Interestingly enough if the color unlike anything ever seen before was replaced by radiation poisoning during a time where people dont have much knowledge and experience about it. It does represent the fear of it very well and it would be actually quite scary.
When I showed the original video to Dad, he pointed out that the story was written around the time when the Radium Girls news broke. They had been using radium paint to make glow in the dark watches. Also, while we're fairly used to glow in the dark things now, the color *is* odd.
20:35 "Reading his stories, you get the vibe that the narrators are not... mentally well" Hmmm, maybe because they were written by someone who wasn't well and didn't socialize much, thus did not know how "mentally well" people usually behaved...? Just a thought....
There's this 'could have been' alt history where he and Robert Howard could've de-radicalized eachother a little. And they did for a while, but then Howard called it quits.
@@JoshSweetvale Maybe I've got the timeline mixed up in my head, but I feel like Robert E. Howard got more radical, not less, as time went on, and he mixed Emma Goldman inspired anarcho-feminism with his own anti-civilization sentiments. Sure he was moving in the opposite political direction of where Lovecraft had been, but I wouldn't exactly call REH's ideals not radical.
Not to mention his tendency to write scientists who did *field research* as if they were easily startled wannabe poets. Or how dang near *everyone* has a mental breakdown at little more than the *suggestion* that humanity isn't the biggest, oldest fish in the universal ocean.
Aside from all the racism stuff, I actually feel like I can relate to Lovecraft quite a bit; being chronically depressed, agoraphobic, and a very anxious person myself. Dealing with a lot of long term mental disorders, I can understand how he could reach the mindset that everything is terrifying, especially other people, especially people who aren't familiar to him. That doesn't excuse racism of course, but I do see how the racism could evolve as a natural consequence of just being very fearful of everything around you - and I actually feel quite a lot of pity for him, that he was so wrapped up in his own anxieties, that he ended up living a miserable life - and missing the opportunity to grow and learn that comes from challenging yourself to experience new and uncertain situations. I like to think of his life story as an inspiration; remembering that I don't want to go down the same path he did, even when my anxieties compel me to stay inside and stay in bed.
I also think that maybe he went as hard as he did, digging himself in such a trench, because of the fact that he was taught to lie to himself at a young age about that whole “inherently exceptional” thing. He clearly saw that it wasn’t true and decided to stick his hands over his ears and lie to himself, and that causes a spiral of getting worse and worse and worse over time. It even explains him moving back in to his hometown until he died. For someone who’s imagination can dream up the most horrifying things ever seen or read by man, to live in a world of his own fantasizing…how miserable he must have have been.
Re: Lovecraft's characters' lack of depth/familiarity; On a theoretical level, it serves the story well. The POV characters are usually not very impactful to the progression of the plot, and sort of underlines the fact the Horror can't really be halted in any meaningful way.
A thing to note; you said Poe didn't write things like that but he did, once. Poe's only full novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket," does kinda read like proto Lovecraft (while also being proto Verne). It seems to have been a bit of a parody of adventure stories but it's themes of finding strange and terrifying things out beyond the known world does feel quite Lovecraftian.
He was parodying the 'Bigfoot tales' of his day, the 'adventure narrative' - by going off the rails and introducing blatantly supernatural elements Gulliver-style. Verne made a career of it later, but cultural context says 'Arthur Pym' is _basically_ a novel-length shitpost.
Alright I'm from Baltimore and live in Boston. I can't give New England Poe ... He loved it here. It was the only place in his life he ever found peace. Unsurprisingly He wrote almost everything back south when he was miserable.
8:35 I _really_ like At the Mountains of Madness, where a *hexapodal starfish creature* got an empathetic look! “God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn -- whatever they had been, *they were men!”* Then he goes on to say something to the effect of "Yeah, if I found random aliens poking around my base while I'm still dazed from cryosleep, I'd whack 'em over the head too. Poor bastard. And we trespassed and killed him. It. Him." There was some part of Lovecraft that wasn't... irrationally disgusted. And while it was smol, he kept it.
