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 ScarletRose wrote:
The Shadow Over Innsmouth is (among other things) a transparent metaphor for miscegenation/race mixing.

I don't think it matters. The work stands whether this is true or not. For some people, it being about racism gives it layers to dissect and appreciate, while to others, they can focus on the many working elements beyond that which resonates with them. For instance, as someone who sees Lovecraft through the lens of social anxiety, there is plenty to this particular story that I could (and probably one day will) write about. To me, the story is about being an outsider. It is about going to an unfamiliar place and the anxiety of doing simple actions like asking for directions, feeling like you are being critically judged for it.

Most people consider the clencher on the racism thing to be that little bit at the end, but in fact, I consider the ending where they nuke the coast then oh noes, I may be one of them, to be an extremely weak ending that felt kind of tacked on. It kind of feels different than most of Lovecraft's other work. Yeah, there's a little stinger at the end, but how many of his stories end with military intervention and the evil being vanquished? I don't think the story suffers for it, honestly, because that is more of a coda rather than the true conclusion to the story. The story wasn't about him having Innsmouth blood, that's just a little "this is not over" thing.

Taking a deep look at a work involves understanding the author and their life.

I disagree, because I don't think Lovecraft was saying anything in particular. Lovecraft was a genre aficionado, and so well versed in its tropes that they still publish his essay on writing horror a century later (and it's pretty good). He must've written thousands of letters to other authors talking about the craft. He even ghost wrote for several. I don't think he set out to make a statement on miscegenation. I think he just wanted to write a horror story. He used his own anxiety to drive that.

A lot of Lovecraft as a person ended up in his stories - his anxieties, his fears, his beliefs etc. Trying to cut out one aspect of his life and saying no one can talk about it because to talk about is to somehow bash him is cutting out an avenue of understanding his work. It's diminishing those stories.

I would be thrilled if we talked about anything in Lovecraft's life besides racism, but that is apparently the only thing that matters in 2020. Like, I think the way that Lovecraft shared his creations with his peers - the creation of the "Mythos" - is a fascinating show of respect and admiration for his fellow writers. But the only thing that apparently matters is what he named his cat.

And when it comes to the really obviously racist stories it does call into question what the motive is for attempting to normalize Lovecraft.

What exactly are you accusing me of here? NORMALIZE Lovecraft? What the feth does that even mean?

Even when it's not innsmouth, it's a breeding with massive apes from the "darkest depths of the Congo".

I don't know how to take that as anything but the racism that it is.

Shadow Over Innsmouth isn’t a story about a man who has trouble dealing with social interaction. The text doesn’t support that claim at all. Rather, it’s about a man who stumbles upon a horrendous case of cross-species breeding, which utterly horrifies him; and then, far more horrifically, he discovers that he himself is also tainted. That discovery is key to the theme of the work; not an afterthought.

 Sqorgar wrote:
I would be thrilled if we talked about anything in Lovecraft's life besides racism, but that is apparently the only thing that matters in 2020.

This honestly seems like a you problem, not a 2020 problem. I, Manchu, Lance and others have all mentioned other things in Lovecraft's life that influenced his work: His atheism, his Anglo-Protestant background, his Victorian sensibilities, his sense of isolation in a world he never felt he fit in with. I've mentioned the significance of his works for modern horror writers several times and tried to discuss how he broke new ground in the genre writing stories about themes and ideas that were a little ahead of his time.

You are quite literally the only reason this thread is mostly a back and forth between you and everyone else about Lovecraft's racism. Other people have treated it as "that thing thats worth mentioning cause it does come up a lot." You're the only single issue poster here right now.

Like, I think the way that Lovecraft shared his creations with his peers - the creation of the "Mythos" - is a fascinating show of respect and admiration for his fellow writers.

