Quote from: Valatar on June 12, 2021, 04:43:12 PM
The cosmic horror isn't that there are fish people, but that they started off human.  That was the whole deal with Shadow over Innsmouth, Olmstead was a human, or so he believed, and actively worked against the deep ones, but by the end of the story his connection with them had corrupted his mind and body to the point that he went out to join them.  The human/deep one hybrids didn't pop out fishy from the get-go, or evil from the get-go, but became so over decades.  Someone who hadn't gone far along the transformation would still be human, or human-ish, so a hybrid narrator for a story coming across as mostly human isn't really a deal breaker.  Their eventual fate, however, would be wholly inhuman, and by then they'd be welcoming it.  That's where the horror kicks in.

Isn't that body horror? Still Doesn't strike me as particularly cosmic.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on June 11, 2021, 06:47:04 PM
That's been my point as well. All this virtue signaling is doubly stupid because the battles they want to fight have already been fought.

Hence why they try to claim none of this ever happened and/or that the old woke were really everything-ist and bad and wrong.

Last years inclusion and diversity is this years omission and oppression.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 12, 2021, 11:20:59 AM
The deepies in both stories are essentially human. Their piscine nature doesn't make them meaningfully different from humans in a psychological sense. Even though it really should. Living forever and swimming in three dimensions should have a huge effect on their psychology, but we see no evidence of that.

This isn't what I would consider cosmic horror.

What about the Pod People in the "Body Snatcher" movies, then? They do seem human, they behave as humans, some of them (like the "substituted" psychiatrist in the 1956 original) use logic and intelligence to undermine those who are starting to realise that something is very wrong. And yet they are aliens that see us as a way to dominate Earth and nothing else.

But in the original novel (by Jack Finney), they represented the author's fear for "conformism" and the loss of individuality in the American culture. In the movie, director Don Siegel considers the story "an obvious condemnation of both Communism and McCarthyism" (both Finney and the lead actor Kevin McCarthy disagree and consider the movie version "just a horror thriller"). And in Kaufman's 1978 version the Pod People represent both the fear of alienation in the big city and the general paranoia of the era (again Kevin McCarthy, who appears in a cameo, disagrees and says that the first movie and the novel were much scarier because they were set in a small city where everybody thought that he knew everybody else).

Anyway, as you can see, here is another example of "something" whose strength is the ability to mix with humans, deceive and mislead them, but that is actually "something else". And, when given an interpretation, the Pod People always symbolise something that is universally rejected. You can debate the opinions expressed in "Starship Troopers", but there is no debate about the repulsiveness of what the Pod People or the Deep Ones represent.

You can debate, of course, that there is no symbolism but only straightforward horror. In this case, it is good, creative horror (at least IMHO) - not the easy appropriation of some other else's work and some other else's suffering that you see in "Winter Tide".

I agree that Lovecraft wouldn't have liked the explicit sex scenes in "The Doom that Came to Innsmouth", and honestly I found them a bit gratuitous. But I don't condemn the idea of sex in a Lovecraftian tale in principle. Alan Moore (still IMHO) used sex very gratuitously in "Neonomicon" (a tale that even he admits being below his standard) but in an excellent way in "Providence" - where Moore tackles, through the troubled sexuality of the main character, what very possibly were the problems that Lovecraft had with sex in general. So, as usual, it is not what it is, but how you do it.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 12, 2021, 04:46:20 PM

Quote from: Valatar on June 12, 2021, 04:43:12 PM
The cosmic horror isn't that there are fish people, but that they started off human.  That was the whole deal with Shadow over Innsmouth, Olmstead was a human, or so he believed, and actively worked against the deep ones, but by the end of the story his connection with them had corrupted his mind and body to the point that he went out to join them.  The human/deep one hybrids didn't pop out fishy from the get-go, or evil from the get-go, but became so over decades.  Someone who hadn't gone far along the transformation would still be human, or human-ish, so a hybrid narrator for a story coming across as mostly human isn't really a deal breaker.  Their eventual fate, however, would be wholly inhuman, and by then they'd be welcoming it.  That's where the horror kicks in.

