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What the hell was up with HP lovecraft and those Cthulu mythos/deities
- Thread starter DragonSJG
- Start date
The dude grew up with a mother who told him he was ugly and he was afraid of the ocean, everything in it, anything outside his house and of course, minorities.
I mean, like honestly, Cthulu is just a guy with a squid head. It's not super imaginative lol. I mean, maybe for the time I dunno. I think he just took a lot of fish life and morphed them into human form in some way. It's weird, but it never really felt that weird to me. But it might just be me.
scrolling past this I thought you wrote "immigration", which is ironically likely the cause. Dude was psychotically, existentially xenophobic.
Eh. 99.9% of racists are absolute dumbasses. Lovecraft was an extremely creative piece of shit.
I mean, Cthulhu is just a giant with dragon wings and an octopus for a face. He's not that hugely inconcievable. It's like asking how did people come up with unicorns. Some dude just said "What if horses had horns?" That's how creativity happens.
Now Yog-Sothoth is where it's at.
Now Yog-Sothoth is where it's at.
Cthulhu isn't even the weirdest. I think the cosmic horrors and eldritch mysteries in general are much cooler. Having something in the universe your mind is simply unable to comprehend, and you go insane :D
Color out of Space as an example is about a colour you have never seen before. And you can't handle it.
Color out of Space as an example is about a colour you have never seen before. And you can't handle it.
I mean, Cthulhu is just a giant with dragon wings and an octopus for a face. He's not that hugely inconcievable. It's like asking how did people come up with unicorns. Some dude just said "What if horses had horns?" That's how creativity happens.
Now Yog-Sothoth is where it's at.
I mean, that's just an octopus with a bad rash
I think it lends itself to using your own mind to fill in the blanks which is fun to me.
Colour out of Space is more of an example of how Lovecraft didn't understand a goddamn thing about science and really didn't grasp how the electromagnetic spectrum worked.
But then again we are talking about a man who, in his own words, "lacked the constitution for math."
How did Miyamoto come up with Mario anyway? A plumber who runs around bonking mushrooms on the head with his pet dinosaur? Dude must have been on something.
I never understand why people ask stuff like this. The guy wrote horror stories. He came up with some weird stuff sure, but would you really be completely incapable of describing a bizarre monster if writing were the main thing you had going on?
In most cases, Lovecraft avoided describing his creatures in depth. That's why he constantly repeats the same vague terms and describes things often as unfathomable or cyclopean.
Most of the lore, as well, came after his death -- Other writers took what very little was set up in his cycles and created a larger mythos -- primarily August Derleth.
Most of the lore, as well, came after his death -- Other writers took what very little was set up in his cycles and created a larger mythos -- primarily August Derleth.
Could Yog-Sothoth beat Cthulhu?I mean, Cthulhu is just a giant with dragon wings and an octopus for a face. He's not that hugely inconcievable. It's like asking how did people come up with unicorns. Some dude just said "What if horses had horns?" That's how creativity happens.
Now Yog-Sothoth is where it's at.
I don't think The Colour Out of Space was intended as a serious scientific paper.
OP
OP
The simple answer is that Lovecraft was irrationally terrified of everything, up to and including:
*Black people
*The Irish
*Italians
*Fish
*Lobsters
*Antarctica
*Refrigeration
*Pluto
*Ultraviolet Radiation
*Entomology
*Egyptology
*Geometric Principles
... and more!
A lot of this was the result of Lovecraft actually being relatively uneducated but having a sort of lay interest in a lot of topics that were, at his time, on the frontier of science and engineering. Except in his day you couldn't just start a TV channel and rant about how 5G is giving everyone coronavirus, you had to write in to periodicals about how the newly-discovered planet is full of space monsters that have replaced your neighbor and are in league with the people of New Hampshire to breed a new race of plantoid-human hybrids.
*Black people
*The Irish
*Italians
*Fish
*Lobsters
*Antarctica
*Refrigeration
*Pluto
*Ultraviolet Radiation
*Entomology
*Egyptology
*Geometric Principles
... and more!
A lot of this was the result of Lovecraft actually being relatively uneducated but having a sort of lay interest in a lot of topics that were, at his time, on the frontier of science and engineering. Except in his day you couldn't just start a TV channel and rant about how 5G is giving everyone coronavirus, you had to write in to periodicals about how the newly-discovered planet is full of space monsters that have replaced your neighbor and are in league with the people of New Hampshire to breed a new race of plantoid-human hybrids.
Cosmic/Eldritch horror is awesome. Bloodborne is the game to play if you're into strangely deep and unsettling lore, weird monsters, creepy aliens and inter-dimensional creatures from the depths of hell and space.
I hadn't heard of it before, no. I just Googled it. Not sure what I'm meant to do with this information.
Edit: LOL, this description from a Lovecraft wiki is pretty hilarious: "Yog-Sothoth is a cosmic entity and Outer God. Born of the Nameless Mist, he is the progenitor of Cthulhu, Hastur the Unspeakable and the ancestor of the Voormi. He is also the father of Wilbur Whateley."
How did Wilbur get caught up in all that?
The thing from the image a few posts above?
It's a squid with mouths on it.
Everyone is going on about him being racist, but ignoring what is actually applicable here... He was pretty sickly and suffered from severe nightmares/night terrors. These nightmares directly informed a lot of his work.
Be like a real bigoted motherfucking piece of shit but like a creative one of those, that's able to put in some words how they live a pathetic life filled with such a profound fear of anything that is not them that the imagine it to be an aberration from beyond human comprehension that perverts reality by existing.
No but it was inspired by research Lovecraft read and thoroughly misunderstood about the spectrum of light and how there are wavelengths we can't see, and then wondering what such unseeable things could do to us. The answer, of course, being "give us a sunburn," but HPL had a brand to maintain, after all. Color by definition is an illusion our brains conjure to communicate information to us. For that matter purple doesn't technically exist, it's just your brain inventing a shade of color when it can't decide if something's blue or red. The reality, as usual, is much weirder than fiction.
OP
OP
Comes from the fear of the unknown and the unknowable. Fear of an uncaring universe and the fact that our existence is incredibly unimportant in the grand scheme of things. We are an infinitesimal speck in a mind-numbingly vast universe.
so all of that.. but what if monsters?
so all of that.. but what if monsters?
He was afraid of everything. Which made him an excellent horror/science fiction writer.
I remember seeing that famous "pale blue dot" photo of Earth and instantly feeling like I was in a Lovecraft story. That feeling of realizing that on a cosmic scale the whole of Humanity amounts to nothing is really intense and dreadful. Was for me at least.
The Dunwich Horror is both one of Lovecraft's most popular/successful (at least in his own contemporary sense) and least "Lovecraft" stories; it's basically just a dumb monster movie plot where some hillbillies did the nasty with a ghasty and now their son's an invisible stomp monster. It's probably the least navel-gazing or speculative work he's ever written, complete with the suitably pedestrian naming of the antagonists.
Also, yeah, it kind of grounds the whole "inconceivable cosmic horror" to a weird place where I guess despite being beyond all mortal ken it also just sort of fucks your redneck aunt.