Lovecraft had very little to do with the Mythos (I mentioned this earlier), which is still fascinating but important to understanding his work. Lovecraft had no real conception of creating a Mythos. He wanted more to create a pastiche and lexicon for horror writing and shared it with others. He only wrote seven stories in his 'Yog-Sothothery' cycle and only held one in high regard (the Whisperer in the Darkness if I remember right). Much of the Mythos we have today conflates his near fully body of work, something Lovecraft never did. The Mythos as we have it today is largely the work of August Derelth's efforts to codify it (he otherwise gets no credit for much of anything, cause Derelth... wasn't that good) and Chaosium who have basically set the the standard for the visual motifs of Lovecraftian horrors. EDIT: People underestimate the significance of the Delta Green RPG series in particular for codifying so much of the Mythos as we now have it. It's an amazing cultural evolution really, and probably never would have happened if so much of his work hadn't ended up being nerd fuel and in the public domain, or if Lovecraft hadn't been such a prolific corresponder with other writers.

Probably something of an argument to be made there about how strict and long copyright terms can prevent amazing things from happening. Though, as an aside, Disney is apparently rumored to be anticipating there will be no further copyright extensions from the US government, which means the next few decades will see mountains of things entering public domain so that might be insane

Anyone arguing that racism was not a driving force for Lovecraft has never read Horror at Red Hook, I imagine.

Or reanimator.

Just read his description of the barn fighter.

I’m sure someone has written extensively about this in some essay collection but can we talk a bit about Asenath?

Taking the supernatural implications of the story at face value, it’s not even really Asenath; it’s her father Ephraim. So horror number one, Ephraim steals the body of his own daughter. This is already pretty fethed up. But consider that the Waites, along with the Marshes and the Gilmans, are one of Innsmouth’s most prestigious families. That is to say, they are destined for immortality beneath the waves as Deep Ones. So Ephraim was unlikely to have been motivated simply by the fear of death. Perhaps he wished to put off or even escape his ultimate transformation? Whatever his particular intent may have been, Asenath’s conception may in turn have been primarily or even solely motivated by Ephraim’s need for a younger body as she is described as “a child of his old age.” If so, siring a daughter was seemingly a major feth up because Asenath (or Ephraim, really, I guess?) went on to be known for ranting about how having a woman’s brain was holding her back from equalling and even exceeding her father’s “mastery of unknown forces.” And this in turn motivates her (him?) to seduce Derby, in hopes of eventually possessing his brain.

That of course would be horror number two: Ephraim uses the body of his (mostly) good looking young daughter to sexually ensnare a man in order to in turn prey upon him. It’s worth noting carefully that this transference of consciousness apparently requires the target to have a weak will and perhaps also a “fine-wrought brain.” It’s not clear whether the target’s brain must be fine-wrought or if that is merely the objective of the predator. Derby explains to Upton that Ephraim stole Asenath’s body because “she was the only one he could find with the right kind of brain and a weak enough will“ — but of course, her brain being of the right sort was still not satisfactory because, after all, it was nonetheless a woman’s brain. I think the strong inference here is what we would call the distinction between sex and gender. The will (evidently, synonymous with personality) is gendered; the body, including the brain, has a sex. This is important because although Derby has a fine-wrought brain, he has always been weak-willed; this is at least partially due to him being coddled by his mother. Indeed, he was so dominated by his mother up until her death in his mid-30s that her demise psychologically crippled him for four months. Upton has a lot of criticism of Derby for being dependent, naive, flabby; Derby can’t drive a car or even grow a proper moustache. In other words, Derby may have a male brain but he has a feminine will.

Asenath’s body as possessed by Ephraim’s will is therefore a perfect psychosexual counterpart to Derby, who longs to be dominated by a woman. The transference is not psychosexually neutral; a more masculine will has to confront and dominate a more feminine will. But what is the relationship between the physical aspects of the predator and prey? The will in possession of Asenath’s body wants two things in terms of a body, according to Derby: (1) to be a man and (2) to be “fully human.” Derby describes with horror finding his own consciousness inhabiting Asenath’s body, “that cursed fiend's body that isn't even human.” This is literally a reference to her Innsmouth heritage. But the literary effect is to conflate her femaleness with Derby’s horror of her and being imprisoned within her female body. Clearly, in terms of the surface-level horror, Derby doesn’t like either being pushed out of his own body nor being pushed into his wife’s not entirely human body — but is this really a matter, in symbolic terms, of her Innsmouth taint or is this perhaps more to do with his own insecurities?

