I know he’s a racist. That’s the point. I know he’s a racist and it doesn’t make any difference to my appreciation of his popular content, or my appreciation of the entire Mythos genre.
I know Roald Dahl thought Hitler was right on Jews, and had other abhorrent views on them, but I don’t think they shouldn’t make BFG2 or Charlie and The Great Glass Elevator.
Henry Ford didnt just bring us nice cars and factory line production methodology, he also wrote “the International Jew” and birthed into the world ideologies that plague us today
David Bowie made some good music but him and many pop legends raped children in the 60s and 70s.
No one is lauding Dahl for his comments on Jews, no one boycotts Ford Motor Company because of what Henry wrote, no one pedestals Bowie et al for their exploits with underage victims, and no one makes Cthulhu Mythos games that are racist, or buys books/games/films that feature his Creation poem and racist letters.
So what’s the problem with acknowledging that the creators have flaws, sometimes severe flaws, and also recognizing that some of those flaws, those imperfection that are, again, often severe, also show in in their work?So if someone wants to get ideas from that work or speak of that work that they acknowledge this and either address it or work hard to ensure they don’t bring it forward?
Of course you can dislike pop cultures nasty side, but this conversation is not you making a personal choice not to buy the content is it? The pop culture war is mostly middle class white people attacking middle class white people at a personal level or trying to take something away from other middle class people, not people making personal ethical and moral decisions about their consumption and support of content, or even about people making statements about their personal decisions.
This thread is around an article from a white person at EG deciding that people should no longer make Mythos games for me, a minority, because they obviously know what is best for me, and i must be too fragile to hold my own opinions and like what I want to like, because my great white saviours at EG are here to protect me from Lovecraft.
Yeah, that’s the weird part about that article. It starts from a totally reasonable personal decision, “I can’t enjoy Lovecraft’s work anymore because of his racism” but then appends a little “and neither should you.”
Most pop stars from the 60s-80s had sex with girls under 16/18. Perhaps the words statutory should be in there too? Its a minor, so its rape so i wrote it as such.
Well if you are responding with sadness, then at least you are not glossing over it like it didn’t happen. There are positions between the lala it didn’t happen and I don’t care and the let’s remove this material.
We should care. We should acknowledge it, but what to do from there, that is perfectly reasonable to debate.
I’m not interested, if some seem to be, in erasing his work from the universe punitively. But there is some sense in including his background in discussions about him as part of pop culture, because there are regularly 12 year olds who discover the mythos and get their hands on an anthology with The Rats in the Walls. It would be better to be prepared and have some context.
Some people will always be offended when you tell them their grandpappy was a racist. Maybe moreso if it’s true.
Im working on the basis that this is about “is it too racist for gaming?” and indeed my rant could have been heavily disarmed if the article was basically “here is why I wont buy Mythos themed games in the future”
Which is still an odd way to treat August Dereleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, Henry S. Whitehead, and Fritz Leiber because the shoggoth in the room is some of beasties in the games and popular culture werent the product of Lovecraft, but of his contemporaries, and some of the best work from Lumley and Campbell is easy up with that too. Do we have games about Ithaqua, Ghatanothoa, Y’golonac amd Cthugha as long as they don’t reference Lovecraft parts of the Mythos? The author of the original article completely fails to take a near century of content creation into consideration, from Lovecraft’s contemporaries work, to modern authors, so we’ll never know if she hates Ramsey Campbell and wants to ensure doesnt sell any Mythos work or just wants to gut an 100 year old brand/ setting of its core parts and letting the rest continue. Perhaps non-Lovecraft Mythos novels can still be printed but can have [REDACTED] if they mention the C word? Who knows.
You’re late to the party, Shiva. He melted down, got suspended, I muted this thread while he was melting down, and started tracking it again, all since that post. :) It’s like you are railing about the Ford Administration, already.
Lovecraft’s contemporaries aren’t entirely devoid of this stuff either, though I don’t think anyone would argue that e.g. Robert Howard was as virulently bigoted as Lovecraft himself.
No, and Mencken (a contemporary) was calling out the very same attitudes during the same time period. So Lovecraft was a racist, period. Dead horse. The larger question is my 2.) above. And there really isn’t a pat answer for that one.
That said Lovecraft’s racism is easily worked around in most contexts, which is why it rarely comes up in things based on his works. A lot of it is in descriptions of people and the like. Or his burning hatred of all Polynesian people, who tend to get the worst of it for some reason.
It’s enough to acknowledge it and just excise those parts. It helps that he’s not getting anything for it being long dead and past the copyright.
2 is very much dependent on the situation. In this case the dude has been dead for nearly a century so who really cares? It’s a lot harder when the person is alive and making money from it (ala say Orson Scott Card).
