Lovecraft Mythos - Cosmic Horror

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H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos is a shared universe far larger and more terrifying than that of humanity, where ancient, malevolent beings known as the Great Old Ones slumber in the depths of space or time. After Lovecraft's death, the Mythos has been expanded and developed by many authors, including August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. These and many other authors have helped to flesh out the Mythos into a rich and complex Dark Universe.

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Same. (lemmy.zip)

submitted 2 days ago by Morph9@lemmy.zip to c/lovecraft_mythos@lemmy.world

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[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 45 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Lovecraft was horrifically racist. Which is a big inspiration for his writings actually. There's a reason he writes horror about "strange beings nobody quite understands". He was massively scared of the unknown himself, like people with a non-white skintone or who speak in "strange tongues" that aren't English.

IIRC he wasn't really a proponent of racism through a white-supremacy lens. He just feared any culture that wasn't his own. The books are quite an interesting read if you know this btw, it explains why he chose the way he describes the eldritch horrors.

Also he named a cat Niggerman. So take that as you will.

[–] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

he calls mixed races mongrels in his books so yea...

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago

Yeah he was definitely against race mixing, especially if he considered one of those races to be "scary".

[–] TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 14 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Yep. But was married to a Jewish woman for 13 years. Supposedly at the end of his life it wasn't quite as egregious, although still pretty bad.

With the high-grade alien races we can adopt a policy of flexible common-sense—discouraging mixture whenever we can, but not clamping down the bars so ruthlessly against every individual of slightly mixed ancestry. As a matter of fact, most of the psychological race-differences which strike us so prominently are cultural rather than biological. If one could take a Japanese infant, alter his features to the Anglo-Saxon type through plastic surgery, & place him with an American family in Boston for rearing—without stemming him that he is not an American—the chances are that in 20 years the result would be a typical American youth with very few instincts to distinguish him from his pure Nordic college-mates. The same is true of other superior alien races including the Jew—although the Nazis persist in acting on a false biological conception.

H. P. Lovecraft to Natalie H. Wooley, 22 Nov 1934, Letters to Robert Bloch and Others 200-201

That would have been about 2.5ish years before his death. So it shows that he is, in fact, still racist towards the end but not quite as bad as he was early in his career when he was so far beyond the racism of the day that other racists had to pull him back.

I think his time in New York had a lot to do with it. However, it took a toll on his mental health so he went back to WhitefolkIngton.

[–] Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I got into lovecraft around 10. As a kid with severe unchecked anxiety, his horror spoke to me in ways nothing else did. He was also my first case of death of the author. Finding out his eldritch inspiration was just "color people scary" was a world shaking thing for me as someone who couldn't understand why racism was a thing.

Having read and reread every word he put to pin, I genuinely believe he could have been rehabilitated. He comes off as the end result of a sheltered child raised to fear the world in isolation and he was very much exactly that in the historical record. His issues actively decreases when he started experiencing the world. He genuinely reads as someone who would grow to be an ally if he had a better way to be part of a community outside of his very small world.

[–] TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

I agree entirely. He was terrified. It doesn't excuse what he said at all but I truly believe he could have turned a corner as well.

And full disclosure, I got into him for the same reason. I get it.

[–] ekZepp@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I totally agree. All he needed was little of love.

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[–] DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

The dungeons and dragons dudes were akin to white supremacist.