I think a careful reader will not fail to note Derby’s account of his honeymoon in Innsmouth:

Her home—in that town—was a rather disgusting place, but certain objects in it had taught him some surprising things. He was progressing fast in esoteric lore now that he had Asenath's guidance. Some of the experiments she proposed were very daring and radical—he did not feel at liberty to describe them—but he had confidence in her powers and intentions.

Now if you keep in mind that Derby was almost certainly a virgin before the honeymoon and, at least in the traditional course of things, was almost certainly not by the time he returned to Arkham then these three brief sentences take on a symbolic gravity beyond the occult. Disgusting, but surprising. He’s under her guidance. The stuff she’s into is “daring and radical” but a gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell. And of course, she’s firmly in charge. If this is a glimpse into the newlyweds sex life, it’s clear who wears the, ahem, well, shall we say for the sake of politeness pants (although the story does specifically mention that Asenath brings back some “apparatus” from the honeymoon).

 Sqorgar wrote:

 ScarletRose wrote:

Taking a deep look at a work involves understanding the author and their life.

I disagree, because I don't think Lovecraft was saying anything in particular. Lovecraft was a genre aficionado, and so well versed in its tropes that they still publish his essay on writing horror a century later (and it's pretty good). He must've written thousands of letters to other authors talking about the craft. He even ghost wrote for several. I don't think he set out to make a statement on miscegenation. I think he just wanted to write a horror story. He used his own anxiety to drive that.

A lot of Lovecraft as a person ended up in his stories - his anxieties, his fears, his beliefs etc. Trying to cut out one aspect of his life and saying no one can talk about it because to talk about is to somehow bash him is cutting out an avenue of understanding his work. It's diminishing those stories.

I would be thrilled if we talked about anything in Lovecraft's life besides racism, but that is apparently the only thing that matters in 2020. Like, I think the way that Lovecraft shared his creations with his peers - the creation of the "Mythos" - is a fascinating show of respect and admiration for his fellow writers. But the only thing that apparently matters is what he named his cat.

This is the dichotomy that kind of baffles me when it comes to these kinds of things in geek culture, and it always seems to come down to this:

On one hand, you have billions of dollars of industry feverishly monetizing a property in the way that they are oh so well versed at doing: Breaking down the details, perfectly preserving the appearance and aesthetic and cramming the storytelling down into the exact same mold that they cram everything into to market to geeks. I.e, showing you a thing, letting you recognize the thing because you're a good little geek and such a clever boy, and patting you on the head for recognizing the detail.

And then on the other hand, you have some individual somewhere with basically no power who reinterprets the work, either showcasing what it means to them or changing out the visual details specifically to allow them to actually tell a story where recognition and understanding are the ANTITHESIS of the purpose of the narrative...

...and for some reason that first group is doing god's own work while the second is an insidious plot to take away and destroy the thing you love.

As long as a work of horror involves a feeling of cosmic indifference, alienation, fear of the world, fear of yourself, fear of an insidious other, it can be Lovecraft. It is incredibly easy, and in my experience incredibly effective, to frame the feeling of being in a place where you are the 'wrong race' in a lovecraftian narrative. Anxiety, mental health, hereditary and degenerative illness, irrational phobia, and so many tough to express human emotions can be conveyed really well and really intensely in a lovecraftian story framework.

But you know what can't? Funko pop figurines. A tactical miniatures game, where you're rewarded for memorizing the stats of all the various Lovecraft Brand Lovecraft Creatures that we all crave. The shoggoth, the Shub-niggurath, I recognized them, I know what that is! It even has a black goat of a thousand young ability, just like in the canon, wow! I'll memorize and categorize and remember them like pokemon, so that I know when I see something on a store shelf with this name and appearance that it is intended for me, and people like me, to purchase and consume!

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Anyone arguing that racism was not a driving force for Lovecraft has never read Horror at Red Hook, I imagine.

To be fair, even Lovecraft said it wasn't really good. He referred to it as rambling, I believe.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Anyone arguing that racism was not a driving force for Lovecraft has never read Horror at Red Hook, I imagine.