I think one of the reasons lovecraftian media is hard to do is because people focus too much on the aesthetic, the sea, the tentacles, the eyes, all that stuff, but what makes it effective is the enormity of it, the fact that our narrators are facing something much bigger than themselves and they can't stop it... funny enough, what has gotten the closest to it for me is Junji ito's work
about HP Lovecraft liking Astronomy, it would have been easy for him to enjoy it, as despite the fact that Astronomy does date back to ancient civilizations, or at least its very roots are, it didn't go beyond mostly observation and some geometrically and empirically derived rules until quite literally midway through the 20th century. Sure, nowadays we have fields like asteroseismology and discuss the possibility of exploiting quantum entanglement in the event horizon of black holes, but back in Lovecraft's age they were still debating whether the universe was the galaxy or if it went beyond that. Sure, physics was doing great strides by then, and using math past Advanced Calculus and Topology, but relevant Astronomy math was just Algebra. So yeah I totally buy it how Lovecraft would have an interest in Astronomy but hated Math and the Sciences
@@dashiellgillingham4579 Because someone mistranslated "channels" as "canals" from an italian astronomer. Not even kidding that's what contributed to the widespread belief for decades.
11:12 I've lived in Massachusetts for on and off throughout my life AND spent several months in Maine, and honestly... I get it. It might be because of how old everything is, or how much nature there is but there's a certain vibe in the northeast that really lends itself to horror
"Hooves make me think of Satan..." Those ideas of Satan (see Arabic: Shaitan) came from somewhere, originally. Possibly tales of the Celtic Cernunnos, The Horned One, possibly from Greek fauns, minotaurs, or others. It's clear to me that Lovecraft did have classical education as far as literature and folklore. It's also pretty evident that Christianity make a habit of adopting local belief, to fit into its own dogma.
Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. We need more Lovecraftian video games like that. We also need film adaptations for The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow over Innsmouth, Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his family, etc like we got with The Color out of Space.
New England tends to be a lot like actual England...overcast and gloomy. Not always, perhaps, but couple that with the old colonial architecture, it makes for an easy location for horror stories. The east coast is where America started, and there was a lot of bloodshed that came with it. Just...good ol' depressing history lmao
Interestingly enough Lovecraft had quite a good sense of humour. I wouldn't call him hilarious but some of his pieces, like "Herbert West" for example, or "Sweet Ermengard", are really good to get a nice little chuckle out of, so I wouldn't be surprised if the "Gillman Hotel" was an entirely conscious choice of his. Also, he and his friends came up with boxer nicknames for themselves at one point, and his was apparently "Horsepower Hateart", so yes, a little quirky, but definitely funny 😁
It's a month old, so this might go unseen, but- HIGHLY RECOMMEND The TH-cam Channel 'HorrorBabble' does audiobook-esque readings of horror stories, particularly Lovecraft/Cthulu Mythos stories. The Dunwich Horror is done up like a radio play, and is modestly edited down to get more action and less... err, problematic commentary. I have it downloaded as I listen to it quite often on long drives.
Part of the characters I agree, cosmic horror plays on how helpless the humans are to stop or understand their situation, survival is usually by chance or just what anyone would do when they can't fight or solve the problem. Most of the story is just seeing the strange stuff and reacting to it, maybe a discussion or playing mystery solver to get a glimpse of how it all works. But you're not going to fight Cthulhu and get anywhere, the air conditioner guy is already dying it's just waiting for the power to go out, and those colors are already working on their own mechanics and are gone before anything is really understood. Some of it's lazy or shallow writing but the ideas still stick very well and are characters in their own right.
A good example of that existential horror combined with racism is Get Out. If you haven't seen it, I won't spoil it. Also, if you haven't seen the recent movie adaptation of The Colour Out of Space, I highly recommend it. It's nasty.
It's my personal position that he used his work to excise and examine his own fears and contrast them with hopes. Science, curiosity, bravery and in his Howard-inspired works _compassion_ for peers do stem the tide of horrible mutated looming evil.
The thing is his racism is very prominent in his work, so it's a bit difficult to avoid. I'm saying this as someone who likes his works a lot, but you can't really divorce the horror from the racism in this case when the racism is the root of the horror in most stories.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Lovecraft was socially awkward and so his characters are. But, I think that plays to these stories strengths. In Lovecraft's stories the characters have little to no hope, the events will carry on whether they want to or not. The forces they are against are so much larger and stranger than anything we as humans can fight. At best we can hope to break even. It's something that you don't see in a lot of horror. The monster does not know or care if theirs a hero trying to stop it. It will step on them and keep walking, with the same feeling we get for stepping on ants. Ps. My favourite is that reanimator story. I found the ending very chilling.