Isn't that body horror? Still Doesn't strike me as particularly cosmic.

The two things aren't mutually exclusive. A good example is "The Dunwich Horror".

Also, I always considered "Innsmouth" as one of a "two parter" with "The Call of Cthulhu" - and only by reading both you can reconcile body horror and cosmic horror in this specific part of the Mythos. I don't know if Lovecraft ever wrote Innsmouth as a follow up of the "Cthulhu Expanded Universe" (*) or just because he found the idea fun. I guess it was the latter 

(*) Edit: with all Hollywood and their neighbours desperately trying to create "expanded universes", what an opportunity they are missing here. Follow the path of "The Conjuring" series. Introduce bit by bit Arkham, The Miskatonic University, Lovecraft County, some identifiable characters... If they do their job well, "At the Mountains of Madness" could become the culmination. Of course SJWs would NEVER allow something like this, leaving us watching... something else.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 12, 2021, 04:46:20 PM
Isn't that body horror? Still Doesn't strike me as particularly cosmic.

I'd personally consider getting a fishy body to be body horror, it's the part about having peoples' minds and souls twisted to be followers of vile gods that is more along the line of cosmic horror in my book.

Quote from: Reckall on June 12, 2021, 06:22:06 PMYou can debate the opinions expressed in "Starship Troopers", but there is no debate about the repulsiveness of what the Pod People or the Deep Ones represent.

After playing Call of the Sea, I would contest that. There is an allure in being able to live forever under the sea, to be "part of your world."

If you're interested, somebody did a deep dive analysis into The Shadow Over Innsmouth: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/lets-read-everything-howard-phillips-lovecraft-ever-wrote.19724/page-69#post-11986039

A choice quote:

QuoteThe message of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is that we all deserve to die. All of us. Everyone. Every single last human.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 13, 2021, 08:13:42 AM

Quote from: Reckall on June 12, 2021, 06:22:06 PMYou can debate the opinions expressed in "Starship Troopers", but there is no debate about the repulsiveness of what the Pod People or the Deep Ones represent.

After playing Call of the Sea, I would contest that. There is an allure in being able to live forever under the sea, to be "part of your world."

OK, now things get really strange: tonight I dreamed that I swam under the sea as an escape from the real world 

Quote from: Reckall on June 13, 2021, 08:35:17 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 13, 2021, 08:13:42 AM

Quote from: Reckall on June 12, 2021, 06:22:06 PMYou can debate the opinions expressed in "Starship Troopers", but there is no debate about the repulsiveness of what the Pod People or the Deep Ones represent.

After playing Call of the Sea, I would contest that. There is an allure in being able to live forever under the sea, to be "part of your world."

OK, now things get really strange: tonight I dreamed that I swam under the sea as an escape from the real world 

Told you so

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 13, 2021, 08:33:38 AM
If you're interested, somebody did a deep dive analysis into The Shadow Over Innsmouth: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/lets-read-everything-howard-phillips-lovecraft-ever-wrote.19724/page-69#post-11986039

A choice quote:

QuoteThe message of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is that we all deserve to die. All of us. Everyone. Every single last human.

Thanks for the links. I read it and I was not impressed. Classic woke storm: "Lovecraft was problematic because... uh... let's look for reasons..."

Just two examples. First, it stumbles right out of the gate:

Quote
Consider: the story generally presents xenophobia as justifiable. Foreigners are dangerous. Nonhumans are even more dangerous.

No. This is a classic example of false equivalence. You can't arbitrarily tie "Foreigners" to "Non humans". There is a reason as why in fiction humans fear non humans and it should be an obvious one. Neither the main character in Innsmouth is hated by humans: they are a culture of Deep Ones.