To be fair, even Lovecraft said it wasn't really good. He referred to it as rambling, I believe.

Right, but there's a difference between just a rambling, meandering plot and paragraphs of description of how "swarthy", "squinty", "slant-eyed" immigrants have corrupted a town and "swarm" from buildings being raided by the police who have for the most part given up and resigned themselves to erecting barriers to protect the outside from the "contagion".

In his own words for his inspiration of the story from a letter to a fellow writer:

The idea that black magic exists in secret today, or that hellish antique rites still exist in obscurity, is one that I have used and shall use again. When you see my new tale "The Horror at Red Hook", you will see what use I make of the idea in connexion with the gangs of young loafers & herds of evil-looking foreigners that one sees everywhere in New York.

His wife commenting on their time in New York:

Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York, Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind.

 Manchu wrote:
I’m sure someone has written extensively about this in some essay collection but can we talk a bit about Asenath?

I'll talk about Asenath! I find it actually super humorous! 'She' is one of only two females character Lovecraft wrote who had more than a 'is present' role in his fiction and it turns out 'she' was actually a 'he' so it's sort of funny. The only other woman of any significance in his fiction is Lavina Whateley.

But consider that the Waites, along with the Marshes and the Gilmans, are one of Innsmouth’s most prestigious families. That is to say, they are destined for immortality beneath the waves as Deep Ones. So Ephraim was unlikely to have been motivated simply by the fear of death. Perhaps he wished to put off or even escape his ultimate transformation?

I'd say the face value of The Thing of the Doorstep (and only that story) is that Ephraim just wanted to live forever but could only do so by body surfing. He wasn't happy using his daughter so he was eager in the end to get a dude. People have pointed out that Asenath had the 'Innsmouth look' as Lovecraft describes her as having the overprotuberant eyes of the Deep One hybrids. I doubt not becoming a deep one was Ephraim's motivation however as the transformation is supposed to hit in middle age but Ephraim was supposedly an old man when he had Asenath and even older when he finally took her body. It's possible not all hybrids transform, or maybe Ephraim's bloodline was a bit distant from the main branch of the family in Innsmouth.

It's also possible this was simply part of Lovecraft's pastiche, and we shouldn't think to hard about it, I suppose.

That of course would be horror number two: Ephraim uses the body of his (mostly) good looking young daughter to sexually ensnare a man in order to in turn prey upon him.

I honestly find it the most squicky moment in his fiction, and he had a few of those. Presumably, both Ephraim and Edward Derby are straight, so the implication that Asenath is actually her decrepit old man in his daughter's body is multi-level 'ew'.

Asenath’s body as possessed by Ephraim’s will is therefore a perfect psychosexual counterpart to Derby, who longs to be dominated by a woman.

Never really thought about it that way. So you're saying Lovecraft inadvertently wrote an early piece of transgender fiction XD

 Manchu wrote:
Shadow Over Innsmouth isn’t a story about a man who has trouble dealing with social interaction. The text doesn’t support that claim at all. Rather, it’s about a man who stumbles upon a horrendous case of cross-species breeding, which utterly horrifies him; and then, far more horrifically, he discovers that he himself is also tainted. That discovery is key to the theme of the work; not an afterthought.

I didn't say it wasn't about that, just that it didn't matter because the work is still effective without that reading. Like I said, I first came to Lovecraft 20-25 years ago, during the height of my social anxiety. I was a shut in. Racism wasn't part of my world. My world was much, much smaller. Innsmouth was maybe the third Lovecraft story I read, and it made me an instant Lovecraft fan for life. The character may not have had social anxiety, but the descriptions of the dread and unease of being in an alien place, feeling like everyone is suspicious and unwelcoming of you - that sense of unease that comes from feeling like everyone is watching everything you do... yeah, that stuff resonated.