Also there is an anime based on the cthulu mythos cause call of cthulu the trpg by chaosinium is one of the most popular ones in Japan. The anime is called haiyore nyarukochan essentially nyarlohothep is a space police officer that turns herself into a silver haired girl to get it on (love at first sight situation) with a protection target Japanese school boy being targeted by other aliens (and consume Japanese media because apparently aliens lack imagination and try and smuggle earth entertainment off earth lol) it's more comedy than serious though.
For modern 'adaptations' of lovecraft's works, look at the Chaosium company's 'Call of Cthulhu' tabletop game, which they've expanded over the years to cover pretty much every time period imaginable
Ive heard of Titus Crow. It's more action based and has people fight eldritch horrors. There's also Larry Correias Monster Hunter series. In that world Old Ones are affected by magic and holy items like Holy water and Ward stones.
Oh there is also a Japanese light novel free life fantasy online (official localisation available August 2022) borrows a lot from the cthulu mythos for vrmmorpg elements.
A *lot* of people praised Hitler before WWII started. Eugenics was popular at the time and much of what he did was taken directly from what prominent folks in America were promoting and then pushed to their logical conclusion. Edit: I'm absolutely *horrible* at math. I look at equations and just see a mass of writhing numbers and symbols. Science was also my best subject in school. One of the classes I enjoyed most in college was related to astronomy. Helped that I didn't actually have to solve any equations, just plug known numbers into a program that did all the computations for me. Because this was a 100 level class designed for students who hadn't taken calculus. Tried doing research on figuring out where various celestial objects would have been at any given point in the past and nearly burst into tears at the *pages* of advanced mathematics I was bombarded with. I have trouble with simple *long division.* Point being, I get the concepts, the processes and discoveries *fascinate* me, but my brain turns to mush when confronted with the math.
along the thought process at 17:53 HBomberguy made a vid on Cthulhu (2007) by Dan Gildark. he makes the otherness to be homosexuality, having a gay protagonist. it got panned cz it was a social commentary interpretation instead of the scifi aspect. but HBomberguy's vid is really good and w that framing in mind, the movie's actually so underrated.
As someone who was absolutely trying and may still one day attempt to try writing a full collection of like lovecraftian stories the more and more you write the harder it becomes to suggest to that the narrator's and the central characters of the stories are only insane and it's worth noting that like Michael was to have like a group of characters be at the center of the story Lovecraft wrote like different aerators every time if I'm not mistaken I tried to is my first couple stories write it with two ideas in mind of one interpretation being that the supernatural shit was real and the other interpretation being that it wasn't and but these people might be misdiagnosing serious mental illness which was coming at a horrific cost as it goes on I kind of had to make a decision the Supernatural is real cuz it's getting harder and harder to be vague especially when these characters keep coming across the strange phenomenon one after another your hypothesis that it is harder to see them always just crazy people when you've taken the contacts the entirety of the work is very correct
The modern value of Lovecraft lies partly in just how racist he is, and how his works can show just how pervasively racism, classism, misogyny, and other bigotry can be intertwined into every facet of a person's life. H.P. Lovecraft gives a lense by which to understand the irrational fears of the bigoted. This is why I feel that we are wrong to separate art from artist. The art is a tool to see into the mind of one nigh possessed by their fear induced bigotry. This is a tool to help people understand that bigotry is based in fear and ignorance.
There is the concept of character driven story telling (which we associate with good writing today) and plot driven story telling which used to be more in style. So Lovecrafts 2 dimensional characters might be more a product of the time and less so a sign of poor writing skills.