The fear of "others" that can take a human form and mix with the unaware us is present across the human spectrum of fears and arts. It is present in Le Fanu, Stoker, Campbell, Philip K. Dick, Asimov... One could argue that even "Blade Runner" is an example of it. Somehow, it is used only as a sin when useful against Lovecraft. First strike for "I'll give an arbitrary interpretation to an element of the tale so to prove my woke point".

Quote
But then, we have a scene where a mob of villagers with torches - led by the local priests and community leaders - are chasing an outsider out of their town...and it's the bad guys doing it to the main character. The scene is evocative of a Puritan flash mob in a way that the author couldn't possibly have been unaware of

Why! The scene is also evocative of flash mobs who chased away the Frankenstein monster in classic literature and movies. I don't know if Lovecraft went to the movies but he had an in-depth knowledge of classic horror. That "Frankenstein" may have been the inspiration is not considered. Neither is that Lovecraft may have read of Puritan flash mobs and used them just as an inspiration for the scene without any political meaning.

No, there is only one interpretation, and it is the woke one. Don't dare to debate it.

I could go on ("People living in colonial times behaving and looking at the World like... people living in colonial times?! Heresy!" Manhattan, meanwhile, was most famously bought by Dutch explorers from the local natives for goods worth about $25). But I have other things to do with my life - like preparing my upcoming CoC campaign. If you are curious about a specific woke stupidity in that "analysis" just ask.

I think all of the wokeness has poisoned the well for these kinds of debates. This forum is so opposed to wokeness that it's impossible to engage in good faith with anything judged woke or woke-adjacent.

QuoteOne could argue that even "Blade Runner" is an example of it.

Blade Runner presents the replicants as victims and tragic villains, not irredeemable monsters that must be exterminated to protect the human race.

QuoteFirst strike for "I'll give an arbitrary interpretation to an element of the tale so to prove my woke point".

Leila Hahn goes out of her way to explain, rationalize, and defend Lovecraft's behavior rather than dismiss him as a worthless bigot. She psychoanalyses his writing and biography in an attempt to understand him as much as it is possible with a dead person. That's the last thing a truly woke person would do. Empathy is not a woke value.

She goes out of her way to analyze and speculate to a degree that any Lovecraft fan would hope to dream of being able to. She's contributed plenty of interesting analyses of the aliens and monsters that I have never seen in any other fansite or forum or game. Biology, psychology, metaphysics, evolution, etc. A woke bigot who hated HPL would not be doing that. She clearly likes the material enough to write textbooks worth of anakysis and commentary. Effing textbooks worth!

Her analysis of the deepies doesn't treat them as a persecuted minority and acknowledges their imperialistic behavior. She even takes into account that the deepies engage in propaganda and whitewashing of their own history. She explicitly compares them to white colonialists. A woke bigot, again, wouldn't do that. Woke bigots want to fuck the fish people to satisfy their monster fetish, not psychoanalyze them and examine their culture from an anthropological standpoint.

Here you go dismissing all that as woke bigotry and personal attacks on Lovecraft. This is what I mean about poisoning the well. You're so opposed to the woke that you absolutely refuse to tolerate any interpretation of HPL's work that doesn't take it purely at face value and lionizes Lovecraft.

The guy named his cat a racial slur and regularly dehumanized people in his stories on the basis of class, race, and culture. This is the horrifying ending revelation of "Medusa's Coils":

QuoteIt would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside, the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation, . . . for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.

To treat "The Shadow over Innsmouth" purely as a horror story where "fish people bad" is the takeaway and every other critical analysis take not matter how well reasoned is bad and wrong (especially if it sounds "woke")... that takes Death of the Author to the most ridiculous extremes.

QuoteNeither is that Lovecraft may have read of Puritan flash mobs and used them just as an inspiration for the scene without any political meaning.