I think the story survives multiple interpretations, and more importantly, I think it survives the lack of them. Just the setting and ideas in it make for a good horror setting. I hear the next cycle of Arkham Horror The Card Game will be Innsmouth, and I doubt very much it will be a commentary on interspecies breeding. Bloodbourne (a Japanese game) has an Innsmouth section, and Far Harbor might be the best part of Fallout 4. Divorced from any reading, it is still an effecting setting for horror. Whatever sinister reasoning or motive may have been behind the creation of this story, it doesn't matter. It's a great story, period. When something is a great work of art, it refuses all attempts to box it in as any one thing.

But I digress. I've had one person insinuate that I might be a secret racist for normalizing Lovecraft (whatever that means) and another saying that, somehow, I'm the one that made this all about race and that this is exclusively my personal problem. I know this playbook well and I choose not to participate. For what it is worth, I've enjoyed my discussion with you, and I hope that one day, maybe we can have another one without the peanut gallery throwing rocks.

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Manchu wrote:
Shadow Over Innsmouth isn’t a story about a man who has trouble dealing with social interaction. The text doesn’t support that claim at all. Rather, it’s about a man who stumbles upon a horrendous case of cross-species breeding, which utterly horrifies him; and then, far more horrifically, he discovers that he himself is also tainted. That discovery is key to the theme of the work; not an afterthought.

I didn't say it wasn't about that, just that it didn't matter because the work is still effective without that reading. .

Agreed, and also, the entire point of the people you've been arguing with this whole time.

But somehow, Bloodborne and Fallout completely re-imagining Innsmouth and successfully reproducing the same feeling is good, but just changing a couple of words in the original work to avoid what you yourself said was a surface level distraction from more interesting analysis is for some reason bad.

In my eyes, the best lovecraftian fiction I've experienced outside of the author's works are those that completely strip away any hope of familiarity with the fixed lovecraft canon and instead reproduce the same feeling within a totally different narrative context. Especially when you're talking about video games - after 10 years or so of being frustrated that every "official" lovecraft game was just ass, I finally realized that anything that anything that relies on the player going in and purposefully buying a "Lovecraft Video Game" because they recognize imagery and want to play through the plots they know and love will inherently NEVER really feel like Lovecraft.

Instead, games like Pathologic, Darkest Dungeon, Amnesia, Bloodborne and Cultist Simulator successfully reproduce the feeling Lovecraft evokes by creating a totally new esoteric framework and explaining precisely none of it, leaving you to flail around in ignorance, scared of what you don't know. The best ones, like the recent excellent and horrifically misnamed Pathologic 2 even manage to use the mechanics of the game to trick you into acting like a character in a Lovecraft story, rather than forcing you to on rails or just pasting the aesthetic onto another style of game (which is really my only complaint with Bloodborne - it was tough to appreciate the lovecraftian aspects of the game when the ultimate objective is for me to kick monster ass and kill everything I came up against)

My favourite bit in Indiana Jones is when he explains the origins and history of the ark of the covenant to the men at the start. I love that nerdy research part of an adventure, and the clash between understanding something in our mundane way and then seeing a glimpse of the terrifying “truth” of the subject literally melting Nazi faces off at the end was brilliant.

The fact that on one level Indi understood the power of the Ark and was desperate to know more but in the end chose ignorance in its presence (kept his eyes closed) says a lot about the interplay/ difference between understanding and knowing, that’s important to portray in a Mythos adventure.

Not sure if that makes any sense, but then I’ve been mad for years.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

the_scotsman wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Manchu wrote:
Shadow Over Innsmouth isn’t a story about a man who has trouble dealing with social interaction. The text doesn’t support that claim at all. Rather, it’s about a man who stumbles upon a horrendous case of cross-species breeding, which utterly horrifies him; and then, far more horrifically, he discovers that he himself is also tainted. That discovery is key to the theme of the work; not an afterthought.

I didn't say it wasn't about that, just that it didn't matter because the work is still effective without that reading. .

Agreed, and also, the entire point of the people you've been arguing with this whole time.

But somehow, Bloodborne and Fallout completely re-imagining Innsmouth and successfully reproducing the same feeling is good, but just changing a couple of words in the original work to avoid what you yourself said was a surface level distraction from more interesting analysis is for some reason bad.