FYI: He was not racist but xenophobic. He didn't like people outside of his culture, I heard someone say that in his letters he really didn't have a good opinion of italian immigrants. Something else that I've heard is that what he really didn't like was "the uncivilized" or a lack of culture and /or care for traditions, order and high ideas/philosophies. And one can get that vibe by reading between the lines of his stories, most of his human antagonist were uncivilized creeps with hedonistic lifestyles (Call of chthulhu) or people who use esoteric/high knowledge for their own personal and/or nihilistic gains( Reanimator, Herbert west was a blondie btw), like summoning and old one to just end it all, or sometimes both (Dunwich Horror). The thing is that he most likely got this ideas from his upbringing and kept harping on said opinions as a coping mechanism to deal with his crappy life, like a bullied kid that bullies others to feel better. And something that most of his detractors never point out is that his prejudices went away almost as as soon as he got to know someone of said "other groups" specially when his friends help him out in opening up his worldview, the fact that he fell in love with a Jw-ish woman and married her is a testament to that. By the end of his life his prejudices were almost gone, also shown by the change in his stories that went from the cosmic horror of the chthul mythos to the aspiring and surreal fantasy of his Dream Cycle. He's story of overcoming his beliefs that he's got since childhood should be a positive one but most of his detractors ignore that because they just want a witch to burn so they can call/present themselves (self)righteous crusaders.
In 1933, just four years before his death, he wrote, “the negro represents a vastly inferior biological variant which must under no circumstances taint our Aryan stock. The absolute colour-line as applied to negroes is both necessary and sensible.” (Source: Lovecraft, Howard P. to Shea, J. Vernon, May 29th, 1933. Page 10.) There's some xenophobia there, but when he snuggles up to eugenics, you can't really argue that he isn't racist. While he definitely improved over the years, he never wholly overcame his prejudices, especially when it came to black people. He wasn't literally arguing for slavery anymore, but we should acknowledge that his transformation was, at best, incomplete when he died.
I haven't seen it but "Lovecraft Country" tells original theme Lovecraft stories with black protagonists so they explore the horror and the racism is dealt with and not swept aside
On the one hand Lovecraft was a terrible person. On the other he's been dead for almost 90 years and all his work is public domain. You can do literally anything you want with his work and benefit no one but yourself, so go for it.
So you haven’t watched the Tv show “Lovecraft?” Let’s just say He would’ve hated it 😄 All the main characters are black in a town full of racists and creatures.
Ooh I didn't know where to put it but it looks like a good spot I have read Lovecraft And about ¾ of it *was* boring enough. Almost non of it was creepy at the slightest. I'm not typing to show how I'm ✨not like the others✨, I'm just...disappointed man. I started this to sleep one eye open out of fear but all I got was some racist cults doing basic murders and fishy eldrich folks that honestly pretty similar to one another. Maybe I didn't see it, yet what is real difference between Dagon and Cthulhu? Beside sea team and ways they communicate with prohibited aria. Like, what are this folks about? What each of them want individually? And why? For now they look like early Disney villains who are evil just because :( I guess Lovecraft was overhyped for me
![ไข้ขึ้นเลย! เมื่อแฝดโดนจัดเต็มวัคซีนครบ2เดือน🤒 [cc] แดนแพทตี้ SS2 | EP.54 |](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/z2VHItnyyvY/mqdefault.jpg)
Interestingly enough if the color unlike anything ever seen before was replaced by radiation poisoning during a time where people dont have much knowledge and experience about it. It does represent the fear of it very well and it would be actually quite scary.
Hey look at that you must’ve read my comment on the original video
When I showed the original video to Dad, he pointed out that the story was written around the time when the Radium Girls news broke. They had been using radium paint to make glow in the dark watches. Also, while we're fairly used to glow in the dark things now, the color *is* odd.
20:35 "Reading his stories, you get the vibe that the narrators are not... mentally well" Hmmm, maybe because they were written by someone who wasn't well and didn't socialize much, thus did not know how "mentally well" people usually behaved...? Just a thought....
There's this 'could have been' alt history where he and Robert Howard could've de-radicalized eachother a little. And they did for a while, but then Howard called it quits.
@@JoshSweetvale Maybe I've got the timeline mixed up in my head, but I feel like Robert E. Howard got more radical, not less, as time went on, and he mixed Emma Goldman inspired anarcho-feminism with his own anti-civilization sentiments. Sure he was moving in the opposite political direction of where Lovecraft had been, but I wouldn't exactly call REH's ideals not radical.
That's literally what he's saying
At one point Red calls him "Horrible Phobias Lovecraft."
"He never quite gets the natural, human conversation right."
Well spotted, I think. Well named.
Not to mention his tendency to write scientists who did *field research* as if they were easily startled wannabe poets.
Or how dang near *everyone* has a mental breakdown at little more than the *suggestion* that humanity isn't the biggest, oldest fish in the universal ocean.
