Yeah Dess I wasn’t arguing I was just trying to recall my Lovecraftian novels. I seem to think that Dunwich might have been more questionable.
I stand by my aforementioned temporal relativity when it comes to non-political correctness (if not worse): It does NOT make it right. But it was a different time.
Perhaps a smaller different approach: We have 2-3 new Lovecraftian games coming out soon – and from what I can see they are all white male protagonist. Instead of historical consideration perhaps a modern look would be better.
(similarly I do not excuse Edgar rice Burroughs or Robert e Howard…both had terrible problems with people that weren’t their ideal)
But certainly some of the things that could be considered prejudiced are seen, right? This is what I had really not thought about, until I started reading this thread.
Take for instance, a game like Residence Evil 4. All the RE games, as well as silent hill, etc. have some influence from Lovecraft. RE4 was very lovecraftian in its setting to me. Some super rural part of Spain with the locals being messed up inbred mutants, ultimately controlled by evil parasites.
While perhaps not racist in the traditional sense, it certainly plays to the same kind of fear of the “other”, viewing locals from rural communities as being weird and backwards. Kind of a “Deliverance” vibe on some level.
Is that offensive? I dunno. I certainly didn’t think so at the time, but then again, I never really considered it from that angle at all.
I would believe it was not uncommon a name for a pet at the time. The Dambusters dog maybe more evidence of this. Sadly and unfortunately.
Quotes then? I know of a few novels; a section in Horror of Red Hook where he describes immigrant part of town. The mulatto groups of worshippers in CoC and that one’s where someone visits an old man’s house and he has a book on African cannibal tribes.
That’s all I remember. As a swarthy, bearded mulatto with cannibal heritage I’m keen to know if there’s any more?
Edit : read more of thread and theres not much more than I described. No ones making game on his letters. Most of it was a product of its time.
I just read War Of The Running Dogs, the history of the Malayan Emergency and it too has terminology not in use today, ie the use of “Abo” to describe the indigenous tribes. It didn’t change my opinion of the book or author, although it did raise an eyebrow.
As with any pre-woke literature, you just adapt your lens.
In addition to his letters, Lovecraft has a number of poems, one even called On The Creation of Niggers. Just Google it. This guy was not racist for his time, he was ultra racist, even for his time, like not just extremely racist but also xenophobic. There will always be people who will say he was from xyz time and therefore, but no, that’s not true. He would be extreme even compared to most of that. There are just piles of filth with his name on it, and there is nothing abstract or hidden about his view. It’s right there, easy to find. After you find out what he wrote, like the horrific things he wrote outside his more well-known stories, then it’s very easy to see where he puts those ideas and that tone in those stories too.
There’s nothing iffy about it. This is very well known, and some of those dark alleys, dark places, evil area… well he just used neighborhoods with brown people as his inspiration. It’s not easy to overlook, and we shouldn’t ignore it, but I think it is possible to borrow from his ideas as long as it is done with awareness, purposeful to try and keep that hate out of the work that is derived from his ideas.
No one is making games about his letters or poems. They make games about tentacles and star gods.
Who reads Lovecraft and thinks his novels are about non-whites and ghettos? I have been reading cthulhu mythos genre for decades and not a single author post Lovecraft has focused on anything other than monsters and gods even those of the 1930s-80s, which gives me a pretty good idea that their takeaway from their reading of his work was the same as mine. My examples were from memory, I am more than familiar with his work.
The examples I used were in two cases, where his racist attitudes were the focus of the story, ie the “horror” part were the tribal rituals or immigrants themselves.
People need to learn pragmatism when looking at older works and dead authors, and indeed all older works or they will be lost to us.
Edit : ie Roald Dahl was a massive racist who thought Hitler was right about the Jews. Hands up who isn’t going to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory next time it’s on TV? Anyone going to ban Matilda or James and the Giant Peach?
Well without doing my research and trusting that statement it does make me a bit sad. So much genius back then was instilled with racism (if this is true). I mentioned Raymond Chandler who was not actually as bad as some but awkward at Best.
Sigh.
His views are in his stories. The monsters are often interchangeable with non-whites I don’t know what you’re looking for from me, but there are entire literary debates about this. If you honestly want to know, go get the books, not his books but the works that examine his work. Let me know in a few years what you think. There are that many of them. Once you know his views, you easily see it. It’s right there, in his fantasy works too.
Not a single person is talking about banning his pieces. I have no idea why you brought that up out of the blue.
Ban = don’t make games using Lovecraft content. Ie the subject of the thread?
I dont believe Cthulhu Mythos is racist diatribe against non-whites anymore than I believe that Star Wars is about the overthrow of a legitimate government by violent terrorists, which it certainly can be read as if you wanted to.