In my eyes, the best lovecraftian fiction I've experienced outside of the author's works are those that completely strip away any hope of familiarity with the fixed lovecraft canon and instead reproduce the same feeling within a totally different narrative context. Especially when you're talking about video games - after 10 years or so of being frustrated that every "official" lovecraft game was just ass, I finally realized that anything that anything that relies on the player going in and purposefully buying a "Lovecraft Video Game" because they recognize imagery and want to play through the plots they know and love will inherently NEVER really feel like Lovecraft.

Instead, games like Pathologic, Darkest Dungeon, Amnesia, Bloodborne and Cultist Simulator successfully reproduce the feeling Lovecraft evokes by creating a totally new esoteric framework and explaining precisely none of it, leaving you to flail around in ignorance, scared of what you don't know. The best ones, like the recent excellent and horrifically misnamed Pathologic 2 even manage to use the mechanics of the game to trick you into acting like a character in a Lovecraft story, rather than forcing you to on rails or just pasting the aesthetic onto another style of game (which is really my only complaint with Bloodborne - it was tough to appreciate the lovecraftian aspects of the game when the ultimate objective is for me to kick monster ass and kill everything I came up against)

YOU CANT TALK MYTHOS GAMES WITHOUT MENTIONING ETERNAL DARKNESS ON THE N64.

 LordofHats wrote:
Never really thought about it that way. So you're saying Lovecraft inadvertently wrote an early piece of transgender fiction XD

That’s one way of looking at it, and surely valid. I’ll use spoilertags to continue, in consideration of the faint of heart:I don’t think he consciously meant it to be comical but there’s some humor in the potential double entendre not only in the title but throughout the story.

 LordofHats wrote:
both Ephraim and Edward Derby are straight

I’m not so sure about that.

 Sqorgar wrote:
Innsmouth was maybe the third Lovecraft story I read, and it made me an instant Lovecraft fan for life. The character may not have had social anxiety, but the descriptions of the dread and unease of being in an alien place, feeling like everyone is suspicious and unwelcoming of you - that sense of unease that comes from feeling like everyone is watching everything you do... yeah, that stuff resonated.

I think this is especially worth noting, that Shadow Over Innsmouth is certainly one of HPL’s best loved and most well known works. Although I never had to deal with crippling social anxiety, this story was also instantly my favorite when I first started reading HPL as a young teenager and has remained so ever since. I think the setting is definitely a big part of it; there is something really thrilling about the paranoia it generates in the reader.

Innsmouth is also one of hpls stories that is A, relatively plot heavy, and B, nothing in it has become a cliche by modern standards. There is a shot in the original frankenstein films where the creature is in the shot, turns his eyes to the frame, and the camera zooms ever so slightly in on him. To audiences then, that was a terrifying jump scare.

When HPL puts a sting at the end of Herbert West Reanimator where the man comes into the room...AND HES CARRYING HIS OWN SEVERED HEAD!!! That line reads like comedic schlock to a contemporary audience. Innsmouth has relatively little of that so the emotional effect is well preserved.

Idk, if you saw a bloke carrying his own severed head irl I think most people would be freaking out.

I think there the problem is less HPL and more how desensitized everyone is nowadays.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Idk, if you saw a bloke carrying his own severed head irl I think most people would be freaking out.

I think there the problem is less HPL and more how desensitized everyone is nowadays.

Well THAT'S an unusual sentiment to be sharing on an internet forum these days, thank you for the change of pace!

look, just...tell me if you've heard this one before, OK?

A eunuch walks to market with his noblewoman employer. An abderite asks the eunuch, who is that beautiful woman you are with, is that your sister? The eunuch replies, I have no sister. Oh, the abderite says, she must be your daughter then!

If you didn't find that riotously funny, it must be because you are not someone who lives in ancient mesopotamia, and we live in a completely different cultural context to the time and place when this is written. We understand, now, that this is the oldest recorded joke, but though you might abstractly understand why someone from that time period might be able to find that funny, the cultural context and the way that we convey language to signal that we are delivering humor. There are other cultural examples that are even farther removed, like

Zhuangzi: Look at those fish in the pond, we should try to be like them. They are so happy.

Lau: How do you know that they are happy?