Aside from all the racism stuff, I actually feel like I can relate to Lovecraft quite a bit; being chronically depressed, agoraphobic, and a very anxious person myself.
Dealing with a lot of long term mental disorders, I can understand how he could reach the mindset that everything is terrifying, especially other people, especially people who aren't familiar to him. That doesn't excuse racism of course, but I do see how the racism could evolve as a natural consequence of just being very fearful of everything around you - and I actually feel quite a lot of pity for him, that he was so wrapped up in his own anxieties, that he ended up living a miserable life - and missing the opportunity to grow and learn that comes from challenging yourself to experience new and uncertain situations.
I like to think of his life story as an inspiration; remembering that I don't want to go down the same path he did, even when my anxieties compel me to stay inside and stay in bed.
I also think that maybe he went as hard as he did, digging himself in such a trench, because of the fact that he was taught to lie to himself at a young age about that whole “inherently exceptional” thing. He clearly saw that it wasn’t true and decided to stick his hands over his ears and lie to himself, and that causes a spiral of getting worse and worse and worse over time. It even explains him moving back in to his hometown until he died.
For someone who’s imagination can dream up the most horrifying things ever seen or read by man, to live in a world of his own fantasizing…how miserable he must have have been.
Re: Lovecraft's characters' lack of depth/familiarity; On a theoretical level, it serves the story well. The POV characters are usually not very impactful to the progression of the plot, and sort of underlines the fact the Horror can't really be halted in any meaningful way.
A thing to note; you said Poe didn't write things like that but he did, once. Poe's only full novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket," does kinda read like proto Lovecraft (while also being proto Verne). It seems to have been a bit of a parody of adventure stories but it's themes of finding strange and terrifying things out beyond the known world does feel quite Lovecraftian.
He was parodying the 'Bigfoot tales' of his day, the 'adventure narrative' - by going off the rails and introducing blatantly supernatural elements Gulliver-style. Verne made a career of it later, but cultural context says 'Arthur Pym' is _basically_ a novel-length shitpost.
Alright I'm from Baltimore and live in Boston.
I can't give New England Poe ... He loved it here. It was the only place in his life he ever found peace. Unsurprisingly He wrote almost everything back south when he was miserable.
But also... What else is there to do in a Rhode island foggy winter than consider existential dread and the origins and end of the universe?
8:35 I _really_ like At the Mountains of Madness, where a *hexapodal starfish creature* got an empathetic look!
“God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible!
Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn -- whatever they had been, *they were men!”*
Then he goes on to say something to the effect of "Yeah, if I found random aliens poking around my base while I'm still dazed from cryosleep, I'd whack 'em over the head too. Poor bastard. And we trespassed and killed him. It. Him."
There was some part of Lovecraft that wasn't... irrationally disgusted. And while it was smol, he kept it.
Those aliens were the cosmic horror equivalent of upper class white people.
@@Xalerdane That is funny to me.
So glad you're getting back into OSP. They're great and hilarious.
I think one of the reasons lovecraftian media is hard to do is because people focus too much on the aesthetic, the sea, the tentacles, the eyes, all that stuff, but what makes it effective is the enormity of it, the fact that our narrators are facing something much bigger than themselves and they can't stop it... funny enough, what has gotten the closest to it for me is Junji ito's work
Red is a mathematician if I'm not mistaken, so the fact she's so disappointed that Lovecraft found Math hard is a little more understandable.
I wish she had talked about "the thing on the doorstep". That was my favorite.
about HP Lovecraft liking Astronomy, it would have been easy for him to enjoy it, as despite the fact that Astronomy does date back to ancient civilizations, or at least its very roots are, it didn't go beyond mostly observation and some geometrically and empirically derived rules until quite literally midway through the 20th century. Sure, nowadays we have fields like asteroseismology and discuss the possibility of exploiting quantum entanglement in the event horizon of black holes, but back in Lovecraft's age they were still debating whether the universe was the galaxy or if it went beyond that. Sure, physics was doing great strides by then, and using math past Advanced Calculus and Topology, but relevant Astronomy math was just Algebra. So yeah I totally buy it how Lovecraft would have an interest in Astronomy but hated Math and the Sciences
The general public still thought the Martians had maybe built an ecumenopolis by the time HPL dropped.
@@dashiellgillingham4579 exactly!
