confusion noises
Don’t get me wrong. but I’m wondering why they would base their game on the works of someone they seem to despise. ( for obvious reasons)
Especially since they list works of other people that are less problematic.
Because it is great work?
Or rather, it started something great that has now become very much its own thing. Its own well-known universe to build stuff in. With a huge following and many fans.
There’s no good reason NOT to make use of this universe if you want to develop something that fits in it just well.
Not everyone is so caught up in their “need” to be offended by and cancel everything that they are unable to separate a modern variant of a creation a hundred years after its inception from its original and long dead creator.
Lovecraft started something really great. And he was a racist. Wow, crazy, a person that did not only do good or only bad things!
Stories, really, and lore. I mean, take Wagner (please!). No, really, I love The Ring cycle operas and even the goofy butchering of the actual mythology that Wagner occasionally dives into doesn’t take away from the works as an awesome creative endeavor. There is so much there that has been mined for all sorts of other things. Yeah, Wagner mined things that long predated him, but I dare say a lot of what people know or think about the subject matter came from Wagner’s popularization of the themes and characters and stories more than from the source materials. Anyhow, Wagner was a shitty person. Vicious anti-Semite, just nasty in many ways. Should that stop me from paying any attention to his works? I can respect someone for whom the answer to that is yes, but for me, even as a Jew, I’d prefer to enjoy the operas and be amused that, long after Wagner is dead, his work continues to be enjoyed by the people he despised, while the man himself no one gives a shit about. It’s not like he’s getting anything out of it now!
Of course, it also gets tricky going down the rabbit hole of artist vs. art. I mean, I read the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, documents that were created largely by slave-holding, patriarchal, chauvinistic, white supremacist, elitist, bourgeois men with whom I would have many vigorous and probably insurmountable differences if I met them today.
Isn’t that literally what they explained in their twitter post that started this thread?
Tolkien is West/Northern European-centric because those are the sources he drew from/was interested in as a philologist AKA his native environment, culture, history, etc.
I wouldn’t compare him at all in a thread about Lovecraft, who is a known and well documented xenophobe in the extreme.
I offer a alternative
The more we progress as a society the more authors from many generations ago may look outdated
We must look at the past not with arrogance but with pity
Is because we progress that our grandparents ideas look out of place
H.P. Lovecraft was extreme even for his time.
He was no Agatha Christie, that’s for sure.
Oh ok them
The man was an extreme racist. For his time doesn’t even begin to cover it. That excuse needs to just stop I already.
Eh… are you quite sure of that?
He died 1937, thus his most active years were before that. Not sure how much you know about history, but that was a wee bit before racism was even a large problem in the public view. I would argue it was very much en vogue actually, considering the regimes that came to be during that time.
And I’m fairly certain his views would have fit right in with the more “old school” part of the population of most countries.
Sure, his peers, the better educated part of the populace, writers, journalists, etc. were ahead of him, but that was a pretty small part of the population.
Yeah it was so extreme, his wife, I think even he himself acknowledged these powerful reactions he had to anyone he considered outsiders. This stuff is not hidden. You can go find it.
Again I would encourage folks who would like some evidence to go read his private letters which were posthumously published.
He was a racist right wing extremist who railed against political correctness, wrote that non whites were sub humans and defended the murder of non whites. I mean go read this shit if you need to be convinced. Please be aware this is really really offensive so you may want to pass it by if you don’t need convincing.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft#Letters
Just one example.
Summary
The negro is fundamentally the biological inferior of all White and even Mongolian races, and the Northern people must occasionally be reminded of the danger which they incur in admitting him too freely to the privileges of society and government. … The Birth of a Nation, … is said to furnish a remarkable insight into the methods of the Ku-Klux-Klan, that noble but much maligned band of Southerners who saved half of our country from destruction at the close of the Civil War. The Conservative has not yet witnessed the picture in question, but he has seen both in literary and dramatic form The Clansman , that stirring, though crude and melodramatic story by Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr., on which The Birth of a Nation is based, and has likewise made a close historical study of the Klu-Klux-Klan, finding as a result of his research nothing but Honour, Chivalry, and Patriotism in the activities of the Invisible Empire. The Klan merely did for the people what the law refused to do, removing the ballot from unfit hands and restoring to the victims of political vindictiveness their natural rights. The alleged lawbreaking of the Klan was committed only by irresponsible miscreants who, after the dissolution of the Order by its Grand Wizard, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, used its weird masks and terrifying costumes to veil their unorganized villainies.
Race prejudice is a gift of Nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.
- Response to observations made in In A Minor Key by Charles D. Isaacson, in The Conservative , Vol. I, No. 2, (1915), p. 4
Its not fucking subtle guys, go ahead and defend shit like this if you like but you should be aware of what you are defending or excusing. There are a whole books of his letters full of this (some of which I own incidentally) its not a one off.
Not a nice man, I have no idea if he was an odious cunt for his time but he was an odious cunt by my standards for any time.
This is not an issue where one needs to defend ones own political team either, there are conservatives on this board who share my views on Lovecraft and I am as left as they come. This is about reason, ethics and facts. Something we can hopefully all discuss a century after he wrote.
Nobody is suggesting banning his books, just know who he was so you are armed with the cold facts when discussing him and his work. My reaction when I first read his letters as a young man was “Oh, I didn’t realise it was THAT bad, yeah, I have changed my mind.” if this is your first time reading them then I invite you to consider your own position.
He definitely was. His peers found his views shocking and gratuitous at the time.
Not surprising I mean, some of this stuff is hair raisingly awful.
Though the intelligentsia you might fancy as Lovecraft’s peers certainly had different values on balance than ‘the masses’ (if I’m going to be using early 20th century terms), it is important to note that by the early 1900s the majority of people felt that, for instance, slavery and the indiscriminate killing of blacks (i.e., lynching) were wrong. Lovecraft, on the other hand, maybe not so much. Had Lovecraft merely felt that blacks were less cultured or intelligent than whites and thus deserved to be treated as second-class citizens (in line with de jure laws in the South and de facto laws elsewhere in the US at the time). Or had he merely dabbled in offensive stereotype. Then maybe the argument that he was not so bad relative to his era would have some merit, but he was past even that. His loathing of an entire race of people is far beyond viewing them as second-class people in need of ‘upliftment.’ Hemingway could be an example of someone ‘not so bad for his time.’ Lovecraft is something else entirely.
Two occult/Cthulhu that are not written by totally horrible people (as far as I know)
They both have good audiobook versions too
https://www.amazon.com/Lovecraft-Country-Novel-Matt-Ruff/dp/0062292072
If he was that horrible, why not avoid him? Maybe theres other source of cosmic horror more deserving of attention
A reasonable question. It lies at the root of the dilemma, the viability or desirability of separating the artist from the art. Personally, in cases where working with materials from an odious individual does not result in that individual’s enrichment (i.e., they are dead), I can often make a clear separation between art and artist. Sometimes I cannot. Some of it depends on the nature of the work. Writing is tough, because so much of the author usually seeps in to any work that all writing becomes to some extent autobiographical. Same with film or television, though traditional visual arts and music I think have something more of a buffer built in most of the time.
tl;dr it comes down to what the works are, who the authors are, and what you need out of the works. I don’t think there is a one size fits all response. In the case of Lovecraft, if you have interest in or are studying occult horror fiction you kind of have to have a knowledge of his work, from a historical perspective.