Zhuangzi: I am standing right here, looking at them.

To get this one, you'd need to speak a form of ancient chinese where the word for How is the same as the word for Where, and you'd need to understand that the philosopher Zhuangzi is a Daoist who believes that everything is relative while his friend Lau is a logician, who believes that all ideas must be precisely and meaningfully conveyed at all times. By deliberately misinterpreting Lau's use of the word as Where instead of How, Zhuangzi dunks on Lau's philosophy by indirectly pointing out the inherent relativism of language.

Language changes, and as it does, meaning decays. There is nothing specific about the current era to where particular imagery becomes cliche or people become desensitized to particular delivery styles. We now tend to interpret ALL CAPS TEXT as someone shouting, whereas in older literature it is often used as a surprising stinger at the end of a story. Similarly, correspondence through newspaper articles or a series of letters is something that most people don't have much of a cultural touchstone on now, and it's a major way that exposition is often delivered in Lovecraft's work.

I agree with the scotsman. Our generation is no more or less perverted or decayed than any other generation- we just think we are, the same as every other generation.

For all that we internet dwellers have seen it all, through the safety of our screens, we've probably never been in the same room while our parents were having sex, like most peasants.

Odds are very good we've never attended a public execution for entertainment, nor have we seen someone flayed, drawn and quartered, etc, etc.

And few of us have ever helped our parents slaughter a hog, then eaten sausage made from it's blood. Even those that have probably weren't excited about it, because they got a new ball once they got it's bladder out and blew it up.

We're very, very high on secondary experience, but really low on real world experience, compared to our 'sheltered' ancestors.

https://boundingintocomics.com/2020/06/03/smite-introduces-cthulhu-slams-creator-h-p-lovecraft/

TitanAjax wrote, “One final note: Just as we reject the ancient Mayan tradition of ritual human sacrifice, we reject the racist and homophobic ideas espoused by H.P. Lovecraft. We believe that Cthulhu has grown beyond its creator over the past 100 years.”

“We welcome Cthulhu to SMITE, not Lovecraft; racism and homophobia have no place in SMITE, period,” TitanAjax concluded.

That's from something posted TODAY, and ties exactly in to what I said previously. Lovecraft has been turned into a platform for political activism, and I don't understand why people who think he was some evil little man continue to exploit him and his work, as if limply denouncing him somehow absolves them of their sin. Like, just ignore Cthulhu and do something else. Nobody is twisting your arm, forcing you to put Cthulhu in your game. In fact, half the article talks about how many fans of the game think Cthulhu is an inappropriate inclusion in the first place. Why be such a punk ass bitch about it?

Normally, I'm very anti-copyright and a strong believer in public domain, but there's something to be said for not allowing people to take a gak on you with your own creation.

Didn't Evil Hat do the same thing with Fate of Cthulhu? Where they just had to preface their product by calling HPL a naughty boy?

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Didn't Evil Hat do the same thing with Fate of Cthulhu? Where they just had to preface their product by calling HPL a naughty boy?

It's mentioned in the article I linked. Here's their twitter post. "Look up the name of his cat..."

Just don't use Lovecraft's work then! Here's a novel suggestion - make something of your own rather than profiting off the work of someone you hold in utmost contempt! They can't, because they have no actual talent. The only thing they can bring to the table is virtue signalling and the shallow appearance of moral superiority. Those who can't do, teach. And those who can't teach, whine. A bunch of self righteous, no talent donkey-caves.

Well, apparently Fate of Cthulhu happened because they couldn't make a Terminator game, so they based it on the Mythos because apparently its easier to get the rights to that.
Which is why the plot is basically Terminator, but with Cthulhu.

Apparently the system didn't do well. I am not surprised.

There are no rights to get. Lovecraft s work is in the public domain.

 Lance845 wrote:
There are no rights to get. Lovecraft s work is in the public domain.

The long version is maybe?. Like Robert E. Howard, there's debate about which works are public domain and even who owns the copyrights if they aren't. I think there's even works that are public domain in some countries, but not others. Apparently, 2032 is when the last of Lovecraft's work should enter public domain, totally for sure, maybe. At the very least, Chaosium contributed a lot of stuff to the modern mythos, and that's most definitely under their copyright (I think FFG games like Arkham Horror are licensed from Chaosium).