@@dashiellgillingham4579 Because someone mistranslated "channels" as "canals" from an italian astronomer. Not even kidding that's what contributed to the widespread belief for decades.
11:12 I've lived in Massachusetts for on and off throughout my life AND spent several months in Maine, and honestly... I get it. It might be because of how old everything is, or how much nature there is but there's a certain vibe in the northeast that really lends itself to horror
"Hooves make me think of Satan..."
Those ideas of Satan (see Arabic: Shaitan) came from somewhere, originally. Possibly tales of the Celtic Cernunnos, The Horned One, possibly from Greek fauns, minotaurs, or others. It's clear to me that Lovecraft did have classical education as far as literature and folklore. It's also pretty evident that Christianity make a habit of adopting local belief, to fit into its own dogma.
The Cool Air story sounds like it could've been something like a sequel to Reanimator
I love Red's cover songs. They're almost always amazing, and she has a great singing voice.
Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. We need more Lovecraftian video games like that. We also need film adaptations for The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow over Innsmouth, Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his family, etc like we got with The Color out of Space.
Dude, the escape from the Gilman House is still one of the tensest moments in any game I've ever played. It was brilliant.
It doesn't matter what he thought his work meant. You can take whatever you you want from it, and see anything you want to see in it.
New England tends to be a lot like actual England...overcast and gloomy. Not always, perhaps, but couple that with the old colonial architecture, it makes for an easy location for horror stories. The east coast is where America started, and there was a lot of bloodshed that came with it. Just...good ol' depressing history lmao
Considering that human insignificance is such a running theme in his stories, Lovecraft protagonists having very little agency makes sense
Interestingly enough Lovecraft had quite a good sense of humour. I wouldn't call him hilarious but some of his pieces, like "Herbert West" for example, or "Sweet Ermengard", are really good to get a nice little chuckle out of, so I wouldn't be surprised if the "Gillman Hotel" was an entirely conscious choice of his.
Also, he and his friends came up with boxer nicknames for themselves at one point, and his was apparently "Horsepower Hateart", so yes, a little quirky, but definitely funny 😁
It's a month old, so this might go unseen, but-
HIGHLY RECOMMEND
The TH-cam Channel 'HorrorBabble' does audiobook-esque readings of horror stories, particularly Lovecraft/Cthulu Mythos stories. The Dunwich Horror is done up like a radio play, and is modestly edited down to get more action and less... err, problematic commentary. I have it downloaded as I listen to it quite often on long drives.
I love those guys! Ian Gordon's voice was made for Lovecraft. Him and Mike Bennett are my go-to for Lovecraft.
40:50 ah yes, the weapons, magic, spray bottles, and GUN
I'm guessing you haven't heard of Lovecraft country or the recent film adaptation of colors out of space with Nick Cage
Fun fact, Lovecraft parodied his own works quite a lot. XD
Oh?
Part of the characters I agree, cosmic horror plays on how helpless the humans are to stop or understand their situation, survival is usually by chance or just what anyone would do when they can't fight or solve the problem. Most of the story is just seeing the strange stuff and reacting to it, maybe a discussion or playing mystery solver to get a glimpse of how it all works. But you're not going to fight Cthulhu and get anywhere, the air conditioner guy is already dying it's just waiting for the power to go out, and those colors are already working on their own mechanics and are gone before anything is really understood. Some of it's lazy or shallow writing but the ideas still stick very well and are characters in their own right.
A good example of that existential horror combined with racism is Get Out. If you haven't seen it, I won't spoil it.
Also, if you haven't seen the recent movie adaptation of The Colour Out of Space, I highly recommend it. It's nasty.
happy birthday baby Whatley and also you
My favorite HP Lovecraft story is "At the mountains of Madness"
Might want to look into the concept of "Death of the Author." Lovecraft is a posterchild for like the work while disliking the creator.
It's my personal position that he used his work to excise and examine his own fears and contrast them with hopes.
Science, curiosity, bravery and in his Howard-inspired works _compassion_ for peers do stem the tide of horrible mutated looming evil.
