The “for his time” argument is garbage in any context. All it means is that a person was comfortable going along with the status quo, generally because it favored them, because you can find someone (and usually plenty of people!) advocating for practically any moral position in practically any age going back to the invention of writing.
And I would add that anyone who does want to make a “for his time” argument would still be missing the point in this case, since what’s in question is how his works are treated now. Even if someone wanted to defend the artist in the context of his society and time, the question of how his works should influence (or not) our games today would be unrelated.
Sigh.
The “for his time” thing also breaks down for me when we consider people like Sam Clemens. If Clemens could sell gajillions of copies of Huckleberry Finn to just about any American who could read, and then hit them over the skull with “All right then, I’ll GO to hell,” then perhaps we can move fully grasp that by the 1920s and 1930s many of Lovecrat’s characterizations (and that cat name) were outside of societal norms.
Also, like, just because a lot of people at that time were (racist/sexist/xenophobic/other undesirable trait) does not mean that a given person in that time isn’t that trait. Widespread racism is still racism. I think historical context is more relevant when considering, e.g. whether a term meant then what it means today.
If they’re aware of it, and they’re conscious about what to leave behind, I don’t see the problem. When we get into arguments about if though, like if it’s racist, then I don’t see how you can move forward. There’s no awareness or acknowledgment just blind loyalty, and that’s not okay.
Someone mentioned Star Wars before, like a throwaway comment… haha, which is interesting considering how much they took from Nazi propaganda, like straight up lifted. The thing is though, they knew how to leave the ugly behind or make the ugly, you know, actually ugly. They had to be aware, actually acknowledge the issues with the source material in order to do that though.
He was really, really bad even for his time, and no, it wasn’t just classism either.
I think the context of the times does matter.
But in any case, not so much for HPL. He was indeed horrible for his day, his fear of women and foreigners bordered on hysteria.
His wife — they lasted 2 years somehow, despite the fact that she was Jewish — told of how H.P. would get extremely upset on the streets of NYC when there were a lot of various ethnicities around. Drove him nuts. He believed in white supremacy, aristocracy, fascism… gotta keep it pure.
This is from ST Joshi, a biographer and fan of HPL: ““There is no denying the reality of Lovecraft’s racism, nor can it merely be passed off as “typical of his time,” for it appears that Lovecraft expressed his views more pronouncedly (although usually not for publication) than many others of his era. It is also foolish to deny that racism enters into his fiction.”
Yeah, Lovecraft was a pretty racist guy. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Cthulhu mythos should be abandoned whole cloth.
From an extreme angle, let’s say [insert name of terrible person] comes up with the cure to cancer. I’d assume the VAST majority of us would use it as needed unless someone else came up with an equal or better product.
While campaign settings and fictional worlds aren’t needed to survive like a cure to cancer would be for many, these things still provide a benefit and I use a similar logic when approaching them. First and foremost, the man has been dead for many years and therefore will reap no benefit. Second, I haven’t been struck by an equal or better competing mythos than what originally sprang from his writing.
A good part of this is the collective investment in and alteration from the original source, of course, and that’s why any other cosmic horror mythos faces an uphill battle. That’s also why imho the modern auteurs “own” it, now, and any decision to abandon it should be made with that in mind with much less of a focus being given to Lovecraft, himself.
A-H-E-M!!!
I believe I did just that before all the Johnny (or Jill) come-latelys arrived?
I’ll now go ponder if Heidegger’s party membership should impact how I read Being in Time. Or Eisenstein’s and Dovzhenko’s complicity in Stalin’s crimes.
Nice Tristan and Isolde reference, @SamS
Good work with the Finn, @Kelly_Wand
Don’t get radicalized, @Brooski
HPL was the first incel alt-right shitposter.
Pre-dated!
Damnit. Well, Nietzsche was well read and intellectual, and his family put him in the asylum. Whereas HPL and his family were all the same (cucks and spinsters).
I’m sure if we dig hard enough, we can nail Machiavelli, or even quite possibly Aristotle or Plato. I’m sure we can get Eurogamer or Kotaku to write a think-piece on their misuse in gaming.
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OK, I started laughing so hard I started spitting out coffee…
If we play up HP Lovecraft’s racism, the alt right nuts and Q Anon guys may end up forming actual cults worshiping the elder gods.
That’s pretty cool - great post in all respects, Rob.
ChapoTrapHouse shitposters, sigh, shouldnt you be dogpiling people on twitter and brigading on reddit or something?
I apologise in advance for this P&R level rant.
Interesting chart eh? The nasty truth that most people, in some way, perceive articles like the OP in a negative light.
and its not just old people
When people talk about “political correctness” its on a number of levels. Yes, there are a metric fuckton of racists who want to use the N word and burn crosses, imprison LGBTs or re-open the deathcamps, but for some its little more than liking dead authors, or video game cleavage and being told they are Hitler because of it.
This pop culture wars bullshit pushes those people right, it literally created a new support base for Trump where there wasnt one before, and even those that don’t go as far right as that end up “classical liberal” Jordan Peterson fanboi douchebags, who face it, are fucking awful, and one of the reasons is there’s a new industry of middle class white people focusing against peoples favourite characters, writers, films, books, musicians, settings and leisure activities, which naturally they want to defend, rather than say, concentration camps for immigrant toddlers, which its quite easy to get people to condemn. So you “kick them out of gaming/comics/films/warhammer” etc and off they go to be groomed by the Proud Boys and soon they won’t condemn toddler concentration camps because it means crossing the line to our side.
Our governments are institutionally and ideologically racist, with your police even murdering minorities wholesale, but white liberals are too busy fighting other white people over fucking video games and comics and its absolutely infuriating. The vast majority of the culture war around pop culture is distracting, energy wasting bullshit that’s not going to change anything for the positive in the long run.
Great post. This quote from the article was marvelous:
According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”
This is how you show a complete lack of understanding of what the issue is. Your favorite author was a racist, a terrible one. You want to debate that, but there isn’t a debate about that; it’s a known fact. The question is what to do with his content, which also has racist material. Since you can’t get past the first question, you don’t know how to have a discussion about the second issue. Your anger is completely misplaced.
I still believe we can all worry about more than one problem at once without having to completely disregard everything else in our lives. I suppose what I’m saying is that I can dislike pop-culture’s shitty side and still hate that police are killing minorities wholesale? Maybe if the issues aren’t getting enough attention, it isn’t the basic publics fault but the news sources or the lying politicians?