Quote from: Reckall on June 14, 2021, 03:12:12 PMbig snip

I read the whole thing and now I just wanna watch Mullholland Drive.

Actually I want to watch Inland Empire but that's a bit hard to find now and I never had a copy anyway.

Quote from: Reckall on June 14, 2021, 03:12:12 PM<snipped>

I read it all. This is actually a pretty good analysis, Reckall. Hats off.

Oh, and if you want to twitch a little more, I like reading the old Daily Bestiary blog as it comes up with some intriguing ideas for critter encounters.

The one for Great Cthulhu had a particularly disturbing seed. Cthulhu is dreaming in R'lyeh... but the seas and continents have changed significantly... and now a group of cultists seeks to rouse him, not on some mythic island... but in a major American city.

Raleigh, North Carolina, to be precise.

There's this unspoken assumption among many of Lovecraft's defenders that readings of race issues into Lovecraft's work are part of a malign conspiracy to besmirch the author and his work. While there are obviously plenty of SJWs doing just that, that doesn't mean that everyone else is. It doesn't mean that such a reading inherently devalues the work, either, and may very well enhance it.

To say "The Shadow over Innsmouth" is either racist or not racist misses the point. It's not that simple. The story certainly deals with racial themes, such as when the text initially leads you believe the Innsmouth look was the result of race mixing with pacific islanders only to later reveal that it was the result of mixing with fish people.

It is very easy to read as an allegory for fear of miscegenation. But there's more to the horror than that. It's not simply that the fish people engage in conspiracy to infiltrate and supplant humanity. Horror comes from the story unsettling what it means to be human. The fish people, for all their differences, are genetically human. Hominid, if you want to be pedantic. In turn that relates back to racism and fears of miscegenation, which are founded on the belief that other races are subhuman despite their ability to interbreed.

I think that racial themes are inherent to the story and can't be separated from it. But I don't believe that makes the story bad and that we should feel bad for liking it. Whether the story itself is actually presenting the deep ones as villains is ambiguous. Their stated actions are very close what human beings have historically done to each other, so we can't exactly claim they're worse than humans in that respect. Zadok's account isn't necessarily reliable either, and that may have been intentional. Neither is whatever we heard from the fish people themselves. The ending could be interpreted as an ironic nihilistic happy ending depending on how you approach it, since another recurring theme of HPL's stories is that we're all doomed and trying to delay the inevitable is pointless.

I don't think that reductive readings like "it's racist!" or "it's not racist" contribute that much. "The Doom that Came to Innsmouth" presents us with a psychotic serial killer who goes around doing repulsive things and generally being repulsive. "The Litany of Earth" presents us with a flawless Mary Sue who can do no wrong and lectures us for being the real racists. Cthulhutech has them running rape camps with the implication that's mostly or exclusively women being raped for extra misogyny points.

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. There's no room for nuance. The fish people are either evil cultists or a persecuted minority, nothing else. Even in Hahn's thread, I saw the potential for nuance going over a lot of people's heads.

To go back to my horror game comparison for a sec... One of the most disturbing aspects of the Lust from Beyond game isn't that it assaults our eyes with disturbing imagery, but that it makes us feel for the "villains" and "monsters" of the story without diminishing or justifying their horrifying actions. There's drama, introspection, those sorts of things. I feel that enhances the horror factor and that stories about Innsmouth would benefit from that.

Have you ever read "The Black Brat of Dunwich"? Long story short, it's a retelling of "The Dunwich Horror" except with Wilbur Whateley as our doomed protagonist trying to escape the old ones. Otherwise, the events are unchanged, albeit reinterpreted. Wizard Whateley is still a deranged cultist. Furthermore, I think it dovetails very nicely with Hahn's xenology article on the yogspawn, particularly when she asks if Wilbur would have turned out a villain if he was raised by non-cultists and the whole speculation about how he was slowly growing into a horrifying alien monster. The synthesis is very Cronenberg, I think.

I'm sorry. I'm so frustrated by how polarized the discourse has become.

I remember being so angry after reading "Shoggoths in Bloom." Long story short: the story explicitly compares shoggoths with black people. No surprise there. It's so ironically racist because the narrator is a black man. People hated when Detroit: Become Human compared androids with black people, but suddenly that plot outline becomes suddenly okay when you're writing hatefic of HPL.

The story doesn't raise anything new, because we've already been philosophizing similar stuff in bioethics. Is it moral to use slaves if they covet slavery? "Shoggoths in Bloom" say it's wrong (because of the narrator's personal experiences as a black man), but I've seen arguments to the contrary. The reason why slavery is bad is because it causes unnecessary suffering to the slaves. If some robot slaves can't experience that suffering by their nature, then why would it be bad?

I'm so frustrated. I don't know what I want.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 14, 2021, 11:19:37 AM

Quote from: Shasarak on June 14, 2021, 01:02:58 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 13, 2021, 09:07:11 PM
This is why I hate humanity. Every last fucking one. Cthulhu can't wake up fast enough.