The thing is his racism is very prominent in his work, so it's a bit difficult to avoid. I'm saying this as someone who likes his works a lot, but you can't really divorce the horror from the racism in this case when the racism is the root of the horror in most stories.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Lovecraft was socially awkward and so his characters are. But, I think that plays to these stories strengths. In Lovecraft's stories the characters have little to no hope, the events will carry on whether they want to or not. The forces they are against are so much larger and stranger than anything we as humans can fight. At best we can hope to break even. It's something that you don't see in a lot of horror. The monster does not know or care if theirs a hero trying to stop it. It will step on them and keep walking, with the same feeling we get for stepping on ants.
Ps. My favourite is that reanimator story. I found the ending very chilling.
just to add some context; Red is a math-major
this might explain some of the extra spicy sarcasm in places
If you want a fantastic action game with lovecraftian themes and you have a ps4, try out Bloodborne
Also there is an anime based on the cthulu mythos cause call of cthulu the trpg by chaosinium is one of the most popular ones in Japan. The anime is called haiyore nyarukochan essentially nyarlohothep is a space police officer that turns herself into a silver haired girl to get it on (love at first sight situation) with a protection target Japanese school boy being targeted by other aliens (and consume Japanese media because apparently aliens lack imagination and try and smuggle earth entertainment off earth lol) it's more comedy than serious though.
For modern 'adaptations' of lovecraft's works, look at the Chaosium company's 'Call of Cthulhu' tabletop game, which they've expanded over the years to cover pretty much every time period imaginable
Ive heard of Titus Crow. It's more action based and has people fight eldritch horrors. There's also Larry Correias Monster Hunter series. In that world Old Ones are affected by magic and holy items like Holy water and Ward stones.
Shadow Over Innsmouth is my favorite HPL story
Call of Cthulhu is pretty short. It’s nowhere in the realms mountains of Madness or Shadows over Insmouth.
Reanimator was always my jam too.
Birb on da head.
Oh there is also a Japanese light novel free life fantasy online (official localisation available August 2022) borrows a lot from the cthulu mythos for vrmmorpg elements.
Funny you should mention Netflix there was a Netflix movie adaptation of color out of space and a "TV" series called Lovecraft country.
A *lot* of people praised Hitler before WWII started. Eugenics was popular at the time and much of what he did was taken directly from what prominent folks in America were promoting and then pushed to their logical conclusion.
Edit: I'm absolutely *horrible* at math. I look at equations and just see a mass of writhing numbers and symbols. Science was also my best subject in school. One of the classes I enjoyed most in college was related to astronomy. Helped that I didn't actually have to solve any equations, just plug known numbers into a program that did all the computations for me. Because this was a 100 level class designed for students who hadn't taken calculus. Tried doing research on figuring out where various celestial objects would have been at any given point in the past and nearly burst into tears at the *pages* of advanced mathematics I was bombarded with. I have trouble with simple *long division.* Point being, I get the concepts, the processes and discoveries *fascinate* me, but my brain turns to mush when confronted with the math.
along the thought process at 17:53
HBomberguy made a vid on Cthulhu (2007) by Dan Gildark. he makes the otherness to be homosexuality, having a gay protagonist. it got panned cz it was a social commentary interpretation instead of the scifi aspect. but HBomberguy's vid is really good and w that framing in mind, the movie's actually so underrated.
You should play Call of Cthulhu (2018) and The Sinking City. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is good, but pretty buggy.
Also, "Cthulhu Saves the World" is an hilarious Parody-RPG! 😆
As someone who was absolutely trying and may still one day attempt to try writing a full collection of like lovecraftian stories the more and more you write the harder it becomes to suggest to that the narrator's and the central characters of the stories are only insane and it's worth noting that like Michael was to have like a group of characters be at the center of the story Lovecraft wrote like different aerators every time if I'm not mistaken I tried to is my first couple stories write it with two ideas in mind of one interpretation being that the supernatural shit was real and the other interpretation being that it wasn't and but these people might be misdiagnosing serious mental illness which was coming at a horrific cost as it goes on I kind of had to make a decision the Supernatural is real cuz it's getting harder and harder to be vague especially when these characters keep coming across the strange phenomenon one after another your hypothesis that it is harder to see them always just crazy people when you've taken the contacts the entirety of the work is very correct
Have you seen Lovecraft Country? It’s the exact show you described
... does he not know about Lovecraft country?
Biographics explains hp lovecrafts life better look up HP LOVECRAFT TITAN OF TERROR by biographics on youtube
The modern value of Lovecraft lies partly in just how racist he is, and how his works can show just how pervasively racism, classism, misogyny, and other bigotry can be intertwined into every facet of a person's life. H.P. Lovecraft gives a lense by which to understand the irrational fears of the bigoted.