Now you're just insulting HPL's intelligence. The bookworm was a precursor to Tolkien. He would write layers of symbolism and references into his stories that only the erudite would understand. You're deliberately flattening all those layers of meaning simply to defend HPL's character (which isn't being attacked here anyway) while ironically devaluing him as a writer and an intellectual.

This is exactly the kind of anti-intellectual cherry-picking backlash that I expected the woke to have created in their insanity. The well is so poisoned. Do you believe that if you read this analysis ten or twenty years ago that you'd still dismiss it as woke bigotry?

Even S.T. Joshi acknowledges that Lovecraft's work was full of both literal racism and racist allegories, and he's one of the premier Lovecraft scholars. He even handed in his award when they took away HPL's likeness. Acknowledging that Lovecraft was racist because of his upbringing and wrote racism and racist allegories into his work, as was standard at the time he lived in, is not a woke take. I read such analyses as mainstream long before the woke panic.

Maybe Hahn's analyses aren't perfect or extensive enough, but they're hardly woke bigotry. She displays empathy for Lovecraft, which the woke do not do. I know because I have chatted with them about it and they can't fucking shutup about how he's the devil incarnate. Hahn is not attacking Lovecraft. She's treating him like a human being, with all the baggage that entails.

Treating Lovecraft like an actual human being, warts and all, is something that already doesn't happen enough on both sides of the political aisle.

Something to consider is that the cross breed deep ones are more like stages of alien and lean more to a cult than anything really alien until they start to really change. The full on deep ones are much like they Mi-Go and other horrors. They can converse with you. But their minds and goals may be strange in the Deep ones case, or utterly alien in the Mi-Go case. We can understand only a portion and only as long as these creatures stoop to our level and pretend to be human/ish. And the deep ones are still more or less terrestrial in some manner. While being inexorably connected to outer beings.

In effect they do not seem as alien because we mostly only see them when they are either believing or pretending to be human. Which fits with Lovecraft's usual leaning to hint at, but leave some or most details to the imagination of the reader.

Quote from: Omega on June 13, 2021, 01:48:42 PM
Something to consider is that the cross breed deep ones are more like stages of alien and lean more to a cult than anything really alien until they start to really change. The full on deep ones are much like they Mi-Go and other horrors. They can converse with you. But their minds and goals may be strange in the Deep ones case, or utterly alien in the Mi-Go case. We can understand only a portion and only as long as these creatures stoop to our level and pretend to be human/ish. And the deep ones are still more or less terrestrial in some manner. While being inexorably connected to outer beings.

In effect they do not seem as alien because we mostly only see them when they are either believing or pretending to be human. Which fits with Lovecraft's usual leaning to hint at, but leave some or most details to the imagination of the reader.

That doesn't equate to "they're evil monsters and we must exterminate them." They're clearly intelligent and capable of reasoning in a fashion compatible with human existence. We don't actually have any reliable evidence that they're inherently hostile to humanity, either. They're not like the bugs in Starship Troopers that viciously attack any humans they come into contact with.

Sure, it wrecks the horror when you start thinking critically about it. But Hahn's analysis of "The Whisperer in the Darkness" highlight oddities in the original text that makes both the narrator and the aliens out to be quite incompetent. It's quite comedic, actually. https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/lets-read-everything-howard-phillips-lovecraft-ever-wrote.19724/page-47#post-10837016

Hahn's analysis of the mermen biology and psychology is neat. https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/lets-read-everything-howard-phillips-lovecraft-ever-wrote.19724/page-71#post-12004197 Hahn speculates that one possibility is that the mermen are victims of Cthulhu's telepathy. Cthulhu doesn't actually have any interest in lesser beings, it's just that Cthulhu's thoughts blast the minds of any sensitives so that they irrationally worship it. The mermen, being telepathic themselves, fell into Cthulhu's unintentional thrall. This makes them more tragic than villainous.

Hahn's analysis of Cthulhu is also pretty novel. https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/lets-read-everything-howard-phillips-lovecraft-ever-wrote.19724/page-38#post-10350440  Rather than the starspawn being Cthulhu's servants or children, Hahn speculates based on textual inferences that the starspawn and Cthulhu are actually the same thing: an alien hive mind with a malleable multidimensional body.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 13, 2021, 03:02:53 PM

Quote from: Omega on June 13, 2021, 01:48:42 PM
Something to consider is that the cross breed deep ones are more like stages of alien and lean more to a cult than anything really alien until they start to really change. The full on deep ones are much like they Mi-Go and other horrors. They can converse with you. But their minds and goals may be strange in the Deep ones case, or utterly alien in the Mi-Go case. We can understand only a portion and only as long as these creatures stoop to our level and pretend to be human/ish. And the deep ones are still more or less terrestrial in some manner. While being inexorably connected to outer beings.

In effect they do not seem as alien because we mostly only see them when they are either believing or pretending to be human. Which fits with Lovecraft's usual leaning to hint at, but leave some or most details to the imagination of the reader.

That doesn't equate to "they're evil monsters and we must exterminate them." They're clearly intelligent and capable of reasoning in a fashion compatible with human existence. We don't actually have any reliable evidence that they're inherently hostile to humanity, either. They're not like the bugs in Starship Troopers that viciously attack any humans they come into contact with.

Sure, it wrecks the horror when you start thinking critically about it. But Hahn's analysis of "The Whisperer in the Darkness" highlight oddities in the original text that makes both the narrator and the aliens out to be quite incompetent. It's quite comedic, actually. https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/lets-read-everything-howard-phillips-lovecraft-ever-wrote.19724/page-47#post-10837016

Hahn's analysis of the mermen biology and psychology is neat. https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/lets-read-everything-howard-phillips-lovecraft-ever-wrote.19724/page-71#post-12004197 Hahn speculates that one possibility is that the mermen are victims of Cthulhu's telepathy. Cthulhu doesn't actually have any interest in lesser beings, it's just that Cthulhu's thoughts blast the minds of any sensitives so that they irrationally worship it. The mermen, being telepathic themselves, fell into Cthulhu's unintentional thrall. This makes them more tragic than villainous.

Hahn's analysis of Cthulhu is also pretty novel. https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/lets-read-everything-howard-phillips-lovecraft-ever-wrote.19724/page-38#post-10350440  Rather than the starspawn being Cthulhu's servants or children, Hahn speculates based on textual inferences that the starspawn and Cthulhu are actually the same thing: an alien hive mind with a malleable multidimensional body.

So, rather than worship HPL's works, we should worship someone else's speculative interpretations of HPL's works?  So, stupid, once removed.  HPL's works revolve around the ideas that humanity is insignificant, but totally unaware of their insignificance.  That powerful forces move through the universe seeking their inscrutable desires, and their interactions with humanity are similar to our interactions with insects.  That's cosmic horror.  The idea that humanity can be warped and coopted without anything we can do to stop it.  That everything we think we know is a thin veneer separating us from intelligences that are not so much malevolent, just indifferent to us to the point that our destruction is just a unknowing byproduct of their unexplainable goals.  The idea that the monsters of HLP's works either "reason" or are "compatible with human existence" shows a complete lack of understanding of HPL's works and mythos.

Quote from: Reckall on June 13, 2021, 11:38:14 AM

Quote
But then, we have a scene where a mob of villagers with torches - led by the local priests and community leaders - are chasing an outsider out of their town...and it's the bad guys doing it to the main character. The scene is evocative of a Puritan flash mob in a way that the author couldn't possibly have been unaware of

Why! The scene is also evocative of flash mobs who chased away the Frankenstein monster in classic literature and movies. I don't know if Lovecraft went to the movies but he had an in-depth knowledge of classic horror. That "Frankenstein" may have been the inspiration is not considered. Neither is that Lovecraft may have read of Puritan flash mobs and used them just as an inspiration for the scene without any political meaning.

Hang on, who is forming mobs to chase who now?