Just because you want us all to die does not mean we should not all try to get along and live together in harmony.

I mean there is no surviving evidence that you want to bring about the end of days.

Because trying to live in harmony has worked out so well for us, hasn't it? War, genocide, religious fanaticism, politics... the list goes on.

**Looks around at the current lack of war, genocide, religious fanaticism and politics.  Nods**

It was all worth it.

Quote from: Reckall on June 14, 2021, 03:12:12 PM
No one with a normal mind denies that Lovecraft is racist (or, better yet, Xenophobic): you only have to read his tales. I openly recognised this in the first post of this very thread. BTW, I'm Italian and thus among the targeted groups.

No one in their right mind believes Lovecraft was racist, you only have to read his tales.
In several of his stories he portrays immigrants and such as actually in the right and doing what they can to hold off the horrors. While its very often the white people who scoff, disbelieve and nigh invariably make things worse.
In a way he might not have even been xenophobic. Theres been some small discussion that Lovecraft was actually his eras version of woke. My how the pendulum swings doesnt it? He did grow out of his sheltered worldviews once he got out and actually met more people. And got un-woke.

Quote from: Omega on June 14, 2021, 07:32:41 PM

Quote from: Reckall on June 14, 2021, 03:12:12 PM
No one with a normal mind denies that Lovecraft is racist (or, better yet, Xenophobic): you only have to read his tales. I openly recognised this in the first post of this very thread. BTW, I'm Italian and thus among the targeted groups.

No one in their right mind believes Lovecraft was racist, you only have to read his tales.
In several of his stories he portrays immigrants and such as actually in the right and doing what they can to hold off the horrors. While its very often the white people who scoff, disbelieve and nigh invariably make things worse.
In a way he might not have even been xenophobic. Theres been some small discussion that Lovecraft was actually his eras version of woke. My how the pendulum swings doesnt it? He did grow out of his sheltered worldviews once he got out and actually met more people. And got un-woke.

I 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).

Quote from: Shasarak on June 14, 2021, 04:58:37 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 14, 2021, 11:19:37 AM

Quote from: Shasarak on June 14, 2021, 01:02:58 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 13, 2021, 09:07:11 PM
This is why I hate humanity. Every last fucking one. Cthulhu can't wake up fast enough.

Just because you want us all to die does not mean we should not all try to get along and live together in harmony.

I mean there is no surviving evidence that you want to bring about the end of days.

Because trying to live in harmony has worked out so well for us, hasn't it? War, genocide, religious fanaticism, politics... the list goes on.

**Looks around at the current lack of war, genocide, religious fanaticism and politics.  Nods**

It was all worth it.

I'm not quite sure what is literal here - but from my view, humanity has done many terrible things, but it is also the best that it's ever been. War and genocide have been decreasing for decades, and people have been living longer and better lives throughout the world.

I kind of feel that some people here are fighting the wrong battle.

The thing to be defended is whether it's ok to like something even if it contains some racist elements and it isn't necessary for such things to be restricted in order to protect the plebs.  And also to push back on the ridiculously over-inflated work the concept of 'harm' is doing in woke narratives.

There are people here who seem to argue that nothing is ever racist, even things like R.E. Howard, or Lovecraft that to my mind contain ridiculously blatant examples of racism.  It's beside the point to my mind.  Even if you think they don't contain racism, what if they did?  Would it be ok to cancel them? Obviously not.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, I was kind of boggling at BCT there myself.

But that's part and parcel of wokeist thought nowadays, as you said. Many of them do not believe in monsters, either the fictional kind or the real ones that will beat them senseless and laugh about it.

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.

Who cares?  As I said it's not the point. Are you suggesting that if it were racist no one should read and enjoy it?  That whether it is ok to read and enjoy it is dependent on it not being even a little bit racist?

There's an extent to which if you get sucked into arguing the wrong thing, you are implictly conceding the more imporant principle.

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.

I never felt Call of Cthulhu was about shades of grey at all.

I wouldn't call it shades of grey, but it's not black and white either.

The horror of Lovecraft's cosmos is in part the idea the morality and notions of good and evil are purely human and utterly irrelevant in the greater scheme of things.

The great old ones are basically amoral rather than supernaturally evil. Human notions of morality are too small and petty a thing for them to be concerned with.

We can ask call them evil, but at the same time it's potentially like ants thinking that we're evil because we step on them.

There's a quote from Neitzsche which basically presents something of the same idea (although he doesn't see it as necessarily a source of horror)

Quote"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of 'world history' — yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees on the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts."

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 14, 2021, 04:45:11 PM
There's this unspoken assumption among many of Lovecraft's defenders that readings of race issues into Lovecraft's work are part of a malign conspiracy to besmirch the author and his work. While there are obviously plenty of SJWs doing just that, that doesn't mean that everyone else is. It doesn't mean that such a reading inherently devalues the work, either, and may very well enhance it.

Right, and there are plenty of those in the SF writing world, and in Hollywood, and they reinforce the notion that you shouldn't separate the artist from the art. That's how you get works like "Lovecraft Country."