This is why I feel that we are wrong to separate art from artist. The art is a tool to see into the mind of one nigh possessed by their fear induced bigotry. This is a tool to help people understand that bigotry is based in fear and ignorance.
Red is my damn soulmate 🥰
There is the concept of character driven story telling (which we associate with good writing today) and plot driven story telling which used to be more in style. So Lovecrafts 2 dimensional characters might be more a product of the time and less so a sign of poor writing skills.
If you like lovecraftian and elder gods themes then you should look up S.C.P.
You ever read The Litany of Earth?
Try out his Dreamcycle deries, better than the the Chthulhu one
FYI: He was not racist but xenophobic. He didn't like people outside of his culture, I heard someone say that in his letters he really didn't have a good opinion of italian immigrants. Something else that I've heard is that what he really didn't like was "the uncivilized" or a lack of culture and /or care for traditions, order and high ideas/philosophies. And one can get that vibe by reading between the lines of his stories, most of his human antagonist were uncivilized creeps with hedonistic lifestyles (Call of chthulhu) or people who use esoteric/high knowledge for their own personal and/or nihilistic gains( Reanimator, Herbert west was a blondie btw), like summoning and old one to just end it all, or sometimes both (Dunwich Horror).
The thing is that he most likely got this ideas from his upbringing and kept harping on said opinions as a coping mechanism to deal with his crappy life, like a bullied kid that bullies others to feel better.
And something that most of his detractors never point out is that his prejudices went away almost as as soon as he got to know someone of said "other groups" specially when his friends help him out in opening up his worldview, the fact that he fell in love with a Jw-ish woman and married her is a testament to that. By the end of his life his prejudices were almost gone, also shown by the change in his stories that went from the cosmic horror of the chthul mythos to the aspiring and surreal fantasy of his Dream Cycle. He's story of overcoming his beliefs that he's got since childhood should be a positive one but most of his detractors ignore that because they just want a witch to burn so they can call/present themselves (self)righteous crusaders.
In 1933, just four years before his death, he wrote, “the negro represents a vastly inferior biological variant which must under no circumstances taint our Aryan stock. The absolute colour-line as applied to negroes is both necessary and sensible.” (Source: Lovecraft, Howard P. to Shea, J. Vernon, May 29th, 1933. Page 10.) There's some xenophobia there, but when he snuggles up to eugenics, you can't really argue that he isn't racist. While he definitely improved over the years, he never wholly overcame his prejudices, especially when it came to black people. He wasn't literally arguing for slavery anymore, but we should acknowledge that his transformation was, at best, incomplete when he died.
Have you seen the movie
Re-Animator(1985)
I haven't seen it but "Lovecraft Country" tells original theme Lovecraft stories with black protagonists so they explore the horror and the racism is dealt with and not swept aside
BIRD
You should watch lovecraft country on hbo max
On the one hand Lovecraft was a terrible person. On the other he's been dead for almost 90 years and all his work is public domain. You can do literally anything you want with his work and benefit no one but yourself, so go for it.
"ignorance is bliss, so start being ignorant" me when people try to cancel Lovecraft
Finish the Sentence! Everything woke turns to...
Lovecraft Country is a netflix show, but I wouldn't call it good, or worth watching.
So you haven’t watched the Tv show “Lovecraft?” Let’s just say He would’ve hated it 😄 All the main characters are black in a town full of racists and creatures.
Ooh I didn't know where to put it but it looks like a good spot
I have read Lovecraft
And about ¾ of it *was* boring enough. Almost non of it was creepy at the slightest. I'm not typing to show how I'm ✨not like the others✨, I'm just...disappointed man. I started this to sleep one eye open out of fear but all I got was some racist cults doing basic murders and fishy eldrich folks that honestly pretty similar to one another. Maybe I didn't see it, yet what is real difference between Dagon and Cthulhu? Beside sea team and ways they communicate with prohibited aria. Like, what are this folks about? What each of them want individually? And why? For now they look like early Disney villains who are evil just because
:( I guess Lovecraft was overhyped for me
You talk to much
It's a reaction. Want him to just watch and say goodbye at the end?
Well, then don't watch his videos. Easy peasy.