This is pop culture petty bullshit where mainly white people appropriate minority oppression to use as a weapon against white people. If they cared about the principles behind their argument they would be attacking Roald Dahl and nigh on every content creator born before the 60s but they cherry picked Lovecraft because he’s favoured by Western teenage boys. If you want to empower and enable their internal fights go for it but I won’t stand for anyone doing this in my name, or using my identity, especially when Lovecraft has brought me so much joy and wonderful experiences.
Should I copy and paste what I wrote in Era?
If anything, games should respect more Lovecraft. I’m tired of reading things like ‘x game is lovecraftian’ meaning just ‘monsters with tentacles’ or ‘scary game in the 20s’ or ‘dark game with weird aliens’, or even worse, have gratuitous mentions to Elder Gods or shit like that. It’s all very shallow. Slapping something Lovecraftinan to your game has to be like slapping rpg elements, it seems super common and usually it isn’t very well done. And god, adapt something else than Shadow over Insmouth.
About Lovecraft himself, saying he as racist seems a shallow reading of his stories. He was racist, but more than anything, he was classist. You can notice how he disliked the ‘poor, ignorant masses’, the proletariat, the backwards country people (and yes, that included white American men), the poor and dirty immigrants (even the ones that were whiteish), etc. That’s a much more recurring theme than his racism.
He also disliked what I guess he considered the ‘modern society’, and thought of himself he had born in the wrong age, he wished he had born in the time of his grandfathers and parents which I would say he idealized, thinking they were more civil, more educated, the towns had less people, there was less industry, etc. His friends called him ‘grandpa’ as nickname because of that. In other words, he was a pretty freaking weird dude.
If you are not willing to read what he wrote, the stuff that is not in your favorite stories, then you are not going to see the connection; that’s willful blindness, and it changes nothing. That’s your limitation, not mine, and I don’t do anything in your name; I don’t even know your name.
I also think the notion of cosmic horror is interesting, as if you go deep into the subtext and origins historically, it’s something that only the racist, tradition-loving Lovecraft could have created. He was interested in astronomy, but he couldn’t be scientist as he was terrible in math (or I remember it being that way). Still, he maintained his fascination with astronomy and followed the news about it.
You can imagine how notions that for us are normal but maybe there were novelty in his time (there are millions upon million stars, not thousands, the Sun is just another star so possibly each one has planets too, there could be life on Mars, and all that) captured his imagination in a special way. They surely were amazing concepts for normal people, but for someone with a deep fear of ‘the other’, someone who had a love for the traditions, for stability and the known, who was so conservative… surely it touched him something deep that he channelized in his writings.
You can see how the concepts of ‘cosmic horror’, like ‘we are only a point of dust floating on an empty void’, ‘there are beings totally alien, unfathomable and incomprehensible to us’, or ‘the universe don’t care for us, we are not special and never were’ were born from someone with the mix of traditional education at early XX c. with deep-rooted fears and at the same time a fascination the news of astronomy.
Almost one century later, you can’t see how someone would try to write horror using ‘the universe don’t care for us, we are not special and never were’ as a base, for lots of us that’s… just normal.
There was a long while where WWII settings were overused a lot too. Though we may be out of that craze for the time being. (I can’t think of anything recent and major besides the movie Dunkirk.) Everyone has Trump on the brain these days I think.
Of course Lovecraft was racist. It permeates his writing. It’s in his letters. It’s in his stories. Like:
The negro had been knocked out, and moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon.
He was pretty racist even for his time. He was also quite obviously a xenophobic misogynist with a huge dollop of class-prejudice thrown in.
Fortunately, he’s both out of copyright and dead. I can read what I want, and take and pilfer the good bits, while leaving (but not ignoring) the shitty bits. That’s what we do with every other old, dead author, from folks like Tolkein and Kipling, to Shakespeare and Livy.
So I disagree with the Eurogamer entirely. One of the surprising successes is that Lovecraft’s work has been successfully taken out of its oriignal context, and very successfully. It no longer comes with the baggage the author carried. Legally and culturally, it’s ours now, and we’ve done a pretty good job (especially given the politics of the day) to get rid of the awful parts of his writing and themes.
So well, in fact, that many people in this thread seem to have a hard time believing there are countless examples of his writing (even excluding his personal correspondence) that demonstrates some pretty reprehensible views.
I wonder what will happen when Eurogamer finds out about WW2 wargames.
Look, if you guys don’t want to sound like a bunch of videogame nerds and horror fan weirdos, you should have this conversation about Wagner. You’ll be saying the same things and it will make you sound way more smarter.
-Tom
Such an idiotic slippery slope. Yeah, ban Huck Finn, Tarzan, Arabian Nights, Gone With the Wind…Jesus christ.
It’s really just trying to retcon human history. Read and learn, Eurolamer.
If Barenboim can conduct Tristan und Isolde in Israel of all places, then shoggoths in video games aren’t really as impressive.
Best post!