 Sqorgar wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
There are no rights to get. Lovecraft s work is in the public domain.

The long version is maybe?.

At the end of the day, the debate over the copyright status of his works is mostly academic. There is no evident party today who could possibly sue for infringement. Fundamentally even if the copyright exists, there is no one to own them.

I think there's even works that are public domain in some countries, but not others

There are. They're all his collaborative works, which while his copyright on them is as lost any other his collaborators/their estates still own their copyrights. A lot of those stories are basically public domain as well though, because those copyrights, while traceable, haven't really been enforced by anyone and at this stage its unlikely they ever will.

 LordofHats wrote:

At the end of the day, the debate over the copyright status of his works is mostly academic. There is no evident party today who could possibly sue for infringement. Fundamentally even if the copyright exists, there is no one to own them.

I'm pretty sure I've seen Chaosium sue people in the gaming space. And though I don't know that Arkham House has ever successfully sued anyone, I think they've had lawyers send strongly worded letters to people. Mind you, this is going off memory, so I could be wrong.

Regardless, the fact remains, if you are going to use Lovecraft's creations, don't gak on Lovecraft while you do it. It's not even just a matter of respect or decency. It's just a cynical, amoral approach to business where you selfishly exploit talent much greater than yourself. It is at complete odds with having loyal and enthusiastic fans.

It's fine if you want to do something LIKE Lovecraft. In fact, that's a great idea. We wouldn't have Star Wars if George Lucas had gotten the license to Flash Gordon. Dungeons and Dragons was obviously and directly influenced by Tolkien and Howard. Night of the Living Dead was directly based on I Am Legend - but it wasn't I Am Legend. It was it's own thing. Necessity is the mother of invention. Not having something forces you to forge your own path, and if you aren't a completely worthless hack, maybe we end up with the next Star Wars, or maybe even the next Galaxy Quest.

But if you do want to use someone else's work, and they allow it, do it because you want to respect the work and want to do justice to it. There's absolutely no reason to use the name Cthulhu if you aren't going to be true to the name of Cthulhu. The least you can do is reserve your masturbatory fan fiction for the appropriate dark corner of the internet and not pretend like you belong in that legacy.

 Sqorgar wrote:
I'm pretty sure I've seen Chaosium sue people in the gaming space.

They have, but they don't hold Lovecraft's copyrights. They hold their own, and significantly, a major trademark on "Call of Cthulu" within the gaming market that they have been very eager to sue over.

And though I don't know that Arkham House has ever successfully sued anyone

Derleth might have attempted it. He tried to claim he owned the copyrights, but the only thing he could ever prove he owned was distribution rights and even that claim was ultimately somewhat spurious (It's never really been clear if the people he bought them from actually had them to sell in the first place). He never managed to successfully enforce it to my memory.

Regardless, the fact remains, if you are going to use Lovecraft's creations, don't gak on Lovecraft while you do it.

The man is dead. No one is going to tip toe around him because other people are butt hurt about things he did they'd rather not talk about.

 LordofHats wrote:
The only other woman of any significance in his fiction is Lavina Whateley.

In addition to Asenath and Lavinia, there’s also Keziah Mason. HPL suggests a fundamental tension with Keziah, a “mediocre old woman” who nonetheless achieves mathematical insight that would put Einstein to shame. HPL seems to have found a woman’s achievement in this regard especially remarkable (compare to Wizard Whatley).

 Manchu wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
The only other woman of any significance in his fiction is Lavina Whateley.

In addition to Asenath and Lavinia, there’s also Keziah Mason. HPL suggests a fundamental tension with Keziah, a “mediocre old woman” who nonetheless achieves mathematical insight that would put Einstein to shame. HPL seems to have found a woman’s achievement in this regard especially remarkable (compare to Wizard Whatley).

That's Dream's in the Witch-House, right? I guess I didn't really count her because she doesn't show up in the actual story... Does she? I've only read it once.