 14, 2021, 09:40:10 PM
I don't believe R.E. Howard was racist, except in the harmless 'foreigners are strange and exotic' way that people like to pick at lately.  Conan was a racist, but he was living in a time before recorded history, so can't really say that an uneducated barbarian not being super on top of treating people respectfully is terribly out of character.  And even Conan managed to interact with people of very different ethnic groups and nationalities with some degree of aplomb from time to time.

REH was not racist in the modern "everything on earth" way. From research for a RPG for a company back in the 90s what it was was that he really disliked one or more tribes of Native Americans. It reads not so much as racist as "never trust these jerks!" sort of personal experience. Apache? I do not recall as its been 25 years. Pretty sure it was one of the tribes that other tribes didnt like either. Yeah I know. Shocking isnt it? Get thee to a fainting couch!

As for Conan. The idea of him being racist is beyond absurd. This was trotted out back in the 90s iteration of the SJW cult and will near certainly be again when the 2030s iteration rears its ugly head. Conan for example never trusted the Pict as they were notoriously prone to backstabbing and madness and comported with demons and worse. But I am fairly sure that if it did not happen in the books, Conan would give a Pict a chance if they comported themselves in a manner contrary to the general populace. And pretty much how he treated anyone. He'd get along with Stygians and whatever long as they werent trying to kill him.

Conan also had a disdain for civilization as he saw it as a weakening force. He actually respected the Pict more than alot of civilized kingdoms. But he also had an appreciation for the finer things in life, moreso over time. Very much not a one-dimensional character.

And this is the point of this thread. Some of us have seen more than one wave of the exact same stupid claims with each iteration. It didnt fly 20 years ago, and it didnt fly 40 years ago, ad nausium.

As always. These cultists dont actually read the books. They read a paragraph of some college disertation on how wacist authors are! They hate something because someone told them to.

Quote from: Reckall on June 16, 2021, 03:51:08 AM
There is an interesting (and thus often overlooked  ) passage that Lovecraft places right at the beginning of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth":

"There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. [...] Complaints from many liberal organisations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to coöperate with the government in the end."

It is, AFAIK, the only time that Lovecraft inserted a political element in one of his stories. It shows how the Government, while keeping the secrecy, it was actually quite open regarding the events concerning Innsmouth. Lovecraft doesn't write that the liberal organisations became passive "as usual", but "surprisingly". It is not a statement against liberalism or the free press, but the recognition that once one saw what was really happening in Innsmouth any partisanship was dropped. It immediately became a matter of "us vs. them".

I feel that there is a connection, here, between the tale and Lovecraft's famous quote "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown" (which is actually a recognised psychopathology). It doesn't matter if the "other" may actually be a tragic figure, like the Replicants in "Blade Runner" or a malevolent entity like the Pod People in the "Body Snatchers": once an unknown entity may mix with humans and become indistinguishable from them, fear kicks in; then containment, then destruction.

I'm not even sure that's political. More like 'okay, this is what you are defending'. And then they get to meet the Deep Ones and take a SAN hit.

Other media have tried to play this card with varying levels of success -- some less so than others.

Quote from: Omega on June 16, 2021, 05:16:47 AM

Quote from: Valatar on June 14, 2021, 09:40:10 PM
I don't believe R.E. Howard was racist, except in the harmless 'foreigners are strange and exotic' way that people like to pick at lately.  Conan was a racist, but he was living in a time before recorded history, so can't really say that an uneducated barbarian not being super on top of treating people respectfully is terribly out of character.  And even Conan managed to interact with people of very different ethnic groups and nationalities with some degree of aplomb from time to time.

REH was not racist in the modern "everything on earth" way. From research for a RPG for a company back in the 90s what it was was that he really disliked one or more tribes of Native Americans. It reads not so much as racist as "never trust these jerks!" sort of personal experience. Apache? I do not recall as its been 25 years. Pretty sure it was one of the tribes that other tribes didnt like either. Yeah I know. Shocking isnt it? Get thee to a fainting couch!

As for Conan. The idea of him being racist is beyond absurd. This was trotted out back in the 90s iteration of the SJW cult and will near certainly be again when the 2030s iteration rears its ugly head. Conan for example never trusted the Pict as they were notoriously prone to backstabbing and madness and comported with demons and worse. But I am fairly sure that if it did not happen in the books, Conan would give a Pict a chance if they comported themselves in a manner contrary to the general populace. And pretty much how he treated anyone. He'd get along with Stygians and whatever long as they werent trying to kill him.

Conan also had a disdain for civilization as he saw it as a weakening force. He actually respected the Pict more than alot of civilized kingdoms. But he also had an appreciation for the finer things in life, moreso over time. Very much not a one-dimensional character.

And this is the point of this thread. Some of us have seen more than one wave of the exact same stupid claims with each iteration. It didnt fly 20 years ago, and it didnt fly 40 years ago, ad nausium.

As always. These cultists dont actually read the books. They read a paragraph of some college disertation on how wacist authors are! They hate something because someone told them to.

Speaking of REH and only REH written stories (since he only wrote the one full novel about Conan):

Conan befriended, fought alongside and/or slept with Hyrkanians, Shemites, Kushites (and other black kingdoms ppl), Even Kithai isn't presented as "EVIL" in his stories.

On the other hand Lemurians and Hyperboreans  (both Hu-White ppl)  are presented as evil conquerors and slavers and supossedly the Lemurians founded Stigia (and ensalved the darker skinned stigians).

For the noobs:

Kithai is a standing for all Asia, HIrkanians (soppossedly) became the Mongols, Huns, Tatars and Turks. Shemites are a stand in for Arabs and other Semite tribes, Zingarans descend from them.

As for the Picts, in Kull histories they are civilized and not at all evil, after the cataclism the Picts are divided between those who would become the native americans and the savages from the Pictish wilderness/islands. Mayapan from Conan of the Isles is created whole cloth by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter for that novel based in what little REH had written about the picts, so if ANY (I don't remember any example buth still) racism is really there (and I doubt it) it should be laid at the feet of those two authors and not REH.

Yeah, I'm kind of a nerd sue me 

Quote from: Ghostmaker on June 16, 2021, 08:16:24 AM

Quote from: Reckall on June 16, 2021, 03:51:08 AM
There is an interesting (and thus often overlooked  ) passage that Lovecraft places right at the beginning of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth":

"There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. [...] Complaints from many liberal organisations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to coöperate with the government in the end."

It is, AFAIK, the only time that Lovecraft inserted a political element in one of his stories. It shows how the Government, while keeping the secrecy, it was actually quite open regarding the events concerning Innsmouth. Lovecraft doesn't write that the liberal organisations became passive "as usual", but "surprisingly". It is not a statement against liberalism or the free press, but the recognition that once one saw what was really happening in Innsmouth any partisanship was dropped. It immediately became a matter of "us vs. them".

I feel that there is a connection, here, between the tale and Lovecraft's famous quote "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown" (which is actually a recognised psychopathology). It doesn't matter if the "other" may actually be a tragic figure, like the Replicants in "Blade Runner" or a malevolent entity like the Pod People in the "Body Snatchers": once an unknown entity may mix with humans and become indistinguishable from them, fear kicks in; then containment, then destruction.

I'm not even sure that's political. More like 'okay, this is what you are defending'. And then they get to meet the Deep Ones and take a SAN hit.

Other media have tried to play this card with varying levels of success -- some less so than others.

Even with the SAN hit, I find it difficult to believe than modern leftists would just stand aside. I mean, The Shape of a Water is a thing. These are probably the same sort of people who would happily convert to Dagonism and marry fish people just to prove how anti-racist and anti-white they are. Some of them might even actually enjoy it.

And, to be entirely candid, I think the original story is quite comparable to anxieties surrounding transhumanism. The fish people are transhumans. They're genetically compatible with humans, which makes them human (and upsets our definition of what it means to be human). There is the implication that they may have been engineered (from humans) by the starfish heads. That is transhumanism.

Cyberpunk is a relatively recent genre, but I think there are at least a few stories which make transhumans look like cosmic horror monsters. I'd need to check.

But essentially, HPL's stories are a product of their time. Particularly the scientific knowledge of the time. Since then, we had cyberpunk and bioethics.

In a typical cyberpunk setting, I don't think the fish people would raise any eyebrows. They'd probably come across as quaint in a setting like Transhuman Space or Eclipse Phase.

Given even a fraction of the shit I've seen just reading anything by Chris A. Fields, "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and derivatives like "The Doom that Came to Innsmouth" don't hit very hard in the horror factor anymore. Maybe I'm just jaded by being on the internet too long and watching